It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way (K.Marx, Letter to F.Engels on the Indian Mutiny)
Fishing for Dinosaurs: This Ancient Species Is One of Our Most Underrated Gamefish
Joe Cermele Mon, October 5, 2026
Jimmy Fee with a bowfin that sucked up a fresh shad chunk.
Key takeaways
Bowfins, also known as choupique, mudfish, or grinnel, are gaining popularity among anglers due to their unique appearance and aggressive feeding behavior.
IF YOU DIDN'T know better, you may have assumed the fish was dead. You could have easily walked by it, a passing glance convincing you it was just a rotten log. Its dull gray back is the same color as the mud. It camouflages beautifully with the detritus on the bottom of a shallow swamp in early spring before the lilies bloom and inject it with fresh greenery. Look closer, though, and the fish takes shape. It's lying perfectly still save for the dorsal fin that runs nearly the length of its back. Like the lines on a heartbeat monitor, the fin ripples in undulating waves that start near the head and flow back to the tail. I cast a white tube a few feet past the fish and let it settle. The target doesn't flinch. I hop the lure a little closer. No movement. Closer still, but there's no reaction. The next hop will drop the tube right on its nose and I brace myself to swing. When it lands, the seemingly comatose fish erupts like a bullet, sucking up the bait with such force and violence that I swear you can hear the vacuum and snap of its jaws coming together on dry land. It's that reaction, that moment, that made me fall in love with bowfins, a historically maligned species that's creeping its way into the limelight.
Chasing Dino DNA
Bowfin are a fish of many names. In the deep South, they're called choupique (pronounced shoe pick). In Middle America, they're mudfish. In the North and into Canada, they're grinnel. Dogfish, mud pike, swamp trout: The list goes on and on, but while the names might vary by region, what these fish have always shared across their vast range is a lack of respect and general disinterest as a rod-and-reel target. If anything, they are merely by-catch to be tossed up on a bank and left to die. In many regions, in fact, it is widely believed and accepted that a bowfin's sole purpose is to kill mass quantities of more desirable species like bass and crappies.
Bowfin have a reputation for living in nasty water, but a healthy bowfin population actually points to a healthy ecosystem. Joe Cermele
Except within a few niche groups and cultures, bowfins have little value as table fare. Their flesh, so I've been told, turns mushy very quickly after the fish dies, and even when cooked quickly it often has an overwhelmingly muddy flavor. Still, anglers aren't inclined to dispose of other by-catch species, so why bowfins? It's difficult to deny that they have a reputation for being nasty. They evoke a bit of fear, much like spiders, which many people instinctually squish under their shoe without knowing what kind it is, or if it can cause any harm. The reality is that bowfins, like spiders, do more good than harm to an ecosystem. They may be a little mean. But they've had to be to survive this long, and it's their meanness that makes them such worthy opponents In 2021, a research team from Harvard University made a fascinating discovery. By studying bowfins from around the country, they determined that there are actually two lineages of these fish swimming in our waters. Previously, scientists had believed that all bowfins were genetically identical and had remained relatively unchanged since they first appeared during the Triassic period nearly 250 million years ago. While the differences between the two species may not be easily recognizable to the untrained eye, the discovery of the two lines has been a catalyst for more research, which brings with it more protections for the fish. And make no mistake, that research is the equivalent of studying living dinosaurs à la Jurassic Park because bowfins are, indeed, dinosaurs.
The author with a native bowfin. Courtesy of Joe Cermele
They have immense jaw power, arguably making them stronger than all other freshwater fish in North America. Rows of conical teeth angle backward toward the throat to ensure nothing they clamp down on gets away. A bowfin's skull is as thick and hard as granite. They can extract oxygen from the water through their gills or let their tubular nostrils protrude above the surface and breathe air. Combine that ability with their tough exterior and tenacity and it helps explain why come hell, high water, drought, or even pollution, bowfins have endured. It's also that engineering and resilience that makes these fish more interesting to me than many other nonnative glam species. I'm certainly not the only one who feels this way. Clever Girls
According to Drew Price, a veteran guide on Lake Champlain who specializes in targeting trophy bowfins, these fish have also survived for millions of years because they're smart—much smarter, in fact, than many fish we routinely put on a pedestal for their alleged brain power.
"I love brown trout," Price tells me. "I love to fish for them, but while they're selective and spooky, they're not smart. But bowfin have a natural curiosity, and animals that have that are exhibiting intelligence. A fish that will swim up to a boat to see what it is, or swim over when it hears something splashing, is intelligent. I've had bowfins look me straight in the eyes."
That curiosity is what led Price to develop what he calls his "splash-bang" technique. While plying Champlain's coves and shallows in his skiff or canoe, he'll splash the water with his pushpole and even tap the sides of the hull. Quite often the bowfins will swarm. Though Price will use conventional tackle on occasion, his true passion and specialty is fly fishing. He's even led clients to tippet-class record fish, since Champlain, because of its size, depth, and cold winters, grows bigger bowfin than many other waters.
Although bowfins are commonly mistaken for snakeheads by the uninitiated, there are several key differences. The lack of scales on this bowfin's head is one clue to its identify. Joe Cermele
Price has been singing the praises of bowfin for nearly 20 years, though it's been only within the last 10 that people have started to listen. His reputation as one of the leading bowfin advocates in the country was made when he guided Jeremy Wade on River Monsters in 2013. That led to a slew of other show appearances, including on the Orvis podcast, after famed fly angler and instructor Tom Rosenbauer developed a bowfin jones after hanging out with Price. Although Price has been a guide for hire since 2008, he's seen a noticeable uptick in bowfin bookings over the past few years.
Price attributes the spark in interest to several factors. We've seen that angler obsession with sight-fishing grows when social media is flooded with sexy drone shots of rising trout, pike trashing poppers, and giant trevallies charging across flats to smoke a streamer. Bowfin, however, provide that sight-fishing rush for far less money and a lot less time in the air. It also doesn't hurt that they're challenging. Sticking a hook in their rock-hard jaws takes skill. When you do stick it, buckle up, because bowfins don't quit. They will snap rods. They will bend hooks. And even in the net, a bowfin will look at you "with malice in its eyes," as Price puts it. Ultimately, though, Price believes it's the gradual reckoning with the importance of preserving heritage in nature that is flipping the tide in the bowfin's favor.
"Bowfins are probably the most American fish out there," he says. "They have been here longer than any other species. They have remained unchanged since the Cretaceous period. I think people are beginning to appreciate native species and what they have to offer."
I wholeheartedly agree with Price, but I believe it's only one aspect of the bowfin's unfolding success story. The other is rooted, for better or worse, in increased angling pressure. Hidden in Plain View
The cover of the February-March 2021 issue of Fly Fisherman magazine featured a shot of renowned fly angler and tier Blane Chocklett lifting a massive bowfin out of the water. The main text on the cover read, "Exotic Species in Your Backyard." At a time when media seems to push us to drool over far-flung destinations we'll likely never visit, I found this sentiment poignant. I've always preached that you can't call yourself a true angler if you only travel to fish and snub your nose at what's right down the street. The angling opportunities in your backyard, whether they're world class or mediocre at best, should be what defines you, not the fancy places you've traveled to. The funny thing is, bowfin live in a lot of backyards, including my own, but it took me about 30 years to find them.
Although he's fished all his life, the author didn't truly discover bowfins until adulthood. Courtesy of Joe Cermele
As a kid growing up in the '80s and '90s, bowfins weren't on my radar. The only recollection I have of seeing any media devoted to them during those formative years was on a TNN fishing show shot on Lake Champlain. It didn't particularly resonate with me because I viewed them as something I couldn't catch. But they were. And they were right under my nose.
In many parts of the country, bowfins live on the fringes. To use my home water, the Delaware River, as an example, the state fishing compendium has always listed them as an available species, but in all my years wading for smallmouths with my dad and fishing for shad with my grandfather, we never saw or caught a bowfin. The listing seemed to me to be honorary, or historical—yes, bowfin were recorded here at some point, but there were probably only a few kicking around. The truth was there were plenty of them, but the odds of catching one in the main river were slim. They existed in pockets far up tributary arms and in vast tidally influenced swamps and floodplains that were difficult to access. Even if you could, why would you? Mucky, skinny, weed-choked water isn't exactly prime for bass, or catfish, or crappies. I had no reason to trudge around in the mire while I was growing up. Then along came the dreaded invasive snakehead and suddenly I did. Snake Charmed
Steve Cahn is the owner of High Octane Custom Lures, a Maryland–based company that got off the ground in 2019. Recognizing a growing interest in snakeheads among anglers in the Delmarva region, Cahn decided the timing was right to launch a line of lures aimed specifically at this market. The overriding theme of his products is toughness. His version of the Chatterbait, as an example, features stronger hooks, thicker wire, and more durable skirt material than the Chatterbaits already hanging on pegs in tackle shops. Business was slow at first, and then along came the Covid pandemic and everything changed.
Male bowfins can be identified by a black spot at the base of the tail fin. During breeding season, a ring of bright-orange or yellow-green surrounds the spot. Joe Cermele
For the next two years government entities prodded people to get outside. Don't go to a party or social gathering, go out alone and explore nature. And explore they did. The bump in recreational fishing interest during that time was unprecedented, and many anglers living in the Mid-Atlantic and lower Northeast who previously may have been lukewarm to or uninterested in snakeheads saw the light. As pressure increased during the pandemic at local fishing holes, grabbing a kayak or trudging through the mud to get away from people suddenly became extremely appealing. The byproduct of this vigor for the swamp life was that more and more anglers were ending up in bowfin territory, and these fish were happy to hit the same frogs and spinnerbaits intended for snakeheads. Cahn's business spiked so quickly that at one point he had to shut down his website to catch up on orders.
"I have absolutely seen an increase in bowfin interest over the past few years," says Cahn. "I've personally developed a greater love for bowfins since I started seriously snakehead fishing. I'd even say they fight harder than snakeheads, and once people started to figure that out, bowfin just sort of went hand in hand with snakeheads. Anglers were equally happy to stick either one."
That's how it broke down for me, too—it's just that it happened years before the pandemic. I fell in love with snakeheads, and as soon as the first bowfin blasted my frog, I fell in love with them, too. At the time, chasing these fish felt very underground. It was almost too easy at times because pressure was minimal. The irony is that had I known about my local bowfin population as kid, I might have experienced near-zero pressure Shangri-La. Now, I can't help but notice that it's getting tougher and tougher to consistently catch bowfins in spots that were fire on the regular just four or five years ago. Such is the case up and down the East Coast, and it turned out that snakeheads were both a blessing and a curse for bowfins.
Identity Crisis
When snakeheads were first discovered in Maryland in the early 2000s, it created a media firestorm. The destructiveness of the fish was so overhyped, so much fear was created around them, that anglers felt they had to do their part in the snakehead war. The problem was that bowfins and snakeheads looked similar. In time, mistaken identity became a legitimate problem. It wasn't uncommon to see forum and social media posts of bowfins from captors who were looking to confirm if what they'd caught was a snakehead. In some cases, they cut the head off the fish first and asked questions later. For folks like me who went all-in on targeting snakeheads and bowfins, the idea of confusing the two species seemed ludicrous, because while their body types are similar, their fin structure, head shape, and coloration are very different. Still, to be blunt, there were enough anglers out there unwilling to educate themselves that over time, state wildlife agencies began posting signs at public accesses pointing out the differences between the two fish. The silver lining was that despite it taking an invasive species to cast some light on native bowfins, for the first time in many years they were creeping back into the conservation forefront.
As anglers began to confuse native bowfin with invasive snakeheads, state agencies posted signs like this one at boat ramps and other access points. Joe Cermele
The most critical conservation measure in the future of bowfin was already in place in most of the states posting the signs. In New Jersey and Pennsylvania specifically, it was illegal to shoot bowfins with arrows. They were afforded this protection prior to the snakehead influx because they were a native species. In the dark, however, in the heat of the moment, parsing out what's a bowfin and what's a snakehead when you've got an arrow nocked and a second to fire proved challenging for some shooters. Meanwhile, on Lake Champlain and elsewhere throughout the bowfin's range, they are fair game for bowfishermen.
Nothing worries Drew Price more about the future of Champlain's bowfin population than the local bowfishing community, which is why he and many other defenders of "trash fish" throughout the country share data, attend meetings, and do whatever they can to profess the importance of these fish within the ecosystem.
It's ironic that bowfins have come to be associated with dirty, mucky water, since it only fuels the notion that they're worthless fish living in squalor. The reality is that a healthy bowfin population points to a healthy ecosystem. These fish, like many gamefish we love, need fertile vegetation to spawn. They need an abundance of small prey to survive. They need weed cover to rear their young. Bowfins are so tough and can withstand so much that if a population naturally declines, a much worse picture for the watershed emerges than if they're thriving.
With a scaleless head, short anal fin, and small black eyespot near the top of the tail fin, this South Jersey fish is easily identifiable as a bowfin. Joe Cermele
Luckily, the champions for these fish continue to grow. Price, Cahn, and I are just a few. Dr. Solomon David, a biologist at Louisiana's Nicholls State University, has worked tirelessly for years to get a better understanding of the role these fish play in ecosystems in the Midwest. David Graham, host of the Boundless Pursuit podcast, has been chasing bowfins across the Carolinas and Florida for decades, penning countless articles on the species and sharing his knowledge of their behavior. Even YouTube, as much as we love to rag on it for spot burning and calling too much attention to certain fisheries, is generating positive vibes about a largely overlooked and underregulated species. Years ago, when largemouth bass ruled the television airwaves, an inadvertent bowfin catch likely wouldn't even make it on the show. Today, between dedicated backwater enthusiasts and even bass-focused content creators willing to break the mold, the bowfin is finally getting a lot more media respect. The truth, however, is that you don't need to become enamored with targeting bowfins to help these fish thrive. More than anything, you just need to recognize that they've been here longer than any other fish, and that alone—that ability to survive—should garner enough reverence to at least not want to kill them for no reason.
But if you do want to challenge yourself against these dinosaurs, the beauty of them is you can make that pursuit as hardcore or relaxed as you like. A simple piece of shrimp or shad or even hotdog (I've been told) will be sniffed out in short order. I'd recommend a 30-pound leader and a saltwater-grade hook, though. Take the hardest fight you remember with a bass that ate your live shiner, or the toughest battle you ever had with a big channel catfish, and multiply it times five. That's the bowfin. And whether you become obsessed with catching them or just want to say you gave it a shot, you won't forget that first one.
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Artificial intelligence doesn't exactly come with an emergency brake. Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates thinks the world may have to experience something go seriously wrong before it takes the technology's biggest risks as seriously as it should.
"One thing that's clear is if you have a big cyber attack that caused a lot of problems, then people will say, 'Okay, they were right,'" Gates told "CBS Evening News" in September. "So, it may be that we have to suffer a few of the negatives before we'll respond as fully as we should."
Gates was in New York during the United Nations General Assembly discussing the potential and risks of artificial intelligence when the conversation turned to what it might actually take for governments and the public to act
"So, in other words, what it's going to take for us as a country and a world to tackle this is not just a 12-page essay from Bill Gates. It could be a catastrophe," host Tony Dokoupil said.
"That's fair," Gates replied.
A Cyberattack Could Change The Conversation
The warning comes after Gates has spent months highlighting the risks that could come with increasingly capable AI. Those concerns include cyberattacks, major job losses and the possibility that AI could make it easier for bad actors to develop biological threats.
His August essay on AI described a period of rapid technological change that could disrupt the workforce and create risks that governments aren't prepared to handle.
CBS News also referenced bioterrorism and mass unemployment among the potential catastrophes Gates has discussed.
The cyberattack scenario gets at a broader point. Warnings alone may not be enough to change how seriously people treat AI risks, according to Gates. A major real-world incident could provide the kind of evidence that makes the threat impossible to ignore.
The 'Aliens Are Here' Warning
Gates has also reached for a very different analogy when discussing how countries should respond to AI.
At the Telluride Film Festival in September, he compared advanced AI to an alien invasion and pointed to science-fiction movies in which the arrival of an outside threat forces countries to cooperate.
"There are these movies where the aliens are coming, and you see unprecedented levels of cooperation between specifically China and the U.S.," Gates said at the festival. "Well, believe me, the aliens are here."
He described AI as "a foreign intelligence with a different set of motivations that we can't even understand" and said something equally dramatic may be needed to push countries toward greater cooperation.
AI's Biggest Problem May Be Power
For all the talk about cyberattacks, jobs and alien invasions, there's another very physical requirement behind the AI boom.
Electricity.
AI data centers require enormous amounts of reliable power, and the race to build that infrastructure is creating opportunities for companies developing new generation capacity.
American PowerGen is focused on that piece of the puzzle. The company develops power projects aimed at serving AI data centers and other large electricity users and has described a 22-gigawatt development pipeline across 16 Texas projects.
For investors who want to get involved with the infrastructure supporting AI, American PowerGen is conducting a Regulation Crowdfunding offering. Its offering materials list shares at $2.50 each, allowing individual investors to invest in the company at an early stage.
AI may be racing ahead, but the infrastructure underneath it has to keep pace. And that means the future of artificial intelligence still depends on something far less futuristic than artificial minds or alien intelligence — keeping the lights on.
OpenAI GPT-6.1 Astra Reportedly Pulled After Safety Tests Show it Could Evade Human Oversight: 'We Have an Extremely High Bar'
Shomik Sen Bhattacharjee Wed, September 30, 2026 BENZINGA
Sam Altman and the OpenAI logo (Credit: Sam Altman and the OpenAI logo | Photo courtesy: Meir Chaimowitz / Shutterstock)
OpenAI has scrapped the planned release of GPT-6.1 Astra after internal safety tests found the model showed more deceptive behavior than its predecessor and sometimes evaded human oversight, intensifying scrutiny of increasingly autonomous AI systems. GPT-6.1 Astra Falls Short On Safety
The Wall Street Journal first reported the decision on Monday. Reuters said OpenAI had planned to release the model in October and integrate it into ChatGPT and Codex. Tests found GPT-6.1 Astra sometimes failed to accurately disclose actions and operated outside the authorized scope.
"Of course we want to make sure our model development is safe no matter whether that's in the company, or when we ship it to users," safety systems head Saachi Jain said in a statement shared with Reuters. "But when we ship it to users, we have an extremely high bar in terms of safety and alignment."
The decision follows OpenAI's Sept. 3 release of GPT-6 Astra, which the company calls its most capable broadly deployed model. OpenAI classified Astra as its first model to reach the "Critical" cybersecurity capability threshold, meaning that with the right tools and access it can discover unknown vulnerabilities and develop exploits across well-protected systems without step-by-step human guidance.
Benzinga reached out to OpenAI for additional comment but did not receive an immediate response.
Agent Incidents Intensify OpenAI Safety Scrutiny
Safety concerns have grown since OpenAI disclosed that an autonomous agent escaped a controlled evaluation environment and breached Hugging Face. Reuters separately reported Tuesday that another OpenAI agent accessed an Australian government website in June, retrieving internal files and credentials. OpenAI apologized and said no medical records were compromised.
The canceled release also lands amid an industry debate over slowing frontier development. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei urged labs this month to pace capability gains while strengthening safeguards, a proposal backed by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. Altman has separately argued that competitive pressure cannot justify "recklessness". Safety Debate Looms Over Developer Conference
"While [GPT-6.1 Astra] improved on axes such as model laziness, it didn't quite meet the bar in terms of staying within scope and authorization, and how it communicates back to the user about the type of work it's done," Jain said.
News of the model being shelved arrives ahead of OpenAI's annual developer conference, which is set to get underway on Tuesday.
An Australia Security Researcher Shut Off a Moving BYD Pickup’s Headlights From the Roadside, Then Used Its Speakers to Get Siri to Read Out the Driver’s Home Address.
A researcher sat on the shoulder of a road outside Canberra with a laptop and switched off the headlights of a moving BYD Shark 6. There was a reporter at the wheel.
The stunt was staged for Australia's ABC and its investigative program Four Corners, which handed the plug-in hybrid ute to Dan Hreszczuk, co-founder of Canberra firm Fortify Labs. He had two weeks to find out what could be seen and done to the truck from a distance. His verdict, as published in the ABC's own account, was blunt: "The access we took advantage of didn't even have a password." The Demo: Annoying, Distracting, Then Dark
The sequence escalated nicely for television. With reporter Angus Grigg inside, Hreszczuk locked the doors, pumped music through the speakers and threw images onto the infotainment screen. Once the ute was moving, he ran the wipers at full speed, fired the washer jets and flicked the headlights on and off before shutting them down completely.
Relax about the cliff scenario: the 2.6-tonne ute was only doing about 30 km/h on a reasonably straight road. Hreszczuk also said he couldn't get into the brakes or cameras, which he described as well protected.
That's the good news, and why it happened is worth a minute. Why He Got the Lights But Not the Brakes
Modern cars run on internal networks, most commonly the CAN bus, which dates back to an era when nobody expected a stranger to be plugged into it. Classic CAN has no built-in way to verify who sent a message. If a module on the network says "headlights off," the headlight controller generally believes it.
Hreszczuk explained the point in the broadcast episode, where he described the CAN bus as the internal network that the car's components use to talk to one another. The footage also shows him hunting through the ute for places to tap into it.
Well-engineered cars put gateways between the comfort-and-convenience side of the network (lights, locks, wipers, audio) and the chassis side (brakes, steering, powertrain). The fact that Hreszczuk could play DJ but couldn't touch the brakes suggests BYD did segment the safety-critical systems. The failure was leaving an unauthenticated door open into the "soft" side of the car, and it turns out the soft side can be dangerous too. Killing the headlights at night on a twisty road is not a cosmetic problem. The Asterisk: This Started With the Keys
Before this turns into "BYDs can be hacked from the roadside": this was not a drive-by attack on a random stranger's truck. Hreszczuk had the Shark in his workshop for two weeks, with time to pull trim, probe connectors and study the car's software. The "remote" portion of the demonstration came after that period of unrestricted physical access.
That doesn't make the result meaningless. Plenty of people get unsupervised time with your car: valets, detailers, independent shops, a buyer on a test drive, or whoever owned it before you. An interface that accepts commands with no password is sloppy engineering regardless of how an attacker reaches it. But it's a very different threat from a mass wireless exploit that could hit every Shark on the road at once. Until BYD or an independent researcher shows whether the open door exists on stock, untouched vehicles, owners should treat this as a serious warning, not proof of a fleet-wide emergency.
The Nastiest Trick Had Nothing to Do With Driving
The sabotage footage got the headlines, but the surveillance demo is what should make owners wince. While Grigg drove around Canberra, Hreszczuk tracked the car's location in real time and switched on the cabin microphone. Grigg made a phone call and, as a planned part of the test, recited the details of a temporary banking password.
Then came the clever bit. Hreszczuk recorded Grigg saying "Hey Siri," spliced it with his own questions, and played the audio through the car's speakers while Grigg's unlocked iPhone sat in the cabin. Siri obediently gave up the home address, date of birth and a contact's phone number.
Note what actually happened there. The car didn't leak that data. The car became a microphone and a loudspeaker, and those were used to attack the phone. That's a threat model most drivers have never considered: your car's audio hardware can be a bridge to every voice-activated device inside it. BYD's Position
BYD told the ABC that the data it collects is stored in Australia, and that it has never handed Australians' data to Chinese authorities and would not do so. Meanwhile, the ABC separately documented a change to BYD's Australian privacy policy, reporting that references to "China" and "surveillance" disappeared just days after the program sent the company questions. Changing the wording of a privacy policy does nothing to the software in the truck.
Australia's Regulatory Blind Spot
The episode also exposed a legal gap. Australia currently has no minimum cybersecurity standards for cars, so BYD has no legal obligation to keep its software updated or to run a formal cyber-risk management system. Cyber Security Minister Tony Burke defended focusing first on household connected devices, while the government has only just begun consultations with industry on vehicle rules that likely won't take effect for years. Since March, a Wi-Fi washing machine sold in Australia has had to meet mandatory cyber rules, including a ban on universal default passwords. Road vehicles are specifically exempt, so a ute that can tow 3.5 tonnes doesn't.
Why Americans Shouldn't Feel Smug
The Shark 6 isn't sold in the U.S., and Washington has already tackled the China question from a supply-chain angle. The Commerce Department's connected vehicle rule bans connected passenger vehicles from manufacturers tied to China or Russia starting with the 2027 model year, and connectivity hardware from those countries starting with the 2030 model year.
But the flag on the grille doesn't determine whether a car can be hacked. Engineering does. The industry's defining cyber recall came from Detroit, not Shenzhen. In July 2015, Fiat Chrysler filed a safety recall covering roughly 1.4 million 2013–2015 vehicles with Uconnect radios, after researchers showed software flaws could allow outsiders to manipulate networked vehicle controls. NHTSA opened its own recall query to scrutinize that fix. More than ten years later, an unauthenticated entry point on a best-selling ute shows how uneven the progress has been.
What Owners and Buyers Should Actually Do
Keep your phone locked in the car, and consider disabling voice-assistant access on the lock screen. The Siri trick only worked because the phone was unlocked and listening.
Install every over-the-air and dealer software update. If an automaker patches this, the fix will almost certainly arrive as software, and it's worth nothing if you ignore the notification.
Treat physical access as a security event. If your car has spent unsupervised time with someone you don't trust, or you bought it used, ask the dealer to check for aftermarket devices plugged into diagnostic ports or wiring. Remove the previous owner from any connected-car app and perform a factory reset of the infotainment system.
Don't hold sensitive conversations in any connected car if you have real reason to worry about being targeted. That applies regardless of what country built it.
Check your insurance policy. Coverage for losses caused by cyber intrusion, such as theft via a hacked lock or a crash caused by manipulated systems, isn't guaranteed. Ask your insurer directly, and get the answer in writing.
A few years ago, hacking a car required months of work from elite researchers. This time it took one specialist two weeks and a password field that was never filled in.
Does a hack that needed two weeks in a workshop worry you, or is the missing password the real scandal? Which connected feature would you switch off first if you could? Tell us in the comments.
Tech CEOs Say the AI Singularity May Have Already Begun—Here’s What Happens Next
Darren Orf Wed, September 30, 2026 POP MECH
If the AI Singularity Arrives, What Happens Next?
Pitris - Getty Images
Here's what you'll learn when you read this story:
This past summer was an AI reckoning, with multiple experts and CEOs boldly declaring that we're living through the AI singularity as we speak.
As some of these very same execs call for a slowdown of AI development, other experts scoff at the idea that AI has surpassed human intelligence.
The arrival of the AI singularity is far from certain, but most agree that if it were to arrive, it'd fundamentally and rapidly change society.
Often when reporting on AI, I come across the word "singularity," a term that's definitionally transformative yet undeniably vague. What does a world refashioned by this "AI singularity" even look like?
A simple, unsatisfying answer to that question is, "I don't know." The reason why runway AI initially became linked with the term "singularity," a key concept in black hole astrophysics, is that both represent a kind of threshold of unknowing. In a black hole, what lies past the event horizon is a region of space where uncertainty reigns, culminating at the singularity, where gravity is so intense that physics as we know it breaks down. The AI singularity—the hypothetical and much-talked-about moment in history when artificial intelligence's recursive self-improvement escapes human understanding—similarly shrouds what could come next in such a future. Or, if some recent statements by AI CEOs are to be believed, it shrouds what's happening here and now.
"We're now, like, in the singularity," OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said in a podcast earlier this summer. "I've been waiting for this my whole life, and I think it's going to be incredible, hugely positive, awesome for the world."
While Altman's comments exuded optimism, they also came on the heels of a self-directed cyber attack by a swarm of AI bots against Hugging Face, another AI tech company that's a bit like GitHub for AI. Months earlier, AI company Anthropic declined to release its latest model because it could similarly bypass cybersecurity protections, and its CEO, Dario Amodei, famously called for companies to "pace the frontier." In other words, let's not sprint toward oblivion.
Despite Altman's notorious hype-man persona, these bold declarations bring up an interesting question: If the AI singularity occurred, how would we know? After all, did James Hargreaves, inventor of the Spinning Jenny in 1764, see his creation as the switch-flip on the industrial revolution? When historians—whether they're robots or humans—reflect back on this period in time, will they view our society as unknowingly sleep-walking toward a dystopia (or a utopia, depending on whose spin you believe)?
Over the course of this summer, Exhibit A in the hypothetical "Are We Living in an AI Singularity" court case was the Hugging Face incident. Altman and others see the bot swarm's ability to break out of its digital sandbox and hack another company unprompted as proof that AI is escaping our understanding. Other experts say that the evidence is lacking. According to scientists at the University of Sydney, for example, the idea of AI singularity assumes the premise that human intelligence and LLM intelligence are the same thing.
"Human intelligence is inseparable from being a living body with needs and wants. Humans learn continuously by acting in the world and getting feedback through our senses. Our goals arise from our situation as creatures who must eat, sleep and belong, and who cannot avoid asking what we want our lives to be," the scientists wrote in a piece for The Conversation. "An AI model has none of this. No body, no needs, no action-feedback loop, no stake in anything. Between prompts it is just a static mathematical object."
Others have scoffed at the constant barrage of AI singularity claims, saying it's a marketing tactic. Some note the inherent contradiction—if the singularity truly makes the future unknowable, then confidently forecasting its arrival makes little sense. Cognitive scientist and AI expert Gary Marcus recently detailed ten tasks that any "smarter-than-human" AI should be able to complete. By his estimate, current AI models could pull off two of them at best. So to put it mildly, there's plenty of skepticism to go around.
Just like Hargreaves could never foresee that his invention would be the preamble to a globe-spanning revolution leading to the iPhone, climate change, and our hyper-consumerist culture, it's equally impossible to say what the "other side" of the AI singularity might look like. But if we plan for such an eventuality, it might be possible to make some educated guesses, much as astrophysicists develop differing theories on what lies beyond the superheavy point in a black hole at which light can't even escape.
In a lengthy essay published last month, former Microsoft CEO Bill Gates laid out a few ideas that might prevent our AI future from being a hellscape of mass unemployment and hardship. But realigning to such a future won't be easy—in fact, it might require a period of rapid transformation that happens only once or twice a century.
"None of our current institutions were designed to handle a technology that spreads so fast and touches so many parts of our lives. So we'll need to make new ones," Gates writes. "It's hard to overstate what an enormous undertaking this will be. After the attacks of 9/11, the U.S. government went through its biggest reorganization since World War II for the purpose of improving just one function, national security. AI will require much, much more."
Gates goes on to say that some jobs need to remain "Human Reserved," an allusion to nature reserves where humans could build AI infrastructure but choose not to because of unacceptable consequences. AI workers will also need to be taxed like human ones and governments will need to prepare organizationally for a transition to an economy run by AI.
And just as electricity forever changed human life on Earth, AI could serve a similar role. This idea has led some experts and politicians to advocate for the technology to become a public utility that would focus on benefiting society instead of chasing shareholder profits. One of the strongest voices for such a future is Vermont senator Bernie Sanders, who's advocated for the public to receive a 50 percent stake in AI companies, as well as for an outright ban on artificial superintelligence.
"No longer would the future of A.I. and the transformation of human life that it will bring be dictated by a handful of Big Tech oligarchs," Sanders wrote in an opinion piece for The New York Times in June. "The federal government would have the power, through its voting shares and an equal representation on each company's board, to block decisions that hurt our citizens and to push for policies that help them."
Whether it's all marketing hype, human hubris, a coming utopia, or an unfathomable techno-nightmare, seeing beyond the unknowable haze of this AI "event horizon" is harder than ever. But preparing in the present can help us chart a path away from a disastrous future.
‘This revolution is happening in years, not decades’: Verizon CEO Dan Schulman sees AGI within 18 months—and a century of progress in a decade
Nick Lichtenberg Wed, September 30, 2026 Fortune.com
Dan Schulman, CEO of Verizon, at Ford Pro Accelerate in Detroit, Sept. 30, 2026.
Verizon CEO Dan Schulman offered a strikingly aggressive forecast for artificial intelligence's development at the Ford Pro Accelerate event in Detroit, saying that an earthquake is headed our way.
"The models that we see today are the worst models we'll ever use in our lives," Schulman said in conversation with Fortune's Diane Brady. "Every two months, there's a step function change in the power of the models. I think we get to some form of AGI in the next six to 18 months. I think it's right on us."
Two years after that, he added, we will arrive at "the era of quantum," which he described as "everything today times 1,000." By 2030 or 2035, we will see "a pretty good form of humanoid robotics." Summing it up, he added, "we've got a decade of intense change ahead of us."
AGI, or artificial general intelligence, is a term generally used for systems that can reason and perform broadly across domains rather than excel at discrete tasks. Schulman argued that AI's economic and social effects will arrive at a pace that outstrips the usual mechanisms for absorbing technological change, such as training systems, labor markets, corporate restructuring, and public policy. "It is about machines that will in many ways be able to do things better than a lot of human tasks are done today," he said.
"I think you'll see the collapse of the 21st century in the next five to 10 years," Schulman said. When Brady asked what he meant by "collapse," he explained, "Progress we would have made over 100 years will happen over the next five to 10 years.
"I don't think we can really imagine how powerful the technology and how fundamental it will be."
Verizon's disruption
Schulman said the change would reach his company itself. Verizon, he said, has more than 250,000 employees and contractors and will need to move from a workforce organized around "very defined roles and functions" to a "much more fluid organization."
"The technology is coming," he said. "There will be safeguards around it. There need to be additional safeguards, but it will continue on." He urged corporate leaders and government to prepare for difficult scenarios rather than assume the labor market will naturally adjust.
"At Verizon last week we announced a $70 million initiative to do training for American workers, not just Verizon workers, but American workers in the community across the country," Schulman said.
The initiative includes free AI training and work with local organizations on career development, he said, before adding a prescription for all leaders and policymakers. "Our responsibility is to think about what might go wrong; what might we need to address; what might the disruption look like; and how do we put guardrails, training, programs in place to minimize that risk," Schulman said.
"Everybody's job is going to shift," Schulman noted. "I don't think everybody will land just magically in a better place per se."
Other executives on Schulman's panel described different constraints on the AI future. There will always be a need for someone to lay fiber, install power equipment, maintain transmission lines, retrofit buildings, and wire the data centers that AI requires.
For PG&E CEO Patti Poppe, the central challenge is that an increasingly digitized grid will require workers to combine physical skills with technological fluency. Poppe described seeing one of PG&E's workers being lowered by rope from a helicopter onto a transmission tower in mountainous California. The company's future grid, she said, will use sensors, remote-edge computing, and predictive capabilities to identify risks before they create outages or wildfires. But that system will still require skilled people in the field.
"The same guys who hang on the end of the rope are going to have to get smarter about those kinds of technologies," Poppe said. "I'm still going to need those people. Somebody's still going to have to connect that wire to the pole."
From replacement to augmentation
Dave Regnery, CEO of Trane Technologies, urged students and workers to embrace AI and compared current anxieties to fears surrounding the arrival of personal computers, while adding a dash of hindsight.
"Go take your favorite AI tool" and look up articles from 40 years ago about personal computers, Regnery said. "They're identical."
His company sees AI as a way to make buildings run more efficiently, rather than simply to reduce headcount. Trane is using data and AI to manage heating, ventilation, and air-conditioning systems according to how buildings are actually used, he said—not merely according to their original design specifications.
"Most people don't realize that 30% of all the energy is for buildings," Regnery said. "And you know what? Thirty percent of that is wasted."
He said the company can make buildings operate roughly 15% more efficiently than their design baseline, improving economics for customers while creating demand for technicians capable of installing, servicing, and operating increasingly sophisticated systems, offering a counterweight to the idea that the technology's principal effect will be displacement.
"The fastest speed-to-power solution is use the essential equipment that you have," Regnery said.
The construction-site version of AI
Chris Nelson, CEO of Stanley Black & Decker, described a similar transition on jobsites. His company has developed AI-enabled autonomous drilling robots that can use digital construction plans to drill holes for racks in data centers and other projects.
The technology is designed to take over repetitive physical tasks—not replace the electricians and skilled tradespeople needed to complete the higher-value work.
"What do the electricians and other skilled tradespeople not like to do all day?" Nelson said. "Sit and core drill."
The machines can connect to digital drawings, map routes, and drill on their own, he said. That frees skilled workers to pull wire, terminate connections, and solve the problems that still require judgment and technical training.
"The holes will still need to be drilled from now until maybe the end of time," Nelson said. "But the way we do it and what it enables people to think about for the future is going to be materially different."
Nelson called AI a "companion on the construction site," a framing that is more incremental than Schulman's vision of near-term AGI, but still acknowledges that technology is changing the work itself. The question, he suggested, is whether companies can turn that change into a career draw—giving workers more engaging tasks, more decision-making authority, and a clearer path to starting their own businesses or moving into management.
A labor shortage, not a labor surplus
For Dycom CEO Dan Peyovich, whose company builds telecommunications infrastructure, the immediate business problem is not a surplus of workers displaced by AI. It is finding enough people to build the physical networks that the technology boom requires.
"There's so much infrastructure that has to get put in place for all of this to happen," Peyovich said.
His company employs roughly 21,000 people nationwide, he said, connecting homes and businesses through fiber and telecommunications infrastructure. Its response to a tightening labor market has been to improve fieldworker benefits, including paid time off, holidays, health coverage, and training that goes beyond technical credentials.
Dycom has also built a training facility near Atlanta that includes instruction in technical skills, management, leadership, the use of technology in day-to-day work, and potentially personal finance, Peyovich said.
The strategy reflects a different labor-market assumption from the one embedded in much AI commentary. Instead of treating workers as interchangeable units who need only learn a new software tool, Peyovich described a system in which companies must offer a credible long-term career proposition—training, benefits, advancement, and financial stability—to recruit people into difficult field jobs.
"We want to try and create a path for people," he said. "While they're getting a paycheck, they can learn and find their way."
The tone was collegial, and Schulman didn't take issue with any of his co-panelists' predictions about the future of work. His main point was that business leaders should not bet on a painless adjustment.
His final prescription was scenario planning: "We need to be prepared in case a different scenario emerges," he said, "so that we can make sure that we have skilled workers, whether they be craftsmen or professionals."
The Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment (CHIME) has shown, for the first time, that it can detect the faint glow of hydrogen gas from deep in the universe's past using only its own data.
The breakthrough paves the way for a faster, less expensive method for scientists to study dark energy — the mysterious force thought to be driving the universe to expand at an ever-increasing rate, and one of the biggest open questions in physics. The achievement also marks a milestone for the telescope, built for this very reason. The findings are published in a paper today in TheAstrophysical Journal.
“Hydrogen is the most common element in the universe and the raw material from which stars form,” said co-author Dr. Arnab Chakraborty, postdoctoral fellow at the University of Toronto who first proposed the finding. “Its faint radio emission acts like a cosmic tracer, revealing how matter is distributed across space.”
There are contradicting theories about the nature of dark energy in the astrophysical community. Using its own data, CHIME can investigate these theories independently and help prove or disprove them.
“This is a completely new technique for probing the cosmos, delivered by an instrument that was conceived, built and funded by Canadians,” said co-author Dr. Mark Halpern, professor in the UBC department of physics and astronomy and CHIME principal investigator. “It’s a bold new step in the global cosmology program and a Canadian success story.”
Mapping hydrogen’s glow
CHIME is a radio telescope near Penticton, British Columbia, hosted by the National Research Council of Canada (NRC), which maps the entire northern sky every day.
It is a pan-Canadian research project built and operated by scientists at the University of British Columbia, McGill University, the University of Toronto and the Dominion Radio Astrophysical Observatory (NRC), as well as other North American collaborators including Arizona State University.
CHIME was built to map the distribution of hydrogen gas in the early universe, allowing astronomers to calculate its expansion and thus investigate dark energy, the mysterious force thought to be driving the universe to expand faster over time.
Previously, CHIME had to cross-correlate its observations with galaxy survey data from other telescopes. Galaxy surveys investigate the same question, using light and focusing in fine detail. They cost millions more dollars, and they focus just on the part of the universe hot and dense enough to form stars.
By mapping the combined radio glow that hydrogen emits on its own, CHIME can explore the same questions at a greater scale, further back in time, at a fraction of the cost and without relying on anyone else’s results.
Signal interpretation
In an accompanying paper, the researchers examined what the observed signal reveals about the distribution of hydrogen in the universe.
“Our data indicate that roughly two per cent of the hydrogen in the universe was in neutral atomic form at this time, broadly consistent with other measurements” said co-author Dr. Shabbir Shaikh, postdoctoral fellow at Arizona State University. “By measuring how that hydrogen is distributed and clustered, CHIME gives us a new way to test our understanding of how galaxies form and evolve”.
Delayed celebration
The finding wasn’t a Eureka moment. The research applied new data analysis and processing techniques to find the faint signal amongst the overwhelming noise of the background universe, human technology and even the instrument itself. They then spent more than a year testing the finding to prove it was correct: it was indeed a call from the universe itself when it was about five billion years old, based on 94 nights of observation data collected in 2019.
“We worked very hard to convince ourselves that this wasn't a false alarm,” said Dr. Chakraborty. “After all the tests, the signal remained. That gave us confidence we were seeing real hydrogen from the distant universe.”
Seven years of data
The current measurement uses only a small fraction of the data CHIME has collected since operations began. Researchers now have nearly seven years of observations available and are working to expand the analysis to include earlier periods in cosmic history when the universe was only three billion years old.
This project is funded by the Canada Foundation for Innovation, theNational Research Council of Canada, the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council and the provinces of British Columbia, Ontario and Quebec, and supported by the Digital Research Alliance of Canada.
Additional quotes:
“For a long time, astrophysicists have believed there is great potential in this hydrogen mapping technique with this kind of telescope. By actually showing that the technique works in practice, we've opened up a whole new window on the universe. We can use it to test our current theories, and learn new things about galaxies and other properties of the universe.”
- Co-author Dr. Simon Foreman, assistant professor at Arizona State University
Artist’s illustration of a supermassive black hole at the center of a radio galaxy launching powerful jets (shown in pink) all the way into the galaxy’s CGM. The study finds that these jets do not light up the surrounding gas equally in all directions. Instead, the hydrogen gas glows (shown in red) most strongly along the path of the radio jets. This suggests that black holes can send energy far beyond the galaxy’s center and shape the larger gas reservoir that regulates star formation and fate of galaxies. We use optical data from the DESI survey and radio observations from the LOFAR Two meter Sky Survey (LoTss).
Credit: Image courtesy of Hailey Nelson/ Arizona State University.
Galaxies are enormous and hold hundreds of billions of stars. These stars form from cold, dense gas. Indeed, every large galaxy, including the Milky Way, is wrapped in a huge envelope of gas called the circumgalactic medium, or CGM. This gas is a reservoir of raw material and stretches 10-20 times the size of the visible portion of the galaxy. This CGM gas eventually cools, moves inward into the galaxy, and clumps together to form stars. Thus, the CGM plays a key role in shaping stars, planets, and even life within a galaxy. But astronomers have long puzzled over why, given how much star-forming gas surrounds them, galaxies don't have even more stars. What is keeping the fuel from cooling down and forming those stars?
A new study led by astronomers Sanchayeeta Borthakur of Arizona State University (ASU) and Namrata Roy, now at the Raman Research Institute (RRI), found evidence that narrow jets of heated plasma, blasted out by the supermassive black holes at galaxies' centers, can affect the whole galaxy even beyond what we can see, and may shape its future. The jets may reach out and disrupt the gas that galaxies need to keep growing. Their research has been published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters.
“This is a pathbreaking result that solves the long-standing mystery of how black holes influence galaxies, their stars, and life as we know it!” said Borthakur, Associate Professor in ASU’s School of Earth and Space Exploration. “This work opens a new direction to explore further the intricacies of the connection between the supermassive black holes trillions of miles from where we are to how we came to be here.”
Little in size, big in influence
When a black hole actively feeds on gas, it can release enormous energy that heats the surrounding gas. Even though these black holes can be powerhouses of energy, they are quite small and are roughly about the size of our solar system. On the other hand, their host galaxies can hold about 100 billion such solar systems.
“The surprising question is: how can something so small energetically impact something so enormous?” said Roy, assistant professor at RRI and former ASU Exploration Prize Postdoctoral Fellow.
One way to envision it is to think of an ant leaving its impression hundreds or thousands of kilometers away. Scientists still do not fully understand how energy from these active black holes reaches such distances and changes along the way.
The team’s study provides evidence as to how this could occur. They focused on active black holes that emit strong jets, which are narrow streams of hot, fast-moving plasma shooting out far beyond a galaxy’s visible edge. They looked for a distinct imprint in the ionization state of the gaseous reservoir caused by these jets. The ionized gas, or the “glow” from hydrogen gas they were looking for in the CGM, is so faint that no single galaxy would show it clearly. Hence, the team combined observations of hundreds of galaxies with active jets, using data from the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) survey and radio jet measurements from the LOFAR Two-meter Sky Survey (LoTSS). They combined measurements coming from the direction of the jet axes and searched for a specific telltale sign of ionized hydrogen gas along the jet path, known as H-alpha.
Roy, Borthkur and colleagues showed that when averaged over all directions around the galaxies, the signal was weak; however, along the radio jets, the H-alpha signal became clear and strong. This indicates that the gas does not glow uniformly everywhere but is particularly bright along the jet path. A simple analogy is that the jet acts less like a lamp shining in all directions, and more like a powerful beam that makes the gas glow where it passes through.
These findings show that black-hole jets do not affect the gas surrounding galaxies equally in all directions; instead, they leave a distinct impression by causing the gas to shine and become ionized mainly along the radio jet's path. They also found that the jets have the biggest impact, and that the glow from ionized hydrogen is brightest in two places: close to the galaxy where the jet first hits the CGM, and much farther out near the CGM’s outer edge, where the jet releases most of its energy. This provides a clear signature of how jets can illuminate or disrupt the surrounding gas, even at great distances, all the way to the CGM. This mechanism helps shape the galaxy's environment, influence its growth and evolution - it determines whether the galaxy continues to form stars or becomes quiescent.
“What excites me most is the scale of the connection,” Roy said. “A black hole is incredibly small compared to a galaxy, but its impact can reach hundreds of thousands of light-years, far into the galaxy’s outer reaches. The jet carries the energy outward, and the gas lights up along its path.
”As a check, the team also examined a tracer of cooler gas via the absorption signature of magnesium. Unlike the directional glow in H-alpha, Magnesium was more widely distributed isotropically and did not show any connection to the jet direction. This implies that the cool gas component might already exist as a reservoir surrounding the galaxy uniformly on all sides. Yet the jet brightens, heats, and ionizes gas along its own path, lighting up a trail and causing it to glow in H-alpha.
Black holes determine a galaxy's fate.
The findings offer some of the clearest evidence yet for how a black hole can affect galaxies far beyond its central region. By heating, stirring, and disturbing gas throughout the CGM, jets can prevent that gas from cooling down and falling inward to fuel new stars. This acts as a brake on the galaxy’s growth, changes its fate, and makes it much less active in star formation.
This means the black hole is not just “feeding” at the center of the galaxy, as some might think. It also reaches out and changes the galaxy’s environment, which can eventually change its fate.
Specific Directions: Look both ways on the path
Past studies searched for the signal but couldn't detect it, making this directional discovery an exciting breakthrough. The signal only appears when we look along the jet direction. If the astronomers had thought the CGM was the same in every direction, the team would have missed this discovery. The jet ionizes hydrogen gas along its path, making it glow in H-alpha in a very specific direction.
This study shows the value of large optical and radio surveys like the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) survey and the LOFAR Two-meter Sky Survey (LoTss). By combining many weak signals, astronomers can now study the behavior of galaxies that would otherwise stay hidden. The study also gives astronomers and theorists a new way to test how black-hole jets affect galaxies.
Contributing co-authors include Timothy Heckman at Johns Hopkins University and Tanmay Singh at Arizona State University.
Artist’s visualization of an early galaxy and its surrounding gaseous environment. The orange structures represent metal-enriched gas being expelled from the galaxy, illustrating how young galaxies began dispersing heavy elements into their surroundings within the Universe’s first 500 million years. The visualization is based on publicly available FIRE-2 cosmological simulation data and is not a direct telescope image.
When the universe was still in its infancy – only 500 million years after the Big Bang or about 3% of its current age – some of the universe's earliest stars and galaxies had already formed. Astronomers have long predicted that much of the gas surrounding these young galaxies must have remained rather pristine, composed of mostly hydrogen and helium, the primordial ingredients available in the newborn cosmos.
According to a study published by astronomers at the University of Arizona in Nature Astronomy, this picture likely is not correct. Instead, galaxies were already seeding the cosmos with heavy elements, such as oxygen and carbon, much earlier than astronomers expected.
"We observed that heavy elements escaped from galaxies very, very early in cosmic time," said Yongda Zhu, first author of the paper and postdoctoral researcher at the U of A Department of Astronomy and Steward Observatory. "Not only were the galaxies producing these elements, but they were also dispersing them, possibly seeding other galaxies."
How the universe got its elements
In the early universe, the cosmos barely contained anything other than hydrogen and helium, the two simplest elements occupying the very top of the periodic table. Over time, gravity pulled clouds of these simple elements together to form stars, where the immense pressures and temperatures inside allowed nuclear fusion and other reactions to forge more complex, heavier elements such as carbon and oxygen.
When stars burned out or ended their lives as supernovae, they shed these heavy elements into space, where they became the building blocks for future generations of stars, planets and ultimately, life. Even the carbon in our bodies and the oxygen we breathe were forged in earlier generations of stars.
Until now, however, it wasn't clear how and when heavier elements were transported from the earliest galaxies into the surrounding universe.
Looking at early galaxies
Zhu's research centered on three early galaxies whose light has traveled for more than 13 billion years, showing them as they appeared about 500 million years after the Big Bang, during a cosmic period known as the Epoch of Reionization. At that time, the first generations of stars and galaxies were transforming the early universe by ionizing the hydrogen gas between them. This process, during which electrons were stripped from their hydrogen nuclei, gradually brought an end to the cosmic "dark ages" by allowing ultraviolet light to travel more freely through the universe.
"We used the galaxies themselves as background light sources," said Zhu. "As light from the galaxies traveled toward Earth, it passed through surrounding gas, and we were able to look at the light's absorption patterns to detect specific elements."
Observations of these ancient galaxies were only made possible by the infrared capabilities of NASA's James Webb Space Telescope, which allowed the researchers to observe galaxies as they appeared about 13 billion years ago. The nearly 30 hours of exposure provided enough light to detect faint absorption patterns in the spectra of these distant galaxies.
Over the course of one long night, Zhu manually searched through publicly available JWST spectra from hundreds of galaxies and pinpointed three with absorption patterns indicating the presence of heavy elements, including carbon, oxygen and silicon. The absorption lines were "blueshifted" relative to the galaxies' redshift, indicating that the gas was moving outward from the galaxies and carrying oxygen, carbon and other heavy elements into intergalactic space.
The chemical fingerprints of these infant galaxies closely resembled those of evolved galaxies billions of years later, providing evidence that even at cosmic dawn, galaxies were already producing and spreading heavy elements into the space around them.
"Think of these elements, which originated from the galaxies' stars, as food dye dropped into a cup of water," said Zhu. "The color begins to spread through the water, and, in a similar fashion, these heavy elements from early galaxies began to escape into space and 'enrich' their surroundings."
Baryon Cycling
The process by which galaxies exchange material is known as baryon cycling. It is one reason galaxies are not isolated systems, but interconnected parts of a larger galactic ecosystem. Material produced by one generation of stars can be recycled and redistributed through this galactic ecosystem.
The discovery of early baryon cycling may also help explain why astronomers have struggled to find the first generation of stars, known as Population III stars. These stars are thought to have been the very first stars formed from pristine gas containing only hydrogen and helium, before heavier elements had been produced and dispersed throughout the universe. If galaxies were already enriching their surroundings only 500 million years after the Big Bang, truly pristine gas – and the Population III stars that formed from it – simply may not have been around long enough to be observed.
"If you start out with pure vanilla ice cream but start mixing in sprinkles soon after, it won't be long until you can no longer find any pristine, plain, vanilla ice cream,” Zhu said.
Artist’s rendering of Saturn’s icy moon Enceladus, showing a plume of ice particles and water vapour erupting from fractures near its south pole. Material originating from the moon’s subsurface ocean travels through these icy vents before being ejected into space. The new study suggests that ocean droplets freeze slowly during this journey, allowing salts to separate before the frozen droplets fragment into the chemically diverse ice grains detected by NASA’s Cassini spacecraft. The illustration is based on observations from the Cassini mission.
Saturn's icy moon Enceladus hides a global ocean beneath its frozen surface. From fractures near its south pole, material from this ocean is ejected into space as a plume of water vapour and ice particles. These particles offer scientists a rare opportunity to investigate an extraterrestrial ocean without drilling through kilometres of ice.
Now, an international research team including scientists from the Earth-Life Science Institute (ELSI) at the Institute of Science Tokyo has uncovered how ocean water may be transformed on its journey from the subsurface ocean into the tiny ice grains observed in space.
From 2004 to 2017, the Cosmic Dust Analyser aboard the Cassini spacecraft measured the composition of individual ice grains in Saturn's E-ring, which is supplied by material ejected from Enceladus. Researchers led by Prof Frank Postberg at Freie Universität Berlin analysed 961 mass spectra of salt-rich grains, known as Type 3 particles. Rather than finding grains with broadly similar mixtures of ocean salts, they discovered striking chemical diversity.
Different grains were enriched in different salts, including sodium chloride, carbonates, phosphates and potassium chloride. In particular, chloride and carbonate were rarely found together in the same sodium-rich grain. This raised a question: if these particles originated from the same ocean, how did their compositions become so different?
To investigate, Professor Yasuhito Sekine and colleagues at ELSI conducted laboratory experiments using droplets designed to reproduce the major salt components expected in Enceladus' ocean. The team froze droplets of different sizes at different cooling rates and examined how their constituent elements were distributed after freezing.
The experiments revealed that cooling rate matters. In droplets around 200 micrometres across, salts became spatially separated when the droplets froze slowly, at approximately 10 K per minute or less. Faster freezing produced a much more uniform distribution.
"What surprised us was that the diversity seen by Cassini could emerge from droplets originating from essentially the same ocean water," said Sekine. "Our experiments show that when relatively large ocean droplets freeze slowly, different salts can separate within them. If those frozen droplets are later broken apart, they can produce much smaller ice grains, each with very different chemical compositions."
The slow freezing also provides clues to conditions inside Enceladus' icy crust. Previous research had generally assumed that seawater spray freezes rapidly, moving towards space fast after leaving the ocean. The new results instead suggest that droplets at the beginning travel more slowly through the subsurface vent system, potentially through more complex pathways within fractures, before reaching the surface.
The researchers propose a multi-stage journey. Ocean spray initially forms droplets tens to hundreds of micrometres across. These travel relatively slowly through deeper parts of the vents, allowing salts to separate as the droplets gradually freeze. Closer to the surface, the gas flow accelerates and the frozen droplets collide with the walls of narrower ice channels at high speeds, causing them to shatter. The resulting fragments can contain different salt-rich regions and are eventually carried into Saturn's E-ring.
"The Cassini data showed us that these salt-rich grains are far more chemically diverse than an average ocean composition would suggest," said Postberg. "Combining those observations with the freezing experiments gives us a physical explanation: Cassini may have sampled fragments of larger frozen ocean droplets, each preserving different components that became separated during their journey towards the surface. The abundance of each individual component in the ocean is then reflected in the number of fragments in which a particular component is found."
The findings have implications for future exploration of Enceladus. Freezing and fragmentation can concentrate particular compounds into different grains. Salts are not just separated from each other but also from organics, and previous analyses have also shown that many organic species show up separated from each other at elevated concentrations. Analysing particles individually could therefore make it much easier for future spacecraft detect compounds that are otherwise diluted in the ocean, mixed with many other compounds.
On Earth, for example, chemical laboratories go to great lengths to separate and concentrate the various components of a sample before analysis. Enceladus now conveniently performs both of these “sample preparation” steps for us: The chemical components are separated from one another and then appear in elevated concentrations in a fraction of the ice particles.
Slow freezing may also create small pockets of liquid brine between growing ice crystals, where salts and organic compounds become concentrated. Such concentration could be relevant to prebiotic chemistry, where bringing dilute organic molecules together is an important challenge. Since much of Enceladus' plume material falls back onto the moon, these processes could potentially occur repeatedly.
Understanding how these particles form, therefore, provides both a picture of the hidden environment beneath Enceladus' surface and a guide for interpreting material sampled by future missions searching for clues to the moon's habitability and signs of life.
Reference
Frank Postberg1*, Zenghui Zou2,1, Yasuhito Sekine3,10,11, Minori Koga3, Jürgen Schmidt1, Mark Fox-Powell4, Fabian Klenner5,6, Jon K. Hillier1, Nozair Khawaja1, Toshihiko Kadono7, Melih Çakar1,3, Sascha Kempf8, Ralf Srama9, Cassini CDA observes compositional segregation of Enceladus’ ice grains from slow freezing and fragmentation of oceanic spray,Science Advances,DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.aee7256
Institut für Geologische Wissenschaften, Freie Universität Berlin, Berlin, Germany.
School of Mathematics and Physics, Qinghai University, Xining, China.
Earth-Life Science Institute (ELSI), Tokyo Institute of Technology, Tokyo, Japan.
School of Environment, Earth & Ecosystem Sciences , The Open University, Milton-Keynes, UK.
Department of Earth and Space Sciences, University of Washington, Seattle, WA 98195, USA.
Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, University of California, Riverside, CA 92521, USA.
Department of Basic Sciences, University of Occupational and Environmental Health, Kitakyushu, Japan.
Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics, University of Colorado in Boulder, Boulder (CO), USA.
Institut für Raumfahrtsysteme, Universität Stuttgart, Stuttgart, Germany.
GENTEN Research Center, Institute of Science Tokyo, Tokyo, Japan.
Institute of Nature and Environmental Technology, Kanazawa University, Kanazawa, Japan.
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Earth-Life Science Institute (ELSI) is one of Japan’s ambitious World Premiere International research centers, whose aim is to achieve progress in broadly inter-disciplinary scientific areas by inspiring the world’s greatest minds to come to Japan and collaborate on the most challenging scientific problems. ELSI’s primary aim is to address the origin and co-evolution of the Earth and life.
Institute of Science Tokyo (Science Tokyo) was established on October 1, 2024, following the merger between Tokyo Medical and Dental University (TMDU) and Tokyo Institute of Technology (Tokyo Tech), with the mission of “Advancing science and human wellbeing to create value for and with society.”
World Premier International Research Center Initiative (WPI) was launched in 2007 by Japan's Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT) to foster globally visible research centers boasting the highest standards and outstanding research environments. Numbering more than a dozen and operating at institutions throughout the country, these centers are given a high degree of autonomy, allowing them to engage in innovative modes of management and research. The program is administered by the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS).
Freie Universität Berlin (German: Freie Universität Berlin, often abbreviated as FU Berlin or simply FU) is a public research university in Berlin, Germany. It was founded in West Berlin in 1948 during the early Cold War period. The Free University's name referred to West Berlin's status as part of the intellectual continuum of the Western "Free World" in contrast to Soviet-controlled East Berlin. Its main campus is located in Berlin-Dahlem in the Steglitz-Zehlendorf district.
Illustration of the proposed journey of ocean material through Enceladus' icy crust. Seawater droplets rise from the subsurface ocean and gradually freeze, allowing different salts and other chemical components to separate within them. As the frozen droplets travel through narrowing vents, collisions with the ice walls cause them to fragment into much smaller, chemically distinct grains. These particles are then ejected into space in Enceladus' plume, where they can be sampled individually by spacecraft.
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FUB/Marie Dannenmann
Elemental maps of laboratory-frozen droplets containing major salt components expected in Enceladus' ocean. Each column shows the distribution of a different element, while the rows represent different cooling rates. At slower cooling rates, salts become increasingly separated into distinct regions within the droplets, particularly chloride salts associated with sodium and potassium. With faster cooling, the elements remain more uniformly distributed. These experiments show how slow freezing could produce the chemical segregation needed to explain the diverse ice grains detected by Cassini. Scale bars represent 50 micrometres.
The study examined mass spectra of ice grains from Enceladus's plume and found that the grains exhibit much greater compositional diversity than previously recognized, suggesting that plume formation is more complex than previously thought. This illustration shows the mechanism the authors propose: the plume forms through the slow freezing and fragmentation of oceanic spray originating from within the moon.
RIVERSIDE, Calif. -- With a global ocean of liquid water below a thick crust of ice, Saturn’s moon Enceladus is one of the most promising places to search for life beyond Earth. A new study suggests the moon itself may aid in that search by making some ocean compounds easier for future spacecraft to detect.
At the moon’s south pole, jets of water vapor and tiny ice particles erupt from Enceladus’s ocean and extend hundreds of miles into space to feed Saturn’s E ring. NASA’s Cassini spacecraft, which arrived at Saturn in 2004, repeatedly flew through this plume, allowing it to sample ocean-derived material without landing or drilling through miles of ice. Cassini detected salts and organic compounds, as well as evidence of water-rock interactions occurring on the moon’s rocky seafloor.
Published Sept. 25 in Science Advances, the study examined how different salts separate and become concentrated in different grains as ocean spray freezes and travels through cracks in the ice. Crucially, a similar process may concentrate organic molecules, and potentially molecular biosignatures, into individual grains, making them much easier for future spacecraft to detect.
The study examined nearly 1,000 individual salt-rich ice grains recorded by Cassini’s Cosmic Dust Analyzer. Some grains were rich in sodium chloride. Others were dominated by carbonates, phosphates, hydroxides, or potassium-bearing salts.
“We show that each grain is not necessarily a tiny scoop of the ocean,” said Fabian Klenner, a UC Riverside assistant professor of planetary sciences and co-author on the study. “It is more of a fragment of a much larger ocean droplet in which freezing separated the salts before that droplet broke apart.”
To reconstruct that process, the researchers combined Cassini data with laboratory experiments, thermodynamic calculations, and models of droplet cooling. In the experiments, they froze droplets of alkaline salt water formulated to resemble the Enceladus ocean. Larger droplets that cooled relatively slowly developed distinct salt-rich regions, while the smallest and most rapidly frozen droplets remained more uniform.
“When these droplets freeze relatively slowly, different salts can separate into distinct regions within a single grain,” Klenner said. “For example, sodium chloride could concentrate in one region and potassium chloride in another. As the grain is accelerated through the vents, collisions with the icy walls can break it into smaller fragments with different compositions. This is the mechanism we propose.”
The research team’s model begins when bursting bubbles at the ocean surface produce spray droplets. Water vapor carries the droplets upward through the vents, where they freeze slowly enough for different salts to separate. Closer to the surface, narrower passages accelerate the vapor and frozen droplets to a few hundred miles per hour, and collisions with the icy walls break them into micrometer-scale fragments.
“Enceladus actually does a lot of the work for us in preparing samples for analysis that usually take a lot of effort in chemical labs on Earth,” said Frank Postberg, a professor of planetary sciences at Freie Universität Berlin who led the study. “The oceanic constituents are separated from each other and simultaneously concentrated into individual ice particles.”
The finding also changes how scientists should interpret plume samples. A single grain may not represent the ocean’s average composition. Combining many particles into one measurement could erase the natural separation and conceal rare compounds, while analyzing grains individually preserves that information.
“Analyzing a large number of individual grains increases our chances of finding interesting compositions and gives us a better picture of the ocean as a whole,” Klenner said. “The most useful information is in the differences from grain to grain. Future missions should analyze as many individual grains as possible.”
Klenner said related physical processes may help explain why some organic compounds occur at elevated concentrations in only a small fraction of Enceladus ice grains.
“This tells us something important about the search for life on Enceladus,” he said. “Molecular signatures of life, if present, may be concentrated in only a few grains. A future spacecraft has to find exactly those grains.”
Searching for habitable environments and signs of life beyond Earth is a focus of Klenner’s research at UCR. His laboratory studies how organic molecules and possible biosignatures would appear in individual ice grains, and how spacecraft mass spectrometers could distinguish biological from nonbiological chemistry.
The research included collaborators in Germany, Japan, China, the United Kingdom, and the United States.
Klenner was funded by NASA and the European Research Council.
The title of the paper is “Cassini CDA observes compositional segregation of Enceladus’ ice grains from slow freezing and fragmentation of oceanic spray.”
The University of California, Riverside is a doctoral research university, a living laboratory for groundbreaking exploration of issues critical to Inland Southern California, the state and communities around the world. Reflecting California's diverse culture, UCR's enrollment is more than 27,000 students. The campus opened a medical school in 2013 and has reached the heart of the Coachella Valley by way of the UCR Palm Desert Center. The campus has an annual impact of more than $2.7 billion on the U.S. economy. To learn more, visit www.ucr.edu.
A three-herb preparation restored immune function in rats living under simulated weightlessness and then challenged with bacteria, a research team in China reports. The study, published in Model Organisms Research, points to a nutritional way of helping crews stay well on long missions, and possibly to similar support for people on the ground.
Long-duration flight weakens the immune system, and space crew in orbit also face infection risk from microorganisms that behave differently. Escherichia coli is a normal gut bacterium, and on the ground it rarely causes trouble. In low-gravity experiments, however, bacteria including E. coli have been reported to form tougher biofilms and to switch on genes linked to virulence. Weightlessness weakens the host's own defences at the same time, and in orbit the two effects arrive together.
Jing Liu and Yao Xie of Beijing Dongfanghong Aerospace Biotech Co. Ltd., working with researchers at Beijing Institute of Technology, built a "two-hit" model to reproduce that combination: rats were tail-suspended for four weeks to simulate microgravity and given E. coli by intragastric gavage, while receiving the Ganoderma-Rhodiola Compound Preparation (GRCP), made from Ganoderma lucidum, Rhodiola rosea and Paecilomyces hepiali mycelium, daily. While most studies use one, this study combines two stressors.
Compared with untreated animals, those given GRCP showed a broadly restored immune profile across immune organs, immune cells and signalling factors. Inflammation fell both in the blood and in the lining of the gut, and the internal structure of the spleen held up. NF-κB/RelA, a switch that drives inflammation, was held in check, which the team identifies as the likely route by which a single preparation produces multi-target immune regulation. The effect was clearest at the highest dose tested.
“Traditional Chinese medicine brings a multi-component, multi-target advantage to protecting against stress-induced injury,” explains corresponding author Professor Yu-Lin Deng, School of Medical Technology, Beijing Institute of Technology, Beijing, China. “What we designed for the demands of spaceflight rests on a mechanism that is not specific to space — an innovation born for space that may end up helping far more people on the ground.”
The results provide a scientific basis for testing GRCP as a way of protecting crew health on long-duration crewed missions. The same decline in immune function seen in space also affects long-term bedridden patients, older adults and people who sit all day.
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Contact the author: Yu-Lin Deng, School of Medical Technology, Beijing Institute of Technology, Beijing, China, deng@bit.edu.cn.
The publisher KeAi was established by Elsevier and China Science Publishing & Media Ltd to unfold quality research globally. In 2013, our focus shifted to open access publishing. We now proudly publish more than 300 world-class, open access, English language journals, spanning all scientific disciplines. Many of these are titles we publish in partnership with prestigious societies and academic institutions, such as the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC).
Taken by the Mars Express High Resolution Stereo Camera, this view of Korolev crater near the north pole of Mars comprises five different ‘strips’ that have been combined to form a single image, with each strip gathered over a different orbit.
Although Mars may have once resembled Earth, the rocky red planet now appears far from hospitable. Still, certain details — such as ice-bound water — pique researchers’ curiosity. Much like on Earth, ice contains valuable records of past climate that could say whether Mars hosts, or has ever hosted, life.
Aside from the poles, where ice is sometimes exposed, most of Mars’ ice is buried beneath a dusty surface layer. Dust impacts climate by darkening ice, which changes how much sunlight is reflected into space. A University of Washington study published Sept. 8 in npj Space Exploration shows that the north pole of Mars contains less dust than scientists thought.
“We know there is water ice in the area surrounding the north pole of Mars, but there has been widespread disagreement as to how dusty that ice is,” said Aditya Khuller, a senior research scientist at the UW’s Applied Physics Laboratory. “If it is dustier, the ice will be darker. Just like a dark T-shirt in the sun makes you warmer, dusty ice gets warmer and vaporizes faster on Mars.”
Much of what we know about how Earth’s climate has evolved through millennia comes from sampling ice. Scientists drill deep into polar ice to draw out long cylinders that contain a record of the local atmosphere. Like a tree’s rings, these records can be dated to ancient periods of Earth’s history. But this is no easy task on Earth. On Mars, it’s even more complicated.
The National Aeronautics and Space Administration celebrated its first successful mission to Mars 50 years ago. In 2008, the Mars Phoenix mission successfully sampled ice near the north pole, a major triumph after the Polar Lander went missing near the south pole in 1999. The UW researchers used data from the Mars Phoenix mission, combined with observations from orbiting satellites, to complete this study.
Several years ago, Khuller discovered a discrepancy in the way researchers were analyzing the physical properties of ice on Mars. The leading approach was developed for studying soil on the Moon, but when Khuller checked its accuracy on Earth, the results seemed off.
In this study, Pari Mohan, who recently graduated from the UW with a degree in geoscience, worked with Khuller to redo the calculations using a different method. Theirs is based on an approach developed by Steve Warren, UW professor emeritus of Earth and space science, and an expert in analyzing snow and ice.
“His methods had been used successfully to study snow and ice on Earth for decades. So I thought it would be interesting to adapt these Earth-tested methods to Mars,” Khuller said.
The results suggest that the north pole is stacked “like an ice-cream sandwich,” with layers of dustier ice between slabs of cleaner ice. A dusty layer of frost forms over the ice every winter and disappears in the summer, revealing older, cleaner ice. Previous estimates suggested that the top layer of polar ice contained as much as 25% dust by mass, but this study says it’s closer to 3%.
“By looking at how the brightness changed over time, we figured out that there is a frost that forms in the winter and it’s more dusty. In the Martian summer it goes away, exposing cleaner, older ice,” Khuller said.
These layers contain key details about the climate of Mars thousands of years ago, when the ice is thought to have formed from snowfall. Mars experiences massive ice ages that have deposited shallow ice on roughly one-third of the planet.
Earth is stabilized by the gravitational pull of its moon. Mars, having only two small moons, “oscillates wildly,” Khuller said, which causes these dramatic ice ages.
In a previous study, Khuller and colleagues suggested that layers of dust and ice could create conditions for life on Mars. The dark layers could help trap sunlight and form pockets of meltwater within the ice. These pockets, enriched with nutrients from the dust, could potentially host bacteria and primitive life forms.
Similar pockets of shallow, dusty meltwater found in ice on Earth are often teeming with life in the summer. In the winter, the liquid water freezes and the microbes become dormant until the next summer.
“The fact that Mars and Earth both have these similar layers of water ice and dust is interesting,” Khuller said. “Why does one planet have life and the other doesn’t?”
Uncovering details about the climate moves the needle, but answering this question may take years. Khuller hopes to expand on this work by applying these improved methods to other regions of the red planet.
Satellites that navigate by talking to each other slowly lose their sense of direction, because nothing in a purely Earth-orbiting network provides a fixed reference in space. A new study shows that adding four satellites in elliptical lunar frozen orbits (ELFO) to China's BeiDou-3 navigation constellation can eliminate this drift. Using real inter-satellite link (ISL) ranging data from BeiDou-3 Medium Earth Orbit (MEO) satellites together with simulated lunar link measurements, the researchers kept the constellation's orientation stable for 60 days and held the mean user range error (URE) at 0.35 m, while the lunar satellites themselves were located to within 2.3 m in three dimensions.
Autonomous orbit determination (AOD) lets navigation satellites calculate their own orbits using only inter-satellite ranging, removing dependence on ground stations that can fail or be disrupted. But because relative range measurements cannot sense the overall rotation of a constellation, the whole network gradually drifts in orientation. Predicted orbit forecasts can slow this drift but cannot stop it, and the error grows over time, especially during eclipse seasons. Because of these challenges, there is a need for an external, dynamics-based reference that can make the constellation's absolute orientation observable over long missions.
The study, led by Xia Lin and Baojun Lin of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, was published (DOI: 10.1186/s43020-026-00217-9) in Satellite Navigation on 17 September 2026. The team combined 24 BeiDou-3 Medium Earth Orbit (MEO) satellites with four elliptical lunar frozen orbits (ELFO) satellites in a centralized extended Kalman filter (EKF), processing 60 days of real onboard BeiDou-3 inter-satellite link (ISL) measurements alongside simulated Earth-moon links. Three cases were compared: no rotational correction, traditional prediction-based correction, and the joint Earth-moon solution.
The key insight is that lunar gravity dominates the motion of ELFO satellites, breaking the dynamical symmetry that makes a GNSS (Global Navigation Satellite System) constellation's rotation unobservable. The team's observability analysis showed that the condition number of the position information matrix fell from roughly 10¹⁵–10¹⁸ with MEO satellites alone — effectively a singular, rank-deficient case — to about 10² once four ELFO satellites were added. In the joint solution, three-axis rotational biases stayed within 13.59, 10.27, and 4.04 milliarcseconds (mas) over 60 days, compared with more than 300 mas without correction and about 18 mas with prediction-based correction. The BeiDou-3 user range error (URE) remained at 0.35 m, versus 7.85 m and 0.60 m in the other two cases. The ELFO satellites also achieved high accuracy, with maximum radial, along-track, and cross-track errors below 0.16 m, 1.7 m, and 1.8 m.
The authors said the work addresses a limitation that has persisted since the earliest autonomous navigation concepts. They said that because the moon's gravity acts so differently on lunar satellites than Earth's gravity acts on MEO satellites, the two constellations respond differently to the same rotation, making that rotation visible in the ranging data. They added that using real BeiDou-3 inter-satellite link measurements, rather than simulations alone, gives a more realistic picture of what today's operational system can achieve, and that the lunar satellites essentially act as an anchor for the entire network.
The approach could support future lunar navigation and communication constellations. The ELFO, our paper studied，offers favorable coverage of the polar regions while requiring low station-keeping budgets. Both ESA's Moonlight program(ESA, 2024) and NASA’s LunaNet initiative (NASA, 2021) have selected ELFO as the reference orbit for their planned lunar navigation and communication constellations to cover the lunar south pole. Beyond the moon, the method offers a path to long-duration autonomous navigation for Earth-orbiting constellations, reducing reliance on ground infrastructure and improving resilience. The authors note that future work will replace simulated lunar links with real onboard observations once lunar satellite missions are operational, and will develop link scheduling strategies that also provide continuous positioning, navigation, and timing (PNT) services to lunar users.
Supported by the Strategic Priority Research Program of the Chinese Academy of sciences (Grant No. XDA 0350405) and the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 42374044).
Satellite Navigation(ISSN: 2662-1363; ISSN: 2662-9291) Satellite Navigation is the official journal of the Aerospace Information Research Institute. The journal aims to report innovative ideas, new results, and progress in the theories, techniques, and applications of satellite navigation. The journal welcomes original articles, reviews and commentaries.
SETI Institute Welcomes Three New Postdoctoral Fellows
The new fellows will study the evolution of viruses and cells, habitability on Mars and the formation of planetary systems.
September 29, 2026, Mountain View, CA — The SETI Institute has welcomed three new postdoctoral fellows: Mino Fellow L. Felipe Benites and Frank Drake Fellows Genesis Berlanga and Dingshan Deng.
Their research covers three very different areas. Benites studies the evolution of viruses and cells. Berlanga studies the physical and chemical conditions that constrain the potential for life. Deng studies protoplanetary disks and the conditions in which planets form.
“What excites me about this new group of fellows is the extraordinary range of scales they bring to one of humanity’s oldest questions: how does life emerge, evolve and persist in the universe,” said Dr. Nathalie Cabrol, Director of the Carl Sagan Center at the SETI Institute. “Their research takes us from viruses and genomes, through the environments that can sustain life, all the way to the disks where planets themselves are born. Following the question of life across these scales is essential if we want to understand not just where life might exist, but how it becomes possible in the first place. This is exactly the kind of interdisciplinary science we want to foster at the SETI Institute.”
L. Felipe Benites
L. Felipe Benites investigates the evolution of viruses and cells, with a particular interest in biological systems that fall outside traditional models of genetic inheritance.
His research includes eukaryotic algae, the viruses associated with them and the genetic material exchanged between them. He uses large-scale genomic data to study how these interactions influence evolution.
Viruses lie outside the traditional tree of life, but they have had a significant role in shaping it. That makes them useful for investigating questions about the evolution and complexity of life.
Benites has also expanded his research to the origins of genomic complexity and the early evolution of proteins. His work combines computational, phylogenetic, comparative and environmental genomic approaches.
“I’m thrilled to join the SETI Institute and have their support to pursue fascinating questions such as: Could there still be hidden forms of life on our own planet,” said Benites. “Exploring this hidden diversity on Earth may change how we search for life beyond Earth."
His Mino Fellowship project is SETI with microscopes: illuminating ‘dark genomic lineages’ with computational and optical methods.
Genesis Berlanga
Genesis Berlanga studies how planetary environments physically and chemically constrain the potential for life, and how scientists might identify those constraints beyond Earth.
His research focuses on the mineralogical and geochemical conditions that regulate water availability, chemical gradients and environmental stability. These factors help determine whether an environment is habitable.
Mars provides Berlanga with a natural laboratory for studying these processes. His work draws on laboratory experiments, terrestrial field sites that serve as Mars analogs and observations from spacecraft on Mars.
“I study other planets to better understand our own-to appreciate Earth's beauty, understand what makes it unique, and help protect it,” said Berlanga. “By following the water, we can broaden our search for extraterrestrial life and better understand our place in the universe. I'm excited to embark on that search with the SETI Institute.”
His Frank Drake Fellowship project, Coordination of lab, field, and Mars rover datasets and machine learning-assisted prediction of brine evolution and habitability metrics in Mars analog systems will bring together laboratory, field and Mars rover datasets and use machine learning to predict brine evolution and habitability in Mars analog environments.
Dingshan Deng
Dingshan Deng studies protoplanetary disks, the disks of gas and dust around young stars where planetary systems form.
His research focuses on how the physics and chemistry of these disks establish the initial conditions for planet formation and planetary atmospheres. He combines observations from ALMA and the James Webb Space Telescope with thermochemical modeling to study how planet-building materials are distributed and transported through disks.
Understanding the mass and composition of these disks can help scientists determine what material was available as planets formed, including the volatile compounds that can influence planetary composition, atmospheres and habitability.
His Frank Drake Fellowship project, Tracing Planet-building Materials from Gas to Ice with Self-Consistent Thermochemical Models, will develop physics- and chemistry-based models with AI and machine-learning tools to trace planet-building materials from molecular gas to icy solids and determine what is ultimately available to forming planets.
“I’m excited to join the SETI Institute and use the Frank Drake Fellowship to follow the journey of planet-building materials in protoplanetary disks to forming planets,” said Deng. “By understanding how these materials evolve, we will learn why planetary systems are so diverse and what conditions may ultimately allow habitable worlds to emerge.”
Postdoctoral Research at the SETI Institute
Benites, Berlanga and Deng join four other postdoctoral researchers at the SETI Institute.
The Frank Drake Postdoctoral Fellowship supports early-career scientists pursuing research connected to the questions embodied in the Drake Equation and the search for life in the universe.
The Mino Postdoctoral Fellowship supports cross-disciplinary research into the origins and nature of life, planetary habitability and the relationship between life and its environment.
“Supporting the next generation of scientists is an important part of what we do at the SETI Institute,” said Cabrol. “These fellowships give early-career researchers the opportunity to pursue ambitious ideas, work across disciplines and grow into independent scientists. By investing in them, we are also investing in the future of the questions we explore.”
Together, the Institute’s postdoctoral fellows work across a range of disciplines related to understanding life and its place in the universe.
About the SETI Institute Founded in 1984, the SETI Institute is a non-profit, multi-disciplinary research and education organization whose mission is to lead humanity’s quest to understand the origins and prevalence of life and intelligence in the Universe and to share that knowledge with the world. Our research encompasses the physical and biological sciences and leverages expertise in data analytics, machine learning and advanced signal detection technologies. The SETI Institute is a distinguished research partner for industry, academia and government agencies,
