In 1981, today’s most-pervasive avalanche rescue technology only existed as an emerging solution to detect tumors.

RECCO arrived in the avalanche safety world thanks to one man who’d lost a friend in the alpine. And it did so quietly — the earliest receivers only produced a peep on transponders from about a meter away. They were too cumbersome to be practical in the field and clearly too limited to make an impact on rescues.

Fast forward 40 years to today, and RECCO reflectors are virtually everywhere. Signals cut through 20 meters of snow or 80 meters of air.

It’s elementary that mountain rescue looks different now than it did then. But is it more effective?

1,643 victims

That was the inquiry in one broad, recent survey of avalanche rescues in Switzerland from 1981-2020. In it, lead author Simon Rauch and his colleagues comb through 1,643 avy disaster records in search of patterns. The authors broke the data down into two sets: the period from 1981-1990 and the overall period (1981-2020).

They discovered that rescues got faster and survival rates climbed overall. And though emergency responders are far faster now than in the ‘80s, you’re still significantly better off if your own team comes to your aid.

Generally, a “critical avalanche burial” (like those in the study) occurs when a victim’s head and chest are completely buried in snow. For obvious reasons, these avalanche subjects benefit from fast rescues. Disregarding all other circumstances or injuries, a human trapped in avalanche pack snow can suffocate in 15 minutes.

In avy rescue, speed has always been the name of the game. And operations that took 10 minutes or less “remained high” in success rate throughout those 40 years of data, the report found. Survival at 130 minutes or more also increased.

Companion rescues averaged 15 minutes from 1981-1990. The average drops to 10 minutes over all four decades. Rescue professionals sped up significantly more: down to 90 minutes on average from 153 minutes.

Overall survival increased slightly.

• From 1981-1990, 43.5% of victims survived.
• During the entire study period, 53.4% survived.

The report stopped shy of correlating results with specific activities, instead pointing to improvements in field techniques and medical technology.

And Mother Nature still makes the rules. Every avalanche rescuer, the report urged, should work fast.

“In this study, the risk of dying from suffocation between 10 and 30 minutes of burial remained unchanged over the past four decades," it cautioned, "highlighting the greatest challenge in the search and rescue of [buried] individuals...The time window for a successful rescue is short and should be considered by all educators, stakeholders, and manufacturers of avalanche safety equipment.”

Here’s the deal: If you want visual stimulation and alpine drama, look elsewhere in a climbing documentary. But if you want a dense mountain report from an ambivalent veteran, immune to travails that could force lesser souls to the brink, keep watching.

Colin Haley’s 2023 solo bid on the Supercanaleta, a Fitz Roy masterpiece that loosens the bowels of even the staunchest climbers, is as simple as that. Haley doesn’t feel sorry for himself, wears the anachronistic facial sun shades, and executes a laborious and impressive ascent.

While filming himself.

Here’s a tidbit from one of the alpine world’s most stoic customers in the high alpine:

"I’m kinda just physically and mentally fried a bit. I kind of think this super-intense, stressful stuff is not for me anymore. [But] even just bailing from here is definitely going to be a very long journey. It’s something like 4,000 feet of rappelling from here to the ‘schrund."

Stick around for an incisive self-inventory in the meadow below. Spoiler alert: don’t bet against my guy.

Amity Warme is tough. It’s no surprise she’s willing to take a big, complicated, 25-pitch bite out of El Capitan the old-fashioned way.

Watch Warme and Brent Barghahn do just that in Ground Up. Arc’teryx chronicles the two penitents on an old-fashioned "ground up" attempt on El Capitan’s El Niño (Pineapple Express variation, 5.13b/c).

It’s a characteristic outing for Warme who, Alex Honnold assesses, "brings a little bit of that old-school mountaineering vibe to modern performance rock climbing."

Power screams and physical-limit climbing

The ascent comes off as a modern foray into the canon of rock climbing — ground-up style, or climbing without rappelling or scouting pitches, is the oldest way to climb El Capitan. It used to be the only accepted way and didn’t become possible in free climbing until several generations of climbers had tangoed with the wall.

If you like a try-hard, you’ll appreciate this pair’s effort. Hang on tight for power screams, physical-limit climbing through clouds and rain showers, and plenty of roof-wrangling.

Murphy’s Law doesn’t quite descend over the climbers like the Yosemite Valley storms do. But this eight-day siege is an adventure by definition, and the team grapples with unexpected and uncontrollable events.

It’s a mixed bag. One thing you won’t find in it, though? Ask Warme.

"You know what they say — excuses are like buttholes," she quips. "Everyone’s got one and no one wants to hear yours."

Message received.

In September 2023, a bizarre wave of concentrated seismic upheaval reverberated across the planet for nine days.

The quake baffled seismologists. Most seismic signals are chaotic and brief. These were concerted and prolonged, like sonic energy from "a big musical instrument," Stephen Hicks, a seismologist at University College London, told Science.

Why?

While there’s still no answer to every question about the nine-day event, researchers now think they’ve discovered its primary cause.

In a yearlong study published this month, Hicks and 67 co-authors spell out how a rockslide in a Greenland fjord caused a local tsunami that triggered the worldwide echo. The research demanded a concerted effort between local sources and seismology field leaders scattered across the globe.

On Sept. 16, 2023, an enormous chunk of ice and rock cut loose from a glacier bed above eastern Greenland’s Dickson Fjord. The slide measured some 25 million cubic meters, about 10 times the volume of the Great Pyramid of Giza, Quanta Magazine reported. It tore through the glacier bed and wiped out historic Inuit archaeological sites and 20th-century trapper hunts.

When it escaped out the glacier’s mouth at 160kmph and thundered into the ocean, the splash was immense. Waves crested at 200m and flooded a military outpost on Ella Island, 72 km away. (Quanta reported nobody was injured or killed, but that the island is now "far smaller.")

The event shook the planet. Instruments built to detect secret nuclear weapons tests registered it in Russia, 3,300 km away.

Then the strange humming phenomenon began.

Trapped wave?

Seismic signals usually dissipate reliably because of the laws of physics and basic inertia. Waves eventually weaken as they broadcast, feedback decreases, and the disturbance settles out. But in this case, seismic waves kept echoing across the planet, despite a Danish navy survey three days after the collapse that found no further disturbance.

Detective work into subterranean phenomena commenced. One theory was that the concussion might have caused significant ice melt, which then forced water through natural caverns under the glacier. This could turn the glacial piping into the geological equivalent of a musical instrument.

But eventually, the 68 scientists landed on a prevailing theory: a seiche wave.

In a seiche wave, water gets trapped in wave motion, bouncing back and forth in a contained space. It’s common in lakes and harbors. One seiche wave in Lake Erie, Michigan swept several beachgoers into the water in 2013.

However, multiple angles of inquiry failed to substantiate the theory, including an experiment in one scientist’s bathtub. Finally, computer modeling with equipment from the Danish navy persuaded the group. Water in a seiche wave could only escape Dickson Fjord gradually, via small channels, so a wave could get trapped for longer than average.

Amazingly, the researchers found that the wave had depleted to just a few centimeters high after three days. That was strong enough to continue the "song" and slight enough to trick the Danish site surveyors.

The Dickson Fjord event is rare but not unprecedented. Shockwaves rumbled for 18 days after the titanic, 9.1 magnitude Sumatra-Andaman earthquake and tsunami in December 2004. And consensus suggests that after the Chicxulub asteroid annihilated the dinosaurs 66 million years ago, it shook the earth for months.

At the top of his reach, Mark Hudon can only just touch Jordan Cannon’s head.

It’s an odd first impression about Free as Can Be, the Arc’teryx chronicle of the unlikely climbing duo, but it definitely hits. Does it owe to their matching outfits which, intentional or not, immediately paint Hudon as Cannon’s mini-me?

Is it Cannon’s skinny, sneaky height or Hudon’s yawning wingspan?

If the quirky Hudon is some kind of odd doppleganger for the polite Cannon, neither one seems to mind the arrangement.

“Jordan [targeted] Mark. It’s very sad, actually,” climber and filmmaker Cedar Wright jokes. “He’s preying on a senior citizen so that he can go and send his projects.”

Wright’s take is characteristically needling and clever.

Free as Can Be weaves several storylines together around one core thread, which is the year Cannon spent supporting Hudon on his goal to free climb El Capitan.

63-year-old vs 20-something

The novelty is clear but limited in a story about a friendship between a 63-year-old and a 20-something. Which makes it a good thing the film’s directorial choices are sometimes circuitous.

Hudon’s own story as a talented but uncelebrated 1970s Yosemite pioneer is vibrant and informative.

So are the interviews, especially one with Brad Gobright — which lands eerily in the 2021 film after his 2019 death.

And while the dynamics between Hudon and Cannon aren’t necessarily fresh, they do offer interesting qualities. How would Cannon, a young technician, support this transient, enigmatic elder in his challenge quest? By surprising him with a travel-oriented training program packed with modern techniques and aspirational objectives.

It builds to become a slow-burning endearment. If the odd couple setup didn’t stimulate me, the camera’s ability to capture the evident adoration between the two did.

Cannon can be serious to the point of insufferable. And while Hudon’s default mode is impish, he doesn’t always play the funny man between the two.

“Today, we’re teaching an old dog new tricks,” Cannon says in voiceover, shooting a cell phone video of Hudon racking up.

“Me being the old dog,” Hudon retorts skeptically.

“You only look old,” Cannon fires back.

Hudon’s face — half “good one, wise guy,” half “wanna fight?” — is priceless.

Overall, Free as Can Be’s colors pop. It would be easy for the film to posture at wisdom while limiting itself by sentimentality. Instead, skillful storytelling allows it to mimic the skill of its protagonists: it catches lightning in a bottle.

In a situation that humanitarians call a “disaster in the making,” loggers are encroaching on an uncontacted tribe in the Peruvian Amazon.

Survival International, a nonprofit that advocates for indigenous people worldwide, recently showed a video of several dozen Mashco Piro people on a riverbank. They are just several kilometers away from a prospective logging site. According to the nonprofit, the footage depicts a dangerous incursion. If the loggers and the natives cross paths, violence or disease could break out.

The last time the two groups clashed in 2022, tribespeople attacked workers with two-meter-long arrows, killing a 21-year-old and injuring his 54-year-old companion.

In the Survival International statement, Alfredo Vargas Pio, President of the local indigenous organization Fenamad, blamed the Peruvian government for putting the tribe in jeopardy.

“This is irrefutable evidence that many Mashco Piro live in this area, which the government has not only failed to protect but actually sold off to logging companies. The logging workers could bring in new diseases which would wipe out the Mashco Piro, and there’s also a risk of violence on either side, so it’s very important that the territorial rights of the Mashco Piro are recognized and protected in law,” Pio said.

Disputed territory

Since uncontacted tribes avoid interaction with outsiders by definition, understanding where they do and don't live can be difficult. Legally, the Mashco Piro’s land exists as a reserve right next to a 50,000-hectare logging concession owned by Canales Tahuamanu, or Catahua.

The Peruvian government granted the rights to both tracts in 2002. But it almost immediately became clear that the isolated group ranged well beyond the reserve’s borders.

In 2016, a panel from the ministry that handles Peru’s indigenous affairs found that the Mashco Piro were using land on 14 separate concessions. The panel recommended expanding the reserve and paying the difference to the affected businesses. However, the measure died on its way through the government.

Meanwhile, the situation in the Amazon began to worsen. Amid the employee slayings in 2022, Catahua sued locals advocating for the Mashco Piro in one village. A year later, a U.N. envoy asked the company to halt logging in the area, also alleging possible "forced contact” with the Mashco Piro.

In a Washington Post interview, the lawyer representing Catahua denied its workers had ever contacted the tribe.

History (and future?) of violence

This is the next chapter in a narrative of harassment that has plagued the Mashco Piro’s relationship with outsiders for over a century.

Rubber tycoon Carlos Fermin Fitzcarrald commanded a private army to slaughter most of the tribe in 1894. The episode forced the survivors deeper into the Amazon and opened a cultural wound that would not heal.

Survival’s recent images show over 50 Mashco Piro people near Monte Salvado, a village inhabited by their close cousins, the Yine, in southeast Peru. Seventeen more later appeared near a neighboring village.

It’s a stone’s throw away from Catahua’s next logging target, according to Survival. And the less-confrontational Yine previously told the nonprofit that the Mashco Piro “angrily denounced” loggers’ incursion on their land.

For companies like Catahua, regulations enforce sustainable practices — in theory. In one 2014 study, a team of international lawyers found evidence that regulatory documents actually open the door for rampant illegal logging. Among the 609 concessions active at the time, the group suspected “major violations” on 68% of them, even under the supervision of authorities.

International support for indigenous people’s land rights is widespread. The U.N. Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, International Labour Organization, and the Inter-American Human Rights Commission all recognize the rights of indigenous people on their traditional lands. And U.N. guidelines on uncontacted peoples restrict outsiders from forcing contact upon them.

As Catahua poises to open operations at the new site, the threat of more violence looms.

“The Mashco Piro are desperate. Those arrows are the proof,” Julio Cusurichi, an Indigenous leader Amazon icon, told the Post. “They would not have acted that way unless they were forced to.”

When a medium-sized cetacean resembling a dolphin washed up on a New Zealand beach, marine biologists took notice.

The whale measured about five meters long, including a beak-shaped nose, when it washed ashore on July 4. Almost no one had ever seen anything like the male specimen before, and researchers are now toiling to identify it.

The relatively unscathed remains could belong to a spade-toothed whale, according to the New Zealand Department of Conservation (DOC). If that’s what the animal is, it’s by far the world’s rarest whale.

Anton van Helden, the science advisor of the DOC’s marine species team, was on site. “There is no doubt that [a spade-toothed whale] is what it is,” van Helden said.

Spade-toothed whales are one of the most poorly-known large mammals. Since the 1800s, the DOC's Gabe Davies explained, only six samples have ever been documented worldwide. "This is huge,” he said.

The six samples include a jawbone with two teeth retrieved east of New Zealand, which first identified the species in 1874. After that, two skeletal remains showed up in Chile. Two further specimens stranded on islands near New Zealand gave clues about their color patterns, but they proved too rotten to dissect. No reports of live sightings exist.

Blubber on the rocks

Coastal marine ranger Jim Fyfe first called in the find to the DOC, sending pictures in an effort to identify it. And when van Helden caught wind of the story, he rushed to the scene.

Locals and authorities acted quickly to preserve the carcass. They first buried it in sand to prevent rot, then transported it to a freezer.

“It looked like a massive giant dolphin, the shape of it,” van Helden told The Guardian.

Identifying a 'taoka'

With its remains now safely frozen, the DOC will work to confirm van Helden’s conviction that it is indeed a spade-toothed whale. When Fyfe inspected it, he checked for its distinctive teeth — named after the flensing blades once used by whalers to remove blubber. But they were broken off and rendered no proof, The Guardian said.

The DOC has already sent tissue samples to the University of Auckland’s Cetacean Tissue Archive for DNA sequencing. The institute boasts the second-largest collection of whale, dolphin, and porpoise tissue in the world. However, DNA tests could take months.

Authorities share a special interest in the project with 8,000 registered Maori people of the Te Rūnanga ō Ōtākou tribal council. It’s the first opportunity to dissect a possible spade-toothed whale, which the council interprets as a taoka — a treasure.

The council has urged temperance.

“It is important to ensure appropriate respect for this taoka is shown through the shared journey of learning, applying mātauraka Māori as we discover more about this rare species,” Te Rūnanga ō Ōtakou chair Nadia Wesley-Smith said.

The original Mercury space capsule had no window, a hatch with 70 bolts that had to be removed from outside, and zilch for the astronaut to do except endure g-forces, hope nothing went wrong, and throw an “abort” switch on command from mission control if it did.

It was so easy a monkey could do it.

The year was 1960. Two years earlier, seven test pilots known as the “Mercury Seven” had fought through almost two years of experimental training to become the first American in space.

It is understandable if their egos were hurt when NASA decided to send up a monkey first.

Correction: a chimpanzee.

In an event that’s varyingly heralded and maligned, the first hominid in space completed his record-setting flight on Jan. 31, 1961. Ham the Astrochimp blasted off on top of a Mercury-Redstone rocket — a rig that amounted to a chair strapped to an eight-story-tall ballistic missile — and punched a hole through the atmosphere.

Ham survived a 250-kilometer-high Mach 7 flight that spiraled out of its planned path and almost killed him. At three-and-a-half years old, he became an incidental hero while still technically an infant.

Three months later, astronaut Alan Shepard became the first U.S. astronaut in space. NASA largely assuaged his and his cohort’s complaints in the years to come. All seven Mercury astronauts made landmark flights as the American space program decisively eclipsed the rival Soviets’.

Ham, meanwhile, never flew again. In fact, according to virtually all accounts, he refused to.

Though the ape was “grinning” when recovery crews rescued him from a sinking Mercury capsule and brought him aboard the U.S.S. Donner, all may not have been well. When handlers later brought him near the “couch” he sat in for his 16.5 minutes in space, he recoiled from it.

In 1983, Ham died from liver failure at a North Carolina zoo at around 26 years old. The Astrochimp’s remains now lie in a commemorative grave at the International Space Hall of Fame in Alamogordo, New Mexico.

But what good is a Hall of Fame honor to a chimp?

It’s been 60 years since NASA closed the books on Project Mercury. Now, space historians, animal advocates, and even philosophers have all spun Ham’s story into a complex fabric that unites humans with our closest living ancestors — but also highlights a mutual isolation.

Number 65

Ham was born in approximately 1957 in what was then French Cameroon, West Africa. Captured by trappers, he soon ended up at a Florida tourist attraction called the Miami Rare Bird Farm. In 1959, the U.S. Air Force purchased the young chimp for $457 and transferred him to Holloman Air Force Base in New Mexico.

The facility spelled out Ham’s name in acronym — Holloman Aerospace Medical Center — but at first, he was just a number.

The U.S. military had been busy acquiring chimps to support testing for the space program. Urgency had run high since October 4, 1957, when the U.S.S.R. struck fear into the free world by launching a microwave-sized, largely inert object.

Sputnik 1 had achieved an elliptical low-Earth orbit, which it proved by transmitting basic, beeping radio signals around the planet.

It’s hard to overstate the primitivity of early space engineering. At the start of the Mercury program, engineers were still trying to figure out if humans could perform tasks in orbital flight as mundane as operating levers. It’s one of the factors that make those early achievements so astonishing.

Enter Number 65 and the rest of Project Mercury’s test chimpanzees.

When NASA personnel selected him and 39 other chimps for aptitude testing — which was virtually identical to the human astronauts’ training — the only living creature in space had been Laika, the Soviet dog.

Laika, a stray plucked from the Moscow streets, died in orbit on a 1957 mission that became infamous for animal rights abuse even at the time. In a cruel turn of early space travel, Sputnik engineers shot the female stray into space with one meal and the expectation that she would run out of oxygen and die in seven days. (The flight went awry and she likely died within hours.)

NASA officials claimed that the U.S., in contrast, chose chimpanzee pilots because they wanted the animals to survive their flights from liftoff to capsule recovery and work while they were on board.

They resembled astronauts, could potentially perform similar tasks in the capsule, and were docile, NASA said.

NASA manuals referenced in the 1998 book, This New Ocean: A History of Project Mercury, read:

Intelligent and normally docile, the chimpanzee is a primate of sufficient size and sapience to provide a reasonable facsimile of human behavior. Its average response time to a given physical stimulus is .7 of a second, compared with man's average .5 second. Having the same organ placement and internal suspension as man, plus a long medical research background, the chimpanzee chosen to ride the Redstone and perform a lever-pulling chore throughout the mission should not only test out the life-support systems but prove that levers could be pulled during launch, weightlessness, and reentry.

Flight school

Ham the Astrochimp’s training followed B.F. Skinner’s conditioning theory: rewards for the correct response, corporal punishment for the wrong one.

Project Mercury handlers strapped chimps into simple chairs, facing a panel fitted with colored lights and levers. According to the National Air and Space Museum, they earned banana pellets if they responded to the right light-and-sound cue by activating the right lever. If not, they received electrical shocks on the soles of their feet.

They endured rocket sled launches, sat in isolation training, and performed intelligence tests. They also underwent g-force testing in a massive centrifuge at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, just like the astronauts. Incessant medical checkups and monitoring accompanied the regimen.

Edward C. Dittmer, Sr., a World War II veteran and non-commissioned laboratory officer, acted as Ham’s lead trainer at Holloman. Later, he repeatedly praised the chimp’s trainability and sometimes humanized him.

Dittmer said, according to the Space Hall of Fame:

“...I think…I know he liked me. I’d hold him, and he was just like a little kid. He’d put his arm around me and he’d play, you know. He was a well-tempered chimp.”

Tom Wolfe, author of the celebrated Mercury Project chronicle The Right Stuff, wrote that the relative peace was hard-won. Before “rebellion proved to be a dead end” for the chimps, he wrote:

The beasts tried everything they could think of to escape. They snapped, snarled, bit, thrashed at the straps, and made runs for it. Or they bided their time and used their heads. They would go along with a training task, seeming to cooperate, until the white smoker seemed to let his guard down — then they’d make a break for it. But the resistance and the wiles were of no avail. All they got for their struggles was more zaps.

Engineers at Holloman culled the entry class of 40 primates down to 18. Six finalists, including Ham, moved on to Cape Canaveral, Florida for final testing.

Starting on January 2, 1961, 29 separate tests stood between the chimps and the planned suborbital flight. Three weeks later, NASA wrote, the tests “had made each of the six chimps a bored but well-fed expert at the job of lever-pulling.”

When the electrical shocks and the banana pellets abated, Ham emerged at the top of the pile along with a female alternate.

“The competition was fierce, but one of the males was exceptionally frisky and in
good humor” in the days leading up to the space flight, NASA wrote.

Ham and his alternate went on a “low-residue” diet 19 hours before liftoff and awaited circumstances they couldn’t possibly anticipate.

Rocket rides

Until flight day, Jan. 31, 1961, the United States space program had produced discouraging results.

Throughout the '50s, Jupiter and Atlas rockets veered off course and exploded spectacularly, on and off the tortured Cape Canaveral launchpad.

The Redstone proved more reliable in early tests but was still a beast of a machine.

It was essentially a 10-meter aluminum can of liquid oxygen and ethyl alcohol on top of a gaudy combustion engine. First designed as a surface-to-surface ballistic missile with an 800km range, it generated 35,380kg of thrust and tore through the sky at 9,400 kph, or Mach 7.5.

The Mercury capsule acted as its nosecone, and the astronaut — or astrochimp — held on for the ride.

The first Mercury-Redstone launch attempt, MR-1, took place on Nov. 21, 1960 — just over two months before Ham’s flight. It was an unmanned test, and despite the rocket’s menacing power, anyone or anything strapped into the capsule that day would have experienced almost nothing but a meek trip from the top of the rocket back to the ground.

When NASA hit the ignition on MR-1, the rig fumed briefly, climbed a few centimeters off the launch pad, and settled back down. Then, comically, an electrical chain reaction caused the escape tower to blast off and deployed the still-attached capsule’s drogue (or safety) parachute.

The so-called “four-inch flight” drew public ridicule to Project Mercury, along with a little levity. But it also introduced glaring safety concerns. If Ham or any astronaut had been on board, they would have been trapped on top of a teetering, 25-meter-tall live bomb.

The failure also delayed planned tests of the recovery system. This was a critical piece of the Mercury program, in part because capsules would touch down in the ocean off the Florida coast. Recovering a capsule was an all-hands-on-deck situation: a plethora of aircraft and ships were involved. Failure meant the capsule could sink, dooming its occupant to drown.

By the time Ham and his alternate astrochimp made their final trip out to the launch pad for MR-2, only one Mercury-Redstone test (MR-1A) had succeeded.

Malfunctions and setbacks delayed Ham’s January 31 flight almost to the breaking point. And when the rocket finally did lift off, it put him through conditions more extreme than anyone expected.

‘Ham’ in a can

Accounts report Ham’s condition as calm on the morning of the launch. His handlers secured him in his couch, then trolleyed him toward the Redstone.

This New Ocean renders the moment stirringly, if oddly:

“There, an hour and a half before the scheduled launch time, the chimpanzee named ‘Ham,’ still active and spirited although encased in his biopack, boarded the elevator to meet his destiny.”

MR-2 was scheduled for liftoff before noon because mission control didn’t want to risk a night recovery. According to NASA, the hours-long countdown and final check process went as planned until about 7:45 am. That’s when a “tiny but important” inverter in the automatic control system started overheating.

Nevertheless, technicians loaded Ham into the capsule at 7:53 am and bolted down the heavy hatch for liftoff.

Hours of delays followed as mission control tried to fix the inverter. Chaos beset the launchpad, too, as an elevator got stuck, too many people took too long to clear the pad area, checks of the environmental control system ran 20 minutes too long, and flaps on the rocket’s booster tail jammed.

At 11:40, This New Ocean’s authors wrote, “it was decided that now or never was the time to go today.”

Five minutes before noon, controllers hit the red button, and Ham shot skyward.

Seconds into the flight, the Mercury-Redstone started to pitch upward. A launch angle just one degree steeper could significantly alter the flight plan. Speed, duration, recovery point, and g-forces all changed dramatically.

According to NASA, the high angle slammed Ham with a maximum g-force of 14.7 (making his body weigh 243 kg). He experienced 58,000kg of thrust for one unplanned second, and his 8,200 kph top speed was about 1,000 kph faster than planned.

Ham’s flight hit its apex at 253km — about 150km above the rough threshold between Earth and space. He was weightless for 6.6 minutes, according to NASA, during a flight that lasted two minutes longer than expected.

At the capsule’s highest point, NASA knew Ham was going to come down farther away — much farther away — than mission control hoped.

“At its zenith, Ham's spacecraft was already 77km farther downrange than programmed,” NASA calculated. He landed over 200km away from his target landing site.

Ham still wasn’t out of the woods. Cabin pressure had plummeted at one point during the flight. NASA later traced the problem to a spring-loaded valve that had unexpectedly popped open from vibrations.

This breech, and a rough landing due to an overcooked reentry, almost spelled the end for Ham.

When the capsule splashed down at 12:12 pm, it turned upside down and started sinking. The closest rescue was a destroyer stationed almost 100km away.

When the helicopters arrived on the scene, they found the spacecraft on its side, taking on water, and submerging. Wave action after impact had apparently punished the capsule and its occupant severely. The beryllium heatshield upon impact had skipped on the water and bounced against the capsule bottom, punching two holes in the titanium pressure bulkhead. After the craft capsized, the open cabin pressure relief valve let still more sea water enter the capsule.

Pilots finally recovered the spacecraft around 3 pm, filled with about 360kg of water.

It’s unknown how long it would have taken the capsule to sink, but Gus Grissom almost drowned under similar circumstances on MR-4 six months later. (NASA incorporated an explosive escape hatch into the Mercury design in the interim.)

Through his ordeal, Ham reportedly remained calm and performed admirably — pulling his levers when prompted to avoid the shocks on the soles of his feet. The punishment program was strenuous, with a clock that reset to schedule a new shock every 15 seconds. If Ham failed to prevent it, he would get a full blast.

(Enos, who became the first chimpanzee to orbit the Earth later that year, endured an especially grim situation. During his three-hour flight, the shock system shorted out and inverted. The five-year-old chimp responded to every prompt perfectly but still received 76 shocks.)

Grounded

Ham never flew again. Despite the “grin” he displayed as he accepted an apple after MR-2, he refused to go near his couch for a photo shoot on a later occasion. Though interpreted as a happy gesture at the time, the grin likely meant something else.

The world-famous Jane Goodall assessed it for the 2003 film One Small Step: The Story of the ‘Space Chimps.’

“Actually, that is the most extreme fear that I’ve ever seen on any chimpanzee,” she said. It’s now widely thought that when a chimpanzee shows its top teeth during a smile, as Ham did, it’s not a smile — it’s a “fear grimace.”

From the deck of the U.S.S. Donner in 1961, Ham’s story didn’t get brighter. NASA eventually transferred him to the Smithsonian Zoo in Washington, D.C., where he lived alone until 1980. (It’s also widely understood that chimpanzees need companionship to flourish.)

Finally, Ham arrived at the North Carolina Zoological Park in a habitat among several other chimps but died of liver failure three years later. NASA would macerate his corpse for research: separate the flesh from the bones, usually by soaking in room-temperature water. His skeleton showed no signs of stress from his space flight, according to the U.S. National Museum of Health and Medicine. His soft tissue was cremated and transported to his ceremonial grave at the Space Hall of Fame.

It’s impossible to quantify the stimulation Ham incurred during his Project Mercury experience — or during the rest of his life. Shock treatment on monkeys started PETA, and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has repeatedly tried to ban it on humans. The human body can only endure the g-forces Ham survived for about a minute.

“Being unable to debrief his handlers, Ham alone knew at this time how grueling his flight had been,” said Robert F. Wallace, an information officer onboard the U.S.S. Donner when Ham landed.

There’s an aviator slang phrase for a pilot with no control over his ship. To a pilot, “SPAM in a can” means exactly what it sounds like: your aircraft is the can, and you’re the SPAM.

Ham’s name is an acronym, sure, but how hard is it to make the SPAM leap?

“[Ham] still would have been nursing at age 3 ½, dependent on his mother for survival,” Save the Chimps points out. “It is hard to imagine a human toddler performing as well as Ham in this challenging task. It speaks to his character, intelligence, and bravery.”

Ham’s involuntary contribution helped re-orient the space race in favor of the U.S., which NASA acknowledged. But if his Project Mercury cohort visited him after he left the program, no record of it exists.

“Ham's survival, despite a host of harrowing mischances over which he had no control, raised the confidence of the astronauts and the capsule engineers alike,” This New Ocean reads.

Wolfe puts a considerably sharper point on it in his last mention of Ham in The Right Stuff. The public attitude toward human space flight after Ham’s success, he wrote, boiled down to “‘My God, do you mean there are men brave enough to try what the ape has just gone through?'"

In a crowded field of climbing films that are increasingly hard to tell apart, Mike Call’s The Artist kept me guessing. My notes are tangled and scrawled, and (perhaps largely due to personal reasons) would be stained with saline if I’d been leaning over the paper instead of backward.

Can you expect the son of this woman to portray a mundane hero?

Let me explain what I mean by “kept me guessing.”

Here’s a linear story arc The Artist could follow:

Boone Speed anchored sport climbing in the 1990s, burning a trail through American Fork Canyon that fried everyone not named Chris Sharma. Then he played an instrumental role in inventing modern bouldering gear and creating the market for it. Then he became a world-class photographer.

All along, his unforgiving personality burned just as hot as his ambition. He ostracized some of his closest friends. Everything he did “put a dent in the world,” in Call’s words, but he appeared to pay the price for it. It looked like he couldn’t break through whatever membrane was keeping him restless in his own skin.

Then later in life, he cooled off — realizing, as he says in the film, that his oldest relationships are the most important thing. He sums up the epiphany with a familiar sentiment: “How much better does it get?”

All of that’s true. But, like all art, there’s what The Artist appears to do, and then there’s what it actually does.

Here’s what it actually does:

Describes Speed’s early dynamism from behind the lens

Call was Speed’s earliest videographer. Three decades later, their relationship is the same. But instead of depicting a one-dimensional Speed by handing him the narrative reins, Call tells it his way — which adds depth to his subject right away.

Emphasizes real-world outcomes

Introducing key mentors like Maria Cranor, Black Diamond’s marketing director while Speed was embroiled in generating the modern bouldering market, provides accountability. Cranor and other key influences create rules and boundaries for young Speed, shaping his decisions.

Pusher, a company that Speed helped found, wasn't just a collective of heathens. It was the first climbing company that paid no attention to anything except bouldering. Pusher sold an aesthetic involving T-shirts, ads, and some seminal videos. It also made climbing holds.

Allows its aesthetics to penetrate

The Artist exalts the aesthetic principle of reduction: Do more with less. You can see it in Speed’s interior decoration, with demure houseplants and a small reproduction of one of his father’s sculptures. It’s also the principle he applies to guide his photography.

And if you’ve ever climbed, you know how to apply it.

The film stays out of the way, allowing emotive expression from images, colors, and interview subjects alike.

Pumps the gas — but doesn’t over-rev

Speaking of Speed’s father, don’t miss the son describing how he felt after his father died. But don’t expect lingering close-ups of misty eyes or quivering lips. Call knows the viewer can feel every bit of the moment’s pathos without having their head dunked in a bucket of it.

(For the record, yes, this is the part that got me choked me up.)

Elsewhere, skip to 14:10 for peak tough-guy Boone.

Focuses on the art, not the artist

So The Artist doesn’t focus on the artist?

Correct, it does not. Instead, it watches what the artist is watching: his subjects. In a way, Speed is the hero of the film. But not really. Because it’s actually about everyone except him.

In the fat part of the bell curve of climbing films, production crews can labor in dramatics, saturated visuals, or tired storylines.

Another segment in the big part of the curve is the predictable. We watch a climber trace a typical heroic cycle of accepting challenge, faltering, transforming, and eventually meeting the challenge to achieve redemption.

The Artist pretends to be both; instead, it’s neither.

There's more to explore that way.

In 1250 AD, a cluster of earthen mounds by the Mississippi River swarming with artisans, farmers, and even astronomers was the place to be. It was known as Cahokia.

By 1350, it was a ghost town.

Why?

Located across the Mississippi River east of modern-day St. Louis, Cahokia was in its day the largest North American city above Mexico. Its 20,000 souls belonged to a group of Algonquian-speaking tribes from across the lower Midwest. They survived by farming.

Generations of archaeologists have carved away at the soil in the U.S. state of Illinois to find out what happened in those hundred years to cause the thriving town's demise. Researchers have now discarded one of the most popular theories, that severe drought caused crop failure. Prairie grasses, the theory went, then moved in during the drought, replacing crops like maize and squash with inedible roughage.

The tidy hypothesis followed other tales of civilizational extinction. But according to the U.S. Bureau of Land Management (BLM) and Washington University in St. Louis, it didn’t happen.

"Given the diversity of their known food-base, the domesticated landscape around Cahokia may have been resilient in the face of climate change and capable of producing more food than was required by Cahokians," the researchers wrote in a paper published last month.

Scratch the most popular theory of their mysterious disappearance.

 

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No catastrophes

Soil samples extracted from deep underground reveal that no catastrophic crop failure occurred. The study’s co-authors counted carbon isotopes in the soil from throughout the Cahokian period. If particular isotopes kept showing up in layer after layer of soil, they would paint a picture of consistent soil composition over time. In turn, this would indicate whether drastic changes in cultivation had taken place.

The study revealed a consistent presence of Carbon-12 and Carbon-13 across samples. No major death of one dominant plant species — or growth of another — had occurred.

"We saw no evidence that prairie grasses were taking over," said archaeologist Natalie Mueller, who led the study.

However, that doesn’t mean a drought didn’t happen — it just means the Cahokians may not have perished under its pressure.

Co-author Caitlin Rankin of the Nevada Bureau of Land Management said the Cahokians were good enough engineers to keep crops irrigated through dry cycles. They were such skilled builders that Monks Mound, an iconic prehistoric earthwork, is the largest pyramid north of Mesoamerica.

So why did the Cahokians abandon their proud city? One separate theory, also using soil cores, focuses on flooding along the ancient Mississippi.

Rankin and Muelle aren’t sure yet. For now, they suggest that the abandonment happened slowly.

A Spanish tourist is dead in a South African wildlife refuge after what one outlet called a “horrific” trampling.

Reports say the 43-year-old man was riding in a vehicle with his fiancee in Pilanesberg National Park on July 7. The group encountered a herd of elephants, including several calves, near the park gate, about 180 kilometers northwest of Johannesburg.

Ignoring park policy and warnings from his fellow passengers, the man dismounted from the vehicle and approached the herd on foot, camera in hand.

When one adult elephant charged the encroaching tourist, he fled. Soon, others in the herd followed. The group caught the man and trampled him to death in a 30-second incident that left, witnesses told the Daily Mail, nothing but “the tattered blood-soaked clothing of the tourist and the remnants of the tourist's body crushed into the earth.”

Camera's have a zoom function for a reason...
Safari in Africa is one of those reasons!

Spanish tourist trampled to death by elephants in South Africa https://t.co/jE5l1iX7ZR #groundnews via @Ground_app

— Alex Robson (@AlexI_IRobson) July 9, 2024

No further aggression

Once the elephants finished attacking the man, they reportedly retreated into the bush with no further aggression toward the other individuals and vehicles present.

Rangers responding to the scene could not help the trampled victim. Some witnesses attributed the incident to the elephants’ protective instincts over their calves.

Park officials handed the case to police for further investigation. Tourists in Pilanesberg are welcome to drive their own vehicles, and most of the park is accessible in a typical commuter car. However, Piet Nel, the North West Parks and Tourism Board's acting chief conservation officer, told ABC News that strict rules against leaving vehicles apply inside the park.

Pilanesberg park officials inform visitors they're not allowed to leave vehicles, Nel said — and that each visitor signs a form showing they understand the rule. A police spokesperson told the Daily Mail that Sunday's victim was driving the car he was in, stopped, and got out on his own.

“In some cases, people are oblivious to the dangers in the parks,” Nel said. "We must remember that you are entering a wild area. The [Parks and Tourism] Board is very saddened by this tragic accident and would like to express their sincere condolences to the deceased's next of kin and friends.”

Officials have released no further details about the victim. Sun City, a famed resort and casino that borders the park, reportedly sent professionals to aid the dead man’s traumatized companions.

The fatality marks this year’s third deadly elephant attack on a tourist after two Americans died in separate incidents in Zambia.

In the wide world of whale sex, the largest of all species also ranks among the most private.

The intimate lives of the planet’s biggest animals range from eye-opening to relatable to hilarious. But of all cetacean species, we may know the least about the reproductive habits of blue whales.

At least now, we know where to look.

Marine biologists in Timor-Leste, a modest island situated along a major blue whale migration route between Australia and Indonesia, submitted the first underwater footage of a mother blue whale nursing a calf. The two animals are actually pygmy blue whales — a subgroup that’s several meters shorter than the species’ biggest individuals.

The Timor-Leste discovery, part of a 10-year study, could signal more groundbreaking insights to come.

“Our decade-long project has documented some of the lesser-known intimate reproductive behaviors of blue whales, some for the very first time,” said Karen Edyvane, marine ecologist and project lead on the Australian National University study. “From newborn calves and nursing mothers to amorous adults in courtship, the waters of Timor-Leste really are providing blue whale scientists with some of our first glimpses into the private lives of one of the world’s largest but most elusive animals.”

Like their parents, blue whale calves are enormous. Newborns average seven meters long and weigh in at 2,300-2,700 kilograms. They also grow rapidly, thanks in part to their mothers’ generous supply of high-fat milk. A new blue whale mother can produce 50 gallons of her 35-50% milk-fat lactate each day, according to the Marine Mammal Center. When a calf nurses healthily, it can gain an incredible 4.5 kg each hour.

None of that has helped scientists observe this or any other blue whale reproductive behavior, though. In 2018, scientists off the coast of Sri Lanka tracked two individuals performing a mating ritual for several days. The huge animals spend so much time feeding on krill, National Geographic explained, that “seeing other behaviors is quite rare.”

The ongoing effort to better understand these iconic, endangered whales could focus on Timor-Leste. Its deep coastal waters host famously prolific blue whale migrations each season along a 5,000km migration route. Whale tourism is popular on the island, and researchers identified it as one of the “most accessible and best” blue whale research locations.

As such, participatory citizen science fueled the success of Edyvane’s team. Research  partner Jose Quintas, National Director for Environment and Research at the Timor-Leste Ministry of Tourism, said tourists, students, and anglers all shared information that drove the project forward.

As the project concludes, Quintas emphasized conservation as a key objective in the ongoing regional mission. The World Wildlife Fund estimates blue whale numbers at 10,000-25,000 — down from a pre-whaling population of 250,000 or more.

“We really need to use this valuable new information to ensure we fully protect and conserve these animals when they pass through Timor-Leste’s waters and beyond,” Quintas said. “For this, we urgently need cooperation and support from Australia and the wider international community.”

For the species to keep rebounding, it’s pivotal for young whales like the pygmy blue in the video to survive. Blue whales are thought to reproduce slowly — about once every two to three years.

When embattled deep-sea tourism startup OceanGate lost its only submersible and its CEO in one catastrophic dive last June, reactions varied. 

Most of the world watched with bated breath as emergency crews tried to locate the lost ship and rescue its five-person crew. Media focus ranged from tragic and personal to skeptical — repeated safety issues and setbacks had plagued the Titan throughout its development. Stockton Rush, OceanGate’s CEO and the submersible’s pilot, had made charged comments about regulations and safety in the deep-sea exploration industry. 

To state it gently, the Titan was an outlier in design. The pilot’s interface was a video game controller. The only interior fixtures were two screens and a front porthole window. And the crew squatted on the floor for the duration of each voyage, seated on a plain rubber mat. 

Not to mention its carbon fiber hull — a first-of-its-kind gambit that, now, will likely never again be attempted. 

The search for the Titan and its crew ended when remotely operated vehicles found it in pieces on the ocean floor. The U.S. Coast Guard called the incident a “catastrophic loss” of pressure inside the cabin. Official investigations commenced, and OceanGate promptly shuttered operations.

James Cameron speaks out

Some experts, including experienced deep-sea submersible pilot and film director James Cameron, later implied Rush had been on a dangerous crash course all along.

“You don’t move fast and break things if the thing you’re going to break has got you inside it,” the director recently told 60 Minutes Australia. 

As the Coast Guard and other agencies continue their investigations, tech news outlet Wired recently shared the results of its own year-long probe involving “tens of thousands” of OceanGate documents and internal communications. 

Dating back to the company’s early days in 2013, the investigation plots a chronicle of compounding decisions by Rush and other key individuals leading up to the Titan disaster. 

This timeline navigates the tortuous development of the doomed submersible.

2009 

OceanGate opens with plans to charter deep-sea trips for tourism and research. It first uses older, steel-hulled craft. 

2013 

CEO Stockton Rush announces plans for a new carbon-fiber submersible. The lightweight material makes a cylindrical build feasible, according to Rush, adding more capacity for passengers than traditional sphere-shaped designs. 

2015 

OceanGate first tests the concept with a steel prototype called the Cyclops 1. Red flags pop up right away. Reporting for New Scientist, investigative reporter Mark Harris dives with Rush in an early test. He reports the Cyclops glitches badly at only 130 meters. 

'Scared the shit out of everyone'

2016 

Designs continue to fluctuate and fail across multiple experiments with different materials for critical components. Wired later reveals OceanGate’s testing protocols clash with engineers’ recommendations.  

According to Wired:

• In a pressure test at a University of Washington lab, a carbon-fiber scale model of the Cyclops 2 implodes at about 6,500 psi — close to the water pressure at 3,800 meters, the depth of the Titanic, but thousands of meters short of OceanGate’s target safety margin. “The building rocked, my ears rang for a long time,” reads an employee email. “Scared the shit out of everyone.”
• Cyclops 2 prototypes never survive the targeted safety-margin pressure in testing, and the company never tests the titanium components the final sub will use in conjunction with the fiber. Instead, the company thickens the hull specs from 4.5 to 5 inches and commissions a contractor to build the final design.
• When it arrives, it is too thick for portable ultrasonic testing equipment. Ultrasonic testing can detect miniscule flaws or weak points in the final product without destroying it. Testing would have been possible with a stationary ultrasonic rig. Instead, Rush concludes transporting and testing the Titan is too expensive. Ultrasonic tests never occur.
• Finally, the ship uses an acrylic viewport that falls far short of pressure safety targets. Will Kohnen, the designer of the nine-inch-thick unit, later tells Wired that OceanGate fell well short of a rigorous testing protocol for the unit. He claims that he only rated the window to 650 meters. When he urges Rush to reconsider the component, the CEO allegedly refuses. 

'You are going to kill someone'

2018 

According to Wired:

• Rush fires marine operations manager David Lochridge after Lochridge refuses to sign off on the final sub, citing 27 safety issues from flammable materials to missing bolts and more concerns over the carbon fiber hull. Lochridge files a whistleblower report to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), but Rush sues him for breach of contract, leading Lochridge to drop the complaint.
• “Titan and its safety systems are way beyond anything currently in use…I have grown tired of industry players who try to use a safety argument to stop innovation and new entrants from entering their small existing market,” Rush wrote to McCallum in one of the Wired documents. “Since [starting] OceanGate, we have heard the baseless cries of ‘You are going to kill someone’ way too often.”
  
• Rob McCallum, a deep-sea explorer, also seeks to discourage Rush from proceeding in a petition drafted by Kohnen.
• One safety system relies on acoustic feedback from the carbon fiber hull as it crackles and pops under pressure. OceanGate frames it as an early-warning system that can signal the crew to surface at a certain threshold of “micro-buckling.” A safety consultant familiar with material acoustics says that the noises actually indicate “irreversible” damage to the hull.
• Real-world testing began but proceeded poorly. The submersible once nearly broke apart in shallow, choppy water with Rush inside. And when the Titan first reached 4,000 meters, the hull warped alarmingly — by up to 37% more than intended, according to engineers.
• Rush starts to worry about noises from the hull at depth. Finally, a pilot inspecting it with a flashlight notices a crack. Later, OceanGate finds 11 square feet of carbon fiber delaminated — meaning the layers of material had separated.

A successful dive

2021 

According to Wired:

• Contractors re-manufacture the carbon hull using updated techniques. It passes pressure tests at a University of Maryland lab, but OceanGate elects to salvage the old titanium rings from the damaged sub based on Rush’s intolerance toward added cost and delay.
• An employee spots new lifting points attached to the two titanium rings. They’re a new addition, and a representative from the original manufacturer had warned OceanGate back in 2017 to raise and lower the vehicle only with nylon slings: “The titanium cannot take load/tension,” the individual said.
• July 13 - OceanGate completes its first successful visit to the Titanic with tourists. 

2022-23

But problems persist, from inane to frightening. OceanGate cancels a 2022 mission with Intelligencer reporter David Pogue on board when, 11 meters below the surface, two rubber floats come partly untethered from the sub’s launching platform.

 

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'MacGyvered'

The event comes a year after a crew gets trapped on board the Titan. Instead of the programmed six hours, the expedition lasts 27, much closer to the cabin’s 96-hour oxygen threshold.

Inspecting the vehicle before his failed outing, Pogue tells Rush that the sub feels “MacGyvered.” When Rush acknowledges the comment, Pogue asks if that has concerned anyone else in the deep-sea industry. 

Rush tells Pogue: 

Oh yeah! Oh yeah. Yeah, no, I’m definitely an outlier. There’s been more intrigue into that than I can go into. There were a lot of rules out there that didn’t make engineering sense to me. They made sense at the time, in the ’60s and ’70s. But, you know, there’s a limit. You know, at some point, safety just is pure waste. I mean, if you just want to be safe, don’t get out of bed, don’t get in your car, don’t do anything. At some point, you’re gonna take some risk, and it really is a risk-reward question. I said, “I think I can do this just as safely by breaking the rules.”

June 18, 2023 - Titan dives toward its famous target but never returns. The U.S. Navy eventually reveals it detected “an acoustic anomaly consistent with an implosion” shortly after the Titan’s surface crew lost contact with it, according to CBS. 

The U.S. Coast Guard launches an investigation, which continues today. 

If people rock climbed before 1492, the evidence is conjectural.

Villagers inhabited the Sky Caves of Nepal, carved into stone hundreds of meters off the ground, as early as the seventh century BC. Asked how the ancients got up there, locals are known to quip, “The lamas fly.”

Similar sites exist in the western United States, where thousand-year-old groups like the Mogollon left faint traces of climbing to cliff dwellings and cultural depots such as Hueco Tanks.

But no documented record of a climb existed anywhere in the world until 1492. That year -- which coincidentally was also the year that Columbus set sail -- King Charles VIII decided to force one of his military engineers to climb Mont Aiguille — a 400m limestone mesa some called Mount Inaccessible. On its flat top, angels allegedly cavorted.

The engineer's name was Antoine de Ville. He and 10 other intrepid souls started up the northwest face armed with wooden ladders.

By all accounts, de Ville and his team did reach the 2,087m summit. After their unlikely flurry up hundreds of meters' worth of ladders, nobody else repeated it for centuries.

Most advanced ever

De Ville’s first ascent was the most advanced known rock climb relative to the rest of its era. Former American Alpine Journal editor J. Monroe Thorington’s 1965 report had this to say about the Mont Aiguille route: “The ascent was said to be ‘half a league by ladders, and a league by a route terrifying to see and even more so to descend.’ Only a few years after the event, Antoine de Ville was spoken of as an ‘alchimiste,’ a sorcerer!”

According to Thorington's research, ground witnesses sourced from French authorities corroborated that de Ville had actually summited Mont Aiguille.

De Ville simply called the ascent “le plus horrible” — “the worst.” Details on the campaign itself are scarce. But all 11 members, including multiple religious officials and a “ladder-man to the king,” seem to have topped out on Mont Aiguille.

Quick repeaters scurry up ladders

De Ville and his crew first spent a few days on the summit meadow building a mountain hut -- no details on how they carried the lumber up those ladders. They also erected a few crosses in the name of Charles VIII and wrote fantasy reports about unusual flora and fauna, and some mysterious human footprints.

The note about footprints turned out to be prescient, Thorington reported. Two more groups of local nobles and bureaucrats soon followed de Ville’s ladders to the top.

“Imagine their astonishment,” he wrote, when conspicuous people such as a viscount popped up onto the mesa.

Ladders, sorcery, or otherwise, it’s beyond argument that de Ville was ahead of his time. Later climbers retrofitted his route with fixed safety gear, including iron chains. American climber and historian W.A.B. Coolidge repeated it in 1881. His account, per Thorington:

"The way (center of NW face) lies through several deeply cut fissures, or rather, hollows of the most extraordinary nature. At one moment, we seemed to be in the very bowels of the mountain in a great cavern, whither scarcely any light penetrated. The rock is very smooth and bad to climb, so I was glad to avail myself of the iron chains.”

Today, climbing beta website The Crag calls de Ville’s route the Voie Normal and rates it at a gentle 4a (5.4).

Maybe controversially, the site credits the first ascent to Jean Liotard in 1834 — the man who allegedly arrived second, 342 years after de Ville.

Of course, most believe that de Ville genuinely summited the peak. A few have even tried to re-enact the legendary ladder ascent for a documentary project. It continues to be an intriguing objective for the historically minded.

Tomorrow’s objective: Mont Aiguille- The oldest documented rock climb in the world 1st done in 1400… pic.twitter.com/4bySgInEbp

— Mark Seaton (@guidemark) July 2, 2024

Inside their complex colonies, ants take on one of several vocations: hunter, engineer, soldier, explorer, queen — and hitchhiker?

When car owners filed reports of temporary ant infestations in their vehicles, the stories circulated on social media. In the incidents, which took place in heavily populated north and central Taiwan, thousands of ants crowded into car trunks, crevices, or even engine compartments.

Danger danger Ant-Voltage!

Returned to disconnect the car from the charger this morning & found these guys going about their business.

Removed adaptor carefully & carefully removed Ants on the floor so they all return home safely. #poletopole #nissanariya pic.twitter.com/iQDvJFkAHl

— Pole to Pole EV (@PoletoPoleEV) August 8, 2023

In all, researchers found nine species of largely invasive, tree-dwelling ants hitching free rides. But could they actually be migrating on purpose?

Six-legged hitchhikers

Virginia Tech entomologist Scotty Yang led a study that leveraged citizen science to investigate. According to his team, the ants are in fact looking to broaden their horizons — and their territory.

The team documented 52 cases of “ant hitchhiking” on 44 cars and eight scooters from 2017 to 2023. In each event, a car or scooter owner spotted a swarm of ants on their car, then joined a Facebook group Yang started and reported where they were parked, how long they had been there, and where they were going next.

While some cases looked like foraging, many related more closely to the ants’ “exploratory” behavior, the study found. Workers sometimes escorted a queen and larvae into a car that was empty of food or other attractants, presumably focused on finding a new area to colonize.

Of the nine ant species represented in the study, seven were invasive. Territorial expansion is integral to every invasive species, Yang pointed out. Ants like the black cocoa ant (Dolichoderus thoracicus), which accounted for 60% of the hitchhiking, thrive outside their own habitats because they can overwhelm competitor species in others.

“Tracking invasive insects and how they spread is an important subject for entomologists because these creatures can represent threats to native species of plants and animals,” Yang told Earth.com.

In the urban jungles from which the ants were mainly migrating, the impulse to move out makes sense. Researchers already knew ants in crowded areas often transported their colonies from trees onto building surfaces or other fixtures.

Effective, invasive, pervasive?

If the black cocoas and other ants in the study were looking for new neighborhoods, their strategy was sound. Yang’s research found they could have traveled several hundred kilometers in the infested vehicles — “largely exceeding” their natural ability to spread through dispersal.

Repurposing human infrastructure to do it also made sense. Taiwan is one of the world’s most densely populated countries, so wildlife corridors are often choked by sprawling cities. Ants in the study shared the common factors of strong climbing ability, heat tolerance, and aggressive foraging instincts.

To cling onto their arboreal homes, ants like black cocoas use hooked claws and retractable adhesive pads on their feet. Exposed to the elements, they don’t benefit from temperature-regulated underground nests like other ants. And, the study said, they’re notably vigilant. Because their canopy habitat has limited resources, they “exhibit frequent foraging activities and territorial patrolling” around their nesting trees.

Finally, every driver in a hot city loves a shady parking spot — usually right under a tree.

The authors admitted their study’s volunteer setup limited data availability. But they also suspect ant hitchhiking is far more common than they currently grasp.

Yang’s project envisions a future framework for managing the adaptive technique. The stakes could be high.

One of the world’s most successful invasive ants is also a freeloader. Yellow crazy ants (Anoplolepis gracilipes) find frequent passage on cargo ships transporting produce. Though their original habitat is disputed, they now occur throughout the Indo-Pacific region and Australia. There, they notoriously pillage ecosystems with their acid-spraying attacks and gargantuan colonies.

On Christmas Island, colonies ballooned to 750 acres as they decimated a local crab species, fundamentally altering the forest understory and now endangering even mature trees.

Conservationists think they might have never arrived in the first place — without hitchhiking.

Hey Antarctic newbie, are you a "fingee" or a "fidlet?" And what are those on your feet — "bunny boots" or mukluks?

If you were a new transplant to Antarctic shores, it would be understandable if you didn’t know. In fact, the people slinging the opaque lingo would prefer you didn’t, according to a researcher who investigated the topic.

But — to get the answers, all you’d have to do is refer to your trusty Antarctic Dictionary.

The manual was part of an opportunistic PhD project by the University of Canterbury’s Dr. Steph Kaefer. On a 2019 visit to Antarctica, Kaefer’s ear for linguistics perked up when she heard veterans dropping what sounded like totally novel words.

What was a fingee, anyway? And why, whenever the topic was ground transportation, did it suddenly swing into the realm of “doo?”

A fingee, Kaefer found out, was an American adaptation of the acronym F.N.G. — an unsavory military term for a “[expletive] new guy.” Brits, on the other hand, called new arrivals fidlets. This was an acronym, too, albeit a more straight-laced one. Falkland Islands Dependency was the name of the British station from which it derived.

Hiding your meaning from newcomers

Kaefer’s study revolved around a core tenet of linguistic synthesis: When you don’t want outsiders to know what you’re talking about, invent slang.

“Often, when we create words, we make them transparent," Kaefer told the University. "Particularly in a situation where you need to pass on a lot of information easily, you want people to understand without needing much background information. But when you’re creating a community, whether intentionally or not, and you don’t want people to understand, you might make the words more opaque so that people can't work them out unless they’re part of that group.”

Because Antarctic communities are so isolated, their offbeat lingo grabs hold even tighter. People working on “The Ice” (as Americans would say) or “South” (British) don’t enjoy open lines of contact with outsiders, whether it’s workers in other stations or their families back home.

Due to this, lingual customs make deep treadmarks.

Which, incidentally, is also a quality of Antarctic “doos” — or snow machines, in British continental slang.

Singing has served as one of the world’s main forms of communication for birds, whales, and of course humans. But a new study shows that at least for one variety of tree-dwelling primate, it’s the same old song and dance.

One specific type of lemur makes sounds that bear a striking resemblance to human song. Because Madagascan indris use vocal rhythms that sync up with some of our most foundational beats, researchers think they might be the link to the origin of human singing.

Of course, many other animals communicate by singing. But the new study, published in the journal Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, explains how indris use a singular rhythmic pattern called isochrony to transmit alarm signals.

Indris have found fame as the world's "singing lemurs." Their squealing, mesmerizing vocalizations reverberate through jungle canopies, especially in the early morning.

Keeping the beat

But they aren't just improvising.

In isochrony, each interval between sounds or notes is equal. This creates a natural pattern or beat, like a clock or metronome ticking.

After the University of Warwick team first noticed the trend in the indris, they set up a long-term study to monitor any patterns. Data collection covered a painstaking 15 years. Beginning in 2005, the team followed 51 indris and listened to them sing 820 different songs, lead study author Dr. Chiara De Gregorio told Phys.org.

When the long serenade finally finished, they noticed a striking conformity. Isochrony is a defining quality of human music, and the large lemurs’ songs showed the same affinity for it. Every single song and alarm call used the pattern.

"This discovery positions indris as animals with the highest number of vocal rhythms shared with the human musical repertoire — surpassing songbirds and other mammals," said De Gregorio.

The results help corroborate a long-standing theory among evolution researchers: that songs indicate an ancient common ancestor between species.

"The findings highlight the evolutionary roots of musical rhythm,” said study co-author Dr. Daria Valente of the University of Turin, “demonstrating that the foundational elements of human music can be traced back to early primate communication systems."

From Frankenstein’s monster to Roy Batty and beyond, humanoid creations have always piqued our fascination.

But the closest we’ve come to bringing the fantasy to life — in real life — is by building robots. Until recently, this strategy hasn’t produced strongly convincing results. Even though a viral tidbit attributed to Stephen Hawking proposed a world where humans would play a role for robots similar to “what dogs are to humans,” it was tough to see us becoming their best friends. Back in 2016, Boston Dynamics’ Atlas robot wasn't very endearing until a YouTuber brilliantly added a human touch in post-production.

Robot capabilities have come much further eight years later, but what’s the next step? How about realistic, human-like skin, like the Terminator?

One lab announced new developments in robot skin systems that could significantly blur the line between man and machine.

Healthy 'skin,' wide 'grin'

Cultured from human skin cells and secured with attachment systems based on human ligaments, the new material self-heals and adheres to its frame with a stretchy, rebounding quality. Thanks to a “perforation-type” anchor system, it resists loosening and tearing — which have been disturbing giveaways of robot skin up to now.

The University of Tokyo lab team announced its findings with a June 25 paper in the journal Cell Reports Physical Science. Uncanny photos and video shows the new cultured skin undergoing “smile” tests — a flat “face” stretched onto a metallic chassis contorts back and forth into a mouthless grin.

Material durability and lasting tension are inherent challenges robotics researchers face while engineering skin. The new, cultured product reverses previous anchoring structures that protruded upward from below, attaching to the skin via hooks. Over time, the skin stretched and loosened around the anchoring points.

The Tokyo team’s artificially grown skin, instead, uses V-shaped hooks that insert into tiny perforations in the robot’s skeleton.

To do it, technicians must essentially paint on the robot’s skin. First, they coat the robot with a water-vapor plasma to make it attract water instead of repel it. Lab techs then smear a skin-forming, “cell-laden gel both onto and into” the V-shaped holes in the robot’s structure. The hydrophilic, or water-attractive, skeleton then pulls the skin hooks into the perforations over time.

Testing will continue as the team seeks better durability. They mentioned the skin can self-heal under minor wear and tear, but did not measure the recovery rate. Human skin maintains the distinct edge in self-repairability for now. The robot skin’s developers are looking to mimic ours as closely as possible.

Study co-author Shoji Takeuchi told LiveScience the team is trying to increase the skin’s nutrient and moisture supply, which “could involve developing integrated blood vessels or other perfusion systems within the skin."

Another objective is to increase shear strength. Don’t look for ripstop stitching, though. “Optimizing the collagen structure and concentration within the cultured skin” is the target, Takeuchi said.

You can’t stand in the way of progress. So you’d might as well smile about it — whether you’ve got a face made of bone or titanium.

If 2011 UL21, a mountain-sized object hurtling through space at 93,000 kilometers per hour, hit Earth, things could get dicey.

It won’t, astronomers say — but it will come closer to it than any other celestial projectile in the past 125 years. And it will put on a live show you can watch on the internet or even with a decent telescope.

2011 UL21 makes an official close pass of Earth once every three years. That’s when it orbits within 1.3 astronomical units of the Sun — the criteria for a “near-Earth” asteroid. Near-earth asteroids zip past Earth at a cozy distance of 45,000,000 kilometers or closer.

In this case, much closer.

No chance of catastrophe

2011 UL21 will buzz the tower on June 28-29 at about 6.6 million km. It’s the closest approach the asteroid has made in over a century, according to NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

It’s a moot point because there’s zero chance a collision will occur, the European Space Agency (ESA) reassured, but 2011 UL21 would wreak mass destruction if it hit Earth.

Spacereference.org estimates 2011 UL21’s size to be 1.7-3.9 kilometers in diameter — about five times smaller than the space rock that killed the dinosaurs. First observed in 2011, it’s bigger than 99% of all known near-Earth asteroids.

If an asteroid were the size of a 20-story building, it would be just 3% as big as 2011 UL21. Still, it would rip into Earth with a force similar to today’s biggest nuclear bombs, completely destroying any major city it hit.

Such collision damage could spread to a continental or even planetary scale. For now, though, it will harmlessly delight stargazers by making a close, bright pass.

A livestream by the Virtual Telescope Project (VTP) will broadcast the asteroid’s hurtling progress once it starts approaching this Thursday, June 27. The feed will come from the Bellatrix Astronomical Observatory in Ceccano, Italy.

Surprise twin visitor

Armchair astronomers in the northern hemisphere with decent telescopes may be able to catch a glimpse of it during its brightest period, from June 28-29, according to LiveScience.

More alarmingly, its arrival will coincide with another massive near-Earth object that will pass — harmlessly — much closer but wasn’t discovered until just days ago.

2024 MK will cruise past Earth at about 290 km. The ESA spotted it on June 16, and its fly-by date is June 29. It is between 120m and 260m wide.

“There is no risk of 2024 MK impacting Earth,” the ESA said. "However, an asteroid this size would cause considerable damage if it did, so its discovery just one week before it flies past our planet highlights the ongoing need to improve our ability to detect and monitor potentially hazardous near-Earth objects."

Safe in a shooting gallery?

Coincidentally, the close-quarters celestial action all leads up to Asteroid Day on June 30. The UN-endorsed event commemorates the largest observed asteroid strike on record: the 1908 Tunguska Event, in which an airburst decimated a largely desolate Siberian region.

If it seems like the Earth is a sitting duck in the shooting gallery of space, well, so is everything else in space. But astronomers now think there’s very little chance an asteroid similar to 2011 UL21 will hit Earth for the next 1,000 years.

Then again, close calls are likely. Keep your eyes on the sky in 2029. That’s when Aphophis, an asteroid named after the Egyptian god of chaos, will visit next. It’s as big as the Empire State Building — and it will thread the needle between us and our orbiting satcom satellites.

It’s a bridge too far to paint Jacopo Larcher as a revisionist. But in European rock climbing, he’s trying to synthesize a future that diverges from its past — and he’s not afraid to confront history in order to do it.

Ask yourself: Would you forgo a bombproof bolt for a marginal cam placement if you were facing a nasty fall?

 

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That’s the game Larcher plays all the time as he barnstorms around his home continent, ignoring bolts on sport climbs. He accepts the hazard as part of an effort to reframe the role of the expansion bolt — the central piece of hardware in a modern route developer’s toolkit.

Making 'the sharp end' even sharper

Larcher is The Traditionalist, in his new role for The North Face as well as in practice. Since the mid-2010s, he’s blazed his own trail through the climbing world by creating specific, hard climbs that would terrify most people.

Lead climbers attempting the menacing crux on 2021’s Shikantaza must rely on thin aid climbing gear, placed behind a flake that threatens to rip off, tensioned to cams below to stay in place. Nobody knows how hard Shikantaza is because Larcher never gave it a definitive grade — and nobody else has tried it.

In keeping with the ethics of The Traditionalist, the route could very well stay that way for good. Larcher refused to bolt it partly in deference to its original developer, who tragically died in unrelated circumstances in 2017. And partly because he’s decreasingly interested in the sport climbing game.

Shikantaza is a king line on a spectacular boulder in an idyllic Italian valley — how many souls would siege it if Larcher defanged it with a hammer drill?

To be clear, bolting has advanced rock climbing as a sport more than any other single factor. Most of the world’s hardest routes are impractical to protect with traditional gear, and many are impossible to protect traditionally.

Some are just extremely marginal. Those are the ones where Larcher makes his living.

Watch him jam a skyhook into a tiny horizontal seam on Jeune Et Con, then pound on it with his fist to secure it. Realize, along the way, that it’s the only piece of protection on the whole rig.

A little contrived?

Elsewhere, things get a little contrived. But when they do, it’s important to remember that all climbing is fairly contrived.

Into the Sun is Larcher’s extension of a high-ball boulder problem by Fred Nicole. To begin, the climber stands on bouldering pads with a harness on and starts up. The boulder problem ends at a big hole at about three-quarters height. At this point, the climber usually lets go, falling to the pads below. Instead, a helper hands the climber a pre-rigged rope and trad gear on the end of a pole.

The climber grabs the gear and clips into the rope, the helper becomes a belayer, and the climber tops out on the boulder after another three vertical meters.

It’s a little silly. Until you consider that Seb Bouin, Adam Ondra, and the rest of the mutants in the Flatanger Cave often switch between ropes mid-climb. Or that Alex Honnold, on the first ascent of the 15-meter high-ball boulder Too Big to Flail, amassed 36 crash pads at the base. Or that high-altitude climbers are locked in an ongoing mud fight over whether it's fair to use supplemental oxygen — in an industry that relies on it at least 90% of the time.

Faster, lighter?

Above the noise, though, there's one mountain perspective from which Larcher’s traditional fixation makes perfect sense. The seemingly invincible “fast and light” ethic supports it all the way.

Bolting a first ascent is heavy, gnarly, expensive work. Plugging a little gear, rappelling down, and walking away like nothing ever happened? Comparatively, it’s light as a feather. If a first ascensionist can get away with it, why face the burden of drilling a bolt at all?

Of course, "getting away with it" is relative. Fear and risk tolerances vary.

Will legions of sport climbers hang up their quickdraws in Larcher’s image? Pile their online shopping carts high with loads of arcane trad and aid equipment like beaks, skyhooks, and ballnuts? Play with sketchy gear placements and evaluate what climbing and, by extension, life is really about?

I doubt it. It’s too easy (and fun) to show up to a cliff someone already bolted and start playing around on it — trust me.

But Larcher’s not trying to change the past, he’s trying to influence the future. Hard trad climbing, he points out, is a “young movement” in Europe.

“You can really see that other climbers who don’t trad climb start to realize there is this other discipline,” Larcher says in the film. “[Trad climbing] never gets boring. You have to deal with your fears. You have to sometimes decide if you want to go for it, knowing there might be consequences.

“For me, It makes me feel more alive.”

Seems like word’s getting around.

An elephant encounter in Zambia resulted in the death of an American tourist on Wednesday. It was the country’s second such tourist fatality this year.

Sixty-four-year-old Juliana Gle Tourneau died in the incident near the Maramba Cultural Bridge in the town of Livingstone, according to local affiliate ZNBC.

ABC reported a herd of elephants gathered near the bridge, causing a traffic jam that included Tourneau’s vehicle. She and her companions were observing the elephants when, officials said, one of the animals charged the vehicle, threw Tourneau out, and trampled her to death.

Tourneau, of New Mexico, died around 5:50 pm local time.

It’s the second time an American tourist has lost her life in an elephant encounter in Zambia this year. Minnesotan Gail Mattson, 79, died in March when a bull elephant attacked her safari vehicle in Kafue Nature Reserve.

Although Zambia has been the location of these two 2024 fatalities, elephants can be dangerous anywhere. In India, elephants kill over 100 people each year, and over 200 people have been killed in Kenya over the last seven years, according to the World Wildlife Fund.

Twenty years ago, the Iberian lynx almost disappeared from the planet, but the species has now come back from the brink. Once one of the world’s rarest cats, the Iberian lynx (Lynx pardinus) has now officially escaped the Endangered list.

According to the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), the modestly sized, tufted-eared cats’ population dwindled to just 62 adults in 2001. That desperate situation has turned a corner, though, and mature Iberian lynx now number around 648. (The IUCN estimates the total population at around 2,000, including kittens.)

Still 'Vulnerable'

Those numbers are still relatively meager. Famously rare snow leopards still soundly outnumber Iberian lynxes, at somewhere between 4,000-6,500. And the lynxes' official status has only improved from “Endangered” to “Vulnerable."

But the effort marks a resounding success in habitat engineering and harm reduction.

“The greatest recovery of a cat species ever achieved through conservation, this success is the result of committed collaboration between public bodies, scientific institutions, NGOs, private companies, and community members including local landowners, farmers, gamekeepers and hunters,” said Francisco Javier Salcedo Ortiz, Coordinator of the LIFE Lynx-Connect project, which funded and led the work.

The IUCN attributes the recovery to several factors. Ortiz’s team sought to protect and restore Mediterranean scrub and forest habitat, decrease Iberian lynx fatalities from human activity, and increase the abundance of its main prey species, the endangered European rabbit.

Threats still remain. Recent viral outbreaks have decimated European rabbits, culling some populations by an estimated 60-80%. Diseases from domestic cats can also spread to Iberian lynx, and road kill and poaching remain dangers.

Experts are countering those challenges with a parallel effort to expand the lynx population’s genetic diversity. Breeding programs and translocations have been key pieces of the conservation efforts. So has reintroduction, with 400 cats added to wild lands since 2010.

Though the cats have added 450 square kilometers to their existing 3,320 square km territory in Portugal and Spain, the work isn’t over yet. The IUCN Green Status of Species -- different from the Red List -- still lists the Iberian lynx as Largely Depleted. If focused efforts continue, though, the organization said a path to full recovery is feasible.

It’s a remarkable turnaround for a cat that almost lost its habitat and its cornerstone prey species.

There’s a new record for the world’s oldest liquid wine, discovered during home renovations in a necropolis in southern Spain.

Seville’s Carmona necropolis dates 2,000 years ago, to the first century AD. The ancient Roman Imperial site was one of Spain’s first necropolises (a cemetery belonging to an ancient city) opened to the public.

Until 2019, though, no one knew it contained the world’s oldest wine. That’s when construction workers renovating a family’s property unearthed a buried chamber that contained eight small, arch-shaped wall niches. Six of them contained one urn each, crafted from stoneware, glass, or lead.

Five urns held ashes, bone fragments, and/or other objects typical of Roman funerals. But one, shaped from glass with elaborate handles, contained about five liters of a dark amber liquid. An archaeochemical testing team from the University of Córdoba later confirmed it was a time-honored party beverage.

“The wine turned out to be quite similar to wines from here in Andalucia: Montilla-Moriles; sherry-type wines from Jerez, and manzanilla from Sanlucar,” Jose Rafael Ruiz Arrebola, an organic chemist who led the analysis, told Arkeonews.

Although it didn’t look exactly white anymore, Arrebola’s team identified it as white wine using liquid chromatography and mass spectrometry. Specific polyphenols and a mineral salt profile convinced the team it was indeed white wine.

The stash outdates the world’s oldest unopened bottle of wine by around two centuries. The Speyer Wine Bottle is a 1.5-liter jug found in Germany in 1867, dating to between 325-359 AD.

Though the Carmona team noted the new wine’s impressive preservation due to ancient Roman techniques and climatic stability inside the tomb, they didn’t recommend drinking it. A single bottle of 1540-vintage Steinwein, housed in Germany’s Bürgerspital Winery, purports to be the world’s oldest drinkable wine. Bottles from the 1700s have fetched over $100,000.

The European Space Agency (ESA) is determined to land a probe on one of Saturn's smallest moons. When it does, its singular goal will be to finally discover alien life.

In a spring 2024 press release, the agency announced the plan to launch a spacecraft that will make an unprecedented landing on the tiny Saturnian moon of Enceladus.

Enceladus is so interesting because it has the three accepted criteria for extraterrestrial life: liquid water, other organic material, and a heat source.

The mission, called Voyage 2050, will cost billions of euros and a large chunk of careers. But according to the space program’s advisory board, the long shot is worth it.

“The mission concepts that we have recommended would provide tremendous scientific return, driving forward our knowledge, and would be fundamental for the successful detection of biosignatures on icy moons,” said Dr. Zita Martins, an astrobiologist at Portugal’s Instituto Superior Técnico and the lead consulting planetary scientist.

Tiny, enticing icy target

Mission control will face many complications as they attempt to make contact. But the minuscule moon looks promising as an oasis of life. For the ESA, this prospect outweighs the technical difficulties.

Encrusted in a thick sheet of ice, Enceladus has the most reflective surface of any object in the solar system. When the NASA probe Cassini cruised past it in the early 2000s, it photographed giant geysers erupting from cracks in the surface.

The plumes of water vapor and ice particles issued from what NASA called a “global ocean.” According to models, its warm, rocky core warms the ocean and propels vapor through the jets that pierce the surface.

It’s one thing to know this fascinating world exists and another to land a rig on it.

Enceladus orbits Saturn across a gaping void of 1.3 billion kilometers from Earth. The 2005 Cassini/Huygens project produced the only successful landing at a comparable distance, with a touchdown on Titan.

Enceladus is also a tiny target. Only 515km across, it would easily fit inside the state of Colorado.

Landing on so small an object will require persistent defiance of gravity. Enceladus orbits Saturn along with a thicket of 145 other moons. Due to its size and position, it will exert almost none of the natural traction a spacecraft could leverage for a landing.

“Enceladus is small, with weak gravity, which means you will need a lot of fuel to slow it down so that it does not whiz past its target into deep space,” astronomer Michele Dougherty, involved in the Cassini mission, told The Guardian. “That is going to be a tricky issue for those designing the mission.”

The ESA noted an early-2040s launch could be possible and suggested an Ariane 6 probe could reach Saturn by the 2050s. Enceladus edged out Saturn’s Titan and Jupiter’s Europa, both thought to harbor subterranean oceans, as a main target.

"A game of life and death.”

“Something that will live in my soul forever.”

“I try to live my dreams.”

K2 and the Invisible Footmen wastes no time leaping into mountain-sport platitudes. But there’s a dark underbelly to this, and the film bares it almost right away.

A laden Pakistani porter on his way to base camp at Pakistan’s most famous peak cuts in.

“The people who don’t care,” he says, “make us carry 30-35 kilograms” (translated). He shakes his head slightly and glances aside. “The ones who do care make us carry up to 22-24kg.”

It’s important to remember that all realities exist at once. In one of them, men work themselves to the bone so others can stand on top of mountains.

Inequities between people who go on paid expeditions and people who make them possible run as deep as the industry. It’s a microcosm of a human arrangement that collars the planet and inflicts wounds that have nothing to do with mountaineering.

However, that’s not true if your economic world is contained within mountaineering. That’s the case for many Pakistani K2 porters, who generally earn a pittance compared to international guides but show up for work nonetheless.

Paltry wages

Earnings for a low-altitude porter (one who stays below the highest of the peak’s five camps) can be paltry: $55 has been reported as a three-week rate. To make things worse, there’s no reliable rate for porters — only pack weight and altitude limits. Nepali Sherpas and western guides also crowd the K2 market, and are reportedly well-compensated.

Without seismic change, there's no indication the Pakistanis' situation will improve. Developing new skills is a venture for either the bold or the reckless. Equipment is prohibitively expensive and training is inaccessible.

“We come here every year,” one aging Pakistani man says in the film. “We don’t have any other choice. Our helplessness brings us here.”

They filter in for the season from all over Pakistan, but some call the Karakoram home — like Muhammad Hassan of the Shigar District.

Last year on K2

Hassan became the icon of a movement to improve the lives of K2 porters, but not until he lost his own. Hassan died near the K2 summit on July 27, 2023 in an incident that quickly became a bone of contention. Climbers and guide staff variously reported Hassan sustained an injury that immobilized him, then died while summit-bound teams jumped over him on their way up.

Invisible Footmen constructs a world where such callous behavior seems feasible. Money rules everything in front of the lens, and men seem as desperate to capture it as they are jaded toward it.

The film is not void of joy, but don’t expect a romp. This is a world with caustic and deeply entrenched problems, and Invisible Footmen concerns itself with depicting it.

Hassan’s story shocked a faction of the mountaineering community awake. It prompted a government investigation, led to a two-year ban on the company Hassan worked for, and stimulated funding for his surviving family via crowdsourcing.

A year later, lasting change still seems diffuse. The K2 season is primed for takeoff — time will tell if wages for Pakistani porters continue to gutter.

In a majestic and rarely observed sight, millions of migrating insects hum through a 30-meter-wide pass in the Pyrenees every autumn.

The massive flying convoy fascinated the University of Exeter ecologists who recently witnessed it. It also indicated that the broader region likely hosts billions of the migrating pollinators each year, a boon for ecosystems across Europe.

In the event, marmalade hoverflies (Espisyrphus balteatus) stream through the narrow Puerto de Bujaruelo like a hose on full blast.

“What we found was truly remarkable,” Will Hawkes, with the Centre for Ecology and Conservation on Exeter’s Penryn Campus in Cornwall, said in a press release. “There were some days when the number of flies was well over 3,000 individuals per meter, per minute.”

The narrow conduit has also reportedly facilitated human travel since the Roman Empire. These days, it’s a pollinator superhighway at an altitude of 2,273m.

Normally 'invisible'

Hoverflies accounted for 90% of the flying species. Butterflies and dragonflies added up to 2% of the total — enough for Hawkes’ team to count by visual observation. Netting the bugs was the only way to come close to an accurate estimate of their overall numbers.

“You sweep your net, and it’s full of the tiniest of flies,” Hawkes told The Guardian, “all journeying on this unbelievably huge migration.”

The fall migration originated mainly from northern Europe, in locales as far north as the United Kingdom, the team said. It was anybody’s guess where the insects spent the winter. They could be headed to Valencia, Spain — where dozens of the continent’s butterfly species amass — or even further south.

In the grand scheme of insect migrations, the action in the Puerto de Bujaruelo is fairly routine. But it’s usually impossible to experience at a close enough distance to make a perceptible impression. One 10-year study found 3.5 trillion aphids, moths, flies, and other insects migrated at high altitude over the southern United Kingdom every year.

But unless you can reach that high altitude yourself, through some means that allow you to take a look around, you’ll never scope the tiny travelers.

At the Puerto de Bujaruelo, on the other hand, conditions are perfect.

“The combination of high-altitude mountains and [low-speed] wind patterns render what is normally an invisible high-altitude migration into this incredibly rare spectacle observable at ground level,” said lead researcher Karl Wotton. “To see so many insects all moving purposefully in the same direction at the same time is truly one of the great wonders of nature.”

Insects on decline?

To select Puerto de Bujaruelo as a study location, Wotton’s team took cues from decades-old observations. Two bird biologists first recorded the sweeping migration in the 1950s. Curious whether it still existed despite reports of worldwide insect decline, the group carried out research over a four-year span.

They found species that play key roles in not only decomposition and pollination, but also pest control. (Hoverflies prey on the larvae of aphids, which can harm plants if their numbers get out of control). Every insect in the migration transports nutrients thaat soil and plants rely on, such as phosphorus and nitrogen.

A 2021 article in the journal PNAS likened global insect decline to “death by a thousand cuts.” CNN reported habitat loss is creating an “insect apocalypse” in some areas.

Wotton’s research team, meanwhile, said that other areas in the Pyrenees could see migrations similar to the one in the Puerto de Bujaruelo. If that’s the case, it would make the region a keystone for migratory insects across the continent — and even highlight their recovery.

“Insects are resilient and can bounce back quickly,” Wotton said. “Together, we can protect these most remarkable migrants of all.”

If you get a black widow bite, you’ll most likely experience the following: immediate severe pain, muscle cramps, a racing heartbeat, and sometimes, nausea and vomiting. You’ll likely survive, but you might need an injection of antibodies from horse blood to recover.

Now, at least part of that program could change. After years of effort, bioengineers have derived the first black widow spider antivenom from humans. It’s still years away from hitting the market, but it marks one step toward replacing the current flawed, unreliable antivenom.

A research team led by Michael Hust, an expert on pathogens and toxins with the Technical University of Braunschweig, Germany, announced the findings Wednesday in Frontiers in Immunology.

Focusing on European black widows (Latrodectus tredecimguttatus), the team scoured 10 billion human antibodies in search of the right formula. Of these, they ultimately identified just 45 antibodies that would counteract the venom. Their treatment only works against European widow variants for now, Hust told U.S. News and World Report.

It’s still a step in the right direction. The existing horse-derived antivenom is far from guaranteed successful and can trigger allergic reactions. And creating it is “slow, dangerous” work, according to the European Union’s Community Research and Development Information Service.

Black widows rank as the most venomous spiders in North America and instill legendary fear.

Their venom, called alpha-latrotoxin, can affect patients for several days after a bite. However, bites are rarely fatal. One study involving 23,409 cases found just 1.4% experienced “life-threatening” symptoms. Another in 2020 examined 1,015 patients — none died.

There’s a well-known behavioral resemblance between big cats and house cats. If you’ve ever seen video of a lioness stalking an antelope, it’s evident the first time you watch Socks target a grasshopper. 

Here’s the latest case of how all cats resemble each other. It’s the first known film in the wild of a family of Bornean clouded leopards — endangered jungle cats with proportionally the longest canine teeth of any cat species worldwide. 

Bornean clouded leopard (Neofelis diardi) canines can reach five centimeters long. It’s a shocking weapon based on a mature specimen’s modest size. The teeth are the same size as a tiger's, even though tigers are 10 times bigger.

The two cubs in this footage, though? They bounce around the underbrush in Indonesia’s Tanjung Puting National Park like tabby kittens on an IKEA rug. 

A gotcha moment

The Orangutan Foundation captured the quick clip with a camera trap, and framed it as a good sign for the Bornean clouded leopard’s limited population. Video of the species in the wild already existed — but not of a mother and cubs. 

Habitat loss and poaching threaten the cats, according to Globalconservation.org. Few Bornean clouded leopards reach breeding age, making the footage much more encouraging. 

“The clouded leopard is an arboreal species and excellent hunter on the ground that plays an important role in maintaining the ecosystem,” research manager A. Yoga Perdana said in a press release. “As one of the rarest species, being able to see a female and cubs gives us evidence that they are healthy and actively breeding.” 

NASA’s advice to future astronauts caught in a solar storm on Mars? Hide behind something — or get ready to absorb a devastating radiation dose.

Instruments on the Curiosity Rover registered strong solar flares on the Red Planet in late May. Camera footage arrived on Earth, showing intermittent white flecks as charged particles slammed into the lens.

The biggest event hit on May 20, delivering a solar flare NASA estimated at a severity of X12. It’s one of the strongest categories of these solar barrages, and it ripped into the Martian surface with a radiation dose of 8,100 micrograys — equivalent to 30 chest X-rays.

Duck and cover

NASA pointed out that future astronauts could be standing alongside Curiosity or other equipment during similar storms. The radiation dose from an equivalent event wouldn’t be lethal, but the astronauts would be best advised to take cover. Don Hassler, principal investigator with the Southwest Research Institute’s Solar System Science and Exploration Division, helped monitor the storm for NASA.

“Cliffsides or lava tubes would provide additional shielding for an astronaut from such an event,” Hassler said. "In Mars orbit or deep space, the dose rate would be significantly more."

It sure would. The recent X12 event paled compared to one the Odyssey spacecraft, orbiting Mars, absorbed in 2003. That punishing storm destroyed an instrument on board the craft specifically designed to measure solar radiation. NASA clocked it at X45 — on par with the famed Carrington Event.

Hardware from NASA and the European Space Agency helped measure the recent blast, which also produced numerous auroras in Mars’ night sky. Martian auroras emit ultraviolet light rather than visible light like ours do, so they can't be seen by the naked eye. Because Mars has no magnetic field, auroras also don’t scatter toward its poles. Instead, they engulf the entire planet.

Earthbound aurora watchers should stay tuned — Hassler added that high activity on the solar surface could unleash more storms toward Mars and Earth in the coming weeks.

You might think that a rumble between a tiger and a bear would be a scrappy, brutal affair. But when a wildlife conservation area in India became the sparring grounds for those two unlikely foes this spring, onlookers watched a different story.

Safari goers watched the encounter inside Pilibhit Tiger Reserve, a protected area in India's northern Uttar Pradesh state. Tense video footage shows a tigress (Panthera tigris) sidling along a dirt road. She’s one of the target species in the preserve, where a partially engineered ecosystem hosts hundreds of species of her prey animals.

But sloth bears (Melursus ursinus) — like the one that trundles out of roadside brush just meters ahead of her — aren’t one of them.

A mutual scope-out

But instead of a violent clash between rivals, the encounter takes the shape of a mutual scope-out.

The animals stand back and size each other up as the bear crosses the road and slips into the brush on the other side. The tension does break when the bear later charges. But if there’s any aggression involved, it doesn’t escalate.

A rarest of rare sight of a bear charging towards a tigress, captured today at Pilibhit Tiger Reserve- A CATS( Conservation Assured Tiger Standards) habitat developed assiduously by UP Forest Department.
Pl don’t miss the calm and composure of Big Cat even in face of attack &… pic.twitter.com/jU48UWpTqJ

— Dr Rajiv Kumar Gupta IAS (Retd) (@drrajivguptaias) April 30, 2024

A wildlife photographer on the safari noted the tigress appeared to “surrender” in the encounter, while an ecology and conservation lecturer who was not on site said the bear wasn’t aggressive at all.

“The tiger took time to watch the bear, sizing it up possibly to understand more about it. The bear did not show a particularly aggressive charge from the video so the tiger must have decided it was big enough to stand its ground,” Tara Pirie, with the U.K.’s University of Surrey, told LiveScience.

As similarly sized apex predators, tigers and sloth bears don’t compete over identical resources. Sloth bears are omnivores that only prey on insects such as termites and ants. And, according to a 2022 paper in the journal Scientific Reports, they share the same biggest threat: road development in their habitat.

As the original poster of the encounter on X pointed out, nature takes care of itself.

“Don’t miss the calm and composure of Big Cat even in face of attack & nervousness and fear of bear aware of unequal status [sic],” Dr. Rajiv Kumar Gupta wrote. “Nature has many lessons to teach humans!!”

A tiny pod of orcas in the Strait of Gibraltar started tripping big alarms in 2020 when the animals started damaging and sinking boats — a lot of them. Until now, 673 sailboats and fishing boats have sustained damage from orcas in southwest European waters over the past four years, according to a new report. Seven of those sank in incidents that involved ramming and bumping, especially focused on the boats’ rudders.

Humans have largely reacted via 1) fascination and 2) trying to figure out what’s going on. Fabulous theories have circulated, such as some that claimed the encounters were trauma responses.

Orcas are famously intelligent. They selectively eat great white shark livers for vaguely understood reasons, communicate in dialects, and even used humans as a companion hunting species in Australia (in a centuries-long symbiosis called the “Law of the Tongue”).

But, a new theory argues, the young orcas responsible for harassing boats in today’s Mediterranean waters display a relatable shortfall: They play too rough.

Breaking their toys

Recent footage from the Spanish group Conservation, Information, and Research on Cetaceans (CIRCE) shows the whales approaching and nosing at boat rudders while others watch from a short distance.

The behavior goes beyond “simple curiosity,” CIRCE argues. It more closely resembles a game — “a playful and challenging exploration” or “a “search for environmental enrichment.”

When they damage or sink a boat, it could just be the natural cost of their exuberance. Most of the orcas hounding the boats are young or adolescent males, according to the report. They belong to the critically endangered Iberian population, estimated at fewer than 40 individuals.

"There's nothing in the behavior of the animals that suggests that they're being aggressive," study co-author Alex Zerbini, a University of Washington senior research scientist also involved with the International Whaling Commission, told The Washington Post. “As they play with the rudder, they don't understand that they can damage the rudder and that damaging the rudder will affect human beings.”

Too much time on their flippers?

Finally, the report pointed out, the whales might just be enjoying more leisure time than they used to. The Iberian population’s main food source is the bluefin tuna, a species that almost disappeared from overfishing as recently as the 1990s. Now that bluefin numbers have somewhat recovered in the Mediterranean, their predators may hunt their food more quickly — and so face a surplus of free time.

It’s possible the orcas "have all this leisure time on their hands because they don't have to eat every fish they find," study co-author Naomi Rose, with the Animal Welfare Institute in Washington D.C., told the Post.

But if the killer whales are in fact just having fun with it all, the anglers and sailors in the region aren’t. The report also includes recommendations for how to deter the interactions but limit harm to the whales and their habitat.

For now, short sonic blasts are the focal strategy. Loud noises can startle the animals away with a low risk of provoking more attention.

But tomorrow, who knows? The mercurial apex predators who helped our ancestors establish the Law of the Tongue seem capable of toying with us at almost every turn.

Hiking socks are a critical piece of outdoor gear. While you may be tempted to grab any old pair out of your sock drawer for your next day out, good hiking socks provide comfort, cushioning, and moisture-wicking that your daily socks can't. They are vital to keeping your feet healthy during long hikes.

To find the best pair of hiking socks, Gear Editor Chelsey Cook and Sam Anderson put dozens of socks to the test, wearing some pairs until they literally came apart at the seams. They hiked and backpacked in the Southwest desert and Alaskan tundra, testing the socks in sand and snow alike and on hard-packed trails and river crossings. Chelsey wore a few pairs for over a week straight while on backpacking trips throughout Alaska to evaluate their durability and odor control, and tested toesocks while running an ultramarathon. She also packed three pairs for a month of travel in Peru, to test how they held up to repeated daily abuse of wandering the streets of Cusco and hiking throughout the Sacred Valley.

Throughout our testing, we considered durability, cushioning, and comfort. We tested socks made from different materials, with different heights and cushioning levels. This guide represents the hiking socks that kept our feet the happiest during long days on the trail.

If you're looking for a pair of boots to go with your hiking socks, check out our guide to The Best Hiking Boots of 2024.

Editor’s Note: We updated this guide on May 29, 2024, to announce our Best Overall Hiking Socks as the Darn Tough Hiker Micro Crew Cushion Hiking Socks. We also added superlatives for Best Hiking Socks for Cold Weather and Best Hiking Socks to Prevent Blisters. 

Our Picks for the Best Hiking Socks

• Best Overall Hiking Socks: Darn Tough Hiker Micro Crew Cushion Hiking Socks
• Best Lightweight Hiking Socks: Farm to Feet Max Patch 1/4 Lightweight Hiking Socks
• Best Hiking Socks for Cold Weather: Smartwool Ski Targeted Cushion Over the Calf Socks
• Best Hiking Socks to Prevent Blisters: Injinji Trail Midweight Socks

Best Overall Hiking Socks:

Darn Tough Hiker Micro Crew Cushion Hiking Socks 

Features:

• Responsibly sourced merino wool insulates even when wet
• Well-established reputation for long-term durability, coupled with a lifetime warranty
• Micro crew height works with most hiking boots
• Made in Vermont
• Favorite of thru-hikers

Why we like them: Incredible durability with a lifetime warranty, very comfortable

What we don't like: Expensive, may be too warm for hiking in hot climates

Materials: 61% merino wool, 36% nylon, 3% lycra spandex | Height: Micro crew | Weight: Midweight

The Darn Tough Hiker Micro Crew Cushion Hiking Socks ($25) are Sam's and Chelsey's pick for their favorite overall hiking socks. Both Sam and Chelsey have (regrettably) spent weeks in the backcountry with only one or two pairs of socks, and Darn Toughs were the only ones to stand up to the job. The merino wool keeps odor at bay while also providing insulation, and the cushioning is comfortable even after long days on your feet. The height and cushioning level also makes them ideal for a range of activities, including hiking, biking, scrambling, and packrafting.

They're also ridiculously durable. Despite using them for all of her hiking, trail running, and daily sock needs, Chelsey has never managed to wear a hole in any of her pairs, though the elastic ankle has occasionally stretched out after a few seasons of use. Luckily, with Darn Tough's Guaranteed for Life program, Chelsey has just mailed her old, worn-out socks to the Vermont-based company, and they've sent her a new pair or a gift card in exchange. This makes the upfront $25 cost easier to swallow.

Some hikers may find them a little too warm for hot days or hard efforts. Thankfully, Darn Tough also has Light Hiker Micro Crew Socks, which Chelsey uses for trail running.

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Best Lightweight Hiking Socks:

Farm to Feet Max Patch 1/4 Lightweight Hiking Socks

Features:

• Supply chain is entirely within the U.S.
• Targeted, light cushion keeps socks comfortable and lightweight
• Seamless toe closure reduces bulk and friction
• Aesthetic mountain pattern around the ankle

Why we like them: Supportive and lightweight, with cushioning in all the right places

What we don't like: Low height may not work with most traditional hiking boots, not as durable as Darn Toughs

 Materials: 59% nylon, 37% merino wool, 4% spandex | Height: Ankle  | Weight: Lightweight

The Farm to Feet Max Patch 1/4 Lightweight Hiking Socks ($22) are above-the-ankle hiking socks with targeted cushioning to keep them lightweight. The socks are made with 100% U.S.-sourced merino wool, as well as American nylon and spandex, and feature a comfortable seamless toe closure to reduce bulk and blisters. High-density cushioning is focused only along the ball, heel, and top of your foot, to let your feet breathe in warmer conditions. The Max Patch socks also only reach just above your ankle bone. While this helps keep you cool during hot hikes, the low height can cause some rubbing in traditional hiking boots. These socks are best worn with hiking shoes, mid-height hiking boots, and trail runners.

Chelsey found the Farm to Feet socks less durable than Darn Toughs, likely because of the thinner material. However, Farm to Feet also has a Satisfaction Guarantee program that lets you send back socks if you aren't happy with their durability.

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Best Hiking Socks for Cold Weather:

Smartwool Ski Over the Calf Targeted Cushion Sock

Features:

• Over the calf height keeps your lower legs warm
• Targeted cushion to protect your feet without making the socks bulky
• Mesh zones increase breathability
• Indestructawool technology enhances durability

What we like them: Durable, warm without being bulky, merino wool for odor control

What we don't like: Shin cushioning is unnecessary for hiking and may make the socks too warm for some conditions

Materials: 59% merino wool, 27% recycled nylon, 3% elastane | Height: Over the calf | Weight: Midweight

The Smartwool Ski Over the Calf Targeted Cushion Socks ($28) is Chelsey's pick for the best hiking socks for cold weather and winter hikes. The high, over-the-calf length provides ample coverage to keep your feet and lower legs warm, while the targeted cushion in the balls and heels will make those long days on your feet more enjoyable. The targeted cushion also keeps the socks slim enough to fit in hiking boots without squishing your toes. Like the Darn Tough Hiker Micro Crew Cushion Hiking Socks, the Smartwool Ski Socks have a high percentage of merino wool, making the socks softer and more odor-resistant than other materials.

While the shin cushioning isn't necessary for hiking, it may help keep your legs warmer and make the socks more versatile. Chelsey uses the same pair for winter hiking and backcountry skiing. Smartwool also offers the same socks with full cushion and zero cushion.

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Best Hiking Socks to Prevent Blisters:

Injinji Trail Midweight Socks

Features:

• Mesh top for breathability
• Each toe is protected to reduce skin-on-skin friction and lets your foot splay naturally
• Band around the arch increases support
• Extra cushioning on the footbed

Why we like them: The best blister-prevention out there, light enough for hot days

What we don't like: Toe-socks aren't for everyone, elastic in the ankle stretches out

Materials: 39% CoolMax EcoMade, 58% nylon, 3% lycra | Height: Crew | Weight: Midweight

While the Injinji Trail Midweight Socks ($17) may look a little ridiculous, toesocks are incredibly popular amongst ultrarunners, and for a good reason. These socks are blister--preventing wonders. With each toe individually protected by its own sock, skin-on-skin friction, one of the main causes of blisters, is essentially eliminated. Chelsey tested them for herself throughout several long training runs and ultramarathons and walked away without a single blister. Having each toe separated also lets her feet splay and move naturally in her shoes, reducing the usual pain she feels in her forefoot on long runs and hikes. The mesh top kept her feet from overheating, while the arch band supported her on long days.

While the feeling of fabric between your toes takes time to get used to, it's well worth it for how happy your feet will be after a long hike or run. Injinji also offers mini-crew and ankle socks if you prefer a shorter sock.

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About our testing process

The ExplorersWeb sock testing team, comprised of Chelsey Cook and Sam Anderson, has worn through so many socks during their collective 35 years of backpacking, climbing, and mountaineering that they've lost count. They gladly took on the challenge of testing a batch of new hiking socks to determine which pairs should be included in this guide.

Sam Anderson started this guide in May 2022. He's a jack of all trades — an avid road tripper and passionate rock climber, and a chainsaw operator and carpenter. Whether he's working or playing, he's on his feet and more often than not in boots. Sam relies on the right hiking socks to keep his feet comfortable and prioritizes socks made from moisture-wicking and odor-controlling materials. He tested socks on backpacking and rock climbing trips along the West Coast,

Gear Editor Chelsey Cook took over the hiking socks guide in May 2024. As a mountaineering and backpacking guide in Alaska, she often spends at least four months a year in the field. With an average pack weight over 75 pounds on most expeditions, she cuts weight and bulk where she can, and typically flies into the backcountry with only two pairs of socks to cover her for up to three weeks.

Because she demands so much from each pair, Chelsey values durability, adequate cushioning, and comfort. She's a die-hard Darn Tough fan, exclusively wearing them for all her backpacking and mountain biking needs, and in her daily life. She also tested cold-weather hiking socks while backcountry skiing in France and Washington, and on mountaineering trips in the Alaska Range. She brought the Smartwool Ski Over the Calf Targeted Cushion Socks on Denali, running the socks through their paces for three weeks. Lastly, because she's a glutton for recreational discomfort, Chelsey signed up for a 250-mile ultramarathon in Utah and wore the Injinji Trail Midweight Socks for the first 120 miles. While the rest of her body fell apart, her feet did not, and she walked away from the race without a single blister.

To meet a wide range of hiking needs, we included socks with different heights and cushioning in this guide. All the socks in this guide meet our standards for durability, comfort, and support. They're also all from trusted brands, many of which have outstanding warranty programs.

Things to consider in hiking socks

Materials

The hiking socks market is filled with wool socks and for good reason. Wool regulates temperature and wicks moisture, helping prevent sweaty feet. It insulates when wet, a property that Chelsey appreciates in Alaska, where every hike seems to include a river crossing. Wool also naturally reduces odor.

Most wool socks come in a blend of fibers, including a synthetic material like nylon and a stretchy one like spandex. Merino wool is typically softer and less itchy than regular wool. Look for brands that source their merino wool responsibly.

Some hiking socks, particularly liner socks, are made from polyester, a synthetic material. Polyester socks are affordable, light, and quick-drying. Polyester isn't as breathable or soft as wool and tends to get stinky quicker. It's also a synthetic material derived from petroleum, so not as sustainable as natural wool.

Height

Hiking socks come in all different heights, from no-show to over the calf and everything in between. The right height depends on your footwear. The higher your boots, the taller your socks should be to prevent the boots from rubbing your skin

• No-show: These socks are so short that they won't show over the top of a running shoe. They offer your ankles no protection from abrasions, either from your hiking boots or from brush. We didn't include any in this buyer's guide, but they can be a good option for trail running shoes.
• Ankle: Also called 1/4 crew, these hiking socks come just above your ankle bone. While too short for traditional hiking boots, Chelsey often wears them with running shoes and likes the Farm to Feet Max Patch 1/4 Lightweight Hiking Socks.
• Crew: This is the most common height for hiking socks. They extend a few inches above your ankle bone, protecting your skin from higher-cuffed hiking boots and brushy trails.
• Over the calf: These socks come to just below the knee, and are often labeled as ski socks rather than hiking socks. They provide maximum abrasion protection and warmth and are a good option for winter hiking and mountaineering.

Cushioning

The amount of cushioning in hiking socks affects their thickness, warmth, and comfort.

• No cushioning: Hiking socks with no cushioning are lightweight and breathable. These socks can be a good option for hot day hikes, but your feet may suffer on longer trips without any cushioning.
• Light cushioning: Made for warmer conditions, these socks are lightweight, with cushioning only in a few key areas, like the balls and heels of the feet. Light cushioning is sometimes called targeted cushioning, like in the Farm to Feet Max Patch 1/4 Lightweight Hiking Socks.
• Medium cushioning: These socks have cushioning on the balls and heels, and sometimes the entire footbed. They're a great choice for moderate to cooler temperatures, and the increased cushioning will keep your feet happier on longer days or under heavy packs. Chelsey uses medium cushioning on her backpacking trips and long day hikes.
• Heavy cushioning: These socks are the thickest and warmest available. They're designed for winter conditions and mountaineering and aren't suitable for most backpacking trips. Chelsey brings a pair of heavy-cushioned socks on Denali for summit day, and to use as her "sleep socks". They're generally too thick to fit comfortably in her hiking boots.

Durability

Between long days on the trail, dealing with sweat and dirt, and then being put through the wash cycle, hiking socks go through a lot of wear and tear over their lifespan. You want your hiking socks to last you several seasons of adventure, and durability is a key component to hiking socks choice. While all the brands in this buyer's guide make high-quality socks, some are more durable than others. For instance, Chelsey found that Smartwool hiking socks are prone to holes. The ankles on her Injinji's also stretched out quickly, though the rest of the socks held up well. Darn Toughs, while not the softest and lightest hiking socks, truly live up to their name. Chelsey has not yet managed to wear a hole in them, though she has noticed the ankles loosening after a year of heavy, almost daily use — which is frankly more abuse than any single pair of socks should bear.

Some brands, like Farm to Feet and Darn Tough, have warranty programs. Farm to Feet's Satisfaction Guarantee Program lets you send back socks that don't meet your durability and performance standards in exchange for new ones. Darn Tough's Guaranteed for Life program similarly lets you send back worn-out socks in exchange for a new pair. Chelsey's sent in Darn Tough socks with stretched-out ankles and thin heels and appreciates how quick and easy the program is.

Frequently asked questions

What materials are best for hiking socks?

Wool is the best material for hiking socks. Wool wicks moisture and insulates while wet, and provides cushioning for your feet. Most hiking socks come in a blend of wool, nylon, and an elastic material like lycra. Polyester is also sometimes used, but it doesn't have the same odor control as wool does.

What are the best hiking socks?

Our pick for the best hiking socks are the Darn Tough Hiker Micro Crew Cushion Hiking Socks. We loved how comfortable and cushioned they were, with a height that comfortably fits with most hiking boots. Darn Tough also has an impeccable lifetime warranty for their socks, making them our best-value choice as well.

Are thick or thin socks better for hiking?

It depends on the climate you're hiking in, your personal preference, and the type of hiking boots you're using. Thicker socks offer more cushioning, which might be more comfortable if you're wearing traditional hiking boots, carrying a heavy backpack, or will be spending long hours on your feet. However, they are also warmer and bulkier, which can be uncomfortable on hot days. Thinner socks don't offer as much cushioning but can be a good option if you use light hiking shoes or trail running shoes, or are going on day hikes in hotter weather. Whatever socks you choose, make sure they fit comfortably in your shoes and don't cram your toes. The thicker the sock, the more room in your shoe it will take up!

Should I wear liner socks?

Liner socks, thin socks you wear under your hiking socks, were once a popular method to help wick moisture and keep your feet dry. Most hiking socks on the market today, particularly those made of merino wool, have such high moisture-wicking performance that you don't need liner socks. Some hikers also use liner socks to help prevent blisters. If your feet are blister-prone, it may be worth trying, though we recommend trying the Injinji Trail Midweight Socks first.

Perched on the tip of a fiord in Baffin Bay, Nuuk cuts a pretty picture. Greenland’s capital city exists as a bright patchwork of colorful houses, art and history museums, and cold, clear seawater.

It’s home to less than 20,000 people — and, soon, a large-scale international airport.

Kalaallit Airports first confirmed plans to build terminals and runways in Nuuk capable of operating direct flights from North America and Europe in 2023. Completion is now only five months away, with a grand opening set for Nov. 28.

 

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The 'right' kind of tourists

It’s a huge development for a small city, and for a country with only one current international airport, at the remote former U.S. military base of Kangerlussuaq. From here, you need to hop on a small prop plane to get anywhere else in Greenland, including to its capital, Nuuk.

Yet Greenland experienced its busiest tourist season ever last year, hosting about 130,000 visitors. (By contrast, Iceland draws about two million per year.) Greenland's most popular draw is the town of Ilulissat, which features a fiord stuffed with mammoth icebergs.

Greenland’s economy still relies heavily on fishing. While some acknowledge that diversifying into tourism could benefit the country, they also worry about too many tourists crowding into a sensitive ecosystem without much travel infrastructure.

“As an industry, we knew that mass tourism would never work — it wouldn’t work for the locals, and it wouldn’t work for the tourists,” Stine Selmer, a sustainability consultant who also runs her own travel company, told Adventure.com. “It would cannibalize our product.”

That product, unequivocally, is the sprawling landscape of Greenland, the world's largest island.

Selmer also mentioned the country’s tourism industry wants to attract the “right” kind of people: adventure travelers with an appreciation for nature.

That’s clear from most of the travel opportunities, which revolve around trekking, coastal tours, and natural attractions like the Northern Lights. Regulation is relatively strict — especially in Northeast Greenland National Park, the world’s 10th-largest protected area, where a well-funded expedition recently got sent packing when members couldn’t show permits.

Pristine lands, frozen progress

But a high-volume tourist inflow could overwhelm resources. It’s not difficult to comprehend the relative wildness of a country almost as big as India, with about 25,000 times fewer people. It’s a balancing act for a country where reindeer and whales still dominate landscapes of rock and ice, but forward progress is slow.

Oil exploration is illegal in Greenland, and the government has treated mining with scrutiny. In 2021, it blocked one of the planet’s largest planned rare-earth mines due to the possibility of radioactive contamination.

“We need to have more growth,” Mute B. Egede, Greenland’s prime minister, told The New York Times. “Right now, most of our money comes from fisheries. We need some other income possibilities, and tourism is one of the key potentials for future growth.”

Of course, tourist dollars could help improve life for Greenlanders. Because roads don’t connect towns to one another, most residents travel domestically by air. Other new planned airports in Qaqortoq and Ilulissat could make it a little easier to visit distant friends and relatives.

“I think everybody, in Nuuk, at least, is just looking forward to having this airport because it means less wasted time, more direct business, political, and social connections,” Tanny Por, head of international relations at Visit Greenland, told Adventure.com. “Everything will be more connected in that way.”

 

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It will have to catch up first. Air Greenland, the country’s government-owned commercial airline, said it could face scaling challenges ahead of the Nuuk airport update.

“It is preparing for the new infrastructure, both geographically — as we need to change the hub — and physically, as we need to relocate people and equipment,” CEO Jacob Nitter Sørensen told Aviation Week. “Additionally, it is getting ready with new equipment, processes, routines, procedures, products and schedules — essentially everything.”

Game changers

As it grows, Greenland only needs to look to its closest international travel companion for a cautionary tale. Iceland exploded in popularity following what some considered an incautious tourism campaign in the 2010s. It now faces overcrowding and landscape degradation.

Regardless, Kalaallit Airports officials herald the new facilities in Nuuk with high expectations.

"We believe the airport will be a game-changer, not just for Nuuk but for the entire country,” said Kalaallit Airports managing director Jens Lauridsen. “The grand opening and celebration will underscore the significance of this historic event."

Jean Daniel Pession and his girlfriend, Elisa Arlian, died together after reportedly falling 700 meters from the top of Italy’s Monte Zerbion (2,719m). Neither skier survived the fall, the Italian Winter Sports Federation confirmed in a June 1 statement — but rescuers found them in each other’s arms.

Still tied together

Pession, a 28-year-old World Cup skier from Aosta Valley, Italy, knew the peak well. RAI, Italy’s national public broadcasting company, reported in a tweet that he and Arlian were “almost at the summit, just a step away, when suddenly they were betrayed by the mountain they loved so much.” Rescuers found them after their fatal fall “still tied together, like in a final embrace.”

L'atleta di chilometro lanciato Jean Daniel Pession e la sua compagna Elisa Arlian, entrambi esperti di montagna e maestri di sci, sono morti precipitando dal Monte Zerbion, in Valle d'Aosta. Dopo ore di ricerche, i soccorritori hanno trovato i loro corpi sepolti dalla neve pic.twitter.com/rW13Zdn7qj

— Tg3 (@Tg3web) June 2, 2024

The couple headed toward the peak in the early morning, according to RAI. When they failed to return promptly, family members alerted emergency responders. An arduous helicopter search finally located their bodies, thanks in part to a device that managed to pick up a cell phone signal from one of the skiers. By the time crews reached two red-jacketed skiers, it was too late.

Body recovery was successful — Pession and Arlian’s remains were transported to Aosta Valley’s Champoluc mortuary.

Pession’s World Cup speed skiing career began in 2021. His best result was an 11th-place finish at a November event that season in Idrefiall, Sweden.

Arlian, 26, had worked as a ski instructor in Saint-Barthélemy and a primary school teacher.

 

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Among others, condolences for the couple came from the President of the Aosta Valley Regional Council, Alberto Bertin.

“Two young lives broken by an accident in the mountains, that mountain which was their passion. In this moment of profound sadness, we express our closeness to the families, friends, and the entire sporting community, holding us close to them with affection and compassion,” Bertin told RAI.

They don’t make them like they used to — at all.

It can take natural diamonds over three billion years to grow, but researchers in a South Korean lab have successfully fabricated the precious stones in just 15 minutes.

The equipment they used didn’t rely on time-tested requirements for lab-grown diamonds like higher atmospheric pressure or starter stones, so the breakthrough could change the game.

In nature, diamonds form in geologic crucibles where pressure can be 50,000 times higher than at sea level. Temperatures soar to over 1,500˚C. If the precious stones ever make it through the 2,900km-thick mantle to the crust, they can only be had through arduous, extractive mining. The process can take anywhere from 1 to 3.3 billion years, from formation to extraction.

Of course, there’s an incentive to speed up the process. Seventeen percent of all diamonds on the global market are lab-grown, CNN reported, and the industry has expanded from $1 billion in 2016 to over $12 billion in 2022.

Labs synthesize diamonds by (roughly) reproducing the same natural conditions in which the stones form. Technicians place a small starter (or seed) diamond in a chamber, then crank up the heat and pressure. They introduce liquid metal, such as iron, with carbon dissolved inside. The carbon separates from the metal under the intense forces, then gathers around the seed diamond to begin forming.

It’s called high-pressure and high-temperature (HPHT) and it produces about 99% of all lab-grown diamonds. But it comes with limitations. It’s a challenge to maintain the extreme heat and pressure, and it can take weeks to form an average diamond as big as a wooden match head.

And even with other fabrication methods, like chemical vapor deposition, you still need a seed diamond to start.

Not anymore. Rodney Ruoff, a physical chemist at the Institute for Basic Science in South Korea, helped pioneer a new lab technique for growing diamonds in minutes with homemade equipment.

Published April 24 in the journal Nature, the team’s findings describe a nine-liter chamber loaded with the element gallium. Once you flip the switch, it’s ready in 15 minutes. It can produce diamonds 15 minutes after that.

Rouff’s team tested several metal and gas cocktails inside the chamber on a hunt for efficiency. They determined gallium, an obscure metal that liquefies at just 30˚C, was a good catalyst. Unrelated research showed it could create methane as a byproduct, then cause graphene to form from the gas, according to LiveScience.

The rapid feedback loop then helped them determine that a gallium-nickel-iron-silicon mixture provided the best results.

They’re not sure yet, but the researchers think the silicon acts as a seed for crystallization. Carbon deposits onto it from catalytically-produced methane gas.

The technique uses a lower temperature (only 1,025˚C) than HPHT or any other known way to grow diamonds and requires no added atmospheric pressure.

Its one limitation — it can only produce tiny stones. Rouff’s team only managed to coax diamonds hundreds of thousands of times smaller than HPHT examples.

Diamond miners are safe for now. The new stones are too small for jewelry or any other commercial purpose. But that may not always be the case. Rouff began his research over a decade ago, and his outside-the-box thinking solved a problem that could now create rapid progress.

“Growth of diamond in liquid metal at moderate temperature and 1 atm pressure opens many possibilities,” the study said.

Climbs in the Buttermilk Boulders don’t surrender easily, even to the world’s best pebble wrestlers.

At first sight, it’s easy to figure out why. The quartz erratics hulk over the broad playa of the Owens Valley in eastern California. Savage crimps in steep faces guard top-outs that soar above 15 meters. Around icons like the Grandma and Grandpa Peabody Boulders, generations of hopefuls have steadily pounded the landscape into dust by throwing down palatial crash pad carpets.

When a climber scores a first ascent in the Buttermilks, it’s a big deal. Jared Roth pulled off an unthinkable ascent with Rastaman Vibration (V12, 15m) in 2002. Roth started Rastaman from a standing position, skipping some entry moves too radical for the time and place. Eight years later, Paul Robinson finally unlocked them, forcing a sit start after two years’ work: Lucid Dreaming, V15.

A similar saga played in the Sierra foothills above the Peabodies. Bouldering luminaries Chris Sharma and Jason Kehl started clashing with the Golden Boulder’s steep, soaring face in the early 2000s. But neither climber could solve its puzzle of crimps and contortions. In 2011, Sonnie Trotter finally skipped half of it, creating the shoulder-start rig Standing on the Shoulders of Giants (V9). But the ground-up line remained one of the Buttermilks' last unclimbed centerpieces — until this spring.

 

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Freefall veteran

Keenan Takahashi is a gamer. The 30-something-year-old has invested the majority of two decades into the climbing game. Takahashi is as recognizable for his unkempt mustachios as for his gung-ho style on rock. He’s tamed big rigs and exacting projects all over the world. He has been called “obsessive,” and he's probably spent more time in freefall than most people have spent on the couch.

In April, he added another notch to his belt.

The Gold Standard (V15) is the long-deferred completion of Trotter’s Shoulders. Watch Takahashi wage and win the first ascent war here — in painter’s pants and gondolier shirts.

To psych up, he invokes a Soundcloud rapper.

“Chicken f*ckin’ bone, now it’s on!”

Firmly. Consistent with the Mellow label, this joint is a familiar chronicle of the ups and downs of high-ball prospecting. Alongside partner-in-crime Katie Lamb, Takahashi frets, focuses, and fumes through the effort.

If the central Californian sometimes seems overstimulated, it’s a short leap to guess why. Takahashi’s investment in The Gold Standard spanned years. His tendency to fixate obviously fueled progress but increased the pressure.

Insipid chatter

Also get ready for insipid chatter from spotters (admittedly, I cannot control this when I am the spotter) and Mellow’s vulnerability to dramatization. Some will struggle with disjuncts between production elements and on-screen events, like when a yearning, tense musical crescendo intensifies as a headlamped Takahashi proceeds up the rig but falls — uneventfully, from a height of about five meters.

Anyone who’s done it, though, knows that climbing a worthy project feels more intense than post-production could ever make it seem.

ExplorersWeb couldn’t reach Takahashi for comment as of this writing, but his Instagram post caption is a can’t-miss. Want a drive-by tour through the strange, standout mind at the top of the Buttermilks? Here you go.

“The only difficulty was self-imposed, and to see it for what it is allowed me to step away from the outcome and focus on the moment. The wind rose, and I just felt excited to give it hell…I’m not really sure how to write a caption about something that I’ve been looking at for 12+ years, trying for six seasons, and thought I might never send. But… I’m f*cking psyched to have seen this one through!!!”

Chicken bone, Keenan.

A prolonged rescue campaign near the summit of Denali has only partly succeeded.

Overwhelmed by strafing winds and clouds on the 6,190m peak, three Malaysian climbers called for rescue via satellite message at 1 am on Tuesday, May 28. Seventy-eight hours later, the ordeal for all three is over: one via prompt rescue from a lower camp, one via survival in a snow cave, and one via death.

The National Park Service (NPS) today reported that at 7 am, a helicopter pilot and climbing ranger extracted one surviving expedition member from his snow shelter on the Football Field at 5,974m. The operation used a short-haul rescue basket dangling from a rope line.

Death in a snow cave

Previously, one expedition member had managed to descend to Denali High Camp (5,242m) and was rescued there. But the final team member succumbed to severe frostbite and hypothermia in the snow cave on the Football Field.

Officials did not release details on the deceased climber pending family notification. But it did disclose that he had died “approximately two days prior” to the end of rescue operations.

Adverse conditions on the peak hampered the rescue, which involved National Guard assets and independent guides. Untenable flying conditions persisted throughout the three-day window as the NPS struggled to reach the stranded climbers. The helicopter team did not manage to survey the location until overnight Thursday when they dropped a duffel bag of supplies in the stranded climbers’ area.

"This was an exceptionally difficult and challenging rescue," said Denali NPS spokesperson Paul Ollig. "We have so much gratitude for the individuals involved at all levels of the operation."

Broken bones, a lacerated vertebrae, and bound wrists: An Iron Age woman suffered these last brutalities in a suspected human sacrifice.

Remains discovered near Winterborne Kingston, in southern England, bore clues that convinced archaeologists they were looking at a sad, special case. The Bournemouth University research team made the find in 2010, and published a study in The Antiquities Journal on May 14.

It revolves around a hardworking woman who died at the bottom of a storage pit in a ceremonial rite around 400 BC. Researchers found her skeletal remains face down on top of deliberately arranged animal bones.

“Placement of the body further suggests that [the] killing was enacted within the pit, execution as spectacle forming the final act in a larger ceremony involving the creation of an animal bone stack or platform,” the paper said.

Brief, brutal Iron Age life

The dig crew found the woman’s skeleton almost fully complete. Her injuries began with a cracked, partially healed rib which indicated she only lived for a few weeks after sustaining it.

A narrow, lateral slit on her second cervical vertebra suggests her fatal wound. It likely came from a sharp blade, inserted from behind, just below the skull.

Electron microscopes revealed the woman’s bones had robust attachment points, indicating strong muscles consistent with hard labor. Her spine also showed heavy wear and tear, apart from the blade wound. And the placement of her hands, palm-to-palm in front of her face, suggests her killers bound her wrists.

Strontium testing, which matches levels of that element in teeth to areas where it occurs in foods and water, proved she may have been a visitor to the village where she died.

"All the significant facts we have found, such as the problems with her spine, her tough working life, the major injury to her rib, the fact she could have come from elsewhere, and the way she was buried could be explained away in isolation," said study co-author and forensic anthropologist Martin Smith.

"But when you put them all together with her deposition face down on a platform of animal bone, the most plausible conclusion is that she has been the victim of a ritual killing. And of course, we found a large cut mark on her neck, which could be the smoking gun."

Ritual killing or business as usual?

Modern-day Winterborne Kingston saw heavy use around the time of the woman’s suspected murder, the researchers pointed out. Called a “banjo enclosure,” the site represents a protected area ringed by a ditch, holding multiple roundhouses and pits. Ancient humans used other sites nearby for mixed agriculture with “a strong pastoral element,” the paper said.

The pit containing the woman was 1.2 meters deep. Bones arranged around and underneath her remains mostly belonged to horses and cows. The researchers found the array was likely deliberate — performed at the same time as the woman’s ritual death.

The circumstances could relate to a spiritual fixation on underworld entities among Iron Age people.

Ongoing research shows “the presence of votive items within pits throughout much of Iron Age Europe could indicate belief in a subterranean plane of existence, to which the digging of pits created an interface,” the paper said.

Excavations in far-flung areas have similarities, suggesting “irregular rituals which engraved a cosmology into the physical lives of Iron Age people,” the British Museum's J.D. Hill wrote.

The woman joins other examples of suspected Iron Age European human sacrifice, like the gravely mutilated Lindow Man.

Archaeologists suggest victims in many such incidents seem to have been low-status individuals like criminals, slaves, or foreigners. Others point out that women in late Iron Age society faced a sexual prejudice still familiar today.

“Being able to humanize the story of this woman’s life has given us a valuable glimpse into the other side of Iron Age society,” Smith, the study co-author, said. “Behind every ancient burial we find is someone's story waiting to be told.”

Planet Vulcan was the famous homeworld of the humanoid species to which Star Trek hero Mr. Spock belonged.

Logical, steadfast Spock was cast as a troubled galactic refugee aboard the starship Enterprise. In the ubiquitous sci-fi franchise, Vulcan orbited the star 40 Eridani A, or HD 26965. In an alternative timeline in a later Star Trek film, a sadistic Romulan miner detonated red matter in its core, causing Vulcan to implode.

HD 26965 also exists in the real universe, and Spock and the show inspired legions of capable stargazers. The hunt to find a real Vulcan around that star was on.

In 2018, astronomers announced they had found it. A team using Arizona’s Dharma Endowment Foundation Telescope (DEFT) detected a “wobble” in the light signature of HD 26965, indicating the orbit of an earth-like exoplanet. Furthermore, they teased, the star “may be an ideal host star for an advanced civilization."

But like Spock’s doomed world in the alternative timeline, the researchers’ hopes later imploded.

Further studies in 2021, 2022, and 2023 cast doubt on the findings. And finally, updated research claims to confirm that Planet Vulcan was nothing but stardust in the wind.

It may be a sad development for Mr. Spock, but anyone predisposed to logic would applaud the process.

In astronomy, radial velocity describes movement due to the interactions between stars and planets. Since each one orbits the other, but stars are much more massive, stars that host planets wobble slightly around an orbital axis close to their own gravitational centers.

Astronomers use this method to detect exoplanets because stars are much easier to see and measure. However, it’s not a failsafe. A star’s velocity can also change because of surface conditions. A recent study in The Astronomical Journal confirmed that HD 26965’s radial velocity could indicate an exoplanet with a 42-day orbit. But the star itself takes 42 days to spin once on its axis, so the 2018 team could have misinterpreted the signals.

Further investigation satisfied the new researchers enough for them to title their paper The Death of Vulcan.

Vulcan may be dead. But the hunt for exoplanets is far from it. The team positioned its work as a roadmap for future research, inviting further testing to determine “the universality of [its] methods.”

It’s not the first time a line of scientific inquiry has advanced due to disconfirmation. Or as Spock might say, “when you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.”

Denali park rangers sprang into action when several mountaineers climbed into dangerous conditions early this week.

Five climbers in two parties required rescues on Tuesday, May 28, suffering from cold-related injuries and immobility. By now, three have been rescued — but two men are still stranded and exposed, stuck in a snow cave high on Denali.

The action began at 1:00 am on Tuesday, when park rangers began fielding Garmin InReach messages from three climbers stuck on Denali’s 6,190m summit. Hypothermic and immobile, the team maintained contact with the rangers until approximately 3:30 am, according to an National Park Service (NPS) press release.

They told rangers they planned to descend to the Football Field — a flat area about 200m below the summit — but then their communication went dark. Rangers received no further updates, nor did the Garmin’s location change. Further updates confirmed the climbers were three Malaysian men, aged 36, 47, and 48.

Clouds stall rescue

The summit remained socked in by clouds throughout Tuesday morning, preventing access by the park's high-altitude helicopter. The Alaska Rescue Coordination Center (RCC) stepped in, and an Alaska National Guard HC-130J combat rescue plane scrambled toward the imperiled climbers.

The crew ultimately spotted the two younger climbers near the altitude of the Football Field, per the NPS, but “stagnant cloud layers” still obstructed a helicopter rescue.

Though the two climbers had to wait for better aviation weather, a mountaineering guide did find their partner at Zebra Rocks several hundred meters below.

Finally, at 5:00 pm, the clouds began to break. An NPS pilot and mountaineering ranger took off in an agency helicopter from Talkeetna, bound for the summit. But it was still unreachable, and in the end, they landed at Camp 3 at 4,328m.

There, they assisted in a second, unrelated rescue of two other climbers stuck in the Camp 3 medical tent with frostbite. The helicopter team evacuated both to Talkeetna. One proceeded to a LifeMed air ambulance for “advanced care.”

One down, two to go

The NPS helicopter team then flew back to the mountain. By 9:00 pm, the Zebra Rocks climber had managed to descend to Denali High Camp at 5,242m with help from a separate guided party.

Landing in camp, the pilot and ranger found the 48-year-old suffering from “severe frostbite and hypothermia.” They successfully evacuated the patient to Talkeetna.

Meanwhile, an expedition guide had located the two climbers still stranded at the Football Field. They could no longer walk, and the NPS said the guide committed “significant time to assist and provide care” for them before worsening conditions forced the guide to retreat to High Camp.

Today, NPS rescuers continued to wait, as stiff winds battered the peak. Neither ground nor air teams could reach the two climbers on the Football Field. Their last satellite messages on Wednesday night indicated their device was almost dead, and they're now holed up in a "crude" snow cave.

The ordeal follows what the NPS called an "extended" summit push by the Malaysians. The rescue effort alone has eclipsed 60 hours.

Memorial Day, the last Monday of May, signals the busiest two weeks of the Denali climbing season, according to the NPS. Currently, 506 climbers are active on the mountain, following another 117 earlier in the season. The NPS calculates the season summit rate at 15%.

The world’s only Oscar-winning free soloist is at it again.

Alex Honnold broke another record on El Capitan, rope soloing the iconic Salathe Wall (5.13b or 5.9 C2) almost fast enough to cut the existing standard in half.

Honnold tagged the El Cap summit just 11 hours, 18 minutes after he left the ground on Thursday, he told the San Francisco Chronicle. In terms of speed, the effort was the equivalent of a moon landing — the previous solo record on the Salathe stood at just under 20 hours.

That mark briefly belonged to Brant Hysell, a Lake Tahoe-based climber who ticked the route in 19 hours, 58 minutes on May 11. His 12-day stint at the top of the Salathe speed pile ended a decade-long reign by Cheyne Lempe, who posted a 20:06 run in 2013.

Game on

Why didn’t Honnold snatch the record sooner? Because Lempe is his friend — but he doesn’t know Hysell.

“When it was my friend who held [the record], it would have felt weird to go and dunk on him,” Honnold explained. “But if it’s someone I don’t know, it’s like, game on!”

The free soloist adds his new record to a growing list of El Capitan benchmarks, including the overall Salathe speed record (4:55 with the late Sean Leary in 2009).

The Salathe shares big swaths of El Cap with the Freerider (5.12d, and the climb from Free Solo, in case you’ve been under a rock since 2017). Honnold attributed his relatively blazing speed on Thursday’s record burn to his familiarity with the wall — he free soloed segments of it.

Like his record-setting effort, Honnold’s Yosemite visit was over in a flash. He bailed out of the park on Friday morning, according to the Chronicle, bound for his Las Vegas home after a “big-wall tuneup” trip and a record he said “felt like low-hanging fruit.”

No Big Deal.

Electronics giant Apple has secured film rights to the story of legendary mountaineer Tenzing Norgay.

Tenzing, starring Willem Dafoe and Tom Hiddleston, will belong to the California company's film production arm, Apple Original Films, according to Variety. Hiddleston (best known as Loki in Marvel's The Avengers) will star as Sir Edmund Hillary with Dafoe (Poor Things, Eternity's Gate) as expedition leader John Hunt.

Tom Hiddleston and Willem Dafoe to star in Jennifer Peedom’s ‘TENZING’ for Apple.

Following the life of Sherpa Tenzing Norgay and his summit of Mount Everest in 1953.

(https://t.co/sIGSRGOiZG) pic.twitter.com/b87sr1aRjd

— Film Updates (@FilmUpdates) May 14, 2024

Casting for the film’s namesake, Tenzing Norgay, is in progress. Norgay’s son, Norbu Tenzing, will act as one of several executive producers alongside director Jennifer Peedom.

It’s familiar storytelling territory for Peedom, who previously worked on the documentary Sherpa. According to film industry outlet The Wrap, her work with the Norgay family on that film engendered a close relationship which led to the new project.

It’s one of several collaborations in which Tenzing marks another installment. The film will be Dafoe and Peedom’s third venture together, after 2017's Mountain and 2021's River. Also, Apple continues its ongoing work with production company See-Saw — the producer for all five seasons of the show Slow Horses.

If drone warfare or dancing robots aren’t already scary enough, how about submarine drone warfare?

The United States and Australia are testing two unmanned underwater vehicles (UUVs) alongside their countries' navies. Prototypes of the two colorfully named submersible drones -- Manta Ray (U.S.) and Ghost Shark (Australia) -- are already active. Soon, fleets of such vehicles may patrol international waters for military purposes.

Details on the mysterious drones are few. But the Manta Ray's developer, Northrop Grumman, says its modular design allows it to be transported in a shipping container and assembled on site. Defense tech firm Anduril Australia claims it delivered the $140 million Ghost Shark ahead of schedule, just two years after the project began.

Underwater drones face challenges surface or air-based units do not. Significant data signal loss occurs underwater because of temperature, salinity, and depth. The Manta Ray's propulsion systems underwent testing off Southern California during February and March.

Civilian counterparts?

“Our successful, full-scale Manta Ray testing validates the vehicle’s readiness to advance toward real-world operations,” Dr. Kyle Woerner, DARPA program manager for Manta Ray, said in a statement.

Beyond more military testing, there is no mention of civilian components of either project. But it's not hard to imagine tiny, private drones photographing underwater reefs, wrecks, and wildlife the way their aerial counterparts do.

Two years ago, the U.S. began developing the Orca, a 26-meter-long UUV designed to perform “long-range critical missions.” But the Boeing project got underway long after China began building a similar vehicle, an expert told CNN.

“While details are scarce, as with most Chinese capabilities, they have been developing them for at least 15 years and likely now have something similar to the Orca (but with torpedoes) in the testing phase,” said Emma Salisbury, a fellow at the British think tank Council on Geostrategy.

A dozen explorers intent on driving special amphibious vehicles to both poles have hit a roadblock — but not before already achieving an unprecedented drive.

The Transglobal Car Expedition seeks to become “the world’s first wheeled surface circumnavigation of the Earth through both geographic poles.” As of early April, the group had already covered its planned route from New York City to the Geographic North Pole via Yellowknife, Canada.

 

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Driving to the North Pole is a bold, risky objective no one had completed before. They followed this up by driving from the North Pole to Greenland -- another unprecedented feat.

But the group didn’t get to celebrate its success for long. On the way south to Nuuk, Greenland, they ran into authorities in Station Nord who denied them entry.

Unsafe at any speed

Naalakkersuisut, Greenland’s government, reviewed the team’s credentials to enter Northeast Greenland National Park on Friday. Authorities rejected them on the basis of safety, according to a press release.

“It is too dangerous both for the expedition and for the authorities who would have to rescue the expedition in an emergency situation to travel in the relevant areas in Greenland,” the release said. “Therefore, the expedition cannot legally continue through the National Park.”

The release went on to state the expedition had left Greenland. Transglobal leader Vasily Shakhnovsky, a Russian oil baron who ranks among the world’s richest men, gave details to 7 Summits Club, one of the expedition's main advocates:

“They collected passports and conducted a full-fledged search of cars for weapons. The police insisted that we leave Greenland as soon as possible. In the end, everything was agreed. We took off safely [from Station Nord] and landed in Svalbard two hours later.”

Vehicles stuck in limbo

The expulsion from Greenland forced the team to leave its specialized vehicles behind. The six-wheel-drive machines are designed for transport in shipping containers. Transglobal’s original plan would have allowed them to ship the rigs to themselves further along the route. This would have been possible between Nuuk and Iceland, as first planned, but sea ice conditions between Station Nord and Svalbard will prevent it.

 

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The custom-built trucks create “less impact on the ground than a human foot” with their six 51-inch wheels that can run on pressure as low as one pound per square inch. That and their light weight help them churn through sea ice where other vehicles would founder and sink. The team aims to begin the Antarctic leg this November after the Antarctic cold has eased but when the sea ice is near its highest levels.

One expedition sponsor also lamented the setback, based on its scientific objectives. Along its 50,000km route, Transglobal plans to conduct research into sea ice, cosmic radiation, light pollution, and more. The regulatory refusal, for now, dismantles its stated plans to study the Greenland ice sheet.

 

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"This is really unfortunate as it is an expedition doing some ground-breaking work in collaboration with scientists from European universities and legitimate international scientific institutions such as CERN and the Italian space agency," said Dr. Maxim Artamonov, manager of a Swiss non-profit that sponsors the expedition.

Not giving up on Greenland yet

Northeast Greenland National Park is the world’s largest national park. At 972,000 square kilometers, it covers almost half the island. The park is so remote that fewer people visit it each year than summit Mount Everest, according to Lindblad Expeditions. Permitting is also famously strict.

It’s the latest episode in a saga of minor calamities and regulatory hassles for the Transglobal Car Expedition team. A Ford F-150 customized by Iceland’s Arctic Trucks and owned by Transglobal sank in arctic waters during testing in 2022. The expedition itself has demanded challenging repairs and toilsome navigation.

 

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Several team members have also struggled with credentials along the way. Vasily Yelagin, a Russian mountaineer who designed the amphibious vehicles, had trouble obtaining a Danish visa, arctic correspondent Galya Morrell reported. And Canadian authorities denied entry to Alexander Abramov, president of the 7 Summits Club, who was on board from New York to the Canadian border. 7 Summits said officials revoked Abramov’s “valid visa right at the border without reason.”

After the team regroups in Svalbard, it faces the adventure’s longest but easiest leg: a five-month tour crisscrossing Europe.

And Shakhnovsky and Co. haven't given up on Greenland yet. In a statement, Transglobal said it is "hopeful" that discussions with Greenland authorities will allow future access to its original north-to-south overland route.

Ever since we’ve known they exist, humans have wondered what it would be like to plummet into a black hole.

Black holes, the celestial objects so massive they are capable of trapping light and “spaghettifying” anything that falls in, have also captured our collective imagination. Astronomers found signs of the first known black hole system, Cygnus X-1, inside the Milky Way in 1964.

But snapping a decent photo of one has proven painstaking. Prolonged attention finally produced the first image of a black hole — a “fuzzy orange donut” designated M87 — in 2019.

 

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Yet all along, astrophysicists were hard at work behind computers, running thousands of encoded mathematical equations to simulate black holes’ shape and behavior. In fact, since the 1970s, simulations have represented the bleeding edge of the field.

Compare the indistinct orange donuts to the detail in the below image, generated by French astrophysicist Jean-Pierre Luminet on an IBM 7040 computer — in 1979.

Best simulation yet

Fast forward to 2024, where Jeremy Schnittman, an astrophysicist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, specializes in creating these advanced simulations. We struggle to know what happens inside black holes, but Schnittman’s two latest videos advance the state of the art.

In them, a simulated camera plunges toward the mysterious singularity at the center of a black hole in ultra-high definition.

“People often ask about this, and simulating these difficult-to-imagine processes helps me connect the mathematics of relativity to actual consequences in the real universe,” Schnittman told ExplorersWeb.

It's the first project that shows The simulated black hole resembles Sagittarius A, the supermassive object at the center of the Milky Way. (Researchers in 2022 released orange donut photos of it, and used Einstein's theory of relativity to model what it might look like at higher resolution.)

The simulated expanses in Schnittman's videos are massive. “Sgr A*” weighs as much as 4.3 million suns and yawns 23.5 million kilometers wide. But it only takes the camera a few simulated seconds to reach it from a distance of 640 million kilometers, then teeter past the event horizon into its inescapable depths.

Schnittman admitted the simulation does not try to depict reality perfectly. First, Sgr A* has an indistinct accretion cloud rather than the razor-sharp disc in the video. And the background is the sky as seen from Earth, rather than from any black hole — because, well, we've never photographed the sky from near a black hole.

A 127,232-core supercomputer

Regardless, the effort was intensive enough. Rendered at 8K, 60fps, the ten terabytes of video footage would have taken a decade to generate on a conventional laptop. Instead of toiling in darkness, Schnittman teamed up with fellow Goddard scientist Brian Powell to use the Discover supercomputer at the NASA Center for Climate Simulation.

“It takes anywhere from a few minutes to a few hours to create one frame of a video like this with the requisite calculations,” Schnittman explained. "So multiply that by 10,000 times, and you need a supercomputer: processors running in parallel.

The compulsion to enter a black hole resembles our fascination with their powerful, sinister connotations. Yes, there is enough gravity inside that not even light can escape. No, we still don’t know what happens at the singularity, where the laws of physics break and math no longer functions.

Spaghettification

But along the way, we do know you would get “spaghettified” — basically, the difference between the gravitational force pulling at your feet and pulling at your head is so enormous that your body would get stretched into a super-elongated, thin noodle.

It’s still possible to escape spaghettification, though, as long as you don’t come close enough to touch the event horizon. This region, inside an orbiting circle of light called the photon ring, takes no prisoners. If it were possible to live inside it for more than a few seconds, you could perceive objects beyond it, but nothing at all could come out.

NASA’s simulations depict both fates — one instance of getting swallowed by the black hole and one of narrowly escaping. In the death scenario, the simulated camera passes the photon ring and approaches the event horizon. The perception of time on board speeds up as gravity increases. Once the camera enters the event horizon, it experiences time outside the black hole as infinite.

“The camera is destroyed. Microseconds later, it reaches the singularity.”

That mirrors one of Schnittman’s professional fantasies — albeit not his first choice.

A cool way to go

“Is [spaghettification] the final glory for an astrophysicist? It would be a cool way to go. I think I’m still going to opt for the lying in bed, surrounded by your loved ones, route," Schnittman joked.

Schnittman is part of a NASA project team tasked to develop a space telescope that could capture the first images of a black hole from outer space. Situated tens of thousands of kilometers away from Earth, it would send back higher-resolution images of — orange donuts.

“It will make all these images much sharper — something like 10 times sharper,” Schnittman said. “The funny thing is, since the simulations existed well before the orange donut was known, we’re not trying to go back and understand the donut. Instead, the donut was exciting to us because we saw it and were like, ‘A-ha! Look, we were right after all.”

The project he describes is half a decade and hundreds of millions of dollars away from implementation. For now, black hole gazers should keep concentrating on one place in the known universe — YouTube.

Famed pilot Richard “Dick” Rutan has died. Rutan earned distinction during a 19-year military career involving Vietnam War missions that sought to increase bombing accuracy. He later achieved fame as one of the first two pilots to circumnavigate the globe without refueling. Rutan died at a Couer d’Alene, Idaho hospital on May 3. He was 85.

RIP LTCOL (Ret) Dick Rutan, an aviator’s aviator.

First to fly nonstop around the world, 300+ combat mission pilot, Vietnam FastFAC, test pilot.

Silver Star, Air Medals, DFCs and more.

Gone west. pic.twitter.com/hIPwoMiDVe

— Rick Wilson (@TheRickWilson) May 5, 2024

Rutan set his circumnavigation record in 1986 alongside co-pilot Jeana Yeager (no relation to Chuck Yeager). Their aircraft was the Rutan Model 76 Voyager, a lightweight craft that could carry more than four times its weight in fuel. Rutan’s brother, Burt, designed and built the craft over a six-year span.

Rutan and Yeager began from California’s Edwards Air Force Base on Dec. 14, 1986. The two took turns as pilots throughout the nine-day flight. But Rutan reportedly flew the Voyager for the first three days straight because the cramped cockpit made it so difficult to swap seats.

Setbacks and significant hazards hampered every phase of the ambitious mission. The airman later said he was “sure he would die” on the record-breaking flight, according to Legacy.com. The two pilots landed back at Edwards on Dec. 23 with just 18 gallons of fuel left.

For nine days in 1986, Dick Rutan and co-pilot Jeana Yeager lived out of a cabin the size of a phone booth, flying an experimental plane nonstop around the world, becoming the first pilots to circumnavigate the globe without stopping. Rutan died at 85. https://t.co/Bb8IJlPzIa

— The Washington Post (@washingtonpost) May 7, 2024

It was far from the first time Rutan had faced danger. His military flight career lasted from 1959-1978 when he retired as a lieutenant colonel. He was a founding member of Operation Commando Sabre, which marked a turning point in U.S. air tactics in the Vietnam War. Missions, where pilots flew F-100 Super Sabres low and fast behind enemy lines with the goal of precision strikes, were notably dangerous. Rutan had to eject once, but earned considerable decorations for his service: a Silver Star, 16 Air Medals, five Distinguished Flying Crosses, and a Purple Heart.

A family representative informed the Washington Post that Rutan died of pulmonary fibrosis — a complication of long COVID. Rutan reportedly died when he chose not to spend a second night on supplemental oxygen after contracting a lung infection. Loved ones and family members, including his brother Burt, were by his side.

How would you go about reading a rolled-up text that had transformed into a lump of coal?

If you were ahead of your time in the 1700s, you could have created a complex machine to painstakingly unroll a single scroll over the course of four years — and destroy a lot of the contents in the process.

If you were ahead of your time in 2024, you could use advanced X-ray imaging to “virtually unroll” the material with no damage. Or even employ AI tools to “read” pages faster.

Researchers are unleashing those tactics now on 2,500-year-old scrolls that reveal details as intimate as the history of Plato’s late-life enslavement, and his opinion about the music he heard on his last night on Earth.

Deathbed blues

The Herculaneum scrolls contain a wealth of philosophy and knowledge from the most revered Western thinkers of all time. Unfortunately, Mount Vesuvius turned the approximately 1,800 documents into charcoal (along with an estimated 16,000 souls) in 79 AD.

Vesuvius most famously buried inland Pompeii, but the lava flows also engulfed Herculaneum, a wealthy coastal town along the Gulf of Naples.

There, the library of one illustrious villa held thousands of priceless scrolls.

“Plato is just the start,” The University of Pisa’s Graziano Ranocchia told The Daily Mail. “Thanks to the most advanced imaging diagnostic techniques, we are finally able to read and decipher new sections of texts that previously seemed inaccessible.”

Contrary to previous opinion, the renowned philosopher didn’t think much of his deathbed music, said Ranocchia. An enslaved woman playing flute couldn’t find the groove, the expiring philosopher told his guests.

Ranocchia’s new discoveries also include Plato’s exact burial place — under a special garden near a shrine to the Muses in the Platonic Academy of Athens. It also turns out that Plato earned such a vaunted tomb despite spending more of his life in slavery than previously thought. Ranocchia said Plato probably became a slave shortly after Socrates' death in either 399 or 404 BC, rather than the accepted 387 BC, CNN reported.

Treasure locked in ash

Excavations of Herculaneum began as early as the 1700s. By the 1750s, archaeologists had started working on the villa. Its treasures proved extensive — it may have belonged to the father-in-law of Julius Caesar.

Eventually, it grew most famous for its library’s contents. The thousand-plus scrolls suffered heavy damage in the eruption, but they became the namesake of the site itself: the Villa dei Papiri -- Papyrus Villa.

Efforts to unlock the scrolls’ secrets commenced right away. Amazingly, the pages were still legible — but almost impossible to unroll without destroying. By 1756, Abbot Piagio, the Vatican Library’s conserver of ancient manuscripts, conceived of a machine that could unroll a single manuscript in four years. Piagio’s device peeled open the documents millimeters at a time, and stenographers made copies of what they saw immediately, before the pages disintegrated.

The fragile carbonized papyrus could only be unrolled by millimeters per day, and any writing seen copied quickly before it faded, then given to scholars for review. Subsequent efforts by others destroyed several scrolls. This is why computerized scanning is so welcome. 2/ pic.twitter.com/PuWy4encPq

— Chapps (@chapps) November 5, 2023

“Piaggio was a revolutionary, but his machine also destroyed a lot of the work since he had to remove the first 0.5cm-1cm of the papyrus before he could start unrolling,” explained Ranocchia.

Big funding, new tech speed research

Generations of researchers remained mostly stumped as far as their contents. Finally, the development of “virtual unrolling” changed the game. Attempts involve shooting the scrolls with X-rays or other wavelengths of light to measure reflectivity differences.

Ranocchia’s methods build on the concept.

Shortwave infrared hyperspectral imaging is sensitive enough to measure variations in the way light bounces off the black ink on the papyrus. Though Ranocchia’s team still cannot peer through to the text at the center of the rolls, they can read unrolled artifacts at a higher rate than ever before.

Also up for study, there’s a Stoic history and a medical document from Alcmaeon, from when the doctor was producing early studies on the brain.

Ranocchia’s work is possible thanks to a 2021 grant from the European Union (ERC – European Research Council) worth $2.7 million in all. The five-year Greek Schools Project seeks to advance research on the Herculaneum scrolls with technological innovations.

Elsewhere, three students collected a $700,000 prize for using AI to decipher 2,000 previously illegible words from other scrolls.

The deepest blue hole on Earth plunges over 400 meters into a narrow bay in the Yucatan Peninsula. And oceanographers haven’t even found the bottom yet.

Taam Ja' Blue Hole took over the title of the world’s deepest blue hole — an underwater sinkhole — on April 29, a paper in Frontiers in Marine Science announced.

The Mexican scuba divers and researchers studying it and similar formations nearby were astonished.

“These blue holes represented an outstanding revelation, particularly that of the Taam Ja’ Blue Hole (TJBH),” they wrote. “The measurements could not reach the bottom and confirm its position, leaving the depths of TJBH ... partially unresolved.”

Submarine labyrinth

For now, Taam Ja’s depth registers at 420m. That's staggeringly deeper than the runner-up, Dragon Hole in the South China Sea at 300m.

 

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Taam Ja’ is a limestone karst cave, located in an area where massive caves like it are relatively common. The northern Yucatan Peninsula is home to the Ring of Cenotes Fault — a sinkhole system formed by the Chicxulub meteorite impact 65 million years ago.

Taam Ja’, though, is a system all its own. To plumb its depths, the scuba team dived inside and used a conductivity, temperature, and depth (CTD) profiler. The device measures the physical, chemical, and even biological properties of any water column and transmits the information to the surface. That’s after initial echo sounder mapping indicated a depth of around 274 meters, and left the team unsatisfied.

Echo waves can get scrambled in blue holes, where massive offshoots can branch out in all directions and water density varies massively. The CTD profiler not only provided a more accurate depth estimate but even suggested Taam Ja’ could be linked to other systems via underwater caves.

 

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A tunnel to Florida?

Astoundingly, the warm water near the bottom of Taam Ja’ could connect with aquifers as far away as Florida, the researchers hypothesized.

It could take a long time to find out. Exploring blue holes is painstaking, and demands a multi-faceted approach. Exploration of Dragon Hole, the former deepest sinkhole, has spanned decades.

But in the case of Taam Ja’, the payoff could be groundbreaking. The focus is on finding its true depth, but discovery possibilities multiply from there. Its biome, submarine channels to other water bodies, and even its relationship with regional faults and fractures are all targets.

For the first time, an animal has been observed treating a wound with medicinal plants.

Biologists in Indonesia noticed Rakus, a male Sumatran orangutan living in Gunung Leuser National Park, behaving oddly in June 2022. Rakus was making “long calls,” an orangutan vocalization generally understood to signal conflict between males. He also had a large lesion below his right eye.

In this month's Scientific Reports, a multi-disciplinary team links the wound to the potential fracas — and then describes a never-before-seen event.

Monkey medicine

Shortly after he sustained the injury, Rakus started “selectively” ripping leaves off a certain medicinal tree, chewing them, and applying the juice to the raw area.

The ape had selected Akar Kuning (Fibraurea tinctoria), which locals use to treat diabetes and malaria.

“As a last step, he fully covered the wound with the chewed leaves,” the study noted.

It took several minutes. Five days later, the wound was closed. Within a month, it had fully healed.

Various factors indicated that Rakus’ behavior was intentional. It took a long time to apply the salve, and the ape rested almost twice as long as usual in the days after he applied it.

However, he might have accidentally discovered the treatment, said lead study author Isabella Laurmer of the Max Planck Institute in Germany.

Orangutans also eat Akar Kuning. It’s possible Rakus touched the wound while feeding and noticed its pain-relieving effects — then, understandably, kept going.

'Socialized' healthcare?

He also might have picked up on the technique from his neighbors, Laurmer said. Even though it’s the first time anyone has witnessed an animal treating a wound medicinally, the behavior could exist elsewhere. African and Asian great apes are known to actively treat wounds, although in different ways. One method involving insects, in particular, grabbed researchers' attention and suggested cultural behavior.

“[This] provides new insights into the existence of self-medication in our closest relatives and in the evolutionary origins of wound medication more broadly,” the paper suggested. “It is possible that there exists a common underlying mechanism for the recognition and application of substances with medical or functional properties to wounds, and that our last common ancestor already showed similar forms of ointment behavior.”

There’s a tradition of improvisation on Mount Dickey in Alaska’s Ruth Gorge. Season after season, the mountain’s mile-high granite faces draw the planet’s best climbers. And season after season, these visitors watch their main objectives evaporate as Mother Nature forces them to obey.

That doesn’t mean they fail.

Tom Livingstone and Gaspar Pintar are the latest pilgrims in the Mt. Dickey saga. The Great Wall (ungraded as of this writing) slices across lower slabs and up a tenuous couloir to the 2,909m summit. It's an unconventional line on the mountain's often-overlooked south face.

 

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Its features attracted Livingstone and Pinter as soon as they arrived in the Gorge, but amounted to Plan B. Originally, they had set their sights on the classic east face route Blood From the Stone — but it didn’t give passage.

“When we swung our axes into what we hoped was ice, we found mostly unprotected sugar snow,” Livingstone wrote on Instagram. He noted other routes stopped them with similar obstacles.

Bad rock, few routes

Pivoting, he and Pintar refocused on the south face. It’s famous for bad rock and generally bereft of routes. But the climbers noticed an opportunity.

“Crazy slabs” protected the couloir and summit access, Livingstone wrote. But the climbers made a bid anyway.

“Many pitches looked improbable, always tricky. The weather was fickle, but we got lucky,” Livingstone reported. “A subtle traversing line up steep rock led us to the middle of the face, pumpy ice, and a cave bivy. Then we zigzagged higher as snow fell (or rather, rose in the updraft).”

Another marginal bivy on a “snow arete” led to pitches of overhanging neve to the top. In their weeks-long stay, this would be the only summit the two touched.

“Conditions seem ‘bad’ this year but we’re happy to have made the most of it,” Livingstone commented — a takeaway that falls directly in line with the recent history of Ruth Gorge climbing.

Failure or opportunity?

For an adroit alpine climber, Blood From the Stone (1,524m, A1 M7+ WI6+X) is a juicy prize. That’s part of the reason Sean Easton spent multiple seasons establishing it with the likes of Ueli Steck. Deterred over and over by ephemeral ice, Easton finally broke through in 2002 with Steck.

The threshold was thin, even though both climbers were at the height of their fitness. (Steck was fresh off his groundbreaking Eiger solo.) Each man took lead falls that would unnerve the masses, and Easton published a breathy report in the American Alpine Journal.

“With moments of doubt, we had ventured forth without certainty…and the path had unwound before us,” he said.

Thin ice and outright difficulty combined to prevent a repeat for over two decades. Livingstone and Pintar are not the first Blood hopefuls to abandon the route and create their own. Alan Rousseau and Jackson Marvell followed the same blueprint to stamp out Ruth Gorge Grinder (1,524m, AI6+ M7 A1) in 2019.

 

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“A pitch and a half up [Blood From the Stone], it became obvious to me there was not enough ice on the route to safely continue,” Rousseau wrote. “If we didn’t feel defeated enough already in that moment, as we rappelled back to the bivy, we saw two ravens fervently tearing through Jackson’s bag of stashed food.”

Defeat, shmefeat. Marvell and Rousseau returned to the Ruth with Matt Cornell in 2023. Another new east face line, Aim For the Bushes (1,600m, AI6 M6X) resulted.

 

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In the Ruth Gorge, one thing’s clear: Just because a rope team backs off doesn’t mean they’re out of the fight.

“In total, we tried six routes,” Livingstone said of his and Pintar’s trip, “staying busy and psyched! Hats off to folk who’ve climbed routes here.”

Chinese scientists took a big step forward for worldwide space exploration this week, publishing the world’s first complete geologic atlas of the Moon.

The atlas set provides high-definition “basic map data for future lunar research and exploration” at a scale of 1:2.5 million.

Researchers with the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) created cloud-based and print versions of the resource. CAS lunar scientist Ouyang Ziyuan said in a statement:

The geologic atlas is of great significance for studying the evolution of the Moon, selecting the site for a future lunar research station, and using lunar resources. It can also help us better understand the Earth and other planets, such as Mars.

The atlas represents 12 years of work and uses data from China's lunar exploration program. The maps include 12,341 impact craters, 81 impact basins, and 17 rock types across the lunar surface. It even depicts the boundaries of the Moon's tectonic plates.

Due for an update

To create it, the researchers engineered a new representation of the Moon’s geological evolution.

Lunar cartography standards were due for an update, said researchers. Existing maps dated back to NASA's Apollo program — a landmark but bygone era in exploration.

"With the improvements in lunar geologic studies, those old maps can no longer meet the needs of future scientific research and lunar exploration," said geochemist Liu Jianzhong of the CAS.

The maps' 1:2,500,000 scale may not let a hiker find his or her way around the lunar surface -- on Earth, typical hiking charts are 10 to 50 times more detailed. Still, the atlas represents an immense coordinative effort that will help explorers well into the future.

"[The atlas] builds on the achievements of the international community over the last decades, as well as on China's own highly successful Chang'e program," said Gregory Michael, a senior scientist from the Free University of Berlin. "It will be a starting point for every new question of lunar geology."

For now, the maps are not freely available. Nature reported the full set exists in a cloud platform called the Digital Moon, and will eventually become available to researchers. Meanwhile, Liu told the outlet, the team is working to boost the maps' resolution.

Aptly, Chang’e mission controllers could be among the first to use the new charts during a Moon visit. An ambitious mission to collect samples from the Moon's far side looks poised to launch as soon as next week.

It turns out that Mount Erebus spews a fortune in gold across Antarctica — $2.1 million worth of it per year, according to reports.

You’d struggle to pan it out of the Antarctic snow, though. Tiny particles of the volcanized gold disperse from Erebus up to 1,000 kilometers across Ross Island. And tiny means tiny: at around 60 microns, the gold flecks are much smaller than the thickness of a human hair.

Still, Erebus disgorges 80 grams of the precious metal every day — scattering $6,000 into the frozen landscape.

It’s one oddity that helps place Erebus among the planet’s most distinct volcanoes. The formation, sharing the name with the Greek god of darkness, bursts from the Ross Sea to a smoldering 3,794m peak. Its active caldera features a bubbling, fluctuating lava lake that has erupted constantly since 1972.

Its riches are likely unextractable. And its labyrinthine gas vents may help researchers understand life on other planets.

 

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Fountain of gold — and 'lava bombs'

Philip Kyle, Professor Emeritus at the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology, has logged more time on Mount Erebus than anyone on Earth. Kyle’s 50+ expeditions to the world’s southernmost volcano have helped produce totemic research. On one effort to access the inner crater for sampling, an explosive eruption launched lava bombs several hundred meters skyward and likely cost him a “walnut-sized” piece of his brain.

But Kyle persisted to become a de facto Erebus ambassador. He explained to BBC Earth Science how the lake exists as a conduit to the volcano’s sub-tectonic guts.

“Erebus is a living volcano because it breathes. By looking at the lava lake, we’re actually looking inside the volcano. It’s like having a window in your chest so you could see your heart,” Kyle described.

Veins of exposed magma on the surface can reach 1,000˚C. But cooler areas can harbor gold particles, which travel upward from deep subterranean deposits in many volcanic events. Most other volcanoes melt these particles during eruptions — but Erebus is different.

Frigid air could explain why. Only seven other volcanoes on Earth support lava lakes. The coldest one is Mount Michael, an 843m outcrop in the South Sandwich Islands. The South Sandwiches can be cold, but not like Erebus. Nearby McMurdo station — only a few meters above sea level — can reach -50˚C.

It’s thought that when the bracing Antarctic air skims the scorching surface of Erebus’ lava lake, the conditions for solid gold materialize.

 

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Keys to the cosmos

Erebus’ perpetual off-gassing doesn’t just disperse precious metals. It also creates networks of ice caves, which provide access into its catacomb-like vents.

Fumarolic ice towers, which form when volcanic gases freeze solid at the surface, indicate entry points.

“When you just go there for the first time, you don’t realize that virtually under every ice tower is a big ice cave system,” Kyle said in the BBC video, adding that “literally hundreds” of the structures exist on Erebus.

Far-fetched enterprises to mine gold from lava lakes date to early colonial efforts. Friar Blas del Castillo earned mixed credit as an early volcanologist for his attempt to extract silver and gold from Nicaragua’s Masaya Volcano in the 16th century. Castillo famously descended into the caldera inside a basket with dubious prospecting tools: a hammer, a flask of wine, and a wooden cross. (The work was misguided — the caldera yielded no trace of precious metals.)

Even if it were feasible to collect the gold microparticles from the expansive Mount Erebus plain, the haul would be contraband in about two-thirds of the world. The Antarctic Treaty prohibits “any activity relating to mineral resources other than scientific research.”

But Erebus’ value could still be astronomical — literally. Its gas vents harbor microbial communities unknown anywhere else on Earth. Temperatures can vary up to 60˚C just 10 cm away from the vent surfaces. The life forms that flourish in this outlandish ecosystem could teach us what thrives in the final frontier.

 

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“Erebus is such an extreme environment — this could provide insight into the possibility of life on a place like Mars,” Kyle said. “There’s lots of new technology, so it’s time for the young studs to come along and do something new and interesting.”

You’d be hard-pressed to find any force of nature more consistent than Earth’s magnetic field. Emphasizing this, MIT and Oxford researchers recently found special rocks in Greenland that prove the planet’s magnetism has not substantially changed in almost 3.7 billion years.

What was happening on Earth 3.7 billion years ago? For one, life was beginning to emerge. It seems there could be a vital linkage between life and the steady presence of the planet’s protective magnetic shield.

“Our magnetic field protects us from harmful radiation from space,” Oxford University’s Claire Nichols, who co-authored a study on the findings, told MIT.

It also helps our oceans and atmosphere remain stable, she added.

The team’s paper appeared this week in the Journal of Geophysical Research. It describes how they sought information in Greenland’s Isua Supracrustal Belt, the site of some of the world’s oldest rocks.

Rocks register the magnetic field

“You get helicoptered in, right up against the ice sheet,” Nichols told MIT. “Here, you have the world’s oldest rocks essentially, surrounded by this dramatic expression of the ice age. It’s a spectacular place.”

Finding these rocks was key to understanding ancient conditions. When minerals trapped in rocks respond to the Earth’s magnetic forces, they can create clues about the state of the magnetic field at a certain time — especially its strength and magnitude. However, most rocks undergo repeated superheating and cooling through plate tectonics or hydrothermal activity, which scrambles the minerals and destroys the magnetic codes they contain.

Rocks in the Isua Supracrustal Belt, on the other hand, have endured massive heat stress in their long existence. But ever since a 550˚C thermal event 3.7 billion years ago, they've remained roughly stable, so the banded iron inside has remained relatively intact.

The researchers think the rocks formed in primordial oceans. They also existed when Earth’s atmosphere didn’t contain oxygen, so soft metals like iron didn’t oxidize as easily. The Isua Supracrustal Belt rocks formed in alternating layers of silica and iron, as it precipitated out of the seawater above.

“They’re very beautiful, weird rocks that don’t look like anything that forms on Earth today,” said Benjamin Weiss of MIT.

The team tested the magnetism inside the rocks by demagnetizing them in a lab. By re-magnetizing them in increments, they could then measure the strength of the original magnetic field by comparison.

The ancient rocks carried magnetization to at least 15 microtesla. That’s about half the strength of today’s magnetic field, enough for the team to deem it “similar.” It’s also similar in magnitude, Nichols told MIT.

Mysteries remain

Even though Earth’s magnetic envelope was cranking at similar power 3.7 billion years ago, it’s hard to tell how it did so. The solid iron inner core now anchors our magnetic field, but it didn’t solidify until about one billion years ago.

Keying in on the field’s primordial generator could provide insights about the origin of life not only here at home, but throughout the galaxy.

“It seems like evidence for whatever was generating a magnetic field back then was a different power source from what we have today,” Weiss told MIT. “And we care about Earth because there’s life here, but it’s also a touchstone for understanding other terrestrial planets. It suggests planets throughout the galaxy probably have lots of ways of powering a magnetic field.”

A record number of bear attacks across Japan have caused widespread alarm and six fatalities in the last year, prompting repeated warnings from authorities and wildlife experts.

Of the 219 attacks in the last 365 days, one of the most publicized occurred when a brown bear allegedly decapitated a Hokkaido fisherman.

Decapitated head found during search for fisherman believed to have been attacked by bear https://t.co/4KZ5vtI9vq pic.twitter.com/WzGYhvVaKx

— The Messenger (@TheMessenger) May 17, 2023

Brown and black bears are under stress from depleted food sources and expanding human populations. In Japan, bears emerge from hibernation around this time of year, hungry and looking to forage. Authorities have already cataloged 32 sightings across the country since April 1, the South China Morning Post reported — 50% more than average.

Bad mood bears

Kevin Short, a naturalist and former professor of cultural anthropology at Tokyo University of Information Sciences, says it’s common for bears to wake up “in a bad mood” after winter. But diminished foraging conditions are pushing them to the brink.

“Last autumn saw an almost total failure of the nut harvest, especially of beech nuts, and that is what the bears rely on to fatten themselves up just before they go into hibernation,” he explained. “The crop was the worst that I can remember, and a lot of bears went into hibernation without sufficient energy reserves to get them through the winter.”

A warm, short winter has also contributed to the situation, which has worsened steeply in recent years. A 2023 official report shared by the Nippon Times showed that sightings hovered near record levels in 2019 and 2020. Attacks, on the other hand, skyrocketed in 2023. No more than 150 occurred in any previous year since 2006.

“More and more, rural farmlands in the foothills that once acted as buffer zones between the bears and humans are disappearing,” Shinsuke Koike, a specialist in biodiversity, forest ecosystem, and bears at the Tokyo University of Agriculture and Technology, told the BBC. "What we need to think about doing now is how to get the bears back into the mountains.”

Hunting ban lifted

Prefectural governments have taken measures both violent and nonviolent toward that end. Japan’s public broadcaster, NHK, shared a series of 30-second instructional videos last year on what to do during bear encounters. And Hokkaido legalized bear hunting again after a decades-long ban.

The 1990 ban protected bears while their numbers guttered at around 5,000. But now, according to reports, populations in the prefecture have doubled. Over 12,000 bears roamed Hokkaido by 2021. Of those, the government caught and killed over 1,000.

Elsewhere, farmers and village-dwellers use robotic “monster wolves” and live dogs to keep bears at bay.

Still, encounters will likely increase as Japan’s rural population continues to decline. And uninformed tourists can face especially high risks in areas like Hokkaido.

As always, experts urge backcountry visitors to be prepared and safety-educated where bears are present.

Medium take: Seb Bouin is the world’s best sport climber not named Adam Ondra. Hot take: Bouin has been the world’s best sport climber, period, for the past two years.

The Frenchman just tagged yet another ninth-grade climb, tossing Les Rois du Lithium (9b/5.15b) onto his growing pile. The route on the sparse limestone of Pic Saint Loup, France, explodes out of an 8b start into 20 meters of the business — a razor-straight line with holds that clearly inspired Bouin, the first ascensionist.

“When I bolted it, I couldn’t imagine there will be so much perfect holds. And when I first tried it, I was amazed by the moves and the line,” Bouin said in a Black Diamond Instagram post.

 

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Bouin called it “probably” his favorite route at the grade ever. That includes Jumbo Love, the United States’ first 9b, and Ondra’s Mamichula.

Lately, the 31-year-old has been aiming higher. Not content with Jumbo in 2022, he completed a savage extension to author Supreme Jumbo Love — America’s first 9b+. That came after he created DNA, the world’s second 9c route (still unrepeated).

Characteristically unwilling to rest on his laurels, Bouin said he’s not done in Pic Saint Loup yet.

“There is another hard and inspiring project in Pic Saint Loup: The Wolf Kingdom project. It will be harder than Les Rois du Lithium,” he said. “Let’s continue the fight!”

Suffice it to say it’s not easy to kill a crocodile. Ninety-five million years of evolution haven’t done it, and most animals can’t do it either.

But a few jungle predators can, and tourists caught one riveting encounter on video in an Indian national park.

T-124, aka Riddhi, is a six-year-old Bengal tigress living in Ranthambore National Park in Rajasthan, India. In 2023, she mothered three cubs — and recently, the family garnered internet fame with a crocodile dinner.

Shared to the park’s official account, the clip shows the cats tearing at a large crocodile corpse near a waterway. "Tigress Riddhi and her cubs killed a crocodile," the caption read (the video does not show the reported kill).

Bengal tigers are among several big cats known to prey on crocodiles, which are generally apex predators themselves. Jaguars can hunt two particular species of caimans, but consensus holds that it’s rare, according to India’s DownToEarth.org. It’s even more unusual to catch one on camera.

If you followed T-124 around, though, you might have a better chance. The tigress stalked a crocodile in February, but the quarry escaped into the water. She's also a descendant of T-16, a female who earned the moniker “crocodile killer” after bagging one of the big reptiles in 2003.

Even for a Bengal tiger, crocodile hunting is risky business — the tables can turn. Don’t tell T-16 that, though. Despite losing both canine teeth in the 2003 crocodile fight, she died in 2016 at 20 years old, outliving the average Bengal by 5-10 years.

What did George Washington squirrel away under the floorboards of his historic Mount Vernon, Va. home? Depending on your point of view, the contents of two dark green glass bottles could either furnish proof or cast doubt on the famous fable about Washington’s moral character.

Archaeologists unearthed the bottles, filled in part with “whole, recognizable cherries,” during renovations to the founding president’s mansion, the Washington Post reported. The group discovered the stash under a brick floor laid around 1770. To preserve the jars’ contents, they promptly decanted it into smaller containers for further study.

“It actually smelled like cherry blossoms when we got to the bottom,” Jason Boroughs, Mount Vernon's principal archaeologist, told the Post.

The mixture inside also included pits, stems, and an unidentifiable amber-colored, gooey residue. Researchers don’t suspect moonshining: The liquid likely seeped into the jugs as groundwater after stopper corks dissolved.

'I cannot tell a lie'

Mount Vernon staff said in a statement that the bottles themselves could date back to the 1740s or '50s. If that’s true, the cherries could conceivably date back to Washington’s childhood — when (spurious) legend holds that he disobediently chopped down the cherry tree and admitted the deed.

It’s unlikely Washington himself picked the cherries found under the brick floor. Instead, enslaved people on the property likely performed the work.

The find puts an exclamation point on a large-scale historic renovation. Washington’s mansion on the site covers a massive 1,024 square-meter footprint. Private donors have funded the current restoration project at a reported $40 million. The project’s target end date is in 2026 — America’s 250th birthday.

Mount Vernon president and CEO Doug Bradburn confirmed workers have made other discoveries along the way. But details remain under wraps.

“We have been deliberate and intentional about carefully excavating areas of potential disruption,” Bradburn said in the statement. “We have made a number of useful discoveries including this blockbuster find of two fully intact glass bottles containing liquid that have not been seen since before the war for American independence.”

It’s hard to overstate the rarity of the Hope and Koh-i-noor diamonds. The stones, excavated from shallow placer mines in India between 1600-1800, are equally famous for their size and clarity. The Koh-i-noor, which is set in the Queen Mother's Crown of England but India has demanded back, weighs a titanic 105.6 carats.

Together, they are called the Golconda stones. Legends swirl around them like the colonialism and controversy that plagued their discovery.

The Hope diamond changed royal hands via the hyperviolence of the French Revolution.

 

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According to legend, the slave who found one of the collection’s most astonishing examples, the 140-carat Regent diamond, stashed it inside a self-inflicted leg wound and smuggled it to India’s coast in exchange for a cut of the sale and safe passage out of the country.

The stones now belong to some of the world’s most exclusive collections: the British Crown Jewels (Koh-i-noor), and the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History (Hope Diamond). By 1830, the mine itself had been picked clean.

Mysterious origins

But where did the diamonds originate? Human hands first touched them in a shallow silt deposit along a riverbed, but we’ve never found the natural cauldron that originally forged the singular stones.

Now, though, anyone hunting the location has their first lead. Research published March 15 in the Journal of Earth System Science suggests the Golconda diamonds originated in the Wajrakarur kimberlite field in modern-day Andhra Pradesh — about 300 kilometers from the placer mine site.

It’s still not a sure thing, geochemists warn. And oddly enough, the main obstacle is the diamonds’ purity.

According to Smithsonian magazine, all known diamonds have formed in a zone about 160km underground in the Earth’s mantle. There, intense heat and pressure create crystals inside shifting solid rock. It takes the crystals an astonishing 1 to 3.3 billion years to mature into diamonds.

They eventually rocket to the surface through Kimberlite pipes — a specific type of volcanic rock structure. It takes a highly violent eruption to disgorge a diamond. Most such events likely took place during the Cretaceous, and the planet has likely seen very few, if any, since.

Flaws give clues

Along this turbulent journey, diamonds collect impurities — traces of materials and fluids that ingress during the stone’s formation. These inclusions are extremely minimal in gem-quality stones, but they also provide almost the only clue to their origins, because they indicate geological conditions during their growth.

A team from India's Savitribai Phule Pune University led the recent effort to trace the Golconda diamonds. The group used a multi-pronged approach involving "bulk rock" geochemistry, field and remote GIS (Geographic Information Systems) study, and paleogeology. Focusing on the chemical compositions of kimberlites surrounding the Krishna River mine site, their findings indicated the Wajrakarur kimberlite field as a possible source.

One shortcoming of their study is that it involved only the upper mantle, one geochemist pointed out to LiveScience. According to the Hebrew University of Jerusalem’s Yaakov Weiss, larger diamonds are thought to form even deeper under the surface.

So pure, they're hard to trace

Finally, because the Golconda diamonds are so pure in composition, it’s exceedingly difficult to connect them to a specific time or place. While the Wajrakarur kimberlite is capable of yielding diamonds, Weiss asserted it would be difficult to demonstrate a chemical linkage.

Other details are more promising. The Savitribai Phule Pune University team did confirm an ancient river channel once connected the Wajrakarur region with the Krishna River placer mine site.

Their work also excluded another local diamond factory from contention: lamproite deposits in the Eastern Dharwar Craton.

We may still be far from knowing when and where the Golconda stones were born. Then again, who could have guessed we would find them hiding under just seven meters of river silt?

Imagine a snake longer than a shipping container — longer than a T-Rex — slithering through a swamp, hunting crocodiles.

It’s the biggest snake that ever lived, researchers think, after unearthing its remains from a strip mine in India.

Vasuki indicus is named after the Hindu snake god that Shiva wore as a necklace. Based on 27 vertebrae paleontologists dug up from the lignite mine that became the beast’s tomb, estimates hold that it could have been 15 meters long.

Del Eocene medio la Vasuki indicus tiene una longitud corporal estimada de entre 11 y 15 metros esto lo haría la serpiente más grande el mundo!, de lo qué sabemos de la serpiente extinta son 27 vértebras https://t.co/SL5BjYssBC pic.twitter.com/YLd121IRq1

— Scar king(Ferrus) (@Destroyer397) April 19, 2024

But it still could have snuck up on you.

"Considering its large size, Vasuki was a slow-moving ambush predator that would subdue its prey through constriction like anacondas and pythons. This snake lived in a marshy swamp near the coast at a time when global temperatures were higher than today," Debajit Datta, a paleontologist at the Indian Institute of Technology Roorkee, told Reuters.

A one-ton snake

Datta led the study into Vasuki indicus, which was published this week in the journal Scientific Reports. On the low end, Vasuki would have been about 11 meters long and weighed a metric ton. The researchers had no choice but to base those figures on vertebrae — the animal’s only remains. The biggest example they found was 11cm wide.

Vasuki was part of the Madtsoiidae snake family, a long-lived reptile group that appeared some 90 million years ago and went extinct about 12,000 years ago. If estimates of its size are accurate, it will edge out the current largest-ever snake — the Cenozoic Titanoboa, at 13 meters long.

Vasuki’s world was scorching, compared to today’s. Global surface temperature now hovers around 15 degrees C, but the Middle Eocene period saw that average soar to 28 degrees. It also thrived while the supercontinent Gondwana was in the process of rending apart, laying the foundation for the world map we know today.

"Vasuki was a majestic animal," Datta said. "It may well have been a gentle giant, resting its head on a high porch formed by coiling its massive body for most of the day or moving sluggishly through the swamp like an endless train. In some ways, it reminds me of Kaa from The Jungle Book."

In the career of an astronomer, it’s hard to overstate the scale of a recent find by a team at Chile’s Very Large Telescope (VLT).

Pasquale Panuzzo, a research engineer and lead author of the team’s recently released work, certainly didn’t.

“It’s a real unicorn. This is the kind of discovery you make once in your research life,” Panuzzo said in a statement by the European Southern Observatory. “So far, black holes this big have only ever been detected in distant galaxies.”

How big is the Milky Way’s newest known black hole? About 33 times the size of the sun — about 50% bigger than the previous galactic record-holder.

Largest black hole of its kind

Gaia-BH3 is the largest black hole of its kind — one formed from a supernova — in our galaxy. Only Sagittarius A, the gravity vacuum the Milky Way rotates around, is bigger. But unlike Gaia-BH3, it didn't come from a stellar explosion.

An extensive European Space Agency team led by Panuzzo submitted its findings to the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics earlier this month. They detail the colossal structure, which they’ve never properly seen through the VLT or other instruments, but can infer to exist based on the movement of a lone star known to be its companion.

The astronomers said more finds like Gaia-BH3 could await. The black hole orbits a location relatively near Earth, at only 2,000 light years away. Because the companion star’s activity triggered the discovery, the door to others like it is wide open.

The Milky Way hosts around 50 confirmed or suspected black holes. But there could be thousands or millions more, based on how many stars have likely died in the galaxy’s 13.6-billion-year history.

More discoveries to come

The next wave of data from Gaia, the space telescope mapping the Milky Way, could reveal more black holes like Gaia-BH3. It’s slated for early 2025 at the earliest, which partly explains why the current team decided to release its discovery early.

“We took the exceptional step of publishing this paper based on preliminary data ahead of the forthcoming Gaia release because of the unique nature of the discovery,” co-author Elisabetta Caffau said. Now, other astronomers can get a jump start on any opportunities to find similar new black holes.

Titanic as it is in our galaxy, Gaia-BH3 is a blip on the universal radar of black hole size. One supermassive black hole currently careening through space is as big as 20 million suns.

At 550 hectares, Majuli is the world’s largest river island. If that phrase conjures the image of a jungly outcrop garlanded with sandy banks, it should — that’s how this island in in extreme eastern India used to look.

But decades of population growth and erosion along the mighty Brahmaputra River wreaked havoc on the island’s forests. Since 1917, over half of Majuli’s total land mass has dissolved into the Brahmaputra and washed out toward the Indian Ocean.

One way to sequester soil and absorb water? Plant trees. That’s what one hard-working Majuli man has been doing since the 1970s.

Jadav Payeng is the “Forest Man of India,” according to former president A.P.J. Abdul Kalam.

Learn how, and why, Payeng planted a forest bigger than Central Park on his home island. Spoiler alert: key aspects of the project can be amazingly simple. To expand the vegetated area, he simply digs a hole in the soil with a stick and plants a cutting.

Some tasks are more challenging. Payeng’s creation acts as a sanctuary for iconic wildlife. Elephants, rhinoceros, and tigers all reside in its confines.

“The biggest threat was from men. They would have destroyed the forest for economic gain and the animals would be vulnerable again,” Payeng explains. “But I will keep planting until my last breath.”

 

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As India faces catastrophic pollution, the country can use all the homegrown conservation warriors it can get. When the Forest Man began his project in 1979, he was just 16 years old. He and his ever-expanding forest are still going strong today.

If you fall into a deep sleep in a full bathtub, you might not expect to wake up — unless you’re a queen bumblebee.

In fact, eastern queen bumblebees can hibernate underwater in frigid temperatures for up to a week. That’s what one ecologist discovered by accident, after receiving a shipment of 300 queen bees for unrelated research.

Sabrina Rondeau took delivery of the eastern bumblebee (Bombus impatiens) queens at Canada’s University of Guelph in 2021. Rondeau was studying how pesticides affect the bees during hibernation by placing them in topsoil-filled tubes, then refrigerating them — a method that mimics their natural dormancy cycle.

But Rondeau opened the fridge one day to a sorry sight: four of the tubes had filled with condensation, completely submerging the fuzzy insects inside.

Freaked out

“I kind of freaked out,” she said. “I was sure the queens were dead.”

Rondeau did her diligence, removing the bees from what she assumed were their tombs. Instead, all four queens stirred, then revived.

“[It was] really surprising,” said colleague Nigel Raine. “These are terrestrial organisms; they’re not really designed to be underwater.”

Don’t tell them that.

Can #bumblebee queens endure periods of inundation while overwintering underground? New Biology Letters paper from Dr. @SabRondeau suggests that hibernating queens can survive up to 1 week submerged under water: https://t.co/hw2IFuhsWY #OpenAccess #Pollinators @RSocPublishing pic.twitter.com/hPs2UCnVjw

— Nigel Raine (@NigelERaine) April 16, 2024

Rondeau and Raine quickly shifted gears to test the bees’ submarine resilience. When they further tested 143 bees, 81% of the queens submerged for a week survived.

Scientists still aren't sure exactly how the bees do this, but it's a testament to the cornerstone pollinator’s survivability. Queen bumblebees can spend months underground each winter, sleeping through the cold, wet months until they emerge again to feed and nest.

So while one-third of all bumblebee species around the world are in decline, this surprising insect seems to have a few survival tricks we were unaware of.

This widespread story of the bumblebees' adaptability, which in the last couple of days has appeared in outlets from CNN to New Scientist, prompted media critic Rusty Foster to comment archly in his Today in Tabs newsletter:

"We accidentally drowned some bumblebees but then unexpectedly they lived, so we’re calling that “exciting new research results” and planning to drown a lot more bumblebees. Scientists!"

Years after a supermarket billionaire went missing near the Matterhorn in the spring of 2018, nobody expected him to come back — so much so that a court in Cologne, Germany eventually declared him legally dead.

But a new investigation shows not all may be as it seems.

Karl-Erivan Haub was 58 when he visited the famous peak to train for a ski mountaineering race. On the morning of April 7, 2018, he quietly boarded a ski lift alone and ascended toward the peak.

That was the last time anyone saw him. Rescuers scoured the Swiss landmark for any trace of Haub but gave up after six days. The executive of the Tengelmann Group, the world’s fourth-largest retail supermarket and distribution company behind titans like Wal-Mart, had disappeared without a trace, as one publication put it.

Haub’s younger brother, Christian, took over sole control of the company 10 days after his death. He later swore in a courtroom that there was no indication that Karl-Erivan, with a reported net worth of $6.4 billion, remained alive.

Now, six years later, it turns out he may be living in Moscow with a woman 20 years his junior.

Lost and found — in Moscow

In a bombshell report, German broadcaster RTL claims it has identified Haub in Moscow. The outlet believes the lost billionaire, now 64, is accompanied by 44-year-old Veronika Ermilova.

"There are strong indications that he could have caused his disappearance intentionally" and "at least parts of his family were aware of it and, against their better judgment, kept this secret from the Cologne District Court and the public," RTL's Liv von Boetticher told German magazine Capital.

Indications that Haub is alive include photos from 2021 showing him in Moscow, Boetticher disclosed.

“As far as I know, these photos were obtained on behalf of Christian Haub and two internal investigators working for him by an Israeli-American company that searched the biometric surveillance system in Moscow for images of Karl-Erivan Haub,” she said.

Russian entanglements

Haub’s Russian entanglements included visits with Ermilova as early as 2008, the outlet reported — after he had already been married to his wife, Katrin, for 19 years.

Ermilova’s LinkedIn profile indicates she is a Marketing Director at Russian Event, which is styled as an events management firm. Shadowy rumors that she works as an agent for Russia’s Federal Security Service (the modern version of the old Soviet KGB) “cannot be proven,” according to investigators.

“What can be proven, however, is that she is always in the same places at the same time as Karl-Erivan Haub,” said the report, obtained by the Daily Mail. “In July 2008, both were in Moscow and Sochi within a few days... In May 2009, both traveled on the same night train from Moscow to St Petersburg, in separate compartments. The trips were booked at the same time and by the same person.”

Overlaps kept occurring throughout the years in Russia — in Omsk, Sochi, Baku, and Moscow, according to the Daily Mail.

The real kicker: Haub allegedly made 13 calls lasting up to an hour to Ermilova's phone in the three days before he disappeared, the probe found.

Survivors under scrutiny

The same Cologne court that declared Haub dead is now investigating Christian Haub on suspicion of making false statements under oath. Christian Haub’s lawyer, Mark Binz, has denied culpability. “Of course, there is no truth to the accusation,” Binz told RTL.

Disputes wracked the Haub family in the wake of Karl-Erivan’s disappearance. Katrin Haub refused to validate her husband’s death certificate in 2021, Euronews reported. But she and her children, along with other members of the family, eventually agreed with the court’s decision. Many of them held shares in the Tengelmann Group.

The decision brought a swift end to a convoluted power struggle in which the remaining shareholders fought over the redistribution of wealth. Georg Haub, who co-ran the Tengelmann Group with Karl-Erivan and Christian, withdrew his 2020 application for Karl-Erivan’s death certificate three months after he filed it.

That came amid multiple reports questioning whether the billionaire was, in fact, dead. Court officials, though, eventually dismissed contradictions as “possibilities, assumptions, and non-verified documents,” reported Euronews.

When Katrin and the rest of Haub’s living heirs signed the certificate in early 2021, their shares in Tengelmann finally transferred to Christian Haub. Negotiations had proven tense.

Ties with oligarchs

Meanwhile, RTL reported that Karl-Erivan had entertained Russian business ties. He called Russian banker Andrey Suzdaltsev in both Russia and Geneva in the hours leading up to his disappearance, the report said. Haub also conducted business with Russian moguls, including Sergey Grishin. The “Scarface Oligarch” controversially sold Prince Harry and Meghan Markle a California mansion in 2020, and claimed to have committed "the largest bank fraud scheme ever” during the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Whether or not Haub is alive, Grishin is among his former associates who are not. The 56-year-old died in a Russian hospital in March 2023 from reported circulatory problems in his brain. Incidentally, Haub’s father, Erivan, died one month before his son’s disappearance at his Wyoming home in 2018.