On Monday, the developer of a large offshore wind farm being built off the coast of New York announced that the federal government had lifted a hold it had placed on the project roughly a month ago. The entire process has been shrouded in mystery. The government never fully enunciated its justification for the hold and hasn't yet commented on the fact that it had been lifted, although there is some hint that it was coupled to a reconsideration of a cancelled natural gas pipeline.

Empire Wind is a large project being built off the southeast shore of Long Island by Equinor, a Norwegian energy company. The first of two phases, Empire Wind 1, will have an 800 MW capacity and has already received permitting and environmental approval. Equinor had started construction of the foundations for the towers that would hold the wind turbines and onshore facilities that would support this and future offshore projects.

All that changed in mid-April when Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum announced via a social media post that the approval for Empire Wind had been rushed and his department would be reviewing it. A Fox News article published a few days later suggests that a review by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration "found the Empire Wind approval process relied on rushed, outdated, and incomplete scientific and environmental analysis." But nobody else has indicated that any such report exists, despite requests from the press.

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There's a lot of matter around, which ensures that any antimatter produced experiences a very short lifespan. Studying antimatter, therefore, has been extremely difficult. But that's changed a bit in recent years, as CERN has set up a facility that produces and traps antimatter, allowing for extensive studies of its properties, including entire anti-atoms.

Unfortunately, the hardware used to capture antiprotons also produces interference that limits the precision with which measurements can be made. So CERN decided that it might be good to determine how to move the antimatter away from where it's produced. Since it was tackling that problem anyway, CERN decided to make a shipping container for antimatter, allowing it to be put on a truck and potentially taken to labs throughout Europe.

A shipping container for antimatter

The problem facing CERN comes from its own hardware. The antimatter it captures is produced by smashing a particle beam into a stationary target. As a result, all the anti-particles that come out of the debris carry a lot of energy. If you want to hold on to any of them, you have to slow them down, which is done using electromagnetic fields that can act on the charged antimatter particles. Unfortunately, as the team behind the new work notes, many of the measurements we'd like to do with the antimatter are "extremely sensitive to external magnetic field noise."

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© Sean Pavone

China has been installing renewable energy at a spectacular rate and now has more renewable capacity than the next 13 countries combined, and four times that of its closest competitor, the US. Yet, so far at least, that hasn't been enough to offset the rise of fossil fuel use in that country. But a new analysis by the NGO Carbon Brief suggests things may be changing, as China's emissions have now dropped over the past year, showing a 1 percent decline compared to the previous March. The decline is largely being led by the power sector, where growth in renewables has surged above rising demand.

This isn't the first time that China's emissions have gone down over the course of a year, but in all previous cases the cause was primarily economic—driven by things like the COVID pandemic or the 2008 housing crisis. The latest shift, however, was driven largely by the country's energy sector, which saw a 2 percent decline in emissions over the past year.

China's emissions have shown a slight decline over the last year, despite economic growth and rising demand for electricity. Credit: Carbon Brief

Carbon Brief put the report together using data from several official government sources, including the National Bureau of Statistics of China, National Energy Administration of China, and the China Electricity Council. Projections for future growth come from the China Wind Energy Association and the China Photovoltaic Industry Association.

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© Yangna

The world of computers is dominated by binary. Silicon transistors are either conducting or they're not, and so we've developed a whole world of math and logical operations around those binary capabilities. And, for the most part, quantum computing has been developing along similar lines, using qubits that, when measured, will be found in one of two states.

In some cases, the use of binary values is a feature of the object being used to hold the qubit. For example, a technology called dual-rail qubits takes its value from which of two linked resonators holds a photon. But there are many other quantum objects that have access to far more than two states—think of something like all the possible energy states an electron could occupy when orbiting an atom. We can use things like this as qubits by only relying on the lowest two energy levels. But there's nothing stopping us from using more than two.

In Wednesday's issue of Nature, researchers describe creating qudits, the generic term for systems that hold quantum information—it's short for quantum digits. Using a system that can be in three or four possible states (qutrits and ququarts, respectively), they demonstrate the first error correction of higher-order quantum memory.

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On Tuesday, the federal government's Joint Task Force to Combat Anti-Semitism announced that it had terminated research grants to Harvard totalling $450 million, spread out across eight federal agencies. The move comes on the heels of $2.2 billion in earlier cuts and an announcement that the university will be prevented from receiving any future grants. The ongoing campaign appears to be heading toward a point where no researchers at Harvard will receive federal funding.

The announcement reiterates accusations that are familiar from earlier federal funding terminations. It references antisemitic incidents during earlier protests about Israel's actions in Gaza and the fact that the Harvard Law Review has taken steps to diversify the authors it publishes, which the government considers illegal discrimination. Notably, the letter does not mention any more recent events, nor Harvard's efforts to address antisemitism on campus, saying:

Harvard’s campus, once a symbol of academic prestige, has become a breeding ground for virtue signaling and discrimination. This is not leadership; it is cowardice. And it’s not academic freedom; it’s institutional disenfranchisement. There is a dark problem on Harvard’s campus, and by prioritizing appeasement over accountability, institutional leaders have forfeited the school's claim to taxpayer support.

It's generally difficult to understand the big picture of these cuts and the reasons for them from this announcement. Instead, it has to be pieced together from the multitude of letters that individual agencies have sent Harvard.

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© Barry Winniker

Back in 2024, a system set up to identify objects that suddenly brighten found something unusual. Unfortunately, the automated system that was supposed to identify it couldn't figure out what it was looking at. Now, about a year later, we know it's the first tidal disruption event—meaning a star being ripped apart by a supermassive black hole—identified at visual wavelengths. It's also a rather unusual one, in that the supermassive black hole in question does not reside at the center of its galaxy. Instead, there's an even more massive object there, which is feeding on matter at the same time.

A mystery object

The object, now called AT2024tvd, was identified by the Zwicky Transient Facility, which is set up to scan the entire northern sky over a period of just two days, after which it repeats the process. Combined with software that scans the data for changes, these repeated exposures allow the system to identify objects that suddenly brighten (or, potentially, anything that suddenly goes dark). Among the events it can identify are tidal disruption events, where a star gets spaghettified by the enormous gravity of a supermassive black hole.

Normally, supermassive black holes live at the center of galaxies. So, the software that does the scanning will only flag something as a potential tidal disruption event if it coincides with the presence of a previous light source at the same location. And that wasn't the case with AT2024tvd, which appeared to be over 2,500 light-years from the center of the galaxy. As a result, the software didn't flag it as a potential tidal disruption event; people didn't figure out what it was until they looked more closely at it.

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© NASA, ESA, STScI, Yuhan Yao (UC Berkeley, Joseph DePasquale

Over the last century or more, humanity has been developing an ever-growing number of new chemicals that have never been seen before by Earth's creatures. Many of these chemicals end up being toxic contaminants that we'd love to get rid of, but we struggle to purify them from the environment or break them down once we do. And microbes haven't had much chance to evolve the ability to break them down for us.

Over the last few years, however, we've found a growing number of cases where bacteria have evolved the ability to break down such chemicals, like industrial contaminants and plastics. Unfortunately, these bacteria are all different species, target different individual contaminants, and thrive in different environments. But now, researchers have developed a new way to take the genes from all these species and place them in a single bacterial strain that can decontaminate complex waste mixtures.

Targeting contaminants

The inspiration for this work was the fact that a lot of this industrial contamination contains a mixture of toxic organic molecules that are commonly found in brackish or salty water. So, the research team, based in Shenzhen, China, started by simply testing a number of lab bacteria strains to develop one that could survive these conditions. The one that seemed to survive the best was Vibrio natriegens. These bacteria were discovered in a salt marsh, and their primary claim to fame is an impressive growth rate, with a population being able to double about every 10 minutes.

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© Aldo Pavan

The ongoing war between the Trump administration and Harvard University has taken a new twist, with the government sending Harvard a letter that, amid what appears to be a stream-of-consciousness culture war rant, announces that the university will not be receiving any further research grants. The letter potentially suggests that Harvard could see funding restored by "complying with long-settled Federal Law," but earlier demands from the administration included conditions that went well beyond those required by law.

The letter, sent by Secretary of Education Linda McMahon, makes it somewhat difficult to tell exactly what the government wants, because most of the text is a borderline deranged rant written in florid MAGA-ese. You don't have to go beyond the first paragraph to get a sense that this is less a setting of funding conditions than an airing of grievances:

Instead of using these funds to advance the education of its students, Harvard is engaging in a systemic pattern of violating federal law. Where do many of these "students" come from, who are they, how do they get into Harvard, or even into our country—and why is there so much HATE? These are questions that must be answered, among many more, but the biggest question of all is, why will Harvard not give straightforward answers to the American public?

Does Harvard have to answer these questions to get funding restored? It's unclear.

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© Kevin Fleming

We've reviewed some pretty expensive bikes here at Ars, and one of the consistent concerns we see in the comments is the fear of theft. That's a widely shared fear, based on a whole bunch of videos that describe how to hide an AirTag tracker where a potential bike thief won't notice it. There are also a number of products available that will hold a hidden AirTag in a reflector, a bike bell, or the head tube.

But Apple has also made it possible for third parties to plug their devices into its "Find My" system, and a company called Knog has made a Bluetooth bike tracker called the Scout that does just that. The Scout goes well beyond tracking, though, providing a motion-sensitive alarm system that will alert you if anybody tries to move your bike.

Meet the Scout

The Scout can be attached to the frame using the screw holes normally used for a water bottle holder. Security screws make it considerably more difficult to remove. Once there, it uses Apple's Find My network to keep the owner apprised of the bike's location (Android users need not apply at the moment). If you're leaving your bike in a high-risk location, you can also use Knog's phone application to set an alarm that will be triggered if the bike is moved.

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On Friday, the US Office of Management and Budget sent Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine), chair of the Senate's Appropriations Committee, an outline of what to expect from the Trump administration's 2026 budget proposal. As expected, the budget includes widespread cuts, affecting nearly every branch of the federal government.

In keeping with the administration's attacks on research agencies and the places research gets done, research funding will be taking an enormous hit, with the National Institutes of Health taking a 40 percent cut and the National Science Foundation losing 55 percent of its 2025 budget. But the budget goes well beyond those highlighted items, with nearly every place science gets done or funded targeted for cuts.

Perhaps even more shocking is the language used to justify the cuts, which reads more like a partisan rant than a serious budget document.

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A thousand years ago, the people living in Chaco Canyon were building massive structures of intricate masonry and trading with locations as far away as Mexico. Within a century, however, the area would be largely abandoned, with little indication that the same culture was re-established elsewhere. If the people of Chaco Canyon migrated to new homes, it's unclear where they ended up.

Around the same time that construction expanded in Chaco Canyon, far smaller pueblos began appearing in the northern Rio Grande Valley hundreds of kilometers away. These have remained occupied to the present day in New Mexico; although their populations shrank dramatically after European contact, their relationship to the Chaco culture has remained ambiguous. Until now, that is. People from one of these communities, Picuris Pueblo, worked with specialistsancient DNA to show that they are the closest relatives of the Chaco people yet discovered, confirming aspects of the pueblo's oral traditions.

A pueblo-driven study

The list of authors of the new paper describing this genetic connection includes members of the Pueblo government, including its present governor. That's because the study was initiated by the members of the Pueblo, who worked with archeologists to get in contact with DNA specialists at the Center for GeoGenetics at the University of Copenhagen. In a press conference, members of the Pueblo said they'd been aware of the power of DNA studies via their use in criminal cases and ancestry services. The leaders of Picuris Pueblo felt that it could help them understand their origin and the nature of some of their oral history, which linked them to the wider Pueblo-building peoples.

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© P. Wei

As part of the Global Change Research Act of 1990, Congress mandated that every four years, the government must produce a National Climate Assessment. This document is intended to provide an overview of the changing state of our knowledge about the process itself and its impact on our environment. Past versions have been comprehensive and involved the work of hundreds of scientists, all coordinated by the US's Global Change Research Program.

It's not clear what the next report will look like. Two weeks after cutting funding for the organization that coordinates the report's production, the Trump administration has apparently informed all the authors working on it that their services are no longer needed.

The National Climate Assessment has typically been like a somewhat smaller-scale version of the IPCC reports, with a greater focus on impacts in the US. It is a very detailed look at the state of climate science, the impacts warming is having on the US, and our efforts to limit warming and deal with those impacts. Various agencies and local governments have used it to help plan for the expected impacts of our warming climate.

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© Cavan Images / Peter Essick

Since the Iberian Peninsula lost power in a massive blackout, grid operators are in the process of trying to restore power to millions of customers and businesses. As you might imagine, the process—termed a "black start"—is quite a bit more challenging than flicking on a switch. However, the challenge is made considerably more difficult because nearly everything about the system—from the management hardware that remotely controls the performance of the grid to the power plants themselves—needs power to operate.

Restarting the grid

You might think that a power plant could easily start generating power, but in reality, only a limited number of facilities have everything they need to handle a black start. That's because it takes power to make power. Facilities that boil water have lots of powered pumps and valves, coal plants need to pulverize the fuel and move it to where it's burned, etc. In most cases, black-start-rated plants have a diesel generator present to supply enough power to get the plant operating. These tend to be smaller plants, since they require proportionally smaller diesel generators.

The initial output of these black start facilities is then used to provide power to all the plants that need an external power source to operate. This has to be managed in a way that ensures that only other power plants get the first electrons to start moving on the grid, otherwise the normal demand would immediately overwhelm the limited number of small plants that are operating. Again, this has to be handled by facilities that need power in order to control the flow of energy across the grid. This is why managing the grid will never be as simple as "put the hardware on the Internet and control it remotely," given that the Internet also needs power to operate.

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© Juan Maria Coy Vergara

What does the "typical" exosolar system look like? We know it's not likely to look like our own Solar System, given that our familiar planets don't include entire classes of planets (Hot Jupiters! Mini-Neptunes!) that we've found elsewhere. And our discovery methods have been heavily biased toward planets that orbit close to their host star, so we don't really have a strong sense of what might be lurking in more distant orbits.

A new study released on Thursday describes a search for what are called "microlensing" events, where a planet acts as a gravitational lens that magnifies the star it's orbiting, causing it to brighten briefly. These events are difficult to capture, but can potentially indicate the presence of planets in more distant orbits. The researchers behind the new work find indications that there's a significant population of rocky super-Earths that are traveling in orbits similar to that of Jupiter and Saturn.

Lenses go micro

The two primary methods we've used to discover exoplanets are called transit and radial velocity. In the transit method, we simply watch the star for dips in the light it sends to Earth, which can be an indication of a planet orbiting in a way that it eclipses a small fraction of the star. For radial velocity, we look for red- or blue-shifts in the light received from the star, caused by a planet tugging the star in different directions as it orbits.

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© Harvard-Smithsonian,Center for Astrophysics/D. A. Aguilar

A few decades ago, it wasn't realistic to attribute individual events—even heat waves—to the general warming trend driven by human-caused climate change. Now, there are peer-reviewed methods of rapidly detecting humanity's fingerprints in the wake of weather disasters like hurricanes or climate-driven wildfires.

In today's issue of Nature, Dartmouth's Christopher Callahan and Justin Mankin argue that we've reached a similar level of sophistication regarding another key question: What are the economic damages caused by individual climate events? They argue that we can now assign monetary values to the damage caused by emissions that can be traced back to individual companies. They found that "The global economy would be $28 trillion richer ... were it not for the extreme heat caused by the emissions from the 111 carbon majors."

They argue that this method might provide legal ammunition for those interested in seeking climate damages in court: "By revealing the human fingerprint on events previously thought to be ‘acts of God,’ attribution science has helped make climate change legally legible."

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© Marc Guitard

On Monday, Harvard University filed a lawsuit that it hopes will end the federal government's hold on over $2 billion of research funds destined for the university's faculty. The suit claims that the government's demands for input on Harvard's hiring and admissions violate the university's First Amendment rights, and that the funding freeze hasn't followed the procedures laid out in federal law.

Earlier in April, the government sent a letter to Harvard demanding various changes, from altering university governance to enforcing a completely undefined "viewpoint diversity" on hiring and admissions. Failing to agree, the government suggested, would place the financial relationship between the government and Harvard at risk. Harvard responded with a strongly worded refusal and, by the end of the day, saw the government put over $2 billion in research funding on hold. Harvard was not told how long the hold would last or what exactly was needed to lift it.

The lawsuit seeks to reverse the hold. Harvard argues that there are two reasons the court should restore the flow of research money.

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© A P Cortizas, Jr.

For those of us whose memory of high school biology hasn't faded entirely, planarians will probably sound very familiar. They're generally used as an example of one of the extreme ends of regenerative capacity. While some animals like mammals have a limited ability to regenerate lost tissues, planarians can be cut roughly in half and regenerate either an entire head or entire tail, depending on which part of the body you choose to keep track of.

In doing so, they have to re-establish something that is typically only needed early in an animal's development: a signaling system that helps tell cells where the animal's head and tail are. Now, a US-based team asked a question that I'd never have thought of: What happens if you cut the animal in half early in development, while the developmental head-to-tail signaling system is still active? The answer turned out to be surprisingly complex.

Heads or tails?

Planarians are small flatworms that would probably be living quiet lives somewhere if biologists hadn't discovered their ability to regenerate lots of adult tissues when damaged. The process has been well-studied by this point and involves the formation of a cluster of stem cells, called a blastema, at the site of damage. From there, many of the signals that control the formation of specialized tissues in the embryo get re-activated, directing the stem cells down the developmental pathways needed to reproduce any lost organs.

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© NNehring

On Thursday, Norwegian company Equinor announced that it was suspending the construction of a planned 800 MW-capacity offshore wind farm currently being built in the waters off New York. The reason? An order from US Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum, who alleged that the project was rushed through review.

The move comes as the US's nascent offshore wind industry is facing uncertainty, with all future leases placed on hold by an executive order issued on the day of Trump's inauguration. The hold was ostensibly put in place to allow time to review the permitting process. But Burgum's move comes the same week a report from the Government Accountability Office, done in response to the executive order, found only minor issues with the existing permitting process.

On hold

The Equnior project, termed Empire Wind, is a key part of New York's plans to meet its climate goals. Combined with a second phase that's currently in planning, Empire Wind would have a rated capacity of two gigawatts, or over 20 percent of the state's planned offshore wind capacity. The initial construction, combined with the development of shore facilities, already has an estimated value of $2.5 billion, Equinor estimates, and is currently employing roughly 1,500 people. Construction was expected to be complete in 2027, although energy production from a subset of the 54 planned 15 MW turbines could have begun before then.

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© Chris McLoughlin

On Wednesday, news broke that researchers had found the most compelling evidence yet of a "biosignature"—a chemical present at levels that are only consistent with life—on a distant exoplanet. It didn't take much time for some less-than-reliable news sources to go from there to talk of a planet that "could be 'teeming with life'" and the obvious follow-up, "Scientists reveal what aliens could REALLY look like on exoplanet K2-18b."

Even in the best of circumstances, however, talk of a biosignature is an invitation to scientists to think of alternative chemistries that could explain the results without needing biological activity. And these are not the best of circumstances, as astronomers are pointing to earlier papers that give a range of reasons to be skeptical of the new results; in fact, an astronomer named Chris Glein emailed me to alert me of potential issues the day before the news broke.

To help you understand the controversy, we're going to look at the data that is being presented as evidence of a biosignature and then go through all the reasons that confirming a biosignature is so difficult.

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© Ed Bell for Simons Foundation

The Trump administration has been using federal research funding as a cudgel. The government has blocked billions of dollars in research funds and threatened to put a hold on even more in order to compel universities to adopt what it presents as essential reforms. In the case of Columbia University, that includes changes in the leadership of individual academic departments.

On Friday, the government sent a list of demands that it presented as necessary to "maintain Harvard’s financial relationship with the federal government." On Monday, Harvard responded that accepting these demands would "allow itself to be taken over by the federal government." The university also changed its home page into an extensive tribute to the research that would be eliminated if the funds were withheld.

The reprisals against Harvard began almost immediately. By the end of Monday, the Trump administration put $2.2 billion of Harvard's research funding on hold. And on Tuesday, Trump himself made threats against the university's tax exempt status.

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© US Schools