• Adam Kovalčík, age 19, innovated a cheaper, faster way to produce an antiviral drug.
• Galidesivir targets RNA viruses like COVID-19, Ebola, and Zika but hasn't completed clinical trials.
• Kovalčík won a $100,000 science fair award for using corn waste to synthesize the drug.

When Adam Kovalčík flew to Ohio for an international science competition, he did not expect to come home with $100,000.

The 19-year-old from Dulovce, Slovakia won that sum on Friday, though, because he developed a faster and cheaper way to make an experimental antiviral drug called galidesivir, which targets RNA viruses like COVID-19, Ebola, and Zika virus.

"This could be a huge step to help prevent some of these RNA viruses," Chris RoDee, a chemist and retired patent examiner, told Business Insider.

Early studies have shown galidesivir can attack RNA viruses, but it has not undergone full clinical trials. Kovalčík thinks he can encourage further research by slashing the cost of producing the drug — from $75 per gram to about $12.50 per gram.

That's because he used corn waste to synthesize twice as much of the drug in just 10 steps, rather than the 15 steps currently required for manufacturing.

Kovalčík even went one step further: He used his method to make a new drug that could also fight RNA viruses.

Kovalčík presented his findings at the Regeneron International Science and Engineering Fair (ISEF) in Columbus, Ohio, this week. The judging committee, which RoDee chaired, chose Kovalčík for the competition's top prize: the $100,000 George D. Yancopoulos Innovator Award.

"I cannot describe this feeling," Kovalčík told BI after receiving the award in a lively ceremony on Friday. "I did not expect such a huge international competition to be won by someone from a small village in a small European country, so it was just pure shock."

Student research at ISEF does not go through the rigorous peer-review process that studies pass before they're published in scientific journals.

However, RoDee said that Kovalčík's chemistry was "really elegant" and his presentation to the judges was "bulletproof."

From corn husks to antiviral medicine

Kovalčík's big cost-saving innovation started with corn husks.

Well, it started with furfuryl alcohol, which comes from corn husks and is relatively cheap compared to other starting points for making drugs.

One by one, Kovalčík added chemicals to a flask of furfuryl alcohol in the lab, like building blocks adding to the molecule, until he got a crucial sugar called aza-saccharide. It only took seven steps to get there.

From there, it was only three more steps to get galidesivir.

"He was able to shortcut this entire process," RoDee said. "He basically halved the number of steps because he just went in through a different door."

Kovalčík's process takes five days. The conventional manufacturing method, he said, takes nine days.

Eventually, he produced another drug, too. Based on early computer calculations, Kovalčík thinks his new molecule could be five times as effective as galidesivir against COVID-19 — binding more strongly to enzymes to kill the virus.

Big plans for drugs and perfume

Kovalčík said he's filed a preliminary patent on his drug-synthesis process.

He also plans to work more with a research group at the Slovak University of Technology in Bratislava, which has supported his project so far.

To be used commercially, Kovalčík's drug-manufacturing process would have to scale up. At the moment, he said, he's struggling to find a way to make more than 200 liters of galidesivir.

He also plans to work with the university researchers on improving other drug-synthesis processes.

"They actually have much more designs and much more new drugs to prepare and test," he said.

Kovalčík's ambitions don't end with advancing drug manufacturing, though. He said he also wants to use his chemistry skills and prize money to start a company that manufactures eco-friendly perfumes from corn.

"From the first time I stepped foot into a lab, I knew that I wanted to do something related to chemistry," Kovalčík said.

Now that he's won recognition for it, he added, "I feel incredible."

• Receipts often contain bisphenols, which are chemicals linked to reproductive toxicity and cancer.
• That's because receipts are coated in a plastic polymer for heat-based printing.
• Dr. Leonardo Trasande from NYU Langone says he opts for email and text receipts when possible.

Plastics and the chemicals they carry are everywhere, from our air, water, and blood to the products we use every day.

Researchers like Dr. Leonardo Trasande know the unexpected places where these chemicals sneak into our lives, like the receipts you get at grocery stores, gas stations, restaurants, and clothing outlets.

"We don't think of thermal paper receipts as plastic, but that shiny coating is a polymer on top," Trasande, a professor of pediatrics and environmental health researcher at NYU Langone, told Business Insider.

Trasande's main complaint about receipts is what that plastic polymer puts into human skin.

Where there is plastic, he added, "chemicals of concern come along for the ride."

When it's an option to receive his receipt by email or text, Trasande goes for that.

Toxic chemicals on store receipts

Receipts are usually made of thermal paper, which is designed to print using heat-sensitive inks. That makes for cheap and easy on-the-spot printing in restaurants and businesses.

The problem is that this thermal paper usually contains bisphenols, a class of chemicals used to manufacture plastics.

The most famous bisphenol, called BPA, has been linked to heart disease, decreased fertility, breast and prostate cancers and, in children, asthma and neurodevelopmental issues. BPA has been phased out of US products over the past decade, including receipts.

However, studies have found that many receipt manufacturers have replaced the BPA with its cousin BPS, which is banned in Europe for use in food containers, considered a reproductive toxin by the state of California, and has been associated with breast cancer.

If you touch a receipt that's coated in BPS, the toxic chemical can quickly enter your body by absorbing through your skin, according to recent research.

This year, the nonprofit watchdog Center for Environmental Health tested receipts from 32 major retailers and found that touching one for 10 seconds would expose someone to enough BPS to legally require a warning in California. Under the state's Proposition 65, businesses must provide warnings about significant exposures to chemicals that cause cancer or reproductive harm. The CEH delivered a legal notice to those 32 retailers in April.

"Chemicals used in plastic materials need to be properly vetted for safety," Trasande said. "Insofar as chemicals are identified to be toxic to human health, we have safer alternatives that should be considered."

He called electronic receipts "an important positive step forward."

Microplastics in receipts

Underlying the bisphenols, of course, is plastic. Though Trasande said there is much more definitive research on the health effects of many chemicals in plastics, emerging science about the proliferation of plastics themselves throughout the human body is not comforting.

The plastic items that surround us all in our homes, workplaces, schools, and even the outdoors are shedding tiny particles called microplastics — or, when they get really tiny, nanoplastics.

These minuscule plastics build up in our bodies. They've been found in almost every human body tissue researchers have checked, from the brain to the lining of the arteries. Their health impacts are not yet clear, but they've been linked to chronic inflammation, lung and colon cancers, reproductive health issues, and heart attack and stroke risk.

"There are limits to what I can control," Trasande said. "At the same time, there are so many steps we can take to reduce our exposure to chemicals of concern and particularly micro- and nanoplastics."

Declining paper receipts is one of them. On the whole, though, Trasande said the world needs to reduce its plastic production.

If business as usual continues, plastics production is expected to triple by 2060, according to the United Nations Environment Programme.

Trasande said a global plastics treaty would help. According to Reuters, the United Nations is set to resume negotiations for such a treaty in August.

• A microplastics and toxic chemicals expert says her family doesn't wear shoes at home.
• Microplastics from car tires and garbage, as well as street runoff, can be tracked indoors on shoes.
• The researcher thinks her kids' Japanese heritage helped them adopt the habit.

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Tracey Woodruff, the director of the Program on Reproductive Health & the Environment at the University of California, San Francisco. She studies how microplastics and toxic chemicals impact fertility and child development. The below has been edited for length and clarity.

I did not grow up removing shoes when entering the house.

My husband and I started getting into the habit when we had kids, and I got more immersed in my research and how to lower exposures to toxic chemicals.

One of the things that can help reduce exposure to microplastics and other toxic chemicals is taking your shoes off before coming into the house to avoid tracking things in from outside.

What's on your shoes

One contributor to microplastic pollution is car tires, so that's going to be outside, and you can track them around on your feet. Degrading plastic from garbage and vehicle runoff can also get on your shoes.

Microplastics are in the air, they're in food, and they're in water. You can breathe them, eat them, and chemicals on them can also absorb into your skin.

I co-authored a systematic review of studies on microplastics last year. We found they may increase the risk of reproductive health effects, particularly for effects on sperm, as well as chronic inflammation and the potential to increase the risk of lung and colon cancer.

Then there are the chemicals used in plastic — like phthalates, which can disrupt testosterone levels and affect fetal development.

It just became a habit

I would say leaving shoes at the door gradually happened over time. It wasn't too hard. It just became a habit.

We have a closet, a bench, and a cabinet for shoes.

One of my sons is very diligent about taking off his shoes when he goes in the house now. He lived in Japan for a couple months. He's got his house slippers.

My other kids also take their shoes off when they come in the house. It's a part of their cultural heritage. My husband's parents came from Japan, and they took their shoes off when they were in the house. We took the kids to Japan to visit relatives when they were small and almost everyone does it there. They identify with their Japanese heritage.

My daughter does it too in her townhouse with her roommates. They have one of those giant shelves with shoes on it.

At my home we have dogs, which I admit is a complicating factor because they're tracking stuff in all the time. I don't have a good solution to that at this point in time.

• All the biggest US cities are sinking, a new study found with satellite analysis.
• In 28 cities, about 29,000 buildings are at risk of damage and worsening flooding.
• This sinking, or subsidence, is mostly caused by groundwater use, the study found.

The ground is slowly sinking or deforming beneath all the biggest cities in the US, according to new satellite analysis.

If cities don't do something about this land-sinking phenomenon, called subsidence, it could damage buildings and infrastructure. It's already driving flooding in many places.

"We did not expect to see such widespread land subsidence," Manoochehr Shirzaei, a geophysicist at Virginia Tech, told Business Insider.

Shirzaei co-authored a study, published Thursday in the journal Nature Cities, using satellites to measure the millimeter-by-millimeter vertical movement of US cities.

He said there was a clear pattern in the data: Urban centers are sinking faster than other areas, and have a greater risk of building damage.

He found that subsidence is distorting 28 cities — all the places they checked — including Seattle, San Diego, Denver, Dallas, Chicago, and New York City.

About 34 million people live in the affected areas.

Uneven sinking can damage cities

Sinking can directly boost flooding, since coastal cities get lower while sea levels rise around them. Even inland, it can create new troughs in the land that pool stormwater.

Take Houston, which was the fastest-sinking city in the new study, with 40% of its land area sinking five millimeters each year and some areas sinking two inches per year. Shirzaei's previous research found that subsidence had left standing water in some unexpected parts of the city after Hurricane Harvey.

The risks are especially high, though, in places where sinking is happening unevenly within a small area.

When part of the ground sinks slower, or even rises while the spot just next to it sinks, that puts a lot of strain on whatever is built there.

At New Orleans' Louis Armstrong International Airport, the differential sinking has already cracked pavement and left huge puddles on the plane taxiway.

In the worst-case scenario, uneven subsidence could tilt buildings, crack foundations, and hobble bridges.

Sinking alone "would not probably cause a significant risk, but when it compounds with other hazards — flood and storms and winds or poor maintenance or poor construction code — then that can be deadly and result in building failure," Shirzaei said.

Hotspots of risk to 29,000 buildings

About 29,000 buildings are at risk, the study found, even though uneven subsidence only affects about 1% of the land area in the studied cities.

That's sort of good news, because it means the problem areas are concentrated in small, identifiable parts of cities.

"These are areas that could potentially be exposed to a hazard if some immediate action is not taken in the next couple of years," Leonard Ohenhen, a postdoctoral researcher at Columbia's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory and the lead author of the study, told BI.

He hopes cities will focus on those hotspots "to enforce some building codes, maybe strengthen the integrity of infrastructure."

Why cities are sinking

Groundwater extraction seems to be the main culprit behind America's sinking cities, according to the study.

That means cities can make a big difference by practicing better groundwater management — balancing withdrawals with rainfall that replenishes underground aquifers.

A few other factors are also at play.

Oil and gas extraction contribute to the problem in Texas, deflating the ground in a similar way to groundwater extraction.

The sheer weight of a city's buildings can also push it down into the Earth, as a 2023 study found in New York City.

In parts of the East Coast and across the center of the US, some subsidence is a leftover reaction from the disappearance of the Laurentide ice sheet. When this ice covered much of North America during the last Ice Age, it squeezed the land around its edges upward. Those regions are still settling back down today.

The study authors said that this was a contributing factor in New York, Indianapolis, Nashville, Philadelphia, Denver, Chicago, and Portland.

Recent studies in Chicago and Miami have suggested that heat from the city and vibrations from construction, respectively, could also contribute to buildings sinking.

• A Soviet spacecraft that failed to launch to Venus is set to fall back to Earth in the next week.
• The Kosmos 482 capsule was built for Venus's brutal atmosphere, so it will likely survive Earth's.
• The capsule is unlikely to hit people or property, but there's a good chance of a huge fireball.

A Soviet spacecraft that stalled on its way to Venus is about to fall back to Earth, space-debris trackers say, and nobody knows where it might land.

Trackers think the object that's rapidly losing altitude in Earth's orbit is the Venus entry capsule from the Soviet Union's Kosmos 482 mission. That means it's a three-foot-wide, half-ton, titanium-encased sphere that was built to withstand a brutal plunge to the surface of Venus.

Since Venus's atmosphere is nearly 100 times denser than Earth's and its surface is about 900 degrees Fahrenheit, this spacecraft is built tough.

It's probably strong enough to survive the fall back to Earth without burning up in our atmosphere, according to Patricia Reiff, a professor of physics and astronomy at Rice University.

"It has a heat shield and it is also more dense than a lot of the normal space debris," Reiff told Business Insider. "The odds are very, very high that it will fall harmlessly to Earth, but there is that small percentage and so we certainly want to be alert."

When, where, and how big the fireball will be

Kosmos 482 was the last of a series of probes the Soviet Union launched to Venus in the 1960s and 70s. This one never made it out of Earth's orbit due to an engine malfunction.

The Venus entry capsule is the final piece of Kosmos 482 that's still hanging around. A large module from the mission and the upper stage of its rocket both fell into Earth's atmosphere uneventfully in the 1980s.

Based on its current trajectory, experts expect the spacecraft will descend so low that it will succumb to the drag of Earth's atmosphere and plummet down sometime between May 7 and 13.

It's too early to know where the Venus capsule will reenter Earth's atmosphere, much less where it will land.

Most of the planet is water, so it's highly unlikely that the capsule will strike people or property.

"I expect it'll have the usual one-in-several-thousand chance of hitting someone," Jonathan McDowell, a Harvard astronomer who tracks notable objects in orbit, wrote in a blog post in April. He added that, although the spacecraft is dense, it has no nuclear materials on board.

"No need for major concern, but you wouldn't want it bashing you on the head," he added.

As the capsule descends lower into the atmosphere, Reiff said NASA's orbital-debris trackers will be able to calculate the last few orbits it will make before falling. Then they'll have a range of places it might land.

The spacecraft's plummet will be visible to anyone nearby as a big, beautiful fireball, according to Reiff.

"A typical meteor is like a grain of sand. A normal fireball might be a marble. This is a meter across, so it's big," Reiff said. "It should be spectacular."

• Cities all over the world, including on the US East and Gulf Coasts, are sinking.
• This phenomenon, called subsidence, can make extreme flooding worse and damage infrastructure.
• From New York to Houston, these 13 cities are losing height each year.

Cities are sinking across the US, some at a few fractions of a millimeter each year, while others lose up to six millimeters a year.

This phenomenon, called subsidence, is a "slow-moving yet widespread hazard," said Manoochehr Shirzaei, a geophysicist at Virginia Tech who co-authored a study published in Nature in March that measured subsidence in 32 coastal cities in the US.

Sinking can come from the sheer weight of skyscrapers and infrastructure, or from people drawing water from underground. Some of it is leftover from the last Ice Age.

Coastal cities worldwide are already prone to catastrophic flooding as sea levels rise because of the climate crisis. Factor in sinking, and the world's vulnerability to future coastal flooding triples, according to a 2019 study.

In the US, sea-level rise combined with subsidence could expose $109 billion of coastal property to high-tide flooding by 2050, according to Shirzaei's calculations.

The good news is that there are relatively inexpensive solutions to subsidence, Shirzaei told Business Insider in an email.

"The key takeaway is that we still have sufficient time to manage this hazard," he said.

Here are the biggest cities that are sinking the most, according to his new study, in geographical order starting from the northern East Coast.

Boston, Massachusetts

Shirzaei and his co-authors have found that there's a lot of variation in subsidence throughout Boston. When sinking occurs at different rates like that, it can put extra strain on infrastructure.

For example, some areas of Boston are sinking about 1 millimeter per year, give or take. Others sink nearly 4 millimeters a year — which translates to almost 4 centimeters per decade.

New York City

The Big Apple is losing about 1.5 millimeters of height each year.

All three airports in the NYC area are sinking, too, according to a study Shirzaei co-authored in 2024. JFK is sinking about 1.7 mm per year, LaGuardia at 1.5 mm per year, and Newark's airport is clocking 1.4 mm per year.

LaGuardia, for one, has already installed water pumps, berms, flood walls, and flood doors. Previous estimates had Laguardia flooding monthly by 2050 and fully underwater by 2100 — and that's without subsidence.

Jersey City, New Jersey

Just across the Hudson River, Jersey City is matching NYC's pace of about 1.5 millimeters per year.

To measure sinking at such a granular level, Shirzaei and his co-authors mapped ground deformations using a satellite-based radar technique called InSAR (short for Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar).

Atlantic City, New Jersey

A little further south, Atlantic City has its neighbors beat with a subsidence of about 2.8 millimeters per year.

A portion of the East Coast's subsidence is a leftover reaction from the disappearance of the Laurentide ice sheet, which covered much of North America during the last Ice Age. The ice sheet's bulk caused the exposed land around its edges to bulge upward — and the mid-Atlantic region is still settling down from the ice sheet's retreat.

Virginia Beach, Virginia

Virginia Beach, Virginia, is sinking 2.2 millimeters per year. Meanwhile, sea level rise has become a growing concern for locals.

In 2021, residents voted in favor of a $568 million program to build infrastructure that guards against rising sea level, according to PBS news.

Charleston, South Carolina

Charleston is the most populous city in South Carolina and its downtown sits on a peninsula flanked by the Ashley River and Cooper River. The city overall is sinking at a median rate of 2.2 millimeters per year, though in some areas its more dramatic at a rate of 6 millimeters per year.

Savannah, Georgia

Savannah is losing almost 2 millimeters per year, though some areas are sinking as much as 5 millimeters per year.

Over 13,000 properties in Savannah are at risk of flooding over the next 30 years, according to the climate risk analysis group First Street. That's over 23% of all homes in the city.

Miami

Last year, a study found that luxury high-rises were slowly sinking on the barrier islands surrounding Miami, possibly due to vibration from nearby construction. Shirzaei found the mainland is sinking, too, by about half a millimeter each year.

Mobile, Alabama

Mobile is losing 1.87 millimeters per year. The Gulf Coast city experiences some of the highest volume of rain in the US, according to the city's official website, and encourages all residents to have disaster survival kits, including canned foods and flashlights, on hand in the event of a flooding emergency.

Biloxi, Mississippi

Biloxi has the most drastic subsidence of all the US cities Shirzaei's team assessed. On the whole, Biloxi is sinking about 5.6 millimeters per year, with a lot of variation. Some parts of the city may be sinking as much as 10 millimeters per year.

New Orleans

New Orleans is losing 1.3 millimeters per year. First Street reports that 99.6% of all properties in the city are at risk of flooding in the next 30 years.

Houston and Galveston, Texas

Shirzaei found that Galveston, Texas, is sinking more than 4 millimeters a year, but inland parts of Houston have also been sinking for decades due to groundwater extraction.

Corpus Christi, Texas

Corpus Christi is sinking almost 3 millimeters per year. Some researchers think local oil and gas drilling has contributed to subsidence, reported local ABC outlet KIIV

"Extraction, generally, we believe it initiates and activates movement around faults and those could initiate land subsidence in some areas," Mohamed Ahmed, a geophysics professor at Texas A&M-Corpus Christi, told the outlet.

What about the West Coast?

Shirzaei's team didn't find much subsidence in California's coastal cities, although the state's inland Central Valley is sinking due to groundwater extraction.

As for Oregon and Washington, the researchers simply don't have good enough data yet to say what's happening to the ground there.

• Tracey Woodruff is an expert on microplastics, plastic-related chemicals, and their health impacts.
• She told Business Insider how she's been reducing microplastics exposure for her kids.
• She thrifts clothes made from natural fibers, hand-washes dishes, and shops at the farmers' market.

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Tracey Woodruff, the director of the Program on Reproductive Health & the Environment at the University of California, San Francisco. She studies how microplastics and toxic chemicals impact fertility and child development. The below has been edited for length and clarity.

I've been working on reducing plastic in my life for a long time. I would say it's an iterative process, instead of trying to attack it all at one time.

Microplastics are in the air, they're in food, and they're in water. You can breathe them, eat them, and chemicals on them can also absorb into your skin.

When my kids were babies, science had not caught up. I used plastic baby bottles. Now, I would recommend glass.

This was before a lot of really important scientists and science were talking about: Oh wow, you know, there's chemicals in these plastics that could be hurting the development of my child.

I've studied the concerning health risks of microplastics

I co-authored a systematic review of studies on microplastics and three different types of health effects: reproductive, respiratory, and then effects on the gut and colon.

We found that microplastics were suspected to increase the risk of reproductive health effects, particularly for effects on sperm, as well as chronic inflammation and the potential to increase the risk of lung and colon cancer. It's not known that microplastics contribute to these health problems, but it's suspected.

Then there are the chemicals used in plastic — like phthalates, which can disrupt testosterone levels and affect fetal development.

Plastic production is projected to triple by 2060. There is certainly enough evidence to take action to prevent future harms.

None of the following tips are 100%, but they're how I'm trying to lower my family's plastic footprint.

Cooking at home

We eat a lot of food prepared inside our home. We make food with lots of fresh, organic fruits and vegetables for two reasons.

One is we know that plastic-related chemicals and microplastics can come from packaging that leeches into food. So it's really important to eat food that's not fast food or packaged food.

The second part is that nutrition improves your resiliency to the toxic effects of microplastics or other related toxic chemicals. Basically, it's going to be harder for toxic chemicals to impact you compared to, for example, if you're eating a lot of ultra-processed food.

It's really about your background risk status. Are you starting off as a healthier person? Or are you starting off as a person who has more underlying health conditions?

(This is not really microplastic related, but we focus on buying organic, because the science is clear that eating an organic diet can reduce your exposure to pesticides.)

Keeping plastic out of the microwave and dishwasher

We don't microwave food in plastic.

We also don't use dishwashing pods, because those are packaged in plastic. We used to wash plastic stuff like containers and lids in the dishwasher, but we do it by hand now.

It's basically the same thing as the microwave. Heat causes degradation of the plastic material, and it's super hot in your dishwasher.

Cleaning house

A lot of chemicals and microplastics hang out in dust.

We use a vacuum with a HEPA filter, and then wet mop and dust with a microfiber cloth. Those are things that don't stir up the dust when you're cleaning. Those are great ways to lower exposures to dust.

We probably dust once a week. I would say vacuuming and mopping happens every other week.

That's also why we take our shoes off before we come into the house — not tracking microplastics in from outside. One of the contributors to microplastics pollution is car tires, so that's going to be outside and you can track them around on your feet. There's also degrading plastic from garbage. We know that taking your shoes off can help.

Thrifting and swapping out plastic clothes

There's a lot of plastic used in clothes. So try and slowly switch over to natural materials like cotton and linen as opposed to polyester and rayon.

I also do a lot of thrifting alone and with my daughter. That's another way to reduce plastics too, is just to reduce your amount of purchasing new — which I know is hard. If your clothes are polyester or rayon materials, and you're buying them used, then they've already been made. It reduces the need to make another plastic garment and put it into the environment.

I don't do product endorsements, but there are websites now that you can use, like ThredUp. I love ThredUp.

Everything I'm wearing right now is actually thrifted, so there you go. And I think some of it's mostly cotton.

It took me time to build these habits

I didn't go out and do this all at once, but slowly over time. It didn't happen overnight. I want to emphasize that point. It happens over time.

Eventually, I could replace things or get things, and it just is a little less impact on the planet and my health.

I also want to say people should not feel guilty about their chemical exposures. I mean, they should do what they can to be healthy and to reduce them, but companies have pushed all these products. Even if you're trying to do the right thing, you can't control where they're used or other people using them. They're getting out and about in the environment, and we're getting exposed to them in so many places. I mean, think of car tires. We don't have control over that.

The real challenge, and the culprit, is that we really need the government to identify and remove these toxic chemicals from products before they come into our house and expose us.

• Three teenagers in New York designed a cardboard, called Kiriboard, to replace plastic packaging.
• They got the idea when a box of motors for their robotics hobby arrived damaged.
• Their invention won the $12,500 Earth Prize. Now they plan to buy a machine to make more Kiriboards.

Three teenage boys in New York City have invented a clever packaging material that they hope will replace toxic plastics and make plastic-free shipping a reality.

Zhi Han (Anthony) Yao, Flint Mueller, and James Clare are planning to pursue a patent and eventually pitch their product to Home Depot, as well as traditional shippers like Amazon, FedEx, and the US Postal Service.

They call their geometric, cardboard invention Kiriboard, since it's inspired by Japanese kirigami, which is the art of cutting and folding paper.

"Something like this is the wave of the future," Jerry Citron, the teenagers' environmental-science teacher, told Business Insider.

Yao, Mueller, and Clare won the Earth Prize on April 8, making them one of seven winning environmental projects by teenagers across the globe. The award comes with $12,500, which they plan to use to buy a cutting machine, called a CNC router, and test more prototypes.

Plastic-free shipping could change the world

Just like any plastic, Styrofoam and other plastic packaging can shed microscopic bits of plastic into homes and the environment.

Microplastics have been detected from the oceans to the top of Mount Everest, in animals' and humans' body tissues and blood, and even in rain all over the planet. They're associated with heart attack and stroke risk. Some researchers suspect they could even be contributing to the recent rise in colon cancers in young people.

"I didn't realize it was as big of an issue as it was," Yao told BI. "I mean, companies have made sustainable initiatives and greener initiatives, but they haven't really fully replaced plastic packaging."

Enter the Kiriboard: Kiriboard is cut into lattice-like shapes so that it can bend to fill the space between an item and the wall of its box. The cuts give the cardboard a three-dimensional structure that makes it sturdy and allows it to bend and absorb impact, protecting what's inside, similar to bubble wrap but without the plastic.

Once perfected, the three teens hope their design can help ship packages of sensitive or heavy equipment even more securely, at a competitive price.

Broken motors and crumple zones

Clare, Mueller, and Yao are all on the same robotics team at Stuyvesant High School in New York City. Clare is a junior, and Mueller and Yao are seniors.

The idea for Kiriboard started when they opened a shipment of Kraken X60 motors, which are about $200 a pop. They found that the brass pins, which connect the motors to a robot, were damaged and unusable. They assumed the pins had been damaged in transit.

"We're like, well, we should do something about this packaging, because clearly the packaging wasn't good enough," Mueller said.

Clare thought about how cars are engineered with crumple zones, meant to absorb the energy of impacts to protect the people inside.

Similarly, he said, "you can make strategic weak points in your packaging so that the package warps and deforms," sparing the package's contents.

With help from the Earth Prize program and Citron, they built and tested their first Kiriboard prototypes.

The matrix

It was a scrappy effort, with cardboard scavenged from their school.

After some research and consulting various teachers, Yao said they drew up eight or nine different designs, and narrowed down to four to build and test. Then, came the fun part: dropping heavy stuff on their creations.

To test their prototypes' durability, the teens slammed them with a roll of tape, a stapler, a can of soda, and a metal water bottle — "which did the most damage, but not as much as we thought it would," Clare said.

They dropped each item onto the Kiriboard prototypes from various heights, so that they could calculate and study the physical forces of each impact.

"Basically, we want to see what's the most amount of force it can take before it snaps," Yao said.

The results were promising, the trio said. The Kiriboard prototypes sustained very little damage, which they judged by checking the cardboard for dents. They plan to move forward with all four designs, which they hope will be useful for different types of shipping.

In the design pictured above, four triangular "legs" hold the Kiriboard in place inside a box.

"This middle section, we call it the matrix. This is supposed to be flexible," Yao said. Once you place an item for shipping inside the box, the matrix "is supposed to form to the product."

Once they've purchased a CNC router to automate cutting the cardboard, they plan to test prototypes by actually shipping them in boxes.

"Right now, we want to perfect our product," Yao said.

When it's ready, they said they might also pitch it to the electronics company AndyMark, which shipped them the robotic motors that arrived broken.

"No shade to them," Clare said, adding that their robotics team frequently orders from AndyMark with no problems.

"We're on the brink of, like, this could become a reality, and it's just up to us to put in that final effort," Mueller said. Clare chimed in: "All from a broken package."

• Microplastics and nanoplastics might interact with the plaque that causes heart attacks and strokes.
• A new study found high levels of plastic in the arterial plaque of stroke and vision-loss patients.
• Cells in plastic-filled plaque also showed signs of altered gene activity, but it's unclear why.

Tiny, microscopic bits of plastic have been found almost everywhere researchers look — including throughout the human body.

Microplastics and their even tinier cousins, nanoplastics, are probably flowing through your blood and building up in your organs like the lungs and liver.

Now, a new study is connecting the dots on microplastics' mysterious correlation with heart attack and stroke risk.

"There is some microplastics in normal, healthy arteries," Dr. Ross Clark, a University of New Mexico medical researcher who led the study, told Business Insider before he presented his findings at the meeting of the American Heart Association in Baltimore on Tuesday.

"But the amount that's there when they become diseased — and become diseased with symptoms — is really, really different," Clark said.

Clark and his team measured microplastics and nanoplastics in the dangerous, fatty plaque that can build up in arteries, block blood flow, and cause strokes or heart attacks.

Compared to the walls of healthy plaque-free arteries, plaque buildup had 16 times more plastic — just in the people who didn't have symptoms. In people who had experienced stroke, mini-stroke, or vision loss, the plaque had 51 times more plastic.

"Wow and not good," Jaime Ross, a neuroscientist at the University of Rhode Island who was not involved in the study but has studied microplastics in mice, told BI after reading the results.

"It's very shocking to see 51 times higher," she said, adding that in her research, a signal that's just three times stronger is "very robust and striking."

What exactly the plastics are doing in there, if anything, remains a mystery. The new study offers some possible clues, though.

This research has not yet undergone the scrutiny of peer review, but Clark said he plans to submit it for publication in a peer-reviewed scientific journal later this year, after replicating some of their results.

Genetic activity looked different with plastic

Clark is a vascular surgeon, not a microplastics specialist. However, he got the idea for this study by talking with his colleague Matthew Campen, who recently discovered that human brains contain a spoon's worth of plastic.

"We realized together that there really wasn't a lot of data on nanoplastics and microplastics in the vascular system, within blood vessels," Clark said.

Previous research had found that people with microplastics in their arterial plaque were more likely to have a heart attack or stroke or die.

To investigate why, Clark studied samples from 48 people's carotid arteries — the pair of superhighways in your neck that channel blood to your brain.

The difference in plastic quantities surprised him, but his team found another concerning trend, too. Cells in the plaque with lots of plastic showed different gene activity than those with low plastic.

In the high-plastic environment, one group of immune cells had switched off a gene that's associated with turning off inflammation. Clark's team also found genetic differences in a group of stem cells thought to help prevent heart attacks and strokes by reducing inflammation and stabilizing plaque.

"Could it be that microplastics are somehow altering their gene expression?" Clark said.

He added that there's "lots more research needed to fully establish that, but at least it gives us a hint as to where to look."

Ross, who specializes in the genetic mechanisms behind disease, agreed that more research is needed, but added that she thinks "these plastics are doing something with these plaques."

'We just don't know'

Tracking microplastics in the human body is a new scientific endeavor as of the last couple years. It's not perfect.

Clark's team heated the plaque samples to more than 1,000 degrees Fahrenheit to vaporize plastic polymers and break them down into smaller organic molecules, which can be identified and measured by their mass and other properties.

Unfortunately, the lipids in plaque can break down into chemicals that look very similar to polyethylene, the most common plastic found in everything from plastic bags to car parts.

"Because we know about this problem, we've taken a lot of steps to remove those lipids and confirm their removal, so that we're sure we're measuring polyethylene," Clark said.

Still, he added, "it's a big limitation, and it should be acknowledged that these types of methodologies are continuously improving."

Clark is trying to get funding to further study interactions between microplastics and immune cells in the walls of blood vessels. He hopes to expand this research beyond the carotid artery and also run some animal experiments to test for cause and effect.

"We just don't know," Clark said. "Almost all of what we know about microplastics in the human body, no matter where you look, can be summed up as: It's there, and we need to study further as to what it's doing, if anything."

• NASA's James Webb Space Telescope detected a possible sign of alien life on a distant planet.
• Alien life has still not been confirmed through science or through studying UFOs (or UAPs).
• NASA's greatest challenge could be explaining any alien discovery to the public.

NASA is not announcing the existence of extraterrestrial life.

The James Webb Space Telescope has detected a possible sign of it, though.

On Wednesday, a peer-reviewed study reported new observations of a possibly ocean-covered planet called K2-18 b, about 120 light-years from Earth. Webb had detected an abundance of a molecule that, on Earth, is only known to come from living organisms like algae.

The discovery is intriguing, but it's not a smoking gun for alien life. A lot of additional research is necessary to rule out non-biological sources of that signal.

If scientists ever break alien-life news, though, the world may have trouble understanding.

Just look at the last few years of UFO mania — or, rather, mania about "unidentified anomalous phenomena," or UAP. (That's the government term for the mysteries most people call UFOs.)

Remember the "Chinese spy balloon" that the Pentagon shot down in 2023?

Suddenly, the US seemed to be spotting mysterious flying "objects" everywhere, and US fighter jets gunned down three more in the skies over Alaska, Canada, and Lake Huron. Even Elon Musk weighed in with an alien joke.

Then, last year, there were the "drones." Starting in New Jersey, reports of nighttime UAP sightings spread across the East Coast and then the entire country, prompting wild speculation and more than 5,000 tips to the FBI.

Observers and enthusiasts have also expressed their feelings about aliens to NASA's independent UAP study team, which concluded in 2023 that there is no evidence UAP have extraterrestrial origins.

Throughout their study, the team faced "nasty and hostile" online harassment, in the words of David Spergel, president of the Simons Foundation and chair of the team.

The harassment and threats were so bad, officials said, that they initially declined to share the name of NASA's top UAP official.

These breathless rumors and hostile messages are just a peek at what scientists and NASA leaders might face if they ever discover true evidence of life beyond Earth.

"You can't overstate just how important that discovery would be. How we're going to confirm that and announce it responsibly, I think is a really, really important question," Lori Glaze, who was leading NASA's planetary science division at the time, told Business Insider at the American Geophysical Union's meeting in 2022.

"The biggest challenge is trying to keep that communication on an even keel, right? With an excitement, and yet also understanding that we need to set the expectations that we have to follow the scientific process."

How NASA scientists might explain any alien findings — gradually

Maybe the James Webb Space Telescope detects a telltale molecule in the atmosphere of a distant Earth-like planet. Maybe Mars samples from the Perseverance rover reach Earth in a decade, and scientists find fossils of ancient microbes inside them.

Many astrobiologists (exactly what it sounds like — people who study the idea of biology beyond Earth) think that evidence of extraterrestrial life could turn up soon.

However, it's unlikely that any evidence would be completely, irrefutably, obviously aliens. Scientists will probably disagree, and won't be 100% confident. That could be hard to explain to the public.

"This is going to be a very, very hard thing to actually get the scientific community, I think, to agree upon — unless we actually see something moving around and waving at us, which is unlikely," Glaze told BI.

That's why NASA has tried to develop a procedure for assessing and sharing such a monumental, sensitive discovery. The conversation is ongoing, Glaze said, but in 2021, the agency published a framework as a starting point. It could help scientists, journalists, and NASA itself explain the science.

It's called the "confidence of life detection" (CoLD) scale, rating scientific confidence in any potential alien-life discovery on a scale of one to seven. A possible detection can climb to higher levels of confidence as evidence builds.

For example, a level one detection might be the discovery of a molecule that could be related to life inside a Perseverance Mars sample. The evidence would graduate to level two once scientists confirm there was no contamination in the sample, or the instruments involved, that could have influenced their findings. By ruling out non-biological sources of the molecule, or by confirming that it came from an environment suitable for life, scientists could move it further up the scale.

Other scientific teams would have to measure the Mars sample themselves, with different methods, and confirm the initial finding to graduate to level six.

According to NASA, in this Mars molecule example, additional evidence from a different part of the red planet may be necessary to bring it up to level seven — where it's probably life.

Each new level of confidence could mean a new public announcement.

The discovery of extraterrestrial life is likely to be a slow build-up, rather than an explosive eureka moment.

"Until now, we have set the public up to think there are only two options: it's life or it's not life," Mary Voytek, head of NASA's Astrobiology Program, said in a press release when the new scale was published. "We need a better way to share the excitement of our discoveries, and demonstrate how each discovery builds on the next, so that we can bring the public and other scientists along on the journey."

The president or other countries could be involved in announcing that extraterrestrial life exists

Announcing the existence of alien life would be an "administration-level" affair, Glaze said, referring to the US presidency. It wouldn't just be NASA explaining itself at press conferences.

NASA might not even be the first entity to discover evidence of life on another planet. Another nation's space agency could find it first.

The discovery of intelligent alien life would be even more Earth-shattering. That would come with its own conundrums: How do we communicate with them? What do we say? And how might they respond?

Even beaming little hints of ourselves into the void has been controversial. In 1974, astronomers sent out radio signals containing the numbers one through 10, information about the composition and structure of DNA, a figure of a human and our global population, and a graphic of the solar system with Earth highlighted.

Critics like Stephen Hawking have said that contacting any extraterrestrial intelligence could pose an existential risk for humanity.

Needless to say, any discovery of alien life would likely lead to chaos — at least in public discourse.

Glaze said NASA's goal is to be a trusted, transparent source of clear scientific information. It could be the agency's biggest challenge yet.

"I'm not sure we even have words to describe it," she said. "The confirmation that we're not alone in the universe is, I think, going to be akin to realizing that the universe doesn't rotate around Earth. It's a very different way of thinking about who we are, where we came from."

This post has been updated to include new events. It was originally published on February 18, 2023.

• Three teens built a salt-powered fridge to help bring vaccines and medical supplies to rural areas.
• The invention uses salts that pull heat from their environments when they dissolve in water.
• They won the 2025 Earth Prize of $12,500 and plan to test 200 units in 120 hospitals.

Three teenagers designed a mini refrigerator that cools itself with salt and doesn't require an outlet. They're bringing it to hospitals to help transport medical supplies to rural areas without electricity.

Dhruv Chaudhary, Mithran Ladhania, and Mridul Jain live in Indore, India and all have parents working in medical fields. The boys decided to find a salty refrigeration technique after hearing how challenging it was to bring COVID-19 vaccines to rural areas without electricity.

Their invention, which they call Thermavault, won them the 2025 Earth Prize on Saturday. The award comes with $12,500, which they plan to use to build 200 of their refrigerators and send them to 120 hospitals for testing.

They hope their refrigerator can help transport vaccines, other medicines and supplies, and even transplant organs.

"We have been able to keep the vaccines inside the Thermavault for almost 10 to 12 hours," Dr. Pritesh Vyas, an orthopedic surgeon who tested the device at V One hospital in Indore, says in a video on the Thermavault website.

With some improvements like a built-in temperature monitor, he added, "it will be definitely helpful, definitely useful in the remote places, the villages."

Finding the right cooling salt

Some salts can have a cooling effect when they're dissolved in water.

That's because when those salts dissolve, the charged atoms, or ions, that make them up break apart. That separation requires energy, which the ions pull from the environment, thus cooling the water around them.

Chaudhary, Ladhania, and Jain searched the internet, first compiling a list of about 150 salts that might work, then narrowing it down to about 20 that seemed most efficient.

They then borrowed a lab at the Indian Institutes of Technology to test those 20, or so. To their disappointment, none of the salts cooled the water enough.

They were back to square one. Turns out, they didn't need the internet after all — their school teacher recommended trying two different salts: barium hydroxide octahydrate and ammonium chloride.

"While we did scour through the entire internet to find the best salt possible, we kind of just ended up back to our ninth-grade science textbook," Chaudhary said.

The trio says they found that ammonium chloride maintained temperatures of around 2 to 6 degrees Celsius (about 35 to 43 degrees Fahrenheit), which is ideal for many vaccines. Adding barium hydroxide octahydrate to the mix produced sub-zero Celsius temperatures, which is ideal for some other vaccines and sometimes for transplant organs.

Now they had two different refrigeration options.

About three months later, they'd built a prototype and were testing it in local hospitals.

Meet the Thermavault salt refrigerator

The fridge itself is an insulated plastic container with a copper wall lining the inside, where the vaccines or organs would sit. The cooling solution, made by dissolving the salts in water, is poured into a space between the plastic outer wall and the copper inner wall.

Cold boxes and coolant packs are already in widespread use for bringing vaccines to rural areas without electricity. Those carriers typically rely on simple ice packs.

One advantage of the ammonium chloride solution, the trio of teens says, is it's reusable in the field without electricity. You don't need a freezer to pull ice from. Rather, you can remove the salt water from the box, boil away the water, and collect the salt in its solid form, ready to dissolve in new water and produce its cooling effect all over again.

Jain said they're planning to use the prize money to pursue a Performance, Quality and Safety (PQS) certification through the World Health Organization so they can pitch it to Gavi — an international alliance that distributes vaccines.

The Earth Prize program also has a volunteer who can help them pursue a patent, according to a spokesperson.

The Earth Prize casts across the planet for teens who are working on environmental projects and awards one winner from each world region. Chaudhary, Ladhania, and Jain won the prize for Asia. A global winner will be chosen by public vote, which closes on April 22.

• Scientists say they've captured the first footage of a living colossal squid in the deep sea.
• The colossal squid is the world's largest invertebrate, but the one in this video is a baby.
• The footage was captured by an underwater expedition near Antarctica.

The colossal squid, a mysterious creature lurking in the Antarctic abyss, has finally made a cameo, a cohort of scientists say.

You may have heard of the giant squid, which is famous from mariners' legends and for its epic battles with sperm whales.

The colossal squid is even bigger and more mysterious. It's so elusive, living in the deep ocean near Antarctica, that scientists didn't even know it existed until 100 years ago.

Since then, fishermen have filmed a few dying colossal squids at the ocean's surface. Scientists have found chewed-up colossal squid in whale and seabird stomachs.

Nobody had confirmed a sighting in the deep sea until now.

Behold, the colossal squid

The footage below is the first to ever show a living colossal squid in its natural habitat, according to the researchers who captured it and two squid experts who verified it.

This animal is the world's heaviest invertebrate, growing up to 23 feet long and 1,100 pounds. The one in this video, though, is just under one foot long. It's a baby.

Kat Bolstad, a squid researcher at the Auckland University of Technology, helped verify the footage. She had previously reassembled a dead colossal squid caught by a fishing vessel.

"This is honestly one of the most exciting observations that we've had across the time I've been working on deep-sea cephalopods," Bolstad said in a press briefing announcing the new footage on Tuesday.

In the video, Bolstad said, "you can see the iridescent shine off the eyeballs."

She also pointed out the rust-colored spots on the squid's body. Those color cells suggest the squid can switch back and forth between being transparent like it is in the video, to being opaque.

"It probably has fine control over whether it can do that in certain regions of the body," Bolstad said.

The video was captured on March 9 by a remotely operated subsea vehicle called SuBastian, operated by a crew aboard a research vessel called "Falkor (too)." It was at a depth of about 600 meters (1968 feet).

The researchers on the vessel were conducting a 35-day expedition near the South Sandwich Islands. It was a mission of the Ocean Census, which is an international scientific collaboration to search for new marine life.

Rare squid discovery: 'I started hyperventilating'

Aaron Evans, an expert in the glass squid family to which colossal squids belong, helped Bolstad identify the creature in the video. They knew it was a colossal squid once they saw hooks on the middle of its eight arms. That's a distinctive feature that differentiates colossal squids from other species in the glass squid family.

When they saw the arm hooks, Evans said in the briefing, "I started hyperventilating."

Another Antarctic expedition in 2023 captured footage of what scientists thought may have been a juvenile colossal squid, but researchers were uncertain.

In the new video, though, "we can see the animal's features in really great detail," Bolstad said.

Colossal squids are unique in other ways, too. They have hooks on their two tentacles, and those hooks can rotate 360 degrees to grab onto prey. They also have the largest eyes of any animal ever studied — living or extinct — probably to help them see in the depths of the ocean.

Researchers suspect those eyes are part of the reason colossal squids are so elusive. Their huge pupils help it see subsea research vehicles before the cameras see them.

"Most adult colossal squid are probably going to try and want to get out of the area," Evans said. "From their perspective, anytime something large is coming towards them, it's not a good thing."

The little squid in the new footage doesn't seem to be alarmed, Bolstad said, and appears to take a "wait and see" stance toward the approaching vehicle.

"Eventually, when we see the adults, we will get footage of very large ones. They will have impressive hooks. They'll be big and muscly. There will be lots of monster hype about them," Bolstad said. "But in this case, we get to introduce the live colossal squid to the world as this beautiful, little, delicate animal."

• Chris Kornman is a coffee specialist and educator for an importer that runs a high-end coffee shop.
• The café raised its coffee prices by 50 cents because of tariffs.
• Kornman says other coffee roasters, shops, and even grocery stores will probably raise prices too.

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Chris Kornman, who is the director of education for Royal Coffee and works out of the company's café and coffee lab, called The Crown, in Oakland, California. The following has been edited for length and clarity.

I'm in a very unique position in the coffee industry, where I get to speak to almost everyone in the supply chain.

At Royal Coffee, we import beans and sell them to coffee roasters. Our business model also includes classes and the coffee we sell at The Crown café.

On April 10, we raised our café prices by 50 cents for every drink, except our $2 dark roast, which is an entry point for people who might not be used to specialty coffee and specialty prices.

That's because, as an importer, we are the first ones hit by the actual cost of tariffs. At the ports we get billed, literally, for the tariffs.

We bring in a lot of coffee from Brazil, Colombia, Ethiopia, and Indonesia, as well as every coffee-producing country in Central America and Tanzania, Kenya, and Uganda. In total, we buy coffee from more than 30 countries.

President Donald Trump paused some of his proposed tariffs, but we're still being impacted by a 10% increase at the point of import for all those countries except Mexico. That erases our entire profit margin if we absorb it.

I think the coffee industry at large is facing an unprecedented crisis. We have to figure out how to make rising costs and uncertainty about tariffs and climate change sustainable for everyone involved, and part of that equation is asking our customers to pay a little bit more for a cup of coffee.

Everything's expensive all the time now

The tariffs come on top of historic high coffee-bean prices for the entire calendar year of 2025. That's been attributed to bad weather in Brazil and Vietnam, the world's two largest coffee producers.

Energy and labor costs continue to go up, too. Shipping costs have also gone up astronomically over the past couple of years. The cost of wholesale, unroasted coffee is already double or sometimes triple what people are used to paying.

I don't see a lot of real, meaningful relief on the horizon.

I was just speaking to a small roaster in Cleveland, Ohio, who's raising his prices. I've had a conversation like that with folks almost every day this year so far. So there was a pre-tariff concern about cost, and then the tariffs hit.

More sticker shock for cheap coffees

For people who are used to very cheap coffee — whether that's the bottom shelf at the grocery store or the gas station at the corner — I think at some point those coffees are going to be diluted by some non-coffee product like vegetable pulp or their prices are going to be raised in ways that will shock the average customer.

I think there's going to be a little less sticker shock for the fancy café customer who's used to paying $6 or $7 for a pour-over or a latte. The difference between $5.50 and $6 for a cappuccino at our cafe is very different from a $1.50 styrofoam coffee cup going up to $3.

We can't just turn up coffee production in the US. Even if we could, the only places that are growing it commercially, volume-wise, are Hawaii and Puerto Rico, and a very, very small amount here in California. They're in no way able to scale up production to make up for the 99% of coffee that we get from everywhere else in the world.

Coffee has been undervalued for a long time

There's been a long-standing desperation in people who produce coffee in many places in the world, that they're not being paid enough.

That breaks my heart, because I don't want to participate in an industry that's built on exploitation. I don't think that's us in the specialty coffee world, but there is a problematic legacy that predates all of us.

The good news is that for the past 20 or 25 years, a lot of folks like myself are trying to increase awareness about good coffee, and how it does cost more, and how coffee has been undervalued for a long time. So there's an opportunity, I think, for increased awareness — if we don't lose customers to alternative caffeine sources.

• Lauren Sánchez launched to the edge of space on a Blue Origin rocket Monday morning.
• It's the first all-female crew since 1963 when Valentina Tereshkova became the first woman in space.
• Sánchez said she was "so proud of this crew" for their bravery.

Jeff Bezos' fiancée Lauren Sánchez made history on Monday, becoming part of the first all-female crew to launch toward space in the 21st century. The last time was in 1963 when cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova became the first woman in space.

Katy Perry, Gayle King, Aisha Bowe, Amanda Nguyen, and Kerianne Flynn joined Sánchez on the flight.

"It was a feeling of joy and camaraderie. It was a feeling of gratefulness. It was a feeling that we're doing this," Sánchez said shortly after returning to Earth.

The journalist and helicopter pilot rode Blue Origin's New Shepard rocket, which takes space tourists to 62 miles above Earth's surface — to the Kármán line, which is the internationally recognized boundary between space and our planet.

The rocket is named after the NASA astronaut Alan Shepard, who conducted a similar, brief suborbital flight to become the first American in space in 1961.

"Alan Shepard did this same exact flight and he became the first American in space, and six women just did the same flight," Sánchez said.

'More connected than you realize'

The six women experienced weightlessness for about three minutes before falling back to Earth. Looking out of the rocket's windows in those few moments of zero-G, Sánchez said she felt connected.

"Earth looked so, it was so quiet," she said adding that, "You look at it and you're like — we're all in this together. That's all I could think about, like, we're so connected, more connected than you realize."

Astronauts have long described similar, overwhelming feelings of awe, unity, and appreciation for Earth's fragility as they gaze down on our planet from space. They call it "the overview effect."

Shepard himself said he cried when he saw Earth from the moon during an Apollo mission in 1971. The Star Trek actor William Shatner also cried when he returned from a suborbital Blue Origin flight in 2021, saying: "It has to do with the enormity and the quickness and the suddenness of life and death."

Sánchez said she was proud of her fellow crew members' bravery while venturing into the unknown.

"Gayle — you know we were just talking in the capsule — doesn't even have ear piercings, she's so afraid to do anything. And she got in that capsule, and I think it profoundly changed her," Sánchez said.

Bezos founded Blue Origin in 2000 and has been launching tourists to space since the billionaire himself flew on New Shepard's maiden passenger flight in 2021.

Bezos founded Blue Origin with the idea to help move heavy, polluting industries off our planet and into space, and has said the company could lay the groundwork for one trillion people to live and work in space someday.

This goal is still a long way off but Blue Origin is making progress.

Although New Shepard can only skim the edge of space, in January the company flew its orbital mega-rocket New Glenn for the first time. New Glenn is designed to lift heavy payloads to space and the moon.

• Jeff Bezos founded Blue Origin in 2000 and has been competing with SpaceX.
• Blue Origin has two rockets and is developing a moon lander and multifunctional spacecraft.
• Here's the rocket company's history, mission, customers, and biggest rocket launches.

Blue Origin's rockets are making a name for themselves in the private space race.

Jeff Bezos founded the aerospace company in 2000 with the idea of moving heavy, polluting industries off our planet and into space, where millions of people would live and work. The company's name, Blue Origin, refers to Earth.

Bezos called Blue Origin his "most important work," in a 2018 interview with Axel Springer.

Blue Origin's mission is to "build a road to space" by developing reliable, cost-effective rockets.

Blue Origin is vying for space industry dominance as spaceflight companies aim for the moon and Mars. The company's New Shepard rockets regularly fly tourists on short flights to the edge of space. Its New Glenn rocket is designed to carry heavy missions into orbit or to the moon. Blue Origin engineers are also developing a moon lander, called Blue Moon, for future NASA use.

Blue Origin's ambitions have been a source of rivalry between Bezos and Elon Musk, whose company SpaceX remains the world's leading rocket-launch provider.

History and founding

Bezos has said he founded Blue Origin with the vision of giant space stations hosting entire mega-cities of people, based on concepts proposed by the physicist Gerard K. O'Neill in 1976.

Bezos told Lex Fridman in 2023 that he wants to support one trillion humans living throughout the solar system. He added that would result in 1,000 Mozarts and 1,000 Einsteins at any given time.

"We could easily support a civilization that large with all the resources in the solar system," he added.

Still, Bezos says in a video on Blue Origin's website that "Earth is the best planet."

Blue Origin did not initially seem to improve Jeff Bezos' net worth, though. Bezos later revealed, in 2017, that he was selling Amazon stock to finance the rocket company.

The company kept a very low profile for its first two decades. Blue Origin's first rocket launch was in 2015. That was an uncrewed test flight of the suborbital New Shepard rocket.

Bezos himself flew on New Shepard's first passenger flight in July 2021, making history as the first billionaire to reach the Kármán line, which is a somewhat arbitrary but internationally recognized boundary at 100 kilometers (62 miles) altitude. It's sometimes referred to as the beginning of outer space.

Bezos stepped down as Amazon CEO that same year, saying he wanted to focus on Blue Origin.

In May 2023, Blue Origin won a NASA contract to land astronauts on the moon, after suing the agency for awarding its first moon-landing contract to only SpaceX. The company lost the lawsuit.

Blue Origin's super-sized orbital rocket, New Glenn, launched for the first time in January 2025.

In April 2025, the company clinched its first Pentagon launch contracts.

Blue Origin's CEO is Dave Limp. The company is headquartered in Kent, Washington, and has rocket launch facilities in West Texas. It has also used a launchpad at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida.

Blue Origin rockets

Blue Origin has one suborbital rocket and one orbital rocket. It's also developing a moon lander and a moon-orbiting spacecraft.

New Glenn

Blue Origin's New Glenn rocket is designed to launch missions into Earth's orbit and to the moon, with a reusable booster to reduce launch costs.

New Glenn is named after the first American to reach orbit, John Glenn. Seven BE-4 engines on the booster give it enough power to carry up to 45 metric tons into space.

New Glenn belongs to a new generation of the largest, most powerful rockets ever built, next to SpaceX's Starship and NASA's new moon rocket, the Space Launch System.

Blue Origin had begun developing an orbital launch system by 2013, and New Glenn finally made its inaugural flight in January 2025.

New Glenn's first launch was a major leap forward for Blue Origin. It was the first time a rocket company successfully reached orbit on its first-ever attempt.

Here's how the rocket's launch works: As New Glenn screams through the skies, the booster does most of the heavy lifting. Once its fuel is spent and the rocket is on a strong trajectory toward space, the booster separates from the rocket's second stage, which continues onward using BE-3U engines.

Blue Origin aims to land the booster on a platform in the ocean, but on New Glenn's first flight, the booster was lost as it fell back to Earth. Eventually, the company wants to reuse boosters up to 25 times.

According to Blue Origin, the company is already working with customers for New Glenn missions, including AST SpaceMobile, telecommunications companies, and the US Space Force.

New Shepard

Blue Origin's New Shepard rocket is designed for suborbital flights which skim the edge of space. It has been flying tourist crews of up to six passengers since 2021.

Bezos himself flew on New Shepard's first flight, then took the Star Trek actor William Shatner on the rocket's second flight later that year.

Upon landing, Shatner said seeing the blackness of space was like looking at death, and added, "I hope I never recover from this."

Blue Origin plans to fly its first all-female passenger crew aboard New Shepard on April 14, including Gayle King, Katy Perry, and Bezos's fiancée, Lauren Sánchez.

Flights on New Shepard last about 11 minutes. Passengers get about three minutes of microgravity, where they can unbuckle from their seats, drift around the spaceship's cabin, and peer out the windows at Earth, before strapping back in for the plummet home.

Because it doesn't need to push itself all the way into orbit, New Shepard is a tiny rocket at just 61 feet tall. BE-3PM engines launch the rocket, then re-fire to softly land it back on the ground. New Shepard is completely reusable.

New Shepard's development involved nine years of testing, which included 16 test flights and three tests of the capsule's emergency escape system.

The vehicle is named after astronaut Alan Shepard, who was the first American to travel to space. Unlike Glenn's orbital flight, Shepard's flight was suborbital.

Blue Moon

Blue Origin is developing the Blue Moon vehicle to land missions on the surface of the moon, launched by the New Glenn rocket.

The company is developing variations of the spacecraft for cargo — up to three metric tons of it — and human crews.

Blue Origin is building BE-7 engines for the lander. The engines are designed to operate in the vacuum of space with enough power to land heavy missions on the moon.

Blue Origin is developing the lander under a $3.4 billion NASA contract.

The contract calls for Blue Origin to conduct an uncrewed test mission to the lunar surface before carrying two astronauts there in 2029.

For NASA astronaut missions, Blue Moon must be able to dock to the Lunar Gateway space station the agency is planning to build in lunar orbit.

Blue Ring

In 2023 Blue Origin announced it was working on a highly maneuverable spacecraft called Blue Ring.

The company plans to sell Blue Ring missions to other companies, which can put more than 3,000 kilograms (about 6,600 pounds) of hardware on board.

Blue Origin says the vehicle can enter a variety of orbits between Earth and the moon.

"Blue Ring addresses two of the most difficult challenges in spaceflight today: growing space infrastructure and increasing mobility on-orbit," Paul Ebertz, the senior vice president of Blue Origin's in-space systems, said in a statement.

The first New Glenn launch carried a prototype of Blue Ring.

Blue Origin vs. SpaceX

Blue Origin and SpaceX have competed for NASA contracts and clout. SpaceX frequently wins the competition.

SpaceX was founded two years later than Blue Origin, but it was launching rockets to orbit by 2008. Its highly influential orbital Falcon 9 rocket first began flying in 2010. Blue Origin didn't launch its first orbital rocket until 2025.

Some of Bezos' space projects mirror Musk's.

For example, like SpaceX's Starship, Blue Origin's New Glenn is designed to be a reusable super-heavy-lift mega-rocket.

While SpaceX launches thousands of Starlink internet satellites into orbit, Bezos's counterpart — Amazon's Kuiper satellites — have been building to their first launch.

At the New York Times DealBook Summit in December 2024, Bezos said that Blue Origin "is not a very good business, yet."

Still, he added, "It's going to be the best business that I've ever been involved in."

• Amara Nwuneli won a $12,500 Earth Prize for turning a dump into a playground in Nigeria.
• Nwuneli plans to use the award money to build three more parks.
• She hopes the green spaces can help clean up trash and combat extreme heat and flooding.

A teenager in Nigeria just won an international award for using recycled materials to transform a trash-dumping ground into a park with a playground, and she's not stopping there.

On Wednesday, 17-year-old Amara Nwuneli was awarded $12,500 in the 2025 Earth Prize competition, which casts a worldwide net for teenagers working on projects for environmental sustainability. The program provides mentorship and support for teens like Nwuneli to further develop their ideas.

Nwuneli said she plans to use the prize money to build three more parks.

"I'm excited for the future," she told Business Insider.

She wants to create more green spaces and shade in Lagos, a city of 17 million people where less than 3% of the land area is green, according to a 2023 analysis.

As cities get hotter across the planet, green space is critical. Trees and vegetation provide shade, which cools the ground, but they also help reflect sunlight away and release moisture. Unlike pavement, green spaces don't absorb much heat, but they do absorb rainwater and help reduce flooding.

Parks and greenery are also good for human health. Studies suggest they can help cut pollution exposure, improve mood, and even reduce mortality.

Turning a dump into a playground

Nwuneli became concerned about the climate crisis after floods overwhelmed her home in 2020, displacing her family. She said her parents' spice business was affected too, since the rains washed away crops.

As a self-described "theater kid," she wanted to get the story out, so she started recording and sharing videos about the floods. She says her efforts raised 2 million Nigerian Naira (roughly $5,000 in 2020 dollars) to help rebuild two local schools.

That was the beginning of the youth NGO she founded, called Preserve Our Roots. They produced a documentary about the climate crisis in Africa in 2023, which you can watch on Youtube.

She said the reaction to her documentary made her want to help Nigerians connect more with the environment.

"People came to us and was like, but I don't see it in my community. I don't see nature," Nwuneli said.

So the group decided to bring the nature home — starting with a small park that wouldn't require a lengthy government approval process.

At a site in Ikota, Nigeria, Nwuneli worked with local artisans to procure reclaimed metal and wood, as well as tires that were laying around the area, to build a slide, swings, and climbing wall.

The area, which Nwuneli described as a slum, is flood-prone. Indeed, many of the surrounding houses are built on stilts, she said. So, with the help of donations and volunteers, Nwuneli's NGO planted flood-resistant trees around the playground — among 300 trees she says they planted across the wider area.

They first homed in on this dump site in November. On March 1, they opened the park for schoolchildren.

"I remember when the children were like, 'now something we can actually call beautiful.' It kind of broke my heart," Nwuneli said.

In her eyes, though, this is just a pilot park.

A Central Park for Lagos

With the Earth Prize funding, Nwuneli is planning three more parks. They won't be playgrounds like the one that opened in March, she says, but multi-functional community hubs with gardens, greenhouses, and waste collection sites.

She's aiming to convert a large landfill in Lagos, pending government approval. For the other two parks, she's targeting the neighboring Nigerian states of Ogun and Oyo, which are also experiencing floods and droughts that will likely get worse as global temperatures rise.

"I'm not satisfied. I feel like every community needs this," Nwuneli said.

Her ultimate dream, she added, is to have a Central Park in Lagos.

The Earth Prize chooses winners for seven world regions. Nwuneli is the winner for Africa. A public vote opens on Saturday to select a global winner.

• Coffee shops are starting to raise their prices in response to President Donald Trump's 10% tariffs.
• The US has limited coffee production, so beans have to be imported.
• Some coffee entrepreneurs told BI they need to cushion their business against tariff uncertainty.

Don't be surprised if your next cup of coffee costs more.

Coffee shops in the US have begun to pass along tariff costs straight to customers' wallets.

Though President Donald Trump put a 90-day pause on most of his reciprocal tariffs on Wednesday, his 10% blanket levies remain in effect. Some coffee importers and cafés are now raising their prices in response.

"That erases our entire profit margin if we absorb it," Chris Kornman, the director of education at the importer Royal Coffee, told Business Insider. He called the situation "an unprecedented crisis" for the coffee industry.

The Crown, a specialty coffee shop that Royal owns in Oakland, California, announced across-the-board price increases on Thursday. All of its drinks will cost an additional 50 cents from now on, Kornman said, with the exception of its $2 dark roast, which is an entry-level drink for customers who aren't used to a natural-processed pour-over or washed Rwandan espresso.

"Unless we get a resolution in Washington soon, this appears to be the new normal, unfortunately," Max Nicholas-Fulmer, the CEO of Royal Coffee, said in a statement shared with BI.

Other coffee shops have also announced price hikes. The Wakery, an Illinois-based late-night coffeehouse, posted a statement to Facebook on Wednesday informing customers that it would be increasing the price of all of its coffee drinks due to the tariffs.

"Our coffee supplier needed to raise their wholesale price, and in order to make our ends meet, we need to respond by raising our coffee prices," it said.

Local reports also indicate that cafés in Austin, Grand Rapids, Michigan, and New Jersey are raising their prices or considering doing so.

Just the beginning

TJ Semanchin, co-owner of Wonderstate Coffee, told BI a 10% increase for a cup of coffee is only "the starting point."

The US is the second largest coffee importer in the world, with Brazil, Colombia, and Vietnam making up around 60% of its coffee supply, according to a 2024 United States Department of Agriculture report. Before he announced pauses to some of the country-specific increases on Wednesday, Trump's sweeping "Liberation Day" tariffs varied by country, with a 46% rate for Vietnam and 10% for both Brazil and Colombia. The blanket 10% tariffs remain for all three countries.

"The coffee market is getting zigzagged in every direction because there's so much uncertainty and volatility in everything," Semanchin said.

Uncertainty summer

Shop owners say tariff whiplash doesn't help. When Trump initially announced 25% tariffs on Mexico, Kornman said staff at Royal Coffee scrambled to scale back its Mexican coffee purchases and notify customers that it might charge more for those beans. Now, Mexico's agricultural products aren't affected. Royal has stopped buying coffee from India in case its tariffs go up to 27%, as Trump initially proposed.

"To quote our logistics coordinator, we're digging holes in all the wrong places," Kornman said.

Pierre and Jackie Marquez, who own Tasa Coffee Roasters in Chicago, say they already bumped up their prices in February because of overall rising costs. If Trump's reciprocal tariffs go into effect at the end of his 90-day pause, the Marquez's say they'll have to increase prices again.

"It's almost a guarantee," Pierre Marquez said.

Domestic coffee production is largely limited to Hawaii, Puerto Rico, and small parts of California. Those farms can't replace coffee imports, Kornman said.

The cost of coffee beans was already creeping upward before Trump's tariffs, due in part to shipping costs and extra-warm weather in Brazil, he added.

"There's also the threat of a global recession on the table at the moment, and that makes it pretty unsavory to talk about raising prices when people may not be able to afford a cup of coffee," Kornman said.

"I don't expect to raise prices again in an ideal world," he added. Still, "it's really hard to predict."

• Colossal Biosciences says it created three wolf pups with the genes of ancient, extinct dire wolves.
• The startup's scientists call this "de-extinction," but other experts say these aren't dire wolves.
• What is certain is that these three wolf pups are the first of their kind.

The beginnings of a real-life "Jurassic Park" are playing out in a high-security, undisclosed location where three unusually large, fluffy, white wolf pups are growing up.

The gene-editing startup Colossal Biosciences, which recently raised $400 million for its de-extinction and conservation missions, announced the pups' existence on Monday, saying they are the first living dire wolves since the species went extinct some 12,500 years ago.

Brothers Romulus and Remus were born in October, followed by female pup Khaleesi in January — all delivered by Caesarean section from their hound-dog surrogate moms to avoid complications from their large size.

"It's the first time that we see an animal that carries multiple genes from an extinct species," Love Dalén, a professor of evolutionary genomics who specializes in mammoth DNA and sits on Colossal's Scientific Advisory Board, told Business Insider in an email.

Colossal Biosciences says these are dire wolves. Some geneticists say they aren't.

"I wouldn't call this the world's first de-extinction. I am not necessarily against the initiative, but these are not dire wolves," Pontus Skoglund, a geneticist who leads an ancient DNA lab at the Francis Crick Institute, told BI in an email.

Even if they were real dire wolves, other scientists say, it may not be a good idea to bring them back.

How Colossal Biosciences made its wolves

Colossal acknowledges its animals aren't perfect genetic matches to extinct dire wolves.

"It's not possible to create something that is 100% genetically identical in every way to a species that used to be alive," Beth Shapiro, Colossal's chief science officer, told BI.

For one thing, scientists don't have a complete genome for dire wolves. Shapiro said they filled in some gaps by extracting more DNA from the best available samples of ancient dire wolves — a 13,000-year-old tooth and a 72,000-year-old skull.

They say they did an ancestral analysis of that genome and determined, for the first time, that the dire wolf's closest living relative is a gray wolf.

In the end, Colossal says it decided to target 20 edits in 14 genes to make pups with the large size, white fur color, extra-muscular legs, and other key traits they think dire wolves had.

Those dire wolf traits have been lost in the lineage of canids, the company's CEO Ben Lamm told BI, so reviving the relevant genes "de-extincted" them.

The startup's scientists created embryos from this new genome and implanted them in hound dog surrogates.

Why these 'dire wolves' are controversial

"Would a chimpanzee with 20 gene edits be called human?" Skoglund asked.

To defend his dire wolves, Lamm pointed to the film "Jurassic Park," in which scientists use frog DNA to fill in gaps in ancient dinosaur DNA sequences.

"Are they dinosaurs? Or are they genetically modified organisms that have been engineered with ancient DNA and frog DNA and all this other stuff?" he asked.

Lamm says this is a philosophical question about how you define a species. Vincent Lynch, a scientist who uses genomics to study evolutionary history, disagrees.

"It's not a dire wolf. It's a cloned gray wolf that they transgenically modified to make it look like what we think dire wolves looked like," Lynch, who is a professor at the University at Buffalo, told BI. "We don't even really know what they looked like."

Lynch added that the creatures in Jurassic Park would not be real dinosaurs either. Their frog genes might influence their behavior. Maybe they would hop around. Maybe they would be able to change sex like frogs, which is what happens in the movie.

"These are grey wolves with an impressive but ultimately small number of precise changes to their genomes," Kevin Daly, a paleogeneticist at Trinity College Dublin, told BI in an email. "It might be best to think of these as being inspired by dire wolves."

Bridging the divide between a grey wolf and a dire wolf would require more complex alterations, like deleting whole sections of the genome, Daly added.

Complicating matters is the fact that Colossal Biosciences has not published this work in a peer-reviewed journal. Lamm said it plans to submit a paper.

Daly said that, without a scientific manuscript from Colossal, "it is difficult for the scientific community to scrutinize its approach and claims."

Colossal staff plans to monitor the three animals to see how their dire-wolf genes show up as the pups mature. They're looking for bigger muscles and a slightly different head shape than unmodified adult grey wolves.

"It's hard to tell that in puppies," Lamm said.

Why de-extinction?

Lamm says the company is striving for "functional de-extinction," which means reviving the traits of ancient animals like dire wolves, dodo birds, or woolly mammoths just enough for the new animals to play the same ecological role as their ancient counterparts.

Colossal's classic example is a new woolly mammoth that can walk the plains of the Arctic, stamping away winter snow and beating down tree growth to form a cold grassland. This "mammoth steppe" would, in theory, absorb more carbon and prevent permafrost from thawing, slowing the climate crisis.

A Colossal mammoth doesn't need to be exactly the same as an ancient woolly mammoth. It basically just needs to be a cold-adapted elephant.

Dalén said he sees the new animals as "Dire Wolf 1.0," adding that, "The work presented here is just the beginning, and shows that Colossal could, in principle, keep doing edits of additional genes if they want."

The movie "Jurassic Park" isn't particularly flattering to this idea. The dinosaurs use their frog DNA to change sex and reproduce, threatening to overwhelm their human captors.

With Colossal, Lynch has a similar concern — not about human-eating mammoths, but about unintended consequences.

"Maybe it doesn't behave like a woolly mammoth or a dire wolf," Lynch said. After all, wolves and elephants are highly social animals that learn many basic behaviors from their parents.

These "dire wolves" are the first of their kind. All they have is their genetics.

• Chewing gum releases hundreds to thousands of microplastics into your mouth, a new study suggests.
• Chewing gum's base ingredient is synthetic rubber, which is a type of plastic.
• A stick of gum is a relatively small source of microplastics, but a chewing habit could add up.

Microplastics are flowing out of gum as you chew it, preliminary results of a new study suggest.

The burst of flavor in the first few minutes of chewing a stick of gum comes from the hundreds to thousands of microplastics the gum is releasing into your saliva, said the study's lead author, Sanjay Mohanty.

Indeed, the base ingredient of chewing gum — the part that makes it chewy — is synthetic rubber. That's plastic.

"That's something very few consumers know," Mohanty, an engineering professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, told Business Insider.

"You are eating a material that is made of plastic. At least 2% of that is plastic," he said, referring to a piece of gum.

To be sure, microplastics are everywhere. Countless products shed them in your home. They're in your dust, food, and drinking water. They're in soil and oceans all over the world — from the Mariana Trench to the top of Mount Everest. They've been found in human blood, poop, hearts, testicles, placentas, and breast milk.

An especially offputting study recently found human brains potentially contained enough microplastics to make a spoon.

Mohanty said, "99% of things I see around me are plastic, so I should not be surprised to find plastic in everything, including my own body."

Research has found correlations between microplastics and inflammation, infertility, lung and colon cancers, and risk of heart attacks and stroke. However, it's unclear if microplastics caused or contributed to those conditions.

"My goal is just to inform what we could do differently," Mohanty said.

Chewing less gum, it seems, is one thing we can do.

Mohanty presented these findings, which have not undergone peer review through a scientific journal, at the spring meeting of the American Chemical Society last week.

"Chewing gum was not something on my radar," Britta Baechler, the director of ocean plastics research at the nonprofit Ocean Conservancy, who recently co-authored a study on microplastics in food, told BI.

"I think scientists are getting really creative with trying to get a more complete picture of our exposure to microplastics," she added.

Natural gum released plastic, too

Mohanty and the graduate students in his lab chose five brands of synthetic gum and gave seven pieces of each brand to a single person, who chewed each piece for up to 20 minutes, rinsing with clean water in between pieces to clear out residual plastic.

Knowing the plastic base of gum, Mohanty wasn't surprised when he measured hundreds to thousands of tiny plastic polymers swimming in the person's saliva as they chewed each piece.

He was surprised, however, when they ran the same tests with five brands of natural gums, which are made from plant materials like chicle instead of a rubber base.

Natural gums resulted in about the same quantity of microplastics in the chewer's saliva.

They even found the same plastic polymers in both types of gum: polyolefins, polyethylene terephthalates, polyacrylamide, and polystyrene. Those types of plastics are also used in food wraps, shopping bags, car parts, egg cartons, and packing peanuts.

Because of the measuring techniques they used, this experiment was only able to detect plastic particles 20 micrometers wide or larger. That's about one-fifth the width of a human hair. It's likely that gum also releases plastic of even smaller size — nanoplastics — Mohanty said.

Should you chew gum?

There's good news — sort of.

The researchers found the most microplastics within the first two minutes of chewing gum. After eight minutes, 94% of the plastic particles they detected had already been released.

A simple way to cut back on plastic is to chew your gum for longer instead of popping a new piece, Lisa Lowe, a graduate student who ran this study with Mohanty, said in a press release.

In the grand scheme of your daily microplastic ingestion, a stick of gum probably isn't much. You ingest billions more microplastics from a cup of tea made with a plastic-containing teabag (which is more common than you might think), a 2019 study found.

Still, a gum-chewing habit could add up. Based on their findings, the researchers calculated that someone who chews 160 to 180 small sticks of gum per year would ingest about 30,000 microplastic particles annually.

Mohanty said his wife stopped chewing gum altogether after hearing their results.

"Why eat chewing gum and directly ingest plastics? Chewing gum is non-essential," Mohanty said.

If you do chew, Mohanty added, throw your gum in the garbage instead of leaving chewed-up plastic in the street.

• Archaeologists found a new pharaoh's tomb at Anubis Mountain in Egypt.
• The tomb is from the mysterious Abydos Dynasty of warrior kings in a chaotic historical era.
• The pharaoh's identity is a mystery for now. Check out his tomb.

Archaeologists have discovered a mysterious new king of ancient Egypt, buried in a network of tombs at Anubis Mountain.

"Discovering king's tombs, new pharaohs, are few and far between," Josef Wegner, a leader of the team that uncovered the new tomb, told Business Insider.

Researchers don't know this pharaoh's identity because they think ancient grave robbers damaged the marking of his name on the tomb wall. Still, he could help illuminate a forgotten era of Egyptian history from about 1640 BCE to 1540 BCE, when warrior pharaohs battled each other for territory.

"It's a really fascinating period of turmoil, conflict," said Wegner, who teaches Egyptian archaeology at the University of Pennsylvania and curates the Penn Museum's Egyptian section.

"It gives birth to the new kingdom, the famous golden age of many of the well-known pharaohs like King Tut and the Ramses kings," he added.

Take a peek inside this unknown pharaoh's tomb.

Wegner's team excavated the 3,600-year-old tomb beneath 23 feet of sand at the necropolis of Anubis Mountain.

It's part of Abydos, one of the oldest cities of ancient Egypt and once home to the little-known Abydos Dynasty, which archaeologists believe was one of several warring kingdoms across Egypt during the region's Second Intermediate Period.

"It's a mystery dynasty," Wegner said of the Abydos kings.

Today, the ancient city is home to a sprawling archaeological site, where the Abydos kings turned the necropolis into a royal cemetery.

Wegner's team had previously discovered a tomb in the area in 2014, housing the remains of a pharaoh named Seneb Kay.

Seneb Kay was evidence for the wars of that time period. Ancient tomb raiders had pulled his body out of its burial site and left it in another chamber. Centuries later, researchers examined the skeleton and found 22 traumatic wounds in his bones, including battle-ax blows that cracked his skull. They concluded he'd died in battle.

The walls of Seneb Kay's tomb were adorned with colorful paintings, including hieroglyphs of the king's name.

Then they discovered seven other undecorated tombs surrounding his, for a total of eight Abydos kings.

"We believed we had exhausted all the evidence until this last winter season at Abydos, where we began working in a new section of the site," Wegner said. "Lo and behold, there's another one of these tombs which is much larger in size than the ones we had found previously."

Like Seneb Kay's tomb, this one was decorated with paintings — including hieroglyphs of the pharaoh's name.

To Wegner's dismay, though, ancient tomb robbers had damaged the hieroglyph painting and made the name illegible.

"It was, of course, a little frustrating that we could see where his name had been preserved," Wegner said.

In the tomb, a series of chambers with 16-foot-high vaulted brick ceilings led to the limestone burial chamber.

"It was such a large, impressive structure," Wegner said. He added that the size of the tomb and its vaults "may have ultimately drawn the tomb robbers to this location."

This pharaoh was probably a predecessor of Seneb Kay.

From small dedicated monuments in the region, Wegner knows of two Abydos kings who haven't been found yet, who could be the person in this new tomb. Their names are Senaiib and Paentjeni.

Wegner still hopes to confirm the new king's identity.

The archaeological team may find clues as it excavates the surrounding area. Wegner said they've finished excavating the tomb's interior since discovering it in January.

One detail gives him hope: They haven't yet found this mystery pharaoh's canopic jars, which store a mummy's organs.

Sometimes tomb robbers would grab and later discard canopic jars, Wegner said. It's also common for such jars to feature the name of the mummified pharaoh. He hopes to find a fragment of one of those jars with this king's name.

"That would be an immediate positive identification," Wegner said.

Wegner plans to return to the site this summer for further excavation.

They have a "sizable area" where they want to keep digging, he said, both for further evidence from this tomb and to check for other tombs, too.

The Anubis Mountain area has yielded much more history than Wegner expected when he began working there in the 1990s.

"We've realized it's a full royal cemetery," he said, "like a Valley of the Kings."