Bruce lost his upper beak in an accident when he was very young.

Ximena Nelson

Bruce lost his upper beak in an accident when he was very young. Ximena Nelson

Bruce “jousting” with another male.

Alex Grabham

Bruce “jousting” with another male. Alex Grabham

Bruce runs and jumps to “joust” with opponents from a distance.

Ximena Nelson

Bruce runs and jumps to “joust” with opponents from a distance. Ximena Nelson

Bruce “jousting” with another male. Alex Grabham

Bruce runs and jumps to “joust” with opponents from a distance. Ximena Nelson

The key to Bruce’s success and overall chill mood? His unique beak-jousting technique, which enabled him to quickly displace his rivals. At close range, Bruce would extend his neck to thrust at opponents, adding a run or jump to the motion when attacking from farther away. Other non-disabled males mostly bit downward onto an opponent’s neck, while Bruce mostly engaged in forward thrusts and targeted the back, head, wings, and legs of his opponents. He kicked at the same rate as other kea but used his half-beak much more frequently.

According to the authors, there are only two other cases in the scientific literature that are comparable to Bruce’s ingenious adaptation. In one case, the late Jane Goodall observed an alpha male chimpanzee named Fabian who lost the use of his arm due to polio; his brother became the new alpha male. Fabian managed to achieve “beta” status via association, and also by developing unusual charging displays. The other case concerned an old Japanese macaque whose ability to walk gradually deteriorated; the macaque maintained his alpha status by allying with the alpha female. But Bruce achieved his alpha status on his own through dominance, not via a useful alliance.

“Bruce shows us that behavioral innovation can help bypass physical disability, at least in species with the cognitive flexibility to develop new solutions,” said co-author Alexander Grabham of Te Whare Wānanga o Waitaha/University of Canterbury in New Zealand. “Previous research has shown links between large brains, behavioral flexibility, and survival at the species level. Bruce demonstrates how those links play out in a single individual across traits that matter day-to-day, such as social dominance. Our findings also raise an important welfare question: if a disabled animal can innovate its way to success, well-intentioned interventions like prosthetics might not always improve their quality of life. Sometimes the animal can do better without help.”

Current Biology, 2026. DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2026.03.004 (About DOIs).

https://arstechnica.com/science/2026/04/meet-bruce-the-beak-jousting-parrot/

The third flight of Blue Origin’s heavy-lift New Glenn launcher began Sunday with the company’s first successful reflight of an orbital-class booster, but ended with a setback for Jeff Bezos’ flagship rocket, a key element in NASA’s Artemis lunar program.

The 321-foot-tall (98-meter) New Glenn launch vehicle ignited its seven methane-fueled BE-4 engines at 7:25 am EDT (11:25 UTC) Sunday, beginning a slow climb from its launch pad at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida.

The main engines, each producing more than a half-million pounds of thrust, accelerated the rocket past the speed of sound in about a minute-and-a-half. Three minutes into the flight, the booster switched off its engines and fell away from New Glenn’s upper stage, powered by two BE-3U engines burning liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen.

New Glenn’s first stage continued a downrange parabolic arc, briefly soaring into space before guiding itself toward Blue Origin’s landing platform in the Atlantic Ocean nearly 400 miles southeast of Cape Canaveral. Reigniting its engines for two braking burns, the booster settled onto the ship for a smoky but on-target touchdown less than 10 minutes after liftoff.

The landing marked the end of the second flight for this booster, named Never Tell Me The Odds, after debuting with a good launch and recovery on Blue Origin’s previous New Glenn mission in November. Blue Origin, founded and owned by Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, has landed and reused its smaller New Shepard suborbital booster numerous times, but New Glenn surpasses New Shepard in difficulty and scale. It flies higher, travels faster, and is three times the height of the New Shepard.

Technicians installed new engines on the booster for Sunday’s flight, but the Blue Origin intends to reuse the engines from the November launch on future New Glenn missions, according to Dave Limp, the company’s CEO.

New Glenn allows Blue Origin to reach into a broader market for launches to low-Earth orbit and beyond. SpaceX has shown it can recycle a Falcon 9 booster for reflight in just nine days, and launch Falcon 9s five or more times in one week using a fleet of reusable boosters and three active launch pads. Blue Origin officials expect reusing New Glenn boosters will unlock a vastly faster launch rate for themselves.

https://arstechnica.com/space/2026/04/errant-upper-stage-spoils-blue-origins-success-in-reusing-new-glenn-booster/

Back in the control room, I sit down and start charging the capacitor banks. At this point, there’s no going back except for an emergency shutdown, and that means losing the shot and waiting for everything to cool down.

“Charging.”

The room goes silent. Everyone’s eyes are on the monitors. Nobody talks.

I typically will share a glance with the researcher whose project the shot is for – today it’s Joe, a visiting scientist from Los Alamos National Lab, who designed the target we’re about to vaporize. He’s gripping his coffee cup like it owes him money. I turn back to the console.

“Charge complete. Firing system shot in three, two, one. Fire.”

I press the button. A loud thud rolls through the building as all that stored energy dumps into the beam. The monitors freeze, capturing everything at the moment of the shot: beam profiles, spectra, diagnostics—these metrics provide a full picture of exactly how the laser performed and whether the shot was clean. Downstairs, in the vacuum chamber, a spot smaller than a human hair just reached temperatures measured in millions of degrees.

I lean back in my chair and start recording laser parameters as everyone exhales. A radiation safety officer heads down first to check readings around the target chamber before anyone else can enter. The experimental team follows to collect data.

Sometimes it all works perfectly. Sometimes a shutter fails to open and you lose the shot.

For example, one afternoon in 2023, we’d spent three hours preparing for a high-priority shot. Target aligned. Capacitors charged. I pressed the button and heard nothing. A shutter had failed somewhere in the chain. The monitors stayed frozen, showing black. Nobody said anything. I wrote SHOT FAILED in the logbook and started the hourlong cooldown sequence. That’s the part they don’t show in movies: sitting in silence, waiting to try again. We got the shot four hours later.

This anticipation is all part of the job: hours of patience for 10 seconds you never quite get used to. Everything happens underneath a campus where thousands of people walk above, unaware that for a fraction of a second, a tiny point of matter hotter than the surface of the Sun just existed below their feet.

Ahmed Helal, research scientist, The University of Texas at Austin. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

https://arstechnica.com/science/2026/04/ive-fired-one-of-americas-most-powerful-lasers-heres-what-a-shot-day-looks-like/

This will disrupt ecosystems as mesotherms are typically apex predators that exert disproportionate control on species below them in the food chain, said Edward Snelling, co-author and physiologist at the University of Pretoria.

“These species are being pushed closer to their physiological limits, which could have consequences for where they can live and how they survive,” said Snelling in a press release. “These animals are already operating on a tight energy budget, and climate change is narrowing their options even further.”

Using tiny sensors on a range of fish, including basking sharks weighing over three tons, researchers calculated how much heat fish produce and lose in real time. From this, they calculated that a one-ton warm-bodied shark may struggle to remain in waters above 62.6° Fahrenheit  (17° Celsius) without taking countermeasures. Discovering these “hidden heat budgets” could prove critical to any hope of conserving them or mapping protection areas, researchers said.

In South Africa, the stakes are both ecological and cultural. Here, great whites have emerged as a “sentinel species”: When their patterns change, it signals a deeper shift in the marine ecosystem.

While long sensationalized as feared predators, they’ve increasingly become icons of marine conservation and eco-tourism, said Stephanie Nicolaides, a marine conservation researcher at the University of the Western Cape. “Many local and international conservation narratives now position the great white not as a villain, but as a keystone species essential to maintaining ocean health,” Nicolaides said.

Declines of great white sightings in False Bay, Mossel Bay, and Gansbaai, however, are multifaceted. Though thermal relocation may be a contributor, their population decline is also linked to a history of overfishing, shark netting, and habitat destruction.

Indeed, though warming waters heighten mesotherms’ vulnerability worldwide, other manmade harms exert the most danger. “If we had to say what is the one thing that we need to urgently address for these animals, it’s the fishing problem,” said Payne. “The most acute, urgent crisis these animals face is from overfishing, and particularly now from bycatch.”

Bycatch refers to fish and other marine animals caught unintentionally by fishermen using huge nets or long lines baited with thousands of hooks.

History, however, offers a grim precedent for physiological vulnerability itself. Fossils of extinct warm-bodied species—like the infamous Megalodon shark, which reached almost 60 feet long—suggest they suffered disproportionately during past ocean temperature increases as they likely struggled to secure food to fuel their large, warm bodies.

“Today’s oceans are changing at unprecedented speeds,” Payne said. “The alarm bells are ringing loudly at this point.”

This article originally appeared on Inside Climate News, a nonprofit, non-partisan news organization that covers climate, energy, and the environment. Sign up for their newsletter here.

https://arstechnica.com/science/2026/04/great-white-sharks-are-overheating/

More swaps coming?… The Vulcan rocket is many months from returning to flight for the US military. One industry source told Ars that the Space Force may not fly another mission on Vulcan before the end of the year. Space Systems Command has moved four launches of new GPS navigation satellites from ULA to SpaceX in the past two years as Vulcan encountered delays. Col. Eric Zarybnisky, head of Space Systems Command’s Space Access office, said the military is “working through a significant number” of potential additional rocket swaps from Vulcan to another launch vehicle, likely SpaceX’s Falcon 9 or Falcon Heavy.

ESA’s first Mars rover finally has a ride. NASA confirmed Thursday that SpaceX will launch the European Space Agency’s Rosalind Franklin Mars rover, perhaps as soon as late 2028, on a Falcon Heavy rocket from Kennedy Space Center, Florida, Ars reports. So why is NASA deciding which rocket will launch a flagship European Mars mission? It’s a long story involving the search for extraterrestrial life, crippling political hatchets, and, of all things, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Ars explores the mission’s tortured history, a nearly quarter-century of broken promises, technical setbacks, and geopolitical drama.

Taking aim on Mars… The announcement is also notable because it is the first time SpaceX has won a launch contract for a mission to Mars. The red planet is the apple of Elon Musk’s eye, with utopian concepts for a Mars settlement to go along with SpaceX’s more tangible work on a massive rocket to actually fly there. This new rocket, named Starship, is still a ways away from reaching Mars. Therefore, it’s likely SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy, no slouch itself, will make the company’s first Mars run on behalf of NASA and the European Space Agency.

Next-gen Starship tested at Starbase. The new, juiced-up version of SpaceX’s Starship mega-rocket cleared a big hurdle this week on the path to its first launch, Space.com reports. That liftoff, targeted for early or mid-May, will be the 12th overall for Starship but the first for the vehicle’s “Version 3,” which is bigger and more powerful than its predecessors. The first Starship V3 vehicle fired its six Raptor engines on Tuesday while anchored on a test stand in South Texas. The static fire test follows a series of cryogenic proof tests earlier this year.

https://arstechnica.com/space/2026/04/rocket-report-starship-v3-test-fired-esas-tentative-step-toward-crew-launch/

Instead, the agency turned to Russia to launch the orbiter and rover on two Proton rockets and provide the descent system to deliver the rover to Mars. In exchange, ESA agreed to add Russian science instruments to the orbiter and rover missions. This was a boon for Russian scientific institutions. Without an international partnership like ExoMars, they lacked any realistic prospect of ever sending their own research payloads to the red planet.

Russia successfully launched the European-built ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter spacecraft on a Proton rocket in 2016. The orbiter is still operating around Mars today, returning scientific data and serving as a communications relay for NASA’s Curiosity and Perseverance rovers. A small European tech demo probe riding piggyback on the orbiter crash landed upon reaching the red planet.

Artist’s illustration of the Rosalind Franklin rover departing its landing platform on Mars.

Credit: Airbus

Additional delays pushed the launch of the ExoMars rover from 2018 until 2020. The rover, by then named for the late British chemist and DNA research pioneer Rosalind Franklin, was nearly ready for launch in 2020 when a series of parachute test failures and the COVID-19 pandemic prompted another delay until late 2022.

Everything changed again when Russian forces invaded Ukraine in February 2022. ESA severed most ties with Russia’s space agency, ending the partnership on ExoMars after all of the mission’s elements, including the Russian rocket and Mars descent stage, were already built and ready for final assembly. ESA also removed two Russian science instruments from the mission.

Once again, the US government stepped in to give the Rosalind Franklin rover a ride to Mars. NASA and ESA formalized the new agreement in 2024, with the US side committing to provide a launch vehicle, the braking engines needed to land, and small nuclear-powered heaters to keep the rover’s sensitive electronics warm during Martian nights. NASA long ago delivered a mass spectrometer for the European rover that will analyze Martian soil to look for markers of organic molecules.

ESA is providing the rover and the carrier spacecraft to ferry it to Mars. Europe is also responsible for the overall assembly of the landing platform and operating the rover on the Martian surface. Airbus built the rover in the United Kingdom and is supplying the main structure for the lander, which will settle onto Mars and deploy ramps for the rover to disembark and begin its mission. German company OHB manufactured the carrier spacecraft, or cruise stage, to shepherd the rover from Earth to Mars. Thales Alenia Space of Italy is in charge of putting all the pieces together and readying the mission for launch.

https://arstechnica.com/space/2026/04/after-a-saga-of-broken-promises-a-european-rover-finally-has-a-ride-to-mars/

To address LLMs’ tendencies toward sycophancy and overenthusiasm, OpenAI says it has tuned the model to be more skeptical, so it’s more likely to tell you when something is a bad drug target. There was a lot of talk about GPT-Rosalind’s “reasoning” and “expert-level” abilities. We were told that the former was defined as being able to work through complex, multi-step processes, while the latter was derived from the model’s performance on a handful of benchmarks.

It’s unclear whether OpenAI has tackled the hallucination issue that has plagued a variety of LLMs and can also strike when the systems are prompted to explain the steps the company took to reach its conclusions. Given past experience, it’s likely we’ll see a mix of glowing reports about unexpected connections the AI finds, as well as instances where it produces obviously erroneous suggestions.

For the moment, however, the company is limiting access due to concerns about the model’s potential for harmful outputs if asked to do something like optimize a virus’s infectivity. Only US-based entities can apply to OpenAI’s trusted access deployment structure at the moment, and the company will limit who can use it. A more limited Life Sciences Research Plugin will be made generally available.

As noted above, a number of other companies have made science-focused agentic LLMs available, but those were much less focused than GPT-Rosalind, which is biology-specific. Until we start hearing reports on the effectiveness of this new model, it’s difficult to evaluate whether this focus improves its utility.

https://arstechnica.com/science/2026/04/openai-starts-offering-a-biology-tuned-llm/

What’s the point of building formative assessments into a course if they’re just handed off to an LLM? Suddenly, it’s a waste of time for both the student and the instructor. Small quizzes are excellent study tools to help students check their own understanding―if a student does them. Now, you can direct an “agentic” LLM browser to complete all the quizzes in an entire course with a single, frictionless prompt.

Should instructors preserve these sorts of assignments for students who want to benefit from them and accept the cheating, or should they eliminate the learning opportunity just to prevent cheating?

Evolution, the natural selection

Many instructors are trying to adapt to this crisis by going back to the only evaluation tools that are pretty much LLM-proof—tests like oral exams or handwritten work created under supervision in the classroom.

None of these solutions are available to instructors of asynchronous online classes. That sucks, since the availability of those classes is important. They can serve students with physical disabilities, students in rural areas far from a campus, or students trying to obtain a degree while working full-time jobs or caring for dependents. If we have to simply give up on the idea of online classes, those are the casualties.

But even for in-person classes, adaptations to prevent LLM cheating are often concessions that reduce pedagogical quality. For example, labor-intensive oral exams didn’t become an endangered species just because of the swelling student-to-instructor ratio. Pen and paper (or keyboard and mouse) exams make it easier for each student’s experience to be the same and remove some of the potential for bias in scoring.

Writing assignments that may previously have been excellent teaching tools have obviously become the first things to end up on the chopping block. I used to have students in a natural disasters class write a plot for a big-budget Hollywood disaster movie, using both accurate and implausible physical processes. It was good practice for their writing skills; the students found it enjoyable, and it forced them to skillfully apply a lot of what they had learned.

https://arstechnica.com/science/2026/04/to-teach-in-the-time-of-chatgpt-is-to-know-pain/

The closing of the Strait of Hormuz stranded tankers from Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, which together provide 20 percent of global LNG. Asia has been especially hard hit because it imports 80 percent to 90 percent of the supply from the Persian Gulf. The reopening of the strait will not restore all of the lost supply. In mid-March, Iranian missiles knocked out 17 percent of capacity at Qatar’s Ras Laffan refinery, and QatarEnergy’s CEO said repairs could take five years.

The United States has made an aggressive push to be a bigger part of the global LNG market, with Trump seeking to secure major purchase agreements from trade partners like Japan, the EU, and South Korea. But the eight existing US LNG export terminals are already running at full capacity. Although Trump has vowed to bring more capacity online, construction, and permitting of the complex multibillion-dollar facilities take years.

As a result, US exports of LNG, about 15 billion cubic feet of gas per day, are currently limited to only 11 percent to 13 percent of total US natural gas production. The situation leaves the United States with an abundance of its top fuel for electricity even while other countries are scrambling to stretch their supplies.

But American consumers have been coping with sharply rising electricity prices for a host of reasons unrelated to the war—mostly due to the capital build-out by utility companies, in part to accommodate the data center explosion but also to build resilience against wildfire, storms, and other climate change impacts and to replace aging infrastructure.

In their bi-monthly video series, energy analysts at the Center for Strategic and International Studies contemplated how the best example of US energy independence is almost wholly unnoticed by American consumers because of these other factors.

“So while we’re staring at the precipice of a global energy crisis, or might already be in one, the United States is going to feel that in oil markets, but we are, for the time being, by the nature of the gas system and the bountiful supply here in the United States, insulated against the gas price shocks?” asked Joseph Majkut, director of the CSIS’ Energy Security and Climate Change program.

https://arstechnica.com/science/2026/04/shock-from-iran-war-has-trumps-vision-for-us-energy-dominance-flailing/

Slamming into the atmosphere at more than 30 times the speed of sound, NASA’s Orion spacecraft blazed a trail over the Pacific Ocean on Friday, returning home with four astronauts and safely capping humanity’s first voyage to the Moon in nearly 54 years.

Temperatures outside the capsule built up to some 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit as a sheath of plasma enveloped the Orion spacecraft, named Integrity, and its four long-distance travelers, temporarily blocking radio signals the Moon ship and Mission Control in Houston. Flying southwest to northeast, the spacecraft steered toward a splashdown zone southwest of San Diego, where a US Navy recovery ship held position to await the crew’s homecoming. Ground teams regained communications with Orion commander Reid Wiseman after a six-minute blackout.

Airborne tracking planes beamed live video of Orion’s descent back to Mission Control, showing the capsule jettison its parachute cover and deploy a series of chutes to stabilize its plunge toward the Pacific. Then, three larger main chutes, each with an area of 10,500 square feet, opened to slow Orion for splashdown at 8:07 pm EDT Friday (00:07 UTC Saturday).

In just 14 minutes, Orion bled off nearly 25,000 mph of velocity, subjecting the crew strapped into their seats to two brief periods of about 3.9 Gs.

The USS John P. Murtha amphibious transport dock ship dispatched helicopters and small boats to begin extracting Wiseman and his Artemis II crewmates: Victor Glover, Christina Koch, and Jeremy Hansen. Wiseman reported “four green crew members” inside the cockpit of the Orion spacecraft, confirming good health and high spirits after splashdown.

Koch exited the capsule first, joining Navy divers on an inflatable raft, or “front porch,” assembled next to the spacecraft. Glover was next, then Hansen, a Canadian astronaut, stepped out of Orion onto the front porch. Wiseman, the captain of the ship, was last to leave his seat and join the recovery team. Two helicopters were expected to hoist the astronauts from the sea and fly them them to the John P. Murtha, where they were to undergo medical checks before traveling to San Diego, then back to Houston for a reunion with their families Saturday.

https://arstechnica.com/space/2026/04/four-astronauts-are-back-home-after-a-daring-ride-around-the-moon/