Author: peterjang73

A nerdy father of two, a husband of a beautiful and understanding wife, an engineer who loves anime and tinkering with PCs and games, but most of all, loves God.
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Manus has kick-started an AI agent boom in China

https://www.technologyreview.com/2025/06/05/1117958/china-ai-agent-boom/

Last year, China saw a boom in foundation models, the do-everything large language models that underpin the AI revolution. This year, the focus has shifted to AI agents—systems that are less about responding to users’ queries and more about autonomously accomplishing things for them. 

There are now a host of Chinese startups building these general-purpose digital tools, which can answer emails, browse the internet to plan vacations, and even design an interactive website. Many of these have emerged in just the last two months, following in the footsteps of Manus—a general AI agent that sparked weeks of social media frenzy for invite codes after its limited-release launch in early March. 

These emerging AI agents aren’t large language models themselves. Instead, they’re built on top of them, using a workflow-based structure designed to get things done. A lot of these systems also introduce a different way of interacting with AI. Rather than just chatting back and forth with users, they are optimized for managing and executing multistep tasks—booking flights, managing schedules, conducting research—by using external tools and remembering instructions. 

China could take the lead on building these kinds of agents. The country’s tightly integrated app ecosystems, rapid product cycles, and digitally fluent user base could provide a favorable environment for embedding AI into daily life. 

For now, its leading AI agent startups are focusing their attention on the global market, because the best Western models don’t operate inside China’s firewalls. But that could change soon: Tech giants like ByteDance and Tencent are preparing their own AI agents that could bake automation directly into their native super-apps, pulling data from their vast ecosystem of programs that dominate many aspects of daily life in the country. 

As the race to define what a useful AI agent looks like unfolds, a mix of ambitious startups and entrenched tech giants are now testing how these tools might actually work in practice—and for whom.

Set the standard

It’s been a whirlwind few months for Manus, which was developed by the Wuhan-based startup Butterfly Effect. The company raised $75 million in a funding round led by the US venture capital firm Benchmark, took the product on an ambitious global roadshow, and hired dozens of new employees. 

Even before registration opened to the public in May, Manus had become a reference point for what a broad, consumer?oriented AI agent should accomplish. Rather than handling narrow chores for businesses, this “general” agent is designed to be able to help with everyday tasks like trip planning, stock comparison, or your kid’s school project. 

Unlike previous AI agents, Manus uses a browser-based sandbox that lets users supervise the agent like an intern, watching in real time as it scrolls through web pages, reads articles, or codes actions. It also proactively asks clarifying questions, supports long-term memory that would serve as context for future tasks.

“Manus represents a promising product experience for AI agents,” says Ang Li, cofounder and CEO of Simular, a startup based in Palo Alto, California, that’s building computer use agents, AI agents that control a virtual computer. “I believe Chinese startups have a huge advantage when it comes to designing consumer products, thanks to cutthroat domestic competition that leads to fast execution and greater attention to product details.”

In the case of Manus, the competition is moving fast. Two of the most buzzy follow?ups, Genspark and Flowith, for example, are already boasting benchmark scores that match or edge past Manus’s. 

Genspark, led by former Baidu executives Eric?Jing and Kay?Zhu, links many small “super agents” through what it calls multi?component prompting. The agent can switch among several large language models, accepts both images and text, and carries out tasks from making slide decks to placing phone calls. Whereas Manus relies heavily on Browser Use, a popular open-source product that lets agents operate a web browser in a virtual window like a human, Genspark directly integrates with a wide array of tools and APIs. Launched in April, the company says that it already has over 5 million users and over $36 million in yearly revenue.

Flowith, the work of a young team that first grabbed public attention in April 2025 at a developer event hosted by the popular social media app Xiaohongshu, takes a different tack. Marketed as an “infinite agent,” it opens on a blank canvas where each question becomes a node on a branching map. Users can backtrack, take new branches, and store results in personal or sharable “knowledge gardens”—a design that feels more like project management software (think Notion) than a typical chat interface. Every inquiry or task builds its own mind-map-like graph, encouraging a more nonlinear and creative interaction with AI. Flowith’s core agent, NEO, runs in the cloud and can perform scheduled tasks like sending emails and compiling files. The founders want the app to be a “knowledge marketbase”, and aims to tap into the social aspect of AI with the aspiration of becoming “the OnlyFans of AI knowledge creators”.

What they also share with Manus is the global ambition. Both Genspark and Flowith have stated that their primary focus is the international market.

A global address

Startups like Manus, Genspark, and Flowith—though founded by Chinese entrepreneurs—could blend seamlessly into the global tech scene and compete effectively abroad. Founders, investors, and analysts that MIT Technology Review has spoken to believe Chinese companies are moving fast, executing well, and quickly coming up with new products. 

Money reinforces the pull to launch overseas. Customers there pay more, and there are plenty to go around. “You can price in USD, and with the exchange rate that’s a sevenfold multiplier,” Manus cofounder?Xiao?Hong quipped on a podcast. “Even if we’re only operating at 10% power because of cultural differences overseas, we’ll still make more than in China.”

But creating the same functionality in China is a challenge. Major US AI companies including OpenAI and Anthropic have opted out of mainland China because of geopolitical risks and challenges with regulatory compliance. Their absence initially created a black market as users resorted to VPNs and third-party mirrors to access tools like ChatGPT and Claude. That vacuum has since been filled by a new wave of Chinese chatbots—DeepSeek, Doubao, Kimi—but the appetite for foreign models hasn’t gone away. 

Manus, for example, uses Anthropic’s Claude?Sonnet—widely considered the top model for agentic tasks. Manus cofounder?Zhang?Tao has repeatedly praised Claude’s ability to juggle tools, remember contexts, and hold multi?round conversations—all crucial for turning chatty software into an effective executive assistant.

But the company’s use of Sonnet has made its agent functionally unusable inside China without a VPN. If you open Manus from a mainland IP address, you’ll see a notice explaining that the team is “working on integrating Qwen’s model,” a special local version that is built on top of Alibaba’s open-source model. 

An engineer overseeing ByteDance’s work on developing an agent, who spoke to MIT Technology Review anonymously to avoid sanction, said that the absence of Claude?Sonnet models “limits everything we do in China.” DeepSeek’s open models, he added, still hallucinate too often and lack training on real?world workflows. Developers we spoke with rank Alibaba’s Qwen series as the best domestic alternative, yet most say that switching to Qwen knocks performance down a notch.

Jiaxin?Pei, a postdoctoral researcher at Stanford’s Institute for Human?Centered AI, thinks that gap will close: “Building agentic capabilities in base LLMs has become a key focus for many LLM builders, and once people realize the value of this, it will only be a matter of time.”

For now, Manus is doubling down on audiences it can already serve. In a written response, the company said its “primary focus is overseas expansion,” noting that new offices in San Francisco, Singapore, and Tokyo have opened in the past month.

A super?app approach

Although the concept of AI agents is still relatively new, the consumer-facing AI app market in China is already crowded with major tech players. DeepSeek remains the most widely used, while ByteDance’s Doubao and Moonshot’s Kimi have also become household names. However, most of these apps are still optimized for chat and entertainment rather than task execution. This gap in the local market has pushed China’s big tech firms to roll out their own user-facing agents, though early versions remain uneven in quality and rough around the edges. 

ByteDance is testing Coze?Space, an AI agent based on its own Doubao model family that lets users toggle between “plan” and “execute” modes, so they can either directly guide the agent’s actions or step back and watch it work autonomously. It connects up to 14 popular apps, including GitHub, Notion, and the company’s own Lark office suite. Early reviews say the tool can feel clunky and has a high failure rate, but it clearly aims to match what Manus offers.

Meanwhile, Zhipu?AI has released a free agent called AutoGLM?Rumination, built on its proprietary ChatGLM models. Shanghai?based Minimax has launched Minimax?Agent. Both products look almost identical to Manus and demo basic tasks such as building a simple website, planning a trip, making a small Flash game, or running quick data analysis.

Despite the limited usability of most general AI agents launched within China, big companies have plans to change that. During a May?15 earnings call, Tencent president Liu?Zhiping teased an agent that would weave automation directly into China’s most ubiquitous app, WeChat. 

Considered the original super-app, WeChat already handles messaging, mobile payments, news, and millions of mini?programs that act like embedded apps. These programs give Tencent, its developer, access to data from millions of services that pervade everyday life in China, an advantage most competitors can only envy.

Historically, China’s consumer internet has splintered into competing walled gardens—share a Taobao link in WeChat and it resolves as plaintext, not a preview card. Unlike the more interoperable Western internet, China’s tech giants have long resisted integration with one another, choosing to wage platform war at the expense of a seamless user experience.

But the use of mini?programs has given WeChat unprecedented reach across services that once resisted interoperability, from gym bookings to grocery orders. An agent able to roam that ecosystem could bypass the integration headaches dogging independent startups.

Alibaba, the e-commerce giant behind the Qwen model series, has been a front-runner in China’s AI race but has been slower to release consumer-facing products. Even though Qwen was the most downloaded open-source model on Hugging Face in 2024, it didn’t power a dedicated chatbot app until early 2025. In March, Alibaba rebranded its cloud storage and search app Quark into an all-in-one AI search tool. By June, Quark had introduced DeepResearch—a new mode that marks its most agent-like effort to date. 

ByteDance and Alibaba did not reply to MIT Technology Review’s request for comments.

“Historically, Chinese tech products tend to pursue the all-in-one, super-app approach, and the latest Chinese AI agents reflect just that,” says Li of Simular, who previously worked at Google DeepMind on AI-enabled work automation. “In contrast, AI agents in the US are more focused on serving specific verticals.”

Pei, the researcher at Stanford, says that existing tech giants could have a huge advantage in bringing the vision of general AI agents to life—especially those with built-in integration across services. “The customer-facing AI agent market is still very early, with tons of problems like authentication and liability,” he says. “But companies that already operate across a wide range of services have a natural advantage in deploying agents at scale.”

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June 5, 2025 at 02:05PM

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Volvo To Introduce World-First Seatbelt Technology In New EX60 Electric SUV

https://www.autoblog.com/news/volvo-ex60-multi-adaptive-seatbelt

Volvo EX60 to Launch World’s First Multi-Adaptive Safety Belt

Most of us take seatbelts for granted, until an accident occurs and this life-saving technology does its job. Now, over six decades since Volvo introduced the three-point safety belt, the Swedish automaker known for its exceptional safety technologies is set to again introduce the next phase of intelligent seatbelt design.

Dubbed the first multi-adaptive safety belt in the world, the new tech will debut in 2026 on the electric EX60, a crossover that will slot in below the existing EX90. This multi-adaptive belt has several innovations that further improve the effectiveness of the modern seat belt, but it’ll require Volvo to process more information about each occupant than we’ve seen before.

Seatbelt Tech Adjusts to Your Weight and Posture

No car accident is exactly the same. Whether it’s the direction or speed of the crash, or the size of the individuals in the car, there are multiple variables that impact the efficacy of seatbelts. As most seatbelts function in the same way, they can’t account for these variables, so they can’t provide equal protection in all scenarios – that’s where Volvo’s smart new belt comes in.

Using a range of interior and exterior sensors, the new multi-adaptive belt from Volvo can adapt to different traffic scenarios, while also altering its load settings based on the size and shape of the person behind the wheel. The sensors process data like passenger posture, weight, height, and body shape, as each factor determines how the seatbelt should perform.

New multi-adaptive safety belt – exploded view

In the event of a serious crash, a higher belt load setting is applied if a larger occupant is seated, as this can lower the chances of a serious head injury. On the other hand, smaller occupants in a less severe crash will get a lower belt load setting, as this can reduce the chance of rib fractures.

“The world first multi-adaptive safety belt is another milestone for automotive safety and a great example of how we leverage real-time data with the ambition to help save millions of more lives,” says Åsa Haglund, head of Volvo Cars Safety Center. “This marks a major upgrade to the modern three-point safety belt, a Volvo invention introduced in 1959, estimated to have saved over a million lives.”

For people living in states with more dangerous roads, these new seatbelts can add some welcome peace of mind.

New multi-adaptive safety belt

Volvo

Multi-Adaptive Seatbelt Will Get Better Over Time

Thanks to over-the-air software updates, Volvo can continuously improve the new seatbelt over time, based on the amount of data it can analyze. New scenarios can be prepared for and different response strategies developed.

Even in its existing form, the multi-adaptive belt is a vast improvement when compared with other three-point belts. The load-limiting profiles for the new seatbelt have been increased from three to 11.

Volvo says the belt was tested at the Volvo Cars Safety Center crash lab, which has been in existence for 25 years, as of 2025.

Volvo Cars Safety Centre Crash Lab

Volvo EX60 Design and Platform Previewed Ahead of 2026 Launch

The future EX60 was teased in clay model form earlier this year, and based on the little we’ve seen of it, it will bear a close resemblance to the smaller EX30. It will also be the first Volvo on the brand’s SPA3 platform, which hosts a structural battery integrated into the floor. 

At a lower price point than the three-row EX90, we expect the EX60 to be a strong seller for the brand. It will arrive in 2026, likely as a 2027 model.


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June 5, 2025 at 03:45PM

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How the Farm Industry Spied on Animal Rights Activists and Pushed the FBI to Treat Them as Bioterrorists

https://www.wired.com/story/fbi-wmdd-dxe-animal-agriculture-alliance/

Hundreds of emails and internal documents reviewed by WIRED reveal top lobbyists and representatives of America’s agricultural industry led a persistent and often covert campaign to surveil, discredit, and suppress animal rights organizations for nearly a decade, while relying on corporate spies to infiltrate meetings and functionally serve as an informant for the FBI.

The documents, mostly obtained through public records requests by the nonprofit Property of the People, detail a secretive and long-running collaboration between the FBI’s Weapons of Mass Destruction Directorate (WMDD)—whose scope today includes Palestinian rights activists and the recent wave of arson targeting Teslas—and the Animal Agriculture Alliance (AAA), a nonprofit trade group representing the interests of US farmers, ranchers, veterinarians, and others across America’s food supply chain.

Since at least 2018, documents show, the AAA has been supplying federal agents with intelligence on the activities of animal rights groups such as Direct Action Everywhere (DxE), with records of emails and meetings reflecting the industry’s broader mission to convince authorities that activists are the preeminent “bioterrorism” threat to the United States. Spies working for the AAA during its collaboration with the FBI went undercover at activism meetings, obtaining photographs, audio recordings, and other strategic material. The group’s ties with law enforcement were leveraged to help shield industry actors from public scrutiny, to press for investigations into its most powerful critics, and to reframe the purpose and efforts of animal rights protesters as a singular national security threat.

The records further show that state authorities have cited protests as a reason to conceal information about disease outbreaks at factory farms from the public.

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Zoe Rosenberg, a UC Berkeley student and animal cruelty investigator at DxE, says she’s hardly surprised that powerful private-sector groups are working to surveil the organization, but she finds their work with the police paradoxical. “If anyone should have the ear of law enforcement, it’s animal cruelty investigators exposing rampant violations of the law leading to real animals suffering and dying horrific deaths,” she tells WIRED.

Profiled by WIRED in 2019, DxE is a grassroots animal rights organization dedicated to nonviolent direct actions, including covert operations that often involve rescuing animals and documenting practices at factory farms that the group considers inhumane.

Rosenberg, 22, is facing charges in California for removing four chickens from a slaughterhouse in Sonoma County in 2023. In addition to minor charges such as trespassing, she was also hit with a felony count of conspiracy to commit those misdemeanors—a discretionary charge that Sonoma County’s prosecutor justified by portraying Rosenberg as a “biosecurity risk” in light of avian flu.

According to Rosenberg, DxE relies on biosecurity protocols that go “above and beyond” industry standards, including quarantining its investigators from birds for a full week before and after entering farms. “All of our investigators before entering a facility shower with hot water and soap and put on freshly washed clothes that have been washed thoroughly and dried on high heat to kill viruses and bacteria,” she says. “Everything is sanitized and then sanitized again upon leaving the facility.”

Rosenberg does not deny removing the chickens, which she named Poppy, Aster, Ivy, and Azalea. “Generally, if we feel an animal is going to die from neglect or maltreatment if we don’t remove them from the facility, then we feel that it is justified and necessary to step in to save their life,” she says. Her attorney, Chris Carraway, says that DxE tried reporting allegations of health violations at the facility to “the point of futility.” Rosenberg says reporting alleged violations often leads to getting bounced between offices; a “never-ending loop of no one agency wanting to take responsibility and enforce animal welfare laws.”

via Wired Top Stories https://www.wired.com

June 3, 2025 at 11:33AM

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Reviving Dead Lithium-Ion Batteries with an AI-Derived Electrolyte Solution

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/reviving-dead-lithium-ion-batteries-with-an-ai-derived-electrolyte-solution/

AI Found a ‘Magic Potion’ That Can Bring Dead Batteries Back to Life

Electric vehicles leave behind mountains of dead lithium-ion batteries. A new “injection” brings them back to life

By You Xiaoying edited by Andrea Thompson

Illustration, view from above of a couple plugging in an electric vehicle to recharge a low or dead battery, indicated with a battery icon with 2 red bars superimposed on the roof of the car

Malte Mueller/Getty Images

A team of researchers in China has found a way to bring dead lithium-ion batteries back to life, potentially reducing both the amount of waste that’s quickly piling up from spent electric vehicle (EV) batteries and the need to produce as many new ones.

“The team’s work is revolutionary because it provides a new idea to reuse end-of-life batteries,” says Jiangong Zhu of Tongji University in Shanghai, who researches battery use in EVs and was not involved in the new study, which was published recently in Nature.

The amount of spent lithium-ion batteries that need disposal is expected to soar from an estimate of 900,000 metric tons this year to 20.5 million metric tons by 2040, according to a report released by the United Nations Development Program last September. As the world’s leader in deploying EVs, China is already handling 2.8 million metric tons of retired cells ever year, according to Huang Jianzhong, chairman of China Electronic Energy Saving Technology Association, a government-approved trade body.

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With consumer markets and waste piles both growing rapidly, Yue Gao, a chemist at Fudan University in Shanghai, and his colleagues anticipated a rising demand for longer-life lithium-ion batteries.

An EV battery usually reaches the end of its lifetime, or when its capacity drops below 80 percent of its original level, after about eight to 10 years. The battery accounts for around 40 percent of the cost of the entire vehicle.

Gao and his colleagues wanted to find a molecule that could replenish a dead cell by infusing it with lithium ions. But “we had no idea what kinds of molecules could do that job or what their chemical structures would be, so we used machine learning to help us,” says Chihao Zhao, a Ph.D. student at Fudan University, who is a member of Gao’s team but was not a co-author of the new study.

Experimental setup showing electrolyte being injected into a spent blue battery pack on a white lab bench

Lithium ions were restored to a spent battery pack by injecting an electrolyte solution.

The researchers used an artificial intelligence model trained on the rules of chemistry. They fed it a database of electrochemical reactions and had it look for molecules that would meet their requirements, such as dissolving well in an electrolyte solution and being relatively cheap to produce. The model recommended three candidates, and the team identified one of them, a salt called lithium trifluoromethanesulfinate (LiSO2CF3), as ideal.

The researchers tested this lithium-ion salt by dissolving it in an electrolyte solution, which allows ions to pass between a cell’s positive and negative terminals. Gao likens this to giving a human patient an IV. “If we can give an injection to a sick person to help them recover,” he says, “why can’t we have a magic potion for drained batteries, too?”

Gao and his colleagues found that the chemical mixture could significantly prolong the lifespan of a lithium iron phosphate (LFP) battery cell. An LFP battery that powers an EV can typically be charged and then discharged about 2,000 times before it is considered “dead” (when its capacity is below the 80 percent mark). By adding the electrolyte whenever the battery neared that threshold, the team was able to restore most of the cell’s capacity each time—and it carried on working almost as well as a new battery. By the end of the experiment, the cell regained 96 percent capacity after nearly 12,000 charge-discharge cycles.

A follow-up experiment showed the method also worked on NMC (nickel, manganese and cobalt) lithium-ion batteries, Gao says.

Fudan University is currently working with China-based battery-material maker Zhejiang Yongtai New Material to commercialize the method, according to a social media post published by Yongtai. Gao envisions a widespread system of “battery-boosting stations” where EV owners will be able to bring dead power sources to be rejuvenated.

The idea is “promising,” says Chenguang Liu of Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University in China, who researches battery materials and was not involved in the study. But he cites a few challenges. For example, the method will need to be made compatible with various battery chemistries—and the safety of the revived cells must be tested.

And EV power comes not from a single, simple cell but from a battery pack that can comprise hundreds or even thousands of cells, along with heat-control systems and other components. “We have only conducted experiments on cells, and we need to find a way to apply it onto a whole battery pack,” Gao says.

His team’s method is the closest thing yet to a “direct-recycling process” for EV batteries in China today, says Hans Eric Melin, an analyst of battery reuse and recycling and managing director of Circular Energy Storage, a London-based consultancy. (In China, some degraded EV batteries are currently used to power other products that require lower energy outputs, such as electric mopeds and energy storage stations. Others are crushed and shredded into industrial waste called “black mass,” from which valuable raw materials, such as lithium and graphite, can be harvested.)

Melin believes there could be commercial opportunities for the researchers’ proposal—though he says the market is likely to be small because the lifespan of an EV battery can be as long as 15 years. It will also require battery packs that are designed in a way to allow for injections of the electrolyte, he notes.

“The question,” he adds, “is whether the benefits are worth it if [the required changes] in some way interfere with other design aspects necessary for the battery’s performance.”

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June 2, 2025 at 06:40AM

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New Liquid Hydrogen Storage and Delivery System Brings Us Closer to Zero-Emission Aviation

https://www.techbriefs.com/component/content/article/53251-new-liquid-hydrogen-storage-and-delivery-system-brings-us-closer-to-zero-emission-aviation?catid=1348&Itemid=690

Researchers at the FAMU-FSU College of Engineering have engineered a practical liquid hydrogen storage and delivery system that brings zero-emission aviation significantly closer to reality. Their innovative design addresses multiple engineering challenges simultaneously, enabling hydrogen to serve as both a clean fuel and an integrated cooling medium for critical power systems in next-generation electric aircraft.

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June 3, 2025 at 07:10AM

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Solar Storms Are Pushing Elon Musk’s Satellites Back to Earth

https://gizmodo.com/solar-storms-are-pushing-elon-musks-satellites-back-to-earth-2000608452

New research suggests that heightened solar activity shortens the lifespans of SpaceX’s Starlink satellites, and may send them careening back to Earth at greater velocities. Perhaps unintuitively, this could increase the risk of satellite debris making landfall. 

This preprint study, which has yet to undergo peer review, adds to a wealth of evidence showing that solar storms wreak havoc on Elon Musk’s Starlinks. Over the last several years, the frequency and intensity of these storms have increased as the Sun approaches solar maximum—the peak in its 11-year cycle. At the same time, the number of satellites orbiting Earth has skyrocketed, largely due to the rise of private megaconstellations like Starlink. 

A team of researchers led by Denny Oliveira from NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center tracked reentries of Starlink satellites between 2020 and 2024. This period coincided with the rising phase of the current solar cycle, when solar activity ramps up ahead of the solar maximum, which occurred in October 2024.

Over the course of those five years, 523 Starlink satellites reentered Earth’s atmosphere. Oliveira and his colleagues analyzed the orbits of these satellites using a statistical technique that identifies patterns in how their rates of orbital decay and reentry change during periods of high solar activity.

The researchers found that geomagnetic activity—disturbances in the upper atmosphere triggered by solar eruptions—causes Starlinks to reenter Earth’s atmosphere sooner than expected. These satellites are designed to remain in orbit for roughly five years. But during bouts of severe geomagnetic storms, their lifespans may be reduced by 10 to 12 days, Oliveira told Gizmodo. 

He and his colleagues believe this happens because geomagnetic activity heats the atmosphere and causes it to expand. This increases drag on satellites, shortening their lifespans and causing them to lose altitude more quickly as they interact with the upper atmosphere. What’s more, atmospheric drag may increase the chances of satellite-on-satellite collisions, as the orbital models that guide collision avoidance measures don’t fully account for the effects of geomagnetic activity. The team’s findings are currently available on the preprint server arXiv.  

A difference of 10 to 12 days may not sound like a big deal, but it could make it nearly impossible for SpaceX to ensure that Starlink satellites return to Earth via controlled reentry, Oliveira explained. What’s more, his analysis shows that increased drag causes satellites to reenter at higher velocities, which he believes could raise the chances of debris reaching the ground.

This may seem counterintuitive, since increasing the velocity of an object during reentry generally increases the likelihood of total disintegration. But Oliveira posits that Starlinks falling at greater speeds may have a better chance of surviving reentry due to reduced atmospheric interaction. Further research will need to confirm this hypothesis, as the study did not directly assess debris risks.

Starlinks are designed to fully burn up during reentry, but that doesn’t always happen. In 2024, a 5.5-pound (2.5-kilogram) chunk of Starlink debris made landfall on a farm in Saskatchewan, New Scientist reported. In February of this year, SpaceX said it is possible for Starlink debris fragments to fall back to Earth, but claimed that this poses “no risk to humans on the ground, at sea, or in the air.”

There are now more than 7,500 Starlinks in orbit, according to Harvard University astronomer Jonathan McDowell, who tracks the constellation. Eventually, SpaceX hopes to quintuple the size of this fleet, with a goal of launching 42,000 Starlinks in total, according to Space.com. This is in addition to the thousands of other satellites currently orbiting Earth. 

“[This is] the first time ever in history that we have so many satellites in orbit at the same time,” Oliveira said. “So, now, we have satellites reentering pretty much every week. And possibly, in the next months or years, every day.” Understanding how changes in solar activity impact their lifespans and their reentries will be critical as Earth’s orbit becomes increasingly crowded.

via Gizmodo https://gizmodo.com/

June 1, 2025 at 05:06AM