Animals like birds and sea turtles navigate using a "biological GPS" called magnetoreception. We now actually know that many animals use this method to connect with Earth’s magnetic field so they know where to go — but scientists don’t really understand how the whole process works yet.

As such, researchers at Cambridge University and the Helmholtz-Zentrum Berlin have been studying tiny ancient fossils littering ocean floors to learn more about magnetoreception. And sure enough, the team says they’ve discovered that these "magnetofossils" indeed exhibit magnetoreception. Because they found the magnetofossils in sediments that date back 97 million years, their work could be the first time we’ve had direct evidence that animals have been navigating the world like this for a very long time.

"Whatever creature made these magnetofossils, we now know it was most likely capable of accurate navigation," Rich Harrison of Cambridge’s Earth Sciences Dept., and research co-leader, said in a statement.

A new way of sensing

The researchers used a new technique that relies on magnetic tomography — a way of visualizing the internal structures of objects using magnetic fields. Previously, scientists had trouble looking inside larger magnetofossils like the newly discovered ones because more standard X-rays were unable to penetrate the outer layers.

That’s why the study’s co-author, Claire Donnelly from the Max Planck Institute in Germany, developed this new technique to peer inside. Because the fossils are rather large compared to magnetic receptors used by bacteria, for instance, the researchers refer to them as "giant" magnetofossils.

"That we were able to map the internal magnetic structure with magnetic tomography was already a great result, but the fact that the results provide insight into the navigation of creatures millions of years ago is really exciting!" Donnelly said in the release.

The team used Donnelly’s technique at the Diamond X-ray facility in Oxford. They found that the arrangements of tiny magnetic fields generated by spinning elections — or magnetic moments, to be precise — pointed to magnetoreception in whatever animals these fossils came from.

"It’s fantastic to see our method being used for the first time to study natural samples," Jeffrey Neethirajan, a Ph.D. student in Donnelly’s lab, said in the release.

The mystery creature

Oddly enough, while the team thinks these fossils signify navigation via magnetoreception, they don’t know what animals created them. "This tells us we need to look for a migratory animal that was common enough in the oceans to leave abundant fossil remains," Harrison said.

Eels might be a good candidate, Harrion speculates, as they evolved around 100 years ago, and they’re able to navigate waterways across the globe.

"Giant magnetofossils mark a key step in tracing how animals evolved basic bacterial magnetoreception into highly-specialized, GPS-like navigation systems," Harrison said.

A paper about the study was published in the journal Nature on Oct. 20.

A new video gives us great looks at last month’s historic first flight of NASA’s new "quiet" X-59 supersonic jet.

NASA plans to use the X-59, an experimental vehicle, to fly faster than the speed of sound without generating sonic booms. The video was taken during the X-59’s first flight on Oct. 28, which took off from Palmdale Regional Airport in California — on a runway shared by the airport and the adjacent U.S. Air Force (USAF) Plant 42 facility.

The video shows the X-59’s extra-long nose gently bouncing as it taxis out of its shelter and heads toward at its runway in the orange-lit Mojave Desert. Combining views from the cockpit, a mission control area and from chase planes, the video brings views from takeoff, flight and touchdown — and the moment when NASA lead X-59 test pilot Nils Larson emerges from the cockpit to greet well-wishers. (Keep watching for a little surprise and humor near the end of the video.)

The X-59 is a collaboration between NASA and aerospace giant Lockheed Martin’s historic Skunk Works facility in Palmdale. The debut flight went "exactly as planned," Lockheed representatives said in a statement published at the time of the flight. (The U.S. government was in shutdown when the flight happened, but certain critical activities were granted an exemption.)

"X-59 is a symbol of American ingenuity. The American spirit knows no bounds. It’s part of our DNA — the desire to go farther, faster, and even quieter than anyone has ever gone before," Acting NASA Administrator Sean Duffy said in the same statement. "This work sustains America’s place as the leader in aviation, and has the potential to change the way the public flies."

Work on the X-59 will continue at NASA’s Armstrong Flight Research Center, which is also at Palmdale. The jet is expected to continue testing through flights over microphones sprinkled around Mojave to measure the vibrations generated. Other aircraft will also measure its shockwaves using air sensors.

Supersonic flights above land in the U.S. have been prohibited since 1973, but if the X-59 can prove out its promises, it may help make commercial supersonic flight possible. Faster air travel would in turn generate a lift not only for commercial travelers but also for transport in case of medical emergency, disaster or military need.

Support for such speed comes directly from the White House, too, as President Donald Trump issued an executive order earlier this year directing the Federal Aviation Administration to examine how to lift the restrictions on U.S. supersonic flight.

Lockheed Martin and NASA aren’t the only entities trying to make supersonic flight routine. Boom Supersonic’s XB-1 jet made its own historic flight in January, also breaking the sound barrier over Mojave. The milestone marked the first time an independently developed commercial aircraft achieved such a milestone over the continental United States.

Iran’s Capital Is Moving. The Reason Is an Ecological Catastrophe

By Humberto Basilio edited by Claire Cameron

Tehran can no longer remain the capital of Iran amid a deepening ecological crisis and acute water shortage.

The situation in Tehran is the result of “a perfect storm of climate change and corruption,” says Michael Rubin, a political analyst at the American Enterprise Institute.

“We no longer have a choice,” Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian reportedly told officials on Friday.

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Instead, Iranian officials are considering moving the capital to the country’s southern coast. But experts say the proposal does not change the reality for the nearly ten million people who live in Tehran, who are now suffering the consequences of a decades-long decline in water supply.

Since at least 2008, scientists have warned that unchecked groundwater pumping for the city and for agriculture was rapidly draining its aquifers. The overuse did not just deplete underground reserves—it destroyed them, as the land compressed and sank irreversibly. One recent study found that Iran’s central plateau, where most of the country’s aquifers are located, is sinking by more than 35 centimeters each year. As a result, the aquifers lose about 1.7 billion cubic meters of water annually as the ground is permanently crushed, leaving no space for underground water storage to recover, says Darío Solano, a geoscientist at the National Autonomous University of Mexico.

“We saw this coming,” says Solano.

Other major cities like Cape Town, Mexico City, Jakarta and parts of California are also facing day zero scenarios as they sink and run out of water.

This is not the first time Iran’s capital has moved. Over the centuries, it has shifted many times, from Isfahan to Tabriz to Shiraz. Some of these former capitals still thrive while others exist only as ruins, says Rubin. But this marks the first time the Iranian government has moved the capital because of an ecological catastrophe.

Yet, Rubin says, “it would be a mistake to look at this only through the lens of climate change.” Water, land and wastewater mismanagement and corruption have made the crisis worse, he says. If the capital moves to the remote Makran coast in the south, it could cost more than $100 billion dollars. The region is known for its harsh climate and difficult terrain, and some experts have doubts about its viability as a national center. Relocating a capital is often driven more by politics than by environmental concerns, says Linda Shi, a social scientist and urban planner at Cornell University. “Climate change is not the thing that is causing it, but it is a convenient factor to blame in order to avoid taking responsibility” for poor political decisions, she says.

A new generation of stratospheric balloons and high-altitude uncrewed aerial vehicles (UAVs) could soon connect the world’s unconnected with high-speed internet at a fraction of the prices commanded by operators of satellite megaconstellations such as SpaceX’s Starlink.

High-altitude platform stations, or HAPS, have been around for a while, but the technology hasn’t fully taken off yet. Google spent 10 years trying to develop balloons that would hover in the stratosphere above remote rural areas and beam internet to residents but abandoned that project, called Loon, in 2021, concluding that it couldn’t be made sustainable.

Richard Deakin, the CEO of World Mobile Stratospheric, said HAPS have failed to make it so far because they couldn’t support power-hungry antennas needed to beam down high-bandwidth internet across vast swaths of land. Previously-tested high-altitude balloons and airships have relied on photovoltaics to generate power, which only provide "a couple of hundred watts," according to Deakin.

He said that his company’s HAPS, an autonomous plane called the Stratomast, will be powered by liquid hydrogen, allowing it not only to hover for six days at an altitude of 60,000 feet (18 km), but also generate enough electricity to support a 10-by-10-foot (3 by 3 meters) phased-array antenna that could connect 500,000 users on Earth at the same time. After six days, a new aircraft would arrive to take over the service while the first returns to the base for refuelling.

Deakin says users will get 200 megabits per second (Mbps) of connectivity directly into their smartphones from Stratomast. That would be a vast improvement over Starlink‘s current direct-to-device offering of 17 Mbps, which is currently only capable of supporting emergency text messaging. Even AST SpaceMobile, which is building a constellation of giant orbiting antennas to beam internet directly to smartphone devices, can sustain only about 21 Mbps.

"When the Stratomast is flying, all these old satellites are going to be in museums," Deakin said.

The 4-metric-ton (4.4 tons) Stratomast aircraft, made of lightweight carbon fiber, has a 184-foot (56 m) wingspan, equivalent to that of a 120-metric-ton (132 tons) Boeing 787 Dreamliner plane. A single Stratomast will cover an area of 6,000 square miles (15,000 square km). Such a wide reach means that the whole of Scotland could be covered with just nine Stratomast platforms, Deakin said. World Mobile Stratospheric estimates the cost of running such a system would be around just £40 million ($52 million US) per year, allowing the company to provide 200 Mbps of internet connectivity to Scotland’s 5.5 million inhabitants at a cost at about 60 pence per person per month.

"That’s enough for TV, computer broadband, the whole thing…,"Gregory Gottlieb, the head of aerial platforms at World Mobile, told Space.com.

In comparison, the cheapest Starlink subscription, only covering areas with low demand, currently costs $40 a month. And price is only one of the drawbacks of LEO satellite internet. To be able to connect to Starlink satellites, users need dedicated terminals. Although Starlink’s downlink speeds reach up to 250 Mbps, the bandwidth gets diluted as the number of users grows. For example, troops on the frontline in eastern Ukraine complain that Starlink bandwidth limits the use of ground robots, as most terminals there only get about 10 Mbps.

"There really isn’t any satellite constellation that can serve more than one person per square kilometer [0.4 square miles]," Mikkel Frandsen, the founder and CEO of another HAPS developer, New Mexico-based Sceye, told Space.com. "That’s kind of the upper end."

Sceye, founded in 2014, has developed an airship-like HAPS powered by solar energy, which has already completed several successful test flights. In August last year, the Sceye airship became the first stratospheric platform that successfully survived a night in the stratosphere without sinking after sunset and remained in a required position above a fixed spot on Earth. The problem of drift and difficulties with station-keeping were among the issues that led to the demise of the Google Loon project, according to Frandsen.

In June, Sceye received a "strategic investment" from Japanese telecommunications operator SoftBank, which hopes the technology will allow it to provide next-generation connectivity to users even in the most underserved areas. Sceye also recently won a contract from NASA to host Earth-observation payloads.

Frandsen said that Sceye doesn’t want to compete with satellite internet providers but thinks that megaconstellations, even when fully deployed, will not be able to satisfy the world’s need for connectivity.

"All satellite constellations, when they’re combined, will not do anything other than [make] a little dent in the global demand for connectivity," he said. "They’re going to do fine business at the prices they’re charging, but they’re not going to serve billions of people. Space isn’t all that scalable. They’re going to serve millions of people."

LEO satellite megaconstellations such as SpaceX‘s Starlink orbit a few hundred kilometers above Earth’s surface. In the past five years, they have replaced distant geostationary satellites, which orbit 22,236 miles (35,786 km) above Earth, as the dominant technology for delivering internet connectivity from space. But the growth in the number of satellites concerns space sustainability experts. The more objects hurtling around the planet, the higher the risk of collisions that could pollute near-Earth space with thousands of dangerous fragments. Moreover, atmospheric physicists worry about the growing amount of metal being burned up in the atmosphere during satellite reentries.

"HAPS are a really interesting domain because I think, in many ways, they cover the best of terrestrial and the best of satellite — high-altitude systems without suffering from the drawbacks," said Deakin.

Gottlieb said that HAPS could provide a convenient, flexible and easily replaceable alternative to satellite internet at times of growing geopolitical tensions.

"There is a view that, within 24 hours of any major conflict, low Earth orbit would be unusable for military purposes," Gottlieb said. "We can deploy aircraft at very short notice. We can be agile in terms of spectrum that we’re using, and all sorts of different boxes that can go onto our platforms."

Deakin’s team has been developing Stratomast since 2019 as part of a collaboration with German telecommunications provider Deutsche Telecom. During tests in Germany and Saudi Arabia, they demonstrated the workings of their novel antenna technology.

Earlier this year, the company was acquired by the U.S.-based telecom provider World Mobile. The company recently partnered with Indonesian telecommunications provider Protelindo to get Stratomast off the ground. The partnership plans to conduct flight tests with their antenna at a lower altitude next summer and hopes to begin stratospheric test flights in 2027.

Sceye, in the meantime, is working on increasing the endurance of its airship and hopes to commence commercial service in 2027.

Are you curious about the recently released emails of Jeffrey Epstein but don’t feel like clicking through thousands of cumbersome files? There’s now a way to search Epstein’s inbox in a much easier way. And it’s both interesting and creepy at the same time.

It’s called Jmail.world and it’s a project by Riley Walz and Luke Igel. They’ve built a tool that might best be described as Jeffrey Epstein Inbox Simulator ’25. At least that’s how The Atlantic’s Charlie Warzel puts it. And it feels like an apt description.

Basically it looks like Gmail and it has many of the same features. And while it’s a clever way to present the tens of thousands of documents released by the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, it’s a very odd feeling to essentially be placed in the late sex trafficker’s shoes.

“The problem was that the PDFs that the above pointed to were hard to read, so we felt putting it in a familiar form with shareable links and easy to screenshot views would be helpful for people. We also wanted to focus on just the emails in that drop,” Igel told Gizmodo over email.

Idel is the co-founder of Kino, an AI video assistant that allows users to index massive amounts of video. Idel says he previously worked at SpaceX, NASA, and was an undergrad at MIT. And he built this tool with Riley Walz, who has done a number of clever projects in the past.

“Riley and I knocked this out in a few hours Wednesday night using Cursor,” Igel told Gizmodo. “This is our first real coding project together! Riley has done so much amazing stuff like this in the past as you know.”

Igel tells Gizmodo it’s “pretty much all” of the emails from the latest batch released by Congress. So while it’s an interesting project, don’t necessarily assume it’s comprehensive. But it’s still an interesting way to browse the inbox of a truly heinous man.

These emails aren’t the “Epstein files” that everyone has been clamoring for over the past few years. Those are files still held by the Department of Justice, though Congress has passed a law requiring their release. The question is whether they’ll ever see the light of day. President Trump ordered a new investigation into Epstein’s ties to powerful Democrats so many people worry that DOJ will say they can’t release any files because there’s an ongoing investigation. But time will tell.