By Walt Hickey

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Ingenuity

The Ingenuity helicopter was the breakout star of the Perseverance mission to Mars, with the rugged little helicopter successfully scouting around the rover and smashing milestone after milestone of flight on another world. The successful flight of a helicopter on Mars went from a charming add-on mission of five experimental flights to a rugged workhorse that accumulated more than two hours of flight time across 72 flights. Now, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and AeroVironment has released what engineers believe was the cause of the January crash that ended Ingenuity’s run: It was designed to track textured features on the Martian surface to aid in navigation, and simply hit a featureless stretch of sandy terrain which disoriented it and led to a hard landing, pushing the aircraft’s rotor blades past their design limits and snapping them, with debris found 49 feet away from the final landing site of the helicopter. It adds one final accomplishment to Ingenuity’s remarkable list: Hot damn, we have solved an aircraft crash mystery that took place on another planet.

Andrew Liszewski, The Verge

Warning

Last week, 38 biologists published a commentary in the prestigious journal Science calling for a ban on research that might lead to the creation of a synthetic microbe with opposite chirality to proteins and DNA, with an accompanying 299-page technical report describing the risks. The DNA of all natural living things on Earth use right-handed sugar molecules to form its lattice, which is why the double helix of DNA has a right-handed twist. The proteins of all life, by contrast, use left-handed amino acids. It is theoretically possible to create DNA using left-handed sugar molecules, and thus a left-handed double helix, and right-handed proteins and end up with an organism that works just fine; the consequences, however, could be apocalyptic. All the ways cells have to fight invading microbes, destroy foreign DNA, and denature unwanted proteins are optimized for right-handed DNA and left-handed proteins, rendering all living things completely vulnerable to such a microbe. Anyway, I’m pleased as punch with the news, as ever since Michael Crichton died we’ve been starved of this kind of diabolically clever airport-paperback-style apocalypse, and this one is downright cunning. Well done all around.

Carl Zimmer, The New York Times

Offshore

Offshore drilling companies are under pressure from insurers and the federal government to provide bonds for the eventual decommissioning of offshore infrastructure. In June, the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management enforced a final rule that requires the industry, not taxpayers, to cover the cost of decommissioning offshore equipment, and that’s got drillers ticked off, especially because their insurers are now demanding they actually do something (like issue bonds) to make sure there’s a pile of money ready to pay for decommissioning when that eventually happens. The BOEM estimate is that drillers will need just shy of $7 billion in supplemental financial assurances to make it happen. As of mid-2023, 2,700 wells and 500 platforms were overdue for decommissioning.

Georgina McCartney, Reuters

Happy Christmas, War Is Over

The percentage of Americans who believe there is a war on Christmas is down from 39 percent in December 2022 to just 23 percent in December 2024. This effect is seen consistently across political perspectives. Glad we solved that one. Perhaps this means it’s time for us to reverse the cessation of civil liberties enacted during the war — you know, the one that jammed an Elf on the Shelf into homes, enacting a massive surveillance dragnet against civilians in diametric opposition to their constitutional rights, developing unaccountable and secret Naughty Lists that algorithmically persecute even the holliest and jolliest among us in a Kafkaesque security theater that teaches kids to develop a level of contentment with state infiltration of the private home and inculcates a default state of compliance with authoritarian reprisals in response to behavior not celebrated by the Man? For as Michel Foucault said, “Our society is one not of spectacle, but of surveillance,” and is the Elf on the Shelf anything different than the Elf surveilling the self? [Ed. note: The National Elf on the Shelf Reauthorization Act passed 99-0 in the Senate immediately after this was filed.]

Jamie Ballard, YouGov

Kraven

Kraven the Hunter, a film based on a comic book character who’s a talented big game hunter who fights Spider-Man, made $11 million in its debut weekend at the box office. The film, whose protagonist at no point hunts animals or fights Spider-Man, has managed to beat Morbius and Madame Web — two films now synonymous with box office flops — for the single worst opening in the history of Sony’s troubled Spider-Man universe. The movie cost $110 million to make, and given a meek opening of $15 million overseas, it’s a pretty far cry from profitable.

Pamela McClintock, The Hollywood Reporter

For Sale, Some Rules, Occasionally Relevant

A 155-pound (52-kilogram) marble slab dated to 300 to 800 A.D. upon which the Ten Commandments were inscribed will hit the auction block this week, with the oldest known such stone tablet going to the highest bidder. First found during railroad excavations in 1913, it spent some time as a paving stone at a local home until 1943, when it was sold to a scholar who clocked that they were pretty important rules to lots of people. The text omits the third commandment, so archaeologists might conclude it was chiseled by a guy who held religion to be important but absolutely loved swearing. Estimated price: $1 million to $2 million.

Associated Press

Viruses

The National Center for Biotechnology Information manages repositories of virus sequences and announced last week that it’s adding 3,000 new Latinized names to databases this coming spring, a move that’s somewhat controversial within the scientific community. Currently, viruses tend to have names related to the disease that they cause (SARS-CoV-2, famously), an organism they infect (like eastern equine encephalitis virus) or where they were first found (like Zika or West Nile). The International Committee on Taxonomy of Viruses wanted to pursue a new system that makes virus names similar to the Latin-heavy Linnaean binomial system. Henceforth, SARS-CoV-2 will be Betacoronavirus pandemicum, HIV will be Lentivirus humimdef1, and West Nile will be Orthoflavivirus nilense. Oh yeah, this is definitely going to catch on, and I’m absolutely certain people are going to be very normal about an international body arbitrarily changing the way we name infectious diseases, an issue upon which everyone is notoriously level-headed and coherent.

Catherine Offord, Science

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