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Benevolent Orca Pods Are Adopting Baby Pilot Whales in an Apparent Effort to Clean Up the Species’ Image

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Researchers have noticed a strangely sweet behavior among Icelandic orcas: the adoption of a baby whale from an entirely different species. 

As so-called "killer whales" have made news over the past few years for violent boat attacks in European waters, marine biologists have noticed a far sweeter behavior in Iceland's frigid waves: the adoption of a baby whale from an entirely different species.

In interviews with Scientific American, scientists described their shock at observing a pilot whale calf that traveled with an Icelandic pod of orcas over a period of years.

One of those researchers, Chérine Baumgartner, said she and her colleagues at the Icelandic Orca Project initially couldn't believe their eyes.

"At first, we were like, 'Oh my god, this killer whale calf has a problem,'" the researcher said of the bulbous-headed baby she and her team first spotted back in 2022. It looked at first glance like a malformed orca — until they realized it was no killer whale at all.

The next day, when Baumgartner and her colleagues were witnessing the same pod again, the baby pilot whale was absent. Eventually, however, they started seeing baby pilot whales with orca pods throughout 2022 and 2023, and began to develop theories about what was happening.

In a new paper published in the journal Ecology and Evolution, Baumgartner and her team from a consortium of Nordic research institutions have posited three theories about the fascinating matchup: that the orcas are hunting the babies, playing with them, or perhaps even nurturing them.

As SciAm notes, each sighting involved a pilot whale calf that could be no more than a few weeks old that swam alongside an adult orca female in what marine biologists call "echelon position," with the baby beside and slightly behind the elder.

In some instances, the baby pilot whale was nudged along by the adult orcas, and on another occasion, it swam ahead of the pod before the adults caught up to it and lifted it out of the water and onto one of their backs.

That kind of playful and protective behavior does not, of course, sound predatory — but because "killer whales" are known for their violence, it can't be completely ruled out, the scientists say.

Along with what the orcas are doing with the baby pilot whales, researchers want to know how the two species, which generally do not overlap, came to not only be in the same place but also coexist in such a way.

"It could be," Baumgartner told SciAm, "[that the orcas] encountered the pilot whale opportunistically, and some individuals played with the whale, and others tried to nurture it."

As study co-author Filipa Samarra noted, there's a chance that climate change has led pilot whales, which typically follow schools of warm water-seeking mackerel, into orca territory.

More on marine life: Scientists Take First Ever Video of Colossal Squid in the Wild... With One Comical Issue

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Apple’s AI-Powered Siri Is Such a Disaster That Employees Have Given the Team Developing It a Rude Nickname

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Apple's AI and machine learning group tasked with upgrading Siri is facing just as much scrutiny from its peers as it is from the public.

Apple has floundered in its efforts to bring a convincing AI product to the table — so much so that it's become the subject of derision even among its own employees, The Information reports.

More specifically, it's the AI and machine-learning group that's getting the lion's share of mockery. Known as AI/ML for short, its woes only deepened after Apple announced that it had to delay its much-hyped next iteration of AI enhancements for Siri until 2026. 

With its leadership being increasingly called into question and with seemingly more embarrassments than victories to its name, Apple engineers outside the group bestowed it a cruel nickname: "AIMLess," according to the Information.

The moniker is also a jab at AI/ML's ousted leaders. 

Coinciding with the delay, Apple told staff it was taking its AI chief John Giannandrea off leading the Siri AI project. Giannandrea had a reputation for being relaxed, quiet, and non-confrontational, while his lieutenant Robby Walker was criticized for lacking ambition and being too risk-averse. More than half a dozen former employees who worked in Giannandrea and Walker's group, per the report, blamed poor leadership for the project's struggles.

Giannandrea is being replaced by head of software engineering Craig Federighi, with executive Mike Rockwell, who worked on Apple's mixed reality Vision Pro headset, assuming Walker's duties. Federighi has led Apple's engineering team since 2012, earning a reputation for efficiency and execution. His leadership style is the opposite of Giannandrea's: tough and demanding, according to the Information. 

The two bigwigs often butted heads, with resentment building between the Siri group and the software group, which had its own crew of AI engineers. The release of OpenAI's ChatGPT deepened the fissure: Gianandrea's team didn't respond with a sense of urgency, according to former engineers, while Federighi's outfit immediately started exploring the use of large language models to improve the iPhone. 

At a critical moment in the AI race that called for decisiveness, the Siri team wavered. After teasing major upgrades to Siri at Apple's annual developers conference, Giannandrea and company couldn't decide whether to build an LLM that would run locally on a user's iPhone or build a bigger one that would run on the cloud to handle more complex tasks. In the end, they went with Plan C: build one huge model to handle everything, according to the Information, undoing the company's commitment to keeping Siri's software on-device, and putting it on the path to a delayed rollout.

Since then, the straits haven't looked any less dire. After all the hype, many users felt that Apple Intelligence was lackluster at best. Apple also faced significant backlash after one of its features for summarizing news headlines constantly misreported them, forcing Apple to pull the plug.

While many in the company are hopeful that the injection of new leadership can salvage Siri's botched AI facelift, getting itself on even footing in the AI race is going to be an uphill battle, even for Apple.

More on Apple: Apple Secretly Working on AirPod Feature That Translates Speech in Real-Time

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There’s Apparently a Huge Financial Problem With Trump’s Massive AI Project

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President Donald Trump's behemoth $500 billion AI infrastructure project, dubbed Stargate, may be doomed from the start.

Trump made the sweeping announcement earlier this week, revealing that the ChatGPT maker, investment company SoftBank, tech giant Oracle, and Abu Dhabi state-run AI fund MGX would initially spend a total of $100 billion on the project, with the eventual goal of reaching half a trillion dollars in just a few years.

But in reality, according to the Financial Times' sources, Stargate may be facing insurmountable financial challenges as it attempts to get off the ground.

"They haven’t figured out the structure, they haven’t figured out the financing, they don’t have the money committed," an unnamed source told the newspaper.

Did Trump put the cart before the horse by making a splashy announcement before the pieces were in place? Critics of the project think it's entirely possible.

The FT's reporting is especially interesting considering this is exactly what multi-hyphenate Elon Musk, a personal enemy of Altman's, accused OpenAI of earlier this week.

"They don’t actually have the money," the mercurial CEO  tweeted just hours after the project was announced.

"SoftBank has well under $10B secured," Musk wrote in a followup an hour later. "I have that on good authority."

It's difficult to gauge the legitimacy of either Musk's or the FT's claims. Could Stargate actually collapse under its own weight, stumbling at the starting line without the necessary funds to build out data centers in the United States?

It's true that SoftBank has had a troubled history with past investments, posting a record $32 billion loss for its Vision Fund in 2023. Many companies the lender has backed have shuttered or filed for bankruptcy, with WeWork being a particularly notable example.

Musk certainly has plenty to gain from voicing his doubts, having founded his own AI company that was passed over by the Stargate program. He's has had an extremely strained relationship with Altman for years.

OpenAI and SoftBank are each expected to commit $19 billion to fund Stargate, as The Information reported on Wednesday. Effectively, each company will hold a 40 percent interest in the project.

The companies behind Stargate claim that work has already begun. Construction began for an Oracle-funded data center in Abilene, Texas, in June 2023, well over a year before Stargate was announced.

But other than that, details about Stargate are notably thin.

"There’s a real intent to do this, but the details haven’t been fleshed out," an unnamed source told the FT. "People want to do splashy things in the first week of Trump being in office."

More on Stargate: Trump's $500 Billion AI Deal Includes Funding by UAE Royal Family Linked to Astonishing Number of Scandals, Including Human Torture

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Scientists Say Skeletons Show Ancient Humans With Huge Heads

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Scientists suggest a

Big Brain Time

Scientists are suggesting that a "large-headed" group of extinct humans once lived during the same time as homo sapiens — that's us, of course — hundreds of millennia ago in what's now modern-day China.

As detailed in a paper published in the journal Nature Communications last month, University of Hawaii at Manoa anthropologist Christopher Bae and Chinese Academy of Sciences paleontologist Xiujie Wu are proposing the existence of a new group of humans called the Juluren, which roughly translates to "big heads."

Many of the proposed group's attributes, based on bone fragments collected across modern-day China, are currently ascribed to Denisovans, a subspecies of archaic humans who lived across Asia from 285,000 to 25,000 years ago.

However, Wu and Bae argue that some of these fossils' features should be assigned to their own species.

"Collectively, these fossils represent a new form of large-brained hominin," they wrote in the study.

Head Hunters

The species, which would've lived from around 300,000 years ago until about 50,000 years ago across eastern Asia, likely hunted wild horses in small groups. They also appeared to make stone tools and used animal hides for survival.

Wu and Bae are hoping to fill in the gaps in our current knowledge of extinct human subspecies by refining how we refer to these disparate groups today.

"This study clarifies a hominin fossil record that has tended to include anything that cannot easily be assigned to Homo erectus, Homo neanderthalensis or Homo sapiens," Bae said in a statement. "Although we started this project several years ago, we did not expect being able to propose a new hominin (human ancestor) species and then to be able to organize the hominin fossils from Asia into different groups."

All told, the research suggests a far more complex and nuanced picture of the dispersal of human groups over hundreds of thousands of years.

"I see the name Juluren not as a replacement for Denisovan, but as a way of referring to a particular group of fossils and their possible place in the network of ancient groups," paleoanthropologist John Hawks, who was not involved in the research, wrote in a blog post about the study.

"I think the record is more expansive than most specialists have been assuming," he added. "Calling all these groups by the same name makes sense only as a contrast to recent humans, not as a description of their populations across space and time."

Wu and Bae would tend to agree.

"If anything, the eastern Asian record is prompting us to recognize just how complex human evolution is more generally and really forcing us to revise and rethink our interpretations of various evolutionary models to better match the growing fossil record," they wrote in their study.

More on homo sapiens: Scientists Find Structure From Before Homo Sapiens Existed

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Scientists Converting Cars to Run on Invasive Seaweed

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Invasive sargassum seaweed may be a great source of biogas, turning it into a fuel that can power converted combustion engine cars.

Seaweed Sedan

Mountains of brown, sludgy sargassum, an invasive species of seaweed, have rendered popular beaches in the Caribbean into an unsightly mess.

The situation has become so dire that Barbados' prime minister Mia Mottley declared the invasion a national emergency in 2018.

But there could be a silver lining, the BBC reports: scientists say sargassum could be a lucrative source of biogas, turning the fibrous species into a fuel that can power converted combustion engine cars. A group of Caribbean scientists recently launched the first-ever vehicles converted to run on the stuff — a creative endeavor that turns a dire environmental crisis into a golden opportunity.

Biogas Boon

The team at the University of the West Indies (UWI) in Barbados developed a conversion kit that can turn a conventional gas-powered car into one that runs on the seaweed product for just $2,500.

"Tourism has suffered a lot from the seaweed; hotels have been spending millions on tackling it," UWI lecturer and renewable energy expert Legena Henry told the BBC.

The team combined rum distillery wastewater with sargassum inside a bioreactor and found that it produced plenty of usable biogas.

"Within just two weeks we got pretty good results," UWI student Brittney McKenzie, who was tasked with collecting the seaweed, told the broadcaster. "It was turning into something even bigger than we initially thought."

Sargassum has become a major problem, threatening not just local endangered wildlife but even human health due to the hydrogen sulfide it releases as it decomposes. Climate change is also allowing its population to explode, covering many Caribbean beaches entirely.

"By repurposing it in vehicles you protect tourism and prevent people from inhaling it," biologist Shamika Spencer, who worked on the project, told the BBC. "When we scale up to fuel more vehicles it will require a very large volume."

But the resulting sargassum-based biofuel won't be a magic fix for a growing environmental crisis.

"My goal is to help build up this region," Henry added. "We are now setting up a four-car pilot to demonstrate real-life working prototypes to convince funders that this is workable and scalable."

More on biogas: A Cruise Line Plans to Power Its Ships with Dead Fish

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Scientists Gene Hack Bacteria That Breaks Down Plastic Waste

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The scientists edited to the bacteria to prove which enzyme it used to degrade PET plastics into bioavailable carbon.

Bottom Feeders

We may have a way of literally eating away at our planet's pollution crisis.

As part of a new study published in the journal Environmental Science and Technology, researchers have shed additional light on a possibly game-changing bacteria that grows on common polyethylene terephthalate (PET) plastics, confirming that it can break down and eat the polymers that make up the waste.

Scientists have long been interested in the plastic-decomposing abilities of the bacteria, Comamonas testosteroni. But this is the first time that the mechanisms behind that process have been fully documented, according to study senior author Ludmilla Aristilde.

"The machinery in environmental microbes is still a largely untapped potential for uncovering sustainable solutions we can exploit," Aristilde, an associate professor of civil and environmental engineering at Northwestern University in Illinois, told The Washington Post.

Enzyme or Reason

To observe its plastic-devouring ability, the researchers isolated a bacterium sample, grew it on shards of PET plastics, and then used advanced microscopic imaging to look for changes inside the microbe, in the plastic, and in the surrounding water.

Later, they identified the specific enzyme that helped break down the plastic. To prove it was the one, they edited the genes of the bacteria so that it wouldn't secrete the enzyme and found that without it, the bacteria's plastic degrading abilities were markedly diminished.

That gene-hacking trick formed a full picture of what goes on. First, the bacteria more or less chews on the plastic to break it into microscopic particles. Then, they use the enzyme to degrade the tiny pieces into their monomer building blocks, which provide a bioavailable source of carbon.

"It is amazing that this bacterium can perform that entire process, and we identified a key enzyme responsible for breaking down the plastic materials," Aristilde said in a statement about the work. "This could be optimized and exploited to help get rid of plastics in the environment."

PET Project

PET plastics, which are often used in water bottles, account for 12 percent of global solid waste, the researchers said. It also accounts for up to 50 percent of the microplastics found in wastewater.

That happens to be the environment that C. testosteroni thrives in, opening up the possibility of tailoring the bacteria to clean up our sewage before it's dumped into the ocean, for example.

But we'll need to understand more about the bacteria before that can happen.

"There's a lot of different kinds of plastic, and there are just as many potential solutions to reducing the environmental harm of plastic pollution," Timothy Hollein, a professor of biology at Loyola University Chicago who was not involved with the study, told WaPo. "We're best positioned to pursue all options at the same time."

More on pollution: A Shocking Percentage of Our Brains Are Made of Microplastics, Scientists Find

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NASA’s Lunar Space Station Just Took a Massive Step Towards Launching

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A core component of NASA's Gateway lunar space station just passed a grueling round of pressure tests, a big win for the project.

Under Pressure

NASA announced yesterday that its forthcoming Gateway lunar space station — an outpost designed to house astronauts in the Moon's orbit — just passed a critical milestone.

According to the agency, Gateway's Habitation and Logistics Outpost (HALO) successfully passed a grueling round of "static load testing," defined by NASA as a "rigorous stress test of how well the structure responds to the forces encountered in deep space."

In other words, HALO won't crumble or crack under the extreme conditions it'll face in lunar orbit.

"Static load testing is one of the major environmental stress tests HALO will undergo," NASA continues in its announcement, adding that HALO, which is currently in Italy, will be transferred to Arizona "once all phases of testing are complete." There, NASA contractor Northrop Grumman will add HALO's finishing touches.

HALO is one of "four pressurized Gateway modules where astronauts will live, conduct science, and prepare for missions to the lunar South Pole region," per NASA's announcement.

It's an exciting mile marker for Gateway, which stands to mark the first sustained human presence on and around our Moon — one of the core goals of NASA's ongoing Artemis program, and perhaps a stepping stone in humanity's efforts to send humans to Mars.

Looking Ahead

While the stress test was a key breakthrough for the Gateway mission, it's still a ways off from lift-off.

The outpost will launch in pieces, and the first components to take flight — HALO and the Power and Propulsion Element (PPE) — are slated for launch aboard a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket in December 2027 at the earliest. By conservative estimates, Gateway is not expected to be inhabited until 2028.

It's an ambitious plan and there's always a chance of delays. In the meantime, it's heartening to see NASA's Gateway, piece by piece, move forward.

"Gateway is humanity's first lunar space station supporting a new era of exploration and scientific discovery as part of NASA's Artemis campaign that will establish a sustained presence on and around the Moon," said NASA of the achievement, "paving the way for the first crewed mission to Mars."

More on the Artemis missions: NASA's Moon Launcher Is in Big Trouble

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