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Scientists Tweaked LSD’s Molecular Structure and Created a Wild New Brain Drug

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Researchers made small tweaks to the molecular structure of LSD to see if it could be turned into an effective brain-healing treatment.

A team of researchers at the University of California, Davis, made small tweaks to the molecular structure of lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) to see if it could be turned into an effective brain-healing treatment for patients that suffer from conditions like schizophrenia — without risking a potentially disastrous acid trip.

As detailed in a new paper published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences last month, the researchers created a new compound called JRT by shifting the position of just two atoms of the psychedelic's molecular structure.

With the two atoms flipped, the new drug could still stimulate brain cell growth and repair damaged neural connections, while simultaneously minimizing psychedelic effects, in mice.

"Basically, what we did here is a tire rotation," said corresponding author and UC Davis chemistry professor David Olson in a statement. "By just transposing two atoms in LSD, we significantly improved JRT’s selectivity profile and reduced its hallucinogenic potential."

In experiments involving mice, the team found that JRT improved negative symptoms of schizophrenia without worsening other behaviors associated with psychosis.

While it's still far too early to tell if JRT could be effective in humans as well, the team is hoping that the new drug could become a powerful new therapeutic, especially for those suffering from conditions like schizophrenia.

"No one really wants to give a hallucinogenic molecule like LSD to a patient with schizophrenia," said Olson. "The development of JRT emphasizes that we can use psychedelics like LSD as starting points to make better medicines."

"We may be able to create medications that can be used in patient populations where psychedelic use is precluded," he added.

Olsen and his colleagues hope their new drug could provide an alternative to drugs like clozapine, a schizophrenia treatment, without negative side effects like an inability to feel pleasure and a decline in cognitive function.

Interestingly, it also proved a powerful antidepressant in early experiments involving mice at doses 100-fold lower than ketamine, a popular anesthetic used for the treatment of depression and pain management.

But before it can be tested in humans, the team still has plenty of work to do.

"JRT has extremely high therapeutic potential," Olsen said in the statement. Right now, we are testing it in other disease models, improving its synthesis, and creating new analogs of JRT that might be even better."

More on LSD: Former CEO Sues Company That Fired Him for Microdosing LSD in an Investor Meeting

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Scientists Intrigued by Bridge of Dark Matter Inside Huge Galaxy Cluster

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The mysterious dark matter

The Perseus cluster is a vast swirl of thousands of galaxies, all bound together by gravity. Famed for its unbelievable size — containing the mass of some 600 trillion suns — it also has a reputation for being one of the few "relaxed" galaxy clusters out there: it shows no signs of having undergone a powerful but disruptive merger with another galaxy, which is how these clusters typically grow. In a word, Perseus looks settled down and pretty stable.

But that may not be the case, according to an international team of astronomers. As detailed in a new study published in the journal Nature Astronomy, the astronomers have found a "bridge" of dark matter that leads to the center of the cluster, which they believe is the remnant of a massive object slamming into the galactic swirl billions of years ago. If this is evidence of a major merger, it'd mean that Perseus isn't so "relaxed" after all.

"This is the missing piece we've been looking for," said study coauthor James Jee, a physicist at University of California, Davis, in a statement about the work. "All the odd shapes and swirling gas observed in the Perseus cluster now make sense within the context of a major merger."

Dark matter is the invisible substance believed to account for around 80 percent of all mass in the universe. While we can't interact with dark matter, its gravity appears to be responsible for governing the shapes of the cosmos's largest structures, pulling "normal" matter together around "clumps" of itself to form the galaxies that we see.

To make the discovery, the astronomers sifted through data collected by the Subaru Telescope in Japan to look for signs of what's known as gravitational lensing. This occurs when the gravity of a massive object bends the light of more distant sources like a lens, magnifying our view of what lies behind it. 

By measuring how the light is being distorted, astronomers can infer traits about the object that's causing the lensing. This technique is known as weak gravitational lensing, and can only be used when there's a large number of galaxies that the distortion's incredibly subtle effects can be observed on. It's one of the primary ways that astronomers map the distribution of dark matter throughout the cosmos.

Using this technique, the astronomers found a dark matter clump located inside the Perseus cluster around 1.4 million light years away from its center, weighing a colossal 200 trillion solar masses (the entire Milky Way, for reference, weighs about 1.5 trillion solar masses). But the clump clearly was a highly disruptive intruder, because it left behind an enormous dark matter "bridge" linking it to the center of the cluster. According to the astronomers, it's as good as a sign of a collision between the clump and the cluster as it gets. And from simulations they performed, this epic merger occurred some five billion years ago — the echoes of which still affect Perseus' structure to this day.

"It took courage to challenge the prevailing consensus, but the simulation results from our collaborators and recent observations from the Euclid and XRISM space telescopes strongly support our findings," lead author HyeongHan Kim, an astronomer at Yonsei University in South Korea, said in the statement.

More on dark matter: Scientists Say Dark Matter May Be Giving Off a Signal

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Nobel-Winning Scientist Says His Researchers Are Fleeing the Country Because of Trump’s Cruelty

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Around 15 of Nobel Prize-winning biochemist David Baker's graduate students and postdoctoral researchers are looking to leave the US.

Last year, University of Washington School of Medicine professor of biochemistry David Baker won the Nobel Prize for his work on designing proteins that can be used in drugs, vaccines, materials, and sensors.

But now that the Trump administration has begun to diminish the role of research and gut scientific funding, around 15 of Baker's graduate students and postdoctoral researchers are looking to leave the US, NBC News reports.

A major funding squeeze is forcing Baker and his colleagues at the Institute for Protein Design to reevaluate and cut back.

"There’s so many amazing people who want to come in, and we can’t take them," he told NBC. "The Nobel Prize was just a little blip. But things have gotten quite bleak."

Trump's war on science in the US has sparked concerns over a major brain drain, with a Nature poll of more than 1,200 scientists finding that a startling 75 percent are now considering leaving the country.

The Trump administration has gutted federal agencies, with the National Institutes of Health ringing the alarm bells following massive layoffs and budget cuts. Billions of dollars worth of contracts have been ordered to be canceled by Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency.

"Right now, due to the funding cuts, we are unable to enroll any more participants into federally funded studies, or start new studies, or do really any new work," UW Medicine infectious disease researcher Rachel Bender Ignacio, who cut her own salary to distribute money to the rest of other staffers, told NBC.

Even politically uncontroversial lines of research, including Alzheimer's and cancer, have been swept up in a major shrinking of funding, which could lead to significant slowdowns in progress toward treatments, cures, and other interventions.

"We’ve gone through a bunch of contingency planning," University of Washington’s Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center director Thomas Grabowski told NBC, referring to grant decisions slowing to a crawl. "When it starts to look like multiple, multiple, multiple months, then there’s not a good answer to your question."

The university received about 1,2200 grants from the NIH, worth around $648 million, last year. This year that approval process ground to a halt, and more than 600 grants are still in limbo.

Scientists are now in the dark, awaiting some much-needed clarity from the agency, which has spent much of its resources pointlessly chasing after president Donald Trump's number-one bogeyman: diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives.

"The fact that they’re cutting these things or putting them in limbo is really upsetting, and you know, I feel like they’re doing surgery with a chainsaw at the federal level," retired attorney Andrea Gilbert, who had undergone treatment for Alzheimer's disease under Grabowski's care, told NBC News.

More on the NIH: Trump Administration Throws Cancer Research Into Turmoil

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It’s Interesting How Truth Social Moved to Sell Stock Right Before Trump’s Tariffs Were Announced

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Just before announcing a major escalation in his tariff war, president Donald Trump freed up the sale of his Truth Social shares.

Just before announcing a major escalation in his tariff war on Wednesday evening — followed by a major stock market wipeout the following morning — president Donald Trump freed up the sale of his Truth Social shares.

As the Financial Times reports, Trump Media and Technology Group (TMTG) revealed that it was planning to sell more than 142 million shares in a late Tuesday filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Most notably, the shares listed in the document include Trump's 114-million-share stake, which is worth roughly $2.3 billion and held in a trust controlled by his son Donald Trump Jr. Other insiders, including a crypto exchange-traded fund, and 106,000 shares held by US attorney Pam Bondi were also included in the latest filing.

While the filing doesn't guarantee any future sale of shares, investors weren't exactly smitten with the optics. Shares plunged eight percent in light of the news, according to the FT, and are down over 45 percent this year amid Trump's escalating trade war.

The timing of the SEC filing is certainly suspect. Trump's "liberation day" tariff announcement on Wednesday triggered a major selloff, causing shares of multinational companies and stock futures to crater.

Trump also vowed in September that he wasn't planning to sell any of his TMTG shares, which caused their value to spike temporarily at the time.

Now that the shares are up for grabs, the president has seemingly had a change of heart — or, perhaps, is getting cold feet now that the economy is feeling the brunt of his catastrophic economic policymaking. It's also possible Trump was always planning to cash out and leave investors exposed.

Meanwhile, Trump Media released a statement on Wednesday, accusing "legacy media outlets" of "spreading a fake story suggesting that a TMTG filing today is paving the way for the Trump trust to sell its shares in TMTG." The company said this week's filing was "routine."

Experts have long pointed out that if Trump were to sell, it could lead to TMTG spiraling.

It's still unclear whether the company — which reported a staggering $400 million loss in 2024, while only netting a pitiful $3.6 million revenue — will realize the mass sale of millions of shares.

But even just the suggestion appears to have spooked investors.

"In this offering it says the Trump trust could sell shares — it doesn't necessarily mean that they will," Morningstar analyst Seth Goldstein told ABC News. "It signals to the market that they could."

"This leaves it up in the air if and when a share sale will happen," he added.

In short, instead of building a viable business that generates meaningful revenue to reflect its valuation, TMTG still feels more like an enrichment scheme for Trump and his closest associates.

"Trump Media has been pretty unsuccessful at creating an operating business model, but they have been quite successful at selling their stock," University of Florida finance professor Jay Ritter told ABC News.

More on TMTG: Trump's Failing Truth Social Was Doing Much Better Under Biden

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Scientist Testing Spider-Man-Style Web Shooters He Accidentally Made in Lab

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Tufts University biotech researcher Marco Lo Presti accidentally discovered a

With Great Power

Tufts University biotech researcher Marco Lo Presti made an astonishing discovery while investigating how silk and dopamine allow mussels to stick to rocky surfaces.

"While using acetone to clean the glassware of this silk and dopamine substance," he told Wired, "I noticed it was undergoing a transition into a solid format, into a web-looking material, into something that looked like a fiber."

Lo Presti and his colleagues immediately got to work, investigating whether the sticky fibers could be turned into a "remote adhesive."

The result is an astonishingly "Spider Man"-like silk that can be shot not unlike the superhero's wrist-mounted web shooters, as detailed in a paper published in the journal Advanced Functional Materials last year.

While it won't allow an adult person to swing from skyscraper to skyscraper any time soon, the results speak for themselves. Footage of the team's experiments shows strands of the material being dripped onto a number of objects from several inches above, forming a solid connection in a matter of seconds and allowing the object to be carried away.

The researcher's collaborator, Tufts engineering professor Fiorenzo Omenetto, recalled being caught off guard by the accidental discovery.

"You explore and you play and you sort of connect the dots," he told Wired. "Part of the play that is very underestimated is where you say 'Hey, wait a second, is this like a Spider-Man thing?' And you brush it off at first, but a material that mimics superpowers is always a very, very good thing."

Comes Great Responsibility

Intriguingly, Lo Presti explained that no spider has the ability to "shoot a stream of solution, which turns into a fiber and does the remote capturing of a distant object."

In other words, the discovery appears to be entirely new, despite initially being inspired by nature.

The fibers also have an impressive tensile strength.

"We can now catch an object up to 30 or 35 centimeters away, and lift an object of around 15 to 20 grams," Lo Presti told Wired.

But scaling it up could prove difficult.

"Everybody wants to know if we're going to be able to swing from buildings," Omenetto added, stopping short of hazarding a guess as to when or if that's possible.

"I mean you could probably lift a very heavy object, but that’s one of the big questions — what can you lift? Can you remotely drag something?" he added. "Silk is very, very strong, it’s very tough, it can lift incredible weights but this is silk in its natural form whether it’s from the spider or the silkworm."

More on the silk shooters: Researchers Create Real-Life "Spider-Man" Web-Slinging Tech

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Scientists Find Signs of Life Deep Inside the Earth

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A groundbreaking new study of microbes underground is challenging everything we thought we knew about extreme environments.

Little Friends

We've heard of underground parties, but this is ridiculous. A new study by an international team of researchers has uncovered troves of microbes thriving in the hostile subsurface of the earth, far from the life-giving energy of the sun.

The findings, published in the journal ScienceAdvances, are the culmination of eight years of first-of-its-kind research comparing over 1,400 datasets from microbiomes across the world.

Chief among the findings is that the dank cracks of the planet's crust could be home to over half of microbial cells on Earth, challenging our previous — and logical — understanding that life gets less diverse and abundant the farther it gets from the sun.

"It’s commonly assumed that the deeper you go below the Earth’s surface, the less energy is available, and the lower is the number of cells that can survive," said lead author Emil Ruff, a microbial ecologist at the famed Woods Hole Marine Biological Laboratory, in a news release about the research. "Whereas the more energy present, the more diversity can be generated and maintained — as in tropical forests or coral reefs, where there’s lots of sun and warmth."

"But we show that in some subsurface environments," he added, "the diversity can easily rival, if not exceed, diversity at the surface."

Breakthrough

That comparable diversity is the key to the group's breakthrough — the researchers wrote in their paper that "species richness and evenness in many subsurface environments rival those in surface environments," in what the team is calling a previously unknown "universal ecological principle."

The study is notable not only for its findings, but also for its methodology.

Prior to the team's work, which began in 2016, there was little concerted effort to standardize microbial datasets from around the globe, due to differences in collection and analysis standards. That changed thanks to a survey led by Bay Paul Center molecular biologist Mitchell Sogin — also a coauthor of the new paper — who organized a drive to standardize microbial DNA datasets from researchers around the world.

The team's comparative work is built on these standardized datasets, allowing them to compare a sample sourced by a team at the University of Utah to that of a sample from the Universidad de Valladolid in Spain.

It's a captivating tale of international collaboration and deep-diving research — paving the way for a fascinating and previously overlooked avenue of research.

More on microorganisms: Researchers Say "Conan the Bacterium" Could Be Hidden Beneath Mars’ Surface

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Paralyzed Man Can Now Fly Drone Using Brain Implant

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A groundbreaking brain implant has allowed a paralyzed man to control a virtual drone and fly it through an obstacle course.

A groundbreaking brain implant has allowed a paralyzed man to control a virtual drone and fly it through an obstacle course.

The feat, as detailed in a study published in the journal Nature Medicine, was achieved by mapping virtual inputs to signals sent by a region of the brain that controls the fingers, the left precentral gyrus, which is where the brain computer interface (BCI) was implanted.

All the paralyzed patient had to do to exert control is simply think about moving the digits of his hand — bringing a whole new meaning, we must report, to the expression of "not lifting a finger."

"This is a greater degree of functionality than anything previously based on finger movements," said study lead author Matthew Willsey, an assistant professor of neurosurgery and biomedical engineering at the University of Michigan, in a statement about the work.

Key to the BCI's success, the researchers argue, was the fact that it was a brain implant, and not a noninvasive alternative like a brain cap. The researchers believe that placing electrodes as close as possible to neurons is essential to achieve highly functional motor control.

In this case, a total of 192 electrodes were surgically placed in the patient's brain, connecting to a computer. 

From there, a type of AI called a feed-forward neural network interprets the signals, assigning them to different finger movements. The AI system learned to distinguish the signals during a training stage in which the patient tried to perform motions with their fingers — in their mind, to clarify — in sync with a moving virtual hand.

In total, the system provides four degrees of freedom: forwards and backwards, left and right, up and down, and horizontal rotation. Plenty to fly a drone or take control of any virtual environment.

The researchers hope that their technique will open up vast recreational opportunities for people with paralysis and other severe disabilities — like being able to play multiplayer video games, a feat already achieved by a Neuralink patient.

"People tend to focus on restoration of the sorts of functions that are basic necessities — eating, dressing, mobility — and those are all important," co-author Jamie Henderson, a Stanford professor of neurosurgery, said in the statement. "But oftentimes, other equally important aspects of life get short shrift, like recreation or connection with peers. People want to play games and interact with their friends."

Willsey's patient, a 69-year-old man who became quadriplegic after sustaining a devastating spine injury, has a passion for flying. With any luck, he may be able to play a full blown flight simulator — or maybe even control a real drone — in the near future.

More on brain implants: First Neuralink Patient Using It to Learn New Languages

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Scientists Intrigued by Planet With Long Tail

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Astronomers have discovered an unusual exoplanet with a long

Being Tailed

Astronomers have discovered an unusual exoplanet with a long "tail" of gas trailing behind it, not unlike a giant comet.

As NASA details in a recent article about the discovery, the planet, dubbed WASP-69 b, is steadily shedding its atmosphere of hydrogen and helium particles, which are being shaped into the astonishing tail by harsh stellar winds blowing its way.

WASP-69 b is a hot Jupiter, which means it's a gas giant roughly the mass of Jupiter but orbits its host star in the Aquarius constellation — some 164 light-years away from earth — at a much shorter distance, causing its surface temperatures to soar.

The sheer amount of radiation from its host star causes lightweight gases including hydrogen and helium to "photoevaporate" into outer space, trailing the planet in an epic wake.

"Strong stellar winds can sculpt that outflow in tails that trail behind the planet," University of California astrophysicist Dakotah Tyler, lead author of a paper published in the journal The Astrophysical Journal, told NASA.

Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/R. Hurt (IPAC)

Breaking Wind

Tyler and his colleagues found that the exoplanet is losing an estimated 200,000 tons of gas per second. While that may sound like a lot, we're talking about planetary scales; every one billion years, the team found, the planet is losing the mass equivalent to planet Earth, which means it's unlikely to ever run out of gas in its atmosphere (WASP-69 b is roughly 90 times the mass of Earth.)

The exoplanet's tail is astonishingly long, extending more than 7.5 times its radius behind it, or 350,000 miles, which is roughly 1.5 times the distance between the Earth and the Moon.

But as the stellar winds shift, WASP-69 b's unusual appendage's size and shape can change, and astronomers are only beginning to understand this unusual phenomenon.

"Studying the escaping atmospheres of highly irradiated exoplanets is critical for understanding the physical mechanisms that shape the demographics of close-in planets," the paper reads.

More on exoplanets: Cornell Astronomer Hoping the James Webb Will Confirm Alien Life in 2025

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Doctors Intrigued by Treatment That Makes Dead Brains Show Signs of Life

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Scientists were astonished to find that recirculating preserving agents through a severed pig's head caused its brain to show signs of life.

Scientists were astonished to find that recirculating a cocktail of preserving agents through a severed pig's head caused the animal's brain to show signs of life.

As New Scientist reports, basic cellular functions were restored in the dismembered brain — something that was previously thought impossible following the cessation of blood flow.

While the pig brain wasn't exactly oinking at the farm after the treatment, in scientifically significant ways it was seemingly brought back from the brink of death — a ghoulish experiment that could have implications for future efforts to reanimate a dead human brain as well.

In fact, Yale School of Medicine neuroscientist Zvonimir Vrselja and his colleagues are looking to try the technique on human brains — efforts, needless to say, that could have thorny ethical ramifications.

For one, the definition of when a person has died has remained a lively debate among health practitioners.

"We are trying to be transparent and very careful because there’s so much value that can come out of this," Vrselja told New Scientist.

Some argue that death occurs when the heart stops beating. Others define it as the point when the brain's functions cease entirely.

Things get murkier when you consider that neuroscientists have already found that brain activity can extend far beyond cardiac arrest. In fact, research has found that the brain can even light up when the heart stops beating.

"The dying brain actually starts this massive rescue effort," University of Michigan neuroscientist Jimo Borjigin told New Scientist.

Borjigin found in a 2023 study that the brain "appeared to be on fire" after four dying people were taken off of life support.

"If we can better understand what’s going on at this point, I believe we could resuscitate it," he added.

Vrselja and his colleagues are at the forefront of those efforts, having developed a special drug cocktail called BrainEx that stops the brain from being damaged by the sudden surge of oxygen-rich blood following brain death.

In a 2019 experiment involving pig brains, the researchers managed to bring some activity back four hours after decapitation.

But even getting remotely near the point of consciousness with a donated human brain could have major ethical ramifications, forcing the team to tread carefully.

"We had to develop new methods to make sure no electrical activity is occurring in an organized way that might reflect any kind of consciousness," Vrselja told New Scientist.

For now, they're using their invention to test out treatments for Alzheimer's and Parkinson's.

Similar techniques could also be used to prolong the shelf life of donor organs, which could save lives.

More on death: Professor of Medicine Says Death Appears to Be Reversible

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Researchers Force Grumpy Cats to Wear Adorable Wittle Wool Hats — for Science

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Veterinary researchers have devised a solution to head off feline resistance to brain scans: hiding the electrodes underneath crocheted hats.

Hide and Seek

Veterinary researchers have devised an ingenious solution to head off feline resistance to brain scans: hiding the electrodes underneath custom-fit crocheted caps.

In a press release about this fascinating and adorable discovery, the University of Montreal boasted that its scientists figured out the system that helps keep the brain scanners on cats who are given chronic pain tests.

When administered while felines are awake, brain scans meant to detect pain conditions like osteoarthritis are often annoying to the cats in question. The animals often end up chewing on wires and trying to shake off the sensitive electrodes of the electroencephalogram (EEGs).

Vets generally sedate cats when giving them EEGs to avoid such a scene, but in their new study published in the Journal of Neuroscience Methods, the UdeM researchers are proposing their novel knitted approach.

In interviews with the New Scientist about their methodology, the researchers said that they came up with the solution after becoming frustrated with cats they were doing brain scans on constantly throwing off their electrodes.

"When you spend more time putting electrodes back on than you do actually recording the EEGs, you get creative," explained PhD student and study coauthor Aliénor Delsart.

Getting Creative

When trying to find solutions to this feline conundrum, the researchers stumbled upon a YouTube tutorial for crocheted cat hats. The team leads had a grad student make the cats' beanies and were pleased to discover that it helped keep the electrodes in place — though there's little doubt that the cats were none too pleased by their new accessories.

With the crocheted beanies secured as a novel solution to the pissed-off cat problem, UdeM team lead Éric Troncy said in the press release that they're looking for government funding to expand their research into chronic feline pain.

"We now plan to obtain [Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada Alliance] funding, in partnership with private companies, to enable us to establish a genuine EEG signature for chronic pain," Troncy said, "and many other applications that will enable us to automate chronic pain detection in the future."

Necessity is, as they say, the mother of invention — and in this case, it may end up helping all of felinekind.

More on cats: Research Finds That Cats Feel Grief When Their Fellow Pets Die... Even Dogs

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Elon Musk Might Die of Old Age Before He Can Make It to Mars, Expert Suggests

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Elon Musk's plans to fly to Mars grow more ambitious every year — but it's unclear whether he'll live long enough to actually see it happen.

Mulling Martians

SpaceX CEO Elon Musk's plans to turn humanity into a "multiplanetary" species grow more ambitious every year — but it's unclear whether he'll live long enough to actually see it happen.

As the Wall Street Journal reports, experts are skeptical about the billionaire's bold plan to take humans to Mars.

In an interview with the newspaper, aerodynamics expert Christopher Combs of the University of Texas said that it may take between 15 and 20 years for it to be safe enough for humans to travel to Mars. Should it take that long, the multi-hyphenate business owner will be in his 60s or 70s by the time he's able to reach the Red Planet.

"SpaceX has a history of designing iteratively, and we kind of expect things to go wrong the first few tries — if you have to wait two years between iterative attempts, that really stretches out your development cycle," Combs told the newspaper. "Can they be perfect the first time?"

Of particular concern are the logistics of getting to the Red Planet, which only has a single window every 26 months where that planet and ours are aligned closely enough to send spacecraft with the least amount of fuel. With future launches having to occur on that timeline, there will only be nine windows for SpaceX's Starships to go to Mars in the next 20 years.

Time Windows

At the age of 53, Musk will ultimately have to pull off at least one crewed Mars mission within the next 20 years to get there himself — and given that the next such window opens in the fourth quarter of this year, he's clearly not going to be able to launch anything to Mars again before late 2026.

To be fair, Musk himself has made public comments about the fuzziness of the Mars travel timeline as it relates to his own lifespan.

"If we don’t improve our pace of progress, I’m definitely, you know, gonna be dead before we go to Mars," Musk said during a 2020 conference. "I would like to not be dead by the time we go to Mars — that’s my aspiration here."

As per recent tweets, Musk is still hoping to send an uncrewed Starship spacecraft to the Red Planet during the next Earth-Mars transfer window in 2026 and claims humans will hitch rides there within the next eight years. Unlike Combs, astrophysicist Peter Hague thinks after crunching the numbers that it can be done.

"2031 for humans is credible," Hague tweeted. "If not 2033. This is happening and you’ll get to see it."

Which expert is more correct remains to be seen. SpaceX still has a lot to prove — and Musk is only getting older.

More on Musk and Mars: Elon Musk Makes Embarrassingly Stupid Claim: If Trump Loses, Humanity Will Never Make It to Mars

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Tech Company Lays Off 5,500 Workers to Invest More in AI, Despite Making $10.3 Billion in Profit

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Cisco posted $10.3 billion in profits last year but is still laying off 5,500 workers as part of an effort to invest more into AI.

Pink Slip Season

Despite tech conglomerate Cisco posting $10.3 billion in profits last year, it's still laying off 5,500 workers as part of an effort to invest more in AI, SFGATE reports.

It joins a litany of other companies like Microsoft and Intuit, the maker of TurboTax, that have used AI as justification for the mass culling of its workforce.

The layoffs at Cisco came to light in a notice posted with the Securities and Exchange Commission this week, affecting seven percent of its staff.

In a short statement, CEO Chuck Robbins used the term "AI" five times, highlighting the company's efforts to keep up in the ongoing AI race.

Earlier this year, Cisco also laid off 4,000 or five percent of it staff, saying that the company wanted to "realign the organization and enable further investment in key priority areas."

In short, companies are no longer hiding their optimism over replacing human labor with AI, an unfortunate reality for those looking to maintain a stable job. But whether this "realignment" will pay off in the long run remains to be seen.

Red Herring

The layoff news helped boost Cisco's stock price on Wednesday, going from $45.04 in the morning to spiking over $48 per share in after-hours trading.

We've already seen similar spikes in the stock prices of other tech companies announcing layoffs.

Cisc's layoffs are also part of another pattern: tech companies saying they are shifting resources to boost their AI efforts and therefore they need to lay off people as part of a restructuring campaign.

While many companies have used AI as a public-facing excuse for their restructuring efforts, experts remain skeptical and think the tech is instead used as a cover.

"Fighting against robots is a nice cover story," University of Oxford economist and data scientist Fabian Stephany told Business Insider earlier this year. "But if you have a closer look, it's often old school, simple economic dynamics like outsourcing or lead management cutting costs to increase salaries in other places."

More on tech layoffs: Microsoft Lays Off 1,500 Workers, Blames "AI Wave"

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Tech Company Lays Off 5,500 Workers to Invest More in AI, Despite Making $10.3 Billion in Profit