Colorado ranchers struggling with severe drought and heat have filed a friend-of-the-court brief in a climate case that soon will be heard by the U.S. Supreme Court.
Leaders of an extremist, far-right party in Germany have quietly borrowed pages from President Trump's playbook to cast doubt on the integrity of absentee voting — alleging without evidence that residents of nursing homes have had their ballots manipulated and calling for an end to postal voting.
Building will soon be underway for Trump's Triumphant Arch
A federal judge again Friday blocked the U.S. Postal Service from enacting President Trump's sweeping new mail ballot rules for the November election.
Record-high diesel prices are squeezing California's economy, driving up fuel and operational costs for local farmers, trucking fleets and supply chains.
© Allen J. Schaben/Los Angeles Times
Gloria Steinem always listened more than she spoke, which is one reason her words had such lasting impact.
New research suggests that human activity is making El Niño even more extreme and globally disruptive.
The Treasury Department proposed the change Thursday. If finalized, the rule would take effect after May 2027, aiming to end race-based student policies or programs.
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During a tense vote on a data center being built in her drought-stricken Arizona district last summer, Tucson City Councilmember Nikki Lee made an unlikely pitch: “We’re going to get a little out-of-this-world for a second, so just bear with me.”
Like many of her constituents, Lee did not want Project Blue, a sprawling 290-acre data center, gobbling up an ounce of her local drinking water. “We need to put data centers where they belong,” she said, and “we don’t think data centers belong in the desert.”
President Donald Trump’s recent bluster aside, it’s possible that the only thing as bipartisan as loving Dolly Parton is hating data centers, whose construction has become so controversial, so costly, and so backlogged here on Earth that companies like Google, Meta, and of course, SpaceX, are actively flirting with the idea of flinging them into orbit instead. Soon after the Tucson City Council rejected Project Blue’s attempt to connect to city utilities, Amazon Web Services, the secretive intended beneficiary, pulled out of the project, and another Jeff Bezos company, Blue Origin, filed a plan with regulators for tens of thousands of possible new data centers, this time, destined for orbit.
Sure, launching a hyperscale AI data center into space is still unprecedented engineering-wise, carries an unfathomably large price tag, could engender its own severe environmental risks, and may or may not draw unwelcome attention from the hunters among the stars. But for AI companies, such trade-offs might still be preferable to the terrestrial roadblocks, among them an explosive populist backlash and a 12-year wait to connect to the power grid.
Next Thursday, Google plans to launch a pilot satellite capable of processing basic AI queries into orbit, the most significant test yet in what’s become a burgeoning race to power AI from space. For now, the satellite won’t approach the levels of computing power at a hulking terrestrial data center like Project Blue. But it is a major step toward a future in which many or even most of our AI queries will be powered not from the outskirts of a city like Tucson, but from a blinking data center circling the skies.
SpaceX’s gargantuan initial public offering earlier this summer was predicated on the idea that it would launch a thus-far-unrealized fleet of orbital data centers to fuel much of the AI economy. The company — whose rockets Google will use to launch its pilot — claims that by the end of this decade, possibly as early as 2028, it will have successfully assembled an AI data center in orbit, with plans to eventually harvest a staggering 100 gigawatts of new solar energy for AI annually, equivalent to one-fifth of all US electricity consumption last year. (As always, that’s a very iffy promise.)
Still, as Google’s overtures clearly demonstrate, it’s no longer a question of if large-scale space-based data centers could be technically feasible, but rather when they’ll be ready to launch, and perhaps more importantly, whether the math of using them to power something like AI will make much financial sense anytime soon. As of now, building a one-gigawatt data center in space would cost about $51.5 billion, according to an analysis by aerospace engineer Andrew McCalip, compared with $16 billion for one on land.
“They’re not breaking any rules of physics. Yes, there are going to be engineering challenges, but they are all solvable with enough time and money,” said Jason Aspiotis, a leading space systems engineer who now leads an orbital data center startup. “The gray area is, well, what about the economics?”
But even if this astronomically kooky plan does take off, it may not change much for those of us left on terra firma: Our energy bills will remain high, even if data centers aren’t there to drive them up. Our earthly infrastructure — affordable housing, public transit, and more — may be just as hard to build as ever. Harder even, maybe, given that crucial resources and untapped tax revenue will be literally rocketing up out of our reach.
No, if these tech giants succeed, it will not fix what’s wrong here on Earth, but merely prove once again their exemption to the gravitational forces holding the rest of us down.
My father spent most of his career working in the satellite industry, and would sometimes let me waltz inside the quaint little data center housed in his office, a room I remember as roughly the size of my school’s computer lab, hosting rows upon rows of servers that I couldn’t touch, churning with a cool, mechanical hum as they crunched zeroes and ones.
AI data centers work similarly to that server room but on an exponentially larger scale, requiring far more land and energy to run, and much more extravagant cooling systems. Sending his office’s data center into orbit would have been extraordinarily difficult, and getting one of the facilities that powers modern LLMs aloft would be an even larger, more ambitious undertaking. But the benefits — namely, “cheap space (no pun intended) and power,” as my dad put it to me recently — are even more enticing.
An orbital data center need not negotiate with an elected official like Lee over precious water rights to the Colorado River, though it would need to install bigger-than-football-field-sized heat radiators to keep itself cool. You can’t simply launch something that big into orbit, meaning a space-based hyperscale data center — the size of which would likely rival that of the International Space Station — would need to be assembled piece by piece, probably by robots. And while the sun would provide an endless supply of solar power to process your ChatGPT queries, it would also inflict incessant radiation on delicate circuitry. If something breaks, you can’t send a technician up to fix it. Many experts are also concerned that if an excess of space junk, which extraterrestrial data centers would inevitably produce, begins colliding like bumper cars in Earth’s low orbit, it could knock out the orbital infrastructure we already rely on, like GPS navigation and weather satellites.
Even plastic decays in space, said Sven Bilén, a professor of aerospace engineering at Penn State, who, like Aspiotis, believes that early orbital data centers will probably be “processing data from space, like spatial imaging satellites or weather satellites, as opposed to, you know, cat videos” or AI-generated reality TV slop.
But even if AI is not the lowest-hanging fruit for deploying compute into space, it is certainly the deepest-pocketed, meaning that many investors and companies like SpaceX and Google seem quite willing to shoulder the start-up costs anyway. And considering how difficult it’s gotten to build data centers on Earth, or at least in the United States, it’s indeed possible that space could become the cheaper, or at least most convenient option, more quickly than one might think.
“In some form or another, in five years, we are going to have some orbital data centers in space for sure,” Krishna Muralidharan, who leads the Center for Semiconductor Manufacturing at the University of Arizona, told me, but it’s hard to say right now whether those consist of just a few expensive prototypes, or the beginning of a much bigger swing toward orbital compute. “Only time will tell whether you’re going to have a business case for it.”
So, is it better to have a data center in space or in your backyard?
David Reid, a member of Virginia’s House of Delegates representing Loudoun County, home to more data centers than anywhere else on Earth, says the question has repeatedly come up at his town hall meetings. Reid is the rare politician — apart from the president, anyway — willing to defend terrestrial data centers, calling them a “money-printing machine” for local schools and infrastructure. Having spent decades working in the defense and technology sectors, he is doubtful that the math on orbital data centers will ever make sense.
“I believe this is, for lack of a better term, fictional nonsense,” he said, and is “creating a distraction from the fact that local officials here on Earth still need to make better zoning decisions.”
If most of the AI industry can eventually be powered by space, as SpaceX claims, it will require millions of sprawling new satellites, in an orbit currently dotted by fewer than 20,000 of them. Though “space is really big,” as Elon Musk has put it, one million satellites would still profoundly and, likely irrevocably, transform our night sky into one in which data centers outnumber visible stars.
“Will humanity notice if there are fewer stars in the sky? Well, not so much right now,” given light pollution in many cities, said John Barentine, an astronomer and environmental advocate for the night sky. “But what if they’re replaced by these artificial stars in the night sky? Is that the point at which people will say, ‘Wait a minute, we don’t want this. We want the benefits, but we don’t want this as a consequence.’”
This is, of course, the tension also at the heart of building data centers here on Earth. To some extent, they’re the most tangible representations of how little power we have to shape the course of a transformative new technology that few trust, and even fewer asked for. It’s one thing to object to a hulking data center, but it might be another altogether to see the sigils of our digital overlords illuminating the firmament. Would a place like Tucson, one of the most beautiful places to stargaze in the world, prefer a Project Blue to a starscape marred by blinking servers in the sky?
Update, September 24, 10:35 am ET: This post was originally published on September 3 and has been updated to include information about a pilot satellite capable of processing basic AI queries that Google is launching soon.
Gloria Steinem, who urged women to pursue self-affirmation, political power and equality both in the workplace and at home, has died.
This story was originally published in The Highlight. To get access to member-exclusive stories like this every month, become a Vox Member today.
Every day it seems scientists are making breakthroughs in Alzheimer’s disease.
New treatments that actually slow the disease’s progression — lecanemab and donanemab — have finally appeared on pharmacy shelves in the past few years, delivering real-world results for patients and their families. New blood tests promise to identify at-risk patients earlier in their lives, giving them the chance to make lifestyle changes and potentially start treatment to stave off symptoms.
The media and wellness influencers are always reporting on new diets, workouts, or hobbies that can combat dementia. Just last month, there was even a report out of China about an experimental brain surgery that allegedly reverses the symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease — the Holy Grail that researchers have been pursuing for generations.
But hype has outpaced the science of treating Alzheimer’s disease before. Promising treatments have gotten a lot of attention before only to fizzle out a short time later. Less than a decade ago, many scientists were wondering whether we had the theory of Alzheimer’s disease completely wrong.
For those of us who don’t work in the field, that confusing history can make it hard to make sense of these recent developments. It sounds like we are entering a new age for Alzheimer’s prevention and treatment — but are we actually? And, if we are, how can people benefit from it?
I called a couple of leading experts to find out.
Here’s the good news: They say scientists are genuinely shifting the paradigm for treating, detecting, and ultimately preventing Alzheimer’s disease. The two drugs on the market can actually slow down cognitive decline for many patients, something that had been out of reach for decades. And more treatments are coming.
“Diagnosis and treatment of Alzheimer’s has changed in a way that is revolutionary compared to, say, four or five years ago,” said Dr. Jason Karlawish, co-director of the Penn Memory Center.
At the clinic where he sees patients, “people are feeling a sense of hope and promise,” he said.
For a long time, the science on Alzheimer’s disease felt stuck. Now it’s moving. There’s only one thing that could stop it, according to experts: the Trump administration’s anti-science agenda.
In 2023, the approval of two drugs transformed the landscape of Alzheimer’s care: lecanemab (sold as Leqembi) and donanemab (sold as Kisunla), two IV treatments that target amyloid plaque in the brain of a person with Alzheimer’s. Before these two drugs — and the approval of aducanemab, a similar but less effective and riskier treatment — it had been decades since the last new Alzheimer’s treatment had come onto the market.
They are not perfect treatments. They are effective only for people with mild cognitive impairment, not more advanced stages of the disease. They can only slow the progression of Alzheimer’s for those people, not stop or reverse it. And they do come with the risk of serious side effects, particularly brain bleeds.
“The good news is, we have these two drugs that can help people,” said Tara Spires-Jones, professor of neurodegeneration at the University of Edinburgh and author of the forthcoming book, Fighting for our Minds: The Neuroscience of Defeating Dementia. “The bad news is, you don’t get any better. You’re still getting worse — you just get worse more slowly.”
These drugs are a start, not the endpoint. Researchers are already working on the next generation of treatments. The drug pipeline is becoming more robust because scientists are finally coalescing around a theory of the disease that’s more complex — and, crucially, opens more potential targets for new drugs.
For a long time, Alzheimer’s research was dominated by the amyloid hypothesis. The theory posited that the buildup of plaque made from amyloid proteins was responsible for disrupting brain signals and creating the telltale loss of memory and identity associated with Alzheimer’s. Scientists are still confident that amyloid plays a role in Alzheimer’s — and the success of these amyloid-targeting drugs supports that interpretation. But there is also a stronger consensus that other mechanisms must be at work. Some people who have evidence of amyloid plaque building up in their brain nonetheless never develop Alzheimer’s disease.
Another type of protein called tau seems to be associated with the disease. Scientists also increasingly believe that inflammation may play a role. Part of the breakthrough of the past few years is that scientists are no longer arguing about whether they even understand this disease at all. Instead, the mission is to pursue different drug targets and increase the chances of delivering new treatments.
“I don’t think people in the field are fighting over, ‘Your mechanism is wrong and mine is right,’” Karlawish said. “I think there’s a kind of general democratization. There are multiple promising mechanisms.”
New tau-targeting treatments are moving through clinical trials. Biogen has a drug called diranersen that aims to stop the production of the tau proteins moving through clinical trials. Preliminary results showed that the drug did appear to reduce tau and improve cognitive symptoms — although, curiously, the most effective response was at the lowest dose. Further research is needed before the drug could receive FDA approval. Another tau-targeting drug from Eisai has also entered clinical trials and is in the earlier safety-check phases. And new amyloid-targeting treatments aim to better penetrate the brain-blood barrier and deliver more effective relief for patients.
In the short term, scientists hope these drugs can slow or even stop cognitive decline better than the currently approved medications. In the longer term, these new approaches — and potentially a combination of different drugs with different targets — could eventually allow scientists to reverse Alzheimer’s. (As for that experimental surgery in China, as Nature reported, scientists say its results will need to be replicated in other clinical trials before we’re confident that it really works.)
“The brain is amazing. You can make new synapses,” Spires-Jones said. “If we could stop the insult, it’s theoretically possible in the future that we could have treatments that not only slow the progression but actually let you get better. But I think we’re pretty far from those. What I think is much closer is really, really meaningful treatments that will slow or even stop disease progression. We’re probably going to see something coming out in the next couple of years.”
But even a “cure” in the long term will be conditional. Because Alzheimer’s eventually causes the brain to die (thus its 100 percent fatality rate), there may still be a point of no return once the disease is too entrenched. “A cure for people in the late stages is practically impossible because too much of the brain has died,” Spires-Jones said.
And that reality makes early detection all the more important. That’s the way patients can get the most out of the current medications and their eventual successors.
It used to be that doctors couldn’t confirm whether somebody had Alzheimer’s disease until the person died and they could perform an autopsy. But the new treatments can give people more time with their loved ones before the disease’s worst symptoms kick in.
That means waiting is not an option. Patients are demanding better methods of detection.
“Treatment attracts patients, for good reason, and treatment demands diagnosis,” Karlawish said. “Treatment really does drive the business model for a disease.”
So, scientists are designing new blood tests that can detect the presence of tau proteins and predict the later onset of Alzheimer’s disease with impressive accuracy. And they are learning more about pivotal periods in a person’s life where their risk of Alzheimer’s might start to grow — and when interventions might therefore be more effective. New research has suggested that menopause may be an accelerant for Alzheimer’s progression, and therefore may represent an important point in someone’s life.
These developments are shaping what the near-term future of Alzheimer’s care will look like. As a person ages, they will be able to take one of these blood tests to see if there are signals they are at a higher risk of the disease. If they are, they will have a growing number of medications that they could take to delay or potentially prevent dementia from setting in. For a woman at risk, for example, hormone replacement therapy has been associated with a reduced risk of dementia. Clinical trials are also underway to test whether existing drugs like donanemab and lecanemab can delay the onset of symptoms for somebody who is at higher risk but has not yet started to experience cognitive decline.
“We couldn’t get the right people at the right time early on — and now we can,” Spires-Jones said. “That’s a problem that’s almost solved now.”
Prevention may also be where GLP-1 drugs ultimately prove most useful. As scientists come to better understand the intimate relationship between vascular health and brain health, there is growing reason to think these medicines could help reduce dementia risk decades before symptoms appear.
That would make GLP-1s a complement to drugs such as lecanemab and donanemab, rather than a competitor. Those treatments are designed for people who already have early-stage Alzheimer’s. GLP-1s, by contrast, have so far shown little ability to slow the disease once cognitive decline has begun. In a disappointing clinical trial involving people with mild cognitive impairment or early Alzheimer’s, researchers found that the drugs had a negligible effect on the progression of the disease.
But that result doesn’t mean there isn’t a role for Ozempic and the next generation of GLP-1 drugs in the fight against Alzheimer’s.
Scientists increasingly believe that chronic inflammation, obesity, and poor vascular health can all accelerate cognitive aging. GLP-1 drugs reduce inflammation, while their effects on weight and metabolic health can substantially lower cardiovascular risk. If US obesity rates continue to fall as these medicines become more widely used, their most consequential effect on Alzheimer’s may therefore be indirect: improving the health of millions of people long before the disease takes hold.
“I think where we’re going in the future is those semaglutide-type drugs will probably be very good for prevention,” Spires-Jones said. “If we can keep people’s obesity in check, that will probably more likely be a preventative treatment. That trial pretty conclusively told us that once you have symptoms, at least, that drug is not going to help.”
This summer, the Alzheimer’s Association announced a $100 million research project to examine whether lifestyle changes plus a GLP-1 medication could reduce the risk of dementia in at-risk older adults.
If you’re worried about your own cognitive health or that of a loved one, you have options, and those options are only going to grow. Talk to your doctor. There are FDA-approved blood tests you can already take. Ask about lecanemab and donanemab. You may also be a good candidate to help scientists in the most active areas of development. Researchers need people to participate in their clinical trials. The Alzheimer’s Association and the federal government have online tools to help people find clinical trials that you or someone you love could be a candidate for.
All the optimism about the future of Alzheimer’s treatment is based on research and clinical trials. When I asked Karlawish and Spires-Jones about where the story goes from here, they shared one concern: that science becomes so politicized that it would be difficult to get grant funding for research projects that could lead to additional breakthroughs.
“In some sense, the biggest threat is outside the science,” Karlawish said. “There’s deep concern that this politicization of the grant process will essentially wreck American science. We can’t sustain that kind of environment and still demand the results that we’ve come to expect.”
President Donald Trump and US Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. like to present their crusade to reform American science as being targeted at frivolous DEI projects. But there are already examples of serious dementia studies being affected: Last month, the Trump administration canceled $15 million in grants for studies to evaluate how discrimination affects long-term brain health.
This is another place where we have more agency to impact what happens next: the ballot box. Use your individual political power to support lawmakers who defend the scientists and researchers doing critical work.
“You can vote for people who will fund and support science as an endeavor,” Spires-Jones said. “Advances in science don’t happen on their own. We need all of society to get involved.”
Michael Shvartsman provided funding for the documentary 'The Man You Don't Know' and attended its Mar-a-Lago premiere in hopes of winning a pardon, according to a lawsuit by an L.A. studio alleging threats and extortion.
The ride-hailing company Uber is cutting thousands of jobs to simplify its management structure, the chief executive said in a letter to employees Wednesday.
The effort is part of the implementation of President Trump's executive order limiting mail voting and has been temporarily halted by a federal judge. The ruling is being appealed by the administration and the directive may ultimately end up back before the U.S. Supreme Court.
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PALAU, Micronesia — On a bright, sunny day last May, I stood on a boat surrounded by the turquoise waters of the island nation of Palau. I was there in the western Pacific watching scuba divers as they prepared to bring up evidence of a mysterious aquatic world.
Palau is famous for its spectacular and rich coral reefs. But these divers were planning to descend past those sun-lit marine communities and down into a lesser-known twilight zone known as the “mesophotic coral ecosystems.”
Mesophotic essentially means “middle” and “light,” which is where these ecosystems are — not quite in the bright daylight, not quite in the profound darkness, but somewhere in between. For simplicity’s sake, we’ll call these communities, which range from some 30 meters to 150 meters below the surface, the “deep reefs.”
One of the divers on the boat with me was a zoologist and curator at the California Academy of Sciences named Luiz Rocha, who has spent decades studying these deep reefs and their secrets.
“Anything between 30 meters and 150 meters is really, really unknown,” he told me.
Because these deep reefs are so unknown, researchers like Rocha are left with big questions. They want to get a baseline picture of what is going on in these ecosystems — even just who lives there! — so that they can better understand how they function. They’ve also tried to work out whether (or not) these deep reefs might provide a refuge for species living in shallower coral reefs.
I was in Palau for Vox’s Unexplainable podcast because, in an effort to gather more information about these mysterious places, Rocha left some scientific structures down in these twilight depths back in 2016. Those structures then spent almost a decade becoming encrusted with all kinds of marine life. And now, Rocha was back to retrieve them, hoping that he — along with many other scientists — would be able to open them up, like a box of scientific puzzle pieces, full of clues about this under-understood marine world.
One thing that’s often acknowledged in papers about and descriptions of the “mesophotic coral ecosystems” is that scientists don’t know as much as they’d like to. A National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration article about them from 2019 is full of “may’s” as in: they may “serve as essential fish habitat for economically and ecologically important species.”
Researchers do know some things, of course. They know that these deep reefs can be found in many of the same locations as shallower coral reefs — so mainly the tropical and subtropical parts of the world, like Micronesia, the Caribbean, and even the Gulf of Mexico. They’ve found that there are many species that seem to be unique to these places, and recent research points to their potential susceptibility to climate change.
Researchers have also gotten a sense of some of the key differences between these deep reefs and their shallower coral neighbors. In shallow reefs, hard corals team up with photosynthesizing algaes. The algaes provide the corals with nutrients, and the corals secrete a calcium-carbonate matrix that helps create the architecture of the reef.
As you go deeper, though, the light begins to fade, and the opportunities for photosynthesis start to fade with it. The temperature also drops. So the animals living down in the deep reefs are the ones that can survive in a dimmer, cooler world.
Scientists can dive into the deep reefs to try to learn more about these understudied places — as Rocha has — but exploring down at 100 meters requires more difficult, riskier technical diving than exploring at shallower depths. The deeper you dive, for example, the faster gasses get pushed into your tissues, which imposes limits on these really deep dives.
“We have a very, very short time,” Rocha says, “And by short time, I mean five minutes. Six, seven minutes.”
Scientists might take some pictures in that time, or make some measurements, or collect a few samples, but then they have to move back upwards, a process which can take hours because they have to rise slowly to avoid decompression sickness.
It is, obviously, not particularly efficient to study an ecosystem in five- to seven-minute bursts. People have also used remote operated vehicles and submersibles to explore the deep reefs, but those have their own issues, and cameras can’t always capture all the detail you might want, or photograph more secretive, cryptic animals. So huge gaps remain in scientific knowledge about these ecosystems.
“Whenever we go somewhere,” Rocha says, “the first thing we find is new species. … It’s the most basic thing in science you can do.” But this effort goes beyond just cataloguing new species of fish or sponges or sea slugs.
Rocha wants to answer seemingly fundamental questions like: What is the main energy source for everything down here in the dimmer light? What does the food chain look like? How have things evolved to live down at these depths? How similar are they to the shallow ecosystems, and how different? How are they affected by climate change — and what’s the most efficient way to protect them?
But, “in some ways we don’t even know what questions to ask,” Rocha says. “We really only know what questions to ask after we have a baseline understanding of what the ecosystem is. And for deep reefs, we don’t know that yet.”
Rocha is not deterred by the enormous number of question marks that surround these deep reefs. For years now, he has been gathering bits of basic information about them, often via those very short dives.
About a decade ago, though, Rocha got interested in another method for sampling the biodiversity of this sort of marine ecosystem — a technique involving “autonomous reef monitoring structures” (ARMS).
Basically, each ARMS is a stack of several PVC plates, separated at uniform intervals and attached to a base plate. They look like little grey, featureless hotels. You take them to a place that you want to study, bring them down, secure them, and then leave them alone for a while to let them collect…life.
“As soon as you drop any kind of clean structure on a reef,” Rocha says, “it starts getting colonized by larvae of everything around it — of sponges, gorgonians, corals. And then, because there’s all a lot of hiding spots between the plates — so between the floors of the hotel — they start getting colonized by shrimp, by mollusks, by ascidians, by anything you can imagine in the ocean. … And it becomes this stable, diverse mini reef, if you will, packed with a lot of biodiversity that would be very hard to collect all at once in any given reef.”
A few years after that initial drop, you come back, collect the ARMS, and then study the mini reef that has grown on them. You can sample and touch and analyze things to your heart’s content.
It’s not only a very effective way to collect lots of creatures, all at once, but also a great way to do so in a standardized way. If you went down — or sent a robot down — to collect an encrusted rock from a reef, you could learn a lot about the life on it, but it would be hard to compare the life on that rock to life on other rocks from other reefs, or even the same reef, because each rock would have its own unique characteristics. Not so for ARMS.
“ Every one’s the same,” Chris Meyer, director of the Smithsonian Global ARMS program, told me, “It’s prefab housing, and then you just look to see who moves in.”
To Rocha, this seemed like a great way to get a really good, long look at the deep reefs instead of the brief glimpses he was getting from diving. It was also, he told me, fairly cheap to deploy them. So from 2016 to 2018, with some private funding, he and his colleagues left ARMS in some of the deep reefs around Palau — as well as in Guam, the Marshall Islands, and French Polynesia. They installed some around 50 meters, and some around 100, and then some around 10 meters, so he could compare the deep reefs to their shallower neighbors.
After that, he waited.
In fact, he waited a little longer than he would have liked, because the retrieval of ARMS is more expensive than deploying them, so he had to work out more funding.
Eventually, private funders agreed to underwrite the retrieval of the ARMS that Rocha had left. Which is how he and his fellow divers finally found themselves on a boat in Palau again, ready to pull up these structures for the deep.
Over the course of a few days, I watched a whole team of people pull several ARMS out of the deep reefs of Palau. Some of the ARMS were relatively sparse, but others were almost fuzzy with organisms — vibrant with red and orange and green and pink and white. One had a massive sponge attached to it, another had several delicate fronds dangling from it like coralline ferns. The ARMS collected each day traveled to the Palau International Coral Reef Center in bins full of seawater, where the scientists quickly got to work — seeing and touching (and smelling) this mysterious ecosystem right up close.
The process was, as it turned out, equal parts magical excitement and well-oiled, Cheez-It fueled disassembly line. After the plates were taken apart, Meyer took photographs of the plates — what he called a “time capsule of the place.” Others in the lab picked carefully through trays of debris, hunting for tiny crabs and worms and mollusks, or scraped samples off the plates and deposited them in tubes.
They collected sea squirts, said to be our closest invertebrate relatives. They collected sponges — flat ones that felt dry underwater, thick ones with bristles like tiny, unmoving caterpillars, one as thin as a flake of skin and shot through with silver filaments. They collected strange, soft corals known as “octocorals,” and they collected colonies of animals called bryozoans, which created what looked like swirling, two-dimensional honeycombs.
“We’re looking for every unique thing, which we call a morphospecies,” a Smithsonian research biologist named Sarah Tweedt explained. “And we’re trying to get some representative tissue samples from all of these things so that we can sequence the DNA — and match the DNA to the organism.”
That is, of course, assuming there is already a known genetic match in our existing DNA libraries.
On the first day that I spent with the team, a Cal Academy curator named Terry Goslinger identified several potential new species. He is an expert on colorful, delightful sea slugs known as nudibranchs, and so, because of his deep knowledge (and because nudibranchs’ bright hues and patterns make them somewhat easier to tell apart than some other underwater creatures), he was able to make some on-the-spot calls about whether or not certain species were likely to be new to science, pending genetic testing to confirm.
Many of the animals were trickier to pin down, though. The researchers did their best to identify the creatures they were finding, but even now, several months out, there’s still a lot of work to be done. Of the close to 3,000 specimens, only a small fraction were identified at a species level. The numbers are a little bit inexact because researchers are still processing the data, but when I checked in with a Cal Academy postdoc working on the project, Susanne Bähr, in July, she told me that only 3 percent of samples had been ID’d by species, and a little less than 20 had a genus designation. Many, many more were only identified at higher, broader taxonomic levels. Genetic testing of the samples, paired with photographs and descriptions of the samples, will help people work out more specific species, and also help them identify whether certain species are new to science.
The most important parts of this work will involve more than just identifying species. In fact, the more time I spent with these researchers in the lab, (including one evening spent with them as they worked past midnight), the more I got the sense that, while they seemed excited about seeing new species, they seemed equally excited to witness relationships between animals.
When I walked into the lab one day, for example, several people urged me to go over and look through a microscope at a creature known as a pompom crab — a tiny yellow crustacean holding purple anemones in its modified front claws. Tweedt was extremely jazzed when she found something referred to as a “skeleton shrimp,” which looked to me like the marine equivalent of a stick insect, blending in on something called a hydroid. She pulled me aside another time, around one in the morning, to show me “the frosting on the cake” of the day, which turned out to be some bright red sea snails and the bright red octocorals they seemed to live on
As she put it in a later conversation, these relationships are, in many ways, the key takeaway from this ARMS project, and what distinguishes it from efforts to bring up a few individual samples at a time. Studying them, or even just looking at the fuller picture ARMS provide, is what will let researchers tackle some of the outstanding questions about these ecosystems. Bähr, for example, is already working with the data from ARMS retrieved in Guam, trying to analyze how much overlap (or lack thereof) there is between species at different depths in the deep reefs.
Really, though, this is all just the beginning. In one of our conversations, Rocha compared the work they are doing now to ecology work done in the mid-20th century to understand how species’ vertical distribution changes as you go up a mountain. This drove home for me how far behind researchers working on the mesophotic deep reefs are compared to their colleagues working on, say, shallower coral reefs. I asked him what kept him working on such a difficult puzzle.
“It’s the reward at the end of it,” he said, “If it’s a hard puzzle, at the end of it, the reward is always bigger.”
“But…in our lifetimes, will we assemble the deep reef puzzle?” I asked.
“No, we will not assemble the puzzle, no,” Rocha said, “but we’ll generate some good pieces for the next generation to assemble.”
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