Decades before the current debates over gender and sexuality, the late Seattle science-fiction writer Vonda N. McIntyre flipped the script on those subjects.

“In many of her stories, there are characters that, by the end of the book, you go, ‘You know, I don’t think it was ever established whether they were male, or female, or something in between,'” fellow science-fiction author Una McCormack says in the latest episode of the Fiction Science podcast. “And it’s done with such a light touch that you would never notice.”

Five years after McIntyre died of cancer at the age of 70, McCormack is playing a lead role in shining a spotlight of her legacy for a new generation. She helped arrange for the publication of “Little Sisters and Other Stories,” an anthology that includes McIntyre’s first published short story (from 1970), her last piece of published fiction (from 2015) and eight more tales from the decades in between.

McIntyre made her mark on science fiction in several ways: She wrote three novelizations of Star Trek movies (II, III and IV), plus two original Star Trek novels. She founded Seattle’s Clarion West Writers Workshop, which will be celebrating McIntyre and the new anthology with a virtual panel presentation next month.

Perhaps most significantly, McIntyre was part of a movement that brought feminist perspectives to science fiction — and often put women characters at the center of the action. (Another noted Pacific Northwest author, Ursula K. LeGuin, was also part of the movement and frequently collaborated with her.)

McCormack argues that McIntyre’s writings weren’t just about feminism. “She was extremely ahead of the curve in the representation of disability, or ‘other-bodied-ness,'” McCormack says. “In ‘The Exile Waiting’ [McIntyre’s first novel], we see a huge diversity of shape and form that humanity can take. So I think she’s ahead of the curve on a lot of things.”

McIntyre turned to science-fiction writing after studying biology and genetics at the University of Washington — and her interest in those subjects shows through in some of the stories included in “Little Sisters.” (“Elfleda,” for example, is told from the point of view of a genetically engineered centaur who has been created to cater to the whims of tourists.)

McCormack, whose 11th Star Trek novel is due to come out in November, says she got a kick out of how McIntyre wrote about humpback whales in her novelization of “Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home.”

“The material with Spock meeting the whales, and the whole whale encounter with the alien probe — it’s all wonderful, and radically decenters the humans in the story,” McCormack says. “It’s like they’re not relevant to this.”

The bottom line? Even when McIntyre wasn’t writing about Star Trek, her stories reflected the philosophy that Mister Spock lived by: infinite diversity in infinite combinations.

“What I draw from this is a robust statement of the reality of human diversity,” McCormack says. “We make the case that it’s a good thing — but it’s also a true thing. Humans are diverse. We are diverse in terms of how our bodies move and operate, how they change, in our sexualities, in how we were in the past, how we were in the future. She states this robustly as fact. She doesn’t get into the arguments. It’s the basis on which her stories operate.”

“Little Sisters and Other Stories” by Vonda N. McIntyre is set for release on May 21. Clarion West is presenting “The Roots and Future of Feminist Science Fiction,” a free virtual panel discussion focusing on McIntyre’s work and other major influences on the genre, at 11 a.m. PT on Saturday, June 8. In addition to McCormack, the panelists include Nicola Griffith, SJ Groenewegen and Nisi Shawl. Advance registration is recommended.

The lead illustration is based on a photograph of McIntyre from the Science Fiction Writers of America, which was converted into a watercolor-style artwork by Media.io, and then augmented with images of a “futuristic neon Seattle skyline with the Space Needle” generated by Microsoft Copilot.

Stay tuned for future episodes of the Fiction Science podcast via Apple, Spotify, Player.fm, Pocket Casts and Podchaser. My co-host for the Fiction Science podcast is Dominica Phetteplace, an award-winning writer who is a graduate of the Clarion West Writers Workshop and currently lives in San Francisco. To learn more about Phetteplace, visit her website, DominicaPhetteplace.com.

NASA has selected four proposals for climate science missions, including an effort led by a University of Washington researcher, to go forward for further study with millions of dollars in funding.

STRIVE, which has UW atmospheric scientist Lyatt Jaeglé as its principal investigator, would focus on interactions between the stratosphere and the troposphere.

“STRIVE would allow us to see the composition and temperature of the atmosphere with much finer detail than previously possible from space,” Jaeglé told GeekWire in an email. “It would enable us to observe how smoke from fires and volcanoes affect the ozone layer. It would give us needed information to understand how the troposphere and stratosphere interact, and how these interactions influence weather, climate and air quality.”

Jaeglé said “the entire STRIVE team is very excited at the prospect of moving forward in this next step to prepare the concept study.”

The three other studies winning support from NASA’s new Earth System Explorers Program are ODYSEA, EDGE and Carbon-I. Each of the science teams for the four selected proposals will receive $5 million to conduct a one-year concept study.

After the study period, NASA will choose two of the proposals to go forward to launch, with readiness dates expected in 2030 and 2032. For each chosen investigation, the mission cost will be capped at $310 million. That figure doesn’t include launch costs, which will be covered by NASA.

NASA’s Earth System Explorers Program focuses on Earth science questions relating to topics such as greenhouse gases, the ozone layer, ocean surface currents and changes in ice and glaciers around the world.

““The proposals represent another example of NASA’s holistic approach to studying our home planet,” Nicky Fox, NASA’s associate administrator for science, said today in a news release. “As we continue to confront our changing climate, and its impacts on humans and our environment, the need for data and scientific research could not be greater. These proposals will help us better prepare for the challenges we face today, and tomorrow.”

Here are further details about each of the proposals:

• STRIVE (Stratosphere Troposphere Response Using Infrared Vertically-Resolved Light Explorer): This mission would provide daily, near-global, high-resolution measurements of temperature, a variety of atmospheric elements and aerosol properties from the upper troposphere to the mesosphere. It would also measure vertical profiles of ozone and trace gases needed to monitor and understand the recovery of the ozone layer. The science team includes researchers from UW, NorthWest Research Associates, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory and other institutions in the U.S. and Canada. Mission partners also include NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center and Northrop Grumman, BAE Systems and Leidos.
• ODYSEA (Ocean Dynamics and Surface Exchange With the Atmosphere): This satellite would measure ocean surface currents and winds to improve our understanding of air-sea interactions and surface current processes that impact weather, climate, marine ecosystems and human well-being. The proposal is led by Sarah Gille at the University of California in San Diego.
• EDGE (Earth Dynamics Geodetic Explorer): This mission would observe the three-dimensional structure of terrestrial ecosystems and the surface topography of glaciers, ice sheets and sea ice as they are changing in response to climate and human activity. The mission would provide a continuation of measurements that are currently made from space by ICESat-2 and GEDI. The proposal is led by UCSD’s Helen Amanda Fricker.
• Carbon-I (The Carbon Investigation): This investigation would enable simultaneous, multi-species measurements of critical greenhouse gases and potential quantification of ethane – which could help study processes that drive natural and human-caused emissions. The proposal is led by Caltech’s Christian Frankenberg.

We’ve updated this report with comments from UW’s Lyatt Jaeglé.

More than 100 researchers — including a Nobel laureate — have signed on to a call for the scientific community to follow a set of safety and security standards when using artificial intelligence to design synthetic proteins.

The community statement on the responsible development of AI for protein design is being unveiled today in Boston at Winter RosettaCon 2024, a conference focusing on biomolecular engineering. The statement follows up on an AI safety summit that was convened last October by the Institute for Protein Design at the University of Washington School of Medicine.

“I view this as a crucial step for the scientific community,” the institute’s director, David Baker, said in a news release. “The responsible use of AI for protein design will unlock new vaccines, medicines and sustainable materials that benefit the world. As scientists, we must ensure this happens while also minimizing the chance that our tools could ever be misused to cause harm.”

The community statement calls on researchers to conduct safety and security reviews of new AI models for protein design before their release, and to issue reports about their research practices.

It says AI-assisted technologies should be part of a rapid response to biological emergencies such as future pandemics. And it urges researchers to participate in security measures around DNA manufacturing — for example, checking the hazard potential of each synthetic gene sequence before it’s used in research.

The process behind the list of principles and voluntary commitments parallels the Asilomar conference that drew up guidelines for the safe use of recombinant DNA in 1975. “That was our explicit model for the summit we hosted in October,” said Ian Haydon, head of communications for the Institute of Protein Design and a member of the panel that prepared the statement.

Among the first researchers to sign on to the statement is Caltech biochemist Frances Arnold, who won a share of the Nobel Prize in chemistry in 2018 for pioneering the use of directed evolution to engineer enzymes. Arnold is also a co-chair of the President’s Council of Advisers on Science and Technology, or PCAST.

Other prominent signers include Eric Horvitz, Microsoft’s chief scientific officer and a member of PCAST; and Harvard geneticist George Church, who’s arguably best-known for his efforts to revive the long-extinct woolly mammoth.

Haydon said other researchers who are active developers of AI technologies for biomolecular structure prediction or design are welcome to add their names to the online list of signatories. There’s a separate list of supporters that anyone can add their name to. (Among the first supporters to put their names on that list are Yann LeCun, vice president and chief AI scientist at Meta; and Mark Dybul, who was U.S. Global AIDS Coordinator under President George W. Bush and is now CEO of Renovaro Biosciences.)

The campaign’s organizers say the fact that a person has signed the statement shouldn’t be read as implying any endorsement by the signer’s institution — and there’s no intent to enforce the voluntary commitments laid out in the statement. That raises a follow-up question: Will the statement have any impact?

“Implementation is the next and most important step,” Haydon told GeekWire in an email. “This new pledge shows that many scientists want to lead the way on this, in consultation with other experts. We anticipate close collaboration between researchers and science funders, publishers and policymakers.”

The Institute for Protein Design is among the world’s leaders in biomolecular engineering: For more than a decade, Baker and his colleagues at the institute have been using computational tools — including a video game — to test out ways in which protein molecules can be folded into “keys” to unlock therapeutic benefits or lock out harmful viruses. In 2019, the institute won a five-year, $45 million grant from the Audacious Project at TED to support its work.

Another leader in the field is Google DeepMind, which used its AlphaFold AI program to predict the 3-D structures of more than 200 million proteins in 2022. DeepMind’s researchers weren’t among the early signers of the community statement; however, Google AI has published its own set of commitments relating to AI research.

“In line with Google’s AI principles, we’re committed to ensuring safe and responsible AI development and deployment,” a Google DeepMind spokesperson told GeekWire in an email. “This includes conducting a comprehensive consultation prior to releasing our protein-folding model AlphaFold, involving a number of external experts.”

Efforts to manage the potential risks of artificial intelligence and maximize the potential benefits have been gathering momentum over the past year:

• Last July, a group of seven tech companies — Amazon, Anthropic, Google, Inflection, Meta, Microsoft and OpenAI — made a series of voluntary commitments with the White House to develop AI responsibly.
• Last month, the University of Washington announced the appointment of a Task Force on Artificial Intelligence to address the ethical and safety issues surrounding AI and develop a university-wide AI strategy.
• This week, the Washington State Legislature approved a plan to create an Artificial Intelligence Task Force that would help lawmakers better understand the benefits and risks of AI.

Haydon sees the campaign to promote the responsible use of AI in biomolecular design as part of that bigger trend.

“This is far from the only community grappling with the benefits and risks of AI,” he said. “We welcome input from others who are thinking through similar issues. But each niche of AI has its own benefits, risks and complexities. What works for large language models or AI trained on hospital data won’t necessarily apply in domains like chemistry or molecular biology. The challenge will be to create the right solutions for each context.”

We’ve updated this report to reflect the fact that more signatories have signed on to the community statement. 

An international team of scientists has blazed a new trail for studying how atoms respond to radiation, by tracking the energetic movement of electrons when a sample of liquid water is blasted with X-rays.

The experiment, described in this week’s issue of the journal Science, required “freezing” the motion of the atoms with which the electrons were associated, on a scale of mere attoseconds. An attosecond is one-quintillionth of a second — or, expressed another way, a millionth of a trillionth of a second.

Attosecond-scale observations could provide scientists with new insights into how radiation exposure affects objects and people.

“What happens to an atom when it is struck by ionizing radiation, like an X-ray? Seeing the earliest stages of this process has long been a missing piece in understanding how radiation affects matter,” Xiaosong Li, a chemistry professor at the University of Washington and a laboratory fellow at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, said in a UW news release. “This new technique for the first time shows us that missing piece and opens the door to seeing the steps where so much complex — and interesting — chemistry occurs!”

Li is one of the senior authors of the Science paper, which describes a technique known as X-ray attosecond transient absorption spectroscopy, or AX-ATAS. The technique uses one X-ray pulse to excite atoms, and follows that with another pulse to probe how the excited atoms responded.

For their experiment, the researchers blasted a thin sheet of water with X-ray laser pulses at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory’s Linac Coherent Light Source in California. The AX-ATAS method made it possible for them to track the electrons energized by the X-rays as they moved into an excited state, all before the bulkier atomic nuclei had time to move and blur the picture.

“We now have a tool where, in principle, you can follow the movement of electrons and see newly ionized molecules as they’re formed in real time,” Linda Young, another senior study author who is a professor at the University of Chicago and a distinguished fellow at Argonne National Laboratory, said in a PNNL news release.

Li and Young are among 26 authors of the study published by Science, titled “Attosecond-Pump Attosecond-Probe X-Ray Spectroscopy of Liquid Water.” The authors based in Washington state include Li as well as Carolyn Pearce (PNNL and Washington State University) and Emily Nienhuis (PNNL), Lixin Lu, one of the paper’s principal authors, conducted research for the study as a UW doctoral student and is now a postdoctoral researcher at Stanford. Check out the news releases from UW and PNNL for further details about the study.

Several years ago, scientists at the University of Washington theorized that key ingredients for life could have built up billions of years ago in special kinds of environments known as soda lakes.

At the time, their hypothesis was based on previously published research, computer modeling and lab experiments. But now the same scientists say they’ve found a shallow lake that just might fit the requirements — and it happens to be just a few hundred miles north of their home base in Seattle.

Their findings, focusing on Last Chance Lake in British Columbia, were published this month in Communications Earth & Environment, an open-access, peer-reviewed scientific journal.

Last Chance Lake is special for several reasons: First of all, it’s definitely a soda lake — that is, a lake where chemical reactions between the lake’s water and the underlying volcanic rocks give rise to high levels of dissolved sodium and carbonate, similar to dissolved baking soda.

Soda lakes can also have high levels of dissolved phosphate. That’s important, because phosphate is an essential building block for DNA and RNA. It’s also a key component of cell membranes. But in order for phosphate to become incorporated into the molecules of life, it has to be present in concentrations that are up to a million times higher than the levels typically found in rivers, lakes or the ocean.

The lab study published in 2019 suggested that under the right conditions, phosphate concentrations could reach the required level in soda lakes.

“I think these soda lakes provide an answer to the phosphate problem,” David Catling, a UW professor of Earth and space sciences who was an author of the 2019 study as well as the newly published work, said in a news release. “Our answer is hopeful: This environment should occur on the early Earth, and probably on other planets, because it’s just a natural outcome of the way that planetary surfaces are made, and how water chemistry works.”

Catling and his colleagues identified Last Chance Lake as having a good chance of solving the “phosphate problem” based on a nearly 30-year-old research paper that referenced the lake’s extraordinarily high phosphate levels.

The lake is only about a foot deep. Dry, windy conditions on British Columbia’s Cariboo Plateau promote evaporation to keep water levels low while concentrating levels of the lake’s dissolved compounds. By summer’s end, the lake’s water has almost completely evaporated, leaving a murky, muddy mix with a salty crust on top.

“You have this seemingly dry salt flat, but there are nooks and crannies. And between the salt and the sediment there are little pockets of water that are really high in dissolved phosphate,” said lead study author Sebastian Haas, a postdoctoral researcher at UW. “What we wanted to understand was why and when could this happen on the ancient Earth, in order to provide a cradle for the origin of life.”

Researchers collected samples of water, lake sediment and salt crust during three visits to the lake in 2021 and 2022. In most lakes, calcium combines with phosphate to form calcium phosphate, a substance that turns up in milk, bones and tooth enamel. But at Last Chance Lake, the calcium instead combines with carbonate and magnesium to form a mineral called dolomite. That leaves the dissolved phosphate free to rise to concentrations far above typical levels.

Further analysis addressed another question about Last Chance Lake: Why aren’t the organisms that are typically found in lakes taking advantage of all that phosphate?

To find the answer, the research team looked at a nearby body of water called Goodenough Lake. They saw that cyanobacteria in Goodenough Lake were indeed consuming the phosphate and providing natural fertilizer for other forms of life. In contrast, the salt levels in Last Chance Lake were too high for life to gain much of a foothold there.

Places like Last Chance Lake could provide more chances for astrobiologists to test out their hypotheses as they learn more about potentially habitable environments in places ranging from Mars, Europa and Enceladus in our own solar system to Earthlike worlds in far-off planetary systems.

“These new findings will help inform origin-of-life researchers who are either replicating these reactions in the lab or are looking for potentially habitable environments on other planets,” Catling said.

Authors of the study published by Communications Earth & Environment, “Biogeochemical Explanations for the World’s Most Phosphate-Rich Lake, an Origin-of-Life Analog,” are Haas, Catling and UW graduate student Kimberly Poppy Sinclair. Graduate students with the UW Astrobiology Program also assisted with sample collection. The research was funded by the Simons Foundation.

The halls at a recent meeting of biologists in Seattle were buzzing with more than just the usual excitement about spiders, bats, bees, elephants and other creatures.

Researchers were also talking about the increased use of artificial intelligence and machine learning, at the the 2024 annual meeting of the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology.

Such methods have life science applications beyond biomedical fields such as protein design, a more well-known use case. Researchers are leveraging AI to study how animals move their bodies, migrate, sense their environment, behave, and more.

“AI and machine learning methods are being used in diverse sub-disciplines in biology — from neuroscience, molecular biology, to animal behavior,” Jeff Riffell, a professor in the Biology Department at the University of Washington, told GeekWire.

Riffell and his colleagues presented an AI-powered system to study how insects detect odors in their environment. Their machine learning model predicts how moth neurons respond to different mixtures of smelly chemicals.

Shir Bar, who studies the intersection of biology and computer vision at Tel Aviv University, told GeekWire that she’s seeing more studies using AI for animal detection, tracking and behavioral classification, as well as in biomechanics for pose estimation (detecting position using computer vision methods).

Bar spoke at the meeting about how scientists can leverage AI, noting that entering the arena and finding the right tools for the task can be daunting. We asked Bar to identify some of the more outstanding AI/ML studies at the meeting, held earlier this month.

Bumblebee cooling

When the weather gets hot, bees keep the colony cool by fanning their wings. Researchers at the University of Wisconsin study this behavior by labeling individual bumblebees and tracking them with an automated imaging system while exposing them to high temperatures that simulate a three-day heatwave. The scientists integrate the tracking of individual bees with deep learning-based identification of fanning behavior. They are now using the system to test how bees respond to heat under different nutrient conditions. The research may help scientists understand how bees respond to climate change.

Insect treadmills

Researchers at Imperial College London place insects on small treadmills to measure how they move. At the meeting they also presented a synthetic dataset on such movement using three-dimensional models of insects, generated by a gaming engine, said Bar. According to the presenters, insects inspire researchers developing six-legged walking robots. After all, many insects can walk on ceilings and walls keep on going even if they lose limbs.

“This is a really innovative way to tackle the lack of training data that’s so prevalent in our field, especially since they are building a general system that is meant to work on diverse species of insects,” said Bar of the presentation.

Zebra tracking

An open-source tool to help capture animal behavior in the wild was showcased at the meeting by researchers at the University of Stuttgart and Princeton University. Smarter-labelme labels data used to train machine learning models, reducing the need to manually annotate datasets on animal movement. The researchers used the tool to quantify the activity of zebras from drone footage over large swaths of the savannah.

Seeing green

Scientists routinely label cellular molecules using green fluorescent protein (GFP), a laboratory tool originally derived from a jellyfish. Different color variants can arise from mutations in GFP, but exactly how has been unclear. Researchers have now developed a neural network model to predict the intensity of fluorescence from the underlying mutations in GFP, using protein folding parameters and other inputs. The approach could lead to the development of improved ways to visualize cellular molecules. This study was undertaken at the University of Maryland and the Janelia Research Campus of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.

Neuroscientists have unveiled their most comprehensive and detailed map of cell types across the entire mouse brain, delivering the latest results of a six-year-long scientific effort in which Seattle’s Allen Institute has played a leading role.

Nine studies published today in the journal Nature document the identification of 5,322 different types of brain cells, and trace the similarities and differences found in a variety of mammalian species — including humans.

The work expands upon previous studies from the BRAIN Initiative Cell Census Network, including earlier surveys of cells in various regions of the mouse brain, as well as cross-species comparisons of cell functions. Researchers from the Allen Institute joined forces with colleagues from the Broad Institute, Harvard, the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, the University of California at San Diego, UC-Berkeley and other institutions to add to their “parts list” for the brain.

“Now we have the cell-type atlas of all the cells in the brain,” Hongkui Zeng, executive vice president and director of the Allen Institute for Brain Science, said in an explanatory video. “This is really a landmark achievement. … It marks the completion of a kind of work that strives for completeness. But it also marks the beginning of the next phase of the journey. It just opens up the door for the next generation of investigations.”

Zeng, who is the senior author of one of the papers in Nature and a co-author of five others, said the next step will be to figure out exactly what all those different cell types do, how their functions are affected by disease, and whether there might be yet-to-be-discovered ways to restore those proper functions.

“It’s not just about a catalog, a list of cell types and where they are — reference information which by itself is already important — but we begin to see how a brain is organized,” Zeng said.

The studies relied on genetic sequencing data plus spatial maps of gene expression, gathered from millions of cells.

Researchers found a strong correlation between the characteristic gene expression patterns for cell types and their location in the brain. In the upper regions of the brain, also known as the dorsal regions, there was a small number of widely diverse cell types. In contrast, the brain’s lower or ventral regions contain a large number of distinct cell types that are more closely related to each other.

“Our hypothesis is an evolution-based explanation,” Zeng told GeekWire in an email. “The evolutionally more ancient, ventral part of the brain (especially the hypothalamus / midbrain / hindbrain) is mainly involved in the survival function of the animal (including feeding, reproduction, metabolism, etc.), and thus it is subject to more evolutionary constraints, and its cell types are more numerous but haven’t diverged much.”

In contrast, the dorsal part of the brain — including the cortex, thalamus and cerebellum — is mainly involved in fast-changing adaptive functions, such as sensory-motor specialization and cognition. “Thus it has expanded and diversified faster, even with fewer millions of years of evolution,” Zeng said.

Another study compared gene regulation in the primary motor cortex of humans, macaques, monkeys and mice. Researchers found that patterns of gene expression that were specific to particular cell types seem to have evolved much more rapidly than patterns that are shared across different cell types.

They said nearly 80 percent of the regulatory elements that are unique to humans are transposable elements — that is, small sections of DNA that can easily change position within the genome.

The analysis also pointed to features that are highly conserved across species in genetic variants that have been linked to multiple sclerosis, anorexia nervosa and tobacco addiction. The researchers said their results demonstrate the value of brain maps for identifying genetic factors that play a part in neurological conditions.

“Humans have evolved over millions of years, and much of that evolutionary history is shared with other animals,” Joseph Ecker, a professor at the Salk Institute who helped lead the cross-species study, explained in a news release. “Data from humans alone is never going to be enough to tell us everything we want to know about how the brain works. By filling in these gaps with other mammalian species, we can continue to answer those questions and improve the machine learning models we use by providing them more data.”

Now that researchers have filled out the parts list for the mouse brain, they’ll be devoting even more attention to the human brain. The Allen Institute is spearheading a five-year effort to create a human cell-type atlas with $173 million in funding from the BRAIN Initiative.

Zeng said cell-type maps are likely to point to new strategies for treating diseases. In that sense, having an accurate map could be the first step toward putting a wayward brain back on the right track.

“We know that many of the diseases originated actually in specific parts of the brain, and probably in specific cell types in those parts of the brain,” she said. “With the map in hand, now we can find out exactly how genes changed in those cell types, in those parts of the brain. … We can then create genetic tools or other kinds of tools, like pharmacological tools, to target those specific cell types.”

John Ngai, director of the BRAIN Initiative, suggested that the best is yet to come.

“Where we previously stood in darkness, this milestone achievement shines a bright light, giving researchers access to the location, function, and pathways between cell types and cell groups in a way we couldn’t imagine previously,” Ngai said. “This product is a testament to the power of this unprecedented, cross-cutting collaboration and paves our path for more precision brain treatments.”

A special section on Nature’s website highlights research from the BRAIN Initiative Cell Census Network relating to the mouse brain-cell atlas, including the nine papers published today as well as a paper that was published in September.

The Allen Institute, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative and the University of Washington have launched a collaboration called the Seattle Hub for Synthetic Biology, with the goal of using genetically modified cells to capture a DNA-based record showing how they change over time.

If the project works out as hoped, it could lead to a deeper understanding of the mechanisms behind cellular processes — including, for example, how tumors grow — and point to new methods for fighting disease and promoting healthy cell growth.

Over the next five years, the Seattle Hub for Synthetic Biology will receive $35 million from the Allen Institute, and another $35 million from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, founded by Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan.

Jay Shendure, a professor of genome sciences at UW Medicine, will serve as the hub’s executive director. Other members of the leadership team include Marion Pepper and Cole Trapnell, researchers at UW Medicine; and Jesse Gray, a veteran of Ascidian Therapeutics and Harvard Medical School. The collaboration will build on technology pioneered at the Allen Discovery Center for Cell Lineage Tracing and the Brotman Baty Institute for Precision Medicine.

Shendure compared the genetically modified cells to flight recorders on airplanes. He said such cells could, for example, be combined with CAR-T cells to track the progress of cancer therapy.

“You could imagine layering them into CAR-T cells to provide a record of what happened, in the context of trying to deliver a certain therapeutic,” he told GeekWire. “And then you could imagine components of these cells, or more sophisticated versions, actually being used as part of the therapy — where, when and how a therapeutic turns on or off is modulated at some level by a much more sophisticated set of machinery.”

A new channel for checking cells

That sort of application is far down the road. In the nearer term, SeaHub’s researchers aim to develop a new channel for chronicling the changes that cells go through. This channel would take an approach that’s different from existing methods that depend on microscope imaging or sequencing a cell’s entire genome.

Shendure and his colleagues at UW have already created two techniques that could help turn elements of the genetic machinery inside cells into tiny time-lapse recording devices.

One of the techniques, known as DNA Typewriter, was the subject of a research paper in the journal Nature last year. The system makes use of gene-editing tools to lay down short snippets of DNA in chronological order, moving along a molecular string like the clicks of the carriage on an old-fashioned typewriter.

“If you insert a five-base-pair sequence, that’s four to the fifth, or 1,024. So there are 1,024 possible symbols that we could insert,” Shendure said. “When you punch a key, so to speak, you write a symbol — one of those 1,024 possible insertions. That’s like the recording of information. And the same edit moves the ‘type head’ one unit down the tape. You’re not just firing letters at a piece of paper, you’re actually typing them in some coherent order.”

The second technique is Engram. “Without Engram, DNA Typewriter is like a monkey at a typewriter, just hitting keys,” Shendure said. “But with Engram, at least for some of the keys, we can say you’re more likely to type this key if this particular signaling pathway is active, or you’re only going to type this key if you’re this particular cell type. So, we’re starting to learn how to assign meanings to keys, and to build a vocabulary of triggers between biological signals and symbols on our keyboard.”

To read the recording, researchers could extract some of the recorder cells and check the sequence of DNA letters that were inserted over time.

What the recorders could reveal

Early practical applications of the cell-recording technologies are likely to focus on studying how cells multiply and develop into tissues under normal conditions, and how things go wrong due to disease.

Studying the growth of a cancerous tumor would be a great example, Shendure said. “If you want to probe the history of one tumor — obviously this would be in a model organism, but it could be a human cell transplanted in a mouse — trying to accumulate that history over time is something that you would want to do,” he said.

Researchers could track the development of different tumors on the cellular level, and study how different treatment strategies affect their growth. For that scenario, a strain of mice could be genetically engineered with cell-recording capability.

“We make a mouse line that essentially has all this stuff stably, and the recording device can be ‘turned on’ at any point,” Shendure said. “You could have it constituently on, so it switches on at the beginning, or you could use a small chemical to turn it on, like doxycycline.”

Such methods could also be used to fine-tune tissue engineering. “If we’re trying to make skin in a dish, or something like that, what’s working? What’s not working? And how do you modulate it to improve the process?” Shendure said.

Using such techniques for clinical treatment in humans is a long-term strategy. But how long-term? “I don’t think they’re as futuristic as they might seem, given everything that’s going on,” Shendure said.

Sharing the science

Findings from the research effort will be shared widely within the scientific community. “It’s all going to be open science, fitting with the philosophy of the Allen Institute and CZI,” Shendure said.

The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative’s backing for the Seattle Hub for Synthetic Biology builds on the philanthropic organization’s history of supporting big-picture biotech projects — including a $3 billion effort aimed at curing, preventing and managing all diseases within a generation, and $15 million in grants that were awarded in 2018 to support a global research effort called the Human Cell Atlas.

“By developing new technologies to measure and understand the history of our cells over time, including how they are impacted by the environment around them, genetic mutations and other factors, we can expand scientists’ understanding of what happens at the cellular level when we go from healthy to sick, and help pinpoint the earliest causes of disease,” CZI co-founder and co-CEO Priscilla Chan said in a news release.

Rui Costa, president and chief executive officer of the Allen Institute, said he and his colleagues are “incredibly excited to enter this new era of collaboration to tackle big moonshot projects in partnership with others.”

UW President Ana Mari Cauce said the project “demonstrates the enormous potential impact of values-driven partnerships, and it represents a new way of thinking about how we can solve problems more quickly and effectively through scientific collaboration.”

“Our shared values, paired with our complementary perspectives and strengths, are a recipe for success, and I can’t wait to see what this team will accomplish together,” Cauce said.

The effort should yield noticeable results within five years, Shendure said.

“It could lead to basically a library of tools for engineering cell types, specific expression, et cetera. … I think there’ll be these deliverables that are broadly useful for the field,” he said.

Shendure hopes researchers at the Seattle Hub for Synthetic Biology will come up with specific bodies of information relating to cell lineages, including cancer cell lineages, that would be impossible to obtain using more conventional technologies. But he also has a bigger goal in mind: “Gaining acceptance for a new modality of measuring things over time, using DNA as a recording medium.”

“That’s been kind of a niche interest of technology development groups,” Shendure said. “We’re trying to really move that toward the mainstream.”

Some of the biggest names in longevity research — and at least one Seattle biotech startup — say they’ll enter a $101 million, seven-year competition to turn back the clock on the effects of aging by at least 10 years.

XPRIZE Healthspan was unveiled today at a conference in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. It’s the richest incentive-based technology competition ever created by the XPRIZE foundation, beating out a $100 million XPRIZE Carbon Removal contest that’s being funded by Elon Musk, the world’s richest (and most controversial) billionaire.

The top prize in the Healthspan competition will go to the team that does the best job of creating a therapy that can be administered in a year or less, leading to the restoration of at least 10 years’ worth of muscular function, cognition and immune function in people aged 65 to 80.

Peter Diamandis, the founder and executive chairman of XPRIZE, said the concept started out as a longevity prize, but the program’s planners “realized that the idea of waiting 20 years to see if someone won the prize was probably impractical.”

“We shifted from longevity to really looking at age reversal first, and then functional restoration second,” Diamandis explained. “You see, it doesn’t really matter what your epigenetic age is. Do you actually feel younger? Do you have the muscle, immune and cognition that you had 10 or 20 years ago? Because at the end of the game, that’s what really matters.”

The guidelines for the competition are still being fine-tuned, but team can already start registering to compete via the XPRIZE Healthspan website. Two years into the program, judges would select up to 40 teams to receive $250,000 progress awards. After three or four years, up to 10 teams would each receive a $1 million award to keep going.

The grand prize would be paid out by 2030 if key milestones for functional restoration are reached. If one of the teams restores 20 years’ worth of function, that team would be eligible to win $81 million. If the best team can manage only 15 years’ worth of restoration, the prize would amount to $71 million. And if the top team achieves a functional improvement amounting to at least 10 years, but less than 15 years, the prize would be $61 million.

In addition to the $101 million prize purse, $40 million has been set aside to cover the cost of operations. Hevolution, a Saudi foundation focusing on longevity research, is providing $40 million to fund the program. Lululemon founder Chip Wilson kicked in another $26 million. Sixteen other donors, including Diamandis, made additional pledges.

Wilson is also funding a separate $10 million competition to promote the development of therapies that can restore at least 10 years’ worth of muscular function in patients with facioscapulohumeral muscular dystrophy, or FSHD — a genetic disorder that affects Wilson and 870,000 others around the world.

Jamie Justice, an adjunct professor focusing on geriatric medicine at Wake Forest University School of Medicine, is the executive director of XPRIZE Healthspan. She said the competition comes at a key moment for the study of aging and longevity.

“Our life expectancy has more than doubled in the last 100 years … but our healthy life has not increased at the same rate,” she said. “And so, currently there is about a 10-year period that we now spend at the end of life in poor health. That’s the lost decade that we need novel, innovative solutions in order to make up. And that’s what this prize is really well-poised to do.”

Diamandis hoped hundreds of teams would sign up to compete. “We had 1,600 teams enter our last $100 million prize,” he noted. “I hope we can exceed that.”

Is the goal of the prize achievable? Or will XPRIZE Healthspan end up like the $30 million Google Lunar X Prize, in which no team was able to win the grand prize for a commercial lunar landing by the 2018 deadline?

Matt Kaeberlein thinks XPRIZE Healthspan is likely to be successful. He’s an affiliate professor at the University of Washington who has long studied the biological mechanism of aging, and he’s also the co-founder and CEO of a Seattle-based health tech startup called OptiSpan. Like the latest XPRIZE program, OptiSpan focuses on technologies that can help people live healthy lives for a longer time.

Kaeberlein likes what he’s seen so far about the XPRIZE program. “I had nothing to do with this prize or the way they designed it,” he said. “I was a little nervous before it came out, that this would be something crazy that didn’t make any sense. But I think they actually did a good job in the way that they put this together.”

He could see several ways the prize could be won — for example, through the use of anti-aging drugs, or supplements, or even an app-based program that could reliably coax people to adopt healthy habits relating to diet and exercise. (A drug called rapamycin is already being studied for potential life-extension properties.)

Kaeberlein doesn’t yet know if OptiSpan will pursue the prize. “I haven’t actually spent much time thinking about competing,” he told GeekWire. “I don’t know. Maybe, but probably not.”

In contrast, Mitchell Lee, the CEO and co-founder of another Seattle startup called Ora Biomedical, is definitely in. “You better believe that Ora Biomedical is running after that prize!” he said in a posting to X / Twitter.

In a follow-up email, Lee told GeekWire that he and his small team were “very excited” to hear about XPRIZE Healthspan. “We fully believe small-molecule interventions that target biological aging are the next revolution in health,” Lee said. “We developed our WormBot-AI drug discovery platform with the goal of identifying the most powerful lifespan-extending interventions.”

Lee explained that part of Ora Biomedical’s process involves testing compounds across models for age-associated conditions and rare diseases, including neuromuscular disorders. The results are then analyzed to gauge the effects on healthy lifespan.

“The XPRIZE Healthspan is an incredible challenge that stands to revolutionize health,” Lee said. “Ora Biomedical is proud to do all we can to meet the goal of creating transformative longevity therapeutics.”

Ora Biomedical is likely to face tough competition. Several researchers in the field of aging said during today’s XPRIZE presentation that they intend to compete.

The speakers included Andrea Maier, director of the Center for Healthy Longevity at the National University of Singapore and founder of Chi Longevity; Laura Niedernhofer, director of the Institute on the Biology of Aging and Metabolism at the University of Minnesota; and Eric Verdin, CEO of the Buck Institute for Research on Aging (which has brought on Seattle bioscience pioneer Lee Hood as chief innovation officer).

Perhaps the best-known presumptive competitor is Harvard geneticist George Church, who co-founded a longevity startup called Rejuvenate Bio. Church said the XPRIZE Healthspan “can definitely be won in the timeframe we have here,” thanks to cutting-edge technologies including stem-cell reprogramming, gene editing and AI-enabled molecular analysis.

When Church was asked whether he wanted to win, he said, “Yes, as part of a team effort. The sooner, the better.”

But Kaeberlein said he’d be wary of approaches that are overly rushed. “I would be nervous that there’d be people who try to push things too fast,” he said.

The Paul G. Allen Frontiers Group, a division of the Seattle-based Allen Institute, is launching a research center in New York to focus on interactions between the nervous system and the immune system.

The Allen Discovery Center for Neuroimmune Interactions, headquartered at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, will receive $10 million over the course of four years from the Paul G. Allen Family Foundation, with a total potential for $20 million over eight years.

The award is the result of an open call for research proposals exploring fundamental questions at the intersection of neuroscience and immunology. It’s the latest open-science initiative celebrating the legacy of Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, who died five years ago at the age of 65 from complications of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. Several other Allen Discovery Centers have been created over the years to focus on fields including human brain evolution and cell lineages.

“Understanding of the complex crosstalk that occurs between peripheral nervous and immune systems will provide this emerging field with an exciting opportunity to change the way we think about physiology at this dynamic interface, both in health and disease,” Kathy Richmond, who is executive vice president and director of the Frontiers Group and the Office of Science and Innovation at the Allen Institute, said today in a news release.

The neuroimmunology research center will be led by Brian Kim of Mount Sinai and David Artis of Weill Cornell Medicine. They’ll bring together a multidisciplinary team to trace interactions between the nervous system and the immune system that occur at sites distant from the brain — for example, at the skin, lung and gut surfaces — and analyze how those interactions relay sensations back to the brain and regulate organ physiology and immune responses.

Kim said the center’s goal will be “to exponentially accelerate the frontier of neuroimmunology by bringing together the pioneers who helped shape the emerging field.”

Artis said the team will include researchers from Mount Sinai, New York University, Weill Cornell Medicine and Yale. The effort represents “a tremendous opportunity to leverage cutting-edge technologies to provide new insights into how the nervous and immune systems communicate with each other to regulate immunity, inflammation and tissue homeostasis,” he said.

If the center lives up to its promise, the resulting research could “transform numerous fields of biology and medicine, including allergy, autoimmunity, cancer, infection and metabolism,” Kim said.

Plenty of high school students plan to make careers out of coding when they graduate from college. And plenty of other students are probably planning careers as cancer-research scientists. 

But how many are planning on doing both at once?

“Coding for Cancer,” a program from the Seattle-based Fred Hutch Cancer Center, aims to let students know that computational research in the biomedical field is one potential career path, and that coding skills play a very important part in modern cancer research.

Raihan Hakim, a junior at the Overlake School in Remond, Wash., completed the Coding for Cancer program over the summer. Working with other students and two Fred Hutch computational biomedical researchers who served as mentors, he completed a coding project exploring how gene mutations relate to cancerous tumors in the body.

“I plotted each patient’s different cancer types, and I put that against whether they had [the mutation] or not, and what stage they were at,” Hakim said.

The project culminated in a Zoom presentation where all the Coding for Cancer teams presented their methods and findings — along with some of their missteps.

Hakim said the program opened his mind to the possibilities of coding and technology outside of more obvious career paths like gaming and app development.

“One thing I learned over the course of the program is how technology can be used in many spaces, especially cancer research,” Hakim said. “It makes our lives easier by doing the work for us.”

Hakim already knew a coding language before enrolling in the program, but that’s by no means a prerequisite for students interested in participating. Coding for Cancer is designed to expose students to the possibilities of using code in cancer research with no prior knowledge of computational science. Mentors teach coding during the first two weeks of the four-week program; the next two are devoted to research.

Hanako Osuga, the program’s lead at Fred Hutch, said an ability to thrive in a virtual learning environment is a better indicator of success in the program than any previous knowledge.

“Virtual programming is a bit difficult at times,” Osuga said. “Anyone who has that curiosity and the drive to learn that skill is more than welcome, and would be a great addition to this program.” 

The program seeks out students from backgrounds historically excluded from the biomedical sciences, and program staff will work with students to secure technological resources — computers or Wi-Fi, for example — that they might not have readily available. 

Students receive a $1,000 stipend after completing the program.

Because the program is virtual, it can reach a larger geographical area, including rural areas of Washington state. This year, three of the program’s 20 students were from central Washington, and one was from eastern Washington.

The goal is to reach students early, to teach them about the possibilities of coding in biomedical sciences before college sets them on other career paths.

“We learned that high schoolers have questions and curiosities around those computational pathways,” Osuga said. “College is almost a little bit too late.” 

Hakim hasn’t settled on what to study in college, or how to apply that skillset down the road. But the program has changed his perspective. 

“Cancer research was always a thing I wanted to do. That was one of the main reasons I applied,” he said. “The unique part was the coding language. I feel like after doing this program, that could be a possibility.”

Students interested in applying for Coding for Cancer’s 2024 cohort should check the program website in early January for updated instructions.

Twenty years after Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen created the bioscience research center that bears his name, Seattle’s Allen Institute is still pushing out into new frontiers. But this weekend, the nonprofit institute — and its hometown — are taking a little time to celebrate.

All this week, the Allen Institute has been highlighting Open Science Week, which touches upon one of the core values that Allen had in mind when he launched the institute with a $100 million donation on Sept. 16, 2003. Seattle Mayor Bruce Harrell and King County Executive Dow Constantine are giving the festivities an extra boost by issuing proclamations designating Saturday as “Open Science Day” in the Emerald City and its environs.

Speaking of emeralds, a gaggle of Seattle landmarks will be lit up in emerald green this weekend in honor of the institute’s 20th anniversary. The list includes the Evergreen Point Floating Bridge, Two Union Square, the Great Wheel, the Pacific Science Center, the Seattle Convention Center, Rainier Square — and of course, the Allen Institute’s seven-story headquarters on South Lake Union.

On Sept. 28, the institute is planning a free public event to showcase the open-science discoveries and tools that have emerged over the past 20 years. (Check the institute’s website to sign up for in-person or virtual attendance.)

Back in 2003, the institute was devoted exclusively to brain science, with the goal of creating the Allen Brain Atlas and mapping the role of genes in brain development. The institute’s researchers began by analyzing thin slices of mouse brains, and leveraged the expertise they gained to produce gene-coded maps of the human brain starting in 2010.

Brain science is still a focus of the institute’s research, but over the years, its mission has expanded. Cell science was added to the portfolio in 2014, and just after Paul Allen’s death in 2018, the institute launched an immunology division with $125 million from the software billionaire’s estate. The most recent addition is the Allen Institute for Neural Dynamics, which was created in 2021.

An organizationally separate counterpart focusing on artificial intelligence — the Allen Institute for AI, or AI2 — was founded in 2014.

Neuroscientist Rui Costa, who was named the institute’s CEO and president in late 2021, told GeekWire that Jody Allen, Paul Allen’s sister and the executor and trustee of his estate, has been “extremely supportive” of the institute. So has the rest of the institute’s board of directors.

“They say, ‘Let’s go for the next 20 years of impact,'” Costa said.

The institute’s staff is on track to rise beyond 800 employees by the end of the year. Its treasure trove of scientific data is at the 500-petabyte level and on its way to reaching an exabyte (that’s a quintillion bytes, or a billion gigabytes) sometime next year. “By 2024, the data that we’ve produced will be on the scale of what CERN has provided for particle physics,” Costa said.

So what are the institute’s biggest achievements? Costa says he has three favorites: the publication of the first Allen Mouse Brain Atlas in 2006, this year’s characterization of what a normal cell should look like … and a discovery that Costa can’t talk about yet because it’s awaiting publication.

“Perhaps bigger than any individual discovery, our most monumental achievement has been advancing the open science movement,” Costa added.

All of the institute’s databases are open-source and freely available to outside researchers, the way Paul Allen intended them to be. “More publications have been produced by outside institutions using our data than what we’ve produced internally,” Costa said. “We think that’s a good thing.”

Twenty years ago, the open-science approach to sharing research was uncommon. “And then it became a thing,” Costa said. “Now we are in a position where we’re doubling down on the concept. We go for complete projects that cannot be handled by an individual lab, but rather by interdisciplinary teams that work together for 10 to 15 years on the project.”

In addition to its four research divisions, the Allen Institute forges partnerships with other research centers through its Paul G. Allen Frontiers Group. The ranks of Allen Distinguished Investigators include Nobel-winning gene editing pioneer Jennifer Doudna and Nobel-winning evolutionary geneticist Svante Pääbo. “We complete projects and change questions, but we don’t change super-fast,” Costa said. “We focus on what we think are the most pertinent questions, and then dive in deep.”

Now the institute is considering research questions having to do with how environmental factors and climate change affect life, how synthetic biology can be used to gain new insights into human health and disease, and how neuroscience can shed light on issues relating to mental health and addiction. There’s currently an open call for proposals to study the neurobiological effects of human-caused environmental changes — with up to $10 million to be awarded to the research team that’s selected.

What would Paul Allen, the self-described “Idea Man,” think of all this?

“When the Allen Institute was founded two decades ago, it began with brain science and a quest to map all of the genes in the mouse brain, and share our data for free,” Costa said in an email. “That was followed by launching new institutes for cell science, immunology and neural dynamics. Today, I believe Paul would marvel at the growing convergence of these different disciplines, and the incredible new computational tools that will help us make discoveries that — just 20 years ago — seemed nearly impossible.”

Tiny robots developed at the University of Washington might look like leaves that could have fallen from a tree, but the control the devices use in getting to the ground is what sets them apart.

The little “microfliers” use a form of origami called the Miura-ori fold, named for Japanese astrophysicist Kōryō Miura, who developed the method for folding a flat sheet of paper into a smaller area.

After being dropped by a drone, the devices go from flat and tumbling to the ground, to folded and falling straight down. The timing of the transition from flat to folded is controlled by a few methods: an onboard pressure sensor (estimating altitude), an onboard timer or a Bluetooth signal.

Each device weighs about 400 milligrams and can travel about 100 yards when dropped from a height of 131 feet. The microfliers carry an onboard battery-free actuator, a solar power-harvesting circuit and controller to trigger the shape changes in mid-air.

The microfliers have the capacity to carry onboard sensors to survey temperature, humidity and other data while soaring, to measure various environmental and atmospheric conditions as they descend. A network of such devices could help researchers paint a picture of what’s happening for different applications, including digital agriculture and monitoring climate change, according to the researchers’ website.

The team published results of its research on Wednesday in Science Robotics.

“Using origami opens up a new design space for microfliers,” said co-senior author Vikram Iyer, UW assistant professor in the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering, in a statement. He said the method “highly energy efficient” and said it “allows us to have battery-free control over microflier descent, which was not possible before.”

Iyer, a former GeekWire Geek of the Week, has been involved in several high-profile projects at the UW using tiny robots featuring low power and low weight.

• He helped attach a tiny robotic camera to the back of a live beetle in 2020.
• He put tiny tracking technology on Asian giant hornets in Washington state to help find their nests.
• And before origami became their latest technique, Iyer and researchers were mimicking dandelion seeds riding the wind.

Additional co-authors on the paper are Kyle Johnson and Vicente Arroyos, both UW doctoral students in the Allen School; Amélie Ferran, a UW doctoral student in the mechanical engineering department; Raul Villanueva, Dennis Yin and Tilboon Elberier, who completed this work as UW undergraduate students studying electrical and computer engineering; Alberto Aliseda, UW professor of mechanical engineering; Sawyer Fuller, UW assistant professor of mechanical engineering; and Shyam Gollakota, UW professor in the Allen School.

Watch Johnson demonstrate how to fold a paper microflier in this video:

As the world’s best-known fictional archaeologist goes after what may be his last ancient mystery in “Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny,” new generations of real-life archaeologists are ready to dig in with 21st-century technologies and sensibilities.

Harrison Ford, the 80-year-old actor who’s played Indiana Jones for 42 years, has said “Dial of Destiny” will be his last sequel in the series. And this one is a doozy: The dial-like gizmo that gives the movie its name is the Antikythera Mechanism, a real-life device that ancient Greeks used to predict eclipses and other astronomical events. The Lance of Longinus, the Tomb of Archimedes and the Ear of Dionysius figure in the plot as well.

Indy and his mysteries will be missed. Sara Gonzalez, a curator of archaeology at Seattle’s Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture, says her favorite movie about her own field is “Raiders of the Lost Ark,” the 1981 film in which Indiana Jones (played by Harrison Ford) made his debut. But that’s not because it’s true to life.

Gonzalez said researchers from the University of Washington’s Department of Anthropology, where she’s an associate professor, recently took a field trip to a local cinema where “Raiders” was playing.

“They have something called HeckleVision, where you can text onto the screen and see it,” she said. “There was this great, fun discussion, happening virtually live, with a whole bunch of anthropologists sitting and watching a movie that we love to deride. But we still kind of love the story and the angle, and we also love educating people about what’s real and what’s fictional about archaeology.”

That’s the subject of the latest episode of the Fiction Science podcast, focusing on the intersection of science and fiction.

Some of the tools available to modern archaeologists would have seemed like science fiction to Indiana Jones’ real-life contemporaries in the 1930s. Researchers are using satellite images, muon detectors and bug-sized cameras to identify and explore ancient ruins in Egypt. Underwater archaeologists employ side-scan sonar, remotely operated vehicles and 3-D imaging to check out shipwrecks in the Caribbean, the Mediterranean and the Canadian Arctic. And X-ray scans helped scientists figure out how the Antikythera Mechanism worked.

Closer to home, Gonzalez and her students use magnetometers, ground-penetrating radar and laser-equipped drones to check out sites of archaeological interest, in partnership with indigenous peoples like the Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde Community of Oregon and the Kashia Band of Pomo Indians in California.

“In ‘Raiders of the Lost Ark,’ you have hundreds if not thousands of people excavating everything,” she said. “That’s really not what we like to do in contemporary archaeology, and it’s certainly not very consistent with the values of indigenous nations.”

Her team developed a new technique for doing a minimally invasive excavations, called “catch and release.” The technique involves carefully peeling back the sod on a square meter’s worth of land, removing and cataloging material layer by layer to a depth of 10 centimeters (4 inches), then replacing everything where it was and closing up the hole.

“We were talking about the method, and I was like, ‘So it’s kind of like catch and release,’ and we all joked, because a lot of us really love fishing,” Gonzalez recalled. “It just stuck, and it’s evocative of exactly what we’re doing.”

Gonzalez has found that digging a hole and flying a drone (or cracking a bullwhip, for that matter) aren’t the most important skills that an archaeologist must master.

“I think the No. 1 rule of doing archaeology and becoming an archaeologist is that you really have to like people … and not just working with other archaeologists, but people within the local communities where you’re working,” she said.

The Burke Museum has had a lot of experience working with the tribes of the Pacific Northwest — most notably in the case of the Ancient One, a.k.a. Kennewick Man, whose 9,000-year-old remains were laid to rest in 2017 after more than two decades of legal wrangling. The Burke Museum was the caretaker of the remains for most of that time, and facilitated their handover to a coalition of five tribes.

Gonzalez noted that she joined the museum’s staff years after the Ancient One was repatriated, but she said the case illustrates how archaeology has evolved since the era depicted in the Indiana Jones movies.

“When the Ancient One comes up, usually I try to focus on another case, such as all the other cases that involve very ancient native ancestors who didn’t end up in the courts,” she said. As an example, she cited the process that followed the discovery of 10,000-year-old human remains in Alaska’s On Your Knees Cave in 1996.

“Archaeologists and community members were able to find a pathway forward that recognized the sovereignty of those nations to make decisions about their ancestors,” Gonzalez said.

The $99 million retooling that resulted in a brand-new Burke Museum building in 2019 provided an opportunity to give the region’s indigenous peoples more of a say in how their story is presented. “Our Material World exhibit that features archaeology at the Burke … was developed in close collaboration with tribal partners across the Pacific Northwest, and especially here in Washington,” Gonzalez said.

One of the Burke’s featured archaeological projects focuses on a Coast Salish canoe that was found eroding out of the banks of the Green River south of Seattle in 1963. Researchers created a digital 3-D model of the canoe and used radiocarbon dating to determine its age. “We think it was probably made in the 1830s to 1840s,” Peter Lape, another archaeologist at the Burke, told University of Washington Magazine.

“Right now, if you come by, you’ll seen the canoe in the process of conservation, and we’re getting it ready to put on display,” Gonzalez said.

The Burke Museum also worked with Native carvers and artists to create a replica of the Green River canoe, which is currently stored at the university’s ASUW Shell House. “Our UW canoe family now paddles it,” Gonzalez said. “So do the archaeologists, on occasion.”

“It’s a really fantastic kind of story about how these collections are brought to life when you’re actually working in partnership with people and ensuring that that knowledge goes back into community and into a living practice.”

That sounds like a lesson that the fictional Indiana Jones might benefit from learning, if there’s at least one more ancient mystery to make a movie about.

“It’s definitely the main takeaway,” Gonzalez said. Then she added with a grin, “I would also say that a lot of archaeologists still really advocate punching Nazis and fascists. That’s definitely a cultural touchstone amongst the community.”

“Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny” opens at theaters tonight. The four previous Indiana Jones movies — “Raiders of the Lost Ark,” “Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom,” “Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade” and “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull” — are playing on Disney+.

Check out an extended version of this story at Alan Boyle’s Cosmic Log for more insights into how archaeology has changed since the fictional days of Indiana Jones, from archaeologists Chris Begley and Brittany Brown.

Stay tuned for future episodes of the Fiction Science podcast via Apple, Google, Overcast, Spotify, Player.fm, Pocket Casts, Radio Public and Podvine. If you like Fiction Science, please rate the podcast and subscribe to get alerts for future episodes.

The U.S. Coast Guard says it plans to recover debris from OceanGate’s Titan submersible, which was lost along with its crew during a dive to the Titanic shipwreck, as part of its investigation into the catastrophe.

“At this time, the priority of the investigation is to recover items from the seafloor,” Capt. Jason Neubauer, who is leading the marine board of investigation, said today during a Boston news briefing.

Debris from the submersible lies about 12,500 feet beneath the surface of the North Atlantic Ocean, about 400 miles from the Newfoundland coast and only about 1,600 feet from the Titanic’s bow. The sub, built by Everett, Wash.-based OceanGate, was on its way to the world’s best-known shipwreck when it lost contact with its support ship a week ago.

An international search-and-rescue operation made use of remotely operated vehicles to find debris from the Titan sub on Thursday. ROVs also will be used to recover wreckage from Titan. “I’m not going to give the details of what the recovery has been to date, but the resources are on site and capable of recovering the debris,” Neubauer told reporters.

The National Transportation Safety Board and its counterparts in Canada, Britain and France are working with the Coast Guard on the investigation.

Neubauer said the nature of the evidence would not be discussed as it was being collected, out of respect for the families of the five crew members who were lost as well as for the various agencies participating in the investigation. The Coast Guard is in communication with the families, and Neubauer said the recovery team was “taking all precautions on site if we are to encounter any human remains.”

The crew members included OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush; veteran Titanic diver PH Nargeolet; British aerospace executive Hamish Harding; and Pakistani business executive Shahzana Dawood and his son, Suleman.

When the pieces of debris from Titan were found on Thursday, the Coast Guard said the crew died due to the catastrophic implosion of the submersible’s hull — and the causes of that implosion are likely to become key issues in the investigation.

In addition to recovering debris, investigators are interviewing crew members who were on the Polar Prince, the support ship that was used for the dive. Those witnesses are being interviewed in St. John’s, Newfoundland.

Neubauer declined to give a timeline for the investigation.

After the evidence is collected, the case would be reviewed during public hearings, and a final report would be delivered to the commandant of the Coast Guard, Neubauer said. That report would include the investigators’ findings, as well as recommendations for further civil and criminal action as well as for regulatory changes “to prevent a similar occurrence,” Neubauer said.

“Any subsequent enforcement activities would be pursued under a separate investigation,” he said.

No matter what the investigation finds, the Coast Guard will continue to provide search and rescue to those in trouble at sea at no charge to those rescued, Coast Guard Rear Adm. John Mauger said.

“As a matter of U.S. law and Coast Guard policy, the Coast Guard doesn’t charge for search and rescue, nor do we associate a cost with human life,” he told reporters. “We always answer the call.”

Previously: Sub tragedy sets off a torrent of questions

It’s too soon to answer all the questions raised by this week’s loss of OceanGate’s Titan submersible and its five-person crew during their dive to the Titanic shipwreck — but the questions are being asked nevertheless.

An international team led by the U.S. Coast Guard is still surveying the site in the wake of Thursday’s determination that the sub, built by Everett, Wash.-based OceanGate, was destroyed due to the catastrophic collapse of its pressure chamber. A remotely operated vehicle identified debris from the sub scattered just 1,600 feet from the Titanic’s iconic bow.

Some of the ships and planes that were involved in the search have left the scene, 400 miles off the coast of Newfoundland, but others are continuing to survey a stretch of seafloor 12,500 feet beneath the surface of the North Atlantic. It’s a hard-to-reach region that now serves as the graveyard for two at-sea disasters.

“We will do the best we can to fully map what’s down there,” Paul Hankins, the director of the U.S. Navy’s salvage operations, said during the news briefing announcing the Titan’s destruction.

Titan was deployed from its support ship, the Polar Prince, on Sunday morning and fell out of contact about an hour and 45 minutes after the dive began. Authorities were alerted to the sub’s disappearance on Sunday night and began the search on Monday. It took until late Wednesday for ROVs capable of reaching the seafloor to arrive on the scene.

The Coast Guard will lead the investigation into what has now been designated a major marine casualty, with the National Transportation Safety Board and other agencies playing a supporting role. The fact that the tragedy took place in international waters is likely to complicate the investigation.

Investigators will focus on the debris — which includes the titanium front end of the pressure chamber as well as the back end. A close analysis of imagery from the ROVs could help experts reconstruct how the crushing pressures of the deep ocean caused the hull to implode.

Coast Guard Rear Adm. John Mauger declined to say how much of the debris — or the remains of the crew — could be brought up to the surface. “It’s an incredibly unforgiving environment down there on the seafloor. … I don’t have an answer for the prospects at this time,” he said.

Among the dead are OceanGate’s co-founder and CEO, Stockton Rush; veteran Titanic diver Paul-Henri Nargeolet; British aviation executive Hamish Harding; and Pakistani business executive Shahzara Dawood and his 19-year-old son, Suleman. All five were mourned by family, friends and public officials.

Washington Gov. Jay Inslee tweeted his condolences to the crew’s families and gave a nod of respect to the Coast Guard. U.S. Rep. Rick Larsen, whose district includes OceanGate’s HQ, said his heart “breaks for the victims, their loved ones and the OceanGate family.”

OceanGate: Office ‘closed indefinitely’

OceanGate said in a statement that its employees were “exhausted and grieving deeply over the loss.” The Everett office would “remain closed indefinitely while the staff copes with the tragic loss of their team member,” the company said.

The websites for OceanGate and for OceanGate Expeditions, the sister company that was in charge of the Titanic tours, were not fully operational as the week drew to a close.

Stockton Rush co-founded OceanGate in 2009. The other co-founder, Guillermo Söhnlein, moved on to other pursuits after four years at the company. As of 2017, Pitchbook estimated OceanGate’s valuation at $60 million. During a funding round in 2020, OceanGate raised $18.1 million from 22 investors. That was at a time when OceanGate was gearing up for the start of Titan’s trips.

OceanGate also received about $450,000 in pandemic-related federal PPP loans in 2020 that were forgiven, according to ProPublica.

It’s not clear who will lead the closely held company in the wake of Stockton Rush’s death. OceanGate’s workforce is in the range of 40 to 60 employees, according to Pitchbook. LinkedIn lists Rush’s widow, Wendy Rush, as the company’s communications director. (For what it’s worth, Wendy Rush’s ancestors include a couple who died along with more than 1,500 others in the 1912 sinking of the Titanic. The couple’s story was fictionalized for the movie “Titanic.”)

The company still owns two subs — Cyclops 1 and Antipodes — but Titan was the big attraction, because it was the only OceanGate vessel capable of going deeper than 500 meters (1,640 feet). Before this week’s tragedy, OceanGate was offering trips to the Titanic and to the Azores in 2024 at a list price of $250,000 per seat. What happens to the money paid for future trips? Add that to the list of not-yet-answerable questions.

OceanGate’s customers signed waivers informing them of the deadly risks they’d face during their Titanic adventures, and that means surviving family members will face high legal hurdles if they decide to seek damages. Legal experts say claimants would have to show that OceanGate was grossly negligent.

Regulations: Likely to be tightened

Even before the Coast Guard confirmed that Titan was destroyed by the collapse of its hull, questions were being raised about the submersible’s safety.

OceanGate pioneered the use of carbon composite in place of metal for a sub’s pressure hull, taking advantage of a technology used by Virgin Galactic for its SpaceShipTwo suborbital rocket ship (and by Boeing for its 787 Dreamliner jet). The idea was that because composite is lighter than steel or titanium, that would free up more weight for, say, a five-person crew rather than the traditional one to three.

But could the hull stand up to the pressure at Titanic depths? In 2018, representatives of the marine technology industry sent Rush a letter warning that the experimental nature of OceanGate’s operations could lead to negative outcomes ranging “from minor to catastrophic.”

In legal documents filed that same year, a fired employee complained that the hull was not adequately tested. OceanGate and the employee settled their dispute, and subsequent testing confirmed that the hull couldn’t be rated for trips to the Titanic. OceanGate arranged for the fabrication of a new hull, in consultation with NASA.

OceanGate also developed what it said was a real-time monitoring system that used sensors to alert Titan’s pilot in case stresses on the hull exceeded a specified limit. However, the company resisted going through the full process of having its compliance with shipping standards checked by an outside authority.

“Bringing an outside entity up to speed on every innovation before it is put into real-world testing is anathema to rapid innovation,” OceanGate said in a 2019 blog posting.

Because the trips to the Titanic took place in international waters, they were not subject to U.S. regulations — and in the waivers that customers were required to sign, OceanGate made sure that was disclosed.

Regulations are likely to get tighter in the future, said Robert Mester, founder and senior salvage master at Northwest Maritime Associates. The fact that the NTSB is getting involved in the accident investigation is a good sign, he told MSNBC.

“In the future, these types of missions that will be carrying people for a fee need to have some kind of regulations, and it’s the government for the United States stepping in to finally say, yeah, we need to take a look at this and find out really what went wrong,” he said.

Peter Goetz, former managing director of the NTSB, told CNN that future undersea explorers may be required to purchase recovery insurance in order to cover the costs of a massive search-and-rescue operation like the one sparked by Titan’s disappearance.

The issue is certain to come up in the course of future congressional hearings.

Implications: What now for the final frontiers?

The Titan disaster won’t stop underwater exploration, but it’s likely to give would-be citizen explorers something more to think about.

“Titanic” film director James Cameron, who has been on more than 30 dives to the Titanic and other deep-ocean destinations, told Reuters that he wished that he had spoken out sooner about his concerns relating to the Titan sub.

“I thought it was a horrible idea. I wish I’d spoken up, but I assumed somebody was smarter than me, you know, because I never experimented with that technology. But it just sounded bad on its face,” Cameron said.

During a CNN interview, Cameron said the tragedy could have a long-term impact. “I’m not worried about exploration, because explorers will go,” he said. “I’m worried that it has a negative impact on, let’s say, citizen explorers, tourists. … These are serious people with serious curiosity willing to put serious money down to go to these interesting places — and I don’t want to discourage that.”

Söhnlein, however, told CNN that Cameron’s worries might be premature. “I kind of again wish we would hold off judgment and see exactly what the data comes back with,” OceanGate’s surviving co-founder said.

Will this week’s tragedy on the deep-sea frontier have an effect on the market for trips to the space frontier, currently offered by Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space venture as well as Virgin Galactic and SpaceX? One of the Titan crew members, Hamish Harding, took a trip just last year on Blue Origin’s suborbital spaceship.

In a commentary written for Space News, space policy consultant Brendan Curry said “those working in the emergent private space travel industry should pay close attention.”

Commercial human spaceflight is regulated by the Federal Aviation Administration under special rules that apply for a “learning period” that’s currently due to end in October. Those rules give commercial space operators more leeway to fly paying passengers, as long as those passengers are informed of the risks and give their consent. The FAA also requires operators to tell their crew and spaceflight participants that the agency hasn’t certified their vehicles as safe.

Alan Stern, a planetary scientist at the Southwest Research Institute, is familiar with the risks on the deep-sea frontier as well as on the space frontier. He went on one of OceanGate’s trips to the Titanic last year, and he’s due to take a suborbital space trip with Virgin Galactic once that company ramps up commercial operations.

Stern said he accepted the risks that came with a trip on Titan.

“I wouldn’t have gone with OceanGate if I didn’t think it was basically safe,” he told GeekWire. “You would be foolhardy to do that. And I did a fair amount of due diligence, calling up people who had already been on OceanGate Expeditions, who are not part of the company, and asking them about their experiences.”

But Stern said there was a “night-and-day” difference between OceanGate and commercial space operators.

“I have nothing but good things to say about what I experienced with OceanGate,” he said. “I don’t mean to demean them. But these organizations — that have thousands of engineers and technicians, like a Virgin Galactic or a Blue Origin — are a completely different operation from a couple of dozen people in a small family business, which is what OceanGate was.”

Stern said he hoped there’d always be room in the exploration business for companies like OceanGate as well as for companies like Blue Origin.

“What OceanGate was doing was a noble cause in exploration. It was producing some good for society, not just for the people who paid for it, but the educators and researchers like myself, who they took along at zero cost to do archaeology, to do ocean biology, to do some other kinds of science, or to be educators. They even took artists to communicate to the public about the deep ocean,” he said.

“They’re very sensitive to raising awareness about the ocean and its fragile ecosystems,” Stern said. “I think the kind of work that they were doing has been a strong positive for society. And I hope it continues.”

Most of us don’t think of atoms as having their own unique vibrations, but they do. In fact, it’s a feature so fundamental to nature’s building blocks that a team of University of Washington researchers recently observed and used this phenomenon in their research study. By studying the light atoms emitted when stimulated by a laser, they were able to detect vibrations sometimes referred to as atomic “breathing.”

The result is a breakthrough that may one day allow us to build better tools for many kinds of quantum technologies.

Led by Mo Li, a professor of photonics and nano devices in both the UW Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and the UW Physics Department, the researchers set out to build a better quantum emitter, or QE, one that could be incorporated into optical circuits.

QEs are an essential part of the quantum technology toolkit in that they provide a way to generate individual quantum particles that can be used as qubits. Analogous to bits of information in everyday computing, qubits are used in quantum computing to perform calculations far beyond what can be achieved with classical computers. Typically, a qubit is built from an electron or a photon because of these particle’s unique quantum properties.

“This is a new, atomic-scale platform, using what the scientific community calls ‘optomechanics,’ in which light and mechanical motions are intrinsically coupled together,” said Li. “It provides a new type of involved quantum effect that can be utilized to control single photons running through integrated optical circuits for many applications.”

To build their QE, the team began with tungsten diselenide, a molecule composed of tungsten and selenium. This was formed into the thinnest of sheets, each only a single atom thick. Two of these sheets were then layered one atop the other and placed over a series of nanopillars, a mere 200 nanometers wide.

This placement on the nanopillars caused the sheets to deform at the point of contact, resulting in a series of regularly spaced quantum dots. Quantum dots are semiconductor particles a few nanometers in size, having unique optical and electronic properties and are a common method of building QEs for quantum applications. Because of the deformation caused by the nanopillars, these are more specifically referred to as “strain-induced quantum dots.”

By applying a precise pulse of laser light to one of the quantum dots, an electron is knocked away from the tungsten diselenide atom’s nucleus. This briefly creates a quasiparticle known as an exciton. This exciton is composed of the negatively charged electron and the corresponding positively charged hole in the opposite sheet. Because they are strongly bound, the electron quickly returns to the atom. When it does this, it releases a single photon encoded with very specific quantum information.

“To feasibly have a quantum network, we need to have ways of reliably creating, operating on, storing and transmitting qubits,” said Adina Ripin, a lead author of the paper, member of the Mo Li Group, and a doctoral student in the physics department. “Photons are a natural choice for transmitting this quantum information because optical fibers enable us to transport photons long distances at high speeds, with low losses of energy or information.”

This approach resulted in producing very consistent, high-quality photons that could potentially be used as qubits. By itself, this would make the project a success. However, certain details soon became apparent in the data, meriting a deeper look.

The researchers found that a quasiparticle called a phonon was also being produced in the process of creating each photon. Phonons are an optomechanical phenomenon based on the vibration between atoms and they occur in all matter. Phonons can be thought of as acoustic analogs to photons, with their own quantum waveforms. Though we can’t directly see or hear this, Li says the vibrations can be visualized as the “breath between atoms.”

In this study, the phonons were generated by the vibration between the two atom-thin layers of tungsten diselenide, which acted like tiny drumheads vibrating relative to each other. The UW team found these phonons were tightly correlated to the photon that was being generated.

“You can think of phonons in terms of a little spring attached to the layers,” Li said. “This spring is vibrating, so it directly changes how the electron and the hole can recombine. Because of this, the photon that’s emitted changes as well.”

Previously, phonons had never been observed in this type of single photon emitter system. Moreover, when analyzing the spectrum of the light emitted, the team found equally spaced peaks representing the phonon’s different quantum energy levels. Expert analysis by Ting Cao, a quantum theorist and an assistant professor in materials science and engineering, revealed that every single photon emitted by an exciton was coupled with one, two, three or more phonons.

“A phonon is the natural quantum vibration of the tungsten diselenide material, and it has the effect of vertically stretching the exciton electron-hole pair sitting in the two layers,” Li continued. “This has a remarkably strong effect on the optical properties of the photon emitted by the exciton that has never been reported before.”

The team was further able to tune the phonon-exciton-photon interaction by applying electrical voltage across the materials. By varying the voltage, they found they could alter the interaction energy of the associated phonons and emitted photons. This was controllable in ways relevant to encoding specific quantum information into a single photon.

“I find it fascinating that we were able to observe a new kind of hybrid quantum platform,” said Ruoming Peng, also a lead author of the paper, who graduated with his doctoral degree from UW ECE in 2022. “By studying the way phonons interact with quantum emitters, we discovered a whole new realm of possibilities for controlling and manipulating quantum states. This could lead to even more exciting discoveries in the future.”

Li and his team want to extend their system further, controlling multiple emitters and their associated phonon states. Doing this would allow the quantum emitters to “talk” to each other, building the basis for new kinds of quantum circuitry. Future applications for these approaches include quantum computing, quantum communications and quantum sensing.

The UW team includes Adina Ripin, Ruoming Peng, Xiaowei Zhang, Srivatsa Chakravarthi, Minhao He, Xiaodong Xu, Kai-Mei Fu, Ting Cao, and Mo Li. The research is supported by the National Science Foundation. Their research paper, “Tunable phononic coupling in excitonic quantum emitters” was recently published in the journal Nature Nanotechnology.

Two veterans of the Seattle area’s tech industry have opened an Indian restaurant with Michelin-recognized roots in downtown Bellevue, Wash.

As investors and franchisees of Farzi Café, this is not the first foray into the restaurant world for technologists Amit Kumar Upadhyay and Dhiraj Singh. But, it is the first time that science and technology have played such a big part in how their investments play out on the plate.

Upadhyay and Singh have a history of going into projects together. Prior to Farzi, they joined forces in another Bellevue eatery called Thaal Indian Restaurant, known for its traditional thali servings.

It was in New Delhi, India, that Upadhyay first experienced Farzi Café, the flagship café that owner and restaurateur Zorawar Kalra opened 14 years ago. Since then, Kalra (often called the “Prince of Indian Cuisine”) has gone on to open 20 restaurants under his Massive Restaurants enterprise.

The opening of Farzi Café at Bellevue Square is its first entry into the United States — with plans to expand across the country.

The majority of Farzi Cafés are owned by Massive Restaurants, while 30% operate as franchises. Kalra believes the franchises benefit from local partnerships that share a deep understanding of the brand’s vision and philosophy.

There are several factors Kalra considers when looking for franchise partners, with financial considerations constituting just one aspect. He wants to know that his partners possess an understanding of hospitality.

Given that this is the restaurant business, he also looks for those who understand the time it takes to develop and to stick with a project over time. But most of all, it boils down to passion.

“Our objective is to collaborate with individuals who approach the restaurant business with earnest commitment,” Kalra said. “Most significantly, we seek franchisees who can cultivate a profound ardor for the food industry and its intricacies.”

Given the city’s deep ties to the tech industry, the selection of a franchise partner in Bellevue who understands and is integrated within the tech hub was pivotal for Kalra.

Both Upadhyay and Singh certainly have strong ties within the tech industry in the region. Upadhyay moved to the area in 2005 to lead a major initiative for T-Mobile. Singh, a principal software engineering manager at Microsoft, put down roots in nearby Sammamish, Wash.

Upadhyay was taken by Kalra’s approach towards Indian food and the desire to position Indian cuisine at the forefront of the American dining scene. He points to the “approach and presentation of Indian food to the global palate,” with the foray into molecular gastronomy being a draw.

“Yes, [molecular gastronomy] was a major attraction for me,” Upadahyay said. “In Seattle, food has not been presented in that way.”

Farzi Café leans into the science and technology behind molecular gastronomy.

• If you peer into the kitchen, it’s not uncommon to see cooks spherifiying (a method to change liquid into a squishy sphere) kiwi for Kiwi Puchka – a deceptively savory bite with cumin granny smith and tamarind gel.
• There is also plenty of fermentation, and the use of “magic elements” like phosphorus paper (which is a showstopper when used tableside to present the Fired Jackfruit Pollichathu) to enhance the overall dining experience.
• Behind the bar, there is the whir of centrifuges at work where cocktails are transformed into “striking concoctions.”

Cocktails that traditionally have a mix of fresh juice, say orange juice, are spun until they turn transparent, making for a clear cocktail while keeping its distinctive flavor intact.

In addition to the centrifuge, sous vide techniques and a sonicator also play a starring role in some of the cocktails. According to Engjell Shala, who oversees Farzi’s global beverage program, “we extract flavors in ways not common to many bars and restaurants.” 

With state-of-the-art point-of-sale systems, advanced kitchen management systems, customer relationship management software for personalized experiences, and data analytics for informed decision-making, Farzi Café leverages technology end-to-end to enhance guest experiences, and drive efficiency.

With Upadhyay and Singh on board, Farzi Café has had a strong start in the U.S. Ultimately, the goal is to have an Indian restaurant affiliated with Farzi Café in the top three dining destinations of every major city across the U.S. 

With the Bellevue opening, Kalra has found a successful model for bringing in the right people for the job.

“I am delighted that this [partnership] materialized, resulting in the establishment of a formidable and professional association,” Kalra said. “Our partnership has quickly evolved into a robust and enduring professional relationship that we are eager to nurture and advance for the foreseeable future.”

[Update: Now what? OceanGate sub tragedy sets off a torrent of questions without answers]

Searchers are continuing to hear what they describe as “banging” noises as they monitor underwater sounds for signs of an OceanGate submersible that went missing during a dive to the wreck of the Titanic.

A growing fleet of remotely operated vehicles is focusing on areas of the North Atlantic Ocean where the sounds appear to be coming from, but so far, no signs of the sub have turned up, said U.S. Coast Guard Capt. Jamie Frederick, a spokesman for the international search team.

“We’re searching where the noises are, and that’s all we can do,” he said today at a news briefing.

The five-person Titan submersible, built by Everett, Wash.-based OceanGate, went out of contact about an hour and 45 minutes into what was expected to be an hours-long dive on Sunday. Five crew members, including OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush, were due to head down more than 12,500 feet to survey the world’s best-known shipwreck and the surrounding seafloor.

The journey was part of OceanGate Expeditions’ campaign to document the deterioration of the wreck — a series of annual expeditions that began in 2021. In addition to Rush, the crew includes veteran Titanic diver PH Nargeolet and three mission specialists who paid a fare listed at $250,000 to participate in the adventure.

One of the mission specialists is Hamish Harding, a British aviation executive who bought a ride on Blue Origin’s suborbital spaceship last year. The other two are Pakistani business executive Shahzada Dawood and his son, Suleman.

When OceanGate and its maritime partners were no longer able to hear from the submersible on Sunday, they alerted U.S. and Canadian authorities — and the search began with aerial surveys on Monday.

OceanGate says the Titan sub is designed to provide life support for up to 96 hours, a length of time that runs out on Thursday. However, Frederick said searchers were not fixated on the clock, and would keep trying to retrieve the submersible even if the operation didn’t locate the sub by Thursday. “When you’re in the middle of a search-and-rescue case, you always have hope,” he said.

He said a Canadian P-8 Poseidon plane equipped with sensors capable of detecting underwater sounds heard noises repeatedly on Tuesday and this morning. However, he couldn’t confirm reports that the noises were repeated every 30 minutes — and he said experts haven’t yet characterized the sounds.

“We don’t know what they are,” he said.

Carl Hartsfield, who heads up the Oceanographic Systems Lab at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, said it’s not always easy to determine the cause of sounds heard at sea.

“There are sounds by biologics that sound man-made to the untrained ear,” he said. “But I can assure you that the people listening to these tapes are trained. There are a lot of vessels in the area, and they each make noise, right? So all that has to be eliminated, and it’s analysis over time.”

Frederick said aerial searchers spotted an object floating on the sea surface around the area where the submersible made its descent, “but they now believe that the object is not related to the missing submarine.”

The search-and-rescue armada is continuing to grow, and spreading out over an area that’s now twice the size of the state of Connecticut, Frederick said. Searchers are coping with winds gusting up to 30 mph, sea swells that range up to 6 or 7 feet, and occasionally foggy conditions.

“We currently have five surface assets searching for the Titan, and we expect 10 total surface assets to search in the next 24 to 48 hours,” Frederick said. “There are two ROVs actively searching, and several more are en route and will arrive by tomorrow morning. We’ve received incredible support with aviation assets from our Coast Guard air station in Elizabeth City [in North Carolina], the Air National Guard and Canadian Armed Forces.”

Frederick said a French team was due to bring in “state-of-the-art” equipment, including an ROV with capabilities that surpass what would be needed to get to the wreck of the Titanic.

“Once they get on, we’re going to have more assets to look, and we’ll continue to put them where we think the best location is,” he said.

[Update: Now what? OceanGate sub tragedy sets off a torrent of questions without answers]

The Titan submersible that has gone missing near the wreck of the Titanic isn’t the only sub in OceanGate’s fleet: Back in 2019, the company took me down to the bottom of Puget Sound in a sub called Cyclops.

Almost four years later, it’s eerie to be keeping track of a far more dramatic dive that has put the Titan’s five crew members in mortal peril. One of those crew members is OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush, who was my guide for the three-hour tour of Possession Sound, a pocket of Puget Sound not far from the company’s HQ in Everett, Wash.

At the time, OceanGate was coping with some logistical complications that forced a postponement of its first planned series of Titan dives to the Titanic, more than 12,500 feet beneath the surface of the North Atlantic Ocean. The company was also gearing up for stress tests of Titan’s hull. (Those tests ended up identifying structural shortcomings that needed to be addressed.)

In the meantime, Rush and his team took on underwater projects that were closer to home and within the technical capabilities of Cyclops 1, the five-person submersible that was a precursor for Titan. (OceanGate also has an older sub called Antipodes, which looks a bit like the Beatles’ Yellow Submarine.)

OceanGate used Cyclops that summer to take researchers to the bottom of Puget Sound for marine biology surveys conducted in collaboration with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. GeekWire photographer Kevin Lisota and I were invited to ride along on a sunny day in August.

Cyclops weighs almost as much as Titan (20,000 pounds vs. 23,000 pounds), and they’re about the same size (22 feet long and roughly 9 feet wide). But Cyclops is rated for depths only up to 1,640 feet (500 meters), while Titan was designed to take on Titanic depths. That means Titan had to be built from sterner stuff. For example, where Cyclops provided a glassy dome with an all-around view of the waters beyond, Titan had to make do with a foot-wide viewport ringed by titanium.

Some of the technological shortcuts that have come in for criticism during Titan’s troubles were pioneered on Cyclops. We sat on the floor of the cramped submersible in our stocking feet, and Titan’s crews do likewise. Cyclops’ thruster system is steered using a PlayStation 3 video-game controller, which was upgraded to a Logitech gamepad for Titan.

One of the controller’s joysticks determines where Cyclops’ vertically oriented, electrically powered thrusters are pointing, and the other controls the horizontal thrusters. A couple of buttons are programmed to serve as “dead man’s switches” that have to be pressed to activate the joysticks.

The idea behind the system is to reduce the complexity and the costs that are typically associated with building submersibles.

When Rush let me have a turn at the controls, he made certain that Cyclops was floating over a muddy stretch of the bottom, with no rocks in sight.

“It’s pretty fun,” I told Rush.

The down side is that I’m typically all thumbs when it comes to manual dexterity — and sure enough, I stirred up a cloud of sediment as I jiggled the joysticks. Rush took back the controller just as we approached a tree stump that was colonized by a clump of anemones.

“Imagine trying to find this if you were diving. … Nobody’s ever seen this log before, I’ll bet you even money,” Rush told me. As we roamed along the bottom, at depths as low as 350 feet, we caught sight of rockfish, prawns, crabs and pint-sized sharks.

The video displays are bigger on Titan, and its crews have access to a toilet with a curtain that can be drawn closed to provide a smidgen of privacy. But from what I can tell, the Titan experience is similar to the Cyclops experience — except for the longer duration, the deeper water, the more exotic sights and the bigger risk.

When Titan lost contact with the surface on Sunday, its crew members were headed for waters more than 35 times deeper than the depths we reached in Cyclops.

Even though we were always much closer to the surface, it felt good to climb out into the sunshine after spending a few hours in the greenish gloom of Puget Sound’s depths. I can only hope that Rush and his crewmates make it through this week’s ordeal and get a similar feeling of relief — multiplied 35 times.

Get the latest news about the search for the Titan sub

[Update: Now what? OceanGate sub tragedy sets off a torrent of questions without answers]

The search for an OceanGate submersible that went out of contact during a dive to the wreck of the Titanic has widened to take in an area of the North Atlantic Ocean that’s the size of the state of Massachusetts.

Everett, Wash.-based OceanGate confirmed in an email that the company’s founder and CEO, Stockton Rush, is “aboard the submersible as a member of the crew.” Other members of the five-person crew are veteran Titanic explorer PH Nargeolet; Pakistani-born business executive Shahzada Dawood and his son, Suleman; and Hamish Harding, a British aviation executive and adventurer.

Rush served as the pilot of the Titan submersible for most of its dives over the past two years — but Bloomberg News cited reports claiming that Nargeolet was the pilot for the dive that began Sunday morning.

OceanGate Expeditions’ mission control ship, the Polar Prince, lost contact with the submersible about an hour and 45 minutes into Sunday’s dive. The last “ping” from Titan reportedly came from an area just above the Titanic wreck, but there’s a chance the sub drifted elsewhere in the depths.

The U.S. Coast Guard, which is leading the search, said in a tweet that 10,000 square miles of ocean — just a little less than Massachusetts’ surface area — had been surveyed as of this morning, roughly 24 hours since the search began.

Search teams are looking for signs of the sub with the aid of surface ships including the Polar Prince and the Deep Energy, plus Coast Guard C-130 planes and Canadian P-3 Aurora and P-8 Poseidon aircraft. The P-8 is equipped with an underwater sonar detection system, and sonar buoys are also being deployed in the area.

“To date, those search efforts have not yielded any results,” Coast Guard Capt. Jamie Frederick said today during a news briefing.

Frederick said remotely operated vehicles were being brought to the scene for underwater deployment as part of a “full-court press” to look for the submersible. If the sub is located, a U.S.-Canadian task force “will look at the next course of action,” including rescue attempts, he said.

“This operation is our top priority right now,” Frederick said.

OceanGate Expeditions says the submersible is designed to provide life support for up to 96 hours, or four days — a time frame that would run out on Thursday.

OceanGate began conducting dives to the Titanic, arguably the world’s best-known shipwreck, in 2021. Its Titan submersible was constructed from carbon composite and titanium to endure the high-pressure environment that exists more than 12,500 feet beneath the ocean surface, in the vicinity of the wreck.

The company’s routine involves picking up crew members at St. John’s, Newfoundland, and bringing them to the dive site about 400 miles offshore. Crew members take turns, five at a time, for attempts to get to the wreck on the ocean floor. The crew for each dive includes a pilot, at least one subject expert, and mission specialists who have paid as much as $250,000 to be part of the adventure.

Who’s on the crew

During last year’s GeekWire Summit, Rush said including paying passengers on the crew was an essential part of OceanGate’s business model. “There were researchers who wanted to go in the ocean … but what was the model?” Rush said. “Well, there are folks who want to do high-end adventure tourism. People who were spending $100,000 to climb Everest or go to Antarctica. Maybe we could merge the two.”

Harding and the father-and-son Dawoods fit the model.

Harding, the chairman of British-based Action Aviation, previously participated in a record-setting dive to Challenger Deep in the Pacific Ocean and a suborbital spaceflight on Blue Origin’s New Shepard rocket ship.

“We look forward to welcoming him home,” Action Aviation said in a statement.

Shahzada Dawood is the vice chairman of Engro, a Pakistani conglomerate with investments in energy, agriculture, petrochemicals and telecommunications. His family ranks among Pakistan’s richest families. He’s an adviser to Prince’s Trust International in Britain as well as a member of the board of trustees for the SETI Institute. Dawood’s son, Suleman, is said to be 19 years old.

“We, at Engro, remain in prayer for their swift and safe return,” Engro said in a tweet.

Paul-Henri Nargeolet is a French maritime expert who has been on more than 35 dives to the Titanic shipwreck over the course of the past 36 years. Last year, he participated in an OceanGate dive that explored a volcanic ridge near the wreck.

“It was amazing to explore this area and find this fascinating volcanic formation teeming with so much life,” he said afterward. The undersea formation is now known as the Nargeolet-Fanning Ridge.

Controversy over classing

The pressurized Titan submersible has a proprietary real-time hull monitoring system that’s designed to provide the pilot with advance warning in case structural stresses exceed specified limits. However, Titan did not go through the full procedure for verifying compliance with the shipping industry’s detailed standards, known as “classing.”

In a 2019 blog post, OceanGate defended that decision.

“Bringing an outside entity up to speed on every innovation before it is put into real-world testing is anathema to rapid innovation,” the company said. “For example, SpaceX, Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic all rely on experienced inside experts to oversee the daily operations, testing and validation versus bringing in outsiders who need to first be educated before being qualified to ‘validate’ any innovations.”

The New York Times reported that leaders in the submersible vehicle industry sent a letter to Rush in 2018 warning that OceanGate’s “current ‘experimental’ approach” could result in problems ranging “from minor to catastrophic.”

Also in 2018, an OceanGate employee named David Lochridge alleged in court documents that he was fired as part of an effort “to avoid addressing the safety and quality control issues” surrounding the company’s submersible development program. Lochridge’s counterclaim came in response to a suit that OceanGate filed against him, alleging the disclosure of confidential information about Titan.

The case, brought to light by The New Republic and Insider, was settled a few months after the court filings.

OceanGate followed up on at least one of Lochridge’s concerns: By early 2020, stress testing had revealed that Titan’s carbon composite hull could not be rated to handle the pressure at the depth of the Titanic wreck, and the hull was rebuilt.

OceanGate’s Titan submersible has gone out of contact during one of its dives to the wreck of the Titanic, 12,500 feet beneath the surface of the North Atlantic Ocean.

The U.S. Coast Guard is leading the search-and-rescue operation.

The sub was built by Everett, Wash.-based OceanGate and operated by a sister company, OceanGate Expeditions. In an emailed statement, OceanGate Expeditions said it was “exploring and mobilizing all options to bring the crew back safely.”

“Our entire focus is on the crew members in the submersible and their families,” the company said. “We are deeply thankful for the extensive assistance we have received from several government agencies and deep-sea companies in our efforts to re-establish contact with the submersible.”

OceanGate Expeditions says a Titanic dive typically takes 10 hours, and the Titan sub has 96 hours’ worth of life support. In a series of tweets, the U.S. Coast Guard Northeast said contact was lost with the five-person crew about an hour and 45 minutes after Sunday’s dive began.

The Coast Guard said C-130 airplanes and a Canadian P-8 Poseidon patrol aircraft with underwater detection capabilities were taking part in the search.

The Titan submersible’s five-person crew typically includes a pilot and researchers as well as mission specialists who have paid $250,000 to be part of the expedition. Crew members take turns heading down to the Titanic shipwreck site from a mission control ship that sails out to the site from Newfoundland, and then returns to port to pick up the next expedition crew.

OceanGate Expeditions started offering Titanic tours in 2021, and conducted a second round of surveys last year as part of its long-term plan to document the shipwreck’s deterioration and the state of the surrounding ecosystem.

This year’s missions began in May. Five crews have made the trip to Newfoundland during the current expedition season, which was scheduled to end later this month.

The crew members on Titan’s troubled dive weren’t immediately identified, but OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush typically pilots the sub. The BBC said British billionaire businessman/explorer Hamish Harding was reportedly onboard. Harding took a ride on Blue Origin’s suborbital spaceship last year.

In an Instagram update, Harding said he would take part in an attempt to dive to the Titanic — and he suggested that this year’s previous expedition crews weren’t able to get to the shipwreck.

“Due to the worst winter in Newfoundland in 40 years, this mission is likely to be the first and only manned mission to the Titanic in 2023,” he wrote.

It took several years for OceanGate to build the Titan, one of three submersibles that it operates. Titan has a pressurized hull made of carbon composite and titanium. The hull is equipped with sensors to detect structural stress amid the high pressures of the deep ocean. This year, OceanGate has been using SpaceX’s Starlink satellite network for its internet connections.

During the expeditions of the past two years, OceanGate Expedition’s crews captured high-resolution imagery of the wreck of the Titanic, a luxury liner that sank to the ocean bottom in 1912 after striking an iceberg in the midst of its first voyage from Britain to New York.

Titan’s crews also documented the sea life along a previously unexplored undersea volcanic ridge now known as Nargeolet-Fanning Ridge.

Previously: How I steered OceanGate’s Cyclops sub to a discovery

After three years of upgrading and waiting, due in part to the coronavirus pandemic, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory has officially resumed its hunt for the signatures of crashing black holes and neutron stars.

“Our LIGO teams have worked through hardship during the past two-plus years to be ready for this moment, and we are indeed ready,” Caltech physicist Albert Lazzarini, the deputy director of the LIGO Laboratory, said in a news release.

Lazzarini said the engineering tests leading up to today’s official start of Observing Run 4, or O4, have already revealed a number of candidate events that have been shared with the astronomical community.

“Most of these involve black hole binary systems, although one may include a neutron star,” he said. “The rates appear to be consistent with expectations.”

One such event, called S230518h, was detected last week. Researchers say that if they can confirm the data, the event was most likely caused by the merger of a faraway black hole and a neutron star.

The twin LIGO gravitational-wave detectors at Hanford, Wash., and Livingston, La., will be joined for O4 by the Virgo detector in Italy as well as the KAGRA observatory in Japan. Virgo is scheduled to take part in the run starting later this year. KAGRA will parallel LIGO’s observations for the next month, take a break for some upgrades, and then rejoin the run.

Detecting gravitational waves is no easy task: Giant underground vacuum tunnels and complex laser systems had to be built to pick up on the faint ripples in spacetime caused by massive disturbances hundreds of millions of light-years away. LIGO’s researchers won the Nobel Prize for physics in 2017 for their initial set of discoveries, and the hardware has been upgraded for each successive run.

The third observing run had to be suspended in March 2020 because of public safety concerns associated with the COVID-19 pandemic, but researchers were nevertheless able to make a round of upgrades aimed at increasing the detectors’ sensitivity and reducing the “noise” in the data. The improvements made for O4 are expected to increase the detection rate for gravitational waves from twice a month to twice a week or more often.

“It’s really going to be a fire hose of detection,” Jeff Kissel, the controls engineer at the LIGO facility in Hanford, said in a video previewing the O4 run.

During the gap between O3 and O4, the Hanford facility opened a LIGO Exploration Center that features a 5,000-square-foot exhibit hall focusing on gravitational-wave science. The educational center is open from 9:30 a.m. to 4 p.m. PT Tuesday through Friday. LIGO Hanford also offers public tours of the observatory site on the second Saturday of each month.

Space: The final frontier … for stem cells? Seattle’s Allen Institute for Cell Science says cells from its collection are going into space for the first time on a private mission to the International Space Station.

The Allen Cell Collection’s assortment of human induced pluripotent stem cells, or IPSCs, will be the focus for one of more than 20 experiments being sent into orbit on a flight organized by Texas-based Axiom Space. Former NASA astronaut Peggy Whitson will command the Ax-2 mission — Axiom’s second trip to the space station — and her crewmates will include Tennessee business executive John Shoffner as well as Saudi astronauts Ali Alqarni and Rayyanah Barnawi.

SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket will loft the crew into orbit in a SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule for what’s expected to be a weeklong stay on the station. Liftoff is set for Sunday at 5:37 p.m. ET (2:37 p.m. PT) at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The fare for each rider on last year’s Ax-1 mission was around $55 million, and although the ticket price for Ax-2 hasn’t been announced, it’s probably in a similar range.

The stem-cell study is part of a series of NASA-funded experiments led by researchers at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles. This experiment is expected to break new ground when it comes to growing IPSCs in space and modifying the cells’ DNA for therapeutic purposes.

Pluripotent stem cells have the ability to differentiate into almost any other kind of cell in the body, including heart cells and brain cells. Researchers have figured out how to reprogram ordinary cells — typically, skin cells — and induce them to become pluripotent stem cells. But there are still hurdles to overcome.

“A major challenge for using iPSCs for therapies in humans is making enough of them at very high quality,” co-principal investigator Arun Sharma, a biologist in the Board of Governors Regenerative Medicine Institute and Smidt Heart Institute at Cedars-Sinai, said in a news release. “We want to be able to mass-produce them by the billions so that we can utilize them for a number of different applications, including discovering new drugs that may be able to improve heart function.”

Stem cell production techniques have been improving, but researchers say gravity-induced tension may make it difficult for masses of IPSCs to expand and grow.

“Gravity constantly pulls these pluripotent stem cells toward Earth, putting pressure on them and providing a stimulus to start turning into other cell types, but in microgravity that effect will no longer be there,” said Clive Svendsen executive director of the Cedars-Sinai Board of Governors Regenerative Medicine Institute and co-principal investigator for the experiment. “When the stress of gravity is not there pulling on the cells, we want to test whether they grow faster, have fewer genetic changes and remain in the pluripotent state.”

The IPSCs from the Allen Cell Collection carry a gene that has been edited to make parts of the cells glow when illuminated by specific wavelengths of light.

“The original purpose of this collection was to understand how the major organelles or ‘parts’ inside a normal human cell are arranged, and how they change as the cell performs different functions or even becomes a different cell type over time,” Ruwanthi Gunawardane, executive director of the Allen Institute for Cell Science, said in a news release. “From that foundation, we and others can then probe and understand how various perturbations such as human disease affect our cells.”

Gunawardane said she and her colleagues “never envisioned our cells making it to space when we created this collection,” but Sharma said the cells’ fluorescence will serve as a key metric for the Cedars-Sinai experiment.

“These particular cells that are making the journey to space are from a beautiful cell line to work with, because you can see them glowing green when they are most potent,” Sharma said. “It’s a great visual readout for how healthy our cells will be in microgravity.”

Brock Roberts, who leads the genome engineering team at the Allen Institute for Cell Science, told GeekWire that the gene-edited cells will give scientists “a readout of the cells’ potency or ‘stemness’ in real time, in live cells.”

In addition to monitoring the cells’ potency, the Cedars-Sinai team plans to investigate whether DNA can effectively be introduced into the cells in the space station’s zero-G environment.

At the end of the Ax-2 mission, the cells will be returned to Earth. If this experiment and follow-up studies live up to researchers’ hopes, it could lead to improvements in stem-cell production techniques for research and therapeutic purposes. Who knows? The final frontier just might become a new frontier for biotech.

OceanGate Expeditions, which has conducted dives to the site of the Titanic shipwreck in 2021 and 2022, says it will begin its trips a month earlier this year, in May — a schedule change that strikes a chord with history.

“May is still considered to be iceberg season in the North Atlantic where the shipwreck of the Titanic lies,” Stockton Rush, president of OceanGate Expeditions, noted in a news release. Rush is also the CEO and founder of Everett, Wash.-based OceanGate Inc., which has OceanGate Expeditions as its exploration branch.

Almost exactly 111 years ago, the Titanic sank after hitting an iceberg during its first voyage, resulting in more than 1,500 deaths. The tragedy sparked one of history’s best-known tales of a disaster at sea — and also sparked interest in underwater shipwreck surveys like the ones organized by OceanGate.

Rush said he and his team were mindful of the potential hazard. “With this in mind, having a capable ship specifically designed for working in the icy Arctic regions is going to be very valuable for our extended crew of scientists, Titanic experts and mission specialists,” he said.

OceanGate Expeditions has signed a charter contract with Horizon Maritime and Miawpukek Horizon Marine Services for the use of the MV Polar Prince, which was previously operated by the Canadian Coast Guard as a light icebreaker known as the Sir Humphrey Gilbert. During most of its 64-year history, the ship cleared ice from harbors and guided other ships through ice-choked marine environments.

“We are excited to have OceanGate Expeditions join us onboard our vessel, the Polar Prince (Oqwatnukewey Eleke’wi’ji’jit), this year as they continue to explore the Titanic wreck and expand upon the important scientific research, archaeological and marine biodiversity work that began in 2021,” said Mi’sel Joe, traditional chief of the Miawpukek First Nation.

Over the past two years, OceanGate’s five-person Titan submersible has surveyed the Titanic site annually to document the shipwreck’s rapidly deteriorating condition as well as the broader ecosystem 13,000 feet beneath the Atlantic’s surface.

“We learned so much during the 2021 and 2022 Titanic expeditions, and have identified new questions we want to answer with further studies of this unique deep-sea artificial reef,” said Steve Ross, who is OceanGate Expeditions’ chief scientist as well as an adjunct research professor at the Center for Marine Science at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington.

“The discovery of the Nargeolet-Fanning Ridge in 2022 also gives us a natural reef comparison to study,” Ross said. “This is a biologically diverse and dense habitat that we look forward to continuing to research.”

Five missions, each lasting eight days, are scheduled to sail out of St. John’s in Newfoundland and head to the Titanic site for dives during a period running from May 11 to June 24. OceanGate is taking on a limited number of mission specialists who pay a $250,000 fee to participate in the adventure.

Lawmakers pondering the relevance of a dinosaur leg bone moved a step closer to designating the unique find as Washington state’s official dinosaur on Monday.

A bill to make Suciasaurus rex the state dinosaur passed the House of Representatives for the third time since the Legislature first started considering it in 2019. House bill 1020, which needs Senate approval, would make the dinosaur one of more than 20 official recognized state symbols in Washington, joining the ranks of the state bird, flower, fruit, fish and more.

The dinosaur fossil is believed to be approximately 80 million years old and is the first ever discovered in Washington state.

In April 2012, researchers from Seattle’s Burke Museum made the find while searching the shoreline for fossil ammonites at Sucia Island State Park in the San Juan Islands.

The fossil is a partial left thigh bone that measures 16.7 inches long and 8.7 inches wide. Paleontologists identified it as being from a theropod dinosaur, the group of two-legged, meat-eating dinosaurs that includes Velociraptor, Tyrannosaurus rex and modern birds, according to the Burke.

According to the language in the House bill, dinosaurs are not usually found in Washington state “because of its proximity to an active tectonic plate boundary and the high degree of human development.” Suciasaurus rex may have roamed somewhere between Baja California, Mexico, and northern California, and the fossil “traveled to Washington along with a portion of the western edge of North America that was displaced to British Columbia in the Late Cretaceous period.”

The fossil, which is on display at the Burke, made another celebrated move in 2019, when it was the last object to travel from the old Burke Museum to the museum’s new home.

The effort to declare an official state dinosaur began with a fourth-grade class at Elmhurst Elementary School in Parkland, Wash. Students wrote to their representatives, a bill was sponsored by Rep. Melanie Morgan, D-Parkland, and the Legislature first took it up in 2019.

On Monday, Morgan spoke from the House floor in support of the bill.

“This is a DINO-mite piece of legislation,” Morgan said. “This is really about civic engagement from our youth with their state legislature. I ask you for the third time to bring the Suciasaurus rex out of extinction, and vote yes especially for our guests today, the children.”

Along with Washington, D.C., 14 states have official dinosaurs.

Washington does have an official state fossil — the Columbian Mammoth was recognized in 1998. Fossils of the prehistoric elephants were found on the Olympic Peninsula.

The dinosaur designation is not the only legislation currently being considered because of a student-led effort. Students from Ellensburg, Wash., are pushing for an official state cactus in Washington.

Ant-Man may be getting small in Marvel’s latest superhero movie — but in the real world, quantum is getting big.

Quantum information science is one of the top tech priorities for the White House, right up there with artificial intelligence. Microsoft, Google, Amazon, IBM and other tech heavyweights are closing in on the development of honest-to-goodness quantum processors. A company called IonQ has a billion-dollar plan to build quantum computers in the Pacific Northwest. The market for quantum computing is projected to hit $125 billion by 2030.

So you might think “Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania” will be going all-out to feature real-life advances in quantum physics.

If that’s what you’re expecting from the movie, think again. “There’s no connection to real physics, or our understanding of reality,” says Chris Ferrie, a quantum physicist at the University of Technology Sydney and the UTS Center for Quantum Software and Information.

Ferrie should know, and not just because he has a Ph.D.: His latest book, titled “Quantum Bullsh*t,” colorfully catalogs all the ways in which popular depictions of quantum physics go wrong. In the latest episode of the Fiction Science podcast, Ferrie explains why those depictions tend to focus on the B.S. rather than the theory’s brilliance.

“The reality .. that quantum physics is a tool for engineers to make predictions about their experiments … is really boring,” he says.

That’s one area where Hollywood has the edge. “Quantumania” is anything but boring. Ant-Man and his family all get small and fight off bad guys in a shrunken dimension known as the Quantum Realm. The use of the Q-word gives a 21st-century scientific aura to a size-reducing plot concept that has had earlier incarnations in “Fantastic Voyage” and “Honey, I Shrunk the Kids.”

Ella Meyer, who tries to demystify quantum computing for students as an outreach coordinator at the University of British Columbia, says “Quantumania” is making her job more challenging.

“I don’t know if anyone’s seen trailers for ‘Ant-Man’ recently, but it’s undoing years of my work by using ‘quantum’ incorrectly,” she said last month at the Northwest Quantum Nexus Summit in Seattle. “And so it’s harder than ever to get people to properly engage with this word.”

The concept behind Marvel’s Quantum Realm came from a quantum physicist, Caltech’s Spiros Michalakis, who was a science consultant for the original Ant-Man movie in 2015. (Marvel’s previously used name for that realm, the Microverse, had to be nixed due to legal issues.)

Michalakis described the Quantum Realm as “a place of infinite possibility, an alternative universe where the laws of physics and the forces of nature as we know them haven’t crystallized.”

Ferrie, who knows Michalakis, points out that there’s actually no such thing as a separate quantum realm. “There’s just one reality. … So I would say there are different windows on this one reality,” he says.

Classical physics offers a panoramic window that tends to look at the universe as a giant machine. “If you keep it well-oiled, everything will work out as expected,” Ferrie says.

In contrast, quantum physics is “more like a stained-glass kaleidoscope,” he says. “It depicts the world with lots of symmetries, but it’s also very complex, and things are not deterministic. There’s randomness and uncertainty.”

On the scale of everyday things like motorcycles, using the classical-physics window makes more sense. But on the scale of subatomic particles like muons, the quantum-physics window works a lot better. That’s where it’s possible to think of the properties of particles as being entangled, potentially over long distances. Or think of a quantum bit of information as representing multiple states at the same time, rather than, say, exclusively “up” or “down.”

In the podcast, Ferrie explains how physicists look at the real world in the context of the uncertainty principle, quantum entanglement, quantum teleportation and other Q-word concepts. It’s a world that’s completely different from Ant-Man’s Quantum Realm.

“We can’t really experience that world,” Ferrie says. “So we’re projecting our own way of looking at the world and communicating about the world into a fictitious sort of scenario.”

He’s not upset about that: “I don’t think there’s people going to sci-fi movies that involve, like, superheroes and people flying and traveling at faster than light speed, and coming away from it thinking they understand something about physics,” he says with a laugh.

He’s more upset about folks who claim that quantum healing crystals or quantum biofeedback devices will cure what ails you for a low, low price. In “Quantum Bullsh*t,” Ferrie drops truth bombs (and occasionally, F-bombs) on the B.S. — and looks somewhat askance at two far-out concepts that capitalize on quantum connections:

Quantum consciousness: Some scientists, including Nobel-winning mathematician Roger Penrose, have speculated that quantum processes may give rise to consciousness and our perceptions of external phenomena. “They’re looking at microscopic biological processes and asking the question, ‘Do I need quantum physics to accurately make predictions and understand those phenomena?’ And for the most part, in all biological processes, the answer is no,” Ferrie says.

Quantum multiverses: The many-worlds hypothesis proposes that reality branches off into multiple versions of the universe — and in sci-fi stories ranging from “Back to the Future” to “The Peripheral,”  those branches get tangled up. The multiverse got title billing in an earlier Marvel movie, “Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness,” and it plays a role in “Quantumania” as well. “This is not something that exists in the rules of quantum physics, right? It’s an interpretation that you add on top of it that’s not verifiable,” Ferrie says.

There is, however, one set of quantum connections that Ferrie says could eventually pay off big time: Those connections have to do with quantum computers and sensors. Such devices actually do make use of quantum effects. For example, quantum bits (a.k.a. qubits) can represent multiple states of information during processing, and not just the “one or zero” states represented by the bits in classical computers.

“There are things you can do with two correlated qubits that you can’t do with two correlated [classical] bits,” Ferrie says. “But if you had more bits, you could do it. So it’s more about the amount of resources that would be required to solve a task.”

Some tasks — such as optimizing networks, or designing molecules, or cracking secret codes — would be more amenable to quantum processing. But after decades of gestation, quantum computing is still in its infancy. And even when it’s mature, Ferrie is betting that most of us won’t even notice.

“Let me put it this way: When we have a quantum computer, you will interface with it exactly the same way as you do [with] a digital computer,” he says. “Why? Because if you needed to know quantum physics to use it, then nobody would buy it.”

The way Ferrie sees it, the real-life quantum realm is something that’s best left to physicists and engineers rather than superheroes.

“It takes a few years of university and you can understand all of the equations and solve them for every situation that you might encounter in the lab,” he says. “Quantum physics is easy. It’s this world that’s weird and surprising — the emergent world that we observe.”

Check out Chris Ferrie’s website for links to more information about quantum physics and quantum B.S. For super-simple explanations of quantum physics, check out the books that Ferrie has written for the younger set, ranging from “Quantum Physics for Babies” to “Do You Know Quantum Physics?” for readers aged 4 to 6. Ferrie also touches on quantum mysteries for grown-ups, in a book titled “Where Did the Universe Come From? And Other Cosmic Questions.”

This report is adapted from the original post on Cosmic Log. Stay tuned for future episodes of the Fiction Science podcast via Anchor, Apple, Google, Overcast, Spotify, Breaker, Pocket Casts, Radio Public and Reason. If you like Fiction Science, please rate the podcast and subscribe to get alerts for future episodes.

The latest film about the Titanic doesn’t show Leonardo DiCaprio standing up on the bow’s railings — instead, a single slim filament of coral takes his place as the king of the world.

That’s just one of the scenes from “Titan — A Viewport to Titanic,” a newly released 20-minute video that recaps OceanGate Expeditions‘ dives to the world’s best-known shipwreck in 2021 and 2022.

The film was assembled from high-resolution video captured during a series of dives made by OceanGate’s Titan submersible — a vessel that was designed specifically to take its crews 12,600 feet deep in the North Atlantic Ocean to document the site, year over year.

“Mission specialists, scientists and Titanic experts helped OceanGate Expeditions capture over 50 hours of high-resolution 4K and 8K footage and images of the wreck site,” Stockton Rush, CEO and founder of Everett, Wash.-based OceanGate, said in a news release.

“Titan — A Viewport to Titanic” is narrated by Rory Golden, a veteran Titanic diver and explorer who’s part of the OceanGate team.

As the scenes unfold, Golden points out spots of interest amid the wreckage: the coral sticking up from the bow, for instance, or strands of coral waving in the deep as the Titan submersible passes along the hull.

Golden said the ship’s condition has deteriorated markedly in the two decades since he made his first Titanic dive. He took special note of the ship’s main mast and its door to the crow’s nest. That’s where lookouts sighted the iceberg that dealt the luxury liner a death blow in 1912 during its debut voyage from Southampton, bound for New York.

“When I first dived on the ship in the summer of 2000, the main mast lay right across the well deck onto the bridge,” Golden says during the film. “And now, as we can see, it has completely collapsed. It’s very sad to see it like this.”

More than 1,500 passengers and crew died in the disaster, which inspired the Oscar-winning “Titanic” movie with DiCaprio’s “King of the World” scene.

Some of the places featured in that movie — such as the Titanic’s grand staircase — were wiped out in the aftermath of the iceberg collision and the ship’s breakup. But OceanGate’s film highlights a few intriguing artifacts that survived, such as the chandeliers that can be seen sitting amid the wreckage, or the dangling crane that lowered one of the Titanic’s lifeboats to the sea more than a century ago, or the telemotor mechanism that played a part in steering the ship.

Several memorial plaques were laid down around the telemotor during previous expeditions. Today they’re encrusted with corrosion. “The three on the left-hand side are actually ones that I left on my dives in 2000 and 2005,” Golden said.

Reflecting on his work with OceanGate, Golden talked up the benefit returning to the Titanic site for multiple consecutive years.

“Having the year-over-year comparisons in addition to earlier footage will give historians important data about the ongoing deterioration of this UNESCO Heritage Site,” he said in today’s news release. “Some of what we are capturing now will one day be gone. The dramatic improvements and developments in camera and lighting technology have made this possible. Being a part of this important documentation initiative is the opportunity of a lifetime.”

OceanGate Expeditions is already planning for the 2023 Titanic Expedition in May and June. “We will continue to work with those joining us as mission specialists and maritime archaeologists to characterize the deterioration of the wreck as we capture fresh footage in 2023 and beyond,” Rush said.

A limited number of slots are open for mission specialists who pay a support fee to participate in the project, OceanGate Expeditions says. Past mission specialists have included a documentary camera operator, a comedy writer-podcaster, a planetary scientist and two investors who previously rode into space on Blue Origin’s New Shepard suborbital rocket ship. The mission support fee for 2023 is $250,000.

Do we each create our own reality? Could different observers create measurably different realities? It’s a fantastical line of thought that has sparked scientific inquiries as well — and now the science and the fiction has come together in a new novel titled “Observer.”

“The observer is actually the basis of the universe, so basically the novel and the scientific ideas are really a rethink of everything we know about time, space and indeed the universe itself,” stem-cell researcher Robert Lanza says in the latest episode of the Fiction Science podcast.

Lanza’s co-author, Seattle science-fiction writer Nancy Kress, agrees that the novel takes aim at one of life’s greatest mysteries. “The novel is about how we understand reality, and nothing could be more important about that, because everything else is based on it,” she says.

The central point of the book, and of the underlying scientific concept, has to do with how consciousness shapes our perception of a buzzy, fuzzy quantum universe that’s mostly made up of empty space.

Debates about the fundamental nature of reality go back centuries, to Plato and his “Allegory of the Cave,” and to Immanuel Kant’s 18th-century philosophical musings about transcendental idealism.

More recently, special relativity and quantum mechanics have provided solid grounding for the idea that the act of observation has an effect on external phenomena.

More than a decade ago, Lanza began laying out his case for claims that the very act of observing the universe sets the parameters for the universe. He and his co-authors have published peer-reviewed research on the subject — including a study in Annalen der Physik, the same journal that published Albert Einstein’s famous E=mc² paper.

Lanza also wrote three books about the concept he calls “biocentrism” — a concept asserting that our brains basically build the universe out of the raw stuff of quantum foam. But biocentrism hasn’t yet gained a lot of traction in the scientific mainstream.

The idea that our view of reality is a mental construct certainly sounds science fiction-y — and in fact, the theme has sparked sci-fi novels like Neal Stephenson’s “Fall; or, Dodge in Hell” as well as sci-fi movies like “The Matrix” film franchise. So maybe it makes sense that the latest work in Lanza’s biocentrism bibliography is a science-fiction tale.

To address the fiction side of the equation, Lanza and his agent turned to a seasoned professional: Nancy Kress, an award-winning writer who’s been living in Seattle for the past 13 years.

Kress is a self-professed science groupie who loves to turn real-world research into a good story. A few years ago, she worked with scientists at Microsoft Research to write a short story about an AI program that tries to help its programmer get over his private grief. But “Observer” marks the first time that Kress has collaborated on a novel with any co-author, let alone a scientist.

“Our main challenge was getting enough of the science in there to show that it’s hard SF, based on actual science, without turning it into a monograph or impairing the fictional elements that actually make it a novel,” Kress said.

Kress laid out a story that focuses on a stressed-out neurosurgeon who agrees to join a hush-hush research project in the Cayman Islands, backed by a Nobel-winning drug discoverer who happens to be her great-uncle. The project involves implanting willing subjects — including the great-uncle — with brain implants that enable the subjects to tweak the way they perceive the outside world. Are they merely simulations, or are they something more?

“Observer” includes plot twists that are ripped from the headlines, including social-media shaming, drone technology and dark-web villainy. There’s even a romance between the neurosurgeon and a hunky doctor who’s brought in to assist with the brain surgery.

Kress said she herself fell in love with that character. “He’s probably too perfect,” she said. “I don’t think there are any guys walking around here that are exactly that perfect … but you do get to create them on the page at least.”

Although the story takes some far-out turns, Kress insists that “Observer” sticks closer to the science than most sci-fi movies do.

“You don’t want to get me started on science-fiction movies, because I will do a long and very nasty rant about how the science is perverted,” she said. (Listen to the podcast for her rant, which specifically targets the movie “Interstellar.”)

For his part, Lanza acknowledges that it could be a long time before the consciousness-tweaking brain implants described in “Observer” hit the market. “The chips are a little bit beyond our technology,” he said.

But over the long run, Lanza is hoping that “Observer” will come to be viewed as less fictional and more scientific. “I would hope that in a hundred years, someone’s going to look back and go, ‘That book had it right,’” he said with a laugh.

How sci-fi syncs up with Seattle tech

Although Kress isn’t a Seattle native, she’s been able to capitalize on her residency in one of the nation’s tech capitals. Her collaboration on “Future Visions,” a collection of short stories commissioned by Microsoft Research, serves as a prime example.

“The tech community intrigues me,” she said. “I was able to view the advanced research project area of Microsoft when they invited a couple of science-fiction writers to view what was going on, carefully accompanied by someone who stuck with us like glue.”

Thanks in part to Seattle-based support networks such as Clarion West — where Kress has taken on stints as an instructor starting back in 1992 — the Pacific Northwest has a strong community of science-fiction writers. And some of those writers have a symbiotic relationship with Seattle’s tech world.

For example, award-winning author Ted Chiang — who wrote the short story that was turned into the movie “Arrival” in 2016 — has also worked as a technical writer at Microsoft. And Neal Stephenson, a master of the cyberpunk sci-fi genre, has kept his hand in the tech scene as an early adviser at Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space venture; as chief futurist at Magic Leap, an augmented-reality company with offices in Seattle; and as a co-founder of Lamina1, which is building a blockchain-based metaverse platform.

Kress said the death of Greg Bear, one of the Seattle sci-fi community’s leading lights, came as a shock in November.

“His loss is really deeply felt by all of us here,” she said. “But there are a lot of up-and-coming writers, and some of them are really, really good. I’m not going to name names, because anybody that I leave out is going to feel offended. But yes, it’s a very vibrant SF community. That’s one reason I like being here.”

Check out the original version of this item on Cosmic Log for additional resources about “Observer” and quantum physics, links to other works by Lanza and Kress, and a bonus reading recommendation from the Cosmic Log Used Book Club.

My co-host for the Fiction Science podcast is Dominica Phetteplace, an award-winning writer who is a graduate of the Clarion West Writers Workshop and currently lives in Berkeley, Calif. To learn more about Phetteplace, visit her website, DominicaPhetteplace.com.

Stay tuned for future episodes of the Fiction Science podcast via Anchor, Apple, Google, Overcast, Spotify, Breaker, Pocket Casts, Radio Public and Reason.

The dinosaur formerly known as Brontosaurus could certainly do a lot of damage with its long tail — but just how fast could that tail whip?

Years ago, a team of researchers — including Nathan Myhrvold, a former Microsoft executive who’s now the CEO of Bellevue, Wash.-based Intellectual Ventures — built a quarter-scale dinosaur tail from 3-D printed vertebrae and a bullwhip popper, and thrashed it around. Their aim was to show that the diplodocid dinosaur now known as Apatosaurus louisae could whip its tail with a supersonic crack more than 150 million years ago.

The team determined that the tail could indeed go supersonic, producing a crack as loud as the report of a naval gun and most likely scaring off potential predators. But now other researchers say their computer modeling shows that Apatosaurus’ tail wasn’t structurally strong enough to sustain a supersonic crack.

“Such an elongated and slender structure would allow achieving tip velocities in the order of 30 m/s, or 100 km/h [62 mph], far slower than the speed of sound,” a team led by Simone Conti of Portugal’s NOVA School of Science and Technology asserted this week in Scientific Reports.

Suffice it to say that Myhrvold isn’t convinced. “Their model is a joke,” he told GeekWire in an email. “They made a model that had a low maximum speed, in the motion they tried. They didn’t move the tail in the correct manner. … This is very much like saying, ‘Gee, I bought a bullwhip and wiggled it, but didn’t hear a crack, so that refutes that bullwhips can crack!'”

So it sounds as if the speed of a dinosaur’s tail will continue to be under dispute. Let’s just hope dueling paleontologists don’t pull out the bullwhips.

A new startup, Consensus, is partnering with the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence (AI2) to help make the information in research studies accessible to the general public.

Consensus is part of a growing ecosystem of applications built on Semantic Scholar, AI2’s research tool that pulls from a library of more than 200 million publications.

Consensus scans the research literature to identify studies with a best-fit answer to queries entered on its website. While Semantic Scholar is geared mainly for researchers, Consensus is built for the nonspecialist.

Consensus CEO Eric Olson calls himself a “diehard amateur science consumer” on his company profile. He told GeekWire he likes to read about science, but always had trouble finding the research he was interested in.

During the pandemic he paired up with his former teammate on the Northwestern University football team, Christian Salem, to found Consensus.

“It was this culmination of a bunch of things: of being locked in our rooms and having some time, seeing the societal demand, and realizing the technology was actually ready to solve the problem,” said Olson.

About a year ago, Olson and Salem quit their previous jobs to work on Consensus out of a second bedroom in Olson’s Boston apartment. Olson was previously a data analyst at sports gaming company DraftKings and Salem was a product manager at the National Football League.

The pair hired Turkey-based machine learning engineer Ali Farid as a contract worker to build the first engine. The startup now has five full-time employees including Farid, and is powered with $1.25 million in funding from Winklevoss Capital and individual investors, including Quotient Technology founder Michael Walsh and The Hustle founder Sam Parr.

This September, Consensus launched an early version of its tool and announced its partnership with Semantic Scholar.

Semantic Scholar’s library has been “semantically” analyzed to draw meaning from paper texts and rank them for the most relevant content for a given search. Over the past two years, Semantic Scholar has also built out its services to integrate with bolt-on applications.

“We’ve done the heavy lifting and we make our corpus of semantically analyzed papers available so others can build these innovative experiences quickly and easily,” said Joe Gorney, manager of strategic partnerships at AI2. “But we can’t do it all, so helping build an ecosystem around AI analysis of scientific literature is the best way to use AI for the common good.”

Semantic Scholar now supports close to 600 researchers and applications. Other partners include Connected Papers, a visual tool to map and recommend papers, and The Collaboratory, Ought, Publish or Perish and Opscidia,

These applications are part of a growing number of services geared mainly to researchers that go beyond workhorse search engines like Google Scholar or PubMed, the National Institutes of Health’s tool. Semantic Scholar also continues to build out its own offerings, including Semantic Reader, a reading application that offers in-line citation links and note taking.

Since its launch, Consensus has signed up 15,000 users, including undergraduate science students and fitness enthusiasts interested in health questions.

Consensus’ engine interprets questions asked in plain English and returns results that best match the question.

Consensus takes into account publication date and study citation count, a rough indicator of quality. But it mainly weighs how relevant the answer is to a specific question, pulling out complete, plainly-written sentences. It aims to be user-friendly and accessible.

Olson recalled showing Consensus to his grandfather, a former scholar of Eastern European political systems who was impressed that it could pull up his research on Polish political history. “It was a really cool moment when I could see that he got it,” said Olson.

Consensus plans to earn revenue through a premium subscription or usage-based model as it builds out its product.

Olson advises users searching for answers to medical questions to “do your due diligence.” Consensus pulls from a broad library of papers of varying quality and is intentionally calling the current offering a beta version. “The results are not meant to be taken as the definitive truth on anything,” said Olson.

Future versions of Consensus will include additional quality indicators such as the number of subjects in a study and ratings on the quality of statistical analyses. Other Consensus partners are SciScore, which measures the rigor of methods used by journals, and CORE, which allows open access to millions of research papers.

Ultimately, the startup aims to display a dashboard compiling data from different studies on a topic. If a question yields polarized answers Olson envisions a dashboard that will help the user weigh the quality of data on each side of the question.

“That’s why we call the company Consensus,” said Olson. “That’s what we want to build.”

Exposure to plants and nature is said to make humans calmer and more productive, and just feel better overall. That theory will be put to test inside a sprawling new greenhouse at the University of Washington in Seattle, where the public will get the chance to regularly mingle with some 6,000 plant specimens from around the world.

The 20,000-square-foot concrete, steel and glass greenhouse replaces the original Botany Greenhouse, where the UW’s biology department had amassed one of the country’s most diverse plant collections over a period of 65 years.

The facility just off the Burke-Gilman Trail is part of the UW’s relatively new Life Sciences Building, a 207,000-square-foot building that opened in 2018 to house the biology department’s teaching and research spaces.

Happy human greenhouse visitors will be matched by the plants, which are happier now thanks to technology that maintains more consistent control over such vital variables as lighting, temperature and humidity. Fans, misters, windows, shade screens and lights are all computer controlled.

“They have much better conditions,” said David Perkel, professor and chair of the UW’s Department of Biology, during a GeekWire tour of the greenhouse this week. He called the new space “state of the art” and the previous space “very, very, very, very manual.”

“It was substantially smaller … and old. Not automated at all,” Perkel said. “There were chains to open some of the higher windows. The greenhouse manager would climb up on top of the building to put shade cloth up when necessary.”

The light-filled greenhouse now includes four climate-controlled rooms to house plant collections — warm tropics, cool tropics, arid and “tree of life” — and five climate-controlled rooms for education and research purposes. There is also classroom space for courses in plant biology.

Greenhouse manager Katie Sadler called the controls and sensing technology “very complex” and said each bay is programmed independently of the others.

“We can change fertilizer formulas with a push of a button,” Sadler said. “We can change a number of variables to make the environment completely different if a researcher needed, so it allows for a lot of flexibility in research opportunities.”

Some of that research is focused on climate change. In highly controlled growth chambers, researchers are conducting specific experiments on how changes in temperature, humidity and carbon dioxide levels will affect future plants.

But it’s not all they do.

Another professor is studying what caterpillar saliva does to leaves and how the leaves respond to the molecules and mount different defenses against any attack.

The UW trades specimens with a number of institutions, and its collection is well regarded due in part to some of the endangered species it maintains.

“We have a specialty in ancient plants, the plants that evolved really early and are still around,” Perkel said. “That’s one of the things that sort of puts us on the map nationwide and distinguishes us.”

Some of the plants were on Earth during the carboniferous and cretaceous periods, many millions of years ago.

“We call them living fossils,” Sadler said. “They really haven’t changed.”

During construction of the new facilities, the collection was stored at a greenhouse complex in Redmond, Wash., where Amazon was also housing plants that would eventually be planted in The Spheres on its Seattle campus.

While Amazon built its glass-domed structures as a work-space perk for employees, they are open at select times for the public. The UW is taking the same approach with its greenhouse, which will be open to the public on a walk-in basis on Thursday afternoons, starting in December.

Along with the mission of being a research and teaching facility, the greenhouse is also designed to facilitate outreach — to K-12 students, to the broad public and to the university community — to ask, as Perkel put it, “Aren’t plants amazing?”

“Children come in and get sparked and become plant lovers for the rest of their lives,” he added.

Sadler still gets that spark in multiple ways every day.

“It’s a pleasure every day. Every single day I learn something,” she said. “And to successfully propagate and grow a plant that’s extinct in the wild — that’s really cool.”

Keep scrolling for more photos:

During an expedition to the Titanic back in 1996, submersible pilot PH Nargeolet noticed a curious sonar blip that was coming from a site near the wreck. Was it a previously undetected piece of wreckage? An unexplored geological feature?

Twenty-six years ago, the pilot wasn’t in a position to investigate further. But now a totally different Titanic expedition has solved the mystery, with Nargeolet serving as part of the team.

Data collected during this summer’s dives by Everett, Wash.-based OceanGate and Bahamas-based OceanGate Expeditions — plus the scientific analysis supported by the nonprofit OceanGate Foundation — reveal that the blip came from a volcanic ridge that serves as a home for corals, sponges and other denizens of the deep sea.

“On the sonar, this could have been any number of things, including the potential of it being another shipwreck,” Nargeolet said today in a news release. “I’ve been seeking the chance to explore this large object that appeared on sonar so long ago. It was amazing to explore this area and find this fascinating volcanic formation teeming with so much life.”

The 9,500-foot-deep, 330-foot-long basalt formation has been provisionally named Nargeolet-Fanning Ridge. That name recognizes the roles played by Nargeolet and by Oisin Fanning, an Irish energy industry executive who served as a mission specialist on this year’s OceanGate expedition.

“When I learned about the possibility of a dive to uncover the mystery of what was seen on sonar … I knew I wanted to be a part of the effort,” said Fanning, who paid to participate in the expedition. “It is a privilege to get to work with OceanGate Expeditions, OceanGate Foundation and the scientific team to better understand what lies deep below the surface of our oceans.”

This summer marked the second research season for OceanGate Expeditions and its scientific team. Last year’s dives in OceanGate’s Titan submersible focused on documenting the state of the 110-year-old Titanic shipwreck, left behind by one of history’s most famous tragedies at sea. This year, scientists continued their study of the wreck, but also took on the task of cataloging the surrounding sea life.

Finding Nargeolet-Fanning Ridge was one of the highlights of this year’s research season, according to Steve Ross, OceanGate Expeditions’ chief scientist.

“This discovery will improve the way we think about biodiversity of the abyss,” said Ross, who is a research professor at the Center for Marine Science at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington. “The apparently basalt volcanic formations are remarkable, and we are astonished at the diversity and density of the sponges, bamboo corals, other cold-water corals, squat lobsters and fishes that are thriving at 2,900 meters deep in the North Atlantic Ocean.”

Ross said the ridge should provide new data points in the study of deep-sea ecosystems. “The variety of life forms, concentration of life and the overall ecosystems may differ between the deep artificial reef of the Titanic and this newly revealed natural deep-ocean reef,” he noted.

Click through OceanGate’s images from the submersible and the seafloor:

Murray Roberts, a marine biologist at the University of Edinburgh who’s also part of the OceanGate team, said he and his colleagues will analyze photos and videos as well as DNA extracted from water samples collected at the reef.

“Scientists have always been surprised about how far sponges and corals spread across the ocean,” Roberts said. “We’re running computer simulations to understand this better, and I expect these unexplored rocky areas are critical in explaining how these animals can disperse across the vast distances of the deep muddy seafloor.”

The results will be shared with the scientific community and policymakers “to be sure these vulnerable ecosystems get the proper attention and protection they deserve,” Roberts said. Data generated by the Titanic studies will be shared openly with other researchers and the general public via the iAtlantic database.

OceanGate Expeditions is already planning next year’s return to the Titanic site — with spots available for mission specialists who can participate in the adventure for a fee of $250,000. The company also offers submersible dives to the “Tongue of the Ocean” in the Great Bahama Bank and to hydrothermal vents in the Azores.

Microsoft and Facebook’s parent company, Meta, have their own visions for a virtual world called the metaverse — but an alternate, open-source vision from Seattle science-fiction author Neal Stephenson is gathering steam.

And while Stephenson may not have billions of dollars at his command, he has a selling point that the tech heavyweights can’t match: He’s the guy who came up with the concept of the metaverse for a 1992 sci-fi novel titled “Snow Crash.”

The venture co-founded by Stephenson and digital currency pioneer Peter Vessenes, known as Lamina1, aims to take advantage of blockchain, a technology that’s just as buzzy as the multiverse. The plan is to develop a Layer 1 (in Latin, “Lamina 1”) blockchain platform that content creators can take advantage of as they build out their corner of the metaverse.

Last November, Stephenson told me that the metaverse as envisioned by Meta and Facebook didn’t exactly match his vision for a virtual world of planetary proportions. “They’re generally not talking about those kinds of planetary-scale things,” Stephenson said at the time.

In the months that followed, the author decided to get into the game himself.

“The 30th anniversary of ‘Snow Crash,’ and recent interest in actually building the Metaverse, has got me thinking about how to do it in a way that’s true to the original concept,” Stephenson said when the veil was lifted on Lamina1 in June. “That means creative ferment rooted in a strong base layer of open-source tech that provides key services to creators while making sure that they get paid.”

In a Medium post, Vessenes said the transactional transparency associated with blockchain will be a good match for a Stephenson-style metaverse.

“I think of it as the base layer for the Open Metaverse: a place to build something a bit closer to Neal’s vision — one that privileges creators, technical and artistic, one that provides support, spatial computing tech, and a community to support those who are building out the Metaverse,” Vessenes said.

Since June, Lamina1 has taken on more of the trappings of a typical tech startup: Stephenson is the company’s chairman, Vessenes is CEO, Magic Leap veteran Rebecca Barkin is president, and Google veteran Jamil Moledina is vice president of games, partnerships and media.

Last month, the company issued a technical white paper that touts the rise of digital goods and digital currencies while “waving the pirate flag” for a digital economy that’s produced and owned by creators.

The white paper’s technology roadmap calls for putting out the initial software tools this month, setting up a blockchain testnet in November, and releasing the alpha version of a metaverse-enabled browser in December. The first Open Metaverse Conference is set to take place in Los Angeles in February.

Lamina1 says a virtual environment inspired by Stephenson’s vision of the metaverse is already “under active early-stage development.”

“Neal Stephenson’s THEEE METAVERSE promises a richly imagined interactive virtual world with an unforgettable origin story,” the white paper says.

Real-life Rome wasn’t built in a day, and the same will be true for the metaverse, whether it’s built by Meta, Microsoft, Lamina1 or a combination of those tech players and others. It’s not clear how much funding Lamina1 is drawing upon, but the company’s website currently lists 17 investors — including LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman and Geoff Entress, a managing director and co-founder of Seattle-based Pioneer Square Labs.

If the concept runs out of steam, that wouldn’t be unprecedented. A decade ago, Stephenson conducted a Kickstarter campaign for a swordfighting video game called Clang. The campaign raised more than $525,000 in funding, but in 2014, Stephenson had to cancel the project and issue refunds. “The prototype was technically innovative, but it wasn’t very fun to play,” he said at the time.

There’s a risk that the same could one day be said of Lamina1, or of the multiverse in general. But this time, the virtual and real stakes will be higher.

When it comes to undersea adventures, can anything match seeing the 110-year-old wreck of the Titanic with your own eyes? Stockton Rush, OceanGate Expeditions’ president and chief submersible pilot, intends to find out.

Over the past couple of years, OceanGate Expeditions — and its sister company, Everett-based OceanGate Inc. — have repeatedly pulled off the difficult feat of sending a crewed submersible down to the Titanic, a luxury liner that tragically sank during its first voyage in 1912.

With Rush in the pilot’s seat, OceanGate’s Titan submersible carried scientific experts and paying customers down to a depth of 12,500 feet to survey the Titanic wreck and its surroundings. The voyages in 2021 and 2022 have attracted plenty of attention from media outlets — including the BBC, which is airing a documentary about the dives this weekend.

During a talk delivered at the GeekWire Summit on Friday, Rush recapped OceanGate’s business plan and looked ahead to the company’s future frontiers.

It all started in 2010. Rush, who was trained as an aerospace engineer and dreamed of becoming an astronaut, reflected on the similarities between the space frontier and the deep-sea frontier.

“We’ve had such amazing movies about space, and not as many about the ocean,” he said. “What I wanted to do with the business was just move the needle, get people excited about the ocean, and discover what was out there.”

During the years that followed, Rush and his OceanGate team built and operated increasingly capable submersibles. At the same time, they worked out a viable business model for their adventures.

“There were researchers who wanted to go in the ocean,” Rush recalled. “Robots, autonomous vehicles had their place, but there was a spot for humans to go down there, more so even than there’s a reason for humans to go to space. But what was the model? We thought, ‘Well, there are folks who want to do high-end adventure tourism. People who were spending $100,000 to climb Everest or go to Antarctica. Maybe we could merge the two.'”

For the Titanic dives, OceanGate Expeditions offered customers the opportunity to participate in Titanic voyages as mission specialists — with a ticket price that eventually settled at the level of $250,000. Most deep-sea submersibles are designed to carry only two or three people, but OceanGate made sure that its Titanic-worthy submersible could accommodate at least four. (For Titan, it turned out to be five.)

“You’ve got to have a pilot,” Rush explained. “You’ve got to have what we call a subject-matter expert. And then, you don’t do the coolest thing you’re ever going to do in your life by yourself. You take your wife, your son, your daughter [or] your best friend. So you’ve got to have four people.”

Now Rush has 13 Titanic dives under his belt: six in 2021, and seven in 2022. The plan calls for making return visits every year to document the ship’s deterioration — and document the deep-sea ecosystem surrounding the wreck.

For example, during this summer’s dives, the OceanGate team discovered a coral reef at a depth of 10,000 feet.

“It had all these sponges and soft corals. … We’ll be having a press release and submitting some papers on this amazing oasis of biodiversity in the abyssal plains, as the researchers like to say,” Rush said. “This thing’s incredible. It’s 20 meters high, 100 meters long, and totally unknown and undiscovered.”

The Titanic isn’t the only destination on OceanGate’s list. In past years, the company organized dives to the Hudson Canyon, an undersea abyss off the coast of New York and New Jersey. There are also plans to survey submarine wrecks off the coast of Rhode Island and conduct deep dives near the Great Bahama Bank.

So what’s Rush’s dream destination? “What I want to do is hydrothermal vents,” he said. Those vents are hotspots where superheated water associated with volcanic activity spews up from Earth’s crust into the cold depths of the ocean. The environment hosts strange varieties of sea life, and some scientists suspect that life on Earth just might trace its origins to deep-sea vents.

“The highest densities of biomass on the planet are next to hydrothermal vents,” Rush said. “And they do it without the sun, all with geothermal energy and the things coming from the [interior of] the planet. The sun could shut down and there’ll still be life down there. So I really want to do that.”

When it comes to shipwrecks, the German World War II battleship Bismarck leads Rush’s wish list. The Bismarck was sunk in 1941 by the British, and now lies on the Atlantic seafloor at a depth of about 17,500 feet — deeper than the Titanic.

“Like the Titanic, it died on its maiden voyage,” Rush said. And like the Titanic, the saga of the Bismarck launched a series of books and movies.

“It’s apparently in amazing condition, except for a few holes that the Brits put in it,” Rush said. The biggest challenge is that OceanGate’s Titan isn’t capable of diving to the Bismarck’s depth. An even sturdier submersible would have to be built to make that part of Rush’s dream come true.

When it comes to OceanGate’s business model, Rush still has space travel on his mind. He envisions OceanGate’s expeditions as potential training tools for commercial spacefliers heading for the high frontier. Several suborbital space travelers and spacefliers-to-be — including Blue Origin customers Dylan Taylor and Evan Dick as well as planetary scientist Alan Stern — took part in this year’s dives.

But Rush’s perspective is clearly more down to earth than it was when he first dreamed of becoming an astronaut himself.

“I think space is wonderful,” Rush said, “but I’m a little more prone to think that the oceans are really right now the critical thing, We’ve got to understand how the planet responds to climate change. It’s all in the ocean, and we know almost nothing. So I’m really excited to do that.”