Enlarge / A skeleton found during 1950's excavations at the Barman site. (credit: Université de Genève )

Did ancient people practice equality? While stereotypes may suggest otherwise, the remains of one Neolithic society reveal evidence that both men and women, as well as locals and foreigners, were all equal in at least a critical aspect of life: what they ate.

The Neolithic saw the dawn of agriculture and animal husbandry some 6,000 years ago. In what is now Valais, Switzerland, the type and amount of food people ate was the same regardless of sex or where they had come from. Researchers led by Déborah Rosselet-Christ of the University of Geneva (UNIGE) learned this by analyzing isotopes in the bones and teeth of adults buried in what is now called the Barmaz necropolis. Based on the 49 individuals studied, people at the Barmaz site enjoyed dietary equality.

“Unlike other similar studies of Neolithic burials, the Barmaz population appears to have drawn its protein resources from a similar environment, with the same access to resources for adults, whether male or female,” the researchers said in a study recently published in the Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports .

Enlarge (credit: Petmal / Getty Images )

As the world races to decarbonize everything from the electricity grid to industry, it faces particular problems with transportation—which alone is responsible for about a quarter of our planet’s energy-related greenhouse gas emissions . The fuels for transport need to be not just green, cheap, and powerful, but also lightweight and safe enough to be carried around.

Fossil fuels—mainly gasoline and diesel—have been extraordinarily effective at powering a diverse range of mobile machines. Since the Industrial Revolution, humanity has perfected the art of dredging these up, refining them, distributing them and combusting them in engines, creating a vast and hard-to-budge industry. Now we have to step away from fossil fuels , and the world is finding no one-size-fits-all replacement.

Each type of transportation has its own peculiarities—which is one reason we have different formulations of hydrocarbons today, from gasoline to diesel, bunker fuel to jet fuel. Cars need a convenient, lightweight power source; container ships need enough oomph to last months; planes absolutely need to be reliable and to work at subzero temperatures. As the fossil fuels are phased out, the transport fuel landscape is “getting more diverse,” says Timothy Lipman, co-director of the Transportation Sustainability Research Center at the University of California, Berkeley.

Enlarge / Four kerosene-fueled Reaver engines power Firefly's Alpha rocket off the pad at Vandenberg Space Force Base, California. (credit: Firefly Aerospace )

Welcome to Edition 7.01 of the Rocket Report! We're compiling this week's report a day later than usual due to the Independence Day holiday. Ars is beginning its seventh year publishing this weekly roundup of rocket news, and there's a lot of it this week despite the holiday here in the United States. Worldwide, there were 122 launches that flew into Earth orbit or beyond in the first half of 2024, up from 91 in the same period last year.

As always, we welcome reader submissions , and if you don't want to miss an issue, please subscribe using the box below (the form will not appear on AMP-enabled versions of the site). Each report will include information on small-, medium-, and heavy-lift rockets as well as a quick look ahead at the next three launches on the calendar.

Firefly launches its fifth Alpha flight. Firefly Aerospace placed eight CubeSats into orbit on a mission funded by NASA on the first flight of the company’s Alpha rocket since an upper stage malfunction more than half a year ago, Space News reports . The two-stage Alpha rocket lifted off from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California late Wednesday, two days after an issue with ground equipment aborted liftoff just before engine ignition. The eight CubeSats come from NASA centers and universities for a range of educational, research, and technology demonstration missions. This was the fifth flight of Firefly's Alpha rocket, capable of placing about a metric ton of payload into low-Earth orbit.

Enlarge / The Birthday Cake flavored bar.

One person may have died from eating Diamond Shruumz microdosing candies, which were recalled last week amid a rash of severe illnesses involving seizures, intubation, and intensive care stays .

According to an update this week from the Food and Drug Administration , the cluster of cases continues to increase across the country. To date, 48 people across 24 states have fallen ill after eating the candies, which include chocolate bars, gummies, and candy cones that were sold online and in retail locations, such as smoke and vape shops. Of the 48 people sickened, 46 were ill enough to seek medical care, and 27 were admitted to a hospital.

For now, the death noted in the FDA's latest update is only "potentially associated" with the candies and is still under investigation. No other information is yet available.

Enlarge / One of the components of the reactor during leak testing. (credit: ITER )

On Tuesday, the people managing the ITER experimental fusion reactor announced that a combination of delays and altered priorities meant that its first-of-its-kind hardware wouldn't see plasma until 2036, with the full-energy deuterium-tritium fusion pushed back to 2039. The latter represents a four-year delay relative to the previous roadmap. While the former is also a delay, it's due in part to changing priorities.

COVID and construction delays

ITER is an attempt to build a fusion reactor that's capable of sustaining plasmas that allow it to operate well beyond the break-even point, where the energy released by fusion reactions significantly exceeds the energy required to create the conditions that enable those reactions. It's meant to hit that milestone by scaling up a well-understood design called a tokamak.

But the problem has been plagued by delays and cost overruns nearly from its start. At early stages, many of these stemmed from changes in designs necessitated by a better and improved understanding of plasmas held at extreme pressures and temperatures due to better modeling capabilities and a better understanding of the behavior of plasmas in smaller reactions.

Enlarge / The app lets you invoke ChatGPT from anywhere in the system with a keyboard shortcut, Spotlight-style. (credit: Samuel Axon)

OpenAI announced its Mac desktop app for ChatGPT with a lot of fanfare a few weeks ago, but it turns out it had a rather serious security issue: user chats were stored in plain text, where any bad actor could find them if they gained access to your machine.

As Threads user Pedro José Pereira Vieito noted earlier this week , "the OpenAI ChatGPT app on macOS is not sandboxed and stores all the conversations in plain-text in a non-protected location," meaning "any other running app / process / malware can read all your ChatGPT conversations without any permission prompt."

He added:

Enlarge (credit: Marc Piasecki / Contributor | Getty Images Entertainment )

Just before the Fourth of July holiday, Elon Musk moved to dismiss a lawsuit alleging that he intentionally misled Twitter investors in 2022 by failing to disclose his growing stake in Twitter while tweeting about potentially starting his own social network in the weeks ahead of announcing his plan to buy Twitter.

Allegedly, Musk devised this fraudulent scheme to reduce the Twitter purchase price by $200 million, a proposed class action filed by an Oklahoma Firefighters pension fund on behalf of all Twitter investors allegedly harmed claimed. But in another court filing this week, Musk insisted that "all indications"—including those referenced in the firefighters' complaint—"point to mistake," not fraud.

According to Musk, evidence showed that he simply misunderstood the Securities Exchange Act when he delayed filing a Rule 13 disclosure of his nearly 10 percent ownership stake in Twitter in March 2022. Musk argued that he believed he was required to disclose this stake at the end of the year, rather than within 10 days after the month in which he amassed a 5 percent stake. He said that previously he'd only filed Rule 13 disclosures as the owner of a company—not as someone suddenly acquiring 5 percent stake.

Enlarge / SpaceX launches Falcon 9 rockets from Pad 39A at NASA's Kennedy Space Center and from Pad 40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. The company plans to develop Starship launch infrastructure at Pad 39A and Pad 37. United Launch Alliance flies Vulcan and Atlas V rockets from Pad 41, and Blue Origin will base its New Glenn rocket at Pad 36. (credit: NASA (labels by Ars Technica))

United Launch Alliance and Blue Origin are worried about SpaceX's plans to launch its enormous Starship rocket from Florida.

In documents submitted to the Federal Aviation Administration last month, ULA and Blue Origin raised concerns about the impact of Starship launch operations on their own activities on Florida's Space Coast. Blue Origin, Jeff Bezos' space company, urged the federal government to consider capping the number of Starship launches and landings, test-firings, and other operations, and limiting SpaceX's activities to particular times.

Elon Musk, founder and CEO of SpaceX, called Blue Origin's filing with the FAA "an obviously disingenuous response. Not cool of them to try (for the third time) to impede SpaceX’s progress by lawfare." We'll get to that in a moment.

Enlarge / Complex space systems like the International Space Station could be vulnerable to hackers. (credit: NASA )

If space systems such as GPS were hacked and knocked offline , much of the world would instantly be returned to the communications and navigation technologies of the 1950s. Yet space cybersecurity is largely invisible to the public at a time of heightened geopolitical tensions.

Cyberattacks on satellites have occurred since the 1980s , but the global wake-up alarm went off only a couple of years ago. An hour before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022, its government operatives hacked Viasat’s satellite-Internet services to cut off communications and create confusion in Ukraine.

I study ethics and emerging technologies and serve as an adviser to the US National Space Council. My colleagues and I at California Polytechnic State University’s Ethics + Emerging Sciences Group released a US National Science Foundation-funded report on June 17, 2024, to explain the problem of cyberattacks in space and help anticipate novel and surprising scenarios .