Human evolutionary science has long been caught up in a debate: Did our last common ancestor with apes walk on its knuckles, like chimpanzees do, or was it more flat-handed? The answer to that question may lie in the anatomy of modern apes and extinct human species’ wrists.
The human-ape family tree doesn’t follow a straight path; it’s gnarled and branching. Scientists estimate it sprouted sometime between eight million and six million years ago, when an unknown ancestral species split into two lineages: nonhuman apes, such as chimpanzees and bonobos, and hominins, upright-walking primates such as Neanderthals, Denisovans, and anatomically modern humans.
In the absence of any fossil of this last common ancestor, it’s difficult for scientists to know what this creature may have looked like or how it behaved. While the search for such a fossil continues, some researchers have turned to other, less direct means of studying our ancient lineage, including fossils of extinct human “cousins” in the family tree, as well as the biology of modern humans and apes.
In a new study published on Tuesday in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, researchers utilized both methods—they analyzed scans of wristbones from nonhuman primates such as gorillas, orangutans, and chimpanzees, as well as more than 50 hominin wristbone fossils. They found evidence that humans and our closest primate relatives—African apes—share wrist traits that may be related to walking on knuckles, although more research is needed to say definitively what a more ancient human species used those traits for, the authors say.
“There appear to be traits which evolved in the common ancestor of humans and African apes that, based on existing biomechanical research, could have been advantageous for knuckle walking,” says Laura Hunter, who conducted the research while a Ph.D. student at the University of Chicago. Some of the features include a “reorganization” of bones on the thumb side of the wrist in both knuckle-walking apes and humans, Hunter says.
A diagram showing seven of eight wristbones. (The eighth bone, the pisiform, is pea-shaped in humans and rod-shaped in nonhuman apes. It was excluded from the study for feasibility reasons.)
“Did Modern Human Carpal Morphology Evolve from Knuckle Walking Traits?” by Laura E. Hunter et al., in Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, Vol. 293. Published online May 19, 2026
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The study is “excellent,” says Tracy Kivell, director of the department of human origins at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, who was not involved with the new research. While previous studies working to answer this question have focused on specific wristbones, this is “most comprehensive analysis of the wrist that we’ve seen yet,” Kivell says.
Hunter and her colleagues theorize that these shared traits may have “stuck around” in the human lineage through our evolutionary history not for knuckle walking but because they happened to also be advantageous for “object manipulation or sophisticated tool behaviors,” she says—a process biologists call “exaptation.”
There are some important caveats to the work. For one, the study is focused on just the wrist—it doesn’t reveal much about other parts of the body that may have been involved in knuckle walking or movement broadly, Kivell says.
The other wrinkle is that scientists can’t know for sure whether similarities between the human and ape wrists prove our common ancestor walked on its knuckles, if they were used in another wrist function, such as climbing, or if they are just a relic of our species’ relative proximity on the primate family tree. “I think we won’t ever know this answer until we find fossils from that time period,” Kivell says.
“I think it is important to emphasize that the title is a question, not a statement,” Hunter says, referring to the study, whose title asks, “Did Modern Human Carpal Morphology Evolve from Knuckle Walking Traits?”“There’s still a lot of work that definitely can be done to really figure out what exactly was happening with our ancestors,” she adds.
That’s part of the difficulty in studying fossils, Hunter notes—because the species are extinct, we may never know how our ancestors behaved.
“If only we could go back in time and see what they were doing,” she says.
Find the bottleneck that could become your next multimillion-dollar idea.
Your next multimillion-dollar AI idea probably won’t come from asking ChatGPT to “pick a niche.” It will come from identifying a painful bottleneck — something people already pay experts, teams, or software to handle — and then using AI to remove the cost, delay, or complexity around it.
Before AI, eliminating those bottlenecks required capital, technical skill, or a full team. Now, a solo founder can test ideas with the kind of leverage that once required a $400M startup, an $80M solo exit, or a $40M chatbot — without hiring consultants or having decades of experience.
The prompts and examples I walk through in the video show how to turn ideas into revenue faster, without waiting on staff, funding, or technical expertise:
Find tasks people already pay experts for and turn them into AI-powered product opportunities
Sort customer conversations into what AI can handle versus what still requires human judgment
Map business workflows that AI agents can run with light oversight
Turn your best-performing content into a reusable AI style system
Reverse-engineer successful AI case studies into prompts you can apply directly
Identify the bottlenecks that keep people locked out of an industry, then use AI to remove them
Build an automation roadmap without hiring a team or raising funding
The Base44 section is especially worth paying attention to. Maor Shlomo built the company alone — no employees, no funding — and grew it to $189,000 in monthly profit before selling it to Wix for roughly $80 million in six months. That story is often misunderstood.
It isn’t about solo founding for its own sake. It’s about how quickly the old requirements are disappearing: team before product, funding before launch, developers before testing, infrastructure before revenue.
In Rule 5 of my book The Wolf Is at the Door,” I call this “Accelerate Adaptability”: the ability to shorten the time between recognizing a shift and changing how you build, sell, support, and create. The key insight from writing the book is simple: the biggest advantage in the AI era doesn’t go to the smartest people — it goes to those willing to act before they feel ready.
They adapt their operating model while everyone else is still debating tools. In business, slow adaptation sounds like: “I need a developer before I can test this,” “I need a team before I can support customers,” or “I need more time before I can scale what already works.” You don’t.
You need clarity on which constraint is actually blocking you, where AI can remove friction, and where human judgment still matters. Every tool, prompt, and system referenced is demonstrated in the video, including the automation roadmap prompt that shows which workflows an AI agent can handle end-to-end with under 20% human oversight.
The Trump administration said on Friday that most foreigners seeking green cards will have to return to their home countries to apply, a remarkable change that could make it more difficult for hundreds of thousands of people to obtain permanent residency.
U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, the agency that oversees the legal immigration system, said it would grant green cards to people inside the country only in “extraordinary circumstances.” People applying for permanent residency, which is one step away from citizenship, will have to go through consular processing outside the country instead, according to a memo issued by the agency.
“This policy allows our immigration system to function as the law intended instead of incentivizing loopholes,” Zach Kahler, a spokesman for the agency, said in a statement. “When aliens apply from their home country, it reduces the need to find and remove those who decide to slip into the shadows and remain in the U.S. illegally after being denied residency.”
The change could upend the lives of people who entered the country lawfully through temporary visas and are seeking green cards to remain in the United States, including students, spouses of U.S. citizens and a wide range of foreign workers. The process of obtaining a green card — which gives immigrants the right to live in the country permanently and provides a path to citizenship — takes months or longer, meaning families could be separated for extended periods.
The memo was immediately met with confusion and chaos as immigration lawyers scrambled to understand which exceptions would be granted. Many also expected the policy change to be met with legal challenges.
The agency did not detail which groups would be eligible for an exception, only suggesting that refugees would not be subject. Mr. Kahler said in a statement that people who “provide an economic benefit or otherwise are in the national interest will likely be able to continue on their current path.”
It was unclear, though, which foreign workers would be exempt and if exceptions would extend to skilled foreign workers on H-1B visas, for instance.
The policy is a major escalation of the Trump administration’s efforts to curb legal immigration and reflects how the president’s crackdown has broadened beyond immigrants living in the country unlawfully. Federal officials have in recent months sought to strip some naturalized citizens of their status and review thousands of green card holders to root out immigrants they believe should be deported.
The change is likely to lead to more families being separated as spouses or relatives wait for decisions on their applications, immigration lawyers and former homeland security officials said. It could also lead to longer processing times as consulates around the world manage an influx of new cases.
“Our consular processing system through which they would have to apply is already overburdened,” said Sarah Pierce, a former policy analyst at Citizenship and Immigration Services who is now the director of social policy at the center-left think tank Third Way. “So that means we could have families separated for months or years.”
About 1.4 million green cards were granted in 2024, with more than 820,000 approved for people inside the country through a process called “adjustment of status,” according to Department of Homeland Security data. Over the past two decades, more than 500,000 people have received green cards via adjustment of status each year, except for in 2020 during the Covid-19 pandemic.
There are various pathways for foreigners to obtain a green card. People with temporary visas can apply to adjust their status if they have spouses who are U.S. citizens, for instance. Certain foreign workers and parents of citizens who are at least 21 years old are also eligible for green cards.
More than 70 percent of people who received a green card through marriage did so through adjustment of status, totaling about 250,000 people in 2024.
Some immigration attorneys said they were inundated with calls and emails from clients on Friday asking how the new memo could affect their cases.
Robert O’Malley, an immigration attorney in Grand Rapids, Mich., said several clients called to ask if their spouses needed to leave the United States, or if they would be able to stay together.
“I’ve done my best to assuage those fears,” Mr. O’Malley said. “But I’m really just trying to digest this six-page memo and wait for further guidance so that we know how to best advise our clients.”
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There are various pathways for foreigners to obtain green cards, which grant them the ability to live and work in the United States as permanent residents. Credit…Libby March for The New York Times
An outbreak of Ebola in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) and Uganda has global public health officials scrambling to contain the relevant virus, which the World Health Organization (WHO) has warned will likely spread further and cause more deaths beyond the more than 130 estimated fatalities so far. This type of Ebola-causing virus, a species called Bundibugyo virus, has no approved vaccine, is thought to be fatal in about 25 to 50 percent of cases and has sickened hundreds, including at least one American.
The WHO has declared the situation “a public health emergency of international concern,” citing the high number of initial suspected cases and “significant uncertainties” about the extent of the spread. But as serious as this outbreak is, public health experts stress that the risk of a pandemic-level threat is low, with minimal danger to the U.S.
“Not every pathogen has the ability to cause a pandemic,” says Amesh Adalja, a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security. “People think it’s either zero or pandemic…. There are many types of public health emergencies that fall short of a pandemic that are still important.”
The situation in the DRC is especially acute: the first cases clustered in a remote region riven with political conflict and violence that displaced more than 100,000 people in 2025. That has made it “very unsafe” for health care workers to offer aid, says Jeanne Marrazzo, chief executive officer of the Infectious Disease Society of America and former director of the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID).
The only American confirmed to have the virus, a missionary physician named Peter Stafford, was reportedly working in the DRC when, doctors believe, he came into contact with someone with Ebola. He has been evacuated for treatment in Germany, which has “previous experience caring for Ebola patients,” according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Currently, there are no known Ebola cases inside the U.S., and the risk of the outbreak spreading to the country is “low at this time,” according to the CDC. The nation’s government has also instituted a travel ban on visitors from three African countries to try to further limit the potential for the virus to enter the U.S.
There are other reasons why risk to the U.S. is likely to remain low, health experts say, including the biology of the virus itself. People typically become infected with orthoebolaviruses, the group of viruses that cause Ebola, through contact with bodily fluids—such as blood, feces, and saliva—and that’s not an especially efficient mode of transmission, Adalja says, unlike, say, that of the COVID-causing virus, which can spread through the air.
“It is not a subtle airborne infection that you can get from people who are presymptomatic, like we see with flu and COVID,” Marrazzo says, adding that some of the worst pandemics have historically been caused by respiratory viruses that can transmit between hosts before symptoms start.
People infected with orthoebolaviruses, on the other hand, are not thought to be infectious until after the onset of symptoms. These can include fever and aches, as well as vomiting, diarrhea, and, as the disease progresses, internal and external bleeding. The incubation period—the time between exposure and symptom onset—for Bundibugyo virus is typically between two and 21 days.
“It would be vanishingly unlikely that this could cause sort of a zombie-type World War Z epidemic,” Marrazzo adds, referring to the 2006 novel about a zombie pandemic and its 2013 film adaptation. “It’s not that kind of virus.”
Past outbreaks show that with rigorous control measures, officials have managed to stop the spread of Ebola, she says. The largest Ebola disease outbreak, which began in 2014, took two years to contain and infected more than 28,000 people, according to the CDC. It was caused by a different and more common species of orthoebolavirus than the current outbreak. Bundibugyo virus, meanwhile, has been linked to just two other outbreaks in Uganda and the DRC since its identification in 2007.
“Ebola does not have pandemic potential, but it clearly is an epidemic disease and has massive regional importance,” Adalja says.
For the average American, the risk of exposure from travelers coming from African countries where Ebola is present is “extremely low” at this time, but not totally inexistent, making it more of a “theoretical risk,” Marrazzo says. “Just be alert, think about where you are, and, if you see someone who’s ill, I would exercise extra caution,” she says.
Still, at this point, it’s much more likely that you will pick up a respiratory infection or a foodborne illness such as norovirus while traveling, she says. Wearing an N95 mask and washing your hands can help prevent those illnesses.
“I’m an infectious disease person, so I’m very cautious. But I would say, ‘Don’t get caught up in some of these theoretical risks that are pretty unlikely.’ And just remember that, every day, people get really sick during travel, and much of that is preventable,” she says.
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A poster displaying Ebola emergency contact numbers is pinned to a tent at the Busunga border crossing between Uganda and the Democratic Republic of Congo in Bundibugyo, on May 18, 2026. BADRU KATUMBA/Getty Images
A well-oiled food storage system can make your grocery haul last longer and deter you from ordering takeout. And when you know that you can count on those trusty Rubbermaid Brilliance glass food containers to keep your workday lunches fresh, it makes the thought of a desk lunch a bit more exciting.
Amazon’s 12 best food storage deals are up to 50% off and include favorites from OXO, Hydro Flask, and Stasher. Grab a chef-recommended ceramic garlic keeper, a RoyalHouse bamboo bread box, and a Homberking glass storage container set for just $2.50 apiece.
House Republicans on Thursday abruptly canceled a vote on a resolution directing President Trump to withdraw U.S. forces from Iran or win approval from Congress to continue the war, after it became clear they lacked the votes to defeat the measure.
The retreat was a striking setback that exposed fractures within the G.O.P. over the conflict at a moment when the party has begun pushing back forcefully on Mr. Trump and his agenda.
It also marked the latest embarrassing blow to Speaker Mike Johnson, who has toiled to defeat efforts to challenge or limit the war in line with the president’s wishes, but is contending with growing wariness within his party as the midterm elections approach and the realities of his minuscule majority.
The decision to shelve the war powers resolution came after Republicans had lost control of the floor during an earlier, unrelated vote, with several of their members defecting and several more absent. As the House chamber descended into chaos, leaders wary of risking another public defeat on a far more politically consequential vote abruptly scrapped the Iran war measure.
The move came just days after a similar resolution moved ahead in the Senate, when a handful of G.O.P. defectors broke from the president and opposed the war. That vote indicated an increasing willingness by some members of the president’s party to pressure him to end a conflict that a majority of Americans say is not worth the costs.
Last week, a similar measure failed in the House by the barest of margins — on a tie vote — leaving Republican leaders no room for more defections.
“They probably did it because they didn’t have the votes,” said Representative Brian Fitzpatrick, a Pennsylvania Republican who last week sided with Democrats in favor of a similar resolution and said he had planned to do so again on Thursday. “I don’t think they’re going to have the votes when we get back.”
“The next time they bring it,” he added, “it’s passing.”
It was the fourth time Democrats had sought to challenge Mr. Trump’s ability to wage war without congressional approval since he initiated the current conflict in late February, but with both chambers scheduled for a weeklong recess in observance of Memorial Day, they will have to wait until Congress returns in June.
The delay left Republicans in control of Congress flummoxed and lamenting the dysfunction that has taken hold on Capitol Hill as they struggle to govern.
“All I want is just one normal day,” said Representative Virginia Foxx of North Carolina, who in her role as the chairwoman of the Rules Committee, is in charge of controlling proceedings on the House floor. “Just give me one normal day.”
More on the Fighting in the Middle East
Hard-Line Military Fraternity: Decision-making in Iran is guided by a small group of men associated with the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps.
How Iran Gained Leverage: Outmatched militarily, Iran used “triangular coercion” by attacking Gulf states and closing the Strait of Hormuz. It points to a long-term U.S. vulnerability.
Early War Plan: An Israeli strike designed to free Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the former Iranian president, from house arrest in Tehran was part of an effort to bring about regime change and put him in power. But the audacious plan quickly went awry, according to the U.S. officials who were briefed on it.
Opportunity for Syria: With multiple Mediterranean ports and borders with Turkey, Iraq, Jordan, and Lebanon, the country offers a desperately needed alternative to the blocked Strait of Hormuz.
Secret Israeli Outposts: Israel spent over a year preparing a covert site in Iraq for its operations against Iran, regional officials said. Iraqi officials later confirmed the existence of a second base.
Almost two miles beneath the waves of the Indian Ocean, a hydrothermal vent spews sulfur into the inky black waters. On its lip, a small snail is not only basking in the poison but converting it into a shell that is part iron. This gastropod is the scaly-foot snail (Chrysomallon squamiferum), perhaps the world’s most metal animal.
Despite being so hardcore, the species has a precarious future. In 2019 the snail became the first species that lives on hydrothermal vents to be classified as endangered by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List of Threatened Species—thanks to the threat of deep-sea mining companies that have been interested in harvesting the minerals at the vents that the snails call home.
For a long time, scientists presumed that the intense pressure and toxic compounds that erupt from Earth’s crust through hydrothermal vents would make these structures and the water around them incompatible with life. But in 2001, researchers found the snails living happily among a myriad of other creatures that thrive in these unforgiving environments. The snails’ iron-rich shell is a vital part of their survival strategy—but not as a protective armor, says Chong Chen, a senior scientist at the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology and a leading expert on the scaly-foot snail, who led the effort to map its genome. Rather, the shell is almost like the human liver in that it helps remove toxins from the snails’ body, he explains.
The reason why has to do with how the snail gets its nutrients. This creature doesn’t eat in a conventional sense. Instead, like other species that live on hydrothermal vents, the snail is home to bacteria that feast on hydrogen sulfide, oxygen, and carbon dioxide and convert those chemicals into sugar. In exchange for providing the bacteria a home in its gut, the snail uses that sugar for energy. The bacteria’s digestion produces toxic sulfur as a by-product, however. To protect itself, the snail excretes the sulfur, which mixes with iron in the vent water. The end result is a shell that’s literally, albeit partially, made of metal, along with the tough scales that give the snail its name.
“The ‘iron armor’ is not for defense, as people thought for many years; instead, it is for symbiosis. The snail is totally happy without the iron armor, which is a by-product formed by the hot vent environment,” Chen says.
The snail, which is less than two inches long, has already inspired some technological innovations. The U.S. Army, for instance, has studied the snail’s scales for inspiration in designing new armor, and its chemical composition has sparked new ideas on how to make the pyrite nanoparticles found in solar panels.
Not only is the snail the single animal known to incorporate iron sulfide into its shell, but it also has evolved to only exist on eight sulfur-rich hydrothermal vents in the world. The amount of space on Earth that can be inhabited by the snail is so small that it amounts to roughly half the size of Disney World, says Jon Copley, a marine biologist at the University of Southampton in England.
The very same environment in which the snail evolved its signature feature is also what has made its future uncertain. Underwater hydrothermal vents form at the edges of Earth’s tectonic plates, where seawater is able to trickle down through the crust. That water is heated by magma below and shoots back upward, bringing with it precious minerals such as copper, zinc, and gold, along with the iron and sulfur found in the snail’s shell.
Those minerals have caught the attention of mining companies. Copper is particularly in demand because of its use in artificial intelligence data centers and green energy production. Although no deep-sea mining is yet underway in these areas, at least two of the vents that the snails live on have been considered for possible operations, according to the IUCN.
“There are rising concerns that if mining is permitted, the habitat could be severely reduced or destroyed,” the organization wrote in its Red List entry. The best way to protect the vents—and the snails—is to “just not mine active hydrothermal vents, period,” Chen says.
Instead, mining companies could target inactive vents, he says. “There are, for example, many inactive hydrothermal massive sulfide deposits in the Indian Ocean. These inactive vents no longer host the scaly-foot snail, and therefore mining these sites would not impact the snails,” Chen says. Still, such vents are no panacea, he adds. “We currently know very little about how unique the inactive vents themselves are in terms of biodiversity,” Chen says. “Ongoing research has found at least some animal groups that seem to be unique to inactive vents, so mining there might impact those animals.”
Aside from the snail’s contributions to modern armor and material sciences, Copley says, there are philosophical reasons to preserve the future of a creature that lives in an environment as alien and inaccessible to humans as any ecosystem on our planet. Few people will ever see a scaly-foot gastropod, but that doesn’t change their preciousness.
Chen is more pragmatic. The snail by itself may not affect humans, but its native ecosystem, while remote, is proving to play a larger role than previously suspected in the overall health of the ocean. The vents pump carbon and other nutrients into the water, and those nutrients sustain the beauty humans admire and the food they eat.
“We are now starting to understand that hydrothermal vents play key roles in regulating the supply of such elements to the ocean and therefore contributing significantly to the global biogeochemical cycles that we all rely on,” Chen says. “The world is one connected planet, more than one might realize. We are now living in the consequences of deforestation’s impacts on the climate, which we did not realize when it began. Mining hot spots like hydrothermal vents may lead to a similar impact.”
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Scaly-foot snail. Hong Kong University of Science and Technology
Three people have died, and more than a dozen first responders have been hospitalized following a possible hazmat situation in New Mexico.
At around 11:00 a.m., local time, Wednesday, New Mexico State Police rushed to a home in Mountainair for a “suspected overdose,” according to authorities.
Four people inside the home were found “unresponsive,” and three of them have since been confirmed dead, the state police said in a Facebook post.
Eighteen first responders were exposed to an “unidentified substance” and taken to the hospital along with the other person inside the home, authorities said. Several first responders have since been released.
The first responders experienced symptoms including nausea and dizziness, after being exposed to the substance, according to state police. Two of them were in serious condition as of Wednesday afternoon.
At least one person inside the home was revived with Narcan, Torrance County Sheriff David Frazee said in an article published by the Santa Fe New Mexican. Narcan is used to try to save people suspected of overdosing on an opioid.
“Evidently, they must have inhaled some toxins or something from the scene,” Frazee said of the first responders.
Mountainair Mayor Peter Nieto said the first responders had “direct contact with the individual who passed, and they were feeling lightheaded, headaches, nausea, things like that,” per the Santa Fe New Mexican.
Nieto said in a Facebook post that while the exact cause of the incident is currently unknown, “all indications are pointing toward narcotics as a possible factor.”
The first responders and the one person inside the home who was still alive were taken to the University of New Mexico Hospital. They are being “quarantined, evaluated, and monitored,” state police said.
New Mexico State Police arrived at the home to help the Torrance County Sheriff’s Office. It’s unclear how many members of each agency were affected by the unknown substance.
Three of the four EMTs from Mountainair EMS have been released from the hospital, Nieto said in a follow-up Facebook post.
EMS Chief Josh Lewis, who was the first to enter the home, will remain in the hospital overnight for observation, the mayor said.
“We are incredibly thankful that the other responders have been released,” Nieto said. “While they are not yet fully recovered, they are doing much better.”
Some Torrance County EMTs and hospital nurses who came into contact with people who were at the home also experienced symptoms, according to the mayor.
“We are keeping them in our thoughts and prayers and wishing them a full and speedy recovery,” Nieto said.
Albuquerque Fire Rescue Hazmat teams are working to identify the substance. Investigators believe it may be spread through contact rather than being airborne, according to authorities.
Mountainair Public Works confirmed that the substance was not carbon monoxide or related to natural gas.
Authorities said they secured a perimeter around the home and that there is “no threat to the public.”
“We ask the public to avoid the area and keep all affected individuals and first responders in their thoughts,” state police said.
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Three dead, more injured after possible hazmat situation in New Mexico
SpaceX, Elon Musk’s privately held rocket and satellite maker, has long been something of a financial mystery, even as it became synonymous with audacious plans to reach the stars.
That changed on Wednesday, when the company revealed just how lucrative its rocket launch and satellite internet businesses have been.
SpaceX’s revenue soared to $18.7 billion in 2025, up 33 percent from a year earlier, the company disclosed in a filing required of firms that are seeking to go public. In the first three months of this year, revenue rose to $4.7 billion from $4.1 billion in the same period a year ago.
But the company lost more than $4.9 billion last year, compared with a $791 million profit in 2024, as capital expenditures nearly doubled to $20.7 billion from heavy spending on artificial intelligence development. In the first three months of this year, SpaceX lost almost as much money as all of 2025, recording a $4.3 billion loss.
SpaceX, which also owns the social media platform X and xAI, the maker of the Grok chatbot, drew back the curtain on its finances for the first time as it prepares for what could be one of the largest initial public offerings to date. The company, which values itself at $1.25 trillion, is aiming to reach the stock market as early as next month and could try to raise $50 billion to $75 billion from the offering.
If successful, SpaceX’s I.P.O. could pave the way for other enormous offerings, including from the A.I. companies Anthropic and OpenAI, which is also preparing to file confidentially for an I.P.O. in the coming weeks. Last week, Cerebras, an A.I. chip maker, kicked off the expected wave of offerings and rose 68 percent on its first day of trading, becoming the largest public offering so far this year and the biggest of any technology firm since 2019.
A strong public markets debut for SpaceX would bring generational riches to Wall Street, the company’s employees, and, of course, Mr. Musk, who is already the world’s richest person and could become its first trillionaire.
Mr. Musk and a SpaceX spokesman did not respond to requests for comment.
How closely Mr. Musk is tied with SpaceX was made clearer in the filing. He owns around 50 percent of the company’s shares outstanding and controls more than 85 percent of the shareholder votes because of a class of super-voting shares, according to the filing. Gwynne Shotwell, SpaceX’s president and chief operating officer, was the only other executive listed in the filing to hold a seven-figure chunk of the super-voting shares.
Based on SpaceX’s current $1.25 trillion valuation, Mr. Musk’s ownership stake is worth more than $635 billion.
“SpaceX is his company,” Jay Ritter, an I.P.O. expert at the University of Florida, said of Mr. Musk’s stake.
Mr. Musk controls more than 85 percent of SpaceX’s shareholder votes because of a class of super-voting shares, according to the company’s filing. Credit…Jason Henry for The New York Times.
Founded in 2002, SpaceX has grown into one of the world’s leading space companies by developing partly reusable rockets with the goal of eventually taking humans to Mars and making people multiplanetary. In the United States, SpaceX accounts for five of every six launches into space, according to Georgetown University’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology.
In February, Mr. Musk merged SpaceX with xAI, which already owned X. Since then, he has expanded the company’s goals, declaring that SpaceX would build artificial intelligence data centers that orbit Earth, create a facility to manufacture complex A.I. chips, and develop human colonies on the moon.
Potential investors would be financing those moonshots, which have drawn skepticism given Mr. Musk’s optimistic timelines for these goals. The billionaire has also shifted SpaceX’s focus in recent months from taking humans to Mars.
The company is preparing another test launch of Starship, its largest rocket, on Thursday. Mr. Musk has said Starship will eventually take people to Mars and bring data centers to space.
SpaceX’s most lucrative business is Starlink, its satellite internet service, which had 10.3 million subscribers at the end of March, double from a year earlier, according to the company filing. Last year, Starlink recorded about $4.4 billion in income from operations, also more than double the year prior.
In its filing, SpaceX said it had “the largest actionable total addressable market” in “human history,” estimating that at $28.5 trillion. That included a $1.6 trillion market for Starlink, $370 billion from “space-enabled solutions” and $26.5 trillion in A.I., which included an estimate of $22.6 trillion for A.I. “enterprise applications.”
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A successful SpaceX offering would bring riches to Wall Street, the company’s employees, and, of course, Elon Musk, who is already the world’s richest person. Credit…Meridith Kohut for The New York Times
Does a ginkgo tree have an inner world? In the film Silent Friend, the protagonist, a neurologist who studies brain activity in infants, attempts to quantify the internal signaling of a ginkgo tree on a university campus. By the end of the movie, he’s using computer-generated visualizations to look at how the tree responds to its environment—not exactly becoming its “friend” but getting a touch closer to understanding the tree’s experience of its surroundings. The film isn’t based on a real study—if plants do have anything like consciousness, scientists have yet to formally describe it—but it’s an imaginative exploration of how consciousness might manifest in different forms of life.
Ildikó Enyedi—Silent Friend’s writer and director, and a self-described amateur science enthusiast—says that the film was largely inspired by real research that has shown that consciousness isn’t solely a human phenomenon. Coming closer to the internal worlds of plants, Enyedi says, “helps us to move out from this instinctive position that our perception is the default.”
Researchers tend to define consciousness loosely as the ability to experience—the subjective, ineffable feeling of being alive. This involves some combination of being awake and aware, having internal awareness (such as mental imagery and inner thoughts), and being connected to the world with an ability to perceive stimuli.
Many cultures around the world have long thought of nonhuman animals as having something like consciousness; some even presume plants have it, too. But in the Western scientific tradition, starting with philosopher René Descartes, the idea of nonhuman consciousness has been questioned—and frequently dismissed.
When the New Age movement started to take hold internationally in the 1970s, some scientists tried to test whether plants really could “think.” Documented and popularized by the 1973 book The Secret Life of Plants, this research came to some far-fetched conclusions, purporting to show that plants “enjoy” classical music and can “read your mind.” Many of the studies referred to in the book weren’t reproducible, though, and scientists rejected them for their lack of rigor. Some claim the studies severely damaged the credibility of future investigations of how plants sense and react to their environments. Still, Enyedi says that this wave of research, which occurred when she was a teenager in the 1970s, got her interested in different definitions of consciousness that could apply outside of the animal kingdom.
The start of the 21st century saw a shift in consciousness research, when scientists began using the tools of neuroscience to try to understand consciousness. Techniques such as electroencephalography (EEG), which relies on electrical signals, and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), which utilizes blood flow, were employed to measure how the brain responds to its environment. With this data, scientists can draw inferences about consciousness.
Today, researchers understand that plants, animals, human adults, and young children have different perceptive worlds. Maybe plants don’t hear or see like humans do, but studies show that they can respond to sounds and mimic shapes and colors. Plants can even “communicate” with one another using underground fungi networks, according to recent research; these hidden networks convey nutrients from one plant to another and transfer messages that initiate chemical defense responses against pests. Other tantalizing clues—such as early evidence that plants can “pay attention” to stimuli via the synchronization of internal electric signals, causing them to activate resilience during a drought or identify potential hosts, among other responses—are pushing scientists to continue investigating how plants experience the world.
Anil Seth is a neurologist at the University of Sussex in England whose work focuses on the cognitive processes of consciousness. He says that just because plenty of creatures can’t, for instance, speak or recognize themselves in a mirror, that doesn’t mean scientists should assume they’re not conscious in their own way.
“We’re trying to get indicators [of consciousness] that are meaningful for the populations we might apply them to,” Seth says. Brain activity, speech or movement are indicators of consciousness in humans. But “different indicators might be more meaningful for nonhuman animals, plants, AI systems, synthetic biology systems like organoids, and so on.”
Silent Friend attempts to link the mysteries of human and plant sensory worlds using the trappings of science, but with an added creative component. While the film embraces artistic embellishments of the science, Seth, with whom Enyedi consulted during the early creative phases of the film, feels it’s an example of how the arts can push the consciousness conversation in new directions.
The fundamental challenge of studying consciousness remains: it’s hard to tell what consciousness is when you can only experience your own version of it. Scientists, in their quest to gather reliable data, have had to boil down consciousness to only factors that can be measured through experiments. “The data about experiences are necessarily indirect,” Seth says. “Part of the reason why film and books are so good [is] because they can do more to flesh out the nature of experiences, in some ways.”
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Actor Tony Leung in Silent Friend. Courtesy 1-2 Special
Film and Writing Festival for Comedy. Showcasing best of comedy short films at the FEEDBACK Film Festival. Plus, showcasing best of comedy novels, short stories, poems, screenplays (TV, short, feature) at the festival performed by professional actors.
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