After watching the James Bond film GoldenEye, Gavin Free of The Slow Mo Guys couldn’t shake a childhood memory. The explosions on screen were something else to say the least, but what really caught his eye was a tiny detail in the corner of the frame. He then discovered that the crew utilized a method in which they recorded real flames from underneath to achieve that effect.

Gavin and his partner Dan Gruchy decided to try it for themselves, with a simple but compelling goal in mind: film fire from directly underneath in super slow motion. A conventional fire pit was flipped upside down and then a large ring burner loaded with propane was suspended above it, while a sturdy framework of curtain poles, tin sheets, as well as metal fittings was rigged up to keep everything stable.

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Down on the floor, their camera, the Ember 2.5k, was sitting well, calibrated to shoot between 300 and 1,000 frames per second at a shutter speed that kept everything in sharp focus. That transformed ordinary seconds into minutes of the most intricate movement on film, but even with simple gas flames, the pictures lacked drama and force, so Gavin began sprinkling in cinnamon as a fine burning powder. The cinnamon took fire well, sending sparks flying everywhere, creating the clear sources of light and interest that they were looking for.

When the slowed down footage played back, it was unlike anything they had seen before. The flames moved in ways that felt almost biological, stretching lazily outward in every direction as they searched for oxygen, their edges folding and rolling over in smooth, unhurried waves that looked more like silk than fire. Swirling patterns rippled across the edges as the gas dropped lower, and the colors shifted from teal into deep blues, forming small delicate structures that resembled inverted clouds drifting down toward the camera.

Adding cinnamon brought the whole thing to life, with particles sparkling and scattering through the gas cloud like a shower of tiny stars. The extra material pushed the temperature up and the flames grew brighter and more frantic in response. Without oxygen near the bottom the fire had been dim and almost eerily calm, but the moment it found air higher up it took off in an instant. Cutting the gas supply brought everything to a controlled stop quickly and safely.
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Moxie Marlinspike, the privacy advocate who created the secure communication app Signal and its widely used open source encryption protocol, said this week that his privacy-focused AI platform, Confer, will start incorporating its technology into Meta’s AI systems.

Every day, billions of chat messages sent through Signal, Meta’s WhatsApp, and Apple’s Messages are protected by end-to-end encryption. The feature, which makes it impossible for tech companies and anyone other than the sender and recipient to snoop on your messages, has become mainstream over the past decade. As generative AI platforms explode in popularity, though, people are now also exchanging billions of messages a day with AI chatbots that don’t offer the protection of end-to-end encryption—making it easy for AI firms to access what you talk about.

This is by design, given that platforms often want to train their AI models on as much user data as possible and have made it hard to opt out of having your information used as training data. But as chatbots and AI agents have become more capable, some technologists and companies are pushing to create more constrained and privacy-focused systems.

“As LLMs continue to be able to do more, we should expect even more data to flow into them,” Marlinspike wrote in a short blog post about his collaboration with Meta published on Tuesday. “Right now, none of that data is private. It is shared with AI companies, their employees, hackers, subpoenas, and governments. As is always the case with unencrypted data, it will inevitably end up in the wrong hands.”

Marlinspike wrote that he will “work to integrate Confer’s privacy technology so that it underpins Meta AI.” He also emphasized that Confer, which debuted at the beginning of this year, will continue to operate independent of Meta. The project’s goal, Marlinspike added, is to offer a technology that “allows everyone to get the full power of AI along with the full privacy of an encrypted conversation.”

In 2016, Marlinspike worked with WhatsApp, which is owned by Meta, to roll out end-to-end encryption to more than a billion accounts simultaneously. Over the last year, WhatsApp has introduced a Meta AI chatbot into its app, which isn’t shielded from the company in the same way individual chats are.

“People use AI in ways that are deeply personal and require access to confidential information,” WhatsApp head Will Cathcart wrote on Wednesday on the social media platform X about the collaboration with Confer. “It’s important that we build that technology in a way that gives people the power to do that privately.”

The adoption of encrypted AI is still emerging. The cryptographic schemes used in end-to-end encryption for traditional digital communication aren’t easily or directly translatable into data protections for generative AI. For its part, Confer is still a new project, and Marlinspike’s blog post did not provide specific details about how exactly the collaboration with Meta will work or what the specific goals are for integration.

Neither Marlinspike nor Meta provided WIRED with additional comment ahead of publication.

Mallory Knodel, a cryptography researcher at New York University, says it would be “great for people using chatbots that use Meta AI to have confidentiality and privacy within that exchange.” Crucially, that means Meta would not be able to access AI chat data for training, says Knodel, who along with colleagues recently published a study on end-to-end encryption and AI. “I really hope more AI chatbots adopt this approach.”

Knodel’s preliminary, initial assessments of Confer indicate that the platform isn’t perfect, but is an important example of how to build a private AI chatbot.

With the launch of Artemis II from Cape Canaveral potentially just weeks away, NASA has been releasing a steady stream of information about the mission through their official site and social media channels to get the public excited about the agency’s long-awaited return to the Moon. While the slickly produced videos and artist renderings might get the most attention, even the most mundane details about a flight that will put humans on the far side of our nearest celestial neighbor for the first time since 1972 can be fascinating.

The Artemis II Moon Mission Daily Agenda is a perfect example. Released earlier this week via the NASA blog, the document seems to have been all but ignored by the mainstream media. But the day-by-day breakdown of the Artemis II mission contains several interesting entries about what the four crew members will be working on during the ten day flight.

Of course, the exact details of the agenda are subject to change once the mission is underway. Some tasks could run longer than anticipated, experiments may not go as planned, and there’s no way to predict technical issues that may arise.

Conversely, the crew could end up breezing through some of the planned activities, freeing up time in the schedule. There’s simply no way of telling until it’s actually happening.

With the understanding that it’s all somewhat tentative, a look through the plan as it stands right now can give us an idea of the sort of highlights we can expect as we follow this historic mission down here on Earth.

Test Drive in Orbit

The first day of Artemis II will be focused entirely on testing out the Orion Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle (MPCV) in the relative safety of low Earth orbit. Should any critical issues be found that would endanger the life of the crew, they can return home in a matter of hours — disappointed surely, but alive.

That might sound dramatic, after all, the Orion already flew on Artemis I back in 2022. But that was a relatively stripped-down version of the spacecraft, which was missing several key systems. Chief among them, the Environmental Control and Life Support System (ECLSS). This system provides breathable air, drinkable water, and manages the temperature, humidity, and pressure inside the capsule to provide the same sort of shirtsleeves working environment that crews have experienced on Apollo, the Space Shuttle, and the International Space Station.

Before performing the trans-lunar injection (TLI) burn that will send them on the way to the Moon, the crew will put the ECLSS through its paces. To stress test the system, the schedule even includes a period on the second day in which the crew will perform aerobic exercise using a flywheel-based device built into the capsule. Exercise is not strictly required on a mission as short as Artemis II, but the fact that the Orion can support such activity could be important for more ambitious flights in the future.

Assuming the ECLSS is operating as expected, the crew will move on to a series of tests that will demonstrate Orion’s ability to navigate and maneuver in close proximity to another spacecraft. This is not a capability that is actually required on Artemis II, but it will be absolutely critical for future missions. In Artemis III and beyond, the Orion will need to rendezvous and dock with a commercially developed lander that will be waiting for it in orbit, not unlike the Command Module and Lunar Module architecture of Apollo.

There won’t be a lander in orbit for Artemis II, and in fact, the Orion that’s flying this mission doesn’t even have a docking hatch. But they can still simulate the act of docking with another vehicle by using the spent upper stage of the Space Launch System (SLS) rocket, known as the Interim Cryogenic Propulsion Stage (ICPS), as a stand-in.

With this shakedown of the Orion complete, the crew will finish the day off by testing their connection to the Deep Space Network. This link will be vital as they journey beyond low Earth orbit, and this test must be completed successfully before the crew will be given the go-ahead by ground controllers to initiate the TLI maneuver that will set them on course for the Moon.

Setting Course for Luna

With all of the systems tests out of the way, the crew will focus most of their second day on preparing for and ultimately executing the trans-lunar injection burn.

In many ways, this is the most critical element of Artemis II. Up until the point that the TLI is initiated, the Orion can easily return home by simply slowing down and dropping back into the Earth’s atmosphere. But once the engines are fired and the vehicle is accelerated to the velocity necessary to intersect with the Moon’s gravitational sphere of influence, they are fully committed.

Interestingly, the completion of the TLI maneuver on day two marks the final major engine burn of the mission. Because Artemis II will be flying what’s known as a free-return trajectory, the same engine burn that puts them on course for the Moon also enables their return eight days later. That is, the flight path of the vehicle is such that it will go around the Moon and then “fall” back towards the Earth automatically.

This is a fault-tolerant flight path which will bring the spacecraft back to Earth even in the event of a propulsion failure. The same approach was used during the Apollo missions as a contingency should the spacecraft fail to enter into lunar orbit — a plan famously utilized to bring the crippled Apollo 13 home.

On the Road to the Moon

Once the TLI burn is completed, Orion is essentially “on rails” for the rest of the flight. A few minor course correction burns are expected over the next several days to fine-tune the spacecraft’s closest approach to the lunar surface, but later, its ultimate splashdown point back on Earth. Obviously you can’t correct a deviation in your course until you actually know how far off the mark you are, so the exact timing and frequency of these adjustments will need to be determined on the fly as the vehicle is in transit.

With the Orion sailing through its predetermined trajectory for the next few days, the crew will have time to perform various experiments and prepare themselves for the later elements of the mission. A number of medical tests are scheduled for this period to see how the crew is performing, and they will perform drills to determine how quickly they can get into their Orion Crew Survival System (OCSS) spacesuits in the event of a emergency.

The crew will also be given time to study the areas of the lunar surface they will be asked to photograph once the spacecraft makes its closest approach. Since the exact position of Orion relative to the Moon won’t be known until the vehicle is on its way, the crew can’t really prepare ahead of time. Once the Orion is on course, ground controllers will be able to calculate what parts of the lunar surface will be visible through the windows, and can inform the crew as to the points of interest that they would like close-up imagery of.

The Big Day

If everything goes according to plan, day six of the mission should see the Orion capsule swing around the far side of the Moon at a distance of less than 10,000 kilometers. The only thing officially on the schedule for this period is, as you might expect, lunar study.

As Artemis II won’t be entering into lunar orbit, this is the only chance the astronauts will get to gather video and images of the surface. They’ll document all of their observations, some of which will need to be recorded and transmitted back to Earth later as mission control will lose contact with the crew for about an hour while the Moon itself is between Earth and Orion.

Soon after the spacecraft emerges from this communications blackout, its expected that scientists on the ground will get a chance to interview the crew about what they saw while the memory is still fresh in their minds.

Given the flurry of activity expected in this relatively brief period, the crew will remain largely off-duty for day seven so they can rest up for the final leg of the mission.

Heading Back Home

With the Moon officially behind them, the final three days of the mission will be largely focused on the splashdown and recovery procedures. It’s expected that several course correction burns will be performed during this period to fine-tune the spacecraft’s course and bring it down safely in the Pacific Ocean. In between these maneuvers, the crew is also scheduled to demonstrate manual attitude control of the Orion.

There are a few more experiments to perform and a bit of housekeeping to do, but it’s safe to say that — save for the fiery reentry into the Earth’s atmosphere — the most exciting aspects of the mission are all completed by this point. There is however one experiment that stands out: on day eight the crew will perform a radiation drill meant to simulate a solar flare, and will use supplies stored in the capsule to quickly erect a radiation shelter. A suite of radiation sensors will be used to determine the effectiveness of the makeshift shielding.

Must-See TV

Most of the people reading this weren’t alive to follow along with the Apollo missions as they happened, and have only experienced them in a historical context. We’ve seen the photos, watched the recordings, and read first-hand accounts from the astronauts. But there has always been a certain detachment — we know that humanity visited the Moon in the same way we know of Marco Polo’s travels through Asia or Edmund Hillary’s trek up Mount Everest. It’s something that happened in a bygone era, the accomplishments of another generation.

But Artemis II and the missions that follow it represent a new generation; an adventure that we’ll all get the chance to experience together in real-time. NASA will be bringing the full capabilities of the Internet and social media to bear, and the world will get to watch every moment unfold in high-definition. If the weather holds and there are no technical issues, we should be seeing the crew work their way though this ambitious agenda in just a few weeks.

Luke Bell had a nagging worry following his last year’s test flight with the first solar-powered drone. Could a drone truly run solely on solar power and stay aloft for far longer than anyone imagined possible on a clear day? He was previously familiar with how the basic components worked in a lesser scale. The initial version flew for about three minutes before the panels snapped and it crashed to the ground.

This time, he wanted to go even further, so he shortened the arm length on his quadcopter frame by 70 grams, resulting in a loss of around 4 watts of power right away. The solar panels themselves received a significant boost, with new stronger TPU sleeves wrapped around each one to withstand a little of wind without snapping. To further reduce mass, he rerouted the wiring to make it shorter and neater.

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Thirty two small solar panels were arranged in an eight by four grid and soldered together into a single unified array, capable of pushing out 110 watts in full daylight, more than enough to keep the drone airborne. Getting the balance right took some careful thinking. Bell mounted the entire panel platform lower on the carbon fiber frame to bring the center of gravity into the right place, which cleared up the stubborn wobble that had been showing up during early test flights. Computer simulations confirmed that the propellers kept spinning cleanly even with the panels sitting directly above them, which was one of the trickier design questions to answer.

Under the hood, a pair of T-Motor Antigravity MN4004 motors spin compact 18 by 6 inch propellers through a T-Motor F60A Mini speed controller, with a T-Motor H7 Mini flight controller and a GPS unit keeping everything stable once the settings were dialed in. Getting to that point took some patience though. Early flights revealed that the solar panels were interfering with the GPS signal, making it difficult to lock onto satellites reliably. Bell had to reposition the unit and recalibrate the compass several times before it was consistently picking up 20 or more signals and holding its position the way he needed it to.

Cape Town’s unpredictable winds created sudden power spikes that the solar panels couldn’t handle on their own, and passing clouds could cut the output in a matter of seconds. To smooth things out, Bell added a small five cell lithium ion pack connected through a set of diodes. It would only kick in when the solar array needed backup, feeding power to the motors just in time to keep things steady, and whenever the sun was generous enough it would quietly recharge at around 11 watts.

So, with the drone completely completed, he took it to the skies over Stellenbosch for a real test. A sunny morning meant he could start it and watch the voltage rise to 20.66 volts in the bright sunlight. The drone took off effortlessly and locked into position hold. Minutes passed, and with only a little manual correction here and there, he watched it sail along slowly. An hour passed, then two, then three and a half, and the machine kept buzzing away smoothly.

At the five hour mark the numbers told the story, 5 hours, 2 minutes, and 21 seconds in the air before Bell finally brought it in for a gentle landing. The entire flight ran on solar power alone, with a small backup battery there purely as a safety net for moments when the panels weren’t pulling in quite enough sunlight. No fuel, no heavy battery pack, just a handful of solar panels drinking in as much South African sunshine as they could manage.

That time shattered the previous flight record for a radio controlled quadcopter, and it will take something special to beat it. Bell is already thinking about what comes next, with plans to ditch the backup battery entirely and squeeze even more efficiency out of the design, likely with a few more tweaks to the frame along the way.
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