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[SOURCE: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Risk_of_astronomical_suffering] | [TOKENS: 717] |
Contents Risk of astronomical suffering Risks of astronomical suffering, also called suffering risks or s-risks, are risks involving much more suffering than all that has occurred on Earth so far. According to some scholars, s-risks warrant serious consideration as they are not extremely unlikely and can arise from unforeseen scenarios. Although they may appear speculative, factors such as technological advancement, power dynamics, and historical precedents indicate that advanced technology could inadvertently result in substantial suffering. Sources of possible s-risks include advanced artificial intelligence, space colonization and the spread of wild animal suffering to other planets. S-risks can be intentional, driven by factors like tribalism, sadism or a desire for retribution; or incidental, for example arising as a byproduct of economic incentives. Sources of s-risk Artificial intelligence is central to s-risk discussions because it may eventually enable powerful actors to control vast technological systems. In a worst-case scenario, AI could be used to create systems of perpetual suffering, such as a totalitarian regime expanding across space. Additionally, s-risks might arise incidentally, such as through AI-driven simulations of conscious beings experiencing suffering, or from economic activities that disregard the well-being of nonhuman or digital minds. Steven Umbrello, an AI ethics researcher, has warned that biological computing may make system design more prone to s-risks. Space colonization could increase suffering by introducing wild animals to new environments. Animals may struggle to survive, facing hunger, disease, and predation, which could result in widespread suffering. Phil Torres argues that space colonization poses significant "suffering risks", where expansion into space will lead to the creation of diverse civilizations and post-human species with conflicting interests. These differences, combined with advanced weaponry and the vast distances between civilizations slowing communications, could result in catastrophic and unresolvable conflicts. Strategies like a "cosmic Leviathan" to impose order or deterrence policies are constrained by the physics of space and the destructive power of future technologies. Torres believes that space colonization should be delayed or avoided altogether. Magnus Vinding's "astronomical atrocity problem" questions whether vast amounts of happiness can justify extreme suffering from space colonization. He highlights moral concerns such as diminishing returns on positive goods, the potentially incomparable weight of severe suffering, and the priority of preventing misery. He argues that if colonization is inevitable, it should be led by agents deeply committed to minimizing harm. S-risk scenarios may also arise intentionally. Such risks escalate in situations such as warfare or terrorism, especially when advanced technology is involved, as conflicts can amplify destructive tendencies like sadism, tribalism, and retributivism. War often intensifies these dynamics, with the possibility of catastrophic threats being used to force concessions. Agential s-risks are further aggravated by malevolent traits in powerful individuals, such as narcissism or psychopathy. This is exemplified by totalitarian dictators like Hitler and Stalin, whose actions in the 20th century inflicted widespread suffering. David Pearce has argued that genetic engineering is a potential s-risk. Pearce argues that while technological mastery over the pleasure-pain axis could lead to the potential eradication of suffering, it could also potentially be used to create levels of suffering beyond the human range. Mitigation strategies To mitigate s-risks, efforts focus on researching and understanding the factors that exacerbate them, particularly in emerging technologies and social structures. Targeted strategies include promoting safe AI design, ensuring cooperation among AI developers, and modeling future civilizations to anticipate risks. Broad strategies may advocate for moral norms against large-scale suffering and stable political institutions. See also References Further reading |
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[SOURCE: https://www.theverge.com/tech/881365/ge-profile-opal-mini-nugget-ice-maker-pro-chewable-appliance] | [TOKENS: 1777] |
TechCloseTechPosts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.FollowFollowSee All TechGadgetsCloseGadgetsPosts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.FollowFollowSee All GadgetsNewsCloseNewsPosts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.FollowFollowSee All NewsGE Profile made a smaller version of its nugget ice maker that needs less counter spaceThe GE Profile Opal Mini will also be much cheaper when it launches in July 2026 for $299.The GE Profile Opal Mini will also be much cheaper when it launches in July 2026 for $299.by Andrew LiszewskiCloseAndrew LiszewskiSenior Reporter, NewsPosts from this author will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.FollowFollowSee All by Andrew LiszewskiFeb 19, 2026, 4:12 PM UTCLinkShareGiftGE Profile is showing off prototypes of its new compact nugget ice maker at the KBIS trade show. Image: GE ProfileAndrew LiszewskiCloseAndrew LiszewskiPosts from this author will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.FollowFollowSee All by Andrew Liszewski is a senior reporter who’s been covering and reviewing the latest gadgets and tech since 2006, but has loved all things electronic since he was a kid.GE Profile has announced two new versions of its popular Opal nugget ice machines with smaller footprints that take up less counter space, and more affordable price tags. Like GE Profile’s larger and pricier Opal 2.0 Ultra, the two new machines make nugget ice — frequently also referred to as chewable ice, or pellet ice — by freezing layers of ice flakes producing nuggets that are easier to chew with more surface area to cool drinks faster.Previously only available in restaurants, GE Profile launched its first Opal machine for making ice nuggets at home back in 2015. Recent models, like the Opal 2.0 Ultra, start at a steep $579, but the new GE Profile Opal Mini is expected to cost $299 when it becomes available sometime in July 2026, while the GE Profile Opal Mini Pro will be $379.The entry-level GE Profile Opal Mini is much smaller than other Opal models because it ditches a water tank on the side for a built-in reservoir that fills from the top. It can still produce up to 34 pounds of ice per day if you’re diligently emptying and refilling it, and includes a filter to improve the taste of the nuggets, and an automatic descale function. But as The Verge’s Jennifer Pattison Tuohy found while reviewing the Opal 2.0 Ultra, these machines can still be arduous to clean.The Pro version of the GE Profile Opal Mini includes a side tank so you don’t have to refill it as frequently (at the cost of a larger footprint) as well as a filter that inhibits scale buildup, a stainless steel ice scoop, and more premium stainless steel finishes (color options are still being finalized). The Pro model also includes Wi-Fi connectivity so the appliance can be scheduled from a mobile app, or send notifications for maintenance issues.Correction, February 19th: An earlier version of this article misstated that the new ice makers are from GE. They are from the GE Profile brand under GE Appliances, which is owned by Haier.Follow topics and authors from this story to see more like this in your personalized homepage feed and to receive email updates.Andrew LiszewskiCloseAndrew LiszewskiSenior Reporter, NewsPosts from this author will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.FollowFollowSee All by Andrew LiszewskiGadgetsCloseGadgetsPosts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.FollowFollowSee All GadgetsNewsCloseNewsPosts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.FollowFollowSee All NewsSmart HomeCloseSmart HomePosts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.FollowFollowSee All Smart HomeTechCloseTechPosts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.FollowFollowSee All TechMost PopularMost PopularXbox chief Phil Spencer is leaving MicrosoftRead Microsoft gaming CEO Asha Sharma’s first memo on the future of XboxThe RAM shortage is coming for everything you care aboutAmazon blames human employees for an AI coding agent’s mistakeWill Stancil, man of the people or just an annoying guy?The Verge DailyA free daily digest of the news that matters most.Email (required)Sign UpBy submitting your email, you agree to our Terms and Privacy Notice. This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.Advertiser Content FromThis is the title for the native ad Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. See All Tech Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. See All Gadgets Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. See All News GE Profile made a smaller version of its nugget ice maker that needs less counter space The GE Profile Opal Mini will also be much cheaper when it launches in July 2026 for $299. The GE Profile Opal Mini will also be much cheaper when it launches in July 2026 for $299. Posts from this author will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. See All by Andrew Liszewski Posts from this author will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. See All by Andrew Liszewski GE Profile has announced two new versions of its popular Opal nugget ice machines with smaller footprints that take up less counter space, and more affordable price tags. Like GE Profile’s larger and pricier Opal 2.0 Ultra, the two new machines make nugget ice — frequently also referred to as chewable ice, or pellet ice — by freezing layers of ice flakes producing nuggets that are easier to chew with more surface area to cool drinks faster. Previously only available in restaurants, GE Profile launched its first Opal machine for making ice nuggets at home back in 2015. Recent models, like the Opal 2.0 Ultra, start at a steep $579, but the new GE Profile Opal Mini is expected to cost $299 when it becomes available sometime in July 2026, while the GE Profile Opal Mini Pro will be $379. The entry-level GE Profile Opal Mini is much smaller than other Opal models because it ditches a water tank on the side for a built-in reservoir that fills from the top. It can still produce up to 34 pounds of ice per day if you’re diligently emptying and refilling it, and includes a filter to improve the taste of the nuggets, and an automatic descale function. But as The Verge’s Jennifer Pattison Tuohy found while reviewing the Opal 2.0 Ultra, these machines can still be arduous to clean. The Pro version of the GE Profile Opal Mini includes a side tank so you don’t have to refill it as frequently (at the cost of a larger footprint) as well as a filter that inhibits scale buildup, a stainless steel ice scoop, and more premium stainless steel finishes (color options are still being finalized). The Pro model also includes Wi-Fi connectivity so the appliance can be scheduled from a mobile app, or send notifications for maintenance issues. Correction, February 19th: An earlier version of this article misstated that the new ice makers are from GE. They are from the GE Profile brand under GE Appliances, which is owned by Haier. Posts from this author will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. See All by Andrew Liszewski Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. See All Gadgets Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. See All News Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. See All Smart Home Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. See All Tech Most Popular The Verge Daily A free daily digest of the news that matters most. This is the title for the native ad More in Tech This is the title for the native ad Top Stories © 2026 Vox Media, LLC. All Rights Reserved |
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[SOURCE: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States#cite_note-344] | [TOKENS: 17273] |
Contents United States The United States of America (USA), also known as the United States (U.S.) or America, is a country primarily located in North America. It is a federal republic of 50 states and a federal capital district, Washington, D.C. The 48 contiguous states border Canada to the north and Mexico to the south, with the semi-exclave of Alaska in the northwest and the archipelago of Hawaii in the Pacific Ocean. The United States also asserts sovereignty over five major island territories and various uninhabited islands in Oceania and the Caribbean.[j] It is a megadiverse country, with the world's third-largest land area[c] and third-largest population, exceeding 341 million.[k] Paleo-Indians first migrated from North Asia to North America at least 15,000 years ago, and formed various civilizations. Spanish colonization established Spanish Florida in 1513, the first European colony in what is now the continental United States. British colonization followed with the 1607 settlement of Virginia, the first of the Thirteen Colonies. Enslavement of Africans was practiced in all colonies by 1770 and supplied most of the labor for the Southern Colonies' plantation economy. Clashes with the British Crown began as a civil protest over the illegality of taxation without representation in Parliament and the denial of other English rights. They evolved into the American Revolution, which led to the Declaration of Independence and a society based on universal rights. Victory in the 1775–1783 Revolutionary War brought international recognition of U.S. sovereignty and fueled westward expansion, further dispossessing native inhabitants. As more states were admitted, a North–South division over slavery led the Confederate States of America to declare secession and fight the Union in the 1861–1865 American Civil War. With the United States' victory and reunification, slavery was abolished nationally. By the late 19th century, the U.S. economy outpaced the French, German and British economies combined. As of 1900, the country had established itself as a great power, a status solidified after its involvement in World War I. Following Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, the U.S. entered World War II. Its aftermath left the U.S. and the Soviet Union as rival superpowers, competing for ideological dominance and international influence during the Cold War. The Soviet Union's collapse in 1991 ended the Cold War, leaving the U.S. as the world's sole superpower. The U.S. federal government is a representative democracy with a president and a constitution that grants separation of powers under three branches: legislative, executive, and judicial. The United States Congress is a bicameral national legislature composed of the House of Representatives (a lower house based on population) and the Senate (an upper house based on equal representation for each state). Federalism grants substantial autonomy to the 50 states. In addition, 574 Native American tribes have sovereignty rights, and there are 326 Native American reservations. Since the 1850s, the Democratic and Republican parties have dominated American politics. American ideals and values are based on a democratic tradition inspired by the American Enlightenment movement. A developed country, the U.S. ranks high in economic competitiveness, innovation, and higher education. Accounting for over a quarter of nominal global GDP, its economy has been the world's largest since about 1890. It is the wealthiest country, with the highest disposable household income per capita among OECD members, though its wealth inequality is highly pronounced. Shaped by centuries of immigration, the culture of the U.S. is diverse and globally influential. Making up more than a third of global military spending, the country has one of the strongest armed forces and is a designated nuclear state. A member of numerous international organizations, the U.S. plays a major role in global political, cultural, economic, and military affairs. Etymology Documented use of the phrase "United States of America" dates back to January 2, 1776. On that day, Stephen Moylan, a Continental Army aide to General George Washington, wrote a letter to Joseph Reed, Washington's aide-de-camp, seeking to go "with full and ample powers from the United States of America to Spain" to seek assistance in the Revolutionary War effort. The first known public usage is an anonymous essay published in the Williamsburg newspaper The Virginia Gazette on April 6, 1776. Sometime on or after June 11, 1776, Thomas Jefferson wrote "United States of America" in a rough draft of the Declaration of Independence, which was adopted by the Second Continental Congress on July 4, 1776. The term "United States" and its initialism "U.S.", used as nouns or as adjectives in English, are common short names for the country. The initialism "USA", a noun, is also common. "United States" and "U.S." are the established terms throughout the U.S. federal government, with prescribed rules.[l] "The States" is an established colloquial shortening of the name, used particularly from abroad; "stateside" is the corresponding adjective or adverb. "America" is the feminine form of the first word of Americus Vesputius, the Latinized name of Italian explorer Amerigo Vespucci (1454–1512);[m] it was first used as a place name by the German cartographers Martin Waldseemüller and Matthias Ringmann in 1507.[n] Vespucci first proposed that the West Indies discovered by Christopher Columbus in 1492 were part of a previously unknown landmass and not among the Indies at the eastern limit of Asia. In English, the term "America" usually does not refer to topics unrelated to the United States, despite the usage of "the Americas" to describe the totality of the continents of North and South America. History The first inhabitants of North America migrated from Siberia approximately 15,000 years ago, either across the Bering land bridge or along the now-submerged Ice Age coastline. Small isolated groups of hunter-gatherers are said to have migrated alongside herds of large herbivores far into Alaska, with ice-free corridors developing along the Pacific coast and valleys of North America in c. 16,500 – c. 13,500 BCE (c. 18,500 – c. 15,500 BP). The Clovis culture, which appeared around 11,000 BCE, is believed to be the first widespread culture in the Americas. Over time, Indigenous North American cultures grew increasingly sophisticated, and some, such as the Mississippian culture, developed agriculture, architecture, and complex societies. In the post-archaic period, the Mississippian cultures were located in the midwestern, eastern, and southern regions, and the Algonquian in the Great Lakes region and along the Eastern Seaboard, while the Hohokam culture and Ancestral Puebloans inhabited the Southwest. Native population estimates of what is now the United States before the arrival of European colonizers range from around 500,000 to nearly 10 million. Christopher Columbus began exploring the Caribbean for Spain in 1492, leading to Spanish-speaking settlements and missions from what are now Puerto Rico and Florida to New Mexico and California. The first Spanish colony in the present-day continental United States was Spanish Florida, chartered in 1513. After several settlements failed there due to starvation and disease, Spain's first permanent town, Saint Augustine, was founded in 1565. France established its own settlements in French Florida in 1562, but they were either abandoned (Charlesfort, 1578) or destroyed by Spanish raids (Fort Caroline, 1565). Permanent French settlements were founded much later along the Great Lakes (Fort Detroit, 1701), the Mississippi River (Saint Louis, 1764) and especially the Gulf of Mexico (New Orleans, 1718). Early European colonies also included the thriving Dutch colony of New Nederland (settled 1626, present-day New York) and the small Swedish colony of New Sweden (settled 1638 in what became Delaware). British colonization of the East Coast began with the Virginia Colony (1607) and the Plymouth Colony (Massachusetts, 1620). The Mayflower Compact in Massachusetts and the Fundamental Orders of Connecticut established precedents for local representative self-governance and constitutionalism that would develop throughout the American colonies. While European settlers in what is now the United States experienced conflicts with Native Americans, they also engaged in trade, exchanging European tools for food and animal pelts.[o] Relations ranged from close cooperation to warfare and massacres. The colonial authorities often pursued policies that forced Native Americans to adopt European lifestyles, including conversion to Christianity. Along the eastern seaboard, settlers trafficked Africans through the Atlantic slave trade, largely to provide manual labor on plantations. The original Thirteen Colonies[p] that would later found the United States were administered as possessions of the British Empire by Crown-appointed governors, though local governments held elections open to most white male property owners. The colonial population grew rapidly from Maine to Georgia, eclipsing Native American populations; by the 1770s, the natural increase of the population was such that only a small minority of Americans had been born overseas. The colonies' distance from Britain facilitated the entrenchment of self-governance, and the First Great Awakening, a series of Christian revivals, fueled colonial interest in guaranteed religious liberty. Following its victory in the French and Indian War, Britain began to assert greater control over local affairs in the Thirteen Colonies, resulting in growing political resistance. One of the primary grievances of the colonists was the denial of their rights as Englishmen, particularly the right to representation in the British government that taxed them. To demonstrate their dissatisfaction and resolve, the First Continental Congress met in 1774 and passed the Continental Association, a colonial boycott of British goods enforced by local "committees of safety" that proved effective. The British attempt to then disarm the colonists resulted in the 1775 Battles of Lexington and Concord, igniting the American Revolutionary War. At the Second Continental Congress, the colonies appointed George Washington commander-in-chief of the Continental Army, and created a committee that named Thomas Jefferson to draft the Declaration of Independence. Two days after the Second Continental Congress passed the Lee Resolution to create an independent, sovereign nation, the Declaration was adopted on July 4, 1776. The political values of the American Revolution evolved from an armed rebellion demanding reform within an empire to a revolution that created a new social and governing system founded on the defense of liberty and the protection of inalienable natural rights; sovereignty of the people; republicanism over monarchy, aristocracy, and other hereditary political power; civic virtue; and an intolerance of political corruption. The Founding Fathers of the United States, who included Washington, Jefferson, John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, James Madison, Thomas Paine, and many others, were inspired by Classical, Renaissance, and Enlightenment philosophies and ideas. Though in practical effect since its drafting in 1777, the Articles of Confederation was ratified in 1781 and formally established a decentralized government that operated until 1789. After the British surrender at the siege of Yorktown in 1781, American sovereignty was internationally recognized by the Treaty of Paris (1783), through which the U.S. gained territory stretching west to the Mississippi River, north to present-day Canada, and south to Spanish Florida. The Northwest Ordinance (1787) established the precedent by which the country's territory would expand with the admission of new states, rather than the expansion of existing states. The U.S. Constitution was drafted at the 1787 Constitutional Convention to overcome the limitations of the Articles. It went into effect in 1789, creating a federal republic governed by three separate branches that together formed a system of checks and balances. George Washington was elected the country's first president under the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights was adopted in 1791 to allay skeptics' concerns about the power of the more centralized government. His resignation as commander-in-chief after the Revolutionary War and his later refusal to run for a third term as the country's first president established a precedent for the supremacy of civil authority in the United States and the peaceful transfer of power. In the late 18th century, American settlers began to expand westward in larger numbers, many with a sense of manifest destiny. The Louisiana Purchase of 1803 from France nearly doubled the territory of the United States. Lingering issues with Britain remained, leading to the War of 1812, which was fought to a draw. Spain ceded Florida and its Gulf Coast territory in 1819. The Missouri Compromise of 1820, which admitted Missouri as a slave state and Maine as a free state, attempted to balance the desire of northern states to prevent the expansion of slavery into new territories with that of southern states to extend it there. Primarily, the compromise prohibited slavery in all other lands of the Louisiana Purchase north of the 36°30′ parallel. As Americans expanded further into territory inhabited by Native Americans, the federal government implemented policies of Indian removal or assimilation. The most significant such legislation was the Indian Removal Act of 1830, a key policy of President Andrew Jackson. It resulted in the Trail of Tears (1830–1850), in which an estimated 60,000 Native Americans living east of the Mississippi River were forcibly removed and displaced to lands far to the west, causing 13,200 to 16,700 deaths along the forced march. Settler expansion as well as this influx of Indigenous peoples from the East resulted in the American Indian Wars west of the Mississippi. During the colonial period, slavery became legal in all the Thirteen colonies, but by 1770 it provided the main labor force in the large-scale, agriculture-dependent economies of the Southern Colonies from Maryland to Georgia. The practice began to be significantly questioned during the American Revolution, and spurred by an active abolitionist movement that had reemerged in the 1830s, states in the North enacted laws to prohibit slavery within their boundaries. At the same time, support for slavery had strengthened in Southern states, with widespread use of inventions such as the cotton gin (1793) having made slavery immensely profitable for Southern elites. The United States annexed the Republic of Texas in 1845, and the 1846 Oregon Treaty led to U.S. control of the present-day American Northwest. Dispute with Mexico over Texas led to the Mexican–American War (1846–1848). After the victory of the U.S., Mexico recognized U.S. sovereignty over Texas, New Mexico, and California in the 1848 Mexican Cession; the cession's lands also included the future states of Nevada, Colorado and Utah. The California gold rush of 1848–1849 spurred a huge migration of white settlers to the Pacific coast, leading to even more confrontations with Native populations. One of the most violent, the California genocide of thousands of Native inhabitants, lasted into the mid-1870s. Additional western territories and states were created. Throughout the 1850s, the sectional conflict regarding slavery was further inflamed by national legislation in the U.S. Congress and decisions of the Supreme Court. In Congress, the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 mandated the forcible return to their owners in the South of slaves taking refuge in non-slave states, while the Kansas–Nebraska Act of 1854 effectively gutted the anti-slavery requirements of the Missouri Compromise. In its Dred Scott decision of 1857, the Supreme Court ruled against a slave brought into non-slave territory, simultaneously declaring the entire Missouri Compromise to be unconstitutional. These and other events exacerbated tensions between North and South that would culminate in the American Civil War (1861–1865). Beginning with South Carolina, 11 slave-state governments voted to secede from the United States in 1861, joining to create the Confederate States of America. All other state governments remained loyal to the Union.[q] War broke out in April 1861 after the Confederacy bombarded Fort Sumter. Following the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863, many freed slaves joined the Union army. The war began to turn in the Union's favor following the 1863 Siege of Vicksburg and Battle of Gettysburg, and the Confederates surrendered in 1865 after the Union's victory in the Battle of Appomattox Court House. Efforts toward reconstruction in the secessionist South had begun as early as 1862, but it was only after President Lincoln's assassination that the three Reconstruction Amendments to the Constitution were ratified to protect civil rights. The amendments codified nationally the abolition of slavery and involuntary servitude except as punishment for crimes, promised equal protection under the law for all persons, and prohibited discrimination on the basis of race or previous enslavement. As a result, African Americans took an active political role in ex-Confederate states in the decade following the Civil War. The former Confederate states were readmitted to the Union, beginning with Tennessee in 1866 and ending with Georgia in 1870. National infrastructure, including transcontinental telegraph and railroads, spurred growth in the American frontier. This was accelerated by the Homestead Acts, through which nearly 10 percent of the total land area of the United States was given away free to some 1.6 million homesteaders. From 1865 through 1917, an unprecedented stream of immigrants arrived in the United States, including 24.4 million from Europe. Most came through the Port of New York, as New York City and other large cities on the East Coast became home to large Jewish, Irish, and Italian populations. Many Northern Europeans as well as significant numbers of Germans and other Central Europeans moved to the Midwest. At the same time, about one million French Canadians migrated from Quebec to New England. During the Great Migration, millions of African Americans left the rural South for urban areas in the North. Alaska was purchased from Russia in 1867. The Compromise of 1877 is generally considered the end of the Reconstruction era, as it resolved the electoral crisis following the 1876 presidential election and led President Rutherford B. Hayes to reduce the role of federal troops in the South. Immediately, the Redeemers began evicting the Carpetbaggers and quickly regained local control of Southern politics in the name of white supremacy. African Americans endured a period of heightened, overt racism following Reconstruction, a time often considered the nadir of American race relations. A series of Supreme Court decisions, including Plessy v. Ferguson, emptied the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments of their force, allowing Jim Crow laws in the South to remain unchecked, sundown towns in the Midwest, and segregation in communities across the country, which would be reinforced in part by the policy of redlining later adopted by the federal Home Owners' Loan Corporation. An explosion of technological advancement, accompanied by the exploitation of cheap immigrant labor, led to rapid economic expansion during the Gilded Age of the late 19th century. It continued into the early 20th, when the United States already outpaced the economies of Britain, France, and Germany combined. This fostered the amassing of power by a few prominent industrialists, largely by their formation of trusts and monopolies to prevent competition. Tycoons led the nation's expansion in the railroad, petroleum, and steel industries. The United States emerged as a pioneer of the automotive industry. These changes resulted in significant increases in economic inequality, slum conditions, and social unrest, creating the environment for labor unions and socialist movements to begin to flourish. This period eventually ended with the advent of the Progressive Era, which was characterized by significant economic and social reforms. Pro-American elements in Hawaii overthrew the Hawaiian monarchy; the islands were annexed in 1898. That same year, Puerto Rico, the Philippines, and Guam were ceded to the U.S. by Spain after the latter's defeat in the Spanish–American War. (The Philippines was granted full independence from the U.S. on July 4, 1946, following World War II. Puerto Rico and Guam have remained U.S. territories.) American Samoa was acquired by the United States in 1900 after the Second Samoan Civil War. The U.S. Virgin Islands were purchased from Denmark in 1917. The United States entered World War I alongside the Allies in 1917 helping to turn the tide against the Central Powers. In 1920, a constitutional amendment granted nationwide women's suffrage. During the 1920s and 1930s, radio for mass communication and early television transformed communications nationwide. The Wall Street Crash of 1929 triggered the Great Depression, to which President Franklin D. Roosevelt responded with the New Deal plan of "reform, recovery and relief", a series of unprecedented and sweeping recovery programs and employment relief projects combined with financial reforms and regulations. Initially neutral during World War II, the U.S. began supplying war materiel to the Allies of World War II in March 1941 and entered the war in December after Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor. Agreeing to a "Europe first" policy, the U.S. concentrated its wartime efforts on Japan's allies Italy and Germany until their final defeat in May 1945. The U.S. developed the first nuclear weapons and used them against the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945, ending the war. The United States was one of the "Four Policemen" who met to plan the post-war world, alongside the United Kingdom, the Soviet Union, and China. The U.S. emerged relatively unscathed from the war, with even greater economic power and international political influence. The end of World War II in 1945 left the U.S. and the Soviet Union as superpowers, each with its own political, military, and economic sphere of influence. Geopolitical tensions between the two superpowers soon led to the Cold War. The U.S. implemented a policy of containment intended to limit the Soviet Union's sphere of influence; engaged in regime change against governments perceived to be aligned with the Soviets; and prevailed in the Space Race, which culminated with the first crewed Moon landing in 1969. Domestically, the U.S. experienced economic growth, urbanization, and population growth following World War II. The civil rights movement emerged, with Martin Luther King Jr. becoming a prominent leader in the early 1960s. The Great Society plan of President Lyndon B. Johnson's administration resulted in groundbreaking and broad-reaching laws, policies and a constitutional amendment to counteract some of the worst effects of lingering institutional racism. The counterculture movement in the U.S. brought significant social changes, including the liberalization of attitudes toward recreational drug use and sexuality. It also encouraged open defiance of the military draft (leading to the end of conscription in 1973) and wide opposition to U.S. intervention in Vietnam, with the U.S. totally withdrawing in 1975. A societal shift in the roles of women was significantly responsible for the large increase in female paid labor participation starting in the 1970s, and by 1985 the majority of American women aged 16 and older were employed. The Fall of Communism and the dissolution of the Soviet Union from 1989 to 1991 marked the end of the Cold War and left the United States as the world's sole superpower. This cemented the United States' global influence, reinforcing the concept of the "American Century" as the U.S. dominated international political, cultural, economic, and military affairs. The 1990s saw the longest recorded economic expansion in American history, a dramatic decline in U.S. crime rates, and advances in technology. Throughout this decade, technological innovations such as the World Wide Web, the evolution of the Pentium microprocessor in accordance with Moore's law, rechargeable lithium-ion batteries, the first gene therapy trial, and cloning either emerged in the U.S. or were improved upon there. The Human Genome Project was formally launched in 1990, while Nasdaq became the first stock market in the United States to trade online in 1998. In the Gulf War of 1991, an American-led international coalition of states expelled an Iraqi invasion force that had occupied neighboring Kuwait. The September 11 attacks on the United States in 2001 by the pan-Islamist militant organization al-Qaeda led to the war on terror and subsequent military interventions in Afghanistan and in Iraq. The U.S. housing bubble culminated in 2007 with the Great Recession, the largest economic contraction since the Great Depression. In the 2010s and early 2020s, the United States has experienced increased political polarization and democratic backsliding. The country's polarization was violently reflected in the January 2021 Capitol attack, when a mob of insurrectionists entered the U.S. Capitol and sought to prevent the peaceful transfer of power in an attempted self-coup d'état. Geography The United States is the world's third-largest country by total area behind Russia and Canada.[c] The 48 contiguous states and the District of Columbia have a combined area of 3,119,885 square miles (8,080,470 km2). In 2021, the United States had 8% of the Earth's permanent meadows and pastures and 10% of its cropland. Starting in the east, the coastal plain of the Atlantic seaboard gives way to inland forests and rolling hills in the Piedmont plateau region. The Appalachian Mountains and the Adirondack Massif separate the East Coast from the Great Lakes and the grasslands of the Midwest. The Mississippi River System, the world's fourth-longest river system, runs predominantly north–south through the center of the country. The flat and fertile prairie of the Great Plains stretches to the west, interrupted by a highland region in the southeast. The Rocky Mountains, west of the Great Plains, extend north to south across the country, peaking at over 14,000 feet (4,300 m) in Colorado. The supervolcano underlying Yellowstone National Park in the Rocky Mountains, the Yellowstone Caldera, is the continent's largest volcanic feature. Farther west are the rocky Great Basin and the Chihuahuan, Sonoran, and Mojave deserts. In the northwest corner of Arizona, carved by the Colorado River, is the Grand Canyon, a steep-sided canyon and popular tourist destination known for its overwhelming visual size and intricate, colorful landscape. The Cascade and Sierra Nevada mountain ranges run close to the Pacific coast. The lowest and highest points in the contiguous United States are in the State of California, about 84 miles (135 km) apart. At an elevation of 20,310 feet (6,190.5 m), Alaska's Denali (also called Mount McKinley) is the highest peak in the country and on the continent. Active volcanoes in the U.S. are common throughout Alaska's Alexander and Aleutian Islands. Located entirely outside North America, the archipelago of Hawaii consists of volcanic islands, physiographically and ethnologically part of the Polynesian subregion of Oceania. In addition to its total land area, the United States has one of the world's largest marine exclusive economic zones spanning approximately 4.5 million square miles (11.7 million km2) of ocean. With its large size and geographic variety, the United States includes most climate types. East of the 100th meridian, the climate ranges from humid continental in the north to humid subtropical in the south. The western Great Plains are semi-arid. Many mountainous areas of the American West have an alpine climate. The climate is arid in the Southwest, Mediterranean in coastal California, and oceanic in coastal Oregon, Washington, and southern Alaska. Most of Alaska is subarctic or polar. Hawaii, the southern tip of Florida and U.S. territories in the Caribbean and Pacific are tropical. The United States receives more high-impact extreme weather incidents than any other country. States bordering the Gulf of Mexico are prone to hurricanes, and most of the world's tornadoes occur in the country, mainly in Tornado Alley. Due to climate change in the country, extreme weather has become more frequent in the U.S. in the 21st century, with three times the number of reported heat waves compared to the 1960s. Since the 1990s, droughts in the American Southwest have become more persistent and more severe. The regions considered as the most attractive to the population are the most vulnerable. The U.S. is one of 17 megadiverse countries containing large numbers of endemic species: about 17,000 species of vascular plants occur in the contiguous United States and Alaska, and over 1,800 species of flowering plants are found in Hawaii, few of which occur on the mainland. The United States is home to 428 mammal species, 784 birds, 311 reptiles, 295 amphibians, and around 91,000 insect species. There are 63 national parks, and hundreds of other federally managed monuments, forests, and wilderness areas, administered by the National Park Service and other agencies. About 28% of the country's land is publicly owned and federally managed, primarily in the Western States. Most of this land is protected, though some is leased for commercial use, and less than one percent is used for military purposes. Environmental issues in the United States include debates on non-renewable resources and nuclear energy, air and water pollution, biodiversity, logging and deforestation, and climate change. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is the federal agency charged with addressing most environmental-related issues. The idea of wilderness has shaped the management of public lands since 1964, with the Wilderness Act. The Endangered Species Act of 1973 provides a way to protect threatened and endangered species and their habitats. The United States Fish and Wildlife Service implements and enforces the Act. In 2024, the U.S. ranked 35th among 180 countries in the Environmental Performance Index. Government and politics The United States is a federal republic of 50 states and a federal capital district, Washington, D.C. The U.S. asserts sovereignty over five unincorporated territories and several uninhabited island possessions. It is the world's oldest surviving federation, and its presidential system of federal government has been adopted, in whole or in part, by many newly independent states worldwide following their decolonization. The Constitution of the United States serves as the country's supreme legal document. Most scholars describe the United States as a liberal democracy.[r] Composed of three branches, all headquartered in Washington, D.C., the federal government is the national government of the United States. The U.S. Constitution establishes a separation of powers intended to provide a system of checks and balances to prevent any of the three branches from becoming supreme. The three-branch system is known as the presidential system, in contrast to the parliamentary system where the executive is part of the legislative body. Many countries around the world adopted this aspect of the 1789 Constitution of the United States, especially in the postcolonial Americas. In the U.S. federal system, sovereign powers are shared between three levels of government specified in the Constitution: the federal government, the states, and Indian tribes. The U.S. also asserts sovereignty over five permanently inhabited territories: American Samoa, Guam, the Northern Mariana Islands, Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands. Residents of the 50 states are governed by their elected state government, under state constitutions compatible with the national constitution, and by elected local governments that are administrative divisions of a state. States are subdivided into counties or county equivalents, and (except for Hawaii) further divided into municipalities, each administered by elected representatives. The District of Columbia is a federal district containing the U.S. capital, Washington, D.C. The federal district is an administrative division of the federal government. Indian country is made up of 574 federally recognized tribes and 326 Indian reservations. They hold a government-to-government relationship with the U.S. federal government in Washington and are legally defined as domestic dependent nations with inherent tribal sovereignty rights. In addition to the five major territories, the U.S. also asserts sovereignty over the United States Minor Outlying Islands in the Pacific Ocean and the Caribbean. The seven undisputed islands without permanent populations are Baker Island, Howland Island, Jarvis Island, Johnston Atoll, Kingman Reef, Midway Atoll, and Palmyra Atoll. U.S. sovereignty over the unpopulated Bajo Nuevo Bank, Navassa Island, Serranilla Bank, and Wake Island is disputed. The Constitution is silent on political parties. However, they developed independently in the 18th century with the Federalist and Anti-Federalist parties. Since then, the United States has operated as a de facto two-party system, though the parties have changed over time. Since the mid-19th century, the two main national parties have been the Democratic Party and the Republican Party. The former is perceived as relatively liberal in its political platform while the latter is perceived as relatively conservative in its platform. The United States has an established structure of foreign relations, with the world's second-largest diplomatic corps as of 2024[update]. It is a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council and home to the United Nations headquarters. The United States is a member of the G7, G20, and OECD intergovernmental organizations. Almost all countries have embassies and many have consulates (official representatives) in the country. Likewise, nearly all countries host formal diplomatic missions with the United States, except Iran, North Korea, and Bhutan. Though Taiwan does not have formal diplomatic relations with the U.S., it maintains close unofficial relations. The United States regularly supplies Taiwan with military equipment to deter potential Chinese aggression. Its geopolitical attention also turned to the Indo-Pacific when the United States joined the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue with Australia, India, and Japan. The United States has a "Special Relationship" with the United Kingdom and strong ties with Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the Philippines, Japan, South Korea, Israel, and several European Union countries such as France, Italy, Germany, Spain, and Poland. The U.S. works closely with its NATO allies on military and national security issues, and with countries in the Americas through the Organization of American States and the United States–Mexico–Canada Free Trade Agreement. The U.S. exercises full international defense authority and responsibility for Micronesia, the Marshall Islands, and Palau through the Compact of Free Association. It has increasingly conducted strategic cooperation with India, while its ties with China have steadily deteriorated. Beginning in 2014, the U.S. had become a key ally of Ukraine. After Donald Trump was elected U.S. president in 2024, he sought to negotiate an end to the Russo-Ukrainian War. He paused all military aid to Ukraine in March 2025, although the aid resumed later. Trump also ended U.S. intelligence sharing with the country, but this too was eventually restored. The president is the commander-in-chief of the United States Armed Forces and appoints its leaders, the secretary of defense and the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The Department of Defense, headquartered at the Pentagon near Washington, D.C., administers five of the six service branches, which are made up of the U.S. Army, Marine Corps, Navy, Air Force, and Space Force. The Coast Guard is administered by the Department of Homeland Security in peacetime and can be transferred to the Department of the Navy in wartime. Total strength of the entire military is about 1.3 million active duty with an additional 400,000 in reserve. The United States spent $997 billion on its military in 2024, which is by far the largest amount of any country, making up 37% of global military spending and accounting for 3.4% of the country's GDP. The U.S. possesses 42% of the world's nuclear weapons—the second-largest stockpile after that of Russia. The U.S. military is widely regarded as the most powerful and advanced in the world. The United States has the third-largest combined armed forces in the world, behind the Chinese People's Liberation Army and Indian Armed Forces. The U.S. military operates about 800 bases and facilities abroad, and maintains deployments greater than 100 active duty personnel in 25 foreign countries. The United States has engaged in over 400 military interventions since its founding in 1776, with over half of these occurring between 1950 and 2019 and 25% occurring in the post-Cold War era. State defense forces (SDFs) are military units that operate under the sole authority of a state government. SDFs are authorized by state and federal law but are under the command of the state's governor. By contrast, the 54 U.S. National Guard organizations[t] fall under the dual control of state or territorial governments and the federal government; their units can also become federalized entities, but SDFs cannot be federalized. The National Guard personnel of a state or territory can be federalized by the president under the National Defense Act Amendments of 1933; this legislation created the Guard and provides for the integration of Army National Guard and Air National Guard units and personnel into the U.S. Army and (since 1947) the U.S. Air Force. The total number of National Guard members is about 430,000, while the estimated combined strength of SDFs is less than 10,000. There are about 18,000 U.S. police agencies from local to national level in the United States. Law in the United States is mainly enforced by local police departments and sheriff departments in their municipal or county jurisdictions. The state police departments have authority in their respective state, and federal agencies such as the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the U.S. Marshals Service have national jurisdiction and specialized duties, such as protecting civil rights, national security, enforcing U.S. federal courts' rulings and federal laws, and interstate criminal activity. State courts conduct almost all civil and criminal trials, while federal courts adjudicate the much smaller number of civil and criminal cases that relate to federal law. There is no unified "criminal justice system" in the United States. The American prison system is largely heterogenous, with thousands of relatively independent systems operating across federal, state, local, and tribal levels. In 2025, "these systems hold nearly 2 million people in 1,566 state prisons, 98 federal prisons, 3,116 local jails, 1,277 juvenile correctional facilities, 133 immigration detention facilities, and 80 Indian country jails, as well as in military prisons, civil commitment centers, state psychiatric hospitals, and prisons in the U.S. territories." Despite disparate systems of confinement, four main institutions dominate: federal prisons, state prisons, local jails, and juvenile correctional facilities. Federal prisons are run by the Federal Bureau of Prisons and hold pretrial detainees as well as people who have been convicted of federal crimes. State prisons, run by the department of corrections of each state, hold people sentenced and serving prison time (usually longer than one year) for felony offenses. Local jails are county or municipal facilities that incarcerate defendants prior to trial; they also hold those serving short sentences (typically under a year). Juvenile correctional facilities are operated by local or state governments and serve as longer-term placements for any minor adjudicated as delinquent and ordered by a judge to be confined. In January 2023, the United States had the sixth-highest per capita incarceration rate in the world—531 people per 100,000 inhabitants—and the largest prison and jail population in the world, with more than 1.9 million people incarcerated. An analysis of the World Health Organization Mortality Database from 2010 showed U.S. homicide rates "were 7 times higher than in other high-income countries, driven by a gun homicide rate that was 25 times higher". Economy The U.S. has a highly developed mixed economy that has been the world's largest nominally since about 1890. Its 2024 gross domestic product (GDP)[e] of more than $29 trillion constituted over 25% of nominal global economic output, or 15% at purchasing power parity (PPP). From 1983 to 2008, U.S. real compounded annual GDP growth was 3.3%, compared to a 2.3% weighted average for the rest of the G7. The country ranks first in the world by nominal GDP, second when adjusted for purchasing power parities (PPP), and ninth by PPP-adjusted GDP per capita. In February 2024, the total U.S. federal government debt was $34.4 trillion. Of the world's 500 largest companies by revenue, 138 were headquartered in the U.S. in 2025, the highest number of any country. The U.S. dollar is the currency most used in international transactions and the world's foremost reserve currency, backed by the country's dominant economy, its military, the petrodollar system, its large U.S. treasuries market, and its linked eurodollar. Several countries use it as their official currency, and in others it is the de facto currency. The U.S. has free trade agreements with several countries, including the USMCA. Although the United States has reached a post-industrial level of economic development and is often described as having a service economy, it remains a major industrial power; in 2024, the U.S. manufacturing sector was the world's second-largest by value output after China's. New York City is the world's principal financial center, and its metropolitan area is the world's largest metropolitan economy. The New York Stock Exchange and Nasdaq, both located in New York City, are the world's two largest stock exchanges by market capitalization and trade volume. The United States is at the forefront of technological advancement and innovation in many economic fields, especially in artificial intelligence; electronics and computers; pharmaceuticals; and medical, aerospace and military equipment. The country's economy is fueled by abundant natural resources, a well-developed infrastructure, and high productivity. The largest trading partners of the United States are the European Union, Mexico, Canada, China, Japan, South Korea, the United Kingdom, Vietnam, India, and Taiwan. The United States is the world's largest importer and second-largest exporter.[u] It is by far the world's largest exporter of services. Americans have the highest average household and employee income among OECD member states, and the fourth-highest median household income in 2023, up from sixth-highest in 2013. With personal consumption expenditures of over $18.5 trillion in 2023, the U.S. has a heavily consumer-driven economy and is the world's largest consumer market. The U.S. ranked first in the number of dollar billionaires and millionaires in 2023, with 735 billionaires and nearly 22 million millionaires. Wealth in the United States is highly concentrated; in 2011, the richest 10% of the adult population owned 72% of the country's household wealth, while the bottom 50% owned just 2%. U.S. wealth inequality increased substantially since the late 1980s, and income inequality in the U.S. reached a record high in 2019. In 2024, the country had some of the highest wealth and income inequality levels among OECD countries. Since the 1970s, there has been a decoupling of U.S. wage gains from worker productivity. In 2016, the top fifth of earners took home more than half of all income, giving the U.S. one of the widest income distributions among OECD countries. There were about 771,480 homeless persons in the U.S. in 2024. In 2022, 6.4 million children experienced food insecurity. Feeding America estimates that around one in five, or approximately 13 million, children experience hunger in the U.S. and do not know where or when they will get their next meal. Also in 2022, about 37.9 million people, or 11.5% of the U.S. population, were living in poverty. The United States has a smaller welfare state and redistributes less income through government action than most other high-income countries. It is the only advanced economy that does not guarantee its workers paid vacation nationally and one of a few countries in the world without federal paid family leave as a legal right. The United States has a higher percentage of low-income workers than almost any other developed country, largely because of a weak collective bargaining system and lack of government support for at-risk workers. The United States has been a leader in technological innovation since the late 19th century and scientific research since the mid-20th century. Methods for producing interchangeable parts and the establishment of a machine tool industry enabled the large-scale manufacturing of U.S. consumer products in the late 19th century. By the early 20th century, factory electrification, the introduction of the assembly line, and other labor-saving techniques created the system of mass production. In the 21st century, the United States continues to be one of the world's foremost scientific powers, though China has emerged as a major competitor in many fields. The U.S. has the highest research and development expenditures of any country and ranks ninth as a percentage of GDP. In 2022, the United States was (after China) the country with the second-highest number of published scientific papers. In 2021, the U.S. ranked second (also after China) by the number of patent applications, and third by trademark and industrial design applications (after China and Germany), according to World Intellectual Property Indicators. In 2025 the United States ranked third (after Switzerland and Sweden) in the Global Innovation Index. The United States is considered to be a world leader in the development of artificial intelligence technology. In 2023, the United States was ranked the second most technologically advanced country in the world (after South Korea) by Global Finance magazine. The United States has maintained a space program since the late 1950s, beginning with the establishment of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) in 1958. NASA's Apollo program (1961–1972) achieved the first crewed Moon landing with the 1969 Apollo 11 mission; it remains one of the agency's most significant milestones. Other major endeavors by NASA include the Space Shuttle program (1981–2011), the Voyager program (1972–present), the Hubble and James Webb space telescopes (launched in 1990 and 2021, respectively), and the multi-mission Mars Exploration Program (Spirit and Opportunity, Curiosity, and Perseverance). NASA is one of five agencies collaborating on the International Space Station (ISS); U.S. contributions to the ISS include several modules, including Destiny (2001), Harmony (2007), and Tranquility (2010), as well as ongoing logistical and operational support. The United States private sector dominates the global commercial spaceflight industry. Prominent American spaceflight contractors include Blue Origin, Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, and SpaceX. NASA programs such as the Commercial Crew Program, Commercial Resupply Services, Commercial Lunar Payload Services, and NextSTEP have facilitated growing private-sector involvement in American spaceflight. In 2023, the United States received approximately 84% of its energy from fossil fuel, and its largest source of energy was petroleum (38%), followed by natural gas (36%), renewable sources (9%), coal (9%), and nuclear power (9%). In 2022, the United States constituted about 4% of the world's population, but consumed around 16% of the world's energy. The U.S. ranks as the second-highest emitter of greenhouse gases behind China. The U.S. is the world's largest producer of nuclear power, generating around 30% of the world's nuclear electricity. It also has the highest number of nuclear power reactors of any country. From 2024, the U.S. plans to triple its nuclear power capacity by 2050. The United States' 4 million miles (6.4 million kilometers) of road network, owned almost entirely by state and local governments, is the longest in the world. The extensive Interstate Highway System that connects all major U.S. cities is funded mostly by the federal government but maintained by state departments of transportation. The system is further extended by state highways and some private toll roads. The U.S. is among the top ten countries with the highest vehicle ownership per capita (850 vehicles per 1,000 people) in 2022. A 2022 study found that 76% of U.S. commuters drive alone and 14% ride a bicycle, including bike owners and users of bike-sharing networks. About 11% use some form of public transportation. Public transportation in the United States is well developed in the largest urban areas, notably New York City, Washington, D.C., Boston, Philadelphia, Chicago, and San Francisco; otherwise, coverage is generally less extensive than in most other developed countries. The U.S. also has many relatively car-dependent localities. Long-distance intercity travel is provided primarily by airlines, but travel by rail is more common along the Northeast Corridor, the only high-speed rail in the U.S. that meets international standards. Amtrak, the country's government-sponsored national passenger rail company, has a relatively sparse network compared to that of Western European countries. Service is concentrated in the Northeast, California, the Midwest, the Pacific Northwest, and Virginia/Southeast. The United States has an extensive air transportation network. U.S. civilian airlines are all privately owned. The three largest airlines in the world, by total number of passengers carried, are U.S.-based; American Airlines became the global leader after its 2013 merger with US Airways. Of the 50 busiest airports in the world, 16 are in the United States, as well as five of the top 10. The world's busiest airport by passenger volume is Hartsfield–Jackson Atlanta International in Atlanta, Georgia. In 2022, most of the 19,969 U.S. airports were owned and operated by local government authorities, and there are also some private airports. Some 5,193 are designated as "public use", including for general aviation. The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) has provided security at most major airports since 2001. The country's rail transport network, the longest in the world at 182,412.3 mi (293,564.2 km), handles mostly freight (in contrast to more passenger-centered rail in Europe). Because they are often privately owned operations, U.S. railroads lag behind those of the rest of the world in terms of electrification. The country's inland waterways are the world's fifth-longest, totaling 25,482 mi (41,009 km). They are used extensively for freight, recreation, and a small amount of passenger traffic. Of the world's 50 busiest container ports, four are located in the United States, with the busiest in the country being the Port of Los Angeles. Demographics The U.S. Census Bureau reported 331,449,281 residents on April 1, 2020,[v] making the United States the third-most-populous country in the world, after India and China. The Census Bureau's official 2025 population estimate was 341,784,857, an increase of 3.1% since the 2020 census. According to the Bureau's U.S. Population Clock, on July 1, 2024, the U.S. population had a net gain of one person every 16 seconds, or about 5400 people per day. In 2023, 51% of Americans age 15 and over were married, 6% were widowed, 10% were divorced, and 34% had never been married. In 2023, the total fertility rate for the U.S. stood at 1.6 children per woman, and, at 23%, it had the world's highest rate of children living in single-parent households in 2019. Most Americans live in the suburbs of major metropolitan areas. The United States has a diverse population; 37 ancestry groups have more than one million members. White Americans with ancestry from Europe, the Middle East, or North Africa form the largest racial and ethnic group at 57.8% of the United States population. Hispanic and Latino Americans form the second-largest group and are 18.7% of the United States population. African Americans constitute the country's third-largest ancestry group and are 12.1% of the total U.S. population. Asian Americans are the country's fourth-largest group, composing 5.9% of the United States population. The country's 3.7 million Native Americans account for about 1%, and some 574 native tribes are recognized by the federal government. In 2024, the median age of the United States population was 39.1 years. While many languages and dialects are spoken in the United States, English is by far the most commonly spoken and written. De facto, English is the official language of the United States, and in 2025, Executive Order 14224 declared English official. However, the U.S. has never had a de jure official language, as Congress has never passed a law to designate English as official for all three federal branches. Some laws, such as U.S. naturalization requirements, nonetheless standardize English. Twenty-eight states and the United States Virgin Islands have laws that designate English as the sole official language; 19 states and the District of Columbia have no official language. Three states and four U.S. territories have recognized local or indigenous languages in addition to English: Hawaii (Hawaiian), Alaska (twenty Native languages),[w] South Dakota (Sioux), American Samoa (Samoan), Puerto Rico (Spanish), Guam (Chamorro), and the Northern Mariana Islands (Carolinian and Chamorro). In total, 169 Native American languages are spoken in the United States. In Puerto Rico, Spanish is more widely spoken than English. According to the American Community Survey (2020), some 245.4 million people in the U.S. age five and older spoke only English at home. About 41.2 million spoke Spanish at home, making it the second most commonly used language. Other languages spoken at home by one million people or more include Chinese (3.40 million), Tagalog (1.71 million), Vietnamese (1.52 million), Arabic (1.39 million), French (1.18 million), Korean (1.07 million), and Russian (1.04 million). German, spoken by 1 million people at home in 2010, fell to 857,000 total speakers in 2020. America's immigrant population is by far the world's largest in absolute terms. In 2022, there were 87.7 million immigrants and U.S.-born children of immigrants in the United States, accounting for nearly 27% of the overall U.S. population. In 2017, out of the U.S. foreign-born population, some 45% (20.7 million) were naturalized citizens, 27% (12.3 million) were lawful permanent residents, 6% (2.2 million) were temporary lawful residents, and 23% (10.5 million) were unauthorized immigrants. In 2019, the top countries of origin for immigrants were Mexico (24% of immigrants), India (6%), China (5%), the Philippines (4.5%), and El Salvador (3%). In fiscal year 2022, over one million immigrants (most of whom entered through family reunification) were granted legal residence. The undocumented immigrant population in the U.S. reached a record high of 14 million in 2023. The First Amendment guarantees the free exercise of religion in the country and forbids Congress from passing laws respecting its establishment. Religious practice is widespread, among the most diverse in the world, and profoundly vibrant. The country has the world's largest Christian population, which includes the fourth-largest population of Catholics. Other notable faiths include Judaism, Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam, New Age, and Native American religions. Religious practice varies significantly by region. "Ceremonial deism" is common in American culture. The overwhelming majority of Americans believe in a higher power or spiritual force, engage in spiritual practices such as prayer, and consider themselves religious or spiritual. In the Southern United States' "Bible Belt", evangelical Protestantism plays a significant role culturally; New England and the Western United States tend to be more secular. Mormonism, a Restorationist movement founded in the U.S. in 1847, is the predominant religion in Utah and a major religion in Idaho. About 82% of Americans live in metropolitan areas, particularly in suburbs; about half of those reside in cities with populations over 50,000. In 2022, 333 incorporated municipalities had populations over 100,000, nine cities had more than one million residents, and four cities—New York City, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Houston—had populations exceeding two million. Many U.S. metropolitan populations are growing rapidly, particularly in the South and West. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), average U.S. life expectancy at birth reached 79.0 years in 2024, its highest recorded level. This was an increase of 0.6 years over 2023. The CDC attributed the improvement to a significant fall in the number of fatal drug overdoses in the country, noting that "heart disease continues to be the leading cause of death in the United States, followed by cancer and unintentional injuries." In 2024, life expectancy at birth for American men rose to 76.5 years (+0.7 years compared to 2023), while life expectancy for women was 81.4 years (+0.3 years). Starting in 1998, life expectancy in the U.S. fell behind that of other wealthy industrialized countries, and Americans' "health disadvantage" gap has been increasing ever since. The Commonwealth Fund reported in 2020 that the U.S. had the highest suicide rate among high-income countries. Approximately one-third of the U.S. adult population is obese and another third is overweight. The U.S. healthcare system far outspends that of any other country, measured both in per capita spending and as a percentage of GDP, but attains worse healthcare outcomes when compared to peer countries for reasons that are debated. The United States is the only developed country without a system of universal healthcare, and a significant proportion of the population that does not carry health insurance. Government-funded healthcare coverage for the poor (Medicaid) and for those age 65 and older (Medicare) is available to Americans who meet the programs' income or age qualifications. In 2010, then-President Obama passed the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.[x] Abortion in the United States is not federally protected, and is illegal or restricted in 17 states. American primary and secondary education, known in the U.S. as K–12 ("kindergarten through 12th grade"), is decentralized. School systems are operated by state, territorial, and sometimes municipal governments and regulated by the U.S. Department of Education. In general, children are required to attend school or an approved homeschool from the age of five or six (kindergarten or first grade) until they are 18 years old. This often brings students through the 12th grade, the final year of a U.S. high school, but some states and territories allow them to leave school earlier, at age 16 or 17. The U.S. spends more on education per student than any other country, an average of $18,614 per year per public elementary and secondary school student in 2020–2021. Among Americans age 25 and older, 92.2% graduated from high school, 62.7% attended some college, 37.7% earned a bachelor's degree, and 14.2% earned a graduate degree. The U.S. literacy rate is near-universal. The U.S. has produced the most Nobel Prize winners of any country, with 411 (having won 413 awards). U.S. tertiary or higher education has earned a global reputation. Many of the world's top universities, as listed by various ranking organizations, are in the United States, including 19 of the top 25. American higher education is dominated by state university systems, although the country's many private universities and colleges enroll about 20% of all American students. Local community colleges generally offer open admissions, lower tuition, and coursework leading to a two-year associate degree or a non-degree certificate. As for public expenditures on higher education, the U.S. spends more per student than the OECD average, and Americans spend more than all nations in combined public and private spending. Colleges and universities directly funded by the federal government do not charge tuition and are limited to military personnel and government employees, including: the U.S. service academies, the Naval Postgraduate School, and military staff colleges. Despite some student loan forgiveness programs in place, student loan debt increased by 102% between 2010 and 2020, and exceeded $1.7 trillion in 2022. Culture and society The United States is home to a wide variety of ethnic groups, traditions, and customs. The country has been described as having the values of individualism and personal autonomy, as well as a strong work ethic and competitiveness. Voluntary altruism towards others also plays a major role; according to a 2016 study by the Charities Aid Foundation, Americans donated 1.44% of total GDP to charity—the highest rate in the world by a large margin. Americans have traditionally been characterized by a unifying political belief in an "American Creed" emphasizing consent of the governed, liberty, equality under the law, democracy, social equality, property rights, and a preference for limited government. The U.S. has acquired significant hard and soft power through its diplomatic influence, economic power, military alliances, and cultural exports such as American movies, music, video games, sports, and food. The influence that the United States exerts on other countries through soft power is referred to as Americanization. Nearly all present Americans or their ancestors came from Europe, Africa, or Asia (the "Old World") within the past five centuries. Mainstream American culture is a Western culture largely derived from the traditions of European immigrants with influences from many other sources, such as traditions brought by slaves from Africa. More recent immigration from Asia and especially Latin America has added to a cultural mix that has been described as a homogenizing melting pot, and a heterogeneous salad bowl, with immigrants contributing to, and often assimilating into, mainstream American culture. Under the First Amendment to the Constitution, the United States is considered to have the strongest protections of free speech of any country. Flag desecration, hate speech, blasphemy, and lese majesty are all forms of protected expression. A 2016 Pew Research Center poll found that Americans were the most supportive of free expression of any polity measured. Additionally, they are the "most supportive of freedom of the press and the right to use the Internet without government censorship". The U.S. is a socially progressive country with permissive attitudes surrounding human sexuality. LGBTQ rights in the United States are among the most advanced by global standards. The American Dream, or the perception that Americans enjoy high levels of social mobility, plays a key role in attracting immigrants. Whether this perception is accurate has been a topic of debate. While mainstream culture holds that the United States is a classless society, scholars identify significant differences between the country's social classes, affecting socialization, language, and values. Americans tend to greatly value socioeconomic achievement, but being ordinary or average is promoted by some as a noble condition as well. The National Foundation on the Arts and the Humanities is an agency of the United States federal government that was established in 1965 with the purpose to "develop and promote a broadly conceived national policy of support for the humanities and the arts in the United States, and for institutions which preserve the cultural heritage of the United States." It is composed of four sub-agencies: Colonial American authors were influenced by John Locke and other Enlightenment philosophers. The American Revolutionary Period (1765–1783) is notable for the political writings of Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Paine, and Thomas Jefferson. Shortly before and after the Revolutionary War, the newspaper rose to prominence, filling a demand for anti-British national literature. An early novel is William Hill Brown's The Power of Sympathy, published in 1791. Writer and critic John Neal in the early- to mid-19th century helped advance America toward a unique literature and culture by criticizing predecessors such as Washington Irving for imitating their British counterparts, and by influencing writers such as Edgar Allan Poe, who took American poetry and short fiction in new directions. Ralph Waldo Emerson and Margaret Fuller pioneered the influential Transcendentalism movement; Henry David Thoreau, author of Walden, was influenced by this movement. The conflict surrounding abolitionism inspired writers, like Harriet Beecher Stowe, and authors of slave narratives, such as Frederick Douglass. Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter (1850) explored the dark side of American history, as did Herman Melville's Moby-Dick (1851). Major American poets of the 19th century American Renaissance include Walt Whitman, Melville, and Emily Dickinson. Mark Twain was the first major American writer to be born in the West. Henry James achieved international recognition with novels like The Portrait of a Lady (1881). As literacy rates rose, periodicals published more stories centered around industrial workers, women, and the rural poor. Naturalism, regionalism, and realism were the major literary movements of the period. While modernism generally took on an international character, modernist authors working within the United States more often rooted their work in specific regions, peoples, and cultures. Following the Great Migration to northern cities, African-American and black West Indian authors of the Harlem Renaissance developed an independent tradition of literature that rebuked a history of inequality and celebrated black culture. An important cultural export during the Jazz Age, these writings were a key influence on Négritude, a philosophy emerging in the 1930s among francophone writers of the African diaspora. In the 1950s, an ideal of homogeneity led many authors to attempt to write the Great American Novel, while the Beat Generation rejected this conformity, using styles that elevated the impact of the spoken word over mechanics to describe drug use, sexuality, and the failings of society. Contemporary literature is more pluralistic than in previous eras, with the closest thing to a unifying feature being a trend toward self-conscious experiments with language. Twelve American laureates have won the Nobel Prize in Literature. Media in the United States is broadly uncensored, with the First Amendment providing significant protections, as reiterated in New York Times Co. v. United States. The four major broadcasters in the U.S. are the National Broadcasting Company (NBC), Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS), American Broadcasting Company (ABC), and Fox Broadcasting Company (Fox). The four major broadcast television networks are all commercial entities. The U.S. cable television system offers hundreds of channels catering to a variety of niches. In 2021, about 83% of Americans over age 12 listened to broadcast radio, while about 40% listened to podcasts. In the prior year, there were 15,460 licensed full-power radio stations in the U.S. according to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). Much of the public radio broadcasting is supplied by National Public Radio (NPR), incorporated in February 1970 under the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967. U.S. newspapers with a global reach and reputation include The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and USA Today. About 800 publications are produced in Spanish. With few exceptions, newspapers are privately owned, either by large chains such as Gannett or McClatchy, which own dozens or even hundreds of newspapers; by small chains that own a handful of papers; or, in an increasingly rare situation, by individuals or families. Major cities often have alternative newspapers to complement the mainstream daily papers, such as The Village Voice in New York City and LA Weekly in Los Angeles. The five most-visited websites in the world are Google, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, and ChatGPT—all of them American-owned. Other popular platforms used include X (formerly Twitter) and Amazon. In 2025, the U.S. was the world's second-largest video game market by revenue (after China). In 2015, the U.S. video game industry consisted of 2,457 companies that employed around 220,000 jobs and generated $30.4 billion in revenue. There are 444 game publishers, developers, and hardware companies in California alone. According to the Game Developers Conference (GDC), the U.S. is the top location for video game development, with 58% of the world's game developers based there in 2025. The United States is well known for its theater. Mainstream theater in the United States derives from the old European theatrical tradition and has been heavily influenced by the British theater. By the middle of the 19th century, America had created new distinct dramatic forms in the Tom Shows, the showboat theater and the minstrel show. The central hub of the American theater scene is the Theater District in Manhattan, with its divisions of Broadway, off-Broadway, and off-off-Broadway. Many movie and television celebrities have gotten their big break working in New York productions. Outside New York City, many cities have professional regional or resident theater companies that produce their own seasons. The biggest-budget theatrical productions are musicals. U.S. theater has an active community theater culture. The Tony Awards recognizes excellence in live Broadway theater and are presented at an annual ceremony in Manhattan. The awards are given for Broadway productions and performances. One is also given for regional theater. Several discretionary non-competitive awards are given as well, including a Special Tony Award, the Tony Honors for Excellence in Theatre, and the Isabelle Stevenson Award. Folk art in colonial America grew out of artisanal craftsmanship in communities that allowed commonly trained people to individually express themselves. It was distinct from Europe's tradition of high art, which was less accessible and generally less relevant to early American settlers. Cultural movements in art and craftsmanship in colonial America generally lagged behind those of Western Europe. For example, the prevailing medieval style of woodworking and primitive sculpture became integral to early American folk art, despite the emergence of Renaissance styles in England in the late 16th and early 17th centuries. The new English styles would have been early enough to make a considerable impact on American folk art, but American styles and forms had already been firmly adopted. Not only did styles change slowly in early America, but there was a tendency for rural artisans there to continue their traditional forms longer than their urban counterparts did—and far longer than those in Western Europe. The Hudson River School was a mid-19th-century movement in the visual arts tradition of European naturalism. The 1913 Armory Show in New York City, an exhibition of European modernist art, shocked the public and transformed the U.S. art scene. American Realism and American Regionalism sought to reflect and give America new ways of looking at itself. Georgia O'Keeffe, Marsden Hartley, and others experimented with new and individualistic styles, which would become known as American modernism. Major artistic movements such as the abstract expressionism of Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning and the pop art of Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein developed largely in the United States. Major photographers include Alfred Stieglitz, Edward Steichen, Dorothea Lange, Edward Weston, James Van Der Zee, Ansel Adams, and Gordon Parks. The tide of modernism and then postmodernism has brought global fame to American architects, including Frank Lloyd Wright, Philip Johnson, and Frank Gehry. The Metropolitan Museum of Art in Manhattan is the largest art museum in the United States and the fourth-largest in the world. American folk music encompasses numerous music genres, variously known as traditional music, traditional folk music, contemporary folk music, or roots music. Many traditional songs have been sung within the same family or folk group for generations, and sometimes trace back to such origins as the British Isles, mainland Europe, or Africa. The rhythmic and lyrical styles of African-American music in particular have influenced American music. Banjos were brought to America through the slave trade. Minstrel shows incorporating the instrument into their acts led to its increased popularity and widespread production in the 19th century. The electric guitar, first invented in the 1930s, and mass-produced by the 1940s, had an enormous influence on popular music, in particular due to the development of rock and roll. The synthesizer, turntablism, and electronic music were also largely developed in the U.S. Elements from folk idioms such as the blues and old-time music were adopted and transformed into popular genres with global audiences. Jazz grew from blues and ragtime in the early 20th century, developing from the innovations and recordings of composers such as W.C. Handy and Jelly Roll Morton. Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington increased its popularity early in the 20th century. Country music developed in the 1920s, bluegrass and rhythm and blues in the 1940s, and rock and roll in the 1950s. In the 1960s, Bob Dylan emerged from the folk revival to become one of the country's most celebrated songwriters. The musical forms of punk and hip hop both originated in the United States in the 1970s. The United States has the world's largest music market, with a total retail value of $15.9 billion in 2022. Most of the world's major record companies are based in the U.S.; they are represented by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA). Mid-20th-century American pop stars, such as Frank Sinatra and Elvis Presley, became global celebrities and best-selling music artists, as have artists of the late 20th century, such as Michael Jackson, Madonna, Whitney Houston, and Mariah Carey, and of the early 21st century, such as Eminem, Britney Spears, Lady Gaga, Katy Perry, Taylor Swift and Beyoncé. The United States has the world's largest apparel market by revenue. Apart from professional business attire, American fashion is eclectic and predominantly informal. Americans' diverse cultural roots are reflected in their clothing; however, sneakers, jeans, T-shirts, and baseball caps are emblematic of American styles. New York, with its Fashion Week, is considered to be one of the "Big Four" global fashion capitals, along with Paris, Milan, and London. A study demonstrated that general proximity to Manhattan's Garment District has been synonymous with American fashion since its inception in the early 20th century. A number of well-known designer labels, among them Tommy Hilfiger, Ralph Lauren, Tom Ford and Calvin Klein, are headquartered in Manhattan. Labels cater to niche markets, such as preteens. New York Fashion Week is one of the most influential fashion shows in the world, and is held twice each year in Manhattan; the annual Met Gala, also in Manhattan, has been called the fashion world's "biggest night". The U.S. film industry has a worldwide influence and following. Hollywood, a district in central Los Angeles, the nation's second-most populous city, is also metonymous for the American filmmaking industry. The major film studios of the United States are the primary source of the most commercially successful movies selling the most tickets in the world. Largely centered in the New York City region from its beginnings in the late 19th century through the first decades of the 20th century, the U.S. film industry has since been primarily based in and around Hollywood. Nonetheless, American film companies have been subject to the forces of globalization in the 21st century, and an increasing number of films are made elsewhere. The Academy Awards, popularly known as "the Oscars", have been held annually by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences since 1929, and the Golden Globe Awards have been held annually since January 1944. The industry peaked in what is commonly referred to as the "Golden Age of Hollywood", from the early sound period until the early 1960s, with screen actors such as John Wayne and Marilyn Monroe becoming iconic figures. In the 1970s, "New Hollywood", or the "Hollywood Renaissance", was defined by grittier films influenced by French and Italian realist pictures of the post-war period. The 21st century has been marked by the rise of American streaming platforms, which came to rival traditional cinema. Early settlers were introduced by Native Americans to foods such as turkey, sweet potatoes, corn, squash, and maple syrup. Of the most enduring and pervasive examples are variations of the native dish called succotash. Early settlers and later immigrants combined these with foods they were familiar with, such as wheat flour, beef, and milk, to create a distinctive American cuisine. New World crops, especially pumpkin, corn, potatoes, and turkey as the main course are part of a shared national menu on Thanksgiving, when many Americans prepare or purchase traditional dishes to celebrate the occasion. Characteristic American dishes such as apple pie, fried chicken, doughnuts, french fries, macaroni and cheese, ice cream, hamburgers, hot dogs, and American pizza derive from the recipes of various immigrant groups. Mexican dishes such as burritos and tacos preexisted the United States in areas later annexed from Mexico, and adaptations of Chinese cuisine as well as pasta dishes freely adapted from Italian sources are all widely consumed. American chefs have had a significant impact on society both domestically and internationally. In 1946, the Culinary Institute of America was founded by Katharine Angell and Frances Roth. This would become the United States' most prestigious culinary school, where many of the most talented American chefs would study prior to successful careers. The United States restaurant industry was projected at $899 billion in sales for 2020, and employed more than 15 million people, representing 10% of the nation's workforce directly. It is the country's second-largest private employer and the third-largest employer overall. The United States is home to over 220 Michelin star-rated restaurants, 70 of which are in New York City. Wine has been produced in what is now the United States since the 1500s, with the first widespread production beginning in what is now New Mexico in 1628. In the modern U.S., wine production is undertaken in all fifty states, with California producing 84 percent of all U.S. wine. With more than 1,100,000 acres (4,500 km2) under vine, the United States is the fourth-largest wine-producing country in the world, after Italy, Spain, and France. The classic American diner, a casual restaurant type originally intended for the working class, emerged during the 19th century from converted railroad dining cars made stationary. The diner soon evolved into purpose-built structures whose number expanded greatly in the 20th century. The American fast-food industry developed alongside the nation's car culture. American restaurants developed the drive-in format in the 1920s, which they began to replace with the drive-through format by the 1940s. American fast-food restaurant chains, such as McDonald's, Burger King, Chick-fil-A, Kentucky Fried Chicken, Dunkin' Donuts and many others, have numerous outlets around the world. The most popular spectator sports in the U.S. are American football, basketball, baseball, soccer, and ice hockey. Their premier leagues are, respectively, the National Football League, the National Basketball Association, Major League Baseball, Major League Soccer, and the National Hockey League, All these leagues enjoy wide-ranging domestic media coverage and, except for the MLS, all are considered the preeminent leagues in their respective sports in the world. While most major U.S. sports such as baseball and American football have evolved out of European practices, basketball, volleyball, skateboarding, and snowboarding are American inventions, many of which have become popular worldwide. Lacrosse and surfing arose from Native American and Native Hawaiian activities that predate European contact. The market for professional sports in the United States was approximately $69 billion in July 2013, roughly 50% larger than that of Europe, the Middle East, and Africa combined. American football is by several measures the most popular spectator sport in the United States. Although American football does not have a substantial following in other nations, the NFL does have the highest average attendance (67,254) of any professional sports league in the world. In the year 2024, the NFL generated over $23 billion, making them the most valued professional sports league in the United States and the world. Baseball has been regarded as the U.S. "national sport" since the late 19th century. The most-watched individual sports in the U.S. are golf and auto racing, particularly NASCAR and IndyCar. On the collegiate level, earnings for the member institutions exceed $1 billion annually, and college football and basketball attract large audiences, as the NCAA March Madness tournament and the College Football Playoff are some of the most watched national sporting events. In the U.S., the intercollegiate sports level serves as the main feeder system for professional and Olympic sports, with significant exceptions such as Minor League Baseball. This differs greatly from practices in nearly all other countries, where publicly and privately funded sports organizations serve this function. Eight Olympic Games have taken place in the United States. The 1904 Summer Olympics in St. Louis, Missouri, were the first-ever Olympic Games held outside of Europe. The Olympic Games will be held in the U.S. for a ninth time when Los Angeles hosts the 2028 Summer Olympics. U.S. athletes have won a total of 2,968 medals (1,179 gold) at the Olympic Games, the most of any country. In other international competition, the United States is the home of a number of prestigious events, including the America's Cup, World Baseball Classic, the U.S. Open, and the Masters Tournament. The U.S. men's national soccer team has qualified for eleven World Cups, while the women's national team has won the FIFA Women's World Cup and Olympic soccer tournament four and five times, respectively. The 1999 FIFA Women's World Cup was hosted by the United States. Its final match was attended by 90,185, setting the world record for largest women's sporting event crowd at the time. The United States hosted the 1994 FIFA World Cup and will co-host, along with Canada and Mexico, the 2026 FIFA World Cup. See also Notes References This article incorporates text from a free content work. Licensed under CC BY-SA IGO 3.0 (license statement/permission). Text taken from World Food and Agriculture – Statistical Yearbook 2023, FAO, FAO. External links 40°N 100°W / 40°N 100°W / 40; -100 (United States of America) |
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[SOURCE: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars#cite_ref-10.1038/d41586-023-03271-4_65-0] | [TOKENS: 11899] |
Contents Mars Mars is the fourth planet from the Sun. It is also known as the "Red Planet", for its orange-red appearance. Mars is a desert-like rocky planet with a tenuous atmosphere that is primarily carbon dioxide (CO2). At the average surface level the atmospheric pressure is a few thousandths of Earth's, atmospheric temperature ranges from −153 to 20 °C (−243 to 68 °F), and cosmic radiation is high. Mars retains some water, in the ground as well as thinly in the atmosphere, forming cirrus clouds, fog, frost, larger polar regions of permafrost and ice caps (with seasonal CO2 snow), but no bodies of liquid surface water. Its surface gravity is roughly a third of Earth's or double that of the Moon. Its diameter, 6,779 km (4,212 mi), is about half the Earth's, or twice the Moon's, and its surface area is the size of all the dry land of Earth. Fine dust is prevalent across the surface and the atmosphere, being picked up and spread at the low Martian gravity even by the weak wind of the tenuous atmosphere. The terrain of Mars roughly follows a north-south divide, the Martian dichotomy, with the northern hemisphere mainly consisting of relatively flat, low lying plains, and the southern hemisphere of cratered highlands. Geologically, the planet is fairly active with marsquakes trembling underneath the ground, but also hosts many enormous volcanoes that are extinct (the tallest is Olympus Mons, 21.9 km or 13.6 mi tall), as well as one of the largest canyons in the Solar System (Valles Marineris, 4,000 km or 2,500 mi long). Mars has two natural satellites that are small and irregular in shape: Phobos and Deimos. With a significant axial tilt of 25 degrees, Mars experiences seasons, like Earth (which has an axial tilt of 23.5 degrees). A Martian solar year is equal to 1.88 Earth years (687 Earth days), a Martian solar day (sol) is equal to 24.6 hours. Mars formed along with the other planets approximately 4.5 billion years ago. During the martian Noachian period (4.5 to 3.5 billion years ago), its surface was marked by meteor impacts, valley formation, erosion, the possible presence of water oceans and the loss of its magnetosphere. The Hesperian period (beginning 3.5 billion years ago and ending 3.3–2.9 billion years ago) was dominated by widespread volcanic activity and flooding that carved immense outflow channels. The Amazonian period, which continues to the present, is the currently dominating and remaining influence on geological processes. Because of Mars's geological history, the possibility of past or present life on Mars remains an area of active scientific investigation, with some possible traces needing further examination. Being visible with the naked eye in Earth's sky as a red wandering star, Mars has been observed throughout history, acquiring diverse associations in different cultures. In 1963 the first flight to Mars took place with Mars 1, but communication was lost en route. The first successful flyby exploration of Mars was conducted in 1965 with Mariner 4. In 1971 Mariner 9 entered orbit around Mars, being the first spacecraft to orbit any body other than the Moon, Sun or Earth; following in the same year were the first uncontrolled impact (Mars 2) and first successful landing (Mars 3) on Mars. Probes have been active on Mars continuously since 1997. At times, more than ten probes have simultaneously operated in orbit or on the surface, more than at any other planet beyond Earth. Mars is an often proposed target for future crewed exploration missions, though no such mission is currently planned. Natural history Scientists have theorized that during the Solar System's formation, Mars was created as the result of a random process of run-away accretion of material from the protoplanetary disk that orbited the Sun. Mars has many distinctive chemical features caused by its position in the Solar System. Elements with comparatively low boiling points, such as chlorine, phosphorus, and sulfur, are much more common on Mars than on Earth; these elements were probably pushed outward by the young Sun's energetic solar wind. After the formation of the planets, the inner Solar System may have been subjected to the so-called Late Heavy Bombardment. About 60% of the surface of Mars shows a record of impacts from that era, whereas much of the remaining surface is probably underlain by immense impact basins caused by those events. However, more recent modeling has disputed the existence of the Late Heavy Bombardment. There is evidence of an enormous impact basin in the Northern Hemisphere of Mars, spanning 10,600 by 8,500 kilometres (6,600 by 5,300 mi), or roughly four times the size of the Moon's South Pole–Aitken basin, which would be the largest impact basin yet discovered if confirmed. It has been hypothesized that the basin was formed when Mars was struck by a Pluto-sized body about four billion years ago. The event, thought to be the cause of the Martian hemispheric dichotomy, created the smooth Borealis basin that covers 40% of the planet. A 2023 study shows evidence, based on the orbital inclination of Deimos (a small moon of Mars), that Mars may once have had a ring system 3.5 billion years to 4 billion years ago. This ring system may have been formed from a moon, 20 times more massive than Phobos, orbiting Mars billions of years ago; and Phobos would be a remnant of that ring. Epochs: The geological history of Mars can be split into many periods, but the following are the three primary periods: Geological activity is still taking place on Mars. The Athabasca Valles is home to sheet-like lava flows created about 200 million years ago. Water flows in the grabens called the Cerberus Fossae occurred less than 20 million years ago, indicating equally recent volcanic intrusions. The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has captured images of avalanches. Physical characteristics Mars is approximately half the diameter of Earth or twice that of the Moon, with a surface area only slightly less than the total area of Earth's dry land. Mars is less dense than Earth, having about 15% of Earth's volume and 11% of Earth's mass, resulting in about 38% of Earth's surface gravity. Mars is the only presently known example of a desert planet, a rocky planet with a surface akin to that of Earth's deserts. The red-orange appearance of the Martian surface is caused by iron(III) oxide (nanophase Fe2O3) and the iron(III) oxide-hydroxide mineral goethite. It can look like butterscotch; other common surface colors include golden, brown, tan, and greenish, depending on the minerals present. Like Earth, Mars is differentiated into a dense metallic core overlaid by less dense rocky layers. The outermost layer is the crust, which is on average about 42–56 kilometres (26–35 mi) thick, with a minimum thickness of 6 kilometres (3.7 mi) in Isidis Planitia, and a maximum thickness of 117 kilometres (73 mi) in the southern Tharsis plateau. For comparison, Earth's crust averages 27.3 ± 4.8 km in thickness. The most abundant elements in the Martian crust are silicon, oxygen, iron, magnesium, aluminum, calcium, and potassium. Mars is confirmed to be seismically active; in 2019, it was reported that InSight had detected and recorded over 450 marsquakes and related events. Beneath the crust is a silicate mantle responsible for many of the tectonic and volcanic features on the planet's surface. The upper Martian mantle is a low-velocity zone, where the velocity of seismic waves is lower than surrounding depth intervals. The mantle appears to be rigid down to the depth of about 250 km, giving Mars a very thick lithosphere compared to Earth. Below this the mantle gradually becomes more ductile, and the seismic wave velocity starts to grow again. The Martian mantle does not appear to have a thermally insulating layer analogous to Earth's lower mantle; instead, below 1050 km in depth, it becomes mineralogically similar to Earth's transition zone. At the bottom of the mantle lies a basal liquid silicate layer approximately 150–180 km thick. The Martian mantle appears to be highly heterogenous, with dense fragments up to 4 km across, likely injected deep into the planet by colossal impacts ~4.5 billion years ago; high-frequency waves from eight marsquakes slowed as they passed these localized regions, and modeling indicates the heterogeneities are compositionally distinct debris preserved because Mars lacks plate tectonics and has a sluggishly convecting interior that prevents complete homogenization. Mars's iron and nickel core is at least partially molten, and may have a solid inner core. It is around half of Mars's radius, approximately 1650–1675 km, and is enriched in light elements such as sulfur, oxygen, carbon, and hydrogen. The temperature of the core is estimated to be 2000–2400 K, compared to 5400–6230 K for Earth's solid inner core. In 2025, based on data from the InSight lander, a group of researchers reported the detection of a solid inner core 613 kilometres (381 mi) ± 67 kilometres (42 mi) in radius. Mars is a terrestrial planet with a surface that consists of minerals containing silicon and oxygen, metals, and other elements that typically make up rock. The Martian surface is primarily composed of tholeiitic basalt, although parts are more silica-rich than typical basalt and may be similar to andesitic rocks on Earth, or silica glass. Regions of low albedo suggest concentrations of plagioclase feldspar, with northern low albedo regions displaying higher than normal concentrations of sheet silicates and high-silicon glass. Parts of the southern highlands include detectable amounts of high-calcium pyroxenes. Localized concentrations of hematite and olivine have been found. Much of the surface is deeply covered by finely grained iron(III) oxide dust. The Phoenix lander returned data showing Martian soil to be slightly alkaline and containing elements such as magnesium, sodium, potassium and chlorine. These nutrients are found in soils on Earth, and are necessary for plant growth. Experiments performed by the lander showed that the Martian soil has a basic pH of 7.7, and contains 0.6% perchlorate by weight, concentrations that are toxic to humans. Streaks are common across Mars and new ones appear frequently on steep slopes of craters, troughs, and valleys. The streaks are dark at first and get lighter with age. The streaks can start in a tiny area, then spread out for hundreds of metres. They have been seen to follow the edges of boulders and other obstacles in their path. The commonly accepted hypotheses include that they are dark underlying layers of soil revealed after avalanches of bright dust or dust devils. Several other explanations have been put forward, including those that involve water or even the growth of organisms. Environmental radiation levels on the surface are on average 0.64 millisieverts of radiation per day, and significantly less than the radiation of 1.84 millisieverts per day or 22 millirads per day during the flight to and from Mars. For comparison the radiation levels in low Earth orbit, where Earth's space stations orbit, are around 0.5 millisieverts of radiation per day. Hellas Planitia has the lowest surface radiation at about 0.342 millisieverts per day, featuring lava tubes southwest of Hadriacus Mons with potentially levels as low as 0.064 millisieverts per day, comparable to radiation levels during flights on Earth. Although Mars has no evidence of a structured global magnetic field, observations show that parts of the planet's crust have been magnetized, suggesting that alternating polarity reversals of its dipole field have occurred in the past. This paleomagnetism of magnetically susceptible minerals is similar to the alternating bands found on Earth's ocean floors. One hypothesis, published in 1999 and re-examined in October 2005 (with the help of the Mars Global Surveyor), is that these bands suggest plate tectonic activity on Mars four billion years ago, before the planetary dynamo ceased to function and the planet's magnetic field faded. Geography and features Although better remembered for mapping the Moon, Johann Heinrich von Mädler and Wilhelm Beer were the first areographers. They began by establishing that most of Mars's surface features were permanent and by more precisely determining the planet's rotation period. In 1840, Mädler combined ten years of observations and drew the first map of Mars. Features on Mars are named from a variety of sources. Albedo features are named for classical mythology. Craters larger than roughly 50 km are named for deceased scientists and writers and others who have contributed to the study of Mars. Smaller craters are named for towns and villages of the world with populations of less than 100,000. Large valleys are named for the word "Mars" or "star" in various languages; smaller valleys are named for rivers. Large albedo features retain many of the older names but are often updated to reflect new knowledge of the nature of the features. For example, Nix Olympica (the snows of Olympus) has become Olympus Mons (Mount Olympus). The surface of Mars as seen from Earth is divided into two kinds of areas, with differing albedo. The paler plains covered with dust and sand rich in reddish iron oxides were once thought of as Martian "continents" and given names like Arabia Terra (land of Arabia) or Amazonis Planitia (Amazonian plain). The dark features were thought to be seas, hence their names Mare Erythraeum, Mare Sirenum and Aurorae Sinus. The largest dark feature seen from Earth is Syrtis Major Planum. The permanent northern polar ice cap is named Planum Boreum. The southern cap is called Planum Australe. Mars's equator is defined by its rotation, but the location of its Prime Meridian was specified, as was Earth's (at Greenwich), by choice of an arbitrary point; Mädler and Beer selected a line for their first maps of Mars in 1830. After the spacecraft Mariner 9 provided extensive imagery of Mars in 1972, a small crater (later called Airy-0), located in the Sinus Meridiani ("Middle Bay" or "Meridian Bay"), was chosen by Merton E. Davies, Harold Masursky, and Gérard de Vaucouleurs for the definition of 0.0° longitude to coincide with the original selection. Because Mars has no oceans, and hence no "sea level", a zero-elevation surface had to be selected as a reference level; this is called the areoid of Mars, analogous to the terrestrial geoid. Zero altitude was defined by the height at which there is 610.5 Pa (6.105 mbar) of atmospheric pressure. This pressure corresponds to the triple point of water, and it is about 0.6% of the sea level surface pressure on Earth (0.006 atm). For mapping purposes, the United States Geological Survey divides the surface of Mars into thirty cartographic quadrangles, each named for a classical albedo feature it contains. In April 2023, The New York Times reported an updated global map of Mars based on images from the Hope spacecraft. A related, but much more detailed, global Mars map was released by NASA on 16 April 2023. The vast upland region Tharsis contains several massive volcanoes, which include the shield volcano Olympus Mons. The edifice is over 600 km (370 mi) wide. Because the mountain is so large, with complex structure at its edges, giving a definite height to it is difficult. Its local relief, from the foot of the cliffs which form its northwest margin to its peak, is over 21 km (13 mi), a little over twice the height of Mauna Kea as measured from its base on the ocean floor. The total elevation change from the plains of Amazonis Planitia, over 1,000 km (620 mi) to the northwest, to the summit approaches 26 km (16 mi), roughly three times the height of Mount Everest, which in comparison stands at just over 8.8 kilometres (5.5 mi). Consequently, Olympus Mons is either the tallest or second-tallest mountain in the Solar System; the only known mountain which might be taller is the Rheasilvia peak on the asteroid Vesta, at 20–25 km (12–16 mi). The dichotomy of Martian topography is striking: northern plains flattened by lava flows contrast with the southern highlands, pitted and cratered by ancient impacts. It is possible that, four billion years ago, the Northern Hemisphere of Mars was struck by an object one-tenth to two-thirds the size of Earth's Moon. If this is the case, the Northern Hemisphere of Mars would be the site of an impact crater 10,600 by 8,500 kilometres (6,600 by 5,300 mi) in size, or roughly the area of Europe, Asia, and Australia combined, surpassing Utopia Planitia and the Moon's South Pole–Aitken basin as the largest impact crater in the Solar System. Mars is scarred by 43,000 impact craters with a diameter of 5 kilometres (3.1 mi) or greater. The largest exposed crater is Hellas, which is 2,300 kilometres (1,400 mi) wide and 7,000 metres (23,000 ft) deep, and is a light albedo feature clearly visible from Earth. There are other notable impact features, such as Argyre, which is around 1,800 kilometres (1,100 mi) in diameter, and Isidis, which is around 1,500 kilometres (930 mi) in diameter. Due to the smaller mass and size of Mars, the probability of an object colliding with the planet is about half that of Earth. Mars is located closer to the asteroid belt, so it has an increased chance of being struck by materials from that source. Mars is more likely to be struck by short-period comets, i.e., those that lie within the orbit of Jupiter. Martian craters can[discuss] have a morphology that suggests the ground became wet after the meteor impact. The large canyon, Valles Marineris (Latin for 'Mariner Valleys, also known as Agathodaemon in the old canal maps), has a length of 4,000 kilometres (2,500 mi) and a depth of up to 7 kilometres (4.3 mi). The length of Valles Marineris is equivalent to the length of Europe and extends across one-fifth the circumference of Mars. By comparison, the Grand Canyon on Earth is only 446 kilometres (277 mi) long and nearly 2 kilometres (1.2 mi) deep. Valles Marineris was formed due to the swelling of the Tharsis area, which caused the crust in the area of Valles Marineris to collapse. In 2012, it was proposed that Valles Marineris is not just a graben, but a plate boundary where 150 kilometres (93 mi) of transverse motion has occurred, making Mars a planet with possibly a two-tectonic plate arrangement. Images from the Thermal Emission Imaging System (THEMIS) aboard NASA's Mars Odyssey orbiter have revealed seven possible cave entrances on the flanks of the volcano Arsia Mons. The caves, named after loved ones of their discoverers, are collectively known as the "seven sisters". Cave entrances measure from 100 to 252 metres (328 to 827 ft) wide and they are estimated to be at least 73 to 96 metres (240 to 315 ft) deep. Because light does not reach the floor of most of the caves, they may extend much deeper than these lower estimates and widen below the surface. "Dena" is the only exception; its floor is visible and was measured to be 130 metres (430 ft) deep. The interiors of these caverns may be protected from micrometeoroids, UV radiation, solar flares and high energy particles that bombard the planet's surface. Martian geysers (or CO2 jets) are putative sites of small gas and dust eruptions that occur in the south polar region of Mars during the spring thaw. "Dark dune spots" and "spiders" – or araneiforms – are the two most visible types of features ascribed to these eruptions. Similarly sized dust will settle from the thinner Martian atmosphere sooner than it would on Earth. For example, the dust suspended by the 2001 global dust storms on Mars only remained in the Martian atmosphere for 0.6 years, while the dust from Mount Pinatubo took about two years to settle. However, under current Martian conditions, the mass movements involved are generally much smaller than on Earth. Even the 2001 global dust storms on Mars moved only the equivalent of a very thin dust layer – about 3 μm thick if deposited with uniform thickness between 58° north and south of the equator. Dust deposition at the two rover sites has proceeded at a rate of about the thickness of a grain every 100 sols. Atmosphere Mars lost its magnetosphere 4 billion years ago, possibly because of numerous asteroid strikes, so the solar wind interacts directly with the Martian ionosphere, lowering the atmospheric density by stripping away atoms from the outer layer. Both Mars Global Surveyor and Mars Express have detected ionized atmospheric particles trailing off into space behind Mars, and this atmospheric loss is being studied by the MAVEN orbiter. Compared to Earth, the atmosphere of Mars is quite rarefied. Atmospheric pressure on the surface today ranges from a low of 30 Pa (0.0044 psi) on Olympus Mons to over 1,155 Pa (0.1675 psi) in Hellas Planitia, with a mean pressure at the surface level of 600 Pa (0.087 psi). The highest atmospheric density on Mars is equal to that found 35 kilometres (22 mi) above Earth's surface. The resulting mean surface pressure is only 0.6% of Earth's 101.3 kPa (14.69 psi). The scale height of the atmosphere is about 10.8 kilometres (6.7 mi), which is higher than Earth's 6 kilometres (3.7 mi), because the surface gravity of Mars is only about 38% of Earth's. The atmosphere of Mars consists of about 96% carbon dioxide, 1.93% argon and 1.89% nitrogen along with traces of oxygen and water. The atmosphere is quite dusty, containing particulates about 1.5 μm in diameter which give the Martian sky a tawny color when seen from the surface. It may take on a pink hue due to iron oxide particles suspended in it. Despite repeated detections of methane on Mars, there is no scientific consensus as to its origin. One suggestion is that methane exists on Mars and that its concentration fluctuates seasonally. The existence of methane could be produced by non-biological process such as serpentinization involving water, carbon dioxide, and the mineral olivine, which is known to be common on Mars, or by Martian life. Compared to Earth, its higher concentration of atmospheric CO2 and lower surface pressure may be why sound is attenuated more on Mars, where natural sources are rare apart from the wind. Using acoustic recordings collected by the Perseverance rover, researchers concluded that the speed of sound there is approximately 240 m/s for frequencies below 240 Hz, and 250 m/s for those above. Auroras have been detected on Mars. Because Mars lacks a global magnetic field, the types and distribution of auroras there differ from those on Earth; rather than being mostly restricted to polar regions as is the case on Earth, a Martian aurora can encompass the planet. In September 2017, NASA reported radiation levels on the surface of the planet Mars were temporarily doubled, and were associated with an aurora 25 times brighter than any observed earlier, due to a massive, and unexpected, solar storm in the middle of the month. Mars has seasons, alternating between its northern and southern hemispheres, similar to on Earth. Additionally the orbit of Mars has, compared to Earth's, a large eccentricity and approaches perihelion when it is summer in its southern hemisphere and winter in its northern, and aphelion when it is winter in its southern hemisphere and summer in its northern. As a result, the seasons in its southern hemisphere are more extreme and the seasons in its northern are milder than would otherwise be the case. The summer temperatures in the south can be warmer than the equivalent summer temperatures in the north by up to 30 °C (54 °F). Martian surface temperatures vary from lows of about −110 °C (−166 °F) to highs of up to 35 °C (95 °F) in equatorial summer. The wide range in temperatures is due to the thin atmosphere which cannot store much solar heat, the low atmospheric pressure (about 1% that of the atmosphere of Earth), and the low thermal inertia of Martian soil. The planet is 1.52 times as far from the Sun as Earth, resulting in just 43% of the amount of sunlight. Mars has the largest dust storms in the Solar System, reaching speeds of over 160 km/h (100 mph). These can vary from a storm over a small area, to gigantic storms that cover the entire planet. They tend to occur when Mars is closest to the Sun, and have been shown to increase global temperature. Seasons also produce dry ice covering polar ice caps. Hydrology While Mars contains water in larger amounts, most of it is dust covered water ice at the Martian polar ice caps. The volume of water ice in the south polar ice cap, if melted, would be enough to cover most of the surface of the planet with a depth of 11 metres (36 ft). Water in its liquid form cannot persist on the surface due to Mars's low atmospheric pressure, which is less than 1% that of Earth. Only at the lowest of elevations are the pressure and temperature high enough for liquid water to exist for short periods. Although little water is present in the atmosphere, there is enough to produce clouds of water ice and different cases of snow and frost, often mixed with snow of carbon dioxide dry ice. Landforms visible on Mars strongly suggest that liquid water has existed on the planet's surface. Huge linear swathes of scoured ground, known as outflow channels, cut across the surface in about 25 places. These are thought to be a record of erosion caused by the catastrophic release of water from subsurface aquifers, though some of these structures have been hypothesized to result from the action of glaciers or lava. One of the larger examples, Ma'adim Vallis, is 700 kilometres (430 mi) long, much greater than the Grand Canyon, with a width of 20 kilometres (12 mi) and a depth of 2 kilometres (1.2 mi) in places. It is thought to have been carved by flowing water early in Mars's history. The youngest of these channels is thought to have formed only a few million years ago. Elsewhere, particularly on the oldest areas of the Martian surface, finer-scale, dendritic networks of valleys are spread across significant proportions of the landscape. Features of these valleys and their distribution strongly imply that they were carved by runoff resulting from precipitation in early Mars history. Subsurface water flow and groundwater sapping may play important subsidiary roles in some networks, but precipitation was probably the root cause of the incision in almost all cases. Along craters and canyon walls, there are thousands of features that appear similar to terrestrial gullies. The gullies tend to be in the highlands of the Southern Hemisphere and face the Equator; all are poleward of 30° latitude. A number of authors have suggested that their formation process involves liquid water, probably from melting ice, although others have argued for formation mechanisms involving carbon dioxide frost or the movement of dry dust. No partially degraded gullies have formed by weathering and no superimposed impact craters have been observed, indicating that these are young features, possibly still active. Other geological features, such as deltas and alluvial fans preserved in craters, are further evidence for warmer, wetter conditions at an interval or intervals in earlier Mars history. Such conditions necessarily require the widespread presence of crater lakes across a large proportion of the surface, for which there is independent mineralogical, sedimentological and geomorphological evidence. Further evidence that liquid water once existed on the surface of Mars comes from the detection of specific minerals such as hematite and goethite, both of which sometimes form in the presence of water. The chemical signature of water vapor on Mars was first unequivocally demonstrated in 1963 by spectroscopy using an Earth-based telescope. In 2004, Opportunity detected the mineral jarosite. This forms only in the presence of acidic water, showing that water once existed on Mars. The Spirit rover found concentrated deposits of silica in 2007 that indicated wet conditions in the past, and in December 2011, the mineral gypsum, which also forms in the presence of water, was found on the surface by NASA's Mars rover Opportunity. It is estimated that the amount of water in the upper mantle of Mars, represented by hydroxyl ions contained within Martian minerals, is equal to or greater than that of Earth at 50–300 parts per million of water, which is enough to cover the entire planet to a depth of 200–1,000 metres (660–3,280 ft). On 18 March 2013, NASA reported evidence from instruments on the Curiosity rover of mineral hydration, likely hydrated calcium sulfate, in several rock samples including the broken fragments of "Tintina" rock and "Sutton Inlier" rock as well as in veins and nodules in other rocks like "Knorr" rock and "Wernicke" rock. Analysis using the rover's DAN instrument provided evidence of subsurface water, amounting to as much as 4% water content, down to a depth of 60 centimetres (24 in), during the rover's traverse from the Bradbury Landing site to the Yellowknife Bay area in the Glenelg terrain. In September 2015, NASA announced that they had found strong evidence of hydrated brine flows in recurring slope lineae, based on spectrometer readings of the darkened areas of slopes. These streaks flow downhill in Martian summer, when the temperature is above −23 °C, and freeze at lower temperatures. These observations supported earlier hypotheses, based on timing of formation and their rate of growth, that these dark streaks resulted from water flowing just below the surface. However, later work suggested that the lineae may be dry, granular flows instead, with at most a limited role for water in initiating the process. A definitive conclusion about the presence, extent, and role of liquid water on the Martian surface remains elusive. Researchers suspect much of the low northern plains of the planet were covered with an ocean hundreds of meters deep, though this theory remains controversial. In March 2015, scientists stated that such an ocean might have been the size of Earth's Arctic Ocean. This finding was derived from the ratio of protium to deuterium in the modern Martian atmosphere compared to that ratio on Earth. The amount of Martian deuterium (D/H = 9.3 ± 1.7 10−4) is five to seven times the amount on Earth (D/H = 1.56 10−4), suggesting that ancient Mars had significantly higher levels of water. Results from the Curiosity rover had previously found a high ratio of deuterium in Gale Crater, though not significantly high enough to suggest the former presence of an ocean. Other scientists caution that these results have not been confirmed, and point out that Martian climate models have not yet shown that the planet was warm enough in the past to support bodies of liquid water. Near the northern polar cap is the 81.4 kilometres (50.6 mi) wide Korolev Crater, which the Mars Express orbiter found to be filled with approximately 2,200 cubic kilometres (530 cu mi) of water ice. In November 2016, NASA reported finding a large amount of underground ice in the Utopia Planitia region. The volume of water detected has been estimated to be equivalent to the volume of water in Lake Superior (which is 12,100 cubic kilometers). During observations from 2018 through 2021, the ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter spotted indications of water, probably subsurface ice, in the Valles Marineris canyon system. Orbital motion Mars's average distance from the Sun is roughly 230 million km (143 million mi), and its orbital period is 687 (Earth) days. The solar day (or sol) on Mars is only slightly longer than an Earth day: 24 hours, 39 minutes, and 35.244 seconds. A Martian year is equal to 1.8809 Earth years, or 1 year, 320 days, and 18.2 hours. The gravitational potential difference and thus the delta-v needed to transfer between Mars and Earth is the second lowest for Earth. The axial tilt of Mars is 25.19° relative to its orbital plane, which is similar to the axial tilt of Earth. As a result, Mars has seasons like Earth, though on Mars they are nearly twice as long because its orbital period is that much longer. In the present day, the orientation of the north pole of Mars is close to the star Deneb. Mars has a relatively pronounced orbital eccentricity of about 0.09; of the seven other planets in the Solar System, only Mercury has a larger orbital eccentricity. It is known that in the past, Mars has had a much more circular orbit. At one point, 1.35 million Earth years ago, Mars had an eccentricity of roughly 0.002, much less than that of Earth today. Mars's cycle of eccentricity is 96,000 Earth years compared to Earth's cycle of 100,000 years. Mars has its closest approach to Earth (opposition) in a synodic period of 779.94 days. It should not be confused with Mars conjunction, where the Earth and Mars are at opposite sides of the Solar System and form a straight line crossing the Sun. The average time between the successive oppositions of Mars, its synodic period, is 780 days; but the number of days between successive oppositions can range from 764 to 812. The distance at close approach varies between about 54 and 103 million km (34 and 64 million mi) due to the planets' elliptical orbits, which causes comparable variation in angular size. At their furthest Mars and Earth can be as far as 401 million km (249 million mi) apart. Mars comes into opposition from Earth every 2.1 years. The planets come into opposition near Mars's perihelion in 2003, 2018 and 2035, with the 2020 and 2033 events being particularly close to perihelic opposition. The mean apparent magnitude of Mars is +0.71 with a standard deviation of 1.05. Because the orbit of Mars is eccentric, the magnitude at opposition from the Sun can range from about −3.0 to −1.4. The minimum brightness is magnitude +1.86 when the planet is near aphelion and in conjunction with the Sun. At its brightest, Mars (along with Jupiter) is second only to Venus in apparent brightness. Mars usually appears distinctly yellow, orange, or red. When farthest away from Earth, it is more than seven times farther away than when it is closest. Mars is usually close enough for particularly good viewing once or twice at 15-year or 17-year intervals. Optical ground-based telescopes are typically limited to resolving features about 300 kilometres (190 mi) across when Earth and Mars are closest because of Earth's atmosphere. As Mars approaches opposition, it begins a period of retrograde motion, which means it will appear to move backwards in a looping curve with respect to the background stars. This retrograde motion lasts for about 72 days, and Mars reaches its peak apparent brightness in the middle of this interval. Moons Mars has two relatively small (compared to Earth's) natural moons, Phobos (about 22 km (14 mi) in diameter) and Deimos (about 12 km (7.5 mi) in diameter), which orbit at 9,376 km (5,826 mi) and 23,460 km (14,580 mi) around the planet. The origin of both moons is unclear, although a popular theory states that they were asteroids captured into Martian orbit. Both satellites were discovered in 1877 by Asaph Hall and were named after the characters Phobos (the deity of panic and fear) and Deimos (the deity of terror and dread), twins from Greek mythology who accompanied their father Ares, god of war, into battle. Mars was the Roman equivalent to Ares. In modern Greek, the planet retains its ancient name Ares (Aris: Άρης). From the surface of Mars, the motions of Phobos and Deimos appear different from that of the Earth's satellite, the Moon. Phobos rises in the west, sets in the east, and rises again in just 11 hours. Deimos, being only just outside synchronous orbit – where the orbital period would match the planet's period of rotation – rises as expected in the east, but slowly. Because the orbit of Phobos is below a synchronous altitude, tidal forces from Mars are gradually lowering its orbit. In about 50 million years, it could either crash into Mars's surface or break up into a ring structure around the planet. The origin of the two satellites is not well understood. Their low albedo and carbonaceous chondrite composition have been regarded as similar to asteroids, supporting a capture theory. The unstable orbit of Phobos would seem to point toward a relatively recent capture. But both have circular orbits near the equator, which is unusual for captured objects, and the required capture dynamics are complex. Accretion early in the history of Mars is plausible, but would not account for a composition resembling asteroids rather than Mars itself, if that is confirmed. Mars may have yet-undiscovered moons, smaller than 50 to 100 metres (160 to 330 ft) in diameter, and a dust ring is predicted to exist between Phobos and Deimos. A third possibility for their origin as satellites of Mars is the involvement of a third body or a type of impact disruption. More-recent lines of evidence for Phobos having a highly porous interior, and suggesting a composition containing mainly phyllosilicates and other minerals known from Mars, point toward an origin of Phobos from material ejected by an impact on Mars that reaccreted in Martian orbit, similar to the prevailing theory for the origin of Earth's satellite. Although the visible and near-infrared (VNIR) spectra of the moons of Mars resemble those of outer-belt asteroids, the thermal infrared spectra of Phobos are reported to be inconsistent with chondrites of any class. It is also possible that Phobos and Deimos were fragments of an older moon, formed by debris from a large impact on Mars, and then destroyed by a more recent impact upon the satellite. More recently, a study conducted by a team of researchers from multiple countries suggests that a lost moon, at least fifteen times the size of Phobos, may have existed in the past. By analyzing rocks which point to tidal processes on the planet, it is possible that these tides may have been regulated by a past moon. Human observations and exploration The history of observations of Mars is marked by oppositions of Mars when the planet is closest to Earth and hence is most easily visible, which occur every couple of years. Even more notable are the perihelic oppositions of Mars, which are distinguished because Mars is close to perihelion, making it even closer to Earth. The ancient Sumerians named Mars Nergal, the god of war and plague. During Sumerian times, Nergal was a minor deity of little significance, but, during later times, his main cult center was the city of Nineveh. In Mesopotamian texts, Mars is referred to as the "star of judgement of the fate of the dead". The existence of Mars as a wandering object in the night sky was also recorded by the ancient Egyptian astronomers and, by 1534 BCE, they were familiar with the retrograde motion of the planet. By the period of the Neo-Babylonian Empire, the Babylonian astronomers were making regular records of the positions of the planets and systematic observations of their behavior. For Mars, they knew that the planet made 37 synodic periods, or 42 circuits of the zodiac, every 79 years. They invented arithmetic methods for making minor corrections to the predicted positions of the planets. In Ancient Greece, the planet was known as Πυρόεις. Commonly, the Greek name for the planet now referred to as Mars, was Ares. It was the Romans who named the planet Mars, for their god of war, often represented by the sword and shield of the planet's namesake. In the fourth century BCE, Aristotle noted that Mars disappeared behind the Moon during an occultation, indicating that the planet was farther away. Ptolemy, a Greek living in Alexandria, attempted to address the problem of the orbital motion of Mars. Ptolemy's model and his collective work on astronomy was presented in the multi-volume collection later called the Almagest (from the Arabic for "greatest"), which became the authoritative treatise on Western astronomy for the next fourteen centuries. Literature from ancient China confirms that Mars was known by Chinese astronomers by no later than the fourth century BCE. In the East Asian cultures, Mars is traditionally referred to as the "fire star" (火星) based on the Wuxing system. In 1609 Johannes Kepler published a 10 year study of Martian orbit, using the diurnal parallax of Mars, measured by Tycho Brahe, to make a preliminary calculation of the relative distance to the planet. From Brahe's observations of Mars, Kepler deduced that the planet orbited the Sun not in a circle, but in an ellipse. Moreover, Kepler showed that Mars sped up as it approached the Sun and slowed down as it moved farther away, in a manner that later physicists would explain as a consequence of the conservation of angular momentum.: 433–437 In 1610 the first use of a telescope for astronomical observation, including Mars, was performed by Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei. With the telescope the diurnal parallax of Mars was again measured in an effort to determine the Sun-Earth distance. This was first performed by Giovanni Domenico Cassini in 1672. The early parallax measurements were hampered by the quality of the instruments. The only occultation of Mars by Venus observed was that of 13 October 1590, seen by Michael Maestlin at Heidelberg. By the 19th century, the resolution of telescopes reached a level sufficient for surface features to be identified. On 5 September 1877, a perihelic opposition to Mars occurred. The Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli used a 22-centimetre (8.7 in) telescope in Milan to help produce the first detailed map of Mars. These maps notably contained features he called canali, which, with the possible exception of the natural canyon Valles Marineris, were later shown to be an optical illusion. These canali were supposedly long, straight lines on the surface of Mars, to which he gave names of famous rivers on Earth. His term, which means "channels" or "grooves", was popularly mistranslated in English as "canals". Influenced by the observations, the orientalist Percival Lowell founded an observatory which had 30- and 45-centimetre (12- and 18-in) telescopes. The observatory was used for the exploration of Mars during the last good opportunity in 1894, and the following less favorable oppositions. He published several books on Mars and life on the planet, which had a great influence on the public. The canali were independently observed by other astronomers, like Henri Joseph Perrotin and Louis Thollon in Nice, using one of the largest telescopes of that time. The seasonal changes (consisting of the diminishing of the polar caps and the dark areas formed during Martian summers) in combination with the canals led to speculation about life on Mars, and it was a long-held belief that Mars contained vast seas and vegetation. As bigger telescopes were used, fewer long, straight canali were observed. During observations in 1909 by Antoniadi with an 84-centimetre (33 in) telescope, irregular patterns were observed, but no canali were seen. The first spacecraft from Earth to visit Mars was Mars 1 of the Soviet Union, which flew by in 1963, but contact was lost en route. NASA's Mariner 4 followed and became the first spacecraft to successfully transmit from Mars; launched on 28 November 1964, it made its closest approach to the planet on 15 July 1965. Mariner 4 detected the weak Martian radiation belt, measured at about 0.1% that of Earth, and captured the first images of another planet from deep space. Once spacecraft visited the planet during the 1960s and 1970s, many previous concepts of Mars were radically broken. After the results of the Viking life-detection experiments, the hypothesis of a dead planet was generally accepted. The data from Mariner 9 and Viking allowed better maps of Mars to be made. Until 1997 and after Viking 1 shut down in 1982, Mars was only visited by three unsuccessful probes, two flying past without contact (Phobos 1, 1988; Mars Observer, 1993), and one (Phobos 2 1989) malfunctioning in orbit before reaching its destination Phobos. In 1997 Mars Pathfinder became the first successful rover mission beyond the Moon and started together with Mars Global Surveyor (operated until late 2006) an uninterrupted active robotic presence at Mars that has lasted until today. It produced complete, extremely detailed maps of the Martian topography, magnetic field and surface minerals. Starting with these missions a range of new improved crewless spacecraft, including orbiters, landers, and rovers, have been sent to Mars, with successful missions by the NASA (United States), Jaxa (Japan), ESA, United Kingdom, ISRO (India), Roscosmos (Russia), the United Arab Emirates, and CNSA (China) to study the planet's surface, climate, and geology, uncovering the different elements of the history and dynamic of the hydrosphere of Mars and possible traces of ancient life. As of 2023[update], Mars is host to ten functioning spacecraft. Eight are in orbit: 2001 Mars Odyssey, Mars Express, Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, MAVEN, ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter, the Hope orbiter, and the Tianwen-1 orbiter. Another two are on the surface: the Mars Science Laboratory Curiosity rover and the Perseverance rover. Collected maps are available online at websites including Google Mars. NASA provides two online tools: Mars Trek, which provides visualizations of the planet using data from 50 years of exploration, and Experience Curiosity, which simulates traveling on Mars in 3-D with Curiosity. Planned missions to Mars include: As of February 2024[update], debris from these types of missions has reached over seven tons. Most of it consists of crashed and inactive spacecraft as well as discarded components. In April 2024, NASA selected several companies to begin studies on providing commercial services to further enable robotic science on Mars. Key areas include establishing telecommunications, payload delivery and surface imaging. Habitability and habitation During the late 19th century, it was widely accepted in the astronomical community that Mars had life-supporting qualities, including the presence of oxygen and water. However, in 1894 W. W. Campbell at Lick Observatory observed the planet and found that "if water vapor or oxygen occur in the atmosphere of Mars it is in quantities too small to be detected by spectroscopes then available". That observation contradicted many of the measurements of the time and was not widely accepted. Campbell and V. M. Slipher repeated the study in 1909 using better instruments, but with the same results. It was not until the findings were confirmed by W. S. Adams in 1925 that the myth of the Earth-like habitability of Mars was finally broken. However, even in the 1960s, articles were published on Martian biology, putting aside explanations other than life for the seasonal changes on Mars. The current understanding of planetary habitability – the ability of a world to develop environmental conditions favorable to the emergence of life – favors planets that have liquid water on their surface. Most often this requires the orbit of a planet to lie within the habitable zone, which for the Sun is estimated to extend from within the orbit of Earth to about that of Mars. During perihelion, Mars dips inside this region, but Mars's thin (low-pressure) atmosphere prevents liquid water from existing over large regions for extended periods. The past flow of liquid water demonstrates the planet's potential for habitability. Recent evidence has suggested that any water on the Martian surface may have been too salty and acidic to support regular terrestrial life. The environmental conditions on Mars are a challenge to sustaining organic life: the planet has little heat transfer across its surface, it has poor insulation against bombardment by the solar wind due to the absence of a magnetosphere and has insufficient atmospheric pressure to retain water in a liquid form (water instead sublimes to a gaseous state). Mars is nearly, or perhaps totally, geologically dead; the end of volcanic activity has apparently stopped the recycling of chemicals and minerals between the surface and interior of the planet. Evidence suggests that the planet was once significantly more habitable than it is today, but whether living organisms ever existed there remains unknown. The Viking probes of the mid-1970s carried experiments designed to detect microorganisms in Martian soil at their respective landing sites and had positive results, including a temporary increase in CO2 production on exposure to water and nutrients. This sign of life was later disputed by scientists, resulting in a continuing debate, with NASA scientist Gilbert Levin asserting that Viking may have found life. A 2014 analysis of Martian meteorite EETA79001 found chlorate, perchlorate, and nitrate ions in sufficiently high concentrations to suggest that they are widespread on Mars. UV and X-ray radiation would turn chlorate and perchlorate ions into other, highly reactive oxychlorines, indicating that any organic molecules would have to be buried under the surface to survive. Small quantities of methane and formaldehyde detected by Mars orbiters are both claimed to be possible evidence for life, as these chemical compounds would quickly break down in the Martian atmosphere. Alternatively, these compounds may instead be replenished by volcanic or other geological means, such as serpentinite. Impact glass, formed by the impact of meteors, which on Earth can preserve signs of life, has also been found on the surface of the impact craters on Mars. Likewise, the glass in impact craters on Mars could have preserved signs of life, if life existed at the site. The Cheyava Falls rock discovered on Mars in June 2024 has been designated by NASA as a "potential biosignature" and was core sampled by the Perseverance rover for possible return to Earth and further examination. Although highly intriguing, no definitive final determination on a biological or abiotic origin of this rock can be made with the data currently available. Several plans for a human mission to Mars have been proposed, but none have come to fruition. The NASA Authorization Act of 2017 directed NASA to study the feasibility of a crewed Mars mission in the early 2030s; the resulting report concluded that this would be unfeasible. In addition, in 2021, China was planning to send a crewed Mars mission in 2033. Privately held companies such as SpaceX have also proposed plans to send humans to Mars, with the eventual goal to settle on the planet. As of 2024, SpaceX has proceeded with the development of the Starship launch vehicle with the goal of Mars colonization. In plans shared with the company in April 2024, Elon Musk envisions the beginning of a Mars colony within the next twenty years. This would be enabled by the planned mass manufacturing of Starship and initially sustained by resupply from Earth, and in situ resource utilization on Mars, until the Mars colony reaches full self sustainability. Any future human mission to Mars will likely take place within the optimal Mars launch window, which occurs every 26 months. The moon Phobos has been proposed as an anchor point for a space elevator. Besides national space agencies and space companies, groups such as the Mars Society and The Planetary Society advocate for human missions to Mars. In culture Mars is named after the Roman god of war (Greek Ares), but was also associated with the demi-god Heracles (Roman Hercules) by ancient Greek astronomers, as detailed by Aristotle. This association between Mars and war dates back at least to Babylonian astronomy, in which the planet was named for the god Nergal, deity of war and destruction. It persisted into modern times, as exemplified by Gustav Holst's orchestral suite The Planets, whose famous first movement labels Mars "The Bringer of War". The planet's symbol, a circle with a spear pointing out to the upper right, is also used as a symbol for the male gender. The symbol dates from at least the 11th century, though a possible predecessor has been found in the Greek Oxyrhynchus Papyri. The idea that Mars was populated by intelligent Martians became widespread in the late 19th century. Schiaparelli's "canali" observations combined with Percival Lowell's books on the subject put forward the standard notion of a planet that was a drying, cooling, dying world with ancient civilizations constructing irrigation works. Many other observations and proclamations by notable personalities added to what has been termed "Mars Fever". In the present day, high-resolution mapping of the surface of Mars has revealed no artifacts of habitation, but pseudoscientific speculation about intelligent life on Mars still continues. Reminiscent of the canali observations, these speculations are based on small scale features perceived in the spacecraft images, such as "pyramids" and the "Face on Mars". In his book Cosmos, planetary astronomer Carl Sagan wrote: "Mars has become a kind of mythic arena onto which we have projected our Earthly hopes and fears." The depiction of Mars in fiction has been stimulated by its dramatic red color and by nineteenth-century scientific speculations that its surface conditions might support not just life but intelligent life. This gave way to many science fiction stories involving these concepts, such as H. G. Wells's The War of the Worlds, in which Martians seek to escape their dying planet by invading Earth; Ray Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles, in which human explorers accidentally destroy a Martian civilization; as well as Edgar Rice Burroughs's series Barsoom, C. S. Lewis's novel Out of the Silent Planet (1938), and a number of Robert A. Heinlein stories before the mid-sixties. Since then, depictions of Martians have also extended to animation. A comic figure of an intelligent Martian, Marvin the Martian, appeared in Haredevil Hare (1948) as a character in the Looney Tunes animated cartoons of Warner Brothers, and has continued as part of popular culture to the present. After the Mariner and Viking spacecraft had returned pictures of Mars as a lifeless and canal-less world, these ideas about Mars were abandoned; for many science-fiction authors, the new discoveries initially seemed like a constraint, but eventually the post-Viking knowledge of Mars became itself a source of inspiration for works like Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy. See also Notes References Further reading External links Solar System → Local Interstellar Cloud → Local Bubble → Gould Belt → Orion Arm → Milky Way → Milky Way subgroup → Local Group → Local Sheet → Local Volume → Virgo Supercluster → Laniakea Supercluster → Pisces–Cetus Supercluster Complex → Local Hole → Observable universe → UniverseEach arrow (→) may be read as "within" or "part of". |
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[SOURCE: https://www.wired.com/politics-issue/] | [TOKENS: 104] |
All Hail the Technocracy Tech went all in on Trump this year. It's just the beginning. I Thought I Knew Silicon Valley. I Was Wrong © 2026 Condé Nast. All rights reserved. WIRED may earn a portion of sales from products that are purchased through our site as part of our Affiliate Partnerships with retailers. The material on this site may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used, except with the prior written permission of Condé Nast. Ad Choices |
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[SOURCE: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/StatXact] | [TOKENS: 82] |
Contents StatXact StatXact is a statistical software package for analyzing data using exact statistics. It calculates exact p-values and confidence intervals for contingency tables and non-parametric procedures. It is marketed by Cytel Inc. References External links This scientific software article is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by adding missing information. This statistics-related article is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by adding missing information. |
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[SOURCE: https://www.mako.co.il/entertainment-celebs/world-2026/Article-340a35106bc7c91026.htm] | [TOKENS: 1950] |
נצפתה עם טבעת - לא אירוסים: זנדאיה מציתה שמועות על חתונה עם טום הולנדהכוכבת תועדה בבוורלי הילס כשהיא עונדת טבעת זהב במקום טבעת האירוסים שהעניק לה השחקן, בשווי 200 אלף דולר. מעריצים בטוחים: החתונה כבר מאחוריהםmako סלבסmakoפורסם: 20.02.26, 22:11 | עודכן: 21.02.26, 10:53הקישור הועתקהאם זדנאיה וטום הולנד התחתנו בסתר? באתר הרכילות האמריקאי Page Six פורסמו הערב (שישי) תמונות של הכוכבת עם טבעת חדשה על האצבע, שונה מטבעת האירוסים שקיבלה בשנה שעברה מהשחקן, מה שהצית מיד גל שמועות על נישואים: "אני חושב שהיא בהיריון וזו הייתה חתונת בזק", נכתב ברשתות.זנדאיה צולמה במהלך בילוי בבוורלי הילס כשהיא עונדת את טבעת הזהב. לפני כשנה, כשהשניים התארסו, תועדה הכוכבת עונדת את טבעת האירוסים - שעיצבה מעצבת בריטית בשווי של לא פחות מ-200 אלף דולר, אחרי שהולנד הציע במהלך חופשת חג המולד, בפרטיות.צילום: Kevin Winter, Getty imagesהשבוע סיפרה הכוכבת למגזין Interview על נורות אזהרה במערכות יחסים. כשהגיבה לשאלה "איזה דגל אדום בבן זוג את מוצאת מקסים?", התשובה שלה הייתה חד משמעית: "ככל שהתבגרתי, אני חושבת שדגל אדום הוא דגל אדום, אתה מבין?". אם הטבעת הנוכחית אכן מבשרת על נישואים, הימים שבהם היא למדה ממה להתרחק מאחור.זנדאיהטום הולנדמצאתם טעות לשון? נצפתה עם טבעת - לא אירוסים: זנדאיה מציתה שמועות על חתונה עם טום הולנד הכוכבת תועדה בבוורלי הילס כשהיא עונדת טבעת זהב במקום טבעת האירוסים שהעניק לה השחקן, בשווי 200 אלף דולר. מעריצים בטוחים: החתונה כבר מאחוריהם האם זדנאיה וטום הולנד התחתנו בסתר? באתר הרכילות האמריקאי Page Six פורסמו הערב (שישי) תמונות של הכוכבת עם טבעת חדשה על האצבע, שונה מטבעת האירוסים שקיבלה בשנה שעברה מהשחקן, מה שהצית מיד גל שמועות על נישואים: "אני חושב שהיא בהיריון וזו הייתה חתונת בזק", נכתב ברשתות. זנדאיה צולמה במהלך בילוי בבוורלי הילס כשהיא עונדת את טבעת הזהב. לפני כשנה, כשהשניים התארסו, תועדה הכוכבת עונדת את טבעת האירוסים - שעיצבה מעצבת בריטית בשווי של לא פחות מ-200 אלף דולר, אחרי שהולנד הציע במהלך חופשת חג המולד, בפרטיות. השבוע סיפרה הכוכבת למגזין Interview על נורות אזהרה במערכות יחסים. כשהגיבה לשאלה "איזה דגל אדום בבן זוג את מוצאת מקסים?", התשובה שלה הייתה חד משמעית: "ככל שהתבגרתי, אני חושבת שדגל אדום הוא דגל אדום, אתה מבין?". אם הטבעת הנוכחית אכן מבשרת על נישואים, הימים שבהם היא למדה ממה להתרחק מאחור. |
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[SOURCE: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_deaths_in_the_United_States] | [TOKENS: 15711] |
Contents Gun violence in the United States Tens of thousands of firearms-related deaths and injuries occur in the United States each year. Data are collected yearly by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the US Department of Justice Bureau of Justice Statistics, the FBI, and various state and local agencies. In 2023, the CDC reported 46,728 gun deaths, of which 58% were suicides, 38% were murders, and the remainder were categorized as law enforcement related, accidental, or of undetermined cause. In 2023, 350 shootings occurred in K-12 schools with an additional 30 on college campuses. This marked the highest number of shootings recorded on school grounds. According to a Pew Research Center report, gun deaths among America's children rose 50% from 2019 to 2021. Estimates of defensive gun use in the United States vary widely and are contested. Analyses of the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics' National Crime Victimization Survey—a large, ongoing probability survey that first establishes that a crime occurred—indicate roughly 61,000–65,000 firearm defenses per year across 1987–2021. An online survey of gun owners in 2021 returned a higher figure. Legislation at the federal, state, and local levels has attempted to address gun violence through methods including restricting firearms purchases by youths and other "at-risk" populations, setting waiting periods for firearm purchases, establishing gun buyback programs, law enforcement and policing strategies, stiff sentencing of gun law violators, education programs for parents and children, and community outreach programs. Recent polling suggests up to 26% of Americans believe guns are the number one national public health threat. Gun ownership The Congressional Research Service in 2009 estimated that among US population of 306 million people, there were 310 million firearms in the U.S., not including military armaments. Of these, 114 million were handguns, 110 million were rifles, and 86 million were shotguns. Accurate figures for civilian gun ownership are difficult to determine. The percentage of Americans and American households who claim to own guns has been in long-term decline, according to the General Social Survey poll. It found that gun ownership by households may have declined from about half, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, down to 32% in 2015. The percentage of individual owners may have declined from 31% in 1985 to 22% in 2014. Gun ownership figures are generally estimated via polling, by such organizations as the General Social Survey (GSS), Harris Interactive, and Gallup. There are significant disparities in the results across polls by different organizations, calling into question their reliability. In Gallup's 1972 survey, 43% reported having a gun in their home. GSS's 1973 survey resulted in 49% reporting a gun in the home. In 1993, Gallup's poll results were 51%. GSS's 1994 poll showed 43%. In 2012, Gallup's survey showed 47% of Americans reporting having a gun in their home, while the GSS in 2012 reports 34%. In 2018 it was estimated that U.S. civilians own 393 million firearms, and that 40% to 42% of the households in the country have at least one gun. However, record gun sales followed in the subsequent years. In 1997, estimates were about 44 million gun owners in the United States. These owners possessed around 192 million firearms, of which an estimated 65 million were handguns. A National Survey on Private Ownership and Use of Firearms (NSPOF), conducted in 1994, estimated that Americans owned 192 million guns: 36% rifles, 34% handguns, 26% shotguns, and 4% other types of long guns. Most firearm owners owned multiple firearms, with the NSPOF survey indicating 25% of adults owned firearms. Throughout the 1970s and much of the 1980s, the estimated rate of gun ownership in the home ranged from 45 to 50%. After highly publicized mass murders, it is consistently observed that there are rapid increases in gun purchases and large crowds at gun vendors and gun shows, due to fears of increased gun control . Gun ownership rates vary across geographic regions, ranging from 2004 estimates of 25% in the Northeastern United States to 60% in the East South Central States. A 2004 Gallup poll estimated that 49% of men reported gun ownership, compared to 33% of women, while 44% of whites owned a gun, compared to 24% of nonwhites. An estimated 56% of those living in rural areas owned a gun, compared to 40% of suburbanites and 29% of those in urban areas. Approximately 53% of Republicans owned guns, compared to 36% of political independents and 31% of Democrats. One criticism of the GSS survey and other proxy measures of gun ownership, is that they do not provide adequate macro-level detail to allow conclusions on the relationship between overall firearm ownership and gun violence. Gary Kleck compared various survey and proxy measures and found no correlation between overall firearm ownership and gun violence. Studies by David Hemenway and his colleagues, which used GSS data and the fraction of suicides committed with a gun as a proxy for gun ownership rates, found a strong positive correlation between gun ownership and homicide in the United States. A 2006 study by Philip J. Cook and Jens Ludwig, also using the percentage of suicides committed with a gun as a proxy, found that gun prevalence correlated with increased homicide rates. Defensive gun use The effectiveness and safety of guns used for personal defense is debated. Studies place the instances of guns used in personal defense as low as 65,000 times per year, and as high as 2.5 million times per year. Under President Bill Clinton, the Department of Justice conducted a survey in 1994 that placed the usage rate of guns used in personal defense at 1.5 million times per year, based on an extrapolation from 45 survey respondents reporting using a firearm for self-defense, but noted this was likely to be an overestimate due to the low sample size. A May 2014 Harvard Injury Control Research Center (HICRC) survey of 150 firearms researchers found that only 8% of them agreed that 'In the United States, guns are used in self-defense far more often than they are used in crime'. HICRC random-respondent national surveys were conducted in 1996 and 1999 to investigate the use of guns in self-defense. Survey participants were asked open-ended questions about defensive gun use incidents and detailed questions about both gun victimization and self-defense gun use. Self-reported defensive gun use incidents were then examined by five criminal court judges, who were asked to determine whether these self-defense gun uses were likely to be legal. The surveys found that far more respondents reported having been threatened or intimidated with a gun, than having used a gun to protect themselves, even after having excluded many of these responses; and, a majority of the reported self-defense gun uses were rated by a majority of judges as probably illegal. This was true even when it was assumed that the respondent had a permit to own and carry the gun, and that the event was described honestly. The conclusion being from this report that most self-described 'defensive' gun uses, are gun uses in escalating arguments, and are both socially undesirable and illegal. Further studies by HICRC found the following: firearms in the home are used more often to intimidate intimates than to thwart crime; gun use in self-defense is rare and not more effective at preventing injury than other protective actions; and a study of hospital gun-shot appearances does not back up the claim of millions of defensive gun use, as virtually all criminals with a gunshot wound go to hospital; with virtually all having been shot whilst the victim of crime and not shot whilst offending. Between 1987 and 1990, David McDowall et al. found that guns were used in defense during a crime incident 64,615 times annually (258,460 times total over the whole period). This equated to two times out of 1,000 criminal incidents (0.2%) that occurred in this period, including criminal incidents where no guns were involved at all. For violent crimes, assault, robbery, and rape, guns were used 0.8% of the time in self-defense. Of the times that guns were used in self-defense, 71% of the crimes were committed by strangers, with the rest of the incidents evenly divided between offenders that were acquaintances or persons well known to the victim. In 28% of incidents where a gun was used for self-defense, victims fired the gun at the offender. In 20% of the self-defense incidents, the guns were used by police officers. During this same period, 1987 to 1990, there were 11,580 gun homicides per year (46,319 total), and the National Crime Victimization Survey estimated that 2,628,532 nonfatal crimes involving guns occurred. McDowall's study for the American Journal of Public Health contrasted with a 1995 study by Gary Kleck and Marc Gertz, which found that 2.45 million crimes were thwarted each year in the U.S. using guns, and in most cases, the potential victim never fired a shot. The results of the Kleck studies have been cited many times in scholarly and popular media. The methodology of the Kleck and Gertz study has been criticized by some researchers but also defended by gun-control advocate Marvin Wolfgang. Using cross-sectional time-series data for U.S. counties from 1977 to 1992, Lott and Mustard of the Law School at the University of Chicago found that allowing citizens to carry concealed weapons deters violent crimes and appears to produce no increase in accidental deaths. They claimed that if those states which did not have right-to-carry concealed gun provisions had adopted them in 1992, approximately 1,570 murders, 4,177 rapes, and over 60,000 aggravated assaults would have been avoided yearly. On the other hand, regarding the efficacy of laws allowing use of firearms for self-defense like stand your ground laws, a 2018 RAND Corporation review of existing research concluded that "there is moderate evidence that stand-your-ground laws may increase homicide rates and limited evidence that the laws increase firearm homicides in particular." In 2019, RAND authors published an update, writing "Since publication of RAND's report, at least four additional studies meeting RAND's standards of rigor have reinforced the finding that "stand your ground" laws increase homicides. None of them found that "stand your ground" laws deter violent crime. No rigorous study has yet determined whether "stand your ground" laws promote legitimate acts of self-defense. Suicides In the U.S., most people who die of suicide use a gun, and most deaths by gun are suicides. In 2010, there were 19,392 firearm-related suicides in the U.S. In 2017, over half of the nation's 47,173 suicides involved a firearm. In 2010, the U.S. Department of Justice reported that about 60% of all adult firearm deaths were by suicide, 61% more than deaths by homicide. One study found that military veterans used firearms in about 67% of suicides in 2014. Firearms are the most lethal method of suicide, with a lethality rate 2.6 times higher than suffocation, the second-most lethal method. From 1999 to 2020, youth firearm suicide death rates increased on average 1.0% per year. American Indian and Alaska Native adolescents had the highest absolute increase in firearm suicide (3.83 per 100 000 population), followed by White (0.69 per 100 000 population), Black (0.67 per 100 000 population), Asian and Pacific Islander (0.64 per 100 000 population), and Hispanic or Latino (0.18 per 100 000 population) individuals. In the United States, access to firearms is associated with an increased risk of suicide. A 1992 case-control study in the New England Journal of Medicine showed an association between estimated household firearm ownership and suicide rates, finding that individuals living in a home where firearms are present are more likely to die by suicide than those individuals who do not own firearms, by a factor of 3 or 4. A 2006 study by researchers from the Harvard School of Public Health found a significant association between changes in estimated household gun ownership rates and suicide rates in the United States among men, women, and children. A 2007 study by the same research team found that in the United States, estimated household gun ownership rates were strongly associated with overall suicide rates and gun suicide rates, but not with non-gun suicide rates. A 2013 study reproduced this finding, even after controlling for different underlying rates of suicidal behavior by states. A 2015 study also found a strong association between estimated gun ownership rates in American cities and rates of both overall and gun suicide, but not with non-gun suicide. Correlation studies comparing different countries do not always find a statistically significant effect.: 30 A 2016 cross-sectional study showed a strong association between estimated household gun ownership rates and gun-related suicide rates among men and women in the United States. The same study found a strong association between estimated gun ownership rates and overall suicide rates, but only in men. During the 1980s and early 1990s, there was a strong upward trend in adolescent suicides with guns as well as a sharp overall increase in suicides among those age 75 and over. A 2018 study found that temporary gun seizure laws were associated with a 13.7% reduction in firearm suicides in Connecticut and a 7.5% reduction in firearm suicides in Indiana. David Hemenway, professor of health policy at Harvard University's School of Public Health, and director of the Harvard Injury Control Research Center and the Harvard Youth Violence Prevention Center, stated Differences in overall suicide rates across cities, states and regions in the United States are best explained not by differences in mental health, suicide ideation, or even suicide attempts, but by availability of firearms. Many suicides are impulsive, and the urge to die fades away. Firearms are a swift, lethal method of suicide with a high case-fatality rate. There are over twice as many gun-related suicides as gun-related homicides in the United States. Firearms are the most popular method of suicide due to the lethality of the weapon. 90% of all suicides attempted using a firearm result in a fatality, as opposed to less than 3% of suicide attempts involving cutting or drug-use. The risk of someone attempting suicide is 4.8 times greater if they are exposed to a firearm on a regular basis; for example, in the home. Homicides Unlike other high-income OECD countries, most homicides in the U.S. are gun homicides. In the U.S. in 2011, 67 percent of homicide victims were killed using a firearm: 66 percent of single-victim homicides and 79 percent of multiple-victim homicides. Between 1968 and 2011, about 1.4 million people died from firearms in the U.S. This number includes all deaths resulting from a firearm, including suicides, homicides, and accidents. In 2017, compared to 22 other high-income nations, the U.S. gun-related homicide rate was 25 times higher. Although the US has half the population of the other 22 nations combined, among those 22 nations studied, the U.S. had 82 percent of gun deaths, 90 percent of all women killed with guns, 91 percent of children under 14 and 92 percent of young people between ages 15 and 24 killed with guns, with guns being the leading cause of death for children. The ownership and regulation of guns are among the most widely debated issues in the US. In 1993, there were seven gun homicides for every 100,000 people. By 2013, that figure had fallen to 3.6, according to Pew Research. The Centers for Disease Control reports that there were 11,078 gun homicides in the U.S. in 2010. This is higher than the FBI's count. The CDC stated there were 14,414 (or 4.4 per 100,000 population) homicides by firearm in 2018, and stated that there were a total of 19,141 homicides (5.8 per 100,000 population) in 2019. Gun-related deaths among children in the U.S. in 2021 was 4,752, surpassing the record total seen during the first year of the pandemic, a new analysis of Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data found. The police chief of Washington, DC attributes the 203 homicides in 2022 to an influx of guns from out-of-town, marking the first time in nearly 20 years that the nation's capital exceeded the 200 homicide threshold in consecutive years. According to the Metropolitan Police Department, Washington last experienced such violence in 2002 and 2003, when it recorded 262 and 246 homicides, respectively. Property crime has decreased by 3% and violent crime decreased by 7% overall since 2021. In 2021, a little above 80% of all murders (20,958 out of 26,031) in the US involved a firearm— the highest percentage since at least 1968, the earliest year for which the CDC has online records. A little under 55% of all suicides (26,328 out of 48,183) in 2021 involved a gun, the highest percentage since 2001. In the 19th century, gun violence played a role in civil disorder such as the Haymarket riot. Homicide rates in cities such as Philadelphia were significantly lower in the 19th century than in modern times. During the 1980s and early 1990s, homicide rates surged in cities across the United States (see applicable graphs). Handgun homicides accounted for nearly all of the overall increase in the homicide rate, from 1985 to 1993, while homicide rates involving other weapons declined during that time frame. The rising trend in homicide rates during the 1980s and early 1990s was most pronounced among lower income and especially unemployed males. Youths and Hispanic and African American males in the U.S. were the most represented, with the injury and death rates tripling for black males aged 13 to 17 and doubling for black males aged 18 to 24. The rise in crack cocaine use in cities across the U.S. has been cited as a factor for increased gun violence among youths during this time period. After 1993, gun violence in the United States began a period of dramatic decline. Prevalence of homicide and violent crime is higher in statistical metropolitan areas of the U.S. than it is in non-metropolitan counties; the vast majority of the U.S. population lives in statistical metropolitan areas. In metropolitan areas, the 2013 homicide rate was 4.7 per 100,000 compared with 3.4 in non-metropolitan counties. More narrowly, the rates of murder and non-negligent manslaughter are identical in metropolitan counties and non-metropolitan counties. In 2005, in U.S. cities with populations greater than 250,000, the mean homicide rate was 12.1 per 100,000. According to 2005 FBI statistics, the highest per capita rates of gun-related homicides in 2005 were in Washington, D.C. (35.4/100,000), Puerto Rico (19.6/100,000), Louisiana (9.9/100,000), and Maryland (9.9/100,000). In 2017, according to the Associated Press, Baltimore broke a record for homicides. [citation needed] In 2005, the 17-24 age group was significantly over-represented in violent crime statistics, particularly homicides involving firearms. In 2005, 17- to 19-year-olds were 4.3% of the overall population of the U.S. but 11.2% of those killed in firearm homicides. This age group accounted for 10.6% of all homicide offenses. The 20-24-year-old age group accounted for 7.1% of the population, but 22.5% of those killed in firearm homicides. The 20-24 age group accounted for 17.7% of all homicide offenses. African American populations in the United States disproportionately represent the majority of firearms injury and homicide compared to other racial groupings. Although mass shootings are covered extensively in the media, mass shootings in the United States account for only a small fraction of gun-related deaths. Regardless, mass shootings occur on a larger scale and much more frequently than in other developed countries. School shootings are described as a "uniquely American crisis", according to The Washington Post in 2018. Children at U.S. schools have active shooter drills. According to USA Today in 2019, "About 95% of public schools now have students and teachers practice huddling in silence, hiding from an imaginary gunman." Those under 17 are not over-represented in homicide statistics. In 2005, 13-16-year-olds accounted for 6% of the overall population of the U.S., but only 3.6% of firearm homicide victims, and 2.7% of overall homicide offenses. People with a criminal record are more likely to die as homicide victims. Between 1990 and 1994, 75% of all homicide victims age 21 and younger in the city of Boston had a prior criminal record. In Philadelphia, the percentage of those killed in gun homicides that had prior criminal records increased from 73% in 1985 to 93% in 1996. In Richmond, Virginia, the risk of gunshot injury is 22 times higher for those males involved with crime. It is significantly more likely that a death will result when either the victim or the attacker has a firearm. The mortality rate for gunshot wounds to the heart is 84%, compared to 30% for people who suffer stab wounds to the heart. In the United States, states with higher gun ownership rates have higher rates of gun homicides and homicides overall, but not higher rates of non-gun homicides. Higher gun availability is positively associated with homicide rates. Some studies suggest that the concept of guns can prime aggressive thoughts and aggressive reactions. An experiment by Berkowitz and LePage in 1967 examined this "weapons effect." Ultimately, when study participants were provoked, their reaction was substantially more aggressive when a gun was visibly present in the room, in contrast with a more benign object like a tennis racket. Other similar experiments like those conducted by Carson, Marcus-Newhall and Miller yield similar results. Such results imply that the presence of a gun in an altercation could elicit an aggressive reaction, which may result in homicide. In 2023, the U.S. ranked 4th out of 34 developed nations in rate of homicides committed with a firearm, according to Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) data.[citation needed] Mexico, Turkey, and Estonia are ranked ahead of the U.S. in incidence of homicides. However, according to comprehensive research by the University of Sydney, the firearm-related homicide rates in Estonia and Turkey are both below the US, at 0.78 in Turkey and 0 in Estonia, while being 5.9 in the US, with Estonia registering zero in 2015. In 2016, a U.S. male aged 15–24 was 70 times more likely to be killed with a gun than his counterparts in any of the other eight largest industrialized nations in the world (the G8). In 2013, in a broader comparison of 218 countries, the U.S. was ranked 111. In 2010, the U.S.' homicide rate was 7 times higher than the average for populous developed countries in the OECD, and its firearm-related homicide rate was 25.2 times higher. In 2013, the United States' firearm-related death rate was 10.64 deaths for every 100,000 inhabitants, a figure very close to Mexico's 11.17, although in Mexico firearm deaths are predominantly homicides whereas in the United States they are predominantly suicides. Although Mexico has strict gun laws, the laws restricting carry are often unenforced, and the laws restricting manufacture and sale are often circumvented by trafficking from the United States and other countries. Canada and Switzerland each have much looser gun control regulation than the majority of developed nations, although significantly more than in the United States, and have firearm death rates of 2.22 and 2.91 per 100,000 citizens, respectively. By comparison Australia, which imposed sweeping gun control laws in response to the Port Arthur massacre in 1996, has a firearm death rate of 0.86 per 100,000. In the United Kingdom the rate is 0.26. In 2014, there were 8,124 gun homicides in the U.S. In 2015, there were 33,636 deaths due to firearms in the U.S., with homicides accounting for 13,286 of those, while guns were used to kill about 50 people in the U.K., a country with population one-fifth of the size of the U.S. population. More people are typically killed with guns in the U.S. in a day—about 85—than in the U.K. in a year, if suicides are included. With deaths by firearm reaching almost 40,000 in the U.S. in 2017, their highest level since 1968, almost 109 people died per day. A study conducted by the Journal of the American Medical Association determined that worldwide yearly gun deaths had reached 250,000 by 2018 and that the United States was one of only six countries that collectively accounted for roughly half of those fatalities. According to the 2023 Small Arms Survey, there are about 120 guns for every 100 Americans. In other words, there are more civilian guns in the United States than there are people. The rate of deaths from gun violence in the United States is eight times greater than in Canada, which has the seventh-highest rate of gun ownership in the world. The definition of a mass shooting remains under debate. The precise inclusion criteria are disputed, and there no broadly accepted definition exists. Mother Jones, using their standard of a mass shooting where a lone gunman kills at least four people in a public place for motivations excluding gang violence or robbery, concluded that between 1982 and 2006 there were 40 mass shootings, an average of 1.6 per year. From 2007 to May 2018, there were 61 mass shootings, an average of 5.4 per year. More broadly, the frequency of mass shootings steadily declined throughout the 1990s and early 2000s, then increased dramatically. Studies indicate that the rate at which public mass shootings occur has tripled since 2011. Between 1982 and 2011, a mass shooting occurred roughly once every 200 days. Between 2011 and 2014, that rate accelerated greatly with at least one mass shooting occurring every 64 days in the United States. In "Behind the Bloodshed", a report by USA Today, said that there were mass killings every two weeks and that public mass killings account for 1 in 6 of all mass killings (26 killings annually would thus be equivalent to 26/6, 4 to 5, public killings per year). Mother Jones listed seven mass shootings in the U.S. for 2015. The average for the period 2011–2015 was about 5 a year. An analysis by Michael Bloomberg's gun violence prevention group, Everytown for Gun Safety, identified 110 mass shootings, defined as shootings in which at least four people were murdered with a firearm, between January 2009 and July 2014. At least 57% were related to domestic or family violence. Other media outlets have reported that hundreds of mass shootings take place in the United States in a single calendar year, citing a crowd-funded website known as Shooting Tracker which defines a mass shooting as having four or more people injured. In December 2015, The Washington Post reported that there had been 355 mass shootings in the United States so far that year. In August 2015, The Washington Post reported that the United States was averaging one mass shooting per day. An earlier report had indicated that in 2015 alone, there had been 294 mass shootings that killed or injured 1,464 people. Shooting Tracker and Mass Shooting Tracker, the two sites that the media have been citing, have been criticized for using a criterion much more inclusive than that used by the government—they count four victims injured as a mass shooting—thus producing much higher figures. Handguns figured in the Virginia Tech shooting, the Binghamton shooting, the 2009 Fort Hood shooting, the 2012 Oikos University shooting, and the 2011 Tucson shooting, but both a handgun and a rifle were used in the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting. The Aurora theater shooting and the Columbine High School massacre were committed by assailants armed with multiple weapons. AR-15 style rifles have been used in a number of the deadliest mass shooting incidents, and have come to be widely characterized as the weapon of choice for perpetrators of mass shootings, despite statistics which show that handguns are the most commonly used weapon type in mass shootings. The number of public mass shootings has increased substantially over several decades, with a steady increase in gun-related deaths. Although mass shootings are covered extensively in the media, they account for a small fraction of gun-related deaths, only 1 percent of all gun deaths between 1980 and 2008. Between January 1 and May 18, 2018, 31 students and teachers were killed inside U.S. schools, exceeding the number of U.S. military service members who died in combat and noncombat roles during the same period. Accidental and negligent injuries The perpetrators and victims of accidental and negligent gun discharges may be of any age. Accidental injuries are most common in homes where guns are kept for self-defense. The injuries are self-inflicted in half of the cases. On January 16, 2013, President Barack Obama issued 23 Executive Orders on Gun Safety, one of which was for the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) to research causes and possible prevention of gun violence. The five main areas of focus were gun violence, risk factors, prevention/intervention, gun safety and how media and violent video games influence the public. They also researched the area of accidental firearm deaths. According to this study not only have the number of accidental firearm deaths been on the decline over the past century but they now account for less than 1% of all unintentional deaths, half of which are self-inflicted. Violent crime In the United States, states with higher levels of gun ownership were associated with higher rates of gun assault and gun robbery. However it is unclear if higher crime rates are a result of increased gun ownership or if gun ownership rates increase as a result of increased crime. In 2000, the costs of gun violence in the United States were estimated to be on the order of $100 billion per year, plus the costs associated with the gun violence avoidance and prevention behaviors. In 2010, gun violence cost U.S. taxpayers about $516 million in direct hospital costs. At least eleven assassination attempts with firearms have been made on U.S. presidents (over one-fifth of all presidents); four sitting presidents have been killed, three with handguns and one with a rifle. Abraham Lincoln survived an earlier attack, but was killed using a .44-caliber Derringer pistol fired by John Wilkes Booth. James A. Garfield was shot two times and mortally wounded by Charles J. Guiteau using a .44-caliber revolver on July 2, 1881. He would die of pneumonia the same year on September 19. On September 6, 1901, William McKinley was fatally wounded by Leon Czolgosz when he fired twice at point-blank range using a .32-caliber revolver. Struck by one of the bullets and receiving immediate surgical treatment, McKinley died 8 days later of gangrene infection. John F. Kennedy was killed by Lee Harvey Oswald with a bolt-action rifle on November 22, 1963. Andrew Jackson, Harry S. Truman, and Gerald Ford (the latter twice) survived unharmed from assassination attempts involving firearms. Ronald Reagan was critically wounded in the March 30, 1981, assassination attempt by John Hinckley Jr. with a .22-caliber revolver. He is the only U.S. president to survive being shot while in office. Former president Theodore Roosevelt was shot and wounded right before delivering a speech during his 1912 presidential campaign. Despite bleeding from his chest, Roosevelt refused to go to a hospital until he delivered the speech. On February 15, 1933, Giuseppe Zangara attempted to assassinate president-elect Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who was giving a speech from his car in Miami, Florida, with a .32-caliber pistol. Roosevelt was unharmed, but Chicago mayor Anton Cermak died in the attempt, and several other bystanders received non-fatal injuries. Response to these events has resulted in federal legislation to regulate the public possession of firearms. For example, the attempted assassination of Franklin Roosevelt contributed to passage of the National Firearms Act of 1934, and the Kennedy assassination (along with others) resulted in the Gun Control Act of 1968. The GCA is a federal law signed by President Lyndon Johnson that broadly regulates the firearms industry and firearms owners. It primarily focuses on regulating interstate commerce in firearms by largely prohibiting interstate firearms transfers except among licensed manufacturers, dealers, and importers. A quarter of robberies of commercial premises in the U.S. are committed with guns. Fatalities are three times as likely in robberies committed with guns than where other, or no, weapons are used, with similar patterns in cases of family violence. Criminologist Philip J. Cook hypothesized that if guns were less available, criminals might commit the same crime, but with less-lethal weapons. He finds that the level of gun ownership in the 50 largest U.S. cities correlates with the rate of robberies committed with guns, but not with overall robbery rates. He also finds that robberies in which the assailant uses a gun are more likely to result in the death of the victim, but less likely to result in injury to the victim. Overall robbery and assault rates in the U.S. are comparable to those in other developed countries, such as Australia and Finland, with much lower levels of gun ownership. A 2000 study showed a strong association between the availability of illegal guns and violent crime rates, but not between legal gun availability and violent crime rates. In 2025, Chandrashekar Pole, a student from Hyderabad, India, was killed in Dallas, Texas while working as a gas station attendant. The incident renewed debate over international student safety. Victims Firearms are the leading cause of death for ages 16–19 in United States since 2020; with the US accounting for 97% of gun-related deaths of late-teens among similarly large and wealthy countries. According to the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics, from 1980 to 2008, 84% of white homicide victims were killed by white offenders and 93% of black homicide victims were killed by black offenders. African-Americans, who were only 13% of the U.S. population in 2010, were 55% of the victims of gun homicide. In 2017 African-American males aged 15 to 34 years were the most frequent victims of firearm homicide in the United States with 81 deaths per 100,000 population. Non-Hispanic whites were 65% of the U.S. population in 2010, but only 25% of the victims. Hispanics were 16% of the population in 2010 and 17% of victims. According to a 2021 CDC study, the male gun homicide rate was over five times the female gun homicide rate. The highest gun homicide rate was among those age 25–44. Non-Hispanic blacks had the highest gun homicide rate in every age group, with a rate 13 times higher than whites in the 25-44 age group. Public opinion With a rise in gun violence and mass shootings in the United States, many surveys have been conducted throughout the recent years to examine the public opinion on certain gun policies and prevention methods in an effort to gain an understanding on the major trends in public opinion. Americans have found to have a range of opinions regarding this issue. Across different studies conducted, it has been found that US public opinion varies based on gender, age, gun ownership status, occupation, education, political affiliation among many other demographics. However, most Americans support some form of restrictions and limitations with firearms, whether they are gun owners or not. A study conducted by Berry College's Department of Political Science utilized data from surveys that were administered from 1999 to 2001, 2011, 2012, 2015, 2017 and 2018. They compared the attitude of the massacre generation which refers to people born after the Columbine high school shooting in 1999 to the older generation. An age effect was only seen in studies conducted after 2012. Results from these surveys indicated that the younger generation are more likely to believe that the government can effectively prevent future mass shootings with more gun prevention laws. The data also suggested that the younger generation are more likely to attribute mass shootings to lack of government regulation. Another study was conducted in April 2015 which measured public opinion of carrying firearms in public places. Results from the study showed that overall, less than one third of the adults in the US supported carrying firearms in public spaces. Support was greater in gun owners compared to non- gun owners. Support for carrying firearms in public was lowest for schools, bars, and sport stadiums. According to the data, 18.2 percent of the respondents supported carrying guns in bars, 17.1 percent supported carrying guns in sport stadiums and 18.8 percent supported carrying guns in schools. Support for carrying firearms was greatest in restaurants and retail stores. 32.9 percent of the respondents support carrying guns in restaurants and 30.8 percent support carrying guns in retail stores. From this study it was concluded that most people in the United States, even most gun owners, are in support of limiting the places gun owners are allowed to carry their weapons. Another study that was conducted in 2015 by Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health revealed that the majority of Americans supported various gun laws and there was minimal difference between gun owners and non-gun owners for a majority of the policies. Support for "prohibiting a person subject to a temporary domestic violence restraining order from having a gun" was around 77.5 percent among gun owners and around 79.6 percent among non-gun owners. Overall, support for a policy that authorizes law enforcement to remove firearms from a person temporarily who may be a threat to themselves or others was 70.9 percent, non- gun owner support was 71.8 percent and gun owner support was 67 percent. The study examined a comparison between public opinion on gun policy immediately after the 2013 school shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary school in Newton, Connecticut and 2 years after the shooting. In most cases there was only a slight change in opinion. For example, overall support for prohibiting a person under the age of 21 from having a gun only decreased 4 percent. A national study of gun policy was conducted in 2019 examining the trends in data from surveys that were administered by the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Policy and Research in 2012, 2015, 2017 and 2019. This study analyzed how the attitude towards certain gun policies changed over time based on political party affiliation and gun ownership status. The study has found that the majority of the people supported a range of gun policies whether they were gun owners or not. From 2015 to 2019, there was an overall increase in support among American adults for 18- gun policies. For instance, support for requiring purchaser licensing and safe gun storage laws increased 5 percent. There was a 4 percent increase in support for universal background checks. Moreover, data showed that a majority of Republicans and Independents supported all except one of the 18 policies. The data reveal high support for safety training among gun owners and non-gun owners. The results of the study indicated that overall 81 percent of the respondents supported the requirement of a safety test for those who have applied for a license to carry firearms in public, in which the support was 73 percent from gun owners and 83 percent from non-gun owners. Additionally, 36 percent of the participants in the study supported permitting a person to carry a concealed gun on a college campus and only 31 percent supported permitting someone to carry guns in elementary school. Overall support for prohibiting a person convicted of a violent crime from carrying a gun in public for 10 years was around 78 percent, where gun owner support was around 71 percent and non-gun owner support was around 80%. Data from this study suggests that both gun owners and non- gunowners support a range of gun policies. A study conducted in 2021 examines American public opinion on several gun violence prevention funding policies among different racial and ethnic groups. Support for funding community-based prevention programs that provide social support was 71 percent among blacks, 68 percent among whites and 69 percent among Hispanics. Moreover, support for funding hospital- based gun violence prevention programs that provide counseling to people to reduce an individual's risk of future violence was 57 percent among whites, 66 percent among blacks and 57 percent among Hispanics. Support for redirecting government funding from police to social programs was 35% among whites, 60% among blacks and 43% among Hispanics. Overall, data revealed that black support for most of the policies examined was greater than white support, however the differences were minimal. Public opinion polls show Americans are about evenly split on banning guns like the AR-15, with recent polls showing support for the ban has dipped slightly. In the midst of a recent surge in mass shootings, including a record 46 school shootings in 2022, an April 2023 Fox News poll found registered voters overwhelmingly supported a wide variety of gun restrictions: Public policy Public policy as related to preventing gun violence is an ongoing political and social debate regarding both the restriction and availability of firearms within the United States. Policy at the Federal level is/has been governed by the Second Amendment, National Firearms Act, Gun Control Act of 1968, Firearm Owners Protection Act, Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act, Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, and the Domestic Violence Offender Act. Gun policy in the U.S. has been revised many times with acts such as the Firearm Owners Protection Act, which loosened provisions for gun sales while banning civilian ownership of machine guns made after 1986. At the federal, state and local level, gun laws such as handgun bans have been overturned by the Supreme Court in cases such as District of Columbia v. Heller and McDonald v. Chicago. These cases hold that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to possess a firearm. D.C. v. Heller only addressed the issue on Federal enclaves, while McDonald v. Chicago addressed the issue as relating to the individual states. Gun control proponents often cite the relatively high number of homicides committed with firearms as reason to support stricter gun control laws. Policies and laws that reduce homicides committed with firearms prevent homicides overall; a decrease in firearm-related homicides is not balanced by an increase in non-firearm homicides. Firearm laws are a subject of debate in the U.S., with firearms used for recreational purposes as well as for personal protection. Gun rights advocates cite the use of firearms for self-protection, and to deter violent crime, as reasons why more guns can reduce crime. Gun rights advocates also say criminals are the least likely to obey firearms laws, and so limiting access to guns by law-abiding people makes them more vulnerable to armed criminals. In a survey of 41 studies, half of the studies found a connection between gun ownership and homicide but these were usually the least rigorous studies. Only six studies controlled at least six statistically significant confounding variables, and none of them showed a significant positive effect. Eleven macro-level studies showed that crime rates increase gun levels (not vice versa). The reason that there is no opposite effect may be that most owners are noncriminals and that they may use guns to prevent violence. Access to firearms The United States Constitution enshrines the right to gun ownership in the Second Amendment of the United States Bill of Rights to ensure the security of a free state through a well regulated Militia. It states: "A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms shall not be infringed." The Constitution makes no distinction between the type of firearm in question or state of residency. Gun dealers in the U.S. are prohibited from selling handguns to those under the age of 21, and long guns to those under the age of 18. In 2017, the National Safety Council released a state ranking on firearms access indicators such as background checks, waiting periods, safe storage, training, and sharing of mental health records with the NICS database to restrict firearm access. Assuming access to guns, the top ten guns involved in crime in the United States show a definite tendency to favor handguns over long guns. The top ten guns used in crime, as reported by the ATF in 1993, were the Smith & Wesson .38 Special and .357 revolvers; Raven Arms .25 caliber, Davis P-380 .380 caliber, Ruger .22 caliber, Lorcin L-380 .380 caliber, and Smith & Wesson semi-automatic handguns; Mossberg and Remington 12 gauge shotguns; and the Tec DC-9 9 mm handgun. An earlier 1985 study of 1,800 incarcerated felons showed that criminals preferred revolvers and other non-semi-automatic firearms over semi-automatic firearms. In Pittsburgh a change in preferences towards pistols occurred in the early 1990s, coinciding with the arrival of crack cocaine and the rise of violent youth gangs. Background checks in California from 1998 to 2000 resulted in 1% of sales being initially denied. The types of guns most often denied included semiautomatic pistols with short barrels and of medium caliber. A 2018 study determined that California's implementation of comprehensive background checks and misdemeanor violation policies was not associated with a net change in the firearm homicide rate over the ensuing 10 years. A 2018 study found no evidence of an association between the repeal of comprehensive background check policies and firearm homicide and suicide rates in Indiana and Tennessee. Among juveniles (minors under the age of 16, 17, or 18, depending on legal jurisdiction) serving in correctional facilities, 86% had owned a gun, with 66% acquiring their first gun by age 14. There was also a tendency for juvenile offenders to have owned several firearms, with 65% owning three or more. Juveniles most often acquired guns illegally from family, friends, drug dealers, and street contacts. Inner city youths cited "self-protection from enemies" as the top reason for carrying a gun. In Rochester, New York, 22% of young males have carried a firearm illegally, most for only a short time. There is little overlap between legal gun ownership and illegal gun carrying among youths. A 2011 study indicated that in states where local background checks for gun purchases are completed, the suicide rate was lower than states without. Gun rights advocates argue that policy aimed at the supply side of the firearms market is based on limited research. One consideration is that 60–70% of firearms sales in the U.S. are transacted through federally licensed firearm dealers, with the remainder taking place in the "secondary market", in which previously owned firearms are transferred by non-dealers. Access to secondary markets is generally less convenient to purchasers, and involves such risks as the possibility of the gun having been used previously in a crime. Unlicensed private sellers were permitted by law to sell privately owned guns at gun shows or at private locations in 24 states as of 1998. Regulations that limit the number of handgun sales in the primary, regulated market to one handgun a month per customer have been shown to be effective at reducing illegal gun trafficking by reducing the supply into the secondary market. Taxes on firearm purchases are another means for government to influence the primary market. Criminals tend to obtain guns through multiple illegal pathways, including large-scale gun traffickers, who tend to provide criminals with relatively few guns. Federally licensed firearm dealers in the primary (new and used gun) market are regulated by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF). Firearm manufacturers are required to mark all firearms manufactured with serial numbers. This allows the ATF to trace guns involved in crimes back to their last Federal Firearms License (FFL) reported change of ownership transaction, although not past the first private sale involving any particular gun. A report by the ATF released in 1999 found that 0.4% of federally licensed dealers sold half of the guns used criminally in 1996 and 1997. This is sometimes done through "straw purchases." State laws, such as those in California, that restrict the number of gun purchases in a month may help stem such "straw purchases." States with gun registration and licensing laws are generally less likely to have guns initially sold there used in crimes. Similarly, crime guns tend to travel from states with weak gun laws to states with strict gun laws. An estimated 500,000 guns are stolen each year, becoming available to prohibited users. During the ATF's Youth Crime Gun Interdiction Initiative (YCGII), which involved expanded tracing of firearms recovered by law enforcement agencies, only 18% of guns used criminally that were recovered in 1998 were in possession of the original owner. Guns recovered by police during criminal investigations were often sold by legitimate retail sales outlets to legal owners, and then diverted to criminal use over relatively short times ranging from a few months to a few years, which makes them relatively new compared with firearms in general circulation. A 2016 survey of prison inmates by the Bureau of Justice Statistics found that 43% of guns used in crimes were obtained from the black market, 25% from an individual, 10% from a retail source (including 0.8% from a gun show), and 6% from theft. The first Federal legislation related to firearms was the Second Amendment to the United States Constitution ratified in 1791. For 143 years, this was the only major Federal legislation regarding firearms. The next Federal firearm legislation was the National Firearms Act of 1934, which created regulations for the sale of firearms, established taxes on their sale, and required registration of some types of firearms such as machine guns. Following the Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. assassinations, the Gun Control Act of 1968 was enacted. This Act regulated gun commerce, restricting mail order sales, and allowing shipments only to licensed firearm dealers. The Act also prohibited sale of firearms to felons, those under indictment, fugitives, illegal aliens, drug users, those dishonorably discharged from the military, and those in mental institutions. The law also restricted importation of so-called Saturday night specials and other types of guns, and limited the sale of automatic weapons and semi-automatic weapon conversion kits. The Firearm Owners Protection Act, also known as the McClure-Volkmer Act, was passed in 1986. It changed some restrictions in the 1968 Act, allowing federally licensed gun dealers and individual unlicensed private sellers to sell at gun shows, while continuing to require licensed gun dealers to require background checks. The 1986 Act also restricted the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms from conducting punitively repetitive inspections, reduced the amount of record-keeping required of gun dealers, raised the burden of proof for convicting gun law violators, and changed restrictions on convicted felons from owning firearms. In addition it also banned new machine guns for sale to the public, but grandfathered in any that were already registered. In the years following the passage of the Gun Control Act of 1968, people buying guns were required to show identification and sign a statement affirming that they were not in any of the prohibited categories. Many states enacted background check laws that went beyond the federal requirements. The Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act passed by Congress in 1993 imposed a waiting period before the purchase of a handgun, giving time for, but not requiring, a background check to be made. The Brady Act also required the establishment of a national system to provide instant criminal background checks, with checks to be done by firearms dealers. The Brady Act only applied to people who bought guns from licensed dealers, whereas felons buy some percentage of their guns from black market sources. Restrictions, such as waiting periods, impose costs and inconveniences on legitimate gun purchasers, such as hunters. A 2000 study found that the implementation of the Brady Act was associated with "reductions in the firearm suicide rate for persons aged 55 years or older but not with reductions in homicide rates or overall suicide rates." The Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, enacted in 1994, included the Federal Assault Weapons Ban, and was a response to public fears over mass shootings. This provision prohibited the manufacture and importation of some firearms with certain features such as a folding stock, pistol grip, flash suppressor, and magazines holding more than ten rounds. A grandfather clause was included that allowed firearms manufactured before 1994 to remain legal. A short-term evaluation by University of Pennsylvania criminologists Christopher S. Koper and Jeffrey A. Roth did not find any clear impact of this legislation on gun violence. Given the short study time period of the evaluation, the National Academy of Sciences advised caution in drawing any conclusions. In September 2004, the assault weapon ban expired, with its sunset clause. The Domestic Violence Offender Gun Ban, the Lautenberg Amendment, prohibited anyone previously convicted of a misdemeanor or felony crime of domestic violence from shipment, transport, ownership and use of guns or ammunition. This was ex post facto, in the opinion of Representative Bob Barr. This law also prohibited the sale or gift of a firearm or ammunition to such a person. It was passed in 1996, and became effective in 1997. The law does not exempt people who use firearms as part of their duties, such as police officers or military personnel with applicable criminal convictions; they may not carry firearms. In the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, police and National Guard units in New Orleans confiscated firearms from private citizens in an attempt to prevent violence. In reaction, Congress passed the Disaster Recovery Personal Protection Act of 2006 in the form of an amendment to Department of Homeland Security Appropriations Act, 2007. Section 706 of the Act prohibits federal employees and those receiving federal funds from confiscating legally possessed firearms during a disaster. On January 5, 2016, President Obama unveiled his new strategy to curb gun violence in America. His proposals focus on new background check requirements that are intended to enhance the effectiveness of the National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS), and greater education and enforcement efforts of existing laws at the state level. In an interview with Bill Simmons of HBO, President Obama also confirmed that gun control will be the "dominant" issue on his agenda in his last year of presidency. All 50 U.S. states allow for the right to carry firearms. A majority of states either require a shall-issue permit or allow carrying without a permit and a minority require a may-issue permit. Right-to-carry laws expanded in the 1990s as homicide rates from gun violence in the U.S. increased, largely in response to incidents such as the Luby's shooting of 1991 in Texas which directly resulted in the passage of a carrying concealed weapon, or CCW, law in Texas in 1995. As Rorie Sherman, staff reporter for the National Law Journal wrote in an article published on April 18, 1994, "It is a time of unparalleled desperation about crime. But the mood is decidedly 'I'll do it myself' and 'Don't get in my way.'" The result was laws, or the lack thereof, that permitted persons to carry firearms openly, known as open carry, often without any permit required, in 22 states by 1998. Laws that permitted persons to carry concealed handguns, sometimes termed a concealed handgun license, CHL, or concealed pistol license, CPL in some jurisdictions instead of CCW, existed in 34 states in the U.S. by 2004. Since then, the number of states with CCW laws has increased; as of 2014[update], all 50 states have some form of CCW laws on the books. Economist John Lott has argued that right-to-carry laws create a perception that more potential crime victims might be carrying firearms, and thus serve as a deterrent against crime. Lott's study has been criticized for not adequately controlling for other factors, including other state laws also enacted, such as Florida's laws requiring background checks and waiting period for handgun buyers. When Lott's data was re-analyzed by some researchers, the only statistically significant effect of concealed-carry laws found was an increase in assaults, with similar findings by Jens Ludwig. Lott and Mustard's 1997 study has also been criticized by Paul Rubin and Hashem Dezhbakhsh for inappropriately using a dummy variable; Rubin and Dezhbakhsh reported in a 2003 study that right-to-carry laws have much smaller and more inconsistent effects than those reported by Lott and Mustard, and that these effects are usually not crime-reducing. Since concealed-carry permits are only given to adults, Philip J. Cook suggested that analysis should focus on the relationship with adult and not juvenile gun incident rates. He found no statistically significant effect. A 2004 National Academy of Sciences survey of existing literature found that the data available "are too weak to support unambiguous conclusions" about the impact of right-to-carry laws on rates of violent crime. NAS suggested that new analytical approaches and datasets at the county or local level are needed to adequately evaluate the impact of right-to-carry laws. A 2014 study found that Arizona's SB 1108, which allowed adults in the state to concealed carry without a permit and without passing a training course, was associated with an increase in gun-related fatalities. A 2018 study by Charles Manski and John V. Pepper found that the apparent effects of RTC laws on crime rates depend significantly on the assumptions made in the analysis. A 2019 study found no statistically significant association between the liberalization of state level firearm carry legislation over the last 30 years and the rates of homicides or other violent crime. Child Access Prevention (CAP) laws enacted by many states require parents to store firearms safely. Safe storage minimizes access by children while maintaining ease of access by adults. CAP laws hold gun owners liable should a child gain access to a loaded gun that is not properly stored. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said that, on average, one child died every three days in accidental incidents in the U.S. from 2000 to 2005. In most states, CAP law violations are considered misdemeanors. Florida's CAP law, enacted in 1989, permits felony prosecution of violators. Research indicates that CAP laws are correlated with a reduction in unintentional gun deaths by 23%, and gun suicides among those aged 14 through 17 by 11%. A study by Lott did not detect a relationship between CAP laws and accidental gun deaths or suicides among those age 19 and under between 1979 and 1996. However, two studies disputed Lott's findings. A 2013 study found that CAP laws are correlated with a reduction of non-fatal gun injuries among both children and adults by 30–40%. In 2016 the American Academy of Pediatrics found that safe gun storage laws were associated with lower overall adolescent suicide rates. Research also indicated that CAP laws were most highly correlated with reductions of non-fatal gun injuries in states where violations were considered felonies, whereas in states that considered violations as misdemeanors, the potential impact of CAP laws was not statistically significant. Some local jurisdictions in the U.S. have more restrictive laws, such as Washington, D.C.'s Firearms Control Regulations Act of 1975, which banned residents from owning handguns, and required permitted firearms be disassembled and locked with a trigger lock. On March 9, 2007, a U.S. Appeals Court ruled the Washington, D.C., handgun ban unconstitutional. The appeal of that case later led to the Supreme Court's ruling in District of Columbia v. Heller that D.C.'s ban was unconstitutional under the Second Amendment. Despite New York City's strict gun control laws, guns are often trafficked in from other parts of the U.S., particularly the southern states. Results from the ATF's Youth Crime Gun Interdiction Initiative indicate that the percentage of imported guns involved in crimes is tied to the stringency of local firearm laws. Prevention programs Violence prevention and educational programs have been established in many schools and communities across the United States. These programs aim to change personal behavior of both children and their parents, encouraging children to stay away from guns, ensure parents store guns safely, and encourage children to solve disputes without resorting to violence. Programs aimed at altering behavior range from passive (requiring no effort on the part of the individual) to active (supervising children, or placing a trigger lock on a gun). The more effort required of people, the more difficult it is to implement a prevention strategy. Prevention strategies focused on modifying the situational environment and the firearm itself may be more effective. Empirical evaluation of gun violence prevention programs has been limited. Of the evaluations that have been done, results indicate such programs have minimal effectiveness. Speak Up is a national youth violence prevention initiative created by The Center to Prevent Youth Violence, which provides young people with tools to improve the safety of their schools and communities. The SPEAK UP program is an anonymous, national hot-line for young people to report threats of violence in their communities or at school. The hot-line is operated in accordance with a protocol developed in collaboration with national education and law enforcement authorities, including the FBI. Trained counselors, with access to translators for 140 languages, collect information from callers and then report the threat to appropriate school and law enforcement officials.[non-primary source needed] One of the most widely used parent counseling programs is Steps to Prevent Firearm Injury program (STOP), which was developed in 1994 by the American Academy of Pediatrics and the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence (the latter of which was then known as the Center to Prevent Handgun Violence). STOP was superseded by STOP 2 in 1998, which has a broader focus including more communities and health care providers. STOP has been evaluated and found not to have a significant effect on gun ownership or firearm storage practices by inner-city parents. Marjorie S. Hardy suggests further evaluation of STOP is needed, as this evaluation had a limited sample size and lacked a control group. A 1999 study found no statistically significant effect of STOP on rates of gun ownership or better gun storage. Prevention programs geared towards children have also not been greatly successful. Many inherent challenges arise when working with children, including their tendency to perceive themselves as invulnerable to injury, limited ability to apply lessons learned, their innate curiosity, and peer pressure. The goal of gun safety programs, usually administered by local firearms dealers and shooting clubs, is to teach older children and adolescents how to handle firearms safely. There has been no systematic evaluation of the effect of these programs on children. For adults, no positive effect on gun storage practices has been found as a result of these programs. Also, researchers have found that gun safety programs for children may likely increase a child's interest in obtaining and using guns, which they cannot be expected to use safely all the time, even with training. One approach taken is gun avoidance, such as when encountering a firearm at a neighbor's home. The Eddie Eagle Gun Safety Program, administered by the National Rifle Association (NRA), is geared towards younger children from pre-kindergarten to sixth grade, and teaches kids that real guns are not toys by emphasizing a "just say no" approach. The Eddie Eagle program is based on training children in a four-step action to take when they see a firearm: (1) Stop! (2) Don't touch! (3) Leave the area. (4) Go tell an adult. Materials, such as coloring books and posters, back the lessons up and provide the repetition necessary in any child-education program. ABC News challenged the effectiveness of the "just say no" approach promoted by the NRA's Eddie the Eagle program in an investigative piece by Diane Sawyer in 1999. Sawyer's piece was based on an academic study conducted by Dr. Marjorie Hardy. Dr. Hardy's study tracked the behavior of elementary age schoolchildren who spent a day learning the Eddie the Eagle four-step action plan from a uniformed police officer. The children were then placed into a playroom which contained a hidden gun. When the children found the gun, they did not run away from the gun, but rather, they inevitably played with it, pulled the trigger while looking into the barrel, or aimed the gun at a playmate and pulled the trigger. The study concluded that children's natural curiosity was far more powerful than the parental admonition to "Just say no". Programs targeted at entire communities, such as community revitalization, after-school programs, and media campaigns, may be more effective in reducing the general level of violence that children are exposed to. Community-based programs that have specifically targeted gun violence include Safe Kids/Healthy Neighborhoods Injury Prevention Program in New York City, and Safe Homes and Havens in Chicago. Evaluation of such community-based programs is difficult, due to many confounding factors and the multifaceted nature of such programs. However, in 2018, a city-wide randomized controlled trial showed that treating vacant lots led to a reduction in gun violence and self-reported fear and depression. A Chicago-based program, "BAM" (Becoming a Man), has produced positive results, according to the University of Chicago Crime Lab, and is expanding to Boston in 2017. The March for Our Lives was a student-led demonstration in support of legislation to prevent gun violence in the United States. It took place in Washington, D.C., on March 24, 2018, with over 880 sibling events throughout the U.S. It was planned by Never Again MSD in collaboration with the nonprofit organization. The demonstration followed the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting in Parkland, Florida on February 14, 2018, which was described by several media outlets as a possible tipping point for gun control legislation. Intervention programs Sociologist James D. Wright suggests that to convince inner-city youths not to carry guns "requires convincing them that they can survive in their neighborhood without being armed, that they can come and go in peace, that being unarmed will not cause them to be victimized, intimidated, or slain." Intervention programs, such as CeaseFire Chicago, Operation Ceasefire in Boston and Project Exile in Richmond, Virginia during the 1990s, have been shown to be effective. Other intervention strategies, such as gun "buy-back" programs have been demonstrated to be ineffective. Gun "buyback" programs are a strategy aimed at influencing the firearms market by taking guns "off the streets". Gun "buyback" programs have been shown to be effective to prevent suicides, but ineffective to prevent homicides with the National Academy of Sciences citing theory underlying these programs as "badly flawed." Guns surrendered tend to be those least likely to be involved in crime, such as old, malfunctioning guns with little resale value, muzzleloading or other black-powder guns, antiques chambered for obsolete cartridges that are no longer commercially manufactured or sold, or guns that individuals inherit but have little value in possessing. Other limitations of gun buyback programs include the fact that it is relatively easy to obtain gun replacements, often of better guns than were relinquished in the buyback. Also, the number of handguns used in crime (about 7,500 per year) is very small compared to about 70 million handguns in the U.S.. (i.e., 0.011%). "Gun bounty" programs launched in several Florida cities have shown more promise. These programs involve cash rewards for anonymous tips about illegal weapons that lead to an arrest and a weapons charge. Since its inception in May 2007, the Miami program has led to 264 arrests and the confiscation of 432 guns owned illegally and $2.2 million in drugs, and has solved several murder and burglary cases. In 1995, Operation Ceasefire was established as a strategy for addressing youth gun violence in Boston. Violence was particularly concentrated in poor, inner-city neighborhoods including Roxbury, Dorchester, and Mattapan. There were 22 youths (under the age of 24) killed in Boston in 1987, with that figure rising to 73 in 1990. Operation Ceasefire entailed a problem-oriented policing approach, and focused on specific places that were crime hot spots—two strategies that when combined have been shown to be quite effective. Particular focus was placed on two elements of the gun violence problem, including illicit gun trafficking and gang violence. Within two years of implementing Operation Ceasefire in Boston, the number of youth homicides dropped to ten, with only one handgun-related youth homicide occurring in 1999 and 2000. The Operation Ceasefire strategy has since been replicated in other cities, including Los Angeles. Erica Bridgeford, spearheaded a "72-hour ceasefire" in August 2017, but the ceasefire was broken with a homicide. Councilman Brandon Scott, Mayor Catherine Pugh and others talked of community policing models that might work for Baltimore. Project Exile, conducted in Richmond, Virginia during the 1990s, was a coordinated effort involving federal, state, and local officials that targeted gun violence. The strategy entailed prosecution of gun violations in Federal courts, where sentencing guidelines were tougher. Project Exile also involved outreach and education efforts through media campaigns, getting the message out about the crackdown. Research analysts offered different opinions as to the program's success in reducing gun crime. Authors of a 2003 analysis of the program argued that the decline in gun homicide was part of a "general regression to the mean" across U.S. cities with high homicide rates. Authors of a 2005 study disagreed, concluding that Richmond's gun homicide rate fell more rapidly than the rates in other large U.S. cities with other influences controlled. Project Safe Neighborhoods (PSN) is a national strategy for reducing gun violence that builds on the strategies implemented in Operation Ceasefire and Project Exile. PSN was established in 2001, with support from the Bush administration, channelled through the United States Attorney's Offices in the United States Department of Justice. The Federal government has spent over US$1.5 billion since the program's inception on the hiring of prosecutors, and providing assistance to state and local jurisdictions in support of training and community outreach efforts. In 2016, Chicago saw a 58% increase in homicides. In response to the spike in gun violence, a group of foundations and social service agencies created the Rapid Employment and Development Initiative (READI) Chicago. A Heartland Alliance program, READI Chicago targets those most at risk of being involved in gun violence – either as perpetrator or a victim. Individuals are provided with 18 months of transitional jobs, cognitive behavioral therapy and legal and social services. Individuals are also provided with 6 months of support as they transition to full-time employment at the end of the 18 months. The University of Chicago Crime Lab is evaluating READI Chicago's impact on gun violence reduction. The evaluation, expected to be completed in Spring 2021, is showing early signs of success. Eddie Bocanegra, senior director of READI Chicago, hopes that the early success of READI Chicago will result in funding from the City of Chicago. Reporting of crime The National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS) is used by law enforcement agencies in the United States for collecting and reporting data on crimes. The NIBRS is one of four subsets of the Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) program. The FBI states the UCR Program is retiring the SRS and will transition to a NIBRS-only data collection by January 1, 2021. Additionally, the FBI states NIBRS will collect more detailed information, including incident date and time, whether reported offenses were attempted or completed, expanded victim types, relationships of victims to offenders and offenses, demographic details, location data, property descriptions, drug types and quantities, the offender's suspected use of drugs or alcohol, the involvement of gang activity, and whether a computer was used in the commission of the crime. Though NIBRS will be collecting more data the reporting if the firearm used was legally or illegally obtained by the suspect will not be identified. Nor will the system have the capability to identify if a legally obtained firearm used in the crime was used by the owner or registered owner, if required to be registered. Additionally, the information of how an illegally obtained firearm was acquired will be left to speculation. The absence of collecting this information into NIBRS the reported "gun violence" data will remain a gross misinterpretation lending anyone information that can be skewed to their liking/needs and not pinpoint where actual efforts need to be directed to curb the use of firearms in crime. Research limitations In the United States, research into firearms and violent crime is fraught with difficulties, associated with limited data on gun ownership and use, firearms markets, and aggregation of crime data. Research studies into gun violence have primarily taken one of two approaches: case-control studies and social ecology. Gun ownership is usually determined through surveys, proxy variables, and sometimes with production and import figures. In statistical analysis of homicides and other types of crime which are rare events, these data tend to have poisson distributions, which also presents methodological challenges to researchers. With data aggregation, it is difficult to make inferences about individual behavior. This problem, known as ecological fallacy, is not always handled properly by researchers; this leads some to jump to conclusions that their data do not necessarily support. In 1996 the NRA lobbied Congressman Jay Dickey (R-Ark.) to include budget provisions that prohibited the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) from advocating or promoting gun control and that deleted $2.6 million from the CDC budget, the exact amount the CDC had spent on firearms research the previous year. The ban was later extended to all research funded by the Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS). According to an article in Nature, this made gun research more difficult, reduced the number of studies, and discouraged researchers from even talking about gun violence at medical and scientific conferences. In 2013, after the December 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, President Barack Obama ordered the CDC to resume funding research on gun violence and prevention, and put $10 million in the 2014 budget request for it. However, the order had no practical effect, as the CDC refused to act without a specific appropriation to cover the research, and Congress repeatedly declined to allocate any funds. As a result, the CDC has not performed any such studies since 1996. Maps See also References Further reading External links |
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[SOURCE: https://www.wired.com/story/dna-transfer-framed-murder/] | [TOKENS: 15901] |
Katie WorthThe Big StoryApr 19, 2018 7:00 AMFramed for Murder by His Own DNAWe leave traces of our genetic material everywhere, even on things we’ve never touched. That got Lukis Anderson charged with a brutal crime he didn’t commit.Lukis Anderson was charged for the murder of Raveesh Kumra after his DNA was found on Kumra's fingernails.Photograph: Carlos Chavarría/The Marshall ProjectCommentLoaderSave StorySave this storyCommentLoaderSave StorySave this storyThis investigation was published in partnership with The Marshall Project and FRONTLINE (PBS).When the DNA results came back, even Lukis Anderson thought he might have committed the murder."I drink a lot," he remembers telling public defender Kelley Kulick as they sat in a plain interview room at the Santa Clara County, California, jail. Sometimes he blacked out, so it was possible he did something he didn't remember. "Maybe I did do it."Kulick shushed him. If she was going to keep her new client off death row, he couldn't go around saying things like that. But she agreed. It looked bad.Before he was charged with murder, Anderson was a 26-year-old homeless alcoholic with a long rap sheet who spent his days hustling for change in downtown San Jose. The murder victim, Raveesh Kumra, was a 66-year-old investor who lived in Monte Sereno, a Silicon Valley enclave 10 miles and many socioeconomic rungs away.Around midnight on November 29, 2012, a group of men had broken into Kumra's 7,000-square-foot mansion. They found him watching CNN in the living room, tied him, blindfolded him, and gagged him with mustache-print duct tape. They found his companion, Harinder, asleep in an upstairs bedroom, hit her on the mouth, and tied her up next to Raveesh. Then they plundered the house for cash and jewelry.After the men left, Harinder, still blindfolded, felt her way to a kitchen phone and called 911. Police arrived, then an ambulance. One of the paramedics declared Raveesh dead. The coroner would later conclude that he had been suffocated by the mustache tape.Three and a half weeks later, the police arrested Anderson. His DNA had been found on Raveesh's fingernails. They believed the men struggled as Anderson tied up his victim. They charged him with murder. Kulick was appointed to his case.Public defender Kelley Kulick was appointed to Lukis Anderson's case after he was charged with first-degree murder. Photograph: Carlos Chavarría/The Marshall ProjectAs they looked at the DNA results, Anderson tried to make sense of a crime he had no memory of committing."Nah, nah, nah. I don't do things like that," he recalls telling her. "But maybe I did.""Lukis, shut up," Kulick says she told him. "Let's just hit the pause button till we work through the evidence to really see what happened."What happened, although months would pass before anyone figured it out, was that Lukis Anderson's DNA had found its way onto the fingernails of a dead man he had never even met.Back in the 1980s, when DNA forensic analysis was still in its infancy, crime labs needed a speck of bodily fluid—usually blood, semen, or spit—to generate a genetic profile.That changed in 1997, when Australian forensic scientist Roland van Oorschot stunned the criminal justice world with a nine-paragraph paper titled "DNA Fingerprints from Fingerprints." It revealed that DNA could be detected not just from bodily fluids but from traces left by a touch. Investigators across the globe began scouring crime scenes for anything—a doorknob, a countertop, a knife handle—that a perpetrator may have tainted with incriminating "touch" DNA.Everyone, including Anderson, leaves a trail of DNA everywhere they go. Photograph: Carlos Chavarría/The Marshall ProjectSometimes that DNA can end up at a crime scene. Photograph: Carlos Chavarría/The Marshall ProjectBut van Oorschot's paper also contained a vital observation: Some people's DNA appeared on things that they had never touched.In the years since, van Oorschot's lab has been one of the few to investigate this phenomenon, dubbed "secondary transfer." What they have learned is that, once it's out in the world, DNA doesn't always stay put.In one of his lab's experiments, for instance, volunteers sat at a table and shared a jug of juice. After 20 minutes of chatting and sipping, swabs were deployed on their hands, the chairs, the table, the jug, and the juice glasses, then tested for genetic material. Although the volunteers never touched each other, 50 percent wound up with another's DNA on their hand. A third of the glasses bore the DNA of volunteers who did not touch or drink from them.Then there was the foreign DNA—profiles that didn't match any of the juice drinkers. It turned up on about half of the chairs and glasses, and all over the participants' hands and the table. The only explanation: The participants unwittingly brought with them alien genes, perhaps from the lover they kissed that morning, the stranger with whom they had shared a bus grip, or the barista who handed them an afternoon latte.In a sense, this isn't surprising: We leave a trail of ourselves everywhere we go. An average person may shed upward of 50 million skin cells a day. Attorney Erin Murphy, author of Inside the Cell, a book about forensic DNA, has calculated that in two minutes the average person sheds enough skin cells to cover a football field. We also spew saliva, which is packed with DNA. If we stand still and talk for 30 seconds, our DNA may be found more than a yard away. With a forceful sneeze, it might land on a nearby wall.To find out the prevalence of DNA in the world, a group of Dutch researchers tested 105 public items—escalator rails, public toilet door handles, shopping basket handles, coins. Ninety-one percent bore human DNA, sometimes from half a dozen people. Even items intimate to us—the armpits of our shirts, say—can bear other people's DNA, they found.The itinerant nature of DNA has serious implications for forensic investigations. After all, if traces of our DNA can make their way to a crime scene we never visited, aren't we all possible suspects?Forensic DNA has other flaws: Complex mixtures of many DNA profiles can be wrongly interpreted, certainty statistics are often wildly miscalculated, and DNA analysis robots have sometimes been stretched past the limits of their sensitivity.But as advances in technology are solving some of these problems, they have actually made the problem of DNA transfer worse. Each new generation of forensic tools is more sensitive; labs today can identify people with DNA from just a handful of cells. A handful of cells can easily migrate.A survey of the published science, interviews with leading scientists, and a review of thousands of pages of court and police documents associated with the Kumra case has elucidated how secondary DNA transfer can undermine the credibility of the criminal justice system's most-trusted tool. And yet, very few crime labs worldwide regularly and robustly study secondary DNA transfer.This is partly because most forensic scientists believe DNA to be the least of their field's problems. They're not wrong: DNA is the most accurate forensic science we have. It has exonerated scores of people convicted based on more flawed disciplines like hair or bite-mark analysis. And there have been few publicized cases of DNA mistakenly implicating someone in a crime.But, like most human enterprises, DNA analysis is not perfect. And without study, the scope and impact of that imperfection is difficult to assess, says Peter Gill, a British forensic researcher. He has little doubt that his field, so often credited with solving crimes, is also responsible for wrongful convictions."The problem is we're not looking for these things," Gill says. "For every miscarriage of justice that is detected, there must be a dozen that are never discovered."The phone rang five times."Are you awake?" the dispatcher asked."Yeah," lied Corporal Erin Lunsford."Are you back on full duty or you still light duty?" she asked, according to a tape of the call.Lunsford had been off crutches for two weeks already, but it was 2:15 am and pouring rain. Probably some downed tree needed to be policed. "Light duty," Lunsford said."Oh," she said. "Never mind.""Why, what are you calling about?" he asked."We had a home invasion that turned into a 187," she said. Cop slang for murder."Shit, seriously?" Lunsford said, waking up.Sergeant Erin Lunsford of the Los Gatos-Monte Sereno Police Department was the lead investigator in Kumra’s murder. Photograph: Carlos Chavarría/The Marshall ProjectLunsford had served all 15 of his professional years as a police officer at the Los Gatos–Monte Sereno Police Department, a 38-officer agency that policed two drowsy towns. He rose through the ranks and was working a stint in the department's detective bureau. He had mostly been investigating property crimes. Los Gatos, a wealthy bedroom community of Silicon Valley, averaged a homicide once every three or four years. Monte Sereno, a bedroom community of the bedroom community, hadn't had a homicide in roughly 20.Lunsford got dressed. He drove through the November torrent. He spotted cop cars clustered around a brick and iron gate. An ambulance flashed quietly in the driveway. Beyond it, the lit Kumra mansion.Lunsford's boss told him to take the lead on the investigation. The on-scene supervisor walked him through the house. Dressers emptied, files dumped. A cellphone in a toilet, pissed on. A refrigerator beeping every 10 seconds, announcing its doors were ajar. Raveesh’s body, heavyset and disheveled, on the floor near the kitchen. His eyes still blindfolded.An investigator from the county coroner's office arrived and moved Kumra's body into a van. Lunsford followed her to the morgue for the autopsy. A doctor undressed the victim and scraped and cut his fingernails for evidence.Lunsford recognized Raveesh, a wealthy businessman who had once owned a share of a local concert venue. Lunsford had come to the Kumra mansion a couple times on "family calls" that never amounted to anything: "Just people arguing," he recalled. He had also run into him at Goguen's Last Call, a dive frequented by Raveesh as a regular and Lunsford as a cop responding to calls. Raveesh was an affable extrovert, always buying rounds; the unofficial mayor of that part of town, Lunsford called him.In the coming days, as Lunsford interviewed people who knew the Kumras, he was told that Raveesh also had relationships with sex workers. Raveesh and Harinder had divorced around 2010 after more than 30 years of marriage, but still lived together.While Lunsford attended the autopsy, a team of gloved investigators combed the mansion. They tucked paper evidence into manila envelopes; bulkier items into brown paper bags. They amassed more than 100.Teams specializing in crime scene investigations were first assembled over a century ago, after the French scientist Edmond Locard devised the principle that birthed the field of forensics: A perpetrator will bring something to a crime scene and leave with something from it. Van Oorschot's touch DNA discovery had unveiled the most literal expression imaginable of Locard's principle.Like those early teams, the investigators in the Kumra mansion were looking for fingerprints, footprints, and hair. But unlike their predecessors, they devoted considerable time to thinking through everything the perpetrators may have touched.Some perpetrators are giving thought to this as well. A 2013 Canadian study of 350 sexual homicides found that about a third of perpetrators appeared to have taken care not to leave DNA, killing their victims in tidier ways than beating or strangling, which are likely to leave behind genetic clues, for instance. And it worked: In those "forensically aware" cases, police solved the case 50 percent of the time, compared to 83 percent of their sloppier counterparts.The men who killed Kumra seemed somewhat forensically aware, albeit clumsily. They had worn latex gloves through their rampage; a pile of them were left in the kitchen sink, wet and soapy, as though someone had tried to wash off the DNA.In the weeks after the murder, Tahnee Nelson Mehmet, a criminalist at the county crime lab, ran dozens of tests on the evidence collected from the Kumra mansion. Most only revealed DNA profiles consistent with Raveesh or Harinder.But in her first few batches of evidence, Mehmet hit forensic pay dirt: a handful of unknown profiles—including on the washed gloves. She ran them through the state database of people arrested for or convicted of felonies and got three hits, all from the Bay Area: 22-year-old DeAngelo Austin on the duct tape; 21-year-old Javier Garcia on the gloves; and, on the fingernail clippings, 26-year-old Lukis Anderson.Within weeks of the DNA hits, Lunsford had plenty of evidence implicating Austin and Garcia: Both were from Oakland, but a warrant for their cellphone records showed they'd pinged towers near Monte Sereno the night of the homicide. Police records showed that Austin belonged to a gang linked to a series of home burglaries. And most damning of all, Austin's older sister, a 32-year-old sex worker named Katrina Fritz, had been involved with Raveesh for 12 years. Police had even found her phone backed up on Raveesh's computer. Eventually she would admit that she had given her brother a map of the house.Connecting Anderson to the crime proved trickier. There were no phone records showing he had traveled to Monte Sereno that night. He wasn't associated with a gang. But one thing on his rap sheet drew Lunsford's attention: A felony residential burglary.Eventually Lunsford found a link. A year earlier, Anderson had been locked up in the same jail as a friend of Austin's named Shawn Hampton. Hampton wore an ankle monitor as a condition of his parole. It showed that two days before the crime he had driven to San Jose. He made a couple of stops downtown, right near Anderson's territory.It started to crystallize for Lunsford: When Austin was planning the break-in, he wanted a local guy experienced in burglary. So Hampton hooked him up with his jail buddy Anderson.Anderson had recently landed back in jail after violating his probation on the burglary charge. Lunsford and his boss, Sergeant Mike D'Antonio, visited him there. They taped the interview."Does this guy look familiar to you? What about this lady?" Lunsford said, laying out pictures of the victims on the interview room table."I don't know, man," Anderson said.Lunsford pulled out a picture of Anderson's mother."All right, what about this lady here? You don't know who she is?" Lunsford said.Anderson met Lunsford's sarcasm with silence.Lunsford set down a letter from the state of California showing the database match between Anderson's DNA and the profile found on the victim's fingernails."This starting to ring some bells?" Lunsford said."My guess is you didn't think anybody was gonna be home," D'Antonio said. "My guess is it went way farther than you ever thought it would go.""I don't know what you're talking about, sir," Anderson said."You do," Lunsford said. "You won't look at their pictures. The only picture you looked at good was your mom."Finally, D'Antonio took a compromising tone."Lukis, Lukis, Lukis," he said. "I don't have a crystal ball to know what the truth is. Only you do. And in all the years I've been doing this I've never seen a DNA hit being wrong."Anderson had been in jail on the murder charge for over a month when a defense investigator dropped a stack of records on Kulick's desk. Look at them, the investigator said. Now.They were Anderson's medical records. Because his murder charge could carry the death penalty, Kulick had the investigator pull everything pertinent to Anderson's medical history, including his mental health, in case they had to ask for leniency during sentencing.Documents from Lukis Anderson's case on public defender Kelley Kulick's desk. Photograph: Carlos Chavarría/The Marshall ProjectShe suspected Anderson could be a good candidate for such leniency. He spent much of his childhood homeless. In early adulthood, he was diagnosed with a mental health disorder and diabetes. And he had developed a mighty alcohol addiction. One day, while drunk, he stepped off a curb and into the path of a moving truck. He survived, but his memory was never quite right again. He lost track of days, sometimes several in a row.That's not to say his life was bleak. He made friends easily. He had a coy sense of humor and dimples that shone like headlights. His buddies, many on the streets themselves, looked after him, as did some downtown shopkeepers. Kulick and her investigator had spoken to several of them. They shook their heads. Anderson might be a drunk, they said, but he wasn't a killer.His rap sheet seemed to agree. It was filled with petty crimes: drunk in public, riding a bike under the influence, probation violations. The one serious conviction—the residential burglary that had caught Lunsford's attention—seemed more benign upon careful reading. According to the police report, Anderson had drunkenly broken the front window of a home and tried to crawl through. The horrified resident had pushed him back out with blankets. Police found him a few minutes later standing on the sidewalk, dazed and bleeding. Though nothing had been stolen, he had been charged with a felony and pleaded no contest. His DNA was added to the state criminal database.The medical records showed that Anderson was also a regular in county hospitals. Most recently, he had arrived in an ambulance to Valley Medical Center, where he was declared inebriated nearly to the point of unconsciousness. Blood alcohol tests indicated he had consumed the equivalent of 21 beers. He spent the night detoxing. The next morning he was discharged, somewhat more sober.The date on that record was November 29. If the record was right, Anderson had been in the hospital precisely as Raveesh Kumra was suffocating on duct tape miles away.Kulick remembers turning to the investigator, who was staring back at her. She was used to alibis being partial and difficult to prove. This one was signed by hospital staff. More than anything, she felt terrified. "To know that you have a factually innocent client sitting in jail facing the death penalty is really scary," she said later. "You don't want to screw up."She knew Lunsford and the prosecutors would try to find holes: Perhaps the date on the record was wrong, or someone had stolen his ID, or there was more than one Lukis Anderson.So she and the investigator systematically retraced his day. Anderson had only patchy recollections of the night in question. But they found a record that a 7-Eleven clerk called authorities at 7:54 pm complaining that Anderson was panhandling. He moved on before the police arrived.His meanderings took him four blocks east, to S&S Market. The clerk there told Kulick that Anderson sat down in front of the store at about 8:15 pm, already drunk, and got drunker. A couple of hours later, he wandered into the store and collapsed in an aisle. The clerk called the authorities.The police arrived first, followed by a truck from the San Jose Fire Department. A paramedic with the fire department told Kulick he had picked up Anderson drunk so often that he knew his birth date by heart. Two other paramedics arrived with an ambulance. They wrestled Anderson onto a stretcher and took him to the hospital. According to his medical records, he was admitted at 10:45 pm. The doctor who treated him said Anderson remained in bed through the night.Harinder Kumra had said the men who killed Raveesh rampaged through her house sometime between 11:30 pm and 1:30 am.Kulick called the district attorney's office. She wanted to meet with them and Lunsford.In 2008, German detectives were on the trail of the "Phantom of Heilbronn." A serial killer and thief, the Phantom murdered immigrants and a cop, robbed a gemstone trader, and munched on a cookie while burglarizing a caravan. Police mobilized across borders, offered a large reward, and racked up more than 16,000 hours on the hunt. But they struggled to discern a pattern to the crimes, other than the DNA profile the Phantom left at 40 crime scenes in Germany, France, and Austria.At long last, they found the Phantom: An elderly Polish worker in a factory that produced the swabs police used to collect DNA. She had somehow contaminated the swabs as she worked. Crime scene investigators had, in turn, contaminated dozens of crime scenes with her DNA.Contamination, the unintentional introduction of DNA into evidence by the very people investigating the crime, is the best understood form of transfer. And after Lunsford heard Kulick's presentation—then retraced Anderson's day himself, concluded he had jailed an innocent man, and felt sick to his stomach for a while—he counted contamination among his leading theories.As the Phantom of Heilbronn case demonstrated, contamination can happen long before evidence arrives in a lab. A 2016 study by Gill, the British forensic researcher, found DNA on three-quarters of crime scene tools he tested, including cameras, measuring tapes, and gloves. Those items can pick up DNA at one scene and move it to the next.Once it arrives in the lab, the risk continues: One set of researchers found stray DNA in even the cleanest parts of their lab. Worried that the very case files they worked on could be a source of contamination, they tested 20. Seventy-five percent held the DNA of people who hadn't handled the file.In Santa Clara County, the district attorney's office reviewed the Kumra case and found no obvious evidence of errors or improper use of tools in the crime lab. They checked if Anderson's DNA had shown up in any other cases the lab had recently handled, and inadvertently wandered into the Kumra case. It had not.So they began investigating a second theory: That Raveesh and Anderson somehow met in the hours or days before the homicide, at which point Anderson's DNA became caught under Raveesh's fingernails."We are convinced that at some point—we just don't know when in the 24 hours, 48 hours, or 72 hours beforehand—that their paths crossed," deputy district attorney Kevin Smith told a San Francisco Chronicle reporter.There now exists a small pile of studies exploring how DNA moves: If a man shakes someone's hand and then uses the restroom, could their DNA wind up on his penis? (Yes.) If someone drags another person by the ankles, how often does their profile clearly show up? (40 percent of the time.) And, of utmost relevance to Lukis Anderson, how many of us walk around with traces of other people's DNA on our fingernails? (1 in 5.)Whether someone's DNA moves from one place to another—and then is found there—depends on a handful of factors: quantity (two transferred cells are less likely to be detected than 2,000), vigor of contact (a limp handshake relays less DNA than a bone-crushing one), the nature of the surfaces involved (a tabletop's chemical content affects how much DNA it picks up), and elapsed time (we're more likely carrying DNA of someone we just hugged than someone we hugged hours ago, since foreign DNA tends to rub off over time).Then there's a person's shedding status: "Good" shedders lavish their DNA on their environment; "poor" shedders move through the world virtually undetectable, genetically speaking. In general, flaky, sweaty, or diseased skin is thought to shed more DNA than healthy, arid skin. Nail chewers, nose pickers, and habitual face touchers spread their DNA around, as do hands that haven't seen a bar of soap lately—discarded DNA can accumulate over time, and soap helps wash it away.And some people simply seem to be naturally superior shedders. Mariya Goray, a forensic science researcher in van Oorschot's lab who coauthored the juice study with him, has found one of her colleagues to be an outrageously prodigious shedder. "He's amazing," she said, her voice tinged with admiration. "Maybe I'll do a study on him. And the study will just be called, 'James.'"She hopes to develop a test to determine a person's shedder status, which could be deployed to assess a suspect's claims that their DNA arrived somewhere innocently.Such a test could have been useful in the case of David Butler, an English cabdriver. In 2011, DNA found on the fingernails of a woman who had been murdered six years earlier was run through a database and matched Butler's. He swore he'd never met the woman. His defense attorney noted that he had a skin condition so severe that fellow cabbies had dubbed him "Flaky." Perhaps he had given a ride to the actual murderer that day, who inadvertently picked up Butler's DNA in the cab and later deposited it on the victim, they theorized.Investigators didn't buy the explanation, but jurors did. Butler was acquitted after eight months in jail. Upon release, he excoriated police for their blind faith in the evidence."DNA has become the magic bullet for the police," Butler told the BBC. "They thought it was my DNA, ergo it must be me."Traditional police work would have never steered police to Anderson. But the DNA hit led them to seek other evidence confirming his guilt. "It wasn't malicious. It was confirmation bias," Kulick says. "They got the DNA, and then they made up a story to fit it."Had the case gone to trial, jurors may well have done the same. A 2008 series of studies by researchers at the University of Nevada, Yale, and Claremont McKenna College found that jurors rated DNA evidence as 95 percent accurate and 94 percent persuasive of a suspect's guilt.Eleven leading DNA transfer scientists contacted for this story were in consensus that the criminal justice system must be willing to question DNA evidence. They were also in agreement about whose job it should be to navigate those queries: forensic scientists.As it stands, forensic scientists generally stick to the question of source (whose DNA is this?) and leave activity (how did it get here?) for judges and juries to wrestle with. But the researchers contend that forensic scientists are best armed with the information necessary to answer that question.Consider a case in which a man is accused of sexually assaulting his stepdaughter. He looks mighty guilty when his DNA and a fragment of sperm is found on her underwear. But jurors might give the defense more credence if a forensic scientist familiarized them with a 2016 Canadian study showing that fathers' DNA is frequently found on their daughters' clean underwear; occasionally, a fragment of sperm is there too. It migrates there in the wash.This shift—from reporting on who to reporting on how—has been encouraged by the European Network of Forensic Science Institutes. But the shift has been slow on that continent and virtually nonexistent in the United States, where defense attorneys have argued that forensic scientists—in many communities employed by the prosecutor's office or police department—should be careful to stick to the facts rather than make conjectures."The problem is that when forensic scientists get involved in those determinations, they're wrought with confirmation bias," says Jennifer Friedman, a Los Angeles County public defender.Meanwhile, forensic scientists in the US have resisted the shift, arguing they lack the data to confidently testify about how DNA moves.Van Oorschot and Gill concede this point. Only a handful of labs in Europe and Australia regularly research transfer. The forensic scientists interviewed for this story say they are not aware of any lab or university in the US that routinely does so.Funding gets some of the blame: The Australian labs and some European labs get government dollars to study DNA transfer. But British forensic researcher and professor Georgina Meakin of University College London says she must find alternative ways to pay for her own transfer research; the Centre for Forensic Sciences, where Meakin works, has launched a crowdfunding page for a new lab to study trace evidence transfer. In the US, all the grants from the National Science Foundation, the National Institute of Standards and Technology, and the National Institute of Justice for forensics research put together likely sum just $13.5 million a year, according to a 2016 report on forensic science by the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST); of that, very little has been spent looking into DNA transfer."The folks with the greatest interest in making sure forensic science isn't misused are defendants," says Eric Lander, principal leader of the Human Genome Project, who cochaired PCAST under President Obama. "Defendants don't have an awful lot of power."In 2009, after issuing a report harshly criticizing the paucity of science behind most forensics, the National Academy of Sciences urged Congress to create a new, independent federal agency to oversee the field. There was little political appetite to do that. Instead, in 2013, Obama created a 40-member National Commission on Forensic Science, filled it with people who saw forensics from radically different perspectives—prosecutors, defense attorneys, academics, lab analysts, and scientists—and made a rule that all actions must be approved by a supermajority. Naturally, the commission got off to a slow start. But ultimately it produced more than 40 recommendations and opinions. These lacked the teeth of a regulatory ruling, but the Justice Department was obligated to respond to them.At the beginning, most of the commission's efforts were focused on improving other disciplines, "because DNA testing as a whole is so much better than much forensic science that we had focused a lot of our attention elsewhere," says US district judge Jed Rakoff, a member of the commission.According to Rakoff and other members interviewed, the commission was just digging into issues touching on DNA transfer when attorney general Jeff Sessions took office last year. In April 2017, his department announced it would not renew the commission's charter. It never met again.Then, in August, President Trump signed the Rapid DNA Act of 2017, allowing law enforcement to use new technology that produces DNA results in just 90 minutes. The bill had bipartisan support and received little press. But privacy advocates worry it may usher in an era of widespread "stop and spit" policing, in which law enforcement asks anyone they stop for a DNA sample. This is already occurring in towns in Florida, Connecticut, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania, according to reporting by ProPublica. If law enforcement deems there is probable cause, they can compel someone to provide DNA; otherwise, it is voluntary.If stop-and-spit becomes more widely used and police databases swell, it could have a disproportionate impact on African Americans and Latinos, who are more often searched, ticketed, and arrested by police. In most states, a felony arrest is enough to add someone in perpetuity to the state database. Just this month, the California Supreme Court declined to overturn a provision requiring all people arrested or charged for a felony to give up their DNA; in Oklahoma, the DNA of any undocumented immigrant arrested on suspicion of any crime is added to a database. Those whose DNA appears in a database face a greater risk of being implicated in a crime they didn't commit.It was Lunsford who figured it out in the end.He was reading through Anderson's medical records and paused on the names of the ambulance paramedics who picked up Anderson from his repose on the sidewalk outside S&S Market. He had seen them before.He pulled up the Kumra case files. Sure enough, there were the names again: Three hours after picking up Anderson, the two paramedics had responded to the Kumra mansion, where they checked Raveesh's vitals.The prosecutors, defense attorney, and police agree that somehow, the paramedics must have moved Anderson's DNA from San Jose to Monte Sereno. Santa Clara County District Attorney Jeff Rosen has postulated that a pulse oximeter slipped over both patients' fingers may have been the culprit; Kulick thinks it could have been their uniforms or another piece of equipment. It may never be known for sure.A spokesman for Rural/Metro Corporation, where the paramedics worked, told San Francisco TV station KPIX5 that the company had high sanitation standards, requiring paramedics to change gloves and sanitize the vehicles.Deputy District Attorney Smith framed the incident as a freak accident. "It's a small world," he told a San Francisco Chronicle reporter.The trial against the other men implicated in the case moved forward. Austin's older sister, Fritz, testified in trials against him and Garcia. She also testified against a third man, Marcellous Drummer, whose DNA had been found on evidence from the Kumra crime scene months after the initial hits.During the trials, Harinder Kumra told jurors she was still haunted by the image of the man who split her lip open. "Every day I see that face. Every night when I sleep, when there's a noise, I think it's him," she said. She has sold the mansion. Members of the Kumra family declined to comment for this story.The DNA in the case did not go uncontested. Garcia's attorney argued that, like Anderson's, Garcia's DNA had arrived at the scene inadvertently. According to the attorney, Austin had come by the trap house where Garcia hung out to pick up Garcia's cousin; the cousin was in on the crime and had borrowed a box of gloves that Garcia frequently used, which is why Garcia's DNA was found on the gloves at the crime scene; the reason Garcia's cellphone pinged towers near Monte Sereno was because his cousin had borrowed it that night. However, the cousin died within weeks of the crime, and therefore wasn't questioned or investigated.The entrance of Raveesh Kumra's residence, in Monte Sereno, California, a Silicon Valley enclave. Photograph: Carlos Chavarría/The Marshall ProjectJurors were not persuaded and convicted Garcia, along with Drummer and Austin, of murder, robbery of an inhabited place, and false imprisonment."I get it," says Garcia's attorney Christopher Givens. "People hear DNA and say, oh, sure you loaned your phone to someone."A jury could have had the same reaction to Anderson, had his alibi not been discovered, Givens says. "The sad thing is, I wouldn't be surprised if he actually pleaded to something. They probably would have offered him a deal, and he would have been scared enough to take it."Garcia received a sentence of 37 years to life; Drummer and Austin's sentences were enhanced for gang affiliation to life without parole. Garcia and Austin have appeals pending. Fritz received a reduced sentence for her testimony. In 2017 she was released from jail after spending four years in custody.Lunsford received accolades for his detective work in the Kumra case and has since been promoted to sergeant; his boss, D'Antonio, is now a captain. But Lunsford says his perspective on DNA has forever changed. "We shook hands, and I transferred on you, you transferred on me. It happens. It's just biological," he says.Based on interviews with prosecutors, defense lawyers and DNA experts, Anderson's case is the clearest known case of DNA transference implicating an innocent man. It's impossible to say how often this kind of thing happens, but law enforcement officials argue that it is well outside the norm. "There is no piece of evidence or science which is absolutely perfect, but DNA is the closest we have," says District Attorney Rosen. "Mr. Anderson was a very unusual situation. We haven't come across it again."Van Oorschot, the forensic science researcher whose 1997 paper revolutionized the field, cautions against disbelieving too much in the power of touch DNA to solve crimes. "I think it's made a huge impact in a positive way," he says. "But no one should ever rely solely on DNA evidence to judge what's going on."Anderson's case has altered the criminal justice system in a small but important way, says Kulick."As defense attorneys, we used to get laughed out of the courtroom if in closing arguments we argued transfer," she says. "That was hocus-pocus. That was made up fiction. But Lukis showed us that it's real."The cost of that demonstration was almost half a year of Anderson's life.Being accused of murder was "gut-wrenching," he says. It pains him that he questioned his own innocence, even though, he says, "deep down I knew I didn't do it."After he was released, Anderson returned to the streets. As is typical in cases where people are wrongly implicated in a crime, he received no compensation for his time in jail. He has continued to struggle with alcohol but has stayed out of major legal trouble since. He's applying for Social Security, which could help him finally secure housing.Anderson feels certain he's not the only innocent person to be locked up because of transfer. He considers himself blessed by God to be free. And he has advice about DNA evidence: "There's more that's gotta be looked at than just the DNA," he says. "You've got to dig deeper a little more. Re-analyze. Do everything all over again … before you say 'this is what it is.' Because it may not necessarily be so." Framed for Murder by His Own DNA This investigation was published in partnership with The Marshall Project and FRONTLINE (PBS). When the DNA results came back, even Lukis Anderson thought he might have committed the murder. "I drink a lot," he remembers telling public defender Kelley Kulick as they sat in a plain interview room at the Santa Clara County, California, jail. Sometimes he blacked out, so it was possible he did something he didn't remember. "Maybe I did do it." Kulick shushed him. If she was going to keep her new client off death row, he couldn't go around saying things like that. But she agreed. It looked bad. Before he was charged with murder, Anderson was a 26-year-old homeless alcoholic with a long rap sheet who spent his days hustling for change in downtown San Jose. The murder victim, Raveesh Kumra, was a 66-year-old investor who lived in Monte Sereno, a Silicon Valley enclave 10 miles and many socioeconomic rungs away. Around midnight on November 29, 2012, a group of men had broken into Kumra's 7,000-square-foot mansion. They found him watching CNN in the living room, tied him, blindfolded him, and gagged him with mustache-print duct tape. They found his companion, Harinder, asleep in an upstairs bedroom, hit her on the mouth, and tied her up next to Raveesh. Then they plundered the house for cash and jewelry. After the men left, Harinder, still blindfolded, felt her way to a kitchen phone and called 911. Police arrived, then an ambulance. One of the paramedics declared Raveesh dead. The coroner would later conclude that he had been suffocated by the mustache tape. Three and a half weeks later, the police arrested Anderson. His DNA had been found on Raveesh's fingernails. They believed the men struggled as Anderson tied up his victim. They charged him with murder. Kulick was appointed to his case. Public defender Kelley Kulick was appointed to Lukis Anderson's case after he was charged with first-degree murder. As they looked at the DNA results, Anderson tried to make sense of a crime he had no memory of committing. "Nah, nah, nah. I don't do things like that," he recalls telling her. "But maybe I did." "Lukis, shut up," Kulick says she told him. "Let's just hit the pause button till we work through the evidence to really see what happened." What happened, although months would pass before anyone figured it out, was that Lukis Anderson's DNA had found its way onto the fingernails of a dead man he had never even met. Back in the 1980s, when DNA forensic analysis was still in its infancy, crime labs needed a speck of bodily fluid—usually blood, semen, or spit—to generate a genetic profile. That changed in 1997, when Australian forensic scientist Roland van Oorschot stunned the criminal justice world with a nine-paragraph paper titled "DNA Fingerprints from Fingerprints." It revealed that DNA could be detected not just from bodily fluids but from traces left by a touch. Investigators across the globe began scouring crime scenes for anything—a doorknob, a countertop, a knife handle—that a perpetrator may have tainted with incriminating "touch" DNA. Everyone, including Anderson, leaves a trail of DNA everywhere they go. Sometimes that DNA can end up at a crime scene. But van Oorschot's paper also contained a vital observation: Some people's DNA appeared on things that they had never touched. In the years since, van Oorschot's lab has been one of the few to investigate this phenomenon, dubbed "secondary transfer." What they have learned is that, once it's out in the world, DNA doesn't always stay put. In one of his lab's experiments, for instance, volunteers sat at a table and shared a jug of juice. After 20 minutes of chatting and sipping, swabs were deployed on their hands, the chairs, the table, the jug, and the juice glasses, then tested for genetic material. Although the volunteers never touched each other, 50 percent wound up with another's DNA on their hand. A third of the glasses bore the DNA of volunteers who did not touch or drink from them. Then there was the foreign DNA—profiles that didn't match any of the juice drinkers. It turned up on about half of the chairs and glasses, and all over the participants' hands and the table. The only explanation: The participants unwittingly brought with them alien genes, perhaps from the lover they kissed that morning, the stranger with whom they had shared a bus grip, or the barista who handed them an afternoon latte. In a sense, this isn't surprising: We leave a trail of ourselves everywhere we go. An average person may shed upward of 50 million skin cells a day. Attorney Erin Murphy, author of Inside the Cell, a book about forensic DNA, has calculated that in two minutes the average person sheds enough skin cells to cover a football field. We also spew saliva, which is packed with DNA. If we stand still and talk for 30 seconds, our DNA may be found more than a yard away. With a forceful sneeze, it might land on a nearby wall. To find out the prevalence of DNA in the world, a group of Dutch researchers tested 105 public items—escalator rails, public toilet door handles, shopping basket handles, coins. Ninety-one percent bore human DNA, sometimes from half a dozen people. Even items intimate to us—the armpits of our shirts, say—can bear other people's DNA, they found. The itinerant nature of DNA has serious implications for forensic investigations. After all, if traces of our DNA can make their way to a crime scene we never visited, aren't we all possible suspects? Forensic DNA has other flaws: Complex mixtures of many DNA profiles can be wrongly interpreted, certainty statistics are often wildly miscalculated, and DNA analysis robots have sometimes been stretched past the limits of their sensitivity. But as advances in technology are solving some of these problems, they have actually made the problem of DNA transfer worse. Each new generation of forensic tools is more sensitive; labs today can identify people with DNA from just a handful of cells. A handful of cells can easily migrate. A survey of the published science, interviews with leading scientists, and a review of thousands of pages of court and police documents associated with the Kumra case has elucidated how secondary DNA transfer can undermine the credibility of the criminal justice system's most-trusted tool. And yet, very few crime labs worldwide regularly and robustly study secondary DNA transfer. This is partly because most forensic scientists believe DNA to be the least of their field's problems. They're not wrong: DNA is the most accurate forensic science we have. It has exonerated scores of people convicted based on more flawed disciplines like hair or bite-mark analysis. And there have been few publicized cases of DNA mistakenly implicating someone in a crime. But, like most human enterprises, DNA analysis is not perfect. And without study, the scope and impact of that imperfection is difficult to assess, says Peter Gill, a British forensic researcher. He has little doubt that his field, so often credited with solving crimes, is also responsible for wrongful convictions. "The problem is we're not looking for these things," Gill says. "For every miscarriage of justice that is detected, there must be a dozen that are never discovered." The phone rang five times. "Are you awake?" the dispatcher asked. "Yeah," lied Corporal Erin Lunsford. "Are you back on full duty or you still light duty?" she asked, according to a tape of the call. Lunsford had been off crutches for two weeks already, but it was 2:15 am and pouring rain. Probably some downed tree needed to be policed. "Light duty," Lunsford said. "Oh," she said. "Never mind." "Why, what are you calling about?" he asked. "We had a home invasion that turned into a 187," she said. Cop slang for murder. "Shit, seriously?" Lunsford said, waking up. Sergeant Erin Lunsford of the Los Gatos-Monte Sereno Police Department was the lead investigator in Kumra’s murder. Lunsford had served all 15 of his professional years as a police officer at the Los Gatos–Monte Sereno Police Department, a 38-officer agency that policed two drowsy towns. He rose through the ranks and was working a stint in the department's detective bureau. He had mostly been investigating property crimes. Los Gatos, a wealthy bedroom community of Silicon Valley, averaged a homicide once every three or four years. Monte Sereno, a bedroom community of the bedroom community, hadn't had a homicide in roughly 20. Lunsford got dressed. He drove through the November torrent. He spotted cop cars clustered around a brick and iron gate. An ambulance flashed quietly in the driveway. Beyond it, the lit Kumra mansion. Lunsford's boss told him to take the lead on the investigation. The on-scene supervisor walked him through the house. Dressers emptied, files dumped. A cellphone in a toilet, pissed on. A refrigerator beeping every 10 seconds, announcing its doors were ajar. Raveesh’s body, heavyset and disheveled, on the floor near the kitchen. His eyes still blindfolded. An investigator from the county coroner's office arrived and moved Kumra's body into a van. Lunsford followed her to the morgue for the autopsy. A doctor undressed the victim and scraped and cut his fingernails for evidence. Lunsford recognized Raveesh, a wealthy businessman who had once owned a share of a local concert venue. Lunsford had come to the Kumra mansion a couple times on "family calls" that never amounted to anything: "Just people arguing," he recalled. He had also run into him at Goguen's Last Call, a dive frequented by Raveesh as a regular and Lunsford as a cop responding to calls. Raveesh was an affable extrovert, always buying rounds; the unofficial mayor of that part of town, Lunsford called him. In the coming days, as Lunsford interviewed people who knew the Kumras, he was told that Raveesh also had relationships with sex workers. Raveesh and Harinder had divorced around 2010 after more than 30 years of marriage, but still lived together. While Lunsford attended the autopsy, a team of gloved investigators combed the mansion. They tucked paper evidence into manila envelopes; bulkier items into brown paper bags. They amassed more than 100. Teams specializing in crime scene investigations were first assembled over a century ago, after the French scientist Edmond Locard devised the principle that birthed the field of forensics: A perpetrator will bring something to a crime scene and leave with something from it. Van Oorschot's touch DNA discovery had unveiled the most literal expression imaginable of Locard's principle. Like those early teams, the investigators in the Kumra mansion were looking for fingerprints, footprints, and hair. But unlike their predecessors, they devoted considerable time to thinking through everything the perpetrators may have touched. Some perpetrators are giving thought to this as well. A 2013 Canadian study of 350 sexual homicides found that about a third of perpetrators appeared to have taken care not to leave DNA, killing their victims in tidier ways than beating or strangling, which are likely to leave behind genetic clues, for instance. And it worked: In those "forensically aware" cases, police solved the case 50 percent of the time, compared to 83 percent of their sloppier counterparts. The men who killed Kumra seemed somewhat forensically aware, albeit clumsily. They had worn latex gloves through their rampage; a pile of them were left in the kitchen sink, wet and soapy, as though someone had tried to wash off the DNA. In the weeks after the murder, Tahnee Nelson Mehmet, a criminalist at the county crime lab, ran dozens of tests on the evidence collected from the Kumra mansion. Most only revealed DNA profiles consistent with Raveesh or Harinder. But in her first few batches of evidence, Mehmet hit forensic pay dirt: a handful of unknown profiles—including on the washed gloves. She ran them through the state database of people arrested for or convicted of felonies and got three hits, all from the Bay Area: 22-year-old DeAngelo Austin on the duct tape; 21-year-old Javier Garcia on the gloves; and, on the fingernail clippings, 26-year-old Lukis Anderson. Within weeks of the DNA hits, Lunsford had plenty of evidence implicating Austin and Garcia: Both were from Oakland, but a warrant for their cellphone records showed they'd pinged towers near Monte Sereno the night of the homicide. Police records showed that Austin belonged to a gang linked to a series of home burglaries. And most damning of all, Austin's older sister, a 32-year-old sex worker named Katrina Fritz, had been involved with Raveesh for 12 years. Police had even found her phone backed up on Raveesh's computer. Eventually she would admit that she had given her brother a map of the house. Connecting Anderson to the crime proved trickier. There were no phone records showing he had traveled to Monte Sereno that night. He wasn't associated with a gang. But one thing on his rap sheet drew Lunsford's attention: A felony residential burglary. Eventually Lunsford found a link. A year earlier, Anderson had been locked up in the same jail as a friend of Austin's named Shawn Hampton. Hampton wore an ankle monitor as a condition of his parole. It showed that two days before the crime he had driven to San Jose. He made a couple of stops downtown, right near Anderson's territory. It started to crystallize for Lunsford: When Austin was planning the break-in, he wanted a local guy experienced in burglary. So Hampton hooked him up with his jail buddy Anderson. Anderson had recently landed back in jail after violating his probation on the burglary charge. Lunsford and his boss, Sergeant Mike D'Antonio, visited him there. They taped the interview. "Does this guy look familiar to you? What about this lady?" Lunsford said, laying out pictures of the victims on the interview room table. "I don't know, man," Anderson said. Lunsford pulled out a picture of Anderson's mother. "All right, what about this lady here? You don't know who she is?" Lunsford said. Anderson met Lunsford's sarcasm with silence. Lunsford set down a letter from the state of California showing the database match between Anderson's DNA and the profile found on the victim's fingernails. "This starting to ring some bells?" Lunsford said. "My guess is you didn't think anybody was gonna be home," D'Antonio said. "My guess is it went way farther than you ever thought it would go." "I don't know what you're talking about, sir," Anderson said. "You do," Lunsford said. "You won't look at their pictures. The only picture you looked at good was your mom." Finally, D'Antonio took a compromising tone. "Lukis, Lukis, Lukis," he said. "I don't have a crystal ball to know what the truth is. Only you do. And in all the years I've been doing this I've never seen a DNA hit being wrong." Anderson had been in jail on the murder charge for over a month when a defense investigator dropped a stack of records on Kulick's desk. Look at them, the investigator said. Now. They were Anderson's medical records. Because his murder charge could carry the death penalty, Kulick had the investigator pull everything pertinent to Anderson's medical history, including his mental health, in case they had to ask for leniency during sentencing. Documents from Lukis Anderson's case on public defender Kelley Kulick's desk. She suspected Anderson could be a good candidate for such leniency. He spent much of his childhood homeless. In early adulthood, he was diagnosed with a mental health disorder and diabetes. And he had developed a mighty alcohol addiction. One day, while drunk, he stepped off a curb and into the path of a moving truck. He survived, but his memory was never quite right again. He lost track of days, sometimes several in a row. That's not to say his life was bleak. He made friends easily. He had a coy sense of humor and dimples that shone like headlights. His buddies, many on the streets themselves, looked after him, as did some downtown shopkeepers. Kulick and her investigator had spoken to several of them. They shook their heads. Anderson might be a drunk, they said, but he wasn't a killer. His rap sheet seemed to agree. It was filled with petty crimes: drunk in public, riding a bike under the influence, probation violations. The one serious conviction—the residential burglary that had caught Lunsford's attention—seemed more benign upon careful reading. According to the police report, Anderson had drunkenly broken the front window of a home and tried to crawl through. The horrified resident had pushed him back out with blankets. Police found him a few minutes later standing on the sidewalk, dazed and bleeding. Though nothing had been stolen, he had been charged with a felony and pleaded no contest. His DNA was added to the state criminal database. The medical records showed that Anderson was also a regular in county hospitals. Most recently, he had arrived in an ambulance to Valley Medical Center, where he was declared inebriated nearly to the point of unconsciousness. Blood alcohol tests indicated he had consumed the equivalent of 21 beers. He spent the night detoxing. The next morning he was discharged, somewhat more sober. The date on that record was November 29. If the record was right, Anderson had been in the hospital precisely as Raveesh Kumra was suffocating on duct tape miles away. Kulick remembers turning to the investigator, who was staring back at her. She was used to alibis being partial and difficult to prove. This one was signed by hospital staff. More than anything, she felt terrified. "To know that you have a factually innocent client sitting in jail facing the death penalty is really scary," she said later. "You don't want to screw up." She knew Lunsford and the prosecutors would try to find holes: Perhaps the date on the record was wrong, or someone had stolen his ID, or there was more than one Lukis Anderson. So she and the investigator systematically retraced his day. Anderson had only patchy recollections of the night in question. But they found a record that a 7-Eleven clerk called authorities at 7:54 pm complaining that Anderson was panhandling. He moved on before the police arrived. His meanderings took him four blocks east, to S&S Market. The clerk there told Kulick that Anderson sat down in front of the store at about 8:15 pm, already drunk, and got drunker. A couple of hours later, he wandered into the store and collapsed in an aisle. The clerk called the authorities. The police arrived first, followed by a truck from the San Jose Fire Department. A paramedic with the fire department told Kulick he had picked up Anderson drunk so often that he knew his birth date by heart. Two other paramedics arrived with an ambulance. They wrestled Anderson onto a stretcher and took him to the hospital. According to his medical records, he was admitted at 10:45 pm. The doctor who treated him said Anderson remained in bed through the night. Harinder Kumra had said the men who killed Raveesh rampaged through her house sometime between 11:30 pm and 1:30 am. Kulick called the district attorney's office. She wanted to meet with them and Lunsford. In 2008, German detectives were on the trail of the "Phantom of Heilbronn." A serial killer and thief, the Phantom murdered immigrants and a cop, robbed a gemstone trader, and munched on a cookie while burglarizing a caravan. Police mobilized across borders, offered a large reward, and racked up more than 16,000 hours on the hunt. But they struggled to discern a pattern to the crimes, other than the DNA profile the Phantom left at 40 crime scenes in Germany, France, and Austria. At long last, they found the Phantom: An elderly Polish worker in a factory that produced the swabs police used to collect DNA. She had somehow contaminated the swabs as she worked. Crime scene investigators had, in turn, contaminated dozens of crime scenes with her DNA. Contamination, the unintentional introduction of DNA into evidence by the very people investigating the crime, is the best understood form of transfer. And after Lunsford heard Kulick's presentation—then retraced Anderson's day himself, concluded he had jailed an innocent man, and felt sick to his stomach for a while—he counted contamination among his leading theories. As the Phantom of Heilbronn case demonstrated, contamination can happen long before evidence arrives in a lab. A 2016 study by Gill, the British forensic researcher, found DNA on three-quarters of crime scene tools he tested, including cameras, measuring tapes, and gloves. Those items can pick up DNA at one scene and move it to the next. Once it arrives in the lab, the risk continues: One set of researchers found stray DNA in even the cleanest parts of their lab. Worried that the very case files they worked on could be a source of contamination, they tested 20. Seventy-five percent held the DNA of people who hadn't handled the file. In Santa Clara County, the district attorney's office reviewed the Kumra case and found no obvious evidence of errors or improper use of tools in the crime lab. They checked if Anderson's DNA had shown up in any other cases the lab had recently handled, and inadvertently wandered into the Kumra case. It had not. So they began investigating a second theory: That Raveesh and Anderson somehow met in the hours or days before the homicide, at which point Anderson's DNA became caught under Raveesh's fingernails. "We are convinced that at some point—we just don't know when in the 24 hours, 48 hours, or 72 hours beforehand—that their paths crossed," deputy district attorney Kevin Smith told a San Francisco Chronicle reporter. There now exists a small pile of studies exploring how DNA moves: If a man shakes someone's hand and then uses the restroom, could their DNA wind up on his penis? (Yes.) If someone drags another person by the ankles, how often does their profile clearly show up? (40 percent of the time.) And, of utmost relevance to Lukis Anderson, how many of us walk around with traces of other people's DNA on our fingernails? (1 in 5.) Whether someone's DNA moves from one place to another—and then is found there—depends on a handful of factors: quantity (two transferred cells are less likely to be detected than 2,000), vigor of contact (a limp handshake relays less DNA than a bone-crushing one), the nature of the surfaces involved (a tabletop's chemical content affects how much DNA it picks up), and elapsed time (we're more likely carrying DNA of someone we just hugged than someone we hugged hours ago, since foreign DNA tends to rub off over time). Then there's a person's shedding status: "Good" shedders lavish their DNA on their environment; "poor" shedders move through the world virtually undetectable, genetically speaking. In general, flaky, sweaty, or diseased skin is thought to shed more DNA than healthy, arid skin. Nail chewers, nose pickers, and habitual face touchers spread their DNA around, as do hands that haven't seen a bar of soap lately—discarded DNA can accumulate over time, and soap helps wash it away. And some people simply seem to be naturally superior shedders. Mariya Goray, a forensic science researcher in van Oorschot's lab who coauthored the juice study with him, has found one of her colleagues to be an outrageously prodigious shedder. "He's amazing," she said, her voice tinged with admiration. "Maybe I'll do a study on him. And the study will just be called, 'James.'" She hopes to develop a test to determine a person's shedder status, which could be deployed to assess a suspect's claims that their DNA arrived somewhere innocently. Such a test could have been useful in the case of David Butler, an English cabdriver. In 2011, DNA found on the fingernails of a woman who had been murdered six years earlier was run through a database and matched Butler's. He swore he'd never met the woman. His defense attorney noted that he had a skin condition so severe that fellow cabbies had dubbed him "Flaky." Perhaps he had given a ride to the actual murderer that day, who inadvertently picked up Butler's DNA in the cab and later deposited it on the victim, they theorized. Investigators didn't buy the explanation, but jurors did. Butler was acquitted after eight months in jail. Upon release, he excoriated police for their blind faith in the evidence. "DNA has become the magic bullet for the police," Butler told the BBC. "They thought it was my DNA, ergo it must be me." Traditional police work would have never steered police to Anderson. But the DNA hit led them to seek other evidence confirming his guilt. "It wasn't malicious. It was confirmation bias," Kulick says. "They got the DNA, and then they made up a story to fit it." Had the case gone to trial, jurors may well have done the same. A 2008 series of studies by researchers at the University of Nevada, Yale, and Claremont McKenna College found that jurors rated DNA evidence as 95 percent accurate and 94 percent persuasive of a suspect's guilt. Eleven leading DNA transfer scientists contacted for this story were in consensus that the criminal justice system must be willing to question DNA evidence. They were also in agreement about whose job it should be to navigate those queries: forensic scientists. As it stands, forensic scientists generally stick to the question of source (whose DNA is this?) and leave activity (how did it get here?) for judges and juries to wrestle with. But the researchers contend that forensic scientists are best armed with the information necessary to answer that question. Consider a case in which a man is accused of sexually assaulting his stepdaughter. He looks mighty guilty when his DNA and a fragment of sperm is found on her underwear. But jurors might give the defense more credence if a forensic scientist familiarized them with a 2016 Canadian study showing that fathers' DNA is frequently found on their daughters' clean underwear; occasionally, a fragment of sperm is there too. It migrates there in the wash. This shift—from reporting on who to reporting on how—has been encouraged by the European Network of Forensic Science Institutes. But the shift has been slow on that continent and virtually nonexistent in the United States, where defense attorneys have argued that forensic scientists—in many communities employed by the prosecutor's office or police department—should be careful to stick to the facts rather than make conjectures. "The problem is that when forensic scientists get involved in those determinations, they're wrought with confirmation bias," says Jennifer Friedman, a Los Angeles County public defender. Meanwhile, forensic scientists in the US have resisted the shift, arguing they lack the data to confidently testify about how DNA moves. Van Oorschot and Gill concede this point. Only a handful of labs in Europe and Australia regularly research transfer. The forensic scientists interviewed for this story say they are not aware of any lab or university in the US that routinely does so. Funding gets some of the blame: The Australian labs and some European labs get government dollars to study DNA transfer. But British forensic researcher and professor Georgina Meakin of University College London says she must find alternative ways to pay for her own transfer research; the Centre for Forensic Sciences, where Meakin works, has launched a crowdfunding page for a new lab to study trace evidence transfer. In the US, all the grants from the National Science Foundation, the National Institute of Standards and Technology, and the National Institute of Justice for forensics research put together likely sum just $13.5 million a year, according to a 2016 report on forensic science by the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST); of that, very little has been spent looking into DNA transfer. "The folks with the greatest interest in making sure forensic science isn't misused are defendants," says Eric Lander, principal leader of the Human Genome Project, who cochaired PCAST under President Obama. "Defendants don't have an awful lot of power." In 2009, after issuing a report harshly criticizing the paucity of science behind most forensics, the National Academy of Sciences urged Congress to create a new, independent federal agency to oversee the field. There was little political appetite to do that. Instead, in 2013, Obama created a 40-member National Commission on Forensic Science, filled it with people who saw forensics from radically different perspectives—prosecutors, defense attorneys, academics, lab analysts, and scientists—and made a rule that all actions must be approved by a supermajority. Naturally, the commission got off to a slow start. But ultimately it produced more than 40 recommendations and opinions. These lacked the teeth of a regulatory ruling, but the Justice Department was obligated to respond to them. At the beginning, most of the commission's efforts were focused on improving other disciplines, "because DNA testing as a whole is so much better than much forensic science that we had focused a lot of our attention elsewhere," says US district judge Jed Rakoff, a member of the commission. According to Rakoff and other members interviewed, the commission was just digging into issues touching on DNA transfer when attorney general Jeff Sessions took office last year. In April 2017, his department announced it would not renew the commission's charter. It never met again. Then, in August, President Trump signed the Rapid DNA Act of 2017, allowing law enforcement to use new technology that produces DNA results in just 90 minutes. The bill had bipartisan support and received little press. But privacy advocates worry it may usher in an era of widespread "stop and spit" policing, in which law enforcement asks anyone they stop for a DNA sample. This is already occurring in towns in Florida, Connecticut, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania, according to reporting by ProPublica. If law enforcement deems there is probable cause, they can compel someone to provide DNA; otherwise, it is voluntary. If stop-and-spit becomes more widely used and police databases swell, it could have a disproportionate impact on African Americans and Latinos, who are more often searched, ticketed, and arrested by police. In most states, a felony arrest is enough to add someone in perpetuity to the state database. Just this month, the California Supreme Court declined to overturn a provision requiring all people arrested or charged for a felony to give up their DNA; in Oklahoma, the DNA of any undocumented immigrant arrested on suspicion of any crime is added to a database. Those whose DNA appears in a database face a greater risk of being implicated in a crime they didn't commit. It was Lunsford who figured it out in the end. He was reading through Anderson's medical records and paused on the names of the ambulance paramedics who picked up Anderson from his repose on the sidewalk outside S&S Market. He had seen them before. He pulled up the Kumra case files. Sure enough, there were the names again: Three hours after picking up Anderson, the two paramedics had responded to the Kumra mansion, where they checked Raveesh's vitals. The prosecutors, defense attorney, and police agree that somehow, the paramedics must have moved Anderson's DNA from San Jose to Monte Sereno. Santa Clara County District Attorney Jeff Rosen has postulated that a pulse oximeter slipped over both patients' fingers may have been the culprit; Kulick thinks it could have been their uniforms or another piece of equipment. It may never be known for sure. A spokesman for Rural/Metro Corporation, where the paramedics worked, told San Francisco TV station KPIX5 that the company had high sanitation standards, requiring paramedics to change gloves and sanitize the vehicles. Deputy District Attorney Smith framed the incident as a freak accident. "It's a small world," he told a San Francisco Chronicle reporter. The trial against the other men implicated in the case moved forward. Austin's older sister, Fritz, testified in trials against him and Garcia. She also testified against a third man, Marcellous Drummer, whose DNA had been found on evidence from the Kumra crime scene months after the initial hits. During the trials, Harinder Kumra told jurors she was still haunted by the image of the man who split her lip open. "Every day I see that face. Every night when I sleep, when there's a noise, I think it's him," she said. She has sold the mansion. Members of the Kumra family declined to comment for this story. The DNA in the case did not go uncontested. Garcia's attorney argued that, like Anderson's, Garcia's DNA had arrived at the scene inadvertently. According to the attorney, Austin had come by the trap house where Garcia hung out to pick up Garcia's cousin; the cousin was in on the crime and had borrowed a box of gloves that Garcia frequently used, which is why Garcia's DNA was found on the gloves at the crime scene; the reason Garcia's cellphone pinged towers near Monte Sereno was because his cousin had borrowed it that night. However, the cousin died within weeks of the crime, and therefore wasn't questioned or investigated. The entrance of Raveesh Kumra's residence, in Monte Sereno, California, a Silicon Valley enclave. Jurors were not persuaded and convicted Garcia, along with Drummer and Austin, of murder, robbery of an inhabited place, and false imprisonment. "I get it," says Garcia's attorney Christopher Givens. "People hear DNA and say, oh, sure you loaned your phone to someone." A jury could have had the same reaction to Anderson, had his alibi not been discovered, Givens says. "The sad thing is, I wouldn't be surprised if he actually pleaded to something. They probably would have offered him a deal, and he would have been scared enough to take it." Garcia received a sentence of 37 years to life; Drummer and Austin's sentences were enhanced for gang affiliation to life without parole. Garcia and Austin have appeals pending. Fritz received a reduced sentence for her testimony. In 2017 she was released from jail after spending four years in custody. Lunsford received accolades for his detective work in the Kumra case and has since been promoted to sergeant; his boss, D'Antonio, is now a captain. But Lunsford says his perspective on DNA has forever changed. "We shook hands, and I transferred on you, you transferred on me. It happens. It's just biological," he says. Based on interviews with prosecutors, defense lawyers and DNA experts, Anderson's case is the clearest known case of DNA transference implicating an innocent man. It's impossible to say how often this kind of thing happens, but law enforcement officials argue that it is well outside the norm. "There is no piece of evidence or science which is absolutely perfect, but DNA is the closest we have," says District Attorney Rosen. "Mr. Anderson was a very unusual situation. We haven't come across it again." Van Oorschot, the forensic science researcher whose 1997 paper revolutionized the field, cautions against disbelieving too much in the power of touch DNA to solve crimes. "I think it's made a huge impact in a positive way," he says. "But no one should ever rely solely on DNA evidence to judge what's going on." Anderson's case has altered the criminal justice system in a small but important way, says Kulick. "As defense attorneys, we used to get laughed out of the courtroom if in closing arguments we argued transfer," she says. "That was hocus-pocus. That was made up fiction. But Lukis showed us that it's real." The cost of that demonstration was almost half a year of Anderson's life. Being accused of murder was "gut-wrenching," he says. It pains him that he questioned his own innocence, even though, he says, "deep down I knew I didn't do it." After he was released, Anderson returned to the streets. As is typical in cases where people are wrongly implicated in a crime, he received no compensation for his time in jail. He has continued to struggle with alcohol but has stayed out of major legal trouble since. He's applying for Social Security, which could help him finally secure housing. Anderson feels certain he's not the only innocent person to be locked up because of transfer. He considers himself blessed by God to be free. And he has advice about DNA evidence: "There's more that's gotta be looked at than just the DNA," he says. "You've got to dig deeper a little more. Re-analyze. Do everything all over again … before you say 'this is what it is.' Because it may not necessarily be so." 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[SOURCE: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-governmental_organization] | [TOKENS: 5807] |
Contents Non-governmental organization A non-governmental organisation (NGO) is an entity that is not part of the government. This can include non-profit and for-profit entities. An NGO may get a significant percentage or even all of its funding from government sources. An NGO typically is thought to be a non-profit organization that operates partially independent of government control. Non-profit NGOs often focus on humanitarian or social issues but can also include clubs and associations offering services to members. Some non-profit NGOs, like the World Economic Forum, may also act as lobby groups for corporations. Unlike international organizations (IGOs), which directly interact with sovereign states and governments, NGOs are independent from them. The term as it is used today was first introduced in Article 71 of the newly formed United Nations Charter in 1945. While there is no fixed or formal definition for what NGOs are, they are generally defined as non-profit entities that are independent of government management or direction—although they may receive government funding. According to the UN Department of Global Communications, an NGO is "a not-for profit, voluntary citizen's group that is organized on a local, national or international level to address issues in support of the public good". The term NGO is used inconsistently, and is sometimes used synonymously with civil society organization (CSO), which is any association founded by citizens. In some countries, NGOs are known as non-profit organizations while political parties and trade unions are sometimes considered NGOs as well. NGOs are classified by (1) orientation- entailing the type of activities an NGO undertakes, such as activities involving human rights, consumer protection, environmentalism, health, or development; and (2) level of operation, which indicates the scale at which an organization works: local, regional, national, or international. The number of NGOs varies widely by country. India has one of the largest sectors, with over 3.7 million NGOs registered on the government's DARPAN portal as of 2024. In contrast, the number of registered NGOs in Russia has seen a significant decline due to restrictive laws, with thousands being liquidated or delisted since the implementation of the "foreign agent" law. The United States, by comparison, has approximately 1.5 million NGOs; an NGO for every 227 people. Types NGOs further the social goals of their members (or founders): improving the natural environment, encouraging the observance of human rights, improving the welfare of the disadvantaged, or representing a corporate agenda. Their goals cover a wide range of issues. They may fund local NGOs, institutions and projects, and implement projects. NGOs can be in the following ways: Similar terms include third-sector organization (TSO), non-profit organization (NPO), voluntary organization (VO), civil society organization (CSO), grassroots organization (GO), social movement organization (SMO), private voluntary organization (PVO), self-help organization (SHO), and non-state actors (NSAs). Numerous variations exist for the NGO acronym, either due to language, region, or specificity.[citation needed] Some Romance languages use the synonymous abbreviation ONG; for example:[citation needed] Other acronyms that are typically used to describe non-governmental organizations include:[citation needed] Activities Non-governmental organizations (NGOs) play a vital role in improving the lives of people who have been affected by natural disasters or are facing other challenges. NGOs can act as implementers, catalysts, and partners to provide essential goods and services to those in need. They work to mobilize resources, both financial and human, to ensure that aid is delivered in a timely and effective manner.[citation needed] NGOs also play a critical role in driving change by advocating for policies and practices that benefit disadvantaged communities. They often work in partnership with other organizations, including government agencies, to address complex challenges that require a collaborative approach. One of the key strengths of NGOs is their ability to work at the grassroots level and to connect with communities directly. This allows them to gain a deep understanding of the issues facing people and to tailor their services to meet the specific needs of each community.[citation needed] NGOs vary by method; some are primarily advocacy groups, and others conduct programs and activities. Oxfam, concerned with poverty alleviation, may provide needy people with the equipment and skills to obtain food and drinking water; the Forum for Fact-finding Documentation and Advocacy (FFDA) helps provide legal assistance to victims of human-rights abuses. The Afghanistan Information Management Services provide specialized technical products and services to support development activities implemented on the ground by other organizations. Management techniques are crucial to project success. The World Bank classifies NGO activity into two general categories: NGOs may also conduct both activities: operational NGOs will use campaigning techniques if they face issues in the field, which could be remedied by policy change, and campaigning NGOs (such as human-rights organizations) often have programs which assist individual victims for whom they are trying to advocate. Operational NGOs seek to "achieve small-scale change directly through projects", mobilizing financial resources, materials, and volunteers to create local programs. They hold large-scale fundraising events and may apply to governments and organizations for grants or contracts to raise money for projects. Operational NGOs often have a hierarchical structure; their headquarters are staffed by professionals who plan projects, create budgets, keep accounts, and report to and communicate with operational fieldworkers on projects. They are most often associated with the delivery of services or environmental issues, emergency relief, and public welfare. Operational NGOs may be subdivided into relief or development organizations, service-delivery or participatory, religious or secular, and public or private. Although operational NGOs may be community-based, many are national or international. The defining activity of an operational NGO is the implementation of projects. Advocacy NGOs or campaigning NGOs seek to "achieve large-scale change promoted indirectly through the influence of the political system". They require an active, efficient group of professional members who can keep supporters informed and motivated. Campaigning NGOs must plan and host demonstrations and events which will attract media, their defining activity. Campaigning NGOs often deal with issues related to human rights, women's rights, and children's rights, and their primary purpose is to defend (or promote) a specific cause. Non-governmental organisations need healthy public relations in order to meet their goals, and use sophisticated public-relations campaigns to raise funds and deal with governments. Interest groups may be politically important, influencing social and political outcomes. A code of ethics was established in 2002 by the World Association of Non-Governmental Organizations. Structure Some NGOs rely on paid staff while others are based on volunteers. Although many NGOs use international staff in developing countries, others rely on local employees or volunteers. Foreign staff may satisfy a donor who wants to see the supported project managed by a person from an industrialized country. The expertise of these employees (or volunteers) may be counterbalanced by several factors, such as; the cost of foreigners is typically higher, they have no grassroots connections in the country, and local expertise may be undervalued. By the end of 1995, Concern Worldwide (an international anti-poverty NGO) employed 174 foreigners and just over 5,000 local staff in Haiti and ten developing countries in Africa and Asia.[citation needed] On average, employees in NGOs earn 11-12% less compared to employees of for-profit organizations and government workers with the same number of qualifications . However, in many cases NGOs employees receive more fringe benefits. NGOs are usually funded by donations, but some avoid formal funding and are run by volunteers. NGOs may have charitable status, or may be tax-exempt in recognition of their social, political, religious, or other purposes. Since the end of World War II, NGOs have had an increased role in international development, particularly in the fields of humanitarian assistance and poverty alleviation. Funding sources include membership dues, the sale of goods and services, grants from international institutions or national governments, corporate social responsibility (CSR) funds and private donations. Although the term "non-governmental organization" implies independence from governments, many NGOs depend on government funding; one-fourth of Oxfam's US$162 million 1998 income was donated by the British government and the EU, and World Vision United States collected $55 million worth of goods in 1998 from the American government. Several EU grants provide funds accessible to NGOs.[citation needed] Government funding of NGOs is controversial, since "the whole point of humanitarian intervention was precise that NGOs and civil society had both a right and an obligation to respond with acts of aid and solidarity to people in need or being subjected to repression or want by the forces that controlled them, whatever the governments concerned might think about the matter." Some NGOs, such as Greenpeace, do not accept funding from governments or intergovernmental organizations. The 1999 budget of the American Association of Retired Persons (AARP) was over $540 million. In America, government funding of NGOs relating to immigration is common, and is one of the stated methods the Office of Refugee Resettlement uses to help integrate immigrants to America. Government funding sometimes accounts for the vast majority of overall funding for these NGOs, for example Global Refuge received 180 million dollars of its 207 million dollar budget from federal funding. In recent years, government contracts to non-profits have exploded both in number and size. The Budget for the Office of Refugee Resettlement has increased from 1.8 billion in 2018 to 6.3 billion in 2022. Critics point to the million-dollar salaries of CEOS and the use of funds for "music therapy" and "pet therapy" as a worrying sign that the money might not be appropriated to help the migrant crisis, but rather as a political move to keep wealthy backers loyal.[citation needed] Overhead is the amount of money spent on running an NGO, rather than on projects. It includes office expenses, salaries, and banking and bookkeeping costs. An NGO's percentage of its overall budget spent on overhead is often used to judge it; less than four percent is considered good. According to the World Association of Non-Governmental Organizations, more than 86 percent should be spent on programs (less than 20 percent on overhead). The Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria has guidelines of five to seven percent overhead to receive funding; the World Bank typically allows 37 percent. A high percentage of overhead relative to total expenditures can make it more difficult to generate funds. High overhead costs may also generate public criticism. A sole focus on overhead, however, can be counterproductive. Research published by the Urban Institute and Stanford University's Center for Social Innovation have shown that rating agencies create incentives for NGOs to lower (and hide) overhead costs, which may reduce organizational effectiveness by starving organizations of infrastructure to deliver services. An alternative rating system would provide, in addition to financial data, a qualitative evaluation of an organization's transparency and governance: In a March 2000 report on United Nations reform priorities, former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan favored international humanitarian intervention as the responsibility to protect citizens from ethnic cleansing, genocide, and crimes against humanity. After that report, the Canadian government launched its Responsibility to Protect (R2P) project outlining the issue of humanitarian intervention. The R2P project has wide applications, and among its more controversial has been the Canadian government's use of R2P to justify its intervention in the coup in Haiti. Large corporations have increased their corporate social responsibility departments to preempt NGO campaigns against corporate practices. Collaboration between corporations and NGOs risks co-option of the weaker partner, typically the NGO. In December 2007, Assistant Secretary of Defense for Health Affairs S. Ward Casscells established an International Health Division of Force Health Protection & Readiness. Part of International Health's mission is to communicate with NGOs about areas of mutual interest. Department of Defense Directive 3000.05, in 2005, required the US Defense Department to regard stability-enhancing activities as equally important as combat. In compliance with international law, the department has developed a capacity to improve essential services in areas of conflict (such as Iraq) where customary lead agencies like the State Department and USAID have difficulty operating. International Health cultivates collaborative, arm's-length relationships with NGOs, recognizing their independence, expertise, and honest-broker status.[citation needed] Regulation and environment by country India has one of the world's largest NGO sectors, with over 3.7 million non-governmental organizations registered on the government's DARPAN portal as of 2024. These organizations are primarily registered as Trusts, Societies, or Section 8 Companies and must obtain special certifications (12A and 80G) from the Income Tax Department to be tax-exempt. A defining feature of the Indian NGO landscape is the stringent regulation of foreign funding, governed by the Foreign Contribution (Regulation) Act, 2010 (FCRA). An FCRA registration is mandatory for any NGO wishing to receive foreign donations. The Indian government has used the act to significantly tighten control over the sector, leading to the cancellation or non-renewal of FCRA licenses for thousands of organizations. This crackdown has particularly affected NGOs working on human rights, environmental advocacy, and civil liberties, prompting criticism from civil society groups that the law is used to suppress dissent. The government maintains that such measures are necessary to ensure accountability and prevent foreign interference in domestic affairs. History International non-governmental organizations date back to at least the late 18th century, and there were an estimated 1,083 NGOs by 1914. International NGOs were important to the anti-slavery and women's suffrage movements, and peaked at the time of the 1932–1934 World Disarmament Conference. The term became popular with the 1945 founding of the United Nations in 1945; Article 71 in Chapter X of its charter stipulated consultative status for organizations which are neither governments nor member states. An international NGO was first defined in resolution 288 (X) of the United Nations Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) on February 27, 1950, as "any international organization that is not founded by an international treaty". The role of NGOs and other "major groups" in sustainable development was recognized in Chapter 27 of Agenda 21. The rise and fall of international NGOs matches contemporary events, waxing in periods of growth and waning in times of crisis. The United Nations gave non-governmental organizations observer status at its assemblies and some meetings. According to the UN, an NGO is a private, not-for-profit organization which is independent of government control and is not merely an opposition political party. An observer has access to most meetings and relevant documentation. The rapid development of the non-governmental sector occurred in Western countries as a result of the restructuring of the welfare state. Globalization of that process occurred after the fall of the communist system, and was an important part of the Washington Consensus. Twentieth-century globalization increased the importance of NGOs. International treaties and organizations, such as the World Trade Organization, focused on capitalist interests. To counterbalance this trend, NGOs emphasize humanitarian issues, development aid, and sustainable development. An example is the World Social Forum, a rival convention of the World Economic Forum held each January in Davos, Switzerland. The fifth World Social Forum, in Porto Alegre, Brazil in January 2005, was attended by representatives of over 1,000 NGOs. The 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, attended by about 2,400 representatives, was the first to demonstrate the power of international NGOs in environmental issues and sustainable development. Transnational NGO networking has become extensive. Legal status Although NGOs are subject to national laws and practices, four main groups may be found worldwide: The Council of Europe drafted the European Convention on the Recognition of the Legal Personality of International Non-Governmental Organisations in Strasbourg in 1986, creating a common legal basis for European NGOs. Article 11 of the European Convention on Human Rights protects the right to associate, which is fundamental for NGOs. Hungary is the only country in the European Union to severely restrict NGOs such as corruption, LGBTQ rights and migration. Economic theory The question whether a public project should be owned by an NGO or by the government has been studied in economics using the tools of the incomplete contracting theory.[citation needed] According to this theory, not every detail of a relationship between decision makers can be contractually specified. Hence, in the future, the parties will bargain with each other to adapt their relationship to changing circumstances. Ownership matters because it determines the parties' willingness to make non-contractible investments. In the context of private firms, Oliver Hart has shown that the party with the more important investment task should be owner. Yet, Besley and Ghatak have argued that in the context of public projects the investment technology does not matter. Specifically, even when the government is the key investor, ownership by an NGO is optimal if and only if the NGO has a larger valuation of the project than the government. However, the general validity of this argument has been questioned by follow-up research. In particular, ownership by the party with the larger valuation need not be optimal when the public good is partially excludable, when both NGO and government may be indispensable, or when the NGO and the government have different bargaining powers. Moreover, the investment technology can matter for the optimal ownership structure when there are bargaining frictions, when the parties interact repeatedly or when the parties are asymmetrically informed. Influence on world affairs Today we celebrate the World NGO Day, we celebrate the key civil society's contribution to public space and their unique ability to give voice to those who would have went [sic] otherwise unheard. Service-delivery NGOs provide public goods and services which governments of developing countries are unable to provide due to a lack of resources. They may be contractors or collaborate with government agencies to reduce the cost of public goods. Capacity-building NGOs affect "culture, structure, projects and daily operations". Advocacy and public-education NGOs aim to modify behavior and ideas through communication, crafting messages to promote social, political, or environmental changes (and as news organisations have cut foreign bureaux, many NGOs have begun to expand into news reporting). Movement NGOs mobilize the public and coordinate large-scale collective activities to advance an activist agenda. Since the end of the Cold War, more NGOs in developed countries have pursued international outreach. By being involved in local and national social resistance, they have influenced domestic policy change in the developing world. Specialized NGOs have forged partnerships, built networks, and found policy niches. Track II diplomacy (or dialogue) is transnational coordination by non-official members of the government, including epistemic communities and former policymakers or analysts. It aims to help policymakers and policy analysts reach a common solution through unofficial discussions. Unlike official diplomacy, conducted by government officials, diplomats, and elected leaders, Track II diplomacy involves experts, scientists, professors and other figures who are not part of government affairs.[citation needed] World NGO Day, which is observed annually on 27 February, was recognised on 17 April 2010 by 12 countries of the IX Baltic Sea NGO Forum at the eighth Summit of the Baltic Sea States in Vilnius, Lithuania. It was internationally recognised on 28 February 2014 in Helsinki, Finland by United Nations Development Programme administrator and former Prime Minister of New Zealand Helen Clark. In the context of NGOs (Non-Governmental Organizations), diplomacy refers to the practice of building and maintaining partnerships with other organizations, stakeholders, and governments to achieve common objectives related to social or environmental issues.[citation needed] NGOs often work in complex environments, where multiple stakeholders have different interests and goals. Diplomacy allows NGOs to navigate these complex environments and engage in constructive dialogue with different actors to promote understanding, build consensus, and facilitate cooperation. Effective NGO diplomacy involves building trust, fostering dialogue, and promoting transparency and accountability. NGOs may engage in diplomacy through various means such as including advocacy, lobbying, partnerships, and negotiations. By working collaboratively with other organizations and stakeholders, NGOs can achieve greater impact and reach their goals more effectively.[citation needed] Criticism Tanzanian author and academic Issa G. Shivji has criticised NGOs in two essays: "Silences in NGO discourse: The role and future of NGOs in Africa" and "Reflections on NGOs in Tanzania: What we are, what we are not and what we ought to be". Shivji writes that despite the good intentions of NGO leaders and activists, he is critical of the "objective effects of actions, regardless of their intentions". According to Shivji, the rise of NGOs is part of a neoliberal paradigm and not motivated purely by altruism; NGOs want to change the world without understanding it, continuing an imperial relationship.[citation needed] In his study of NGO involvement in Mozambique, James Pfeiffer addresses their negative effects on the country's health. According to Pfeiffer, NGOs in Mozambique have "fragmented the local health system, undermined local control of health programs, and contributed to growing local social inequality". They can be uncoordinated, creating parallel projects which divert health-service workers from their normal duties to instead serve the NGOs. This undermines local primary-healthcare efforts, and removes the government's ability to maintain agency over its health sector. Pfeiffer suggested a collaborative model of the NGO and the DPS (the Mozambique Provincial Health Directorate); the NGO should be "formally held to standard and adherence within the host country", reduce "showcase" projects and unsustainable parallel programs. In her 1997 Foreign Affairs article, Jessica Mathews wrote: "For all their strengths, NGOs are special interests. The best of them ... often suffer from tunnel vision, judging every public act by how it affects their particular interest". NGOs are unencumbered by policy trade-offs. According to Vijay Prashad, since the 1970s "the World Bank, under Robert McNamara, championed the NGO as an alternative to the state, leaving intact global and regional relations of power and production." They have been questioned as "too much of a good thing". Eric Werker and Faisal Ahmed made three critiques of NGOs in developing nations. Too many NGOs in a nation (particularly one ruled by a warlord) reduces an NGO's influence, since it can easily be replaced by another NGO. Resource allocation and outsourcing to local organizations in international-development projects incurs expenses for an NGO, lessening the resources and money available to the intended beneficiaries. NGO missions tend to be paternalistic, as well as expensive. The tax-exempt status of NGOs can result in the unintended consequence of negative value for society. NGOs have been accused of preserving imperialism (sometimes operating in a racialized manner in Third World countries), with a function similar to that of the clergy during the colonial era. Political philosopher Peter Hallward has called them an aristocratic form of politics, noting that ActionAid and Christian Aid "effectively condoned the [2004 US-backed] coup" against an elected government in Haiti and are the "humanitarian face of imperialism". Movements in the Global South (such as South Africa's Western Cape Anti-Eviction Campaign) have refused to work with NGOs, concerned that doing so would compromise their autonomy. NGOs have been accused of weakening people by allowing their funders to prioritize stability over social justice. They have been accused of being designed by, and used as extensions of, the foreign-policy instruments of some Western countries and groups of countries. Russian president Vladimir Putin made that accusation at the 43rd Munich Security Conference in 2007, saying that NGOs "are formally independent but they are purposefully financed and therefore under control". According to Michael Bond, "Most large NGOs, such as Oxfam, the Red Cross, Cafod and ActionAid, are striving to make their aid provision more sustainable. But some, mostly in the US, are still exporting the ideologies of their backers." NGOs have been challenged as not representing the needs of the developing world, diminishing the "Southern voice" and preserving the North–South divide. The equality of relationships between northern and southern parts of an NGO, and between southern and northern NGOs working in partnership, has been questioned; the north may lead in advocacy and resource mobilization, and the south delivers services in the developing world. The needs of the developing world may not be addressed appropriately, as northern NGOs do not consult (or participate in) partnerships or assign unrepresentative priorities. NGOs have been accused of damaging the public sector in target countries, such as mismanagement resulting in the breakdown of public healthcare systems. In the 21st century, a significant challenge for NGOs has been the rise of laws designed to restrict their activities, often under the pretext of protecting national sovereignty. A common tactic is the implementation of "foreign agent laws," which compel NGOs receiving any amount of international funding to register as "foreign agents." This term carries strong negative connotations, and registration often leads to prohibitive levels of government scrutiny, public distrust, and the eventual closure of the organization. Russia's 2012 foreign agent law is a prominent example, having been used to systematically dismantle civil society, including human rights groups and environmental advocates. Similar laws have been implemented or proposed in other countries, including Hungary, Georgia, and Nicaragua, and are criticized by the UN and civil society groups as tools to suppress dissent. Conversely, some governments create what are known as GONGOs (Government-Organized Non-Governmental Organizations). These are organizations created and sponsored by a state to appear as independent civil society. GONGOs are often used by authoritarian regimes to advocate for state policies at international forums like the United Nations, co-opting the language of human rights to provide a false sense of legitimacy and counter criticism from genuine, independent NGOs. NGOs have been accused of using misinformation in their campaigns out of self-interest. According to Doug Parr of Greenpeace, there had been "a tendency among our critics to say that science is the only decision-making tool ... but political and commercial interests are using science as a cover for getting their way." Former policy-maker for the German branch of Friends of the Earth Jens Katjek said, "If NGOs want the best for the environment, they have to learn to compromise." Legitimacy, an important asset of an NGO, is its perception as an "independent voice". Neera Chandhoke wrote in a Journal of World-Systems Research article, "To put the point starkly: are the citizens of countries of the South and their needs represented in global civil society, or are citizens as well as their needs constructed by practices of representation? And when we realize that INGOs hardly ever come face to face with the people whose interests and problems they represent, or that they are not accountable to the people they represent, matters become even more troublesome." An NGO's funding affects its legitimacy, and they have become increasingly dependent on a limited number of donors. Competition for funds has increased, in addition to the expectations of donors who may add conditions threatening an NGO's independence. Dependence on official aid may dilute "the willingness of NGOs to speak out on issues which are unpopular with governments", and changes in NGO funding sources have altered their function. The scale and variety of activities in which NGOs participate have grown rapidly since 1980, and particularly since 1990. NGOs need to balance centralization and decentralization. Centralizing NGOs, particularly at the international level, can assign a common theme or set of goals. It may also be advantageous to decentralize an NGO, increasing its chances of responding flexibly and effectively to local issues by implementing projects which are modest in scale, easily monitored, produce immediate benefits, and where all involved know that corruption would be punished. Embezzlement, fraud and financial mismanagement reduce credibility of NGOs. Referring to the NGO culture in Germany in 2025, with many NGO receiving government funding while at the same time pretending to be independent, Ben Krischke wrote in Cicero, the transcription as "Near-Governmental-Organisaton" would be more appropriate. He pointed out, that the concept developed over time under the Angela Merkel administration, with the parties in government being unable to use taxpayer money for partisan activities, directly or via subsidiaries, the number of such activities, for which Krischke gave the example of several "Reporting point"-projects for "incidents below the criminal threshold", somehow rose. A transparency initiative, trying to unravel the path of taxpayer money to various NGOs, is consequently facing substantial opposition by NGO activists from the left. See also References Further reading External links |
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[SOURCE: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samerina] | [TOKENS: 1132] |
Contents Samerina Samerina (Akkadian: 𒊓𒈨𒊑𒈾 Samerina) was the province of the Neo-Assyrian Empire established following the c. 722 BC Assyrian conquest of Samaria by Shalmaneser V, which resulted in the dissolution of the Kingdom of Israel and annexation of Samaria into the empire as a full imperial province administered by a governor. The rule of the expansive Neo-Assyrian Empire went largely unchallenged for the next century until the rise of the Neo-Babylonian Empire brought about the total collapse of Assyrian power by 609, resulting in Assyrian properties, including the province of Samerina, passing into Babylonian control. Among other effects, Assyrian rule resulted in significant population transfers into and out of Samerina as part of the standing policy of resettlement within the Assyrian empire, and close to 30,000 inhabitants of Samerina were deported to other parts of the empire, with other peoples resettled in Samerina. History The Neo-Assyrian province of Samerina was established in the 720s by Shalmaneser V following his conquest of Samaria, also known as the Kingdom of Israel or northern kingdom, which culminated in the capture of its capital city, which was also known as Samaria. The siege of the city of Samaria has been tentatively dated to 725 or 724 BC, and its resolution in 722 BC, near the end of Shalmaneser's reign. The conquest of Samaria was the signature event of Shalmaneser V's reign, and is recorded in both the Babylonian Chronicles and in 2 Kings of the Hebrew Bible. The siege of Samaria was perceived by contemporaries as the most important event of Shalmaneser's time, as is the only event mentioned in the chronicles in association with his reign. It was possibly also highlighted in part due to its considerable remoteness from Assyria. The first documented mention of the province of Samerina is from the reign of Shalmaneser V's successor Sargon II, who was credited with naming the province. This is also the first documented instance where a name derived from "Samaria", the capital city, was used for the entire region, although it is thought likely that this practice was already in place. Following the Assyrian conquest, Sargon II claimed in Assyrian records to have deported 27,280 people to various places throughout the empire, mainly to Guzana in the Assyrian heartland, as well as to the cities of the Medes in the eastern part of the empire (modern-day Iran). The Medes were only conquered by Assyria in 716 BC, six years after the fall of Samaria, suggesting that the relocation took years to plan before it was implemented. The deportations were part of a standard resettlement policy of the Neo-Assyrian Empire to deal with defeated enemy peoples. The resettled people were generally treated well as valued members of the empire and transported together with their families and belongings. At the same time, people from other parts of the empire were resettled in the depopulated Samerina. The resettlement is also called the Assyrian captivity in Jewish history and provides the basis for the narrative of the Ten Lost Tribes. With the Medo-Babylonian conquest of the Assyrian Empire, the end of the Assyrian monarchy with the 609 Fall of Harran, and the rise of the Neo-Babylonian Empire, Samerina passed from Assyrian to Babylonian control.[citation needed] Archaeological surveys and excavations confirm that in the Iron Age III period (c. 723-538) many settlement sites in the region of Samaria, particularly in the northern part of region, ceased to be inhabited. In southern Samaria, several Assyrian military posts were established and existing settlements were largely resettled by deportees from Mesopotamia whom the Assyrians exiled from Babylon, Cuthath (see also Cuthites), Hamath, and Sepharvaim. Conflicting narratives In several Babylonian inscriptions, Sargon II claims to have been the one who conquered Samaria, and various explanations have been proposed for this contradiction. A prominent explanation is that Sargon's inscriptions relating to Samaria may be referencing another incident in which Sargon was forced to put down a large revolt in Syria that also involved the population of Samaria. This revolt took place shortly after Sargon's failure to retake Babylonia from Marduk-apla-iddina in 720, and was led by Yahu-Bihdi, the Assyrian governor of Hamath who also rallied support from the cities of Arpad, Damascus, Sumur and Samaria. The claim of conquest therefore might be related to the city of Samaria being captured a second time during this revolt. In addition to these revolts, Sargon may have had to deal with unfinished conflicts from Shalmaneser's reign. If the explanation of referral to two conquests is accepted however, then it becomes unclear which king was responsible for most of the resettlements, though it is clear from surviving inscriptions that Sargon took responsibility for it. It has also been suggested that Sargon might have finished the initial siege of Samaria, which had been slow, inefficient and still ongoing at the time of Shalmaneser's death. See also References Further reading |
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[SOURCE: https://www.wired.com/story/cyberstalked-teen-girls-for-years-fought-back/] | [TOKENS: 13877] |
Stephanie CliffordThe Big StoryJun 24, 2019 6:00 AMHe Cyberstalked Teen Girls for Years—Then They Fought BackHow a hacker shamed and humiliated high school girls in a small New Hampshire town, and how they helped take him down.How a hacker shamed and humiliated high school girls in a small New Hampshire town, and how they helped take him down.Photograph: Cole Wilson; Embroidery by Diane MeyerCommentLoaderSave StorySave this storyCommentLoaderSave StorySave this storyFor years, Belmont, New Hampshire, had only one detective: Raechel Moulton. An old mill town of 7,200 people, Belmont is surrounded by lakes and forests but isn’t itself much of a draw for the tourists who flock to the region every summer. A hardware store and salon are about all Main Street has to offer; the biggest employer in town is a Shaw’s supermarket. At the police department, where Moulton works, a donation box for Vito, the department’s K-9, is stuffed with change and dollar bills. As Moulton describes it, “We don’t have a lot of people that are rolling in the dough.”Moulton, who is 41, grew up about 20 miles away, in Concord, the state capital. Her mother managed a Walmart and her father repaired power-line transformers. She was a bold kid, the oldest of three, and would stride up to uniformed police officers to ask them about the things on their belts. When she was in the fifth grade, an officer came to her school to run a drug-awareness course. That’s when she decided she was going to be a cop.In high school, Moulton enrolled in a law-and-policing course, where she was assigned to ride along in a patrol car with a male officer. He told her that women shouldn’t become cops. That cemented her ambition. In 2005 she was hired onto the Belmont police force, too. “This job picks you,” she said, sitting straight-spined in the police department, her brown hair pulled back in a tight bun.Crime in Belmont tends toward opioids, thefts, and burglaries. But before long, Moulton was fielding complaints from parents and counselors at Belmont High School about teens sending nude photos, often to people they were dating.The reaction from some parents, though, verged on the lackadaisical. (“They’d say, ‘So what? She sent a boy a picture of her boobs,’” Moulton says.) So, channeling the officer who inspired her as a fifth-grader, Moulton offered workshops at the high school about safe online behavior. She warned students that a nude photo might get sent around to unintended viewers or uploaded online. The results weren’t all she hoped for. “One girl told me, ‘What I got from your class is, as long as my head isn’t in the picture, it’s OK,’” Moulton said.In the spring of 2012, after Moulton had been promoted to detective, a student from Belmont High walked into the police station and told Moulton that someone she hadn’t met and knew only as Seth Williams had been texting and hounding her for naked photos. When she wouldn’t send any, he broke into her cell phone account—she wasn’t sure how—and found nude photos. Then, as if to maximize her humiliation, he copied and sent them to her friends. Hoping it would make Seth stop pestering her, the girl gave in and sent him an explicit photo. But he didn’t stop.A few weeks later, another Belmont High girl showed up at the police station. A guy was harassing her too. Moulton thought the cases were unrelated. But then more girls came in, many describing similar stories and a harasser named Seth Williams. Some were ashamed, some in tears, some accompanied by furious parents.Moulton had an epidemic on her hands.The victims had one thing in common: They all had attended Belmont High.Photograph: Cole Wilson; Embroidery by Diane MeyerIn 2011, May was a 16-year-old who had spent most of her life in Belmont and was living with her mom and two siblings in a duplex with a nice yard. Then, midway through her sophomore year at Belmont High, her family moved to a nearby town and she enrolled in a new school. She barely knew anyone. “I wasn’t that popular, I guess you could say,” May said. So when she got a Facebook friend request from someone named Seth Williams, who had a cute profile photo, she accepted it.Seth started messaging May frequently, making idle conversation, and after they exchanged numbers, he began texting. He said nice things and seemed to want to get to know her. He’d ask about her favorite ice cream flavor and her pets. She enjoyed the back and forth. When he asked for photos of her body, she hesitated at first but talked herself into it. “I still was like, no guy shows me this attention,” she told me. “He actually seems like a nice guy. Maybe it’ll be OK.” May sent him a photo she thought was fun, of her rear in jeans, plastered with handprints from her freshly painted room. He wanted more. She sent him a picture with her in underwear, then one of her bare butt. When he demanded a full nude, she told him, “No. That’s where I draw the line.”No picture, no Facebook, he replied. When May next tried logging in to her accounts, she couldn’t access them: He’d hacked her Facebook and her email and changed the passwords. She begged him to return the accounts; he refused. She blocked him on her phone; he texted from a different number. She changed her number; he still found her. “He always came back,” she said. “Always.”By April 2012, Seth had escalated his threats. Citing the “ass shots” May had sent, he wrote to her: “If you don’t send me a nude by 8, Im sending this picture to people and uploading them to Facebook.”“Get off my FB,” she responded.“Take your clothes off.” “Get fucking naked on camera.” “I’m going to have fun fucking you this summer,” he replied.May didn’t send a naked picture, and Seth retaliated by using fake Facebook accounts in her name to message her friends at her new school. Friends became jumpy, and their parents did too, forbidding them from hanging out with May. “I never felt so alone in my life,” she said.Seth would disappear for a while but then resurface, finding May even as she went through a slew of phone numbers. She trusted only those few friends who’d stood by her. If she was home alone, she locked the door to her bedroom. Strangers made her tense up. “You could be crossing somebody in the road,” she said, “and you don’t know if that’s the person you’re messaging.”By the fall of 2012, Seth had been silent for a while, and May thought maybe, finally, he had decided to stop bothering her for good. But one night, while she was sitting in her living room, a text pinged on her phone. It was Seth. “I just felt like I lost hope,” May said. He was again demanding pictures. This time, though, the text included nude photos of other girls.In one of the images, May recognized a close friend from her Belmont days. Seth had bragged that he had photos of this girl, but May hadn’t been able to bring herself to ask the friend about Seth. “I was very ashamed of myself,” May said, “and I was very upset about what I had done” by sending explicit pictures. Now, with the photo in her possession, she called her friend, thinking maybe she would have advice. The conversation was brief. They didn’t break down or comfort one another. But May’s friend did urge her to talk to her mother and go to Detective Moulton in Belmont.“I remember taking in a deep breath and going up the stairs, and I sat on my mom’s bed, and I said, ‘Mom, I have something that I need to tell you, and I don’t know how,’” May said. The next day, May and her mother went to the Belmont police station.May met with Moulton, who was spending more and more of her time on the mystery. Seth had sent nude photos to other girls, too, and with their help, Moulton was able to identify more potential victims and cold-call them. She checked with neighboring towns for related cases. Girls would come into the station with parents, whom Moulton sometimes would send out of the room while she interviewed their daughters. “Some of the parents were blaming the girls and were really hard on them,” Moulton said. Finally, after she’d tracked down a dozen or so victims, she could clearly see a commonality: They all had, at some point or another, attended Belmont High.Like pretty much every high school, Belmont High had its cliques and hierarchies. At the top, former students told me, were the jocks and the preps, kids whose parents had jobs like nurses or managers. (“When you pull up to someone’s house, and there’s not a speck of rust anywhere on it, the siding’s brand new,” Kyle Bjelf, a 2012 Belmont High graduate, told me, “you could tell they came from money.”) The middle kids identified themselves by their activities (chorus, soccer) or their style (emo, goth). The “fringe” was made up of poor kids and oddballs. Each grade had about 120 students, many of whom had been together since kindergarten. In such a small town, everyone’s relative status was inescapable.Some of the girls were really suffering. One began sleeping in the same bed as her mother. Several feared Seth would attack them. One cried herself to sleep. Another routinely called her mom at work, terrified.Before she left Belmont, May was part of the middle group: Raised by a single mom, she rode the bus and worked at an after-school job. She was outgoing and made a point of being nice to everyone, even the fringe kids who rode the bus. Those kids were often mocked. One graduate told me that the preppies went after the fringe kids: “Like, ‘You smell bad and you need to go sit somewhere else,’ and they’ll do it as loud as they can.”Sex—or supposed sexual behavior—was wielded like a weapon. Boys spread rumors about girls who got “passed around”; pregnant girls were heckled. The word skank rang out in the hallways. “It was crazy,” said a 2012 graduate about rumors of girls’ sexuality. “You couldn’t not know about it because of how many times they were yelled about on the bus; some jack would yell across the caf, ‘Blah blah blah’s a slut.’ ”Dan Clary spent eight years as assistant principal of the high school and, in 2012, became principal. “Kids preyed on the fact they were popular, and they would cause a lot of problems,” said Clary, who is now retired. There wasn’t much to do in Belmont, and after school, kids would head home and fire up Facebook. “It would be a bunch of drama and talking back and forth to each other in the comments sections,” one student said. Clary told me that he instituted consequences as severe as suspension for harassers when students reported cyberbullying.The problem was that a lot of students were not reporting the behavior. They were trying to get through, heads down, not wanting to attract the wrong kind of attention. Seth’s victims seemed to share that trait. A girl named Mackenzie, who was harassed by Seth, told me that when she learned who a few of his other victims were, she realized that none were in the popular crowd. They were consigned to the insecure middle, where every misstep was perilous. Staying quiet seemed a reasonable choice.Supposed sexual behavior was wielded like a weapon at Belmont High School. Boys spread rumors about girls who got “passed around”; pregnant girls were heckled.Photograph: Cole Wilson; Embroidery by Diane MeyerMoulton began tracking down new victims. She quizzed the state’s computer-crimes unit and was told that they didn’t have any known perpetrators who followed Seth’s script. She took over one girl’s phone to try to elicit information from Seth. In that guise, she suggested meeting up at a teen hangout, an outdoor spot nicknamed the Arches. He didn’t seem to recognize the name, and she began to wonder if he wasn’t a local. The pressure was getting to her. She imagined getting a phone call from a parent telling her that a child had been abducted. She still had no idea who Seth was.Then, around the time May first met with her, Moulton received a truly useful piece of information. Moulton had learned that Seth was able to text from four or five different numbers by using services like Textfree, a voice-over-internet-protocol service that allows users to text without subscribing to a cell phone plan. Moulton sent out subpoenas, and the developer of Textfree sent back information that included the Apple universal identifier for Seth’s phone. With that she could subpoena Apple for the phone’s registration and billing information. The results were confusing but included the name Ryan Vallee. He was a 19-year-old graduate of Belmont High, class of 2012.With some digging, Moulton learned that Vallee lived with his mother in Belmont and worked short-term jobs. Even in a small school, Vallee had not made a big impression on his peers. If they could place him at all, classmates remembered him as quiet and awkward.Kyle Bjelf had been close with Vallee in middle school. They’d played a lot of videogames at Vallee’s house, pounding Mountain Dew, and sometimes Bjelf would have dinner there. Bjelf was impressed by his friend’s computer savvy. Once in high school, though, Vallee started hanging out with a new group—two or three guys who were into screamo music and raves. A Facebook photo of Vallee in 2012 shows a bathroom-mirror selfie of a guy with lank brown hair and a long face. In posts, he talks about his favorite movie, Gran Torino; watching South Park; playing laser tag. “He wasn’t a tough kid,” Bjelf said, but as he got older he changed. He started acting out. In class, Bjelf said, Vallee would say “Pass” when he was called on; outside of class, he would provoke fistfights.He also made clumsy efforts to talk to girls online. “do u go to my skool?” he wrote, with his real name, to Mackenzie after she graduated. “i dnt thnk ik u. I jst felt like talkin to sum1 new lol.” Mackenzie didn’t remember him but chatted briefly, saying that she was bad at starting conversations. “lol im bad at tht too,” he said. Later, he would approach her again, this time under the name Seth, and with a profile picture of a handsome, outdoorsy young guy.Moulton now had a choice to make. She didn’t have enough evidence to arrest Vallee. The Apple information was the strongest link between the harassment and a suspect, but she needed more evidence to know it was Vallee for sure.She also knew some of the girls were really suffering. One began sleeping in the same bed as her mother. Several feared Seth would attack them. One cried herself to sleep. Another routinely called her mom at work, sobbing, terrified about being alone. They battled depression, anxiety, nausea. So Moulton told a few of the most troubled girls that Vallee, their former classmate, was a suspect. She hoped it might ease their fears. “They really had a sense of this big huge brute of a person,” Moulton said. “When they found out who it was, some of them were like, ‘Really?’ ”Some barely knew Vallee, but one girl was friendly enough with him that she had sat with him at lunch occasionally. She’d even told him about her online stalker. Vallee, the computer expert, offered his help to unmask “Seth.”May knew Vallee from the Belmont school bus, had dated a friend of his, and had made a point of being friendly toward him. “What did I do for him to feel that I deserved this?” she wondered.One day Vallee showed up at the clothing store where May worked.“All feelings just fell out of me, and I froze,” May said. He made no sign of recognizing her and just wandered around looking at merchandise. She hid in the employee lunch area, behind a locked door, talking to her mom on the phone until he left.As Moulton tried to gather more information, she was also staring down another problem. Even if she could find the proof to arrest Vallee, under New Hampshire law at the time the most she could charge him with was harassment, a misdemeanor carrying a sentence of less than a year. “A couple of those girls, it became their lives for a year and a half,” she said. “I didn’t think the laws of this state were enough for that kind of fear.”So Moulton reached out to the Feds.A back street in Belmont, New Hampshire. Photograph: Cole Wilson; Embroidery by Diane MeyerIn October 2013, five months after they took over the case, federal authorities learned that one of the victims was close to suicide. They charged Vallee with extortion. When Vallee turned himself in to the Belmont police, Moulton was struck by his affect. “He came in and he sat down and basically closed himself up,” Moulton said. “He just kept rubbing his legs and his arms like he was taking a shower in the office.”The harassment stopped. But, under a tight time frame, the government decided to dismiss the case rather than go to trial. Meanwhile the team gathered more evidence. For this stage of the investigation, a new expert came on board: Mona Sedky.Sedky, a lawyer in the Washington, DC, headquarters of the Department of Justice, specialized in computer crimes and corporate hacking. A few years earlier, she had been enlisted to help with a case against a man who had threatened to spread naked images of a young mother online. At that point, the term sextortion was still new to Sedky. She’d spent the bulk of her career as a litigator at the Federal Trade Commission before moving to the Justice Department’s computer crime and intellectual property section. Looking at the documents in that first case, Sedky was struck by how the harasser demanded precise poses and gave his victim strict deadlines. It was a remarkable “level of control over her sexuality,” Sedky said. The man pleaded guilty, but soon after his sentencing, Sedky learned the victim had killed herself.At about the same time, Sedky learned from police that someone in her own extended family had experienced something similar, at age 14. A boyfriend had taken a topless photo of this relative without her knowledge and texted it to others. “She and I have a very close relationship, and for the life of me I can’t figure out why she wouldn’t feel like she could tell me,” Sedky said. “I can’t unring that bell for her, but I can help make sure that other women don’t have that happen to them.”Seth took over several of her accounts and demanded a photo of her breasts. “I won’t send one. I’ll fight back,” Mackenzie wrote him. “You get off on tormenting innocents like this?”Since then, Sedky has worked on about a dozen sextortion cases. While sextortion isn’t a crime spelled out in federal law, prosecutors can charge people with crimes like computer fraud and abuse. Most states outlaw nonconsensual sharing of sexual images, but generally these carry far lighter sentences than the federal laws Sedky relies on. Still, this is new legal territory. According to a Brookings Institution study, as of 2016 only about 80 sextortion cases had been brought in the federal and state systems combined. One challenge is getting local police and prosecutors, who take victims’ initial reports, to understand the harm, said Carrie Goldberg, a lawyer specializing in civil sex-crime lawsuits. “Mona,” she says, “is correcting that.”Matthew O’Neill, a Secret Service agent in New Hampshire, reached out to Sedky for help with the Vallee case. (The Secret Service is known for protecting government officials, but it has a lesser-known duty to investigate computer crimes and identify theft.) Sedky jumped in, issuing subpoenas and other requests to companies like Amazon, Skype, Pinger, Yahoo, Google, AOL, and Facebook. Sedky unearthed the trail all internet users leave: login IP addresses, time and date stamps, and registration information. Investigators then went back further, to the internet providers, to find subscriber and location information.With this information in hand, O’Neill and other agents mapped the locations where Seth had logged in. They all had some plausible link to Vallee: a burrito place near his mother’s house, an air-conditioning business belonging to his mother’s ex-boyfriend. A random person’s Wi-Fi in Gilford, New Hampshire, turned out to belong to his sister’s neighbor. These were crucial bits of circumstantial evidence, and investigators needed as many of them as possible. “In these cyber cases, you have to defeat the SODDI defense,” O’Neill said. That is, “Some other dude did it.” By studying the exchanges with the girls, O’Neill also cracked one way that Seth accessed his victims’ accounts. When Seth was making friendly chatter—like asking May her favorite ice cream flavor and the names of her pets—he was really collecting clues that he then used to answer the security questions on their accounts.Finally, in 2015, federal prosecutors had enough evidence to charge Vallee with interstate threats, aggravated identity theft, and computer fraud and abuse. The indictment listed 10 Jane Doe victims—the women that the government could convince to come forward, including May, Jane Doe No. 4.Vallee was released on bail and ordered not to use the internet. The federal judge hearing the case scheduled the trial for the spring of 2016.Though the evidence was strong, Sedky was worried; she knew from experience that putting vulnerable victims on the stand could be enormously distressing, “so there were definitely some incentives for us to try to get him to plead guilty to avoid a trial.” But Vallee was adamant that it wasn’t him—that some other dude did it. The investigators, meanwhile, were going back to interview the victims again, solidifying their case. One day, they followed up with a young woman who had moved far from Belmont: Mackenzie.After graduating from Belmont High in 2011, Mackenzie moved into her grandparents’ house in North Carolina. Her mother had banned her from social media in high school, so, finally equipped with a phone and out from under her mother’s rules, she “went a little crazy,” she says. She was happy to message with strangers, and when Seth contacted her, she responded. But then Seth took over several of her accounts and demanded a photo of her breasts.“I won’t send one. I’ll fight back,” Mackenzie wrote him. “You get off on tormenting innocents like this?”Mackenzie, who said she was a victim of abuse when she was younger, was determined not to cower. She printed out her exchanges with Seth and took them, in 2012, to the police in her town in North Carolina. “The policewoman told me, ‘Honestly, we don’t really have the technology to be able to deal with something like this, and there’s a very low probability that anything will come from this,’” Mackenzie said.A year later, Seth started using a Belmont girl’s hacked Facebook page to harass Mackenzie further. Mackenzie messaged the girl, who told her about Moulton. Mackenzie passed along dates and screenshots of her interaction with Seth to Moulton, adding to the thick case file.When the trial team was reinterviewing all of Seth’s victims, they called Mackenzie. She told them that Seth had stopped bothering her for a bit, but in recent months he’d contacted her again, using the same hacked Facebook page of the Belmont girl, identified in court papers as M.M.This information was critical: It meant Vallee was back online, breaking the terms of his bail. Moreover, if agents could catch him with whatever device he was using, they would also have his browsing and messaging history. With evidence that strong, they could circumvent Vallee’s “some other dude” defense. The government got an order that required Facebook to deliver daily reports of IP addresses and login times for the M.M. Facebook page. Meanwhile, O’Neill took over Mackenzie’s Facebook. Copying the instant-messaging patois he learned from his teenage daughters, O’Neill posed as Mackenzie, alternately flirting, challenging, and being mad at him. “The more he talks, the more he logs in,” O’Neill said. “The more he logs in, we can identify where he is.”The Facebook reports showed that “Seth” accessed Facebook with a cell phone. The investigators were determined to get it.On a windy March morning, Secret Service agents in black SUVs pulled up outside Vallee’s mother’s house in Laconia and his sister’s apartment in Gilford. They figured Vallee was staying at one of them. O’Neill, acting as Mackenzie, messaged with the hacker of the M.M. Facebook. Then, just after O’Neill signed off with M.M., Vallee left his sister’s apartment. The Secret Service agents in Gilford watched as he drove off in a silver sedan and followed him in their SUV. When Vallee stopped at a traffic light, the officers jumped out of their car, guns raised. Vallee took off, weaving through traffic. The Secret Service and Gilford police tailed him until Vallee hit a dead end. As he got out of the car, a Gilford officer ran up, yelling at him to get on the ground. After getting a search warrant, agents looked in the car and found a backpack. Inside were pajama bottoms, a New Testament, Vaseline, and a Nintendo gaming console and case. Inside the case: a Windows phone, internet-enabled.The next day, Judge Paul Barbadoro sent Ryan Vallee to jail. Five months later, Vallee pleaded guilty to 31 counts, including aggravated identity theft, computer hacking, and cyberstalking.Mackenzie, who was harassed by “Seth.” Photograph: Cole Wilson; Embroidery by Diane MeyerOn February 6, 2017, Ryan Vallee sat in the Concord federal courthouse for sentencing. The hearing lasted nearly three hours, as lawyers debated whether Vallee’s victims should be classified as vulnerable, which might increase his sentence, and whether he knew the effect his harassment had on the victims.Jonathan Saxe, the public defender representing Vallee, discussed psychological reports suggesting his client was on the autism spectrum. “The response to the overwhelming evidence was just no response at all, which was unusual and troubling,” Saxe said. “To him, this was stuff he was doing on a computer, and it didn’t really connect.” On the Windows phone that law enforcement recovered from Vallee was a trail of his searches during the time he was out on bail. Between searching for child pornography and queries like “your laws mean nothing to me,” Vallee visited a Christian web page. Its title: “Why can’t I just be a good person?”Sedky told the judge about the emotional devastation Vallee had wrought. She called his acts a “remote sexual assault” and argued that Vallee should go to prison for eight years, at the high end of federal sentencing guidelines.Prosecutors had asked Vallee’s victims if they wanted to speak at the hearing. Most declined. “I can only guess they were just as ashamed as I was,” May said. But she decided to attend, as did Mackenzie and a third victim. When they all met, May realized she went to college with the third victim. The three sat together, May and Mackenzie clutching the statements they had prepared, waiting through the fog of proceedings in a courtroom crowded with unfamiliar faces. Then, the judge called them up.May had put off writing her statement for weeks, but she pushed herself to speak up in court that day. “The emotional scars that he has caused will never go away, and I’ll never stop hurting,” she said. (Later, when speaking with me, her emotions were even more raw. “I’m not who he put me out to be,” she said. “I’m not just some skanky girl who sent pictures.”)Sitting behind Vallee in the courtroom, Mackenzie studied him. He was with his lawyer, wearing glasses, his eyes cast down. He looked, she told me, “quirky and small, and someone who I probably wouldn’t have been as afraid of if I had actually known who he was.” But when she got up to make her statement, she tried to avoid looking his way. It wasn’t Ryan Vallee she’d feared, she told the judge, trying not to cry, but Seth, who was “everywhere, all the time.”After the third victim spoke, Judge Barbadoro asked Vallee if he had anything to say. He shook his head and said, “No.”“This is a difficult case to sentence because of the extraordinary harm to the young women who have been injured here and also to try to understand the defendant’s conduct, which is difficult to comprehend, even for a judge like me who’s been doing this for 25 years,” Barbadoro said. He sentenced Vallee to the eight years in prison that prosecutors had requested.After the sentencing, Vallee’s mother, who had also attended the hearing, came over to the girls, crying. She hugged them and apologized.Ryan Vallee wasn’t one of the popular kids at Belmont High. But he had two advantages his victims did not. He was a boy, and therefore not as vulnerable to slut-shaming. And he understood how to harness technology to seem powerful, controlling and terrifying victims for years with only a smartphone and a computer.Investigators eventually identified 23 victims and suspected there were even more. These teenagers barely discussed their stalking while it was happening. Even after Vallee was sentenced, few spoke out. No one held a rally. No one said “never again.” “Virtually all young girls in this circumstance are going to feel a sense of shame about this,” Barbadoro, the judge, said at the sentencing hearing. “They’re afraid of the unknown, and their tendency is to repress it, deny it, not—not confront it.”Many people from Belmont—including teachers and guidance counselors—didn’t know about the Vallee case until I contacted them. Amanda Titus, a classmate of Vallee’s, told me that she remembered walking a close friend to the Belmont police station during their senior year to report that she’d been threatened online by an apparent stranger and pressed for nude photos. But Titus hadn’t heard about Vallee until we spoke this year. “I don’t know exactly what happened afterward,” Titus said of her friend. “She didn’t say. Teenage girls are very private.”Vallee, who is in federal prison in Massachusetts, did not respond to several letters I sent him. His case is on appeal. I tried his mother many times before she responded by text: “Why didn’t the Belmont police let me know this was happening when he was 16? Instead they let it go to build the case.”When May and I were trying to find a place to meet, I had suggested a diner or a coffee shop around Belmont. May demurred: Not private enough, she said. We ended up meeting in the lobby of the motel where I was staying. Her mother joined us. Now 25, with wide, blue eyes that never rested long on anything, May spoke in a soft voice that got fainter when she described how Vallee’s threats had isolated her. Still, speaking out seemed to give her a new confidence. She considered using her full name in this article. “If I say, ‘Yup, this is who I am. This is what happened to me, and this is me now,’ then it’s empowering,” she said. In the end, she decided to use her middle name; the last thing she wants is an easy way to be identified that might lead to more online harassment.“Any type of security thing can happen,” she said. “They can hack anything.” Her shoulders slouched, and she directed her voice to the table where we were sitting. “I just never envisioned that, and it’s just … We shouldn’t have to live in a world where we don’t know if people are real or not.” She folded her arms around herself and bit her lip to stop herself from crying.The opening image is of a model and does not depict an actual person discussed in the story.Let us know what you think about this article. Submit a letter to the editor at mail@wired.com. He Cyberstalked Teen Girls for Years—Then They Fought Back For years, Belmont, New Hampshire, had only one detective: Raechel Moulton. An old mill town of 7,200 people, Belmont is surrounded by lakes and forests but isn’t itself much of a draw for the tourists who flock to the region every summer. A hardware store and salon are about all Main Street has to offer; the biggest employer in town is a Shaw’s supermarket. At the police department, where Moulton works, a donation box for Vito, the department’s K-9, is stuffed with change and dollar bills. As Moulton describes it, “We don’t have a lot of people that are rolling in the dough.” Moulton, who is 41, grew up about 20 miles away, in Concord, the state capital. Her mother managed a Walmart and her father repaired power-line transformers. She was a bold kid, the oldest of three, and would stride up to uniformed police officers to ask them about the things on their belts. When she was in the fifth grade, an officer came to her school to run a drug-awareness course. That’s when she decided she was going to be a cop. In high school, Moulton enrolled in a law-and-policing course, where she was assigned to ride along in a patrol car with a male officer. He told her that women shouldn’t become cops. That cemented her ambition. In 2005 she was hired onto the Belmont police force, too. “This job picks you,” she said, sitting straight-spined in the police department, her brown hair pulled back in a tight bun. Crime in Belmont tends toward opioids, thefts, and burglaries. But before long, Moulton was fielding complaints from parents and counselors at Belmont High School about teens sending nude photos, often to people they were dating. The reaction from some parents, though, verged on the lackadaisical. (“They’d say, ‘So what? She sent a boy a picture of her boobs,’” Moulton says.) So, channeling the officer who inspired her as a fifth-grader, Moulton offered workshops at the high school about safe online behavior. She warned students that a nude photo might get sent around to unintended viewers or uploaded online. The results weren’t all she hoped for. “One girl told me, ‘What I got from your class is, as long as my head isn’t in the picture, it’s OK,’” Moulton said. In the spring of 2012, after Moulton had been promoted to detective, a student from Belmont High walked into the police station and told Moulton that someone she hadn’t met and knew only as Seth Williams had been texting and hounding her for naked photos. When she wouldn’t send any, he broke into her cell phone account—she wasn’t sure how—and found nude photos. Then, as if to maximize her humiliation, he copied and sent them to her friends. Hoping it would make Seth stop pestering her, the girl gave in and sent him an explicit photo. But he didn’t stop. A few weeks later, another Belmont High girl showed up at the police station. A guy was harassing her too. Moulton thought the cases were unrelated. But then more girls came in, many describing similar stories and a harasser named Seth Williams. Some were ashamed, some in tears, some accompanied by furious parents. Moulton had an epidemic on her hands. In 2011, May was a 16-year-old who had spent most of her life in Belmont and was living with her mom and two siblings in a duplex with a nice yard. Then, midway through her sophomore year at Belmont High, her family moved to a nearby town and she enrolled in a new school. She barely knew anyone. “I wasn’t that popular, I guess you could say,” May said. So when she got a Facebook friend request from someone named Seth Williams, who had a cute profile photo, she accepted it. Seth started messaging May frequently, making idle conversation, and after they exchanged numbers, he began texting. He said nice things and seemed to want to get to know her. He’d ask about her favorite ice cream flavor and her pets. She enjoyed the back and forth. When he asked for photos of her body, she hesitated at first but talked herself into it. “I still was like, no guy shows me this attention,” she told me. “He actually seems like a nice guy. Maybe it’ll be OK.” May sent him a photo she thought was fun, of her rear in jeans, plastered with handprints from her freshly painted room. He wanted more. She sent him a picture with her in underwear, then one of her bare butt. When he demanded a full nude, she told him, “No. That’s where I draw the line.” No picture, no Facebook, he replied. When May next tried logging in to her accounts, she couldn’t access them: He’d hacked her Facebook and her email and changed the passwords. She begged him to return the accounts; he refused. She blocked him on her phone; he texted from a different number. She changed her number; he still found her. “He always came back,” she said. “Always.” By April 2012, Seth had escalated his threats. Citing the “ass shots” May had sent, he wrote to her: “If you don’t send me a nude by 8, Im sending this picture to people and uploading them to Facebook.” “Get off my FB,” she responded. “Take your clothes off.” “Get fucking naked on camera.” “I’m going to have fun fucking you this summer,” he replied. May didn’t send a naked picture, and Seth retaliated by using fake Facebook accounts in her name to message her friends at her new school. Friends became jumpy, and their parents did too, forbidding them from hanging out with May. “I never felt so alone in my life,” she said. Seth would disappear for a while but then resurface, finding May even as she went through a slew of phone numbers. She trusted only those few friends who’d stood by her. If she was home alone, she locked the door to her bedroom. Strangers made her tense up. “You could be crossing somebody in the road,” she said, “and you don’t know if that’s the person you’re messaging.” By the fall of 2012, Seth had been silent for a while, and May thought maybe, finally, he had decided to stop bothering her for good. But one night, while she was sitting in her living room, a text pinged on her phone. It was Seth. “I just felt like I lost hope,” May said. He was again demanding pictures. This time, though, the text included nude photos of other girls. In one of the images, May recognized a close friend from her Belmont days. Seth had bragged that he had photos of this girl, but May hadn’t been able to bring herself to ask the friend about Seth. “I was very ashamed of myself,” May said, “and I was very upset about what I had done” by sending explicit pictures. Now, with the photo in her possession, she called her friend, thinking maybe she would have advice. The conversation was brief. They didn’t break down or comfort one another. But May’s friend did urge her to talk to her mother and go to Detective Moulton in Belmont. “I remember taking in a deep breath and going up the stairs, and I sat on my mom’s bed, and I said, ‘Mom, I have something that I need to tell you, and I don’t know how,’” May said. The next day, May and her mother went to the Belmont police station. May met with Moulton, who was spending more and more of her time on the mystery. Seth had sent nude photos to other girls, too, and with their help, Moulton was able to identify more potential victims and cold-call them. She checked with neighboring towns for related cases. Girls would come into the station with parents, whom Moulton sometimes would send out of the room while she interviewed their daughters. “Some of the parents were blaming the girls and were really hard on them,” Moulton said. Finally, after she’d tracked down a dozen or so victims, she could clearly see a commonality: They all had, at some point or another, attended Belmont High. Like pretty much every high school, Belmont High had its cliques and hierarchies. At the top, former students told me, were the jocks and the preps, kids whose parents had jobs like nurses or managers. (“When you pull up to someone’s house, and there’s not a speck of rust anywhere on it, the siding’s brand new,” Kyle Bjelf, a 2012 Belmont High graduate, told me, “you could tell they came from money.”) The middle kids identified themselves by their activities (chorus, soccer) or their style (emo, goth). The “fringe” was made up of poor kids and oddballs. Each grade had about 120 students, many of whom had been together since kindergarten. In such a small town, everyone’s relative status was inescapable. Some of the girls were really suffering. One began sleeping in the same bed as her mother. Several feared Seth would attack them. One cried herself to sleep. Another routinely called her mom at work, terrified. Before she left Belmont, May was part of the middle group: Raised by a single mom, she rode the bus and worked at an after-school job. She was outgoing and made a point of being nice to everyone, even the fringe kids who rode the bus. Those kids were often mocked. One graduate told me that the preppies went after the fringe kids: “Like, ‘You smell bad and you need to go sit somewhere else,’ and they’ll do it as loud as they can.” Sex—or supposed sexual behavior—was wielded like a weapon. Boys spread rumors about girls who got “passed around”; pregnant girls were heckled. The word skank rang out in the hallways. “It was crazy,” said a 2012 graduate about rumors of girls’ sexuality. “You couldn’t not know about it because of how many times they were yelled about on the bus; some jack would yell across the caf, ‘Blah blah blah’s a slut.’ ” Dan Clary spent eight years as assistant principal of the high school and, in 2012, became principal. “Kids preyed on the fact they were popular, and they would cause a lot of problems,” said Clary, who is now retired. There wasn’t much to do in Belmont, and after school, kids would head home and fire up Facebook. “It would be a bunch of drama and talking back and forth to each other in the comments sections,” one student said. Clary told me that he instituted consequences as severe as suspension for harassers when students reported cyberbullying. The problem was that a lot of students were not reporting the behavior. They were trying to get through, heads down, not wanting to attract the wrong kind of attention. Seth’s victims seemed to share that trait. A girl named Mackenzie, who was harassed by Seth, told me that when she learned who a few of his other victims were, she realized that none were in the popular crowd. They were consigned to the insecure middle, where every misstep was perilous. Staying quiet seemed a reasonable choice. Moulton began tracking down new victims. She quizzed the state’s computer-crimes unit and was told that they didn’t have any known perpetrators who followed Seth’s script. She took over one girl’s phone to try to elicit information from Seth. In that guise, she suggested meeting up at a teen hangout, an outdoor spot nicknamed the Arches. He didn’t seem to recognize the name, and she began to wonder if he wasn’t a local. The pressure was getting to her. She imagined getting a phone call from a parent telling her that a child had been abducted. She still had no idea who Seth was. Then, around the time May first met with her, Moulton received a truly useful piece of information. Moulton had learned that Seth was able to text from four or five different numbers by using services like Textfree, a voice-over-internet-protocol service that allows users to text without subscribing to a cell phone plan. Moulton sent out subpoenas, and the developer of Textfree sent back information that included the Apple universal identifier for Seth’s phone. With that she could subpoena Apple for the phone’s registration and billing information. The results were confusing but included the name Ryan Vallee. He was a 19-year-old graduate of Belmont High, class of 2012. With some digging, Moulton learned that Vallee lived with his mother in Belmont and worked short-term jobs. Even in a small school, Vallee had not made a big impression on his peers. If they could place him at all, classmates remembered him as quiet and awkward. Kyle Bjelf had been close with Vallee in middle school. They’d played a lot of videogames at Vallee’s house, pounding Mountain Dew, and sometimes Bjelf would have dinner there. Bjelf was impressed by his friend’s computer savvy. Once in high school, though, Vallee started hanging out with a new group—two or three guys who were into screamo music and raves. A Facebook photo of Vallee in 2012 shows a bathroom-mirror selfie of a guy with lank brown hair and a long face. In posts, he talks about his favorite movie, Gran Torino; watching South Park; playing laser tag. “He wasn’t a tough kid,” Bjelf said, but as he got older he changed. He started acting out. In class, Bjelf said, Vallee would say “Pass” when he was called on; outside of class, he would provoke fistfights. He also made clumsy efforts to talk to girls online. “do u go to my skool?” he wrote, with his real name, to Mackenzie after she graduated. “i dnt thnk ik u. I jst felt like talkin to sum1 new lol.” Mackenzie didn’t remember him but chatted briefly, saying that she was bad at starting conversations. “lol im bad at tht too,” he said. Later, he would approach her again, this time under the name Seth, and with a profile picture of a handsome, outdoorsy young guy. Moulton now had a choice to make. She didn’t have enough evidence to arrest Vallee. The Apple information was the strongest link between the harassment and a suspect, but she needed more evidence to know it was Vallee for sure. She also knew some of the girls were really suffering. One began sleeping in the same bed as her mother. Several feared Seth would attack them. One cried herself to sleep. Another routinely called her mom at work, sobbing, terrified about being alone. They battled depression, anxiety, nausea. So Moulton told a few of the most troubled girls that Vallee, their former classmate, was a suspect. She hoped it might ease their fears. “They really had a sense of this big huge brute of a person,” Moulton said. “When they found out who it was, some of them were like, ‘Really?’ ” Some barely knew Vallee, but one girl was friendly enough with him that she had sat with him at lunch occasionally. She’d even told him about her online stalker. Vallee, the computer expert, offered his help to unmask “Seth.” May knew Vallee from the Belmont school bus, had dated a friend of his, and had made a point of being friendly toward him. “What did I do for him to feel that I deserved this?” she wondered. One day Vallee showed up at the clothing store where May worked. “All feelings just fell out of me, and I froze,” May said. He made no sign of recognizing her and just wandered around looking at merchandise. She hid in the employee lunch area, behind a locked door, talking to her mom on the phone until he left. As Moulton tried to gather more information, she was also staring down another problem. Even if she could find the proof to arrest Vallee, under New Hampshire law at the time the most she could charge him with was harassment, a misdemeanor carrying a sentence of less than a year. “A couple of those girls, it became their lives for a year and a half,” she said. “I didn’t think the laws of this state were enough for that kind of fear.” So Moulton reached out to the Feds. A back street in Belmont, New Hampshire. In October 2013, five months after they took over the case, federal authorities learned that one of the victims was close to suicide. They charged Vallee with extortion. When Vallee turned himself in to the Belmont police, Moulton was struck by his affect. “He came in and he sat down and basically closed himself up,” Moulton said. “He just kept rubbing his legs and his arms like he was taking a shower in the office.” The harassment stopped. But, under a tight time frame, the government decided to dismiss the case rather than go to trial. Meanwhile the team gathered more evidence. For this stage of the investigation, a new expert came on board: Mona Sedky. Sedky, a lawyer in the Washington, DC, headquarters of the Department of Justice, specialized in computer crimes and corporate hacking. A few years earlier, she had been enlisted to help with a case against a man who had threatened to spread naked images of a young mother online. At that point, the term sextortion was still new to Sedky. She’d spent the bulk of her career as a litigator at the Federal Trade Commission before moving to the Justice Department’s computer crime and intellectual property section. Looking at the documents in that first case, Sedky was struck by how the harasser demanded precise poses and gave his victim strict deadlines. It was a remarkable “level of control over her sexuality,” Sedky said. The man pleaded guilty, but soon after his sentencing, Sedky learned the victim had killed herself. At about the same time, Sedky learned from police that someone in her own extended family had experienced something similar, at age 14. A boyfriend had taken a topless photo of this relative without her knowledge and texted it to others. “She and I have a very close relationship, and for the life of me I can’t figure out why she wouldn’t feel like she could tell me,” Sedky said. “I can’t unring that bell for her, but I can help make sure that other women don’t have that happen to them.” Seth took over several of her accounts and demanded a photo of her breasts. “I won’t send one. I’ll fight back,” Mackenzie wrote him. “You get off on tormenting innocents like this?” Since then, Sedky has worked on about a dozen sextortion cases. While sextortion isn’t a crime spelled out in federal law, prosecutors can charge people with crimes like computer fraud and abuse. Most states outlaw nonconsensual sharing of sexual images, but generally these carry far lighter sentences than the federal laws Sedky relies on. Still, this is new legal territory. According to a Brookings Institution study, as of 2016 only about 80 sextortion cases had been brought in the federal and state systems combined. One challenge is getting local police and prosecutors, who take victims’ initial reports, to understand the harm, said Carrie Goldberg, a lawyer specializing in civil sex-crime lawsuits. “Mona,” she says, “is correcting that.” Matthew O’Neill, a Secret Service agent in New Hampshire, reached out to Sedky for help with the Vallee case. (The Secret Service is known for protecting government officials, but it has a lesser-known duty to investigate computer crimes and identify theft.) Sedky jumped in, issuing subpoenas and other requests to companies like Amazon, Skype, Pinger, Yahoo, Google, AOL, and Facebook. Sedky unearthed the trail all internet users leave: login IP addresses, time and date stamps, and registration information. Investigators then went back further, to the internet providers, to find subscriber and location information. With this information in hand, O’Neill and other agents mapped the locations where Seth had logged in. They all had some plausible link to Vallee: a burrito place near his mother’s house, an air-conditioning business belonging to his mother’s ex-boyfriend. A random person’s Wi-Fi in Gilford, New Hampshire, turned out to belong to his sister’s neighbor. These were crucial bits of circumstantial evidence, and investigators needed as many of them as possible. “In these cyber cases, you have to defeat the SODDI defense,” O’Neill said. That is, “Some other dude did it.” By studying the exchanges with the girls, O’Neill also cracked one way that Seth accessed his victims’ accounts. When Seth was making friendly chatter—like asking May her favorite ice cream flavor and the names of her pets—he was really collecting clues that he then used to answer the security questions on their accounts. Finally, in 2015, federal prosecutors had enough evidence to charge Vallee with interstate threats, aggravated identity theft, and computer fraud and abuse. The indictment listed 10 Jane Doe victims—the women that the government could convince to come forward, including May, Jane Doe No. 4. Vallee was released on bail and ordered not to use the internet. The federal judge hearing the case scheduled the trial for the spring of 2016. Though the evidence was strong, Sedky was worried; she knew from experience that putting vulnerable victims on the stand could be enormously distressing, “so there were definitely some incentives for us to try to get him to plead guilty to avoid a trial.” But Vallee was adamant that it wasn’t him—that some other dude did it. The investigators, meanwhile, were going back to interview the victims again, solidifying their case. One day, they followed up with a young woman who had moved far from Belmont: Mackenzie. After graduating from Belmont High in 2011, Mackenzie moved into her grandparents’ house in North Carolina. Her mother had banned her from social media in high school, so, finally equipped with a phone and out from under her mother’s rules, she “went a little crazy,” she says. She was happy to message with strangers, and when Seth contacted her, she responded. But then Seth took over several of her accounts and demanded a photo of her breasts. “I won’t send one. I’ll fight back,” Mackenzie wrote him. “You get off on tormenting innocents like this?” Mackenzie, who said she was a victim of abuse when she was younger, was determined not to cower. She printed out her exchanges with Seth and took them, in 2012, to the police in her town in North Carolina. “The policewoman told me, ‘Honestly, we don’t really have the technology to be able to deal with something like this, and there’s a very low probability that anything will come from this,’” Mackenzie said. A year later, Seth started using a Belmont girl’s hacked Facebook page to harass Mackenzie further. Mackenzie messaged the girl, who told her about Moulton. Mackenzie passed along dates and screenshots of her interaction with Seth to Moulton, adding to the thick case file. When the trial team was reinterviewing all of Seth’s victims, they called Mackenzie. She told them that Seth had stopped bothering her for a bit, but in recent months he’d contacted her again, using the same hacked Facebook page of the Belmont girl, identified in court papers as M.M. This information was critical: It meant Vallee was back online, breaking the terms of his bail. Moreover, if agents could catch him with whatever device he was using, they would also have his browsing and messaging history. With evidence that strong, they could circumvent Vallee’s “some other dude” defense. The government got an order that required Facebook to deliver daily reports of IP addresses and login times for the M.M. Facebook page. Meanwhile, O’Neill took over Mackenzie’s Facebook. Copying the instant-messaging patois he learned from his teenage daughters, O’Neill posed as Mackenzie, alternately flirting, challenging, and being mad at him. “The more he talks, the more he logs in,” O’Neill said. “The more he logs in, we can identify where he is.” The Facebook reports showed that “Seth” accessed Facebook with a cell phone. The investigators were determined to get it. On a windy March morning, Secret Service agents in black SUVs pulled up outside Vallee’s mother’s house in Laconia and his sister’s apartment in Gilford. They figured Vallee was staying at one of them. O’Neill, acting as Mackenzie, messaged with the hacker of the M.M. Facebook. Then, just after O’Neill signed off with M.M., Vallee left his sister’s apartment. The Secret Service agents in Gilford watched as he drove off in a silver sedan and followed him in their SUV. When Vallee stopped at a traffic light, the officers jumped out of their car, guns raised. Vallee took off, weaving through traffic. The Secret Service and Gilford police tailed him until Vallee hit a dead end. As he got out of the car, a Gilford officer ran up, yelling at him to get on the ground. After getting a search warrant, agents looked in the car and found a backpack. Inside were pajama bottoms, a New Testament, Vaseline, and a Nintendo gaming console and case. Inside the case: a Windows phone, internet-enabled. The next day, Judge Paul Barbadoro sent Ryan Vallee to jail. Five months later, Vallee pleaded guilty to 31 counts, including aggravated identity theft, computer hacking, and cyberstalking. Mackenzie, who was harassed by “Seth.” On February 6, 2017, Ryan Vallee sat in the Concord federal courthouse for sentencing. The hearing lasted nearly three hours, as lawyers debated whether Vallee’s victims should be classified as vulnerable, which might increase his sentence, and whether he knew the effect his harassment had on the victims. Jonathan Saxe, the public defender representing Vallee, discussed psychological reports suggesting his client was on the autism spectrum. “The response to the overwhelming evidence was just no response at all, which was unusual and troubling,” Saxe said. “To him, this was stuff he was doing on a computer, and it didn’t really connect.” On the Windows phone that law enforcement recovered from Vallee was a trail of his searches during the time he was out on bail. Between searching for child pornography and queries like “your laws mean nothing to me,” Vallee visited a Christian web page. Its title: “Why can’t I just be a good person?” Sedky told the judge about the emotional devastation Vallee had wrought. She called his acts a “remote sexual assault” and argued that Vallee should go to prison for eight years, at the high end of federal sentencing guidelines. Prosecutors had asked Vallee’s victims if they wanted to speak at the hearing. Most declined. “I can only guess they were just as ashamed as I was,” May said. But she decided to attend, as did Mackenzie and a third victim. When they all met, May realized she went to college with the third victim. The three sat together, May and Mackenzie clutching the statements they had prepared, waiting through the fog of proceedings in a courtroom crowded with unfamiliar faces. Then, the judge called them up. May had put off writing her statement for weeks, but she pushed herself to speak up in court that day. “The emotional scars that he has caused will never go away, and I’ll never stop hurting,” she said. (Later, when speaking with me, her emotions were even more raw. “I’m not who he put me out to be,” she said. “I’m not just some skanky girl who sent pictures.”) Sitting behind Vallee in the courtroom, Mackenzie studied him. He was with his lawyer, wearing glasses, his eyes cast down. He looked, she told me, “quirky and small, and someone who I probably wouldn’t have been as afraid of if I had actually known who he was.” But when she got up to make her statement, she tried to avoid looking his way. It wasn’t Ryan Vallee she’d feared, she told the judge, trying not to cry, but Seth, who was “everywhere, all the time.” After the third victim spoke, Judge Barbadoro asked Vallee if he had anything to say. He shook his head and said, “No.” “This is a difficult case to sentence because of the extraordinary harm to the young women who have been injured here and also to try to understand the defendant’s conduct, which is difficult to comprehend, even for a judge like me who’s been doing this for 25 years,” Barbadoro said. He sentenced Vallee to the eight years in prison that prosecutors had requested. After the sentencing, Vallee’s mother, who had also attended the hearing, came over to the girls, crying. She hugged them and apologized. Ryan Vallee wasn’t one of the popular kids at Belmont High. But he had two advantages his victims did not. He was a boy, and therefore not as vulnerable to slut-shaming. And he understood how to harness technology to seem powerful, controlling and terrifying victims for years with only a smartphone and a computer. Investigators eventually identified 23 victims and suspected there were even more. These teenagers barely discussed their stalking while it was happening. Even after Vallee was sentenced, few spoke out. No one held a rally. No one said “never again.” “Virtually all young girls in this circumstance are going to feel a sense of shame about this,” Barbadoro, the judge, said at the sentencing hearing. “They’re afraid of the unknown, and their tendency is to repress it, deny it, not—not confront it.” Many people from Belmont—including teachers and guidance counselors—didn’t know about the Vallee case until I contacted them. Amanda Titus, a classmate of Vallee’s, told me that she remembered walking a close friend to the Belmont police station during their senior year to report that she’d been threatened online by an apparent stranger and pressed for nude photos. But Titus hadn’t heard about Vallee until we spoke this year. “I don’t know exactly what happened afterward,” Titus said of her friend. “She didn’t say. Teenage girls are very private.” Vallee, who is in federal prison in Massachusetts, did not respond to several letters I sent him. His case is on appeal. I tried his mother many times before she responded by text: “Why didn’t the Belmont police let me know this was happening when he was 16? Instead they let it go to build the case.” When May and I were trying to find a place to meet, I had suggested a diner or a coffee shop around Belmont. May demurred: Not private enough, she said. We ended up meeting in the lobby of the motel where I was staying. Her mother joined us. Now 25, with wide, blue eyes that never rested long on anything, May spoke in a soft voice that got fainter when she described how Vallee’s threats had isolated her. Still, speaking out seemed to give her a new confidence. She considered using her full name in this article. “If I say, ‘Yup, this is who I am. This is what happened to me, and this is me now,’ then it’s empowering,” she said. In the end, she decided to use her middle name; the last thing she wants is an easy way to be identified that might lead to more online harassment. “Any type of security thing can happen,” she said. “They can hack anything.” Her shoulders slouched, and she directed her voice to the table where we were sitting. “I just never envisioned that, and it’s just … We shouldn’t have to live in a world where we don’t know if people are real or not.” She folded her arms around herself and bit her lip to stop herself from crying. The opening image is of a model and does not depict an actual person discussed in the story. Let us know what you think about this article. Submit a letter to the editor at mail@wired.com. Comments You Might Also Like In your inbox: Upgrade your life with WIRED-tested gear A wave of unexplained bot traffic is sweeping the web Big Story: The women training for pregnancy like it’s a marathon Iran’s digital surveillance machine is almost complete Listen: Silicon Valley tech workers are trying to stop ICE © 2026 Condé Nast. All rights reserved. WIRED may earn a portion of sales from products that are purchased through our site as part of our Affiliate Partnerships with retailers. The material on this site may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used, except with the prior written permission of Condé Nast. Ad Choices |
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[SOURCE: https://www.mako.co.il/entertainment-celebs/Article-d82b2a94de67c91026.htm] | [TOKENS: 1162] |
המגישה דניאל רוט-אבנרי נפצעה ונזקקה לטיפול רפואימגישת החדשות החליקה היום במדרגות האולפנים במהלך יום שידורים. ב-I24 News מסרו: "תודה על ההתעניינות, היא מרגישה טוב" | פרסום ראשוןלילך מרקוביץ'makoפורסם: 19.02.26, 19:23צילום: יח"צ, יח"צהקישור הועתקמגישת החדשות של ערוץ i24NEWS, דניאל רוט-אבנרי, נפצעה היום (חמישי) במהלך יום עבודתה.ל-mako סלבס נודע כי המגישה, שהגיעה למערכת כחלק מסדר יומה השגרתי, החליקה במדרגות ונחבלה. בעקבות הנפילה היא נזקקה לטיפול רפואי.רוט-אבנרי הגישה את "תוכנית הלילה" ואת המהדורה המוקדמת בערב שישי בערוץ החדשות והייתה בעברה פאנליסטית קבועה ב"אולפן שישי".מ-i24NEWS נמסר בתגובה: "תודה על ההתעניינות, דניאל מרגישה טוב".מצאתם טעות לשון? המגישה דניאל רוט-אבנרי נפצעה ונזקקה לטיפול רפואי מגישת החדשות החליקה היום במדרגות האולפנים במהלך יום שידורים. ב-I24 News מסרו: "תודה על ההתעניינות, היא מרגישה טוב" | פרסום ראשון מגישת החדשות של ערוץ i24NEWS, דניאל רוט-אבנרי, נפצעה היום (חמישי) במהלך יום עבודתה. ל-mako סלבס נודע כי המגישה, שהגיעה למערכת כחלק מסדר יומה השגרתי, החליקה במדרגות ונחבלה. בעקבות הנפילה היא נזקקה לטיפול רפואי. רוט-אבנרי הגישה את "תוכנית הלילה" ואת המהדורה המוקדמת בערב שישי בערוץ החדשות והייתה בעברה פאנליסטית קבועה ב"אולפן שישי". מ-i24NEWS נמסר בתגובה: "תודה על ההתעניינות, דניאל מרגישה טוב". |
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[SOURCE: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_New_York_Times_Building] | [TOKENS: 9833] |
Contents The New York Times Building The New York Times Building is a 52-story skyscraper at 620 Eighth Avenue, between 40th and 41st Streets near Times Square, on the west side of Midtown Manhattan in New York City, New York, U.S. Its chief tenant is the New York Times Company, publisher of The New York Times. The building is 1,046 ft (318.8 m) tall to its pinnacle, with a roof height of 748 ft (228 m). Designed by Renzo Piano and Fox & Fowle, the building was developed by the New York Times Company, Forest City Ratner, and ING Real Estate. The interiors are divided into separate ownership units, with the New York Times Company operating the lower office floors and Brookfield Properties operating the upper floors. As of 2025[update], the New York Times Building is tied with the Chrysler Building as the thirteenth-tallest building in the city. The building is cruciform in plan and has a steel-framed superstructure with a braced mechanical core. It consists of the office tower on the west side of the land lot as well as four-story podium on the east side. Its facade is largely composed of a glass curtain wall, in front of which are ceramic rods that deflect heat and glare. The steel framing and bracing is exposed at the four corner "notches" of the building. The New York Times Building is designed as a green building. The lower stories have a lobby, retail space, and the Times newsroom surrounding an enclosed garden. The other stories are used as office space. During the 1980s and 1990s, the city and state governments of New York proposed a merchandise mart for the site as part of a wide-ranging redevelopment of Times Square. In 1999, the New York Times Company offered to develop its new headquarters on the mart's site. Piano and Fox & Fowle were selected following an architectural design competition, and the land was acquired in 2003 following disputes with existing landowners. The building was completed in 2007 for over $1 billion. The Times Company's space was operated by W. P. Carey from 2009 to 2019; meanwhile, Forest City bought out ING's interest and was then acquired by Brookfield Properties in 2018. Site The New York Times Building is at 620 Eighth Avenue, occupying the eastern side of the avenue between 40th Street and 41st Street, one block west of Times Square in the Midtown Manhattan neighborhood of New York City, New York, U.S. The land lot is rectangular and covers 79,000 ft2 (7,300 m2). It has a frontage of 197.5 ft (60.2 m) on Eighth Avenue to the west and 400 feet (120 m) on both 40th Street to the south and 41st Street to the north. The site takes up the western portion of its city block, which is bounded by Seventh Avenue to the east. The topography of the site generally slopes down from east to west. The New York Times Building is near Eleven Times Square and the Empire Theatre to the north, the City University of New York's Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism to the east, and the Port Authority Bus Terminal to the west. The site is directly bounded on two sides by New York City Subway tunnels. An entrance to the New York City Subway's 42nd Street–Port Authority Bus Terminal station, served by the 1, 2, 3, 7, <7>, A, C, E, N, Q, R, W, and S trains, is next to the building's base. Prior to the building's construction, the site was occupied by a mixture of buildings. The site had been proposed for redevelopment since 1981 as the southern half of an unbuilt merchandise mart (see The New York Times Building § Site redevelopment). At Eighth Avenue and 40th Street was a six-story building erected in 1963, which housed the Taylor Business Institute and the SAE Institute. The address 260 West 41st Street contained Sussex House, an eight-story, 140-room dormitory, as well as a mural advertising garment store Seely Shoulder Shapes. Behind it was a 16-story office building at 265 West 40th Street. Sex shops, prostitution, and loitering were prevalent on the 41st Street side of the site. Five sex shops had been relocated from the site before the building's development, out of 55 businesses total. Architecture The New York Times Building was designed by Renzo Piano and Fox & Fowle and was developed by the New York Times Company, Forest City Ratner, and ING Real Estate. It was Piano's first design in New York City. Gensler designed the interior under the supervision of Margo Grant Walsh. AMEC was the main contractor for the core and shell, while Turner Construction was the contractor for the Times space in the lower section of the building. Other companies involved with the project included structural engineer Thornton Tomasetti, wind consultant RWDI, sealant supplier Dow Corning Corporation, and steel supplier ArcelorMittal. The mechanical, electrical, and plumbing system was designed by Flack + Kurtz. Officially, the New York City Economic Development Corporation owns the site. The Times Building is 52 stories tall with one basement, covering a gross floor area of 1,545,708 square feet (143,601.0 m2). It has two major condominiums of office space: a lower section operated by the New York Times Company and an upper section operated by Brookfield Properties, which took over Forest City Ratner's stake in 2019. The Times space on the 2nd to 27th stories covers 800,000 square feet (74,000 m2), about 58 percent of the office space, while the 29th to 52nd stories spans 600,000 square feet (56,000 m2), covering the remaining 42 percent. The lobby and the mechanical spaces on the 28th and 51st stories are shared by the building's major operators. The top floor is 721 feet (220 m) high. The Times Building rises 748 feet (228 m) from the street to its roof, while the exterior curtain wall rises to 840 feet (256 m) and its mast rises to 1,046 feet (318.8 m). As of 2018[update], including its mast, the New York Times Building is the twelfth-tallest building in the city, tied with the Chrysler Building. The Times Building was designed as a green building. During the building's construction, the architects created a 4,500-square-foot (420 m2) mockup of a portion of the building to test out its environmental features. A yearlong study by the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab and Center for the Built Environment found the Times Building had significant reductions in annual electricity use, utilized less than half the heating energy, and decreased the peak electric demand compared to similarly sized office buildings. The developers did not wish to achieve Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) certification, since that would have required extra expenditures, such as keeping track of construction debris. The Times Building consists of two sections: the 52-story tower on the western portion of the site and a four-story podium occupying the eastern portion. The tower section covers about 24,500 square feet (2,280 m2), with dimensions of 196 by 157 feet (60 by 48 m). The corners of the tower are notched, creating a cruciform layout. The outer columns on the west and east elevations are recessed several feet into the building. The center bays of the north and south elevations are cantilevered slightly past the outermost columns to the north and south. The podium measures 197 by 240 feet (60 by 73 m). The building contains a single basement level underneath the entire site, extending 15 feet (4.6 m) below grade. There are three office entrances, one each on Eighth Avenue, 40th Street, and 41st Street. The facade consists of a glass curtain wall, with ceramic rods mounted on aluminum frames in front of the curtain wall. The facade was made by Benson Global, while the rods were subcontracted to a German sewer-pipe manufacturer. In designing the building, Piano said he was influenced by the massing of the Seagram Building, also in Midtown. There are about 186,000 ceramic rods on the building's facade. The rods, measuring 1+5⁄8 inches (41 mm) in diameter, are mounted about 2 feet (0.61 m) in front of the curtain wall and are carried on aluminum "combs". The rods are made of aluminum silicate, a ceramic chosen for its durability and cost-effectiveness. The rods are intended to deflect heat and glare even if the glass panes were not tinted, and they can change color with the sun and weather. The rod spacing increases from the base to the top, adding transparency for the top 300 feet (91 m) of the usable space. At each story, the rods contain a slight gap at eye level. The rods extend about 73 feet (22 m) above the primary roof. On the north and south elevations, the screens extend slightly past the notched corners. The ceramic rods also rise to 840 feet (260 m), above the main roof. On the Eighth Avenue elevation is a sign with the logo of The New York Times, designed by Michael Bierut of Pentagram. Measuring 110 feet (34 m) long, the logo consists of the Times's name in the Fraktur font at a 10,116-point size. The logo itself is made of 959 custom aluminum sleeves measuring about 3 inches (76 mm) in diameter; these are wrapped around the ceramic rods. Metal halide lamps are also mounted on the facade in front of the rods. They are painted yellow to resemble the taxis of New York City. The ceramic rods have attracted climbers, in part because the rods were originally spaced closely together. Shortly after completion, in mid-2008, three men illegally and independently climbed the ceramic rods on the facade. On June 5, 2008, professional climber Alain Robert climbed the north elevation to protest global warming; a second climber (Rey Clarke) scaled the west elevation later that day. The third climber, a Connecticut man, scaled the building on July 9 to protest the terrorist group Al-Qaeda. As a result of these incidents, some of the ceramic rods were removed, particularly on the north and south elevations, and glass panels were installed to deter climbing. People still climbed the building in later years, including in 2012 and in 2020. The glass curtain wall is composed of double-glazed low emissivity panels that extend from the floor to the ceiling of each story. The panels generally measure 5 feet (1.5 m) wide and 13.5 feet (4.1 m) tall. The use of floor-to-ceiling glass was meant to signify the transparency of the media. It also maximizes natural light and the physical transparency of the facade. The window panes are generally protected by the ceramic rods. Since the rods contain a small gap at each story, the glass panels contain a small ceramic frit near these gaps. At ground level, there are glass storefronts, which allows pedestrians outside to see into the lobby. The notched corners contain exposed steel and lack screens, a design feature that represents the ideal of journalistic transparency. Instead, the corners contain one- and two-story-high rods, which serve as bracing and are designed in a pattern resembling the letter "X" (see The New York Times Building § Superstructure). Underneath the site is durable Hartland bedrock. Before the tower was constructed, the contractors made three sets of borings to extract samples of the composition of the ground. Directly underneath the tower portion of the site, the samples generally contained poor-quality weathered and decomposed rock at a depth of up to 70 feet (21 m). The borings on other parts of the site and underneath the surrounding sidewalk generally contained competent rock at a shallow depth, which increased in quality at greater depths. Furthermore, the northern lot line is adjacent to the IRT Flushing Line subway tunnel (used by the 7 and <7> trains) below 41st Street, as well as a pedestrian passageway at a shallower level. The western lot line is adjacent to the IND Eighth Avenue Line subway tunnel (used by the A, C, and E trains) under Eighth Avenue. The foundation had to be capable of supporting 6,000 to 22,500 kilopascals (870 to 3,260 psi) of pressure. Most of the foundation is on intermediate- or high-quality rock and uses spread footings capable of 20 to 40 short tons per square foot (195 to 391 t/m2). Caissons with rock sockets are installed under the southeast corner of the tower section, where the weakest rock exists. There are forty-two caissons with a diameter of 22 inches (560 mm), which extend between 31 and 89 feet (9.4 and 27.1 m) deep. They are reinforced with steel bars and could hold 850 to 1,250 short tons (760 to 1,120 long tons; 770 to 1,130 t) of vertical pressure. They are filled with concrete with a compressive strength of 6,000 pounds per square inch (41,000 kPa). The building contains a superstructure with 23,500 short tons (21,000 long tons; 21,300 t) of steel. More than 95 percent of the beams are made of recycled steel. Steel was chosen over concrete because it allows flexible office spaces. The superstructure contains box columns measuring 30 by 30 inches (760 by 760 mm) in diameter. The flanges range from 4 inches (100 mm) thick at the base to 2 inches (51 mm) thick at the top stories, giving a lighter appearance. The beams are covered with intumescent coatings for fireproofing. The floor slabs are a composite consisting of 2.5 inches (64 mm) of concrete on a 3-inch (76 mm) metal deck. They are designed to carry live loads of 50 pounds per square foot (2.4 kPa), as well as partitions weighing up to 20 pounds per square foot (0.96 kPa). The Times's stories contain a raised floor structural system, with the finished office floors being above the floor slabs. Conversely, on the upper stories, the finished office floors are the slabs themselves. The superstructure of the tower is braced to the mechanical core, which measures 90 by 65 feet (27 by 20 m). This allows the perimeter of the tower stories to be no more than 42 feet (13 m) from the core. The lower section of the tower, containing the Times's offices, contains two sets of bracing frames that surround the core from north to south. The top 21 stories contain a single bracing line extends from north to south. There are outriggers at the mechanical floors on the 28th and 51st stories. X-shaped braces are used at the tower's corners because the elevator core limits the extent to which west-east bracing lines could be used. The "X"-braces were pre-tensioned during construction to compensate for the shortening of columns. The braces are built in pairs, rather than as single rods, which would have required larger diameters. On the north and south elevations, the center bays are cantilevered about 20 feet (6.1 m) past the perimeter columns. The floor girders of the cantilevered sections are arranged into three framing lines: two at the outer ends of the cantilevers and one at the center. The central girder on each floor is supported by a Vierendeel truss. The outer girders are connected to the perimeter columns by diagonal beams and to each other by columns. Because the Times's stories have raised floors, the girders on these stories protrude through the facade in an offset "dogleg". The 51st-story mechanical space contains elevator rooms, air-conditioning, lighting, and telecommunications equipment, as well as a control area for the building's mechanical services. The main roof above the 52nd story consists of an asphalt covering, above which are concrete pavers on stone ballast. The steel mast atop the building is about 300 feet (91 m) tall and is made of carbon fiber, allowing it to bend during heavy winds without snapping. It extends from a circular baseplate on the 51st story, where it measures 8 feet (2.4 m) wide, and tapers to a width of 8 inches (200 mm) at its pinnacle. The mast is also supported from the roof of the 52nd story. To support the mast, trusses were designed within the floor slabs on the 51st and 52nd stories, and vertical trusses were used to shift the weight of the mast to the columns below. The New York Times Building has a cogeneration plant, which can provide 40 percent of the building's energy requirements. It is variously cited as being capable of 1.4 megawatts (1,900 hp) or 1.5 megawatts (2,000 hp). The plant is in a mechanical room on the top floor of the podium, at the far eastern end. The cogeneration plant is powered by two natural gas-fired engines. The New York Times Building is also connected to the main New York City power grid, which serves as a backup power source. Because of a disagreement with Consolidated Edison (Con Ed), the cogeneration plant is not connected to the grid. The plant runs at 85 or 89 percent efficiency. Heat is generated as a byproduct of the cogeneration plant's operation and is used to provide hot water. The recovered hot water is used in the building's perimeter heating system during the winter, while it is fed into the building's chillers during the summer. The New York Times Building contains a single-stage absorption chiller that is capable of 250 metric tons (280 short tons; 250 long tons). The building also has five electric centrifugal chillers of 1,150 metric tons (1,270 short tons; 1,130 long tons) each, which serve the building's central chilled-water plant. The air from the chillers is delivered from chillers at 68 °F (20 °C). It travels to an underfloor air distribution system under each of the Times's stories and to the ceilings of the top 21 stories. The steam for heating the building itself is purchased from Con Ed rather than being generated on-site, since the architects determined on-site heat generation to be more expensive. The cellar and the podium's roof contain air handling units with steam coils that take low-pressure steam. There are over 18,000 lighting fixtures in the offices, all of which can be dimmed. The electrical ballast in each fixture contains a computer chip, which adjusts the lighting based on natural light levels and on whether the office is occupied. There are also automatic shades, which change automatically based on the sun's position, sunlight glare, and interior heat gain. The shades can also be manually overridden. The movable shades reduce energy consumption by about 13 percent and reduce solar heat gain by 30 percent in the Times portion of the building. The upper stories have two data closets and two electric closets each. In addition, the building has emergency generators throughout. There are 32 elevators total: 24 for passengers and eight for freight. The elevators can run as quickly as 1,600 feet per minute (490 m/min). The building's mechanical core contains four banks of elevators with seven shafts each. The lower stories are served by three elevators from each bank, while the upper stories are served by four elevators from each bank. The elevators contain a destination dispatch system, wherein passengers request their desired floor before entering the cab. Stairways on the tower's western and eastern sides also connect each of the tower stories. When the New York Times Building was built, the ground floor was designed with a lobby, stores, auditorium, and central garden. Two restaurant spaces were also placed on Eighth Avenue. The retail space covers 21,000 square feet (2,000 m2) or 22,000 square feet (2,000 m2) of retail and was originally operated by Forest City Ratner. Under the building's lease agreement, space could not be leased to any fast-food or discount stores; educational centers; or any firm that could attract visitors "without appointment", including medical offices, employment agencies, welfare agencies, or court uses. Furthermore, the United Nations and most governmental agencies of any kind were banned if they could attract visitors "without appointment".[a] From 2007 to 2024, the ground-floor lobby had an art installation called Moveable Type, created by artist Ben Rubin and statistics professor Mark Hansen. The work consists of 280 small electronic screens arranged on either of the lobby's two walls, or 560 total. The screens on each wall are arranged in a grid measuring 53 by 5 feet (16.2 by 1.5 m), with forty columns and seven rows. They display fragments from both the Times's archives and current news stories. The lobby is supported by exposed intumescent beams and contains oak floors and full-height glass windows. Also inside the podium is The Times Center, which includes a 378-seat auditorium for events. The Times Center also includes a 5,000-square-foot (460 m2) meeting space. The Times Center and lobby overlook a garden at the center of the podium, which is visible from the lobby but closed to the public. The garden is surrounded by a glass wall measuring 70 feet (21 m) high and 70 feet across on three sides. It contains seven paper birch trees measuring 50 feet (15 m) tall.[b] The garden originally had a moss glen, but this was replaced in 2010 with ferns and grasses. The birch trees are placed on the northwestern side of the garden, while the mosses were placed on hills in the rest of the space. A walkway made of Ipe wood runs around the garden, and doors lead to the garden from the north and south sides. The walls of the atrium are transparent, resulting in numerous incidents where birds flew into the walls. The Times owned the 2nd to 27th stories but leased out the top six stories of that space before the building's opening. Within the Times section of the building, the structural floor slabs are 16 inches (410 mm) below the finished office floors. The girders at the building's core, as well as utilities and mechanical systems, are placed beneath the raised floors. Air is delivered from under the raised floors. Air enters most of the office spaces through diffusers near each workstation, and perforated floor tiles are used in the Times' conference rooms. The Times offices can also use outdoor air for ventilation, and the air is generally ventilated through the ceiling. The perimeter of each Times story has a ceiling 10.5 feet (3.2 m) high, but most of the office space has a ceiling 9 feet 7 inches (2.92 m) high. The ceiling is divided into a grid of tiles measuring 5 by 5 feet (1.5 by 1.5 m), aligned with the vertical mullions of the facade. The Times generally arranges its offices in an open plan. The 2nd through 4th stories contain the Times newsroom, which extends into the podium and overlooks the garden. The podium also accommodated the Times' web-based staff. Stairs with red banisters connect the newsroom's stories, while a skylight illuminates the workspaces. Throughout the building, the Times offices mainly contain cherry wood furniture. The desks of the Times offices had gypsum-board accents, which themselves are colored in a scarlet red tone, nicknamed "Renzo Red". Copy writers' desks are smaller and have laminate desks without partitions. Two red staircases, one on each side of the building, connect the Times offices. There is also a double-height cafeteria in the Times' section of the building. To encourage interactions between staffers, the offices were generally not assigned to specific workers, and various furniture was scattered throughout; even the staircases are designed as wide-open spaces. The Times space is decorated with about 560 black-and-white prints from the paper's archive. The conference rooms are named after notable figures, supplemented by images from the Times archive. There are about 750 distinct photographs, which illustrate not only the conference rooms but also spaces such as mechanical rooms, electrical closets, and restrooms. The elevator lobbies on each story have different pieces of contemporary furniture, as well as a set of ten video screens that display images from that day's newspaper. Lessees within the upper portion of the Times space, such as law firms Goodwin Procter and Seyfarth Shaw, decorated their offices with more ornate finishes to attract clients. The top 21 stories were designed to be leased to tenants. The rental office floors generally use chilled-water air handlers and receive both cooling and ventilation from the ceiling. On the 29th through 50th stories, the core girders are not depressed below the floor slab, but they can support a raised floor of up to 6 inches (150 mm). The minimum height of the office space is 9 feet 7 inches (2.92 m), though some parts of the ceiling can be up to 10 feet (3.0 m) high. The upper floors were generally marketed to law firms. The spaces were, for the most part, also designed by Gensler. Since law firms generally did not require the open-plan layouts that the Times used, Gensler modified the upper stories' floor-plate dimensions to accommodate more attorneys in the same space. According to the firm's managing principal Robin Klehr Avia, this was done "so you don't have a lot of support areas without enough windows". Some tenants did not use the 5-foot-wide modules that the Times used. Gensler designed several tenants' offices with furniture and color schemes similar to those in the Times offices. History The New York Times, founded in 1851, was first housed in 113 Nassau Street in Lower Manhattan. It moved to 138 Nassau Street, the site of what is now the Potter Building, in 1854. The Times moved to a neighboring five-story edifice at 41 Park Row in 1858. Partially prompted by the development of the neighboring New York Tribune Building, the Times replaced its building in 1889 with a new 13-story building at the same site, one that remains in use by Pace University with some modifications. In 1905, the paper moved to One Times Square at 42nd Street and Broadway. The area surrounding the new headquarters was renamed from Longacre Square to Times Square. The Times outgrew the slender Times Tower within a decade and, in 1913, moved into the Times Annex at 229 West 43rd Street. By 1999, the Times operated at six locations in Manhattan and had a printing plant in Queens. The Urban Development Corporation (UDC), an agency of the New York state government, had proposed redeveloping the area around a portion of West 42nd Street in 1981. Among the UDC's plans was a garment merchandise mart on Eighth Avenue between 40th and 42nd Streets, opposite Port Authority Bus Terminal. The project was to be completed by the Times Square Redevelopment Corporation, comprising members of the New York state and city governments. David Morse and Richard Reinis were selected in April 1982 to develop the mart, but they were removed from the project that November due to funding issues. Subsequently, the state and city disputed over the replacement development team, leading the city to withdraw from the partnership in August 1983. The state and city reached a compromise on the development team that October, wherein the mart would be developed by Tishman Speyer, operated by Trammell Crow, and funded by Equitable Life Assurance. Kohn Pedersen Fox designed a 20-story structure with 2.4 million square feet (220,000 m2) for apparel and computer showrooms. The building would have a limestone and granite facade, a wide arch with a clock spanning 41st Street, arched entrances on Eighth Avenue, and a set of pavilions with ten pyramids on the roof. The proposal was complicated by the fact that developer Paul Milstein wanted to build a 36-story hotel and office building on the northern half of the site, north of what is now the Times building. Kennedy Enterprises was selected to operate a smaller mart in 1987. Chemical Bank had considered occupying office space at the mart before withdrawing in 1989. The mart plan was never completed because of a weakened market. By mid-1999, state and city officials were planning a request for proposals for the southern half of the merchandise mart site. The Times's parent company, the New York Times Company, proposed a 1.3-million-square-foot (120,000 m2) headquarters tower, citing its need to enlarge its operations. If this was not possible, the company would keep its headquarters at 43rd Street but move some jobs to New Jersey. In October 1999, the Times reported that its parent company was negotiating for the site. Though the site was highly visible due to the low stature of the Port Authority Bus Terminal to the west, it was also at the extreme corner of both the traditional Times Square area to the north and the Garment District to the south. Nevertheless, as architect Robert A. M. Stern wrote, the New York Times Company likely perceived the site's fringe location as a beneficial attribute. The new site was not commonly considered to be part of Times Square, leading Paul Goldberger of The New Yorker to say that the plan "has implications that go beyond the sentimental". The Times selected Forest City Ratner Companies as the developer for its Eighth Avenue tower in February 2000. The following month, the Times began negotiating with the city and state. The Times wanted to pay $75 million and a two-thirds deduction in real estate taxes, but the state wanted $125 million for the site and the city wanted the Times to pay full taxes. Some commentators wrote about how the Times had opposed corporate tax relief despite seeking such relief for itself. The parties signed a nonbinding agreement in June 2000, wherein the Times agreed to pay $100 million. The Times was to occupy half of the planned tower, a single unit covering the second through 28th floors. The remainder of the space would be operated by Forest City and leased to office tenants. At the time, other media headquarters were being developed nearby, such as the Hearst Tower on 57th Street and the Condé Nast Building at 4 Times Square. Robert A. M. Stern, his colleague Paul Whalen, and Naresh Kapadia of the 42nd Street Development Project created a set of design guidelines in advance of an architectural design competition for the building. They also created a model conforming to ideals set by the chairman of the New York City Planning Commission. The design guidelines were printed in a 48-page program with a statement by Times architecture critic Herbert Muschamp. Times Company vice chairman Michael Golden said of the design: "We need to contribute to the skyline of New York. We don't want to have people say, 'Gee, The New York Times built a four-story brick warehouse in Manhattan.'" In September 2000, four architects submitted bids for the new tower's design: Renzo Piano, Norman Foster, César Pelli, and the partnership of Frank Gehry and David Childs. Piano called for a rectangular tower rising from a large podium; Foster proposed a right triangle tapering toward the top; Pelli outlined a glass tower with several chamfers; and the Gehry/Childs partnership planned a structure with billowing sheets of glass on the facade. The Gehry/Childs partnership was widely speculated in the media to be the front-runner, but Gehry was worried that the integrity of his design would be compromised in later revisions. As a result, he and Childs withdrew their plan from consideration. Ultimately, the Times selected Piano's proposal in October 2000, and it selected Gensler as the interior architect in February 2001. Piano's plan called for a 776-foot (237 m) structure with a ceramic screen rising to 840 feet (260 m) and a mast rising to 1,142 feet (348 m). Fox & Fowle was selected as Piano's co-architect, focusing on smaller design details and costs. The Empire State Development Corporation (ESDC) had, since the late 1990s, tried to condemn ten lots on the site through eminent domain, but some existing landlords had sued to stop the condemnation. A state court rejected the landlords' claim and, in February 2001, the New York Court of Appeals denied an appeal. The Times and Forest City Ratner negotiated terms of the project, in which the Times would receive $26.1 million in tax breaks. The company would lease the site from the state for $85.6 million over 99 years, considerably below market value. Its payment in lieu of taxes was equivalent to the site's full property tax assessments. In September 2001, the ESDC scheduled a public hearing for the project. Following the September 11 attacks, which occurred in the meantime, the Times reaffirmed its commitment to a new headquarters. At the hearing, many large landlords expressed their support for the new Times headquarters, citing the loss of office space that had been caused by the collapse of the World Trade Center during the attacks. The existing property owners opposed the condemnation, saying that the block was no longer legally a blighted area. That December, the ESDC was authorized to condemn the properties on the site. If the acquisition cost exceeded $85.6 million, the additional cost would be covered by taxpayer funds. By law, the ESDC first had to offer to buy the land from the owners, using the condemnation process only as a last resort. The Times publicly announced plans for the building on December 13, 2001. Piano had originally intended to include an open piazza at the base, but the revised plans called for a tower rising directly from Eighth Avenue, with the Times newsroom surrounding a garden. The main roof would have its own garden and antenna mast. The tower retained its planned glass curtain wall, but the structural system was strengthened. Paul Goldberger wrote that the building, the largest New York City development proposed since the September 11 attacks, "would have drawn plenty of attention even if it had been just another corporate box". Gary Barnett of Intell Development, one of the landowners on the site, filed a lawsuit that December, alleging that the Times had engaged in "fraud, bad faith, and collusion against the taxpayers of the city" by taking tax breaks. Barnett was joined by five other owners who wanted to build their own structure on the land. During the lawsuit, The Village Voice reported that taxpayer funds would need to cover an additional $79 million of the Times site's cost. A New York state judge ruled against Barnett and his co-plaintiffs in August 2002. Over the following year, the state evicted some 55 businesses on the site. The Times itself reported that the state had only provided modest compensation to displaced property owners. The Supreme Court of the United States declined to hear a challenge brought by the landowners in February 2003. That September, the state had assembled the site and the developers started razing existing buildings. Forest City and ING Real Estate held a 42 percent leasehold stake while the New York Times Company owned the remaining 58 percent. In mid-2003, Forest City announced it would request $400 million in tax-free Liberty bonds, allocated for September 11 recovery efforts, to finance the building's construction. Forest City claimed it could not finance its portion of the tower. This request, along with a similar one for the Bank of America Tower three blocks northeast, received public criticism. By October 2003, the construction of the headquarters had been delayed by a year. Forest City had not been able to secure an anchor tenant for its portion of the building, and the Liberty-bond negotiations between Forest City and the state and city governments had stalled. By that time, Forest City had reduced its request to $150 million. ESDC head Charles A. Gargano reportedly held an unfavorable view of Forest City's application for bonds. If financing could not be obtained before construction started in 2004, the project would have to be canceled. After failing to secure Liberty bonds, the developers applied to GMAC Commercial Mortgage Corporation for financing. GMAC provided $320 million in construction funding for the project in July 2004. Times officials predicted that work would start in the middle of that year. That November, the Times sold its old 229 West 43rd Street building to Tishman Speyer for $175 million, though the paper planned to remain at that building for the time being. This prompted criticism from some of the site's former landowners, and The Village Voice said the proceeds from the sale "wiped out the need for much, if not all, of the taxpayer money the Times asked for". According to the Voice, the Times had predicted that its 43rd Street building would have sold for $45 million in 1999. Work began on the new Times building in late 2004, after financing had been secured. Civetta Cousins Joint Venture was hired as the foundation contractor, and work started in August or September 2004. Forest City's executive vice president MaryAnne Gilmartin said the development would conclude a revitalization of the western extremities of Midtown Manhattan. The first steel was erected starting in April 2005, and the foundation was finished that July. Work was slightly delayed during the middle of that year due to a labor strike among ironworkers. The steelwork had reached a height of 400 feet by October 2005. By then, ten of the eleven former landowners were requesting that the city and state governments give them additional compensation, as they alleged their land had been seized at well below market value. The eleventh landowner had been satisfied with a settlement. A groundbreaking ceremony took place in late 2005. The building still had several hundred thousand square feet of vacant office space, in part due to the higher rent in Midtown compared to Lower Manhattan. Real-estate industry executives also expressed uncertainty that architectural renderings of the ceramic curtain wall, and the site's location near the Port Authority Bus Terminal, would be a drawback for tenants. To advertise the upper stories, Ratner hired photographer Annie Leibovitz to photograph the tower's construction. During construction, in March 2006, a rod fell from the tower and dented the roof of a passing car, slightly injuring its occupants. The steel superstructure was topped out during July 2006. The mast was installed later that year. By that October, the facade had been installed to the 42nd floor and interior finishes were being placed on lower stories. The first office tenant at the New York Times Building was law firm Seyfarth Shaw, which leased the 31st to 33rd stories in May 2006. Law firm Covington & Burling then leased the 39th to 43rd stories, while law firm Osler, Hoskin & Harcourt signed for the 36th and 37th stories. Investment firm Legg Mason signed a lease in August 2006 for the 45th to 50th stories, committing to develop the roof garden and a conference center on the 52nd story. Simultaneously, Forest City also announced its intention to buy ING's stake in the ground-story retail and upper-story office space. By late 2006, there was strong demand for office space in the building, particularly among law firms, and the Times had hired CBRE Group to market the 23rd to 27th stories. Goodwin Procter leased the 23rd through 27th, 29th, and 30th stories in March 2007. The 38th floor was taken that April by Korean architecture firm Samoo Architects & Engineers and developer JP Properties, while Judicial Arbitration and Mediation Services took the 34th floor. The first New York Times employees started moving into the building by May 2007. The following month, on June 11, the Times shifted its publishing operations from 43rd Street to its new Eighth Avenue headquarters. Times reporter David W. Dunlap wrote that Piano had described the new building as having "lightness, transparency and immateriality", which intentionally did not fit the traditional image of the "old-fashioned newspaper". The Eighth Avenue building officially opened on November 19, 2007. In total, the structure was projected to cost over $1 billion. In two separate incidents in December 2007 and January 2008, several window panes were cracked by wind gusts. The Japanese company Muji opened a store at the base during May 2008. The four other retail spaces were leased by grocery store Dean & DeLuca, Japanese restaurant Inakaya, Italian restaurant Montenapo by Bice, and a roadside-themed cafe. Also in 2008, the 44th story was occupied by solar energy company First Solar and the Flemish Government. After the tower was scaled several times in mid-2008, workers removed some of the facade's ceramic rods and added glass panels to deter climbing. Piano supported the modifications, but he said that climbing was not even a consideration during the planning process, even though Times executives had focused extensively on reducing the tower's vulnerability to terrorism. By the end of that year, the New York Times Company was facing financial shortfalls and sought to mortgage its building to refinance debt. By January 2009, the Times was negotiating to sell the nineteen stories that it occupied, the 2nd through 21st stories, to W. P. Carey for $225 million. In exchange, the Times would lease back its floors for $24 million a year for 10 years. The leaseback was finalized in March 2009. Part of the 44th story was sublet in 2010 to Kepos Capital, which occupied the space for eight years. By late 2013, the Times wished to lease out the 21st story, the only part of the building that it still owned. Technology company Bounce Exchange leased the 21st story in early 2015 from the Times, which had previously housed its sales and marketing department there. In December 2016, the Times announced it was subletting at least eight floors, totaling 250,000 square feet (23,000 m2), to save the costs of occupying that space. Gensler was hired to reorganize the space, including removing some corner offices that belonged to high-ranking executives such as the CEO and the publisher. Over half of the sublet space, covering 140,000 square feet (13,000 m2), was sublet a little more than a year later to financial firm Liquidnet. During late 2018, British outsourcing firm Williams Lea Tag signed a 10-year lease for 31,058 square feet (2,885.4 m2) of space on the 10th story. Covington & Burling also expanded to the 44th story that year. The Times announced in February 2018 that it would repurchase the building's leasehold from W. P. Carey. Brookfield Properties, which had acquired Forest City Ratner, refinanced the building's first floor and the 28th- through 50th-story condominiums in late 2018 for $635 million. The loan was provided by Deutsche Bank, Bank of America, Barclays Capital, and Citi; it consisted of a $515 million commercial mortgage-backed security and a $120 million junior note. Some $115 million in mezzanine debt was also provided. The Times exercised its option on the leasehold in late 2019 for $245 million. In February 2025, the credit rating of Brookfield's office space was downgraded after several major tenants moved out. Brookfield had taken out mortgage loans totaling $900 million, which needed to be repaid by that December, and there was not enough rental income to pay off the loans. Critical reception When Piano was selected for the Times Building, architectural critic Martin Filler called the selection "very disappointing", saying that "a lot of [Piano's] commercial work is really terrible". Herbert Muschamp, architecture critic for the Times, wrote that Piano was the "world's greatest living practitioner of what I call 'normative' architecture", though he criticized the base as having "too little contrast with the city outside". After the September 11 attacks, Muschamp wrote, "There may be no more constructive way to fill the architectural void [of the World Trade Center] than to revisit the history of progressive architecture in this town", including the planned Times Building and Hearst Tower. Times design writer Steven Heller lamented the move, saying: "The Piano building will be a showpiece, not a home." Architecture magazine wrote in early 2002 that, with its paucity of bright signage that characterized other Times Square buildings, "The architect has chosen to speak to the Times, not to Times Square." Just before the start of construction, Justin Davidson of Newsday wrote that "lightness is both a metaphoric and an architectural goal" in the building's design. In 2006, Paul Goldberger wrote for The New Yorker that the Times Building "comes off as dainty, even flimsy, as if inside this huge tower a little building were struggling to get out", in contrast with Piano's then-recent Morgan Library & Museum expansion. James Gardner of the New York Sun said that he did not believe the Times Building to be "a bad building" but that the ceramic bars "becomes the sort of pure ornamentalism that betrays so much contemporary architecture that overzealously aspires to appear purely functional". When the building was completed, Times architecture critic Nicolai Ouroussoff wrote: "Depending on your point of view, the Times Building can thus be read as a poignant expression of nostalgia or a reassertion of the paper's highest values as it faces an uncertain future. Or, more likely, a bit of both." Suzanne Stephens of Architectural Record wrote that the building "seems strangely bland in New York's architecturally variegated context". The American Institute of Architects' 2007 survey List of America's Favorite Architecture ranked the New York Times Building among the top 150 buildings in the United States. In addition, the building received the American Institute of Architects' 2009 Honor Award. See also References External links |
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[SOURCE: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yehud_(Babylonian_province)] | [TOKENS: 1079] |
Contents Yehud (Babylonian province) Yehud was a province of the Neo-Babylonian Empire established in the former territories of the Kingdom of Judah, which was destroyed by the Babylonians in the aftermath of the Judahite revolts and the siege of Jerusalem in 587/6 BCE. It first existed as a Jewish administrative division under Gedaliah ben Aḥikam. After the collapse of the Neo-Babylonian Empire in 539 BCE, the province was absorbed into the Persian Achaemenid Empire as a self-governing Jewish region called Yehud Medinata. Background In the late 7th century BCE Judah became a vassal kingdom of the Neo-Babylonian Empire; however, there were rival factions at the court in Jerusalem, some supporting loyalty to Babylon, others urging rebellion. In the early years of the 6th century, despite the strong remonstrances of the prophet Jeremiah and others, king Zedekiah revolted against Nebuchadnezzar II and entered into an alliance with pharaoh Hophra of Egypt. The revolt failed, and in 597 BCE many Judahites, including the prophet Ezekiel, were exiled to Babylon. A few years later Judah revolted yet again. In 589 Nebuchadnezzar again besieged Jerusalem, and many Jews fled to Moab, Ammon, Edom and other countries to seek refuge. The city fell after an eighteen-month siege and Nebuchadnezzar again pillaged and destroyed Jerusalem and burned the Temple. Thus, by 586 BCE much of Judah was devastated, the royal family, the priesthood, and the scribes—the country's elite—were in exile in Babylon, and much of the population still in neighbouring countries. The former kingdom suffered a steep decline of both economy and population. Even though Jerusalem and its immediate surroundings were destroyed, along with settlements in the western part of the kingdom, the region of Benjamin, north of Jerusalem, survived the onslaught and became the center of the Babylonian province of Yehud, with Mizpah as its capital. History After the fall of Jerusalem, the former kingdom of Judah became a Babylonian province. According to Miller and Hayes, the province included the towns of Bethel in the north, Mizpah, Jericho in the east, Jerusalem, Beth-Zur in the west and En-Gedi in the south. Jerusalem being in ruins, Mizpah was the administrative center of the province. Gedaliah, a native Judahite but not of the royal Davidic dynasty, was appointed governor (or possibly ruling as a puppet king). On hearing of the appointment, the Jews that had taken refuge in surrounding countries returned to Judah. However, Ishmael ben Nethaniah, a member of the former royal house, assassinated Gedaliah and had the Babylonian garrison killed, triggering - according to a couple of short passages taken at face value by Miller & Hayes and others - a mass movement of refugees to Egypt. A minor fast day, the Fast of Gedaliah, commemorates this event. In Egypt, the refugees settled in Migdol, Tahpanhes, Noph, and Pathros, and Jeremiah went with them as moral guardian. Lipschits refutes this interpretation, pointing out to both the fact that the Septuagint and the Qumran fragment 4QJerb do not contain the words indicating an emptying of the land as found in Jeremiah 43:5, which points to them being a late addition; and to the archaeological testimony for the continued settlement in Benjamin and northern Mount Judah after the destruction of Jerusalem and the First Temple in 586 BCE. Demographics The numbers deported to Babylon or who made their way to Egypt, and the remnant that remained in Yehud province and in surrounding countries, is subject to academic debate. The Book of Jeremiah reports that a total of 4,600 were exiled to Babylon. To these numbers must be added those deported by Nebuchadnezzar in 597 BCE following the first siege to Jerusalem, when he deported the king of Judah, Jeconiah, and his court and other prominent citizens and craftsmen, along with a sizable portion of the Jewish population of Judah, numbering about 10,000. The Book of Kings also suggests that it was eight thousand.[citation needed] Israel Finkelstein, a prominent archaeologist, suggests that the 4,600 represented the heads of households and 8,000 was the total, whilst 10,000 is a rounding upwards of the second number.[citation needed] Jeremiah also hints that an equivalent number may have fled to Egypt. Given these figures, Finkelstein suggests that 3/4 of the population of Judah had remained. In his examination of the archaeological evidence for the demography of Yehud during the 6th century BCE, archaeologist Avraham Faust states that between the deportations and executions caused by the Babylonians, plus the famines and epidemics that occurred during the war, the population of Judah was reduced to barely a 10% of what it had been in the time before the Exile. References |
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[SOURCE: https://www.theverge.com/gadgets/881989/anker-prime-power-bank-20k-200-w-monster-hunter-wilds-deal-sale] | [TOKENS: 2077] |
GadgetsCloseGadgetsPosts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.FollowFollowSee All GadgetsTechCloseTechPosts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.FollowFollowSee All TechVerge ShoppingCloseVerge ShoppingPosts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.FollowFollowSee All Verge ShoppingAnker’s Prime Power Bank can quickly charge three devices, and it’s down to $80Plus, we found deals on Nothing’s CMF Buds 2A and a copy of Monster Hunter Wilds.Plus, we found deals on Nothing’s CMF Buds 2A and a copy of Monster Hunter Wilds.by Sheena VasaniCloseSheena VasaniCommerce WriterPosts from this author will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.FollowFollowSee All by Sheena VasaniFeb 20, 2026, 4:08 PM UTCLinkShareIf you buy something from a Verge link, Vox Media may earn a commission. See our ethics statement.Image: The VergeSheena VasaniCloseSheena VasaniPosts from this author will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.FollowFollowSee All by Sheena Vasani writes about tech news, reviews gadgets, and helps readers save money by highlighting deals and product recommendations for The Verge.Juggling multiple chargers for your gadgets while you’re commuting, working from a cafe, or traveling can get heavy (and pricey!) fast, which is why today’s deal on the Anker Prime Power Bank (20K, 200W) is worth checking out. It can quickly charge three devices at once — including laptops — and it’s down to just $79.99 ($60 off) in black at Woot, which is a new low, through February 27th.Anker Prime Power Bank (20K, 200W)$80$14043% off$80$80 at WootAnker says the 20,000mAh power bank is powerful enough to get an iPhone 16 Pro to 30 percent in just 15 minutes or a 16-inch MacBook Pro to 50 percent in about 40 minutes, making it an easy way to quickly top up your devices while on the go. To deliver those speeds, it offers up to 200W of combined output via two USB-C ports and one USB-A port, so you can charge everything from earbuds to handheld consoles, e-readers, and more. And when the power pack dies, it supports 100W fast recharging via the USB-C port, allowing it to fully recharge in a little over an hour.Additionally, the power bank offers a useful smart display, which lets you check the remaining battery, power input, and power output at a glance, including how many watts each port is drawing. 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A sequel to Monster Hunter World, the game takes place in a new region known as Forbidden Lands and offers even grander monster battles than before. They make the game feel more challenging — and at times exhausting — but the added difficulty makes each victory feel all the more satisfying. Read our review.The 42mm second-generation Garmin Epix Pro Sapphire Edition is on sale starting at $499.99 at Amazon, which is a 50 percent discount. It’s our favorite Garmin for endurance sports, with almost all of the fitness features the brand offers along with topographical maps, turn-by-turn navigation, and advanced training metrics. The OLED smartwatch also features a built-in flashlight that comes with a red light option and even doubles as a strobe in emergencies. Verge DealsSign up for Verge Deals to get deals on products we’ve tested sent to your inbox weekly.Email (required)Sign UpBy submitting your email, you agree to our Terms and Privacy Notice. This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.Follow topics and authors from this story to see more like this in your personalized homepage feed and to receive email updates.Sheena VasaniCloseSheena VasaniCommerce WriterPosts from this author will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.FollowFollowSee All by Sheena VasaniDealsCloseDealsPosts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.FollowFollowSee All DealsGadgetsCloseGadgetsPosts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.FollowFollowSee All GadgetsTechCloseTechPosts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.FollowFollowSee All TechVerge ShoppingCloseVerge ShoppingPosts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.FollowFollowSee All Verge ShoppingMost PopularMost PopularThe RAM shortage is coming for everything you care aboutXbox chief Phil Spencer is leaving MicrosoftRead new Microsoft gaming CEO Asha Sharma’s memo on the future of XboxAmazon blames human employees for an AI coding agent’s mistakeA $10K+ bounty is waiting for anyone who can unplug Ring doorbells from Amazon’s cloudVerge DealsSign up for Verge Deals to get deals on products we’ve tested sent to your inbox weekly.Email (required)Sign UpBy submitting your email, you agree to our Terms and Privacy Notice. This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.Advertiser Content FromThis is the title for the native ad Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. See All Gadgets Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. See All Tech Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. See All Verge Shopping Anker’s Prime Power Bank can quickly charge three devices, and it’s down to $80 Plus, we found deals on Nothing’s CMF Buds 2A and a copy of Monster Hunter Wilds. Plus, we found deals on Nothing’s CMF Buds 2A and a copy of Monster Hunter Wilds. Posts from this author will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. See All by Sheena Vasani If you buy something from a Verge link, Vox Media may earn a commission. See our ethics statement. Posts from this author will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. See All by Sheena Vasani Juggling multiple chargers for your gadgets while you’re commuting, working from a cafe, or traveling can get heavy (and pricey!) fast, which is why today’s deal on the Anker Prime Power Bank (20K, 200W) is worth checking out. It can quickly charge three devices at once — including laptops — and it’s down to just $79.99 ($60 off) in black at Woot, which is a new low, through February 27th. Anker says the 20,000mAh power bank is powerful enough to get an iPhone 16 Pro to 30 percent in just 15 minutes or a 16-inch MacBook Pro to 50 percent in about 40 minutes, making it an easy way to quickly top up your devices while on the go. To deliver those speeds, it offers up to 200W of combined output via two USB-C ports and one USB-A port, so you can charge everything from earbuds to handheld consoles, e-readers, and more. And when the power pack dies, it supports 100W fast recharging via the USB-C port, allowing it to fully recharge in a little over an hour. Additionally, the power bank offers a useful smart display, which lets you check the remaining battery, power input, and power output at a glance, including how many watts each port is drawing. Roughly the size of a deck of cards and weighing about a pound, it’s also easy to slip into a bag and carry on the go. Rounding things out, Anker includes a two-foot USB-C to USB-C cable and a travel pouch, so you have everything you need right out of the box. Verge Deals Sign up for Verge Deals to get deals on products we’ve tested sent to your inbox weekly. Posts from this author will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. See All by Sheena Vasani Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. See All Deals Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. 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[SOURCE: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer#cite_ref-Eniac_63-0] | [TOKENS: 10628] |
Contents Computer A computer is a machine that can be programmed to automatically carry out sequences of arithmetic or logical operations (computation). Modern digital electronic computers can perform generic sets of operations known as programs, which enable computers to perform a wide range of tasks. The term computer system may refer to a nominally complete computer that includes the hardware, operating system, software, and peripheral equipment needed and used for full operation, or to a group of computers that are linked and function together, such as a computer network or computer cluster. A broad range of industrial and consumer products use computers as control systems, including simple special-purpose devices like microwave ovens and remote controls, and factory devices like industrial robots. Computers are at the core of general-purpose devices such as personal computers and mobile devices such as smartphones. Computers power the Internet, which links billions of computers and users. Early computers were meant to be used only for calculations. Simple manual instruments like the abacus have aided people in doing calculations since ancient times. Early in the Industrial Revolution, some mechanical devices were built to automate long, tedious tasks, such as guiding patterns for looms. More sophisticated electrical machines did specialized analog calculations in the early 20th century. The first digital electronic calculating machines were developed during World War II, both electromechanical and using thermionic valves. The first semiconductor transistors in the late 1940s were followed by the silicon-based MOSFET (MOS transistor) and monolithic integrated circuit chip technologies in the late 1950s, leading to the microprocessor and the microcomputer revolution in the 1970s. The speed, power, and versatility of computers have been increasing dramatically ever since then, with transistor counts increasing at a rapid pace (Moore's law noted that counts doubled every two years), leading to the Digital Revolution during the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Conventionally, a modern computer consists of at least one processing element, typically a central processing unit (CPU) in the form of a microprocessor, together with some type of computer memory, typically semiconductor memory chips. The processing element carries out arithmetic and logical operations, and a sequencing and control unit can change the order of operations in response to stored information. Peripheral devices include input devices (keyboards, mice, joysticks, etc.), output devices (monitors, printers, etc.), and input/output devices that perform both functions (e.g. touchscreens). Peripheral devices allow information to be retrieved from an external source, and they enable the results of operations to be saved and retrieved. Etymology It was not until the mid-20th century that the word acquired its modern definition; according to the Oxford English Dictionary, the first known use of the word computer was in a different sense, in a 1613 book called The Yong Mans Gleanings by the English writer Richard Brathwait: "I haue [sic] read the truest computer of Times, and the best Arithmetician that euer [sic] breathed, and he reduceth thy dayes into a short number." This usage of the term referred to a human computer, a person who carried out calculations or computations. The word continued to have the same meaning until the middle of the 20th century. During the latter part of this period, women were often hired as computers because they could be paid less than their male counterparts. By 1943, most human computers were women. The Online Etymology Dictionary gives the first attested use of computer in the 1640s, meaning 'one who calculates'; this is an "agent noun from compute (v.)". The Online Etymology Dictionary states that the use of the term to mean "'calculating machine' (of any type) is from 1897." The Online Etymology Dictionary indicates that the "modern use" of the term, to mean 'programmable digital electronic computer' dates from "1945 under this name; [in a] theoretical [sense] from 1937, as Turing machine". The name has remained, although modern computers are capable of many higher-level functions. History Devices have been used to aid computation for thousands of years, mostly using one-to-one correspondence with fingers. The earliest counting device was most likely a form of tally stick. Later record keeping aids throughout the Fertile Crescent included calculi (clay spheres, cones, etc.) which represented counts of items, likely livestock or grains, sealed in hollow unbaked clay containers.[a] The use of counting rods is one example. The abacus was initially used for arithmetic tasks. The Roman abacus was developed from devices used in Babylonia as early as 2400 BCE. Since then, many other forms of reckoning boards or tables have been invented. In a medieval European counting house, a checkered cloth would be placed on a table, and markers moved around on it according to certain rules, as an aid to calculating sums of money. The Antikythera mechanism is believed to be the earliest known mechanical analog computer, according to Derek J. de Solla Price. It was designed to calculate astronomical positions. It was discovered in 1901 in the Antikythera wreck off the Greek island of Antikythera, between Kythera and Crete, and has been dated to approximately c. 100 BCE. Devices of comparable complexity to the Antikythera mechanism would not reappear until the fourteenth century. Many mechanical aids to calculation and measurement were constructed for astronomical and navigation use. The planisphere was a star chart invented by Abū Rayhān al-Bīrūnī in the early 11th century. The astrolabe was invented in the Hellenistic world in either the 1st or 2nd centuries BCE and is often attributed to Hipparchus. A combination of the planisphere and dioptra, the astrolabe was effectively an analog computer capable of working out several different kinds of problems in spherical astronomy. An astrolabe incorporating a mechanical calendar computer and gear-wheels was invented by Abi Bakr of Isfahan, Persia in 1235. Abū Rayhān al-Bīrūnī invented the first mechanical geared lunisolar calendar astrolabe, an early fixed-wired knowledge processing machine with a gear train and gear-wheels, c. 1000 AD. The sector, a calculating instrument used for solving problems in proportion, trigonometry, multiplication and division, and for various functions, such as squares and cube roots, was developed in the late 16th century and found application in gunnery, surveying and navigation. The planimeter was a manual instrument to calculate the area of a closed figure by tracing over it with a mechanical linkage. The slide rule was invented around 1620–1630, by the English clergyman William Oughtred, shortly after the publication of the concept of the logarithm. It is a hand-operated analog computer for doing multiplication and division. As slide rule development progressed, added scales provided reciprocals, squares and square roots, cubes and cube roots, as well as transcendental functions such as logarithms and exponentials, circular and hyperbolic trigonometry and other functions. Slide rules with special scales are still used for quick performance of routine calculations, such as the E6B circular slide rule used for time and distance calculations on light aircraft. In the 1770s, Pierre Jaquet-Droz, a Swiss watchmaker, built a mechanical doll (automaton) that could write holding a quill pen. By switching the number and order of its internal wheels different letters, and hence different messages, could be produced. In effect, it could be mechanically "programmed" to read instructions. Along with two other complex machines, the doll is at the Musée d'Art et d'Histoire of Neuchâtel, Switzerland, and still operates. In 1831–1835, mathematician and engineer Giovanni Plana devised a Perpetual Calendar machine, which through a system of pulleys and cylinders could predict the perpetual calendar for every year from 0 CE (that is, 1 BCE) to 4000 CE, keeping track of leap years and varying day length. The tide-predicting machine invented by the Scottish scientist Sir William Thomson in 1872 was of great utility to navigation in shallow waters. It used a system of pulleys and wires to automatically calculate predicted tide levels for a set period at a particular location. The differential analyser, a mechanical analog computer designed to solve differential equations by integration, used wheel-and-disc mechanisms to perform the integration. In 1876, Sir William Thomson had already discussed the possible construction of such calculators, but he had been stymied by the limited output torque of the ball-and-disk integrators. In a differential analyzer, the output of one integrator drove the input of the next integrator, or a graphing output. The torque amplifier was the advance that allowed these machines to work. Starting in the 1920s, Vannevar Bush and others developed mechanical differential analyzers. In the 1890s, the Spanish engineer Leonardo Torres Quevedo began to develop a series of advanced analog machines that could solve real and complex roots of polynomials, which were published in 1901 by the Paris Academy of Sciences. Charles Babbage, an English mechanical engineer and polymath, originated the concept of a programmable computer. Considered the "father of the computer", he conceptualized and invented the first mechanical computer in the early 19th century. After working on his difference engine he announced his invention in 1822, in a paper to the Royal Astronomical Society, titled "Note on the application of machinery to the computation of astronomical and mathematical tables". He also designed to aid in navigational calculations, in 1833 he realized that a much more general design, an analytical engine, was possible. The input of programs and data was to be provided to the machine via punched cards, a method being used at the time to direct mechanical looms such as the Jacquard loom. For output, the machine would have a printer, a curve plotter and a bell. The machine would also be able to punch numbers onto cards to be read in later. The engine would incorporate an arithmetic logic unit, control flow in the form of conditional branching and loops, and integrated memory, making it the first design for a general-purpose computer that could be described in modern terms as Turing-complete. The machine was about a century ahead of its time. All the parts for his machine had to be made by hand – this was a major problem for a device with thousands of parts. Eventually, the project was dissolved with the decision of the British Government to cease funding. Babbage's failure to complete the analytical engine can be chiefly attributed to political and financial difficulties as well as his desire to develop an increasingly sophisticated computer and to move ahead faster than anyone else could follow. Nevertheless, his son, Henry Babbage, completed a simplified version of the analytical engine's computing unit (the mill) in 1888. He gave a successful demonstration of its use in computing tables in 1906. In his work Essays on Automatics published in 1914, Leonardo Torres Quevedo wrote a brief history of Babbage's efforts at constructing a mechanical Difference Engine and Analytical Engine. The paper contains a design of a machine capable to calculate formulas like a x ( y − z ) 2 {\displaystyle a^{x}(y-z)^{2}} , for a sequence of sets of values. The whole machine was to be controlled by a read-only program, which was complete with provisions for conditional branching. He also introduced the idea of floating-point arithmetic. In 1920, to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the invention of the arithmometer, Torres presented in Paris the Electromechanical Arithmometer, which allowed a user to input arithmetic problems through a keyboard, and computed and printed the results, demonstrating the feasibility of an electromechanical analytical engine. During the first half of the 20th century, many scientific computing needs were met by increasingly sophisticated analog computers, which used a direct mechanical or electrical model of the problem as a basis for computation. However, these were not programmable and generally lacked the versatility and accuracy of modern digital computers. The first modern analog computer was a tide-predicting machine, invented by Sir William Thomson (later to become Lord Kelvin) in 1872. The differential analyser, a mechanical analog computer designed to solve differential equations by integration using wheel-and-disc mechanisms, was conceptualized in 1876 by James Thomson, the elder brother of the more famous Sir William Thomson. The art of mechanical analog computing reached its zenith with the differential analyzer, completed in 1931 by Vannevar Bush at MIT. By the 1950s, the success of digital electronic computers had spelled the end for most analog computing machines, but analog computers remained in use during the 1950s in some specialized applications such as education (slide rule) and aircraft (control systems).[citation needed] Claude Shannon's 1937 master's thesis laid the foundations of digital computing, with his insight of applying Boolean algebra to the analysis and synthesis of switching circuits being the basic concept which underlies all electronic digital computers. By 1938, the United States Navy had developed the Torpedo Data Computer, an electromechanical analog computer for submarines that used trigonometry to solve the problem of firing a torpedo at a moving target. During World War II, similar devices were developed in other countries. Early digital computers were electromechanical; electric switches drove mechanical relays to perform the calculation. These devices had a low operating speed and were eventually superseded by much faster all-electric computers, originally using vacuum tubes. The Z2, created by German engineer Konrad Zuse in 1939 in Berlin, was one of the earliest examples of an electromechanical relay computer. In 1941, Zuse followed his earlier machine up with the Z3, the world's first working electromechanical programmable, fully automatic digital computer. The Z3 was built with 2000 relays, implementing a 22-bit word length that operated at a clock frequency of about 5–10 Hz. Program code was supplied on punched film while data could be stored in 64 words of memory or supplied from the keyboard. It was quite similar to modern machines in some respects, pioneering numerous advances such as floating-point numbers. Rather than the harder-to-implement decimal system (used in Charles Babbage's earlier design), using a binary system meant that Zuse's machines were easier to build and potentially more reliable, given the technologies available at that time. The Z3 was not itself a universal computer but could be extended to be Turing complete. Zuse's next computer, the Z4, became the world's first commercial computer; after initial delay due to the Second World War, it was completed in 1950 and delivered to the ETH Zurich. The computer was manufactured by Zuse's own company, Zuse KG, which was founded in 1941 as the first company with the sole purpose of developing computers in Berlin. The Z4 served as the inspiration for the construction of the ERMETH, the first Swiss computer and one of the first in Europe. Purely electronic circuit elements soon replaced their mechanical and electromechanical equivalents, at the same time that digital calculation replaced analog. The engineer Tommy Flowers, working at the Post Office Research Station in London in the 1930s, began to explore the possible use of electronics for the telephone exchange. Experimental equipment that he built in 1934 went into operation five years later, converting a portion of the telephone exchange network into an electronic data processing system, using thousands of vacuum tubes. In the US, John Vincent Atanasoff and Clifford E. Berry of Iowa State University developed and tested the Atanasoff–Berry Computer (ABC) in 1942, the first "automatic electronic digital computer". This design was also all-electronic and used about 300 vacuum tubes, with capacitors fixed in a mechanically rotating drum for memory. During World War II, the British code-breakers at Bletchley Park achieved a number of successes at breaking encrypted German military communications. The German encryption machine, Enigma, was first attacked with the help of the electro-mechanical bombes which were often run by women. To crack the more sophisticated German Lorenz SZ 40/42 machine, used for high-level Army communications, Max Newman and his colleagues commissioned Flowers to build the Colossus. He spent eleven months from early February 1943 designing and building the first Colossus. After a functional test in December 1943, Colossus was shipped to Bletchley Park, where it was delivered on 18 January 1944 and attacked its first message on 5 February. Colossus was the world's first electronic digital programmable computer. It used a large number of valves (vacuum tubes). It had paper-tape input and was capable of being configured to perform a variety of boolean logical operations on its data, but it was not Turing-complete. Nine Mk II Colossi were built (The Mk I was converted to a Mk II making ten machines in total). Colossus Mark I contained 1,500 thermionic valves (tubes), but Mark II with 2,400 valves, was both five times faster and simpler to operate than Mark I, greatly speeding the decoding process. The ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer) was the first electronic programmable computer built in the U.S. Although the ENIAC was similar to the Colossus, it was much faster, more flexible, and it was Turing-complete. Like the Colossus, a "program" on the ENIAC was defined by the states of its patch cables and switches, a far cry from the stored program electronic machines that came later. Once a program was written, it had to be mechanically set into the machine with manual resetting of plugs and switches. The programmers of the ENIAC were six women, often known collectively as the "ENIAC girls". It combined the high speed of electronics with the ability to be programmed for many complex problems. It could add or subtract 5000 times a second, a thousand times faster than any other machine. It also had modules to multiply, divide, and square root. High speed memory was limited to 20 words (about 80 bytes). Built under the direction of John Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert at the University of Pennsylvania, ENIAC's development and construction lasted from 1943 to full operation at the end of 1945. The machine was huge, weighing 30 tons, using 200 kilowatts of electric power and contained over 18,000 vacuum tubes, 1,500 relays, and hundreds of thousands of resistors, capacitors, and inductors. The principle of the modern computer was proposed by Alan Turing in his seminal 1936 paper, On Computable Numbers. Turing proposed a simple device that he called "Universal Computing machine" and that is now known as a universal Turing machine. He proved that such a machine is capable of computing anything that is computable by executing instructions (program) stored on tape, allowing the machine to be programmable. The fundamental concept of Turing's design is the stored program, where all the instructions for computing are stored in memory. Von Neumann acknowledged that the central concept of the modern computer was due to this paper. Turing machines are to this day a central object of study in theory of computation. Except for the limitations imposed by their finite memory stores, modern computers are said to be Turing-complete, which is to say, they have algorithm execution capability equivalent to a universal Turing machine. Early computing machines had fixed programs. Changing its function required the re-wiring and re-structuring of the machine. With the proposal of the stored-program computer this changed. A stored-program computer includes by design an instruction set and can store in memory a set of instructions (a program) that details the computation. The theoretical basis for the stored-program computer was laid out by Alan Turing in his 1936 paper. In 1945, Turing joined the National Physical Laboratory and began work on developing an electronic stored-program digital computer. His 1945 report "Proposed Electronic Calculator" was the first specification for such a device. John von Neumann at the University of Pennsylvania also circulated his First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC in 1945. The Manchester Baby was the world's first stored-program computer. It was built at the University of Manchester in England by Frederic C. Williams, Tom Kilburn and Geoff Tootill, and ran its first program on 21 June 1948. It was designed as a testbed for the Williams tube, the first random-access digital storage device. Although the computer was described as "small and primitive" by a 1998 retrospective, it was the first working machine to contain all of the elements essential to a modern electronic computer. As soon as the Baby had demonstrated the feasibility of its design, a project began at the university to develop it into a practically useful computer, the Manchester Mark 1. The Mark 1 in turn quickly became the prototype for the Ferranti Mark 1, the world's first commercially available general-purpose computer. Built by Ferranti, it was delivered to the University of Manchester in February 1951. At least seven of these later machines were delivered between 1953 and 1957, one of them to Shell labs in Amsterdam. In October 1947 the directors of British catering company J. Lyons & Company decided to take an active role in promoting the commercial development of computers. Lyons's LEO I computer, modelled closely on the Cambridge EDSAC of 1949, became operational in April 1951 and ran the world's first routine office computer job. The concept of a field-effect transistor was proposed by Julius Edgar Lilienfeld in 1925. John Bardeen and Walter Brattain, while working under William Shockley at Bell Labs, built the first working transistor, the point-contact transistor, in 1947, which was followed by Shockley's bipolar junction transistor in 1948. From 1955 onwards, transistors replaced vacuum tubes in computer designs, giving rise to the "second generation" of computers. Compared to vacuum tubes, transistors have many advantages: they are smaller, and require less power than vacuum tubes, so give off less heat. Junction transistors were much more reliable than vacuum tubes and had longer, indefinite, service life. Transistorized computers could contain tens of thousands of binary logic circuits in a relatively compact space. However, early junction transistors were relatively bulky devices that were difficult to manufacture on a mass-production basis, which limited them to a number of specialized applications. At the University of Manchester, a team under the leadership of Tom Kilburn designed and built a machine using the newly developed transistors instead of valves. Their first transistorized computer and the first in the world, was operational by 1953, and a second version was completed there in April 1955. However, the machine did make use of valves to generate its 125 kHz clock waveforms and in the circuitry to read and write on its magnetic drum memory, so it was not the first completely transistorized computer. That distinction goes to the Harwell CADET of 1955, built by the electronics division of the Atomic Energy Research Establishment at Harwell. The metal–oxide–silicon field-effect transistor (MOSFET), also known as the MOS transistor, was invented at Bell Labs between 1955 and 1960 and was the first truly compact transistor that could be miniaturized and mass-produced for a wide range of uses. With its high scalability, and much lower power consumption and higher density than bipolar junction transistors, the MOSFET made it possible to build high-density integrated circuits. In addition to data processing, it also enabled the practical use of MOS transistors as memory cell storage elements, leading to the development of MOS semiconductor memory, which replaced earlier magnetic-core memory in computers. The MOSFET led to the microcomputer revolution, and became the driving force behind the computer revolution. The MOSFET is the most widely used transistor in computers, and is the fundamental building block of digital electronics. The next great advance in computing power came with the advent of the integrated circuit (IC). The idea of the integrated circuit was first conceived by a radar scientist working for the Royal Radar Establishment of the Ministry of Defence, Geoffrey W.A. Dummer. Dummer presented the first public description of an integrated circuit at the Symposium on Progress in Quality Electronic Components in Washington, D.C., on 7 May 1952. The first working ICs were invented by Jack Kilby at Texas Instruments and Robert Noyce at Fairchild Semiconductor. Kilby recorded his initial ideas concerning the integrated circuit in July 1958, successfully demonstrating the first working integrated example on 12 September 1958. In his patent application of 6 February 1959, Kilby described his new device as "a body of semiconductor material ... wherein all the components of the electronic circuit are completely integrated". However, Kilby's invention was a hybrid integrated circuit (hybrid IC), rather than a monolithic integrated circuit (IC) chip. Kilby's IC had external wire connections, which made it difficult to mass-produce. Noyce also came up with his own idea of an integrated circuit half a year later than Kilby. Noyce's invention was the first true monolithic IC chip. His chip solved many practical problems that Kilby's had not. Produced at Fairchild Semiconductor, it was made of silicon, whereas Kilby's chip was made of germanium. Noyce's monolithic IC was fabricated using the planar process, developed by his colleague Jean Hoerni in early 1959. In turn, the planar process was based on Carl Frosch and Lincoln Derick work on semiconductor surface passivation by silicon dioxide. Modern monolithic ICs are predominantly MOS (metal–oxide–semiconductor) integrated circuits, built from MOSFETs (MOS transistors). The earliest experimental MOS IC to be fabricated was a 16-transistor chip built by Fred Heiman and Steven Hofstein at RCA in 1962. General Microelectronics later introduced the first commercial MOS IC in 1964, developed by Robert Norman. Following the development of the self-aligned gate (silicon-gate) MOS transistor by Robert Kerwin, Donald Klein and John Sarace at Bell Labs in 1967, the first silicon-gate MOS IC with self-aligned gates was developed by Federico Faggin at Fairchild Semiconductor in 1968. The MOSFET has since become the most critical device component in modern ICs. The development of the MOS integrated circuit led to the invention of the microprocessor, and heralded an explosion in the commercial and personal use of computers. While the subject of exactly which device was the first microprocessor is contentious, partly due to lack of agreement on the exact definition of the term "microprocessor", it is largely undisputed that the first single-chip microprocessor was the Intel 4004, designed and realized by Federico Faggin with his silicon-gate MOS IC technology, along with Ted Hoff, Masatoshi Shima and Stanley Mazor at Intel.[b] In the early 1970s, MOS IC technology enabled the integration of more than 10,000 transistors on a single chip. System on a Chip (SoCs) are complete computers on a microchip (or chip) the size of a coin. They may or may not have integrated RAM and flash memory. If not integrated, the RAM is usually placed directly above (known as Package on package) or below (on the opposite side of the circuit board) the SoC, and the flash memory is usually placed right next to the SoC. This is done to improve data transfer speeds, as the data signals do not have to travel long distances. Since ENIAC in 1945, computers have advanced enormously, with modern SoCs (such as the Snapdragon 865) being the size of a coin while also being hundreds of thousands of times more powerful than ENIAC, integrating billions of transistors, and consuming only a few watts of power. The first mobile computers were heavy and ran from mains power. The 50 lb (23 kg) IBM 5100 was an early example. Later portables such as the Osborne 1 and Compaq Portable were considerably lighter but still needed to be plugged in. The first laptops, such as the Grid Compass, removed this requirement by incorporating batteries – and with the continued miniaturization of computing resources and advancements in portable battery life, portable computers grew in popularity in the 2000s. The same developments allowed manufacturers to integrate computing resources into cellular mobile phones by the early 2000s. These smartphones and tablets run on a variety of operating systems and recently became the dominant computing device on the market. These are powered by System on a Chip (SoCs), which are complete computers on a microchip the size of a coin. Types Computers can be classified in a number of different ways, including: A computer does not need to be electronic, nor even have a processor, nor RAM, nor even a hard disk. While popular usage of the word "computer" is synonymous with a personal electronic computer,[c] a typical modern definition of a computer is: "A device that computes, especially a programmable [usually] electronic machine that performs high-speed mathematical or logical operations or that assembles, stores, correlates, or otherwise processes information." According to this definition, any device that processes information qualifies as a computer. Hardware The term hardware covers all of those parts of a computer that are tangible physical objects. Circuits, computer chips, graphic cards, sound cards, memory (RAM), motherboard, displays, power supplies, cables, keyboards, printers and "mice" input devices are all hardware. A general-purpose computer has four main components: the arithmetic logic unit (ALU), the control unit, the memory, and the input and output devices (collectively termed I/O). These parts are interconnected by buses, often made of groups of wires. Inside each of these parts are thousands to trillions of small electrical circuits which can be turned off or on by means of an electronic switch. Each circuit represents a bit (binary digit) of information so that when the circuit is on it represents a "1", and when off it represents a "0" (in positive logic representation). The circuits are arranged in logic gates so that one or more of the circuits may control the state of one or more of the other circuits. Input devices are the means by which the operations of a computer are controlled and it is provided with data. Examples include: Output devices are the means by which a computer provides the results of its calculations in a human-accessible form. Examples include: The control unit (often called a control system or central controller) manages the computer's various components; it reads and interprets (decodes) the program instructions, transforming them into control signals that activate other parts of the computer.[e] Control systems in advanced computers may change the order of execution of some instructions to improve performance. A key component common to all CPUs is the program counter, a special memory cell (a register) that keeps track of which location in memory the next instruction is to be read from.[f] The control system's function is as follows— this is a simplified description, and some of these steps may be performed concurrently or in a different order depending on the type of CPU: Since the program counter is (conceptually) just another set of memory cells, it can be changed by calculations done in the ALU. Adding 100 to the program counter would cause the next instruction to be read from a place 100 locations further down the program. Instructions that modify the program counter are often known as "jumps" and allow for loops (instructions that are repeated by the computer) and often conditional instruction execution (both examples of control flow). The sequence of operations that the control unit goes through to process an instruction is in itself like a short computer program, and indeed, in some more complex CPU designs, there is another yet smaller computer called a microsequencer, which runs a microcode program that causes all of these events to happen. The control unit, ALU, and registers are collectively known as a central processing unit (CPU). Early CPUs were composed of many separate components. Since the 1970s, CPUs have typically been constructed on a single MOS integrated circuit chip called a microprocessor. The ALU is capable of performing two classes of operations: arithmetic and logic. The set of arithmetic operations that a particular ALU supports may be limited to addition and subtraction, or might include multiplication, division, trigonometry functions such as sine, cosine, etc., and square roots. Some can operate only on whole numbers (integers) while others use floating point to represent real numbers, albeit with limited precision. However, any computer that is capable of performing just the simplest operations can be programmed to break down the more complex operations into simple steps that it can perform. Therefore, any computer can be programmed to perform any arithmetic operation—although it will take more time to do so if its ALU does not directly support the operation. An ALU may also compare numbers and return Boolean truth values (true or false) depending on whether one is equal to, greater than or less than the other ("is 64 greater than 65?"). Logic operations involve Boolean logic: AND, OR, XOR, and NOT. These can be useful for creating complicated conditional statements and processing Boolean logic. Superscalar computers may contain multiple ALUs, allowing them to process several instructions simultaneously. Graphics processors and computers with SIMD and MIMD features often contain ALUs that can perform arithmetic on vectors and matrices. A computer's memory can be viewed as a list of cells into which numbers can be placed or read. Each cell has a numbered "address" and can store a single number. The computer can be instructed to "put the number 123 into the cell numbered 1357" or to "add the number that is in cell 1357 to the number that is in cell 2468 and put the answer into cell 1595." The information stored in memory may represent practically anything. Letters, numbers, even computer instructions can be placed into memory with equal ease. Since the CPU does not differentiate between different types of information, it is the software's responsibility to give significance to what the memory sees as nothing but a series of numbers. In almost all modern computers, each memory cell is set up to store binary numbers in groups of eight bits (called a byte). Each byte is able to represent 256 different numbers (28 = 256); either from 0 to 255 or −128 to +127. To store larger numbers, several consecutive bytes may be used (typically, two, four or eight). When negative numbers are required, they are usually stored in two's complement notation. Other arrangements are possible, but are usually not seen outside of specialized applications or historical contexts. A computer can store any kind of information in memory if it can be represented numerically. Modern computers have billions or even trillions of bytes of memory. The CPU contains a special set of memory cells called registers that can be read and written to much more rapidly than the main memory area. There are typically between two and one hundred registers depending on the type of CPU. Registers are used for the most frequently needed data items to avoid having to access main memory every time data is needed. As data is constantly being worked on, reducing the need to access main memory (which is often slow compared to the ALU and control units) greatly increases the computer's speed. Computer main memory comes in two principal varieties: RAM can be read and written to anytime the CPU commands it, but ROM is preloaded with data and software that never changes, therefore the CPU can only read from it. ROM is typically used to store the computer's initial start-up instructions. In general, the contents of RAM are erased when the power to the computer is turned off, but ROM retains its data indefinitely. In a PC, the ROM contains a specialized program called the BIOS that orchestrates loading the computer's operating system from the hard disk drive into RAM whenever the computer is turned on or reset. In embedded computers, which frequently do not have disk drives, all of the required software may be stored in ROM. Software stored in ROM is often called firmware, because it is notionally more like hardware than software. Flash memory blurs the distinction between ROM and RAM, as it retains its data when turned off but is also rewritable. It is typically much slower than conventional ROM and RAM however, so its use is restricted to applications where high speed is unnecessary.[g] In more sophisticated computers there may be one or more RAM cache memories, which are slower than registers but faster than main memory. Generally computers with this sort of cache are designed to move frequently needed data into the cache automatically, often without the need for any intervention on the programmer's part. I/O is the means by which a computer exchanges information with the outside world. Devices that provide input or output to the computer are called peripherals. On a typical personal computer, peripherals include input devices like the keyboard and mouse, and output devices such as the display and printer. Hard disk drives, floppy disk drives and optical disc drives serve as both input and output devices. Computer networking is another form of I/O. I/O devices are often complex computers in their own right, with their own CPU and memory. A graphics processing unit might contain fifty or more tiny computers that perform the calculations necessary to display 3D graphics.[citation needed] Modern desktop computers contain many smaller computers that assist the main CPU in performing I/O. A 2016-era flat screen display contains its own computer circuitry. While a computer may be viewed as running one gigantic program stored in its main memory, in some systems it is necessary to give the appearance of running several programs simultaneously. This is achieved by multitasking, i.e. having the computer switch rapidly between running each program in turn. One means by which this is done is with a special signal called an interrupt, which can periodically cause the computer to stop executing instructions where it was and do something else instead. By remembering where it was executing prior to the interrupt, the computer can return to that task later. If several programs are running "at the same time". Then the interrupt generator might be causing several hundred interrupts per second, causing a program switch each time. Since modern computers typically execute instructions several orders of magnitude faster than human perception, it may appear that many programs are running at the same time, even though only one is ever executing in any given instant. This method of multitasking is sometimes termed "time-sharing" since each program is allocated a "slice" of time in turn. Before the era of inexpensive computers, the principal use for multitasking was to allow many people to share the same computer. Seemingly, multitasking would cause a computer that is switching between several programs to run more slowly, in direct proportion to the number of programs it is running, but most programs spend much of their time waiting for slow input/output devices to complete their tasks. If a program is waiting for the user to click on the mouse or press a key on the keyboard, then it will not take a "time slice" until the event it is waiting for has occurred. This frees up time for other programs to execute so that many programs may be run simultaneously without unacceptable speed loss. Some computers are designed to distribute their work across several CPUs in a multiprocessing configuration, a technique once employed in only large and powerful machines such as supercomputers, mainframe computers and servers. Multiprocessor and multi-core (multiple CPUs on a single integrated circuit) personal and laptop computers are now widely available, and are being increasingly used in lower-end markets as a result. Supercomputers in particular often have highly unique architectures that differ significantly from the basic stored-program architecture and from general-purpose computers.[h] They often feature thousands of CPUs, customized high-speed interconnects, and specialized computing hardware. Such designs tend to be useful for only specialized tasks due to the large scale of program organization required to use most of the available resources at once. Supercomputers usually see usage in large-scale simulation, graphics rendering, and cryptography applications, as well as with other so-called "embarrassingly parallel" tasks. Software Software is the part of a computer system that consists of the encoded information that determines the computer's operation, such as data or instructions on how to process the data. In contrast to the physical hardware from which the system is built, software is immaterial. Software includes computer programs, libraries and related non-executable data, such as online documentation or digital media. It is often divided into system software and application software. Computer hardware and software require each other and neither is useful on its own. When software is stored in hardware that cannot easily be modified, such as with BIOS ROM in an IBM PC compatible computer, it is sometimes called "firmware". The defining feature of modern computers which distinguishes them from all other machines is that they can be programmed. That is to say that some type of instructions (the program) can be given to the computer, and it will process them. Modern computers based on the von Neumann architecture often have machine code in the form of an imperative programming language. In practical terms, a computer program may be just a few instructions or extend to many millions of instructions, as do the programs for word processors and web browsers for example. A typical modern computer can execute billions of instructions per second (gigaflops) and rarely makes a mistake over many years of operation. Large computer programs consisting of several million instructions may take teams of programmers years to write, and due to the complexity of the task almost certainly contain errors. This section applies to most common RAM machine–based computers. In most cases, computer instructions are simple: add one number to another, move some data from one location to another, send a message to some external device, etc. These instructions are read from the computer's memory and are generally carried out (executed) in the order they were given. However, there are usually specialized instructions to tell the computer to jump ahead or backwards to some other place in the program and to carry on executing from there. These are called "jump" instructions (or branches). Furthermore, jump instructions may be made to happen conditionally so that different sequences of instructions may be used depending on the result of some previous calculation or some external event. Many computers directly support subroutines by providing a type of jump that "remembers" the location it jumped from and another instruction to return to the instruction following that jump instruction. Program execution might be likened to reading a book. While a person will normally read each word and line in sequence, they may at times jump back to an earlier place in the text or skip sections that are not of interest. Similarly, a computer may sometimes go back and repeat the instructions in some section of the program over and over again until some internal condition is met. This is called the flow of control within the program and it is what allows the computer to perform tasks repeatedly without human intervention. Comparatively, a person using a pocket calculator can perform a basic arithmetic operation such as adding two numbers with just a few button presses. But to add together all of the numbers from 1 to 1,000 would take thousands of button presses and a lot of time, with a near certainty of making a mistake. On the other hand, a computer may be programmed to do this with just a few simple instructions. The following example is written in the MIPS assembly language: Once told to run this program, the computer will perform the repetitive addition task without further human intervention. It will almost never make a mistake and a modern PC can complete the task in a fraction of a second. In most computers, individual instructions are stored as machine code with each instruction being given a unique number (its operation code or opcode for short). The command to add two numbers together would have one opcode; the command to multiply them would have a different opcode, and so on. The simplest computers are able to perform any of a handful of different instructions; the more complex computers have several hundred to choose from, each with a unique numerical code. Since the computer's memory is able to store numbers, it can also store the instruction codes. This leads to the important fact that entire programs (which are just lists of these instructions) can be represented as lists of numbers and can themselves be manipulated inside the computer in the same way as numeric data. The fundamental concept of storing programs in the computer's memory alongside the data they operate on is the crux of the von Neumann, or stored program, architecture. In some cases, a computer might store some or all of its program in memory that is kept separate from the data it operates on. This is called the Harvard architecture after the Harvard Mark I computer. Modern von Neumann computers display some traits of the Harvard architecture in their designs, such as in CPU caches. While it is possible to write computer programs as long lists of numbers (machine language) and while this technique was used with many early computers,[i] it is extremely tedious and potentially error-prone to do so in practice, especially for complicated programs. Instead, each basic instruction can be given a short name that is indicative of its function and easy to remember – a mnemonic such as ADD, SUB, MULT or JUMP. These mnemonics are collectively known as a computer's assembly language. Converting programs written in assembly language into something the computer can actually understand (machine language) is usually done by a computer program called an assembler. A programming language is a notation system for writing the source code from which a computer program is produced. Programming languages provide various ways of specifying programs for computers to run. Unlike natural languages, programming languages are designed to permit no ambiguity and to be concise. They are purely written languages and are often difficult to read aloud. They are generally either translated into machine code by a compiler or an assembler before being run, or translated directly at run time by an interpreter. Sometimes programs are executed by a hybrid method of the two techniques. There are thousands of programming languages—some intended for general purpose programming, others useful for only highly specialized applications. Machine languages and the assembly languages that represent them (collectively termed low-level programming languages) are generally unique to the particular architecture of a computer's central processing unit (CPU). For instance, an ARM architecture CPU (such as may be found in a smartphone or a hand-held videogame) cannot understand the machine language of an x86 CPU that might be in a PC.[j] Historically a significant number of other CPU architectures were created and saw extensive use, notably including the MOS Technology 6502 and 6510 in addition to the Zilog Z80. Although considerably easier than in machine language, writing long programs in assembly language is often difficult and is also error prone. Therefore, most practical programs are written in more abstract high-level programming languages that are able to express the needs of the programmer more conveniently (and thereby help reduce programmer error). High level languages are usually "compiled" into machine language (or sometimes into assembly language and then into machine language) using another computer program called a compiler.[k] High level languages are less related to the workings of the target computer than assembly language, and more related to the language and structure of the problem(s) to be solved by the final program. It is therefore often possible to use different compilers to translate the same high level language program into the machine language of many different types of computer. This is part of the means by which software like video games may be made available for different computer architectures such as personal computers and various video game consoles. Program design of small programs is relatively simple and involves the analysis of the problem, collection of inputs, using the programming constructs within languages, devising or using established procedures and algorithms, providing data for output devices and solutions to the problem as applicable. As problems become larger and more complex, features such as subprograms, modules, formal documentation, and new paradigms such as object-oriented programming are encountered. Large programs involving thousands of line of code and more require formal software methodologies. The task of developing large software systems presents a significant intellectual challenge. Producing software with an acceptably high reliability within a predictable schedule and budget has historically been difficult; the academic and professional discipline of software engineering concentrates specifically on this challenge. Errors in computer programs are called "bugs". They may be benign and not affect the usefulness of the program, or have only subtle effects. However, in some cases they may cause the program or the entire system to "hang", becoming unresponsive to input such as mouse clicks or keystrokes, to completely fail, or to crash. Otherwise benign bugs may sometimes be harnessed for malicious intent by an unscrupulous user writing an exploit, code designed to take advantage of a bug and disrupt a computer's proper execution. Bugs are usually not the fault of the computer. Since computers merely execute the instructions they are given, bugs are nearly always the result of programmer error or an oversight made in the program's design.[l] Admiral Grace Hopper, an American computer scientist and developer of the first compiler, is credited for having first used the term "bugs" in computing after a dead moth was found shorting a relay in the Harvard Mark II computer in September 1947. Networking and the Internet Computers have been used to coordinate information between multiple physical locations since the 1950s. The U.S. military's SAGE system was the first large-scale example of such a system, which led to a number of special-purpose commercial systems such as Sabre. In the 1970s, computer engineers at research institutions throughout the United States began to link their computers together using telecommunications technology. The effort was funded by ARPA (now DARPA), and the computer network that resulted was called the ARPANET. Logic gates are a common abstraction which can apply to most of the above digital or analog paradigms. The ability to store and execute lists of instructions called programs makes computers extremely versatile, distinguishing them from calculators. The Church–Turing thesis is a mathematical statement of this versatility: any computer with a minimum capability (being Turing-complete) is, in principle, capable of performing the same tasks that any other computer can perform. Therefore, any type of computer (netbook, supercomputer, cellular automaton, etc.) is able to perform the same computational tasks, given enough time and storage capacity. In the 20th century, artificial intelligence systems were predominantly symbolic: they executed code that was explicitly programmed by software developers. Machine learning models, however, have a set parameters that are adjusted throughout training, so that the model learns to accomplish a task based on the provided data. The efficiency of machine learning (and in particular of neural networks) has rapidly improved with progress in hardware for parallel computing, mainly graphics processing units (GPUs). Some large language models are able to control computers or robots. AI progress may lead to the creation of artificial general intelligence (AGI), a type of AI that could accomplish virtually any intellectual task at least as well as humans. Professions and organizations As the use of computers has spread throughout society, there are an increasing number of careers involving computers. The need for computers to work well together and to be able to exchange information has spawned the need for many standards organizations, clubs and societies of both a formal and informal nature. See also Notes References Sources External links |
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[SOURCE: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karakoram] | [TOKENS: 1802] |
Contents Karakoram The Karakoram (English: /ˌkɑːrəˈkɔːrəm, ˌkær-/, Urdu: [kaːɾaːkoːɾəm]) is a mountain range in Asia located primarily in the Kashmir region. The range spans the borders of Pakistan, China, and India,[a] with the north-western extremities of the range extending into Afghanistan and Tajikistan. The Karakoram contains four of the fourteen eight-thousanders, the highest of which is K2, the second highest mountain on Earth. The Karakoram begins in the Wakhan Corridor in western Afghanistan and extends eastwards into Indian-administered Ladakh and Chinese-administered Aksai Chin, as well as the Chinese province of Xinjiang. Most of the Karakoram is located within the Pakistani-administered Gilgit-Baltistan region. The Karakoram is bounded on the east by the Aksai Chin plateau, on the north-east by the edge of the Tibetan Plateau, and on the north by the river valleys of the Yarkand and Karakash rivers, beyond which lie the Kunlun Mountains. At the north-west corner are the Pamir Mountains. The southern boundary of the Karakoram is formed west to east by the Gilgit, Indus, and Shyok rivers, which separate the range from the north-western end of the Himalaya. These rivers flow north-west before making an abrupt turn south-westwards towards the plains of Pakistan. Roughly in the middle of the Karakoram range is the Karakoram Pass, which was part of a now unused trade route between Ladakh and Yarkand. The range is about 500 km (311 mi) in length and is the most glaciated place on Earth outside the polar regions. The Siachen Glacier (76 km (47 mi) long) and Biafo Glacier (63 km (39 mi) long) are the second- and third-longest glaciers outside the polar regions. The Karakoram is the second-highest mountain range on Earth and part of a complex of ranges that includes the Pamir Mountains, Hindu Kush, and the Indian Himalayas. The range contains eighteen summits higher than 7,500 m (24,600 ft) in elevation, with four above 8,000 m (26,000 ft) which include K2, Gasherbrum I, Broad Peak, and Gasherbrum II. Name Karakoram is a Turkic term meaning black gravel. The Central Asian traders originally applied the name to the Karakoram Pass. Early European travelers, including William Moorcroft and George Hayward, started using the term for the range of mountains west of the pass, although they also used the term Muztagh (meaning, "Ice Mountain") for the range now known as Karakoram. Later terminology was influenced by Thomas Montgomerie of the Survey of India, who gave the labels K1 to K6 (K for Karakoram) to six high mountains visible from his station at Mount Haramukh in the 1850s. These codes were extended up to more than thirty. In traditional Indian geography, the mountains were known as Krishnagiri (black mountains), Kanhagiri, and Kanheri. Exploration Due to its altitude and ruggedness, the Karakoram is much less inhabited than parts of the Himalayas further east. European explorers first visited in the early 19th century, followed by British surveyors starting in 1856. The Muztagh Pass was crossed in 1887 by the expedition of Colonel Francis Younghusband, and the valleys above the Hunza River were explored by General Sir George K. Cockerill in 1892. Explorations in the 1910s and 1920s established most of the geography of the region. The name Karakoram was used in the early 20th century, for example by Kenneth Mason, for the range now known as the Baltoro Muztagh. The term is now used to refer to the entire range from the Batura Muztagh above Hunza in the west to the Saser Muztagh in the bend of the Shyok River in the east. Floral surveys were carried out in the Shyok River catchment and from Panamik to Turtuk village by Chandra Prakash Kala during 1999 and 2000. Geology and glaciers The Karakoram is in one of the world's most geologically active areas, at the plate boundary between the Indo-Australian plate and the Eurasian plate. A significant part, somewhere between 28 and 50 percent, of the Karakoram Range is glaciated, covering an area of more than 15,000 square kilometres or 5,800 square miles, compared to between 8 and 12 percent of the Himalaya and 2.2 percent of the Alps. Mountain glaciers may serve as an indicator of climate change, advancing and receding with long-term changes in temperature and precipitation. The Karakoram glaciers are slightly retreating, unlike the Himalayas, where glaciers are losing mass at a significantly higher rate, many Karakoram glaciers are covered in a layer of rubble which insulates the ice from the warmth of the sun. Where there is no such insulation, the rate of retreat is high. In the last ice age, a connected series of glaciers stretched from western Tibet to Nanga Parbat, and from the Tarim Basin to the Gilgit District. To the south, the Indus glacier was the main valley glacier, which flowed 120 kilometres (75 mi) down from the Nanga Parbat massif to 870 metres (2,850 ft) elevation. In the north, the Karakoram glaciers joined those from the Kunlun Mountains and flowed down to 2,000 metres (6,600 ft) in the Tarim Basin. While the current valley glaciers in the Karakoram reach a maximum length of 76 kilometres (47 mi), several of the ice-age valley glacier branches and main valley glaciers, had lengths up to 700 kilometres (430 mi). During the Ice Age, the glacier snowline was about 1,300 metres (4,300 ft) lower than today. Highest peaks The majority of the highest peaks are in the Gilgit–Baltistan region administered by Pakistan. Baltistan has more than 100 mountain peaks exceeding 6,100 metres (20,000 ft) height from sea level.[citation needed] Following is a list for the highest peaks of the Karakoram. Included are some of the mountains named with a K code, the most well-known of which is the K2. Subranges The naming and division of the various subranges of the Karakoram is not universally agreed upon. However, the following is a list of the most important subranges, following Jerzy Wala. The ranges are listed roughly west to east. Passes 1：Sia La, 2：Bilafond La, 3：Gyong La, 4：Sasser Pass, 5：Burji La, 6：Machulo La, 7：Naltar Pass, 8：Hispar Pass, 9：Shimshal Pass, 10：Karakoram Pass, 11：Turkistan La Pass, 12：Windy Gap, 13：Mustagh Pass, 14：Sarpo Laggo Pass, 15：Khunjerab Pass, 16：Mutsjliga Pass, 17：Mintaka Pass, 18：Kilik Pass Passes from west to east are: The Khunjerab Pass is the only motorable pass across the range. The Shimshal Pass (which does not cross an international border) is the only other pass still in regular use. Cultural references The Karakoram mountain range has been referred to in a number of novels and movies. Rudyard Kipling refers to the Karakoram mountain range in his novel Kim, which was first published in 1900. Marcel Ichac made a film titled Karakoram, chronicling a French expedition to the range in 1936. The film won the Silver Lion at the Venice Film Festival of 1937. Greg Mortenson details the Karakoram, and specifically K2 and the Balti, extensively in his book Three Cups of Tea, about his quest to build schools for children in the region. K2 Kahani (The K2 Story) by Mustansar Hussain Tarar describes his experiences at K2 base camp. See also References Further reading External links |
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[SOURCE: https://www.wired.com/story/confessions-marcus-hutchins-hacker-who-saved-the-internet/] | [TOKENS: 34438] |
Andy GreenbergThe Big StoryMay 12, 2020 6:00 AMThe Confessions of Marcus Hutchins, the Hacker Who Saved the InternetAt 22, he single-handedly put a stop to the worst cyberattack the world had ever seen. Then he was arrested by the FBI. This is his untold story. Photograph: Ramona RosalesSave StorySave this storySave StorySave this storyAt around 7 am on a quiet Wednesday in August 2017, Marcus Hutchins walked out the front door of the Airbnb mansion in Las Vegas where he had been partying for the past week and a half. A gangly, 6'4", 23-year-old hacker with an explosion of blond-brown curls, Hutchins had emerged to retrieve his order of a Big Mac and fries from an Uber Eats deliveryman. But as he stood barefoot on the mansion's driveway wearing only a T-shirt and jeans, Hutchins noticed a black SUV parked on the street—one that looked very much like an FBI stakeout.He stared at the vehicle blankly, his mind still hazed from sleep deprivation and stoned from the legalized Nevada weed he'd been smoking all night. For a fleeting moment, he wondered: Is this finally it?But as soon as the thought surfaced, he dismissed it. The FBI would never be so obvious, he told himself. His feet had begun to scald on the griddle of the driveway. So he grabbed the McDonald's bag and headed back inside, through the mansion's courtyard, and into the pool house he'd been using as a bedroom. With the specter of the SUV fully exorcised from his mind, he rolled another spliff with the last of his weed, smoked it as he ate his burger, and then packed his bags for the airport, where he was scheduled for a first-class flight home to the UK.Hutchins was coming off of an epic, exhausting week at Defcon, one of the world's largest hacker conferences, where he had been celebrated as a hero. Less than three months earlier, Hutchins had saved the internet from what was, at the time, the worst cyberattack in history: a piece of malware called WannaCry. Just as that self-propagating software had begun exploding across the planet, destroying data on hundreds of thousands of computers, it was Hutchins who had found and triggered the secret kill switch contained in its code, neutering WannaCry's global threat immediately.This legendary feat of whitehat hacking had essentially earned Hutchins free drinks for life among the Defcon crowd. He and his entourage had been invited to every VIP hacker party on the strip, taken out to dinner by journalists, and accosted by fans seeking selfies. The story, after all, was irresistible: Hutchins was the shy geek who had single-handedly slain a monster threatening the entire digital world, all while sitting in front of a keyboard in a bedroom in his parents' house in remote western England.Still reeling from the whirlwind of adulation, Hutchins was in no state to dwell on concerns about the FBI, even after he emerged from the mansion a few hours later and once again saw the same black SUV parked across the street. He hopped into an Uber to the airport, his mind still floating through a cannabis-induced cloud. Court documents would later reveal that the SUV followed him along the way—that law enforcement had, in fact, been tracking his location periodically throughout his time in Vegas.When Hutchins arrived at the airport and made his way through the security checkpoint, he was surprised when TSA agents told him not to bother taking any of his three laptops out of his backpack before putting it through the scanner. Instead, as they waved him through, he remembers thinking that they seemed to be making a special effort not to delay him.He wandered leisurely to an airport lounge, grabbed a Coke, and settled into an armchair. He was still hours early for his flight back to the UK, so he killed time posting from his phone to Twitter, writing how excited he was to get back to his job analyzing malware when he got home. “Haven't touched a debugger in over a month now,” he tweeted. He humblebragged about some very expensive shoes his boss had bought him in Vegas and retweeted a compliment from a fan of his reverse-engineering work.Hutchins was composing another tweet when he noticed that three men had walked up to him, a burly redhead with a goatee flanked by two others in Customs and Border Protection uniforms. “Are you Marcus Hutchins?” asked the red-haired man. When Hutchins confirmed that he was, the man asked in a neutral tone for Hutchins to come with them, and led him through a door into a private stairwell.Then they put him in handcuffs.In a state of shock, feeling as if he were watching himself from a distance, Hutchins asked what was going on. “We'll get to that,” the man said.Hutchins remembers mentally racing through every possible illegal thing he'd done that might have interested Customs. Surely, he thought, it couldn't be the thing, that years-old, unmentionable crime. Was it that he might have left marijuana in his bag? Were these bored agents overreacting to petty drug possession?The agents walked him through a security area full of monitors and then sat him down in an interrogation room, where they left him alone. When the red-headed man returned, he was accompanied by a small blonde woman. The two agents flashed their badges: They were with the FBI.For the next few minutes, the agents struck a friendly tone, asking Hutchins about his education and Kryptos Logic, the security firm where he worked. For those minutes, Hutchins allowed himself to believe that perhaps the agents wanted only to learn more about his work on WannaCry, that this was just a particularly aggressive way to get his cooperation into their investigation of that world-shaking cyberattack. Then, 11 minutes into the interview, his interrogators asked him about a program called Kronos.“Kronos,” Hutchins said. “I know that name.” And it began to dawn on him, with a sort of numbness, that he was not going home after all.Fourteen years earlier, long before Marcus Hutchins was a hero or villain to anyone, his parents, Janet and Desmond, settled into a stone house on a cattle farm in remote Devon, just a few minutes from the west coast of England. Janet was a nurse, born in Scotland. Desmond was a social worker from Jamaica who had been a firefighter when he first met Janet in a nightclub in 1986. They had moved from Bracknell, a commuter town 30 miles outside of London, looking for a place where their sons, 9-year-old Marcus and his 7-year-old brother, could grow up with more innocence than life in London's orbit could offer.At first the farm offered exactly the idyll they were seeking: The two boys spent their days romping among the cows, watching farmhands milk them and deliver their calves. They built tree houses and trebuchets out of spare pieces of wood and rode in the tractor of the farmer who had rented their house to them. Hutchins was a bright and happy child, open to friendships but stoic and “self-contained,” as his father, Desmond, puts it, with “a very strong sense of right and wrong.” When he fell and broke his wrist while playing, he didn't shed a single tear, his father says. But when the farmer put down a lame, brain-damaged calf that Hutchins had bonded with, he cried inconsolably.Hutchins didn't always fit in with the other kids in rural Devon. He was taller than the other boys, and he lacked the usual English obsession with soccer; he came to prefer surfing in the freezing waters a few miles from his house instead. He was one of only a few mixed-race children at his school, and he refused to cut his trademark mop of curly hair.But above all, what distinguished Hutchins from everyone around him was his preternatural fascination and facility with computers. From the age of 6, Hutchins had watched his mother use Windows 95 on the family's Dell tower desktop. His father was often annoyed to find him dismantling the family PC or filling it with strange programs. By the time they moved to Devon, Hutchins had begun to be curious about the inscrutable HTML characters behind the websites he visited, and was coding rudimentary “Hello world” scripts in Basic. He soon came to see programming as “a gateway to build whatever you wanted,” as he puts it, far more exciting than even the wooden forts and catapults he built with his brother. “There were no limits,” he says.In computer class, where his peers were still learning to use word processors, Hutchins was miserably bored. The school's computers prevented him from installing the games he wanted to play, like Counterstrike and Call of Duty, and they restricted the sites he could visit online. But Hutchins found he could program his way out of those constraints. Within Microsoft Word, he discovered a feature that allowed him to write scripts in a language called Visual Basic. Using that scripting feature, he could run whatever code he wanted and even install unapproved software. He used that trick to install a proxy to bounce his web traffic through a faraway server, defeating the school's attempts to filter and monitor his web surfing too.On his 13th birthday, after years of fighting for time on the family's aging Dell, Hutchins' parents agreed to buy him his own computer—or rather, the components he requested, piece by piece, to build it himself. Soon, Hutchins' mother says, the computer became a “complete and utter love” that overruled almost everything else in her son's life.Hutchins still surfed, and he had taken up a sport called surf lifesaving, a kind of competitive lifeguarding. He excelled at it and would eventually win a handful of medals at the national level. But when he wasn't in the water, he was in front of his computer, playing videogames or refining his programming skills for hours on end.Janet Hutchins worried about her son's digital obsession. In particular, she feared how the darker fringes of the web, what she only half-jokingly calls the “internet boogeyman,” might influence her son, who she saw as relatively sheltered in their rural English life.So she tried to install parental controls on Marcus' computer; he responded by using a simple technique to gain administrative privileges when he booted up the PC, and immediately turned the controls off. She tried limiting his internet access via their home router; he found a hardware reset on the router that allowed him to restore it to factory settings, then configured the router to boot her offline instead.“After that we had a long chat,” Janet says. She threatened to remove the house's internet connection altogether. Instead they came to a truce. “We agreed that if he reinstated my internet access, I would monitor him in another way,” she says. “But in actual fact, there was no way of monitoring Marcus. Because he was way more clever than any of us were ever going to be.”Illustration: Janelle BaroneMany mothers' fears of the internet boogeyman are overblown. Janet Hutchins' were not.Within a year of getting his own computer, Hutchins was exploring an elementary hacking web forum, one dedicated to wreaking havoc upon the then-popular instant messaging platform MSN. There he found a community of like-minded young hackers showing off their inventions. One bragged of creating a kind of MSN worm that impersonated a JPEG: When someone opened it, the malware would instantly and invisibly send itself to all their MSN contacts, some of whom would fall for the bait and open the photo, which would fire off another round of messages, ad infinitum.Hutchins didn't know what the worm was meant to accomplish—whether it was intended for cybercrime or simply a spammy prank—but he was deeply impressed. “I was like, wow, look what programming can do,” he says. “I want to be able to do this kind of stuff.”Around the time he turned 14, Hutchins posted his own contribution to the forum—a simple password stealer. Install it on someone's computer and it could pull the passwords for the victim's web accounts from where Internet Explorer had stored them for its convenient autofill feature. The passwords were encrypted, but he'd figured out where the browser hid the decryption key too.Hutchins' first piece of malware was met with approval from the forum. And whose passwords did he imagine might be stolen with his invention? “I didn't, really,” Hutchins says. “I just thought, ‘This is a cool thing I've made.’”As Hutchins' hacking career began to take shape, his academic career was deteriorating. He would come home from the beach in the evening and go straight to his room, eat in front of his computer, and then pretend to sleep. After his parents checked that his lights were out and went to bed themselves, he'd get back to his keyboard. “Unbeknownst to us, he'd be up programming into the wee small hours,” Janet says. When she woke him the next morning, “he'd look ghastly. Because he'd only been in bed for half an hour.” Hutchins' mystified mother at one point was so worried she took her son to the doctor, where he was diagnosed with being a sleep-deprived teenager.One day at school, when Hutchins was about 15, he found that he'd been locked out of his network account. A few hours later he was called into a school administrator's office. The staff there accused him of carrying out a cyberattack on the school's network, corrupting one server so deeply it had to be replaced. Hutchins vehemently denied any involvement and demanded to see the evidence. As he tells it, the administrators refused to share it. But he had, by that time, become notorious among the school's IT staff for flouting their security measures. He maintains, even today, that he was merely the most convenient scapegoat. “Marcus was never a good liar,” his mother agrees. “He was quite boastful. If he had done it, he would have said he'd done it.”Hutchins was suspended for two weeks and permanently banned from using computers at school. His answer, from that point on, was simply to spend as little time there as possible. He became fully nocturnal, sleeping well into the school day and often skipping his classes altogether. His parents were furious, but aside from the moments when he was trapped in his mother's car, getting a ride to school or to go surfing, he mostly evaded their lectures and punishments. “They couldn't physically drag me to school,” Hutchins says. “I'm a big guy.”Hutchins' family had, by 2009, moved off the farm, into a house that occupied the former post office of a small, one-pub village. Marcus took a room at the top of the stairs. He emerged from his bedroom only occasionally, to microwave a frozen pizza or make himself more instant coffee for his late-night programming binges. But for the most part, he kept his door closed and locked against his parents, as he delved deeper into a secret life to which they weren't invited.Around the same time, the MSN forum that Hutchins had been frequenting shut down, so he transitioned to another community called HackForums. Its members were a shade more advanced in their skills and a shade murkier in their ethics: a Lord of the Flies collection of young hackers seeking to impress one another with nihilistic feats of exploitation. The minimum table stakes to gain respect from the HackForums crowd was possession of a botnet, a collection of hundreds or thousands of malware-infected computers that obey a hacker's commands, capable of directing junk traffic at rivals to flood their web server and knock them offline—what's known as a distributed denial of service, or DDoS, attack.There was, at this point, no overlap between Hutchins' idyllic English village life and his secret cyberpunk one, no reality checks to prevent him from adopting the amoral atmosphere of the underworld he was entering. So Hutchins, still 15 years old, was soon bragging on the forum about running his own botnet of more than 8,000 computers, mostly hacked with simple fake files he'd uploaded to BitTorrent sites and tricked unwitting users into running.Even more ambitiously, Hutchins also set up his own business: He began renting servers and then selling web hosting services to denizens of HackForums for a monthly fee. The enterprise, which Hutchins called Gh0sthosting, explicitly advertised itself on HackForums as a place where “all illegal sites” were allowed. He suggested in another post that buyers could use his service to host phishing pages designed to impersonate login pages and steal victims' passwords. When one customer asked if it was acceptable to host “warez”—black market software—Hutchins immediately replied, “Yeah any sites but child porn.”But in his teenage mind, Hutchins says, he still saw what he was doing as several steps removed from any real cybercrime. Hosting shady servers or stealing a few Facebook passwords or exploiting a hijacked computer to enlist it in DDoS attacks against other hackers—those hardly seemed like the serious offenses that would earn him the attention of law enforcement. Hutchins wasn't, after all, carrying out bank fraud, stealing actual money from innocent people. Or at least that's what he told himself. He says that the red line of financial fraud, arbitrary as it was, remained inviolable in his self-defined and shifting moral code.In fact, within a year Hutchins grew bored with his botnets and his hosting service, which he found involved placating a lot of “whiny customers.” So he quit both and began to focus on something he enjoyed far more: perfecting his own malware. Soon he was taking apart other hackers' rootkits—programs designed to alter a computer's operating system to make themselves entirely undetectable. He studied their features and learned to hide his code inside other computer processes to make his files invisible in the machine's file directory.When Hutchins posted some sample code to show off his growing skills, another HackForums member was impressed enough that he asked Hutchins to write part of a program that would check whether specific antivirus engines could detect a hacker's malware, a kind of anti-antivirus tool. For that task, Hutchins was paid $200 in the early digital currency Liberty Reserve. The same customer followed up by offering $800 for a “formgrabber” Hutchins had written, a rootkit that could silently steal passwords and other data that people had entered into web forms and send them to the hacker. He happily accepted.Hutchins began to develop a reputation as a talented malware ghostwriter. Then, when he was 16, he was approached by a more serious client, a figure that the teenager would come to know by the pseudonym Vinny.Vinny made Hutchins an offer: He wanted a multifeatured, well-maintained rootkit that he could sell on hacker marketplaces far more professional than HackForums, like Exploit.in and Dark0de. And rather than paying up front for the code, he would give Hutchins half the profits from every sale. They would call the product UPAS Kit, after the Javanese upas tree, whose toxic sap was traditionally used in Southeast Asia to make poison darts and arrows.Vinny seemed different from the braggarts and wannabes Hutchins had met elsewhere in the hacker underground—more professional and tight-lipped, never revealing a single personal detail about himself even as they chatted more and more frequently. And both Hutchins and Vinny were careful to never log their conversations, Hutchins says. (As a result, WIRED has no record of their interactions, only Hutchins' account of them.)Hutchins says he was always careful to cloak his movements online, routing his internet connection through multiple proxy servers and hacked PCs in Eastern Europe intended to confuse any investigator. But he wasn't nearly as disciplined about keeping the details of his personal life secret from Vinny. In one conversation, Hutchins complained to his business partner that there was no quality weed to be found anywhere in his village, deep in rural England. Vinny responded that he would mail him some from a new ecommerce site called Silk Road.This was 2011, early days for Silk Road, and the notorious dark-web drug marketplace was mostly known only to those in the internet underground, not the masses who would later discover it. Hutchins himself thought it had to be a hoax. “Bullshit,” he remembers writing to Vinny. “Prove it.”So Vinny asked for Hutchins' address—and his date of birth. He wanted to send him a birthday present, he said. Hutchins, in a moment he would come to regret, supplied both.On Hutchins' 17th birthday, a package arrived for him in the mail at his parents' house. Inside was a collection of weed, hallucinogenic mushrooms, and ecstasy, courtesy of his mysterious new associate.Illustration: Janelle BaroneHutchins finished writing UPAS Kit after nearly nine months of work, and in the summer of 2012 the rootkit went up for sale. Hutchins didn't ask Vinny any questions about who was buying. He was mostly just pleased to have leveled up from a HackForums show-off to a professional coder whose work was desired and appreciated.The money was nice too: As Vinny began to pay Hutchins thousands of dollars in commissions from UPAS Kit sales—always in bitcoin—Hutchins found himself with his first real disposable income. He upgraded his computer, bought an Xbox and a new sound system for his room, and began to dabble in bitcoin day trading. By this point, he had dropped out of school entirely, and he'd quit surf lifesaving after his coach retired. He told his parents that he was working on freelance programming projects, which seemed to satisfy them.With the success of UPAS Kit, Vinny told Hutchins that it was time to build UPAS Kit 2.0. He wanted new features for this sequel, including a keylogger that could record victims' every keystroke and the ability to see their entire screen. And most of all, he wanted a feature that could insert fake text-entry fields and other content into the pages that victims were seeing—something called a web inject.Vinny added that he knew Hutchins' identity and address. If their business relationship ended, perhaps he would share that information with the FBI.That last demand in particular gave Hutchins a deeply uneasy feeling, he says. Web injects, in Hutchins' mind, had a very clear purpose: They were designed for bank fraud. Most banks require a second factor of authentication when making a transfer; they often send a code via text message to a user's phone and ask them to enter it on a web page as a double check of their identity. Web injects allow hackers to defeat that security measure by sleight of hand. A hacker initiates a bank transfer from the victim's account, and then, when the bank asks the hacker for a confirmation code, the hacker injects a fake message onto the victim's screen asking them to perform a routine reconfirmation of their identity with a text message code. When the victim enters that code from their phone, the hacker passes it on to the bank, confirming the transfer out of their account.Over just a few years, Hutchins had taken so many small steps down the unlit tunnel of online criminality that he'd often lost sight of the lines he was crossing. But in this IM conversation with Vinny, Hutchins says, he could see that he was being asked to do something very wrong—that he would now, without a doubt, be helping thieves steal from innocent victims. And by engaging in actual financial cybercrime, he'd also be inviting law enforcement's attention in a way he never had before.Until that point, Hutchins had allowed himself to imagine that his creations might be used simply to steal access to people's Facebook accounts or to build botnets that mined cryptocurrency on people's PCs. “I never knew definitively what was happening with my code,” he says. “But now it was obvious. This would be used to steal money from people. This would be used to wipe out people's savings.”He says he refused Vinny's demand. “I'm not fucking working on a banking trojan,” he remembers writing.Vinny insisted. And he added a reminder, in what Hutchins understood as equal parts joke and threat, that he knew Hutchins' identity and address. If their business relationship ended, perhaps he would share that information with the FBI.As Hutchins tells it, he was both scared and angry at himself: He had naively shared identifying details with a partner who was turning out to be a ruthless criminal. But he held his ground and threatened to walk away. Vinny, knowing that he needed Hutchins' coding skills, seemed to back down. They reached an agreement: Hutchins would work on the revamped version of UPAS Kit, but without the web injects.As he developed that next-generation rootkit over the following months, Hutchins began attending a local community college. He developed a bond with one of his computer science professors and was surprised to discover that he actually wanted to graduate. But he strained under the load of studying while also building and maintaining Vinny's malware. His business partner now seemed deeply impatient to have their new rootkit finished, and he pinged Hutchins constantly, demanding updates. To cope, Hutchins began turning back to Silk Road, buying amphetamines on the dark web to replace his nighttime coffee binges.After nine months of all-night coding sessions, the second version of UPAS Kit was ready. But as soon as Hutchins shared the finished code with Vinny, he says, Vinny responded with a surprise revelation: He had secretly hired another coder to create the web injects that Hutchins had refused to build. With the two programmers' work combined, Vinny had everything he needed to make a fully functional banking trojan.Hutchins says he felt livid, speechless. He quickly realized he had very little leverage against Vinny. The malware was already written. And for the most part, it was Hutchins who had authored it.In that moment, all of the moral concerns and threats of punishment that Hutchins had brushed off for years suddenly caught up with him in a sobering rush. “There is no getting out of this,” he remembers thinking. “The FBI is going to turn up at my door one day with an arrest warrant. And it will be because I trusted this fucking guy.”Still, as deep as Hutchins had been reeled in by Vinny, he had a choice.Vinny wanted him to do the work of integrating the other programmer's web injects into their malware, then test the rootkit and maintain it with updates once it launched. Hutchins says he knew instinctively that he should walk away and never communicate with Vinny again. But as Hutchins tells it, Vinny seemed to have been preparing for this conversation, and he laid out an argument: Hutchins had already put in nearly nine months of work. He had already essentially built a banking rootkit that would be sold to customers, whether Hutchins liked it or not.Besides, Hutchins was still being paid on commission. If he quit now, he'd get nothing. He'd have taken all the risks, enough to be implicated in the crime, but would receive none of the rewards.As angry as he was at having fallen into Vinny's trap, Hutchins admits that he was also persuaded. So he added one more link to the yearslong chain of bad decisions that had defined his teenage life: He agreed to keep ghostwriting Vinny's banking malware.Hutchins got to work, stitching the web inject features into his rootkit and then testing the program ahead of its release. But he found now that his love of coding had evaporated. He would procrastinate for as long as possible and then submerge into daylong coding binges, overriding his fear and guilt with amphetamines.In June 2014, the rootkit was ready. Vinny began to sell their work on the cybercriminal marketplaces Exploit.in and Dark0de. Later he'd also put it up for sale on AlphaBay, a site on the dark web that had replaced Silk Road after the FBI tore the original darknet market offline.After arguments with jilted customers, Vinny had decided to rebrand and drop the UPAS label. Instead, he came up with a new moniker, a play on Zeus, one of the most notorious banking trojans in the history of cybercrime. Vinny christened his malware in the name of a cruel giant in Greek mythology, the one who had fathered Zeus and all the other vengeful gods in the pantheon of Mount Olympus: He called it Kronos.When Hutchins was 19, his family moved again, this time into an 18th-century, four-story building in Ilfracombe, a Victorian seaside resort town in another part of Devon. Hutchins settled into the basement of the house, with access to his own bathroom and a kitchen that had once been used by the house's servants. That setup allowed him to cut himself off even further from his family and the world. He was, more than ever, alone.When Kronos launched on Exploit.in, the malware was only a modest success. The largely Russian community of hackers on the site were skeptical of Vinny, who didn't speak their language and had priced the trojan at an ambitious $7,000. And like any new software, Kronos had bugs that needed fixing. Customers demanded constant updates and new features. So Hutchins was tasked with nonstop coding for the next year, now with tight deadlines and angry buyers demanding he meet them.To keep up while also trying to finish his last year of college, Hutchins ramped up his amphetamine intake sharply. He would take enough speed to reach what he describes as a state of euphoria. Only in that condition, he says, could he still enjoy his programming work and stave off his growing dread. “Every time I heard a siren, I thought it was coming for me,” he says. Vanquishing those thoughts with still more stimulants, he would stay up for days, studying and coding, and then crash into a state of anxiety and depression before sleeping for 24-hour stretches.All that slingshotting between manic highs and miserable lows took a toll on Hutchins' judgment—most notably in his interactions with another online friend he calls Randy.When Hutchins met Randy on a hacker forum called TrojanForge after the Kronos release, Randy asked Hutchins if he'd write banking malware for him. When Hutchins refused, Randy instead asked for help with some enterprise and educational apps he was trying to launch as legitimate businesses. Hutchins, seeing a way to launder his illegal earnings with legal income, agreed.Randy proved to be a generous patron. When Hutchins told him that he didn't have a MacOS machine to work on Apple apps, Randy asked for his address—which again, Hutchins provided—and shipped him a new iMac desktop as a gift. Later, he asked if Hutchins had a PlayStation console so that they could play games together online. When Hutchins said he didn't, Randy shipped him a new PS4 too.Unlike Vinny, Randy was refreshingly open about his personal life. As he and Hutchins became closer, they would call each other or even video chat, rather than interact via the faceless instant messaging Hutchins had become accustomed to. Randy impressed Hutchins by describing his philanthropic goals, how he was using his profits to fund charities like free coding education projects for kids. Hutchins sensed that much of those profits came from cybercrime. But he began to see Randy as a Robin Hood-like figure, a model he hoped to emulate someday. Randy revealed that he was based in Los Angeles, a sunny paradise where Hutchins had always dreamed of living. At some points, they even talked about moving in together, running a startup out of a house near the beach in Southern California.Randy trusted Hutchins enough that when Hutchins described his bitcoin daytrading tricks, Randy sent him more than $10,000 worth of the cryptocurrency to trade on his behalf. Hutchins had set up his own custom-coded programs that hedged his bitcoin buys with short selling, protecting his holdings against bitcoin's dramatic fluctuations. Randy asked him to manage his own funds with the same techniques.One morning in the summer of 2015, Hutchins woke up after an amphetamine bender to find that there had been an electrical outage during the night. All of his computers had powered off just as bitcoin's price crashed, erasing close to $5,000 of Randy's savings. Still near the bottom of his spasmodic cycle of drug use, Hutchins panicked.He says he found Randy online and immediately admitted to losing his money. But to make up for the loss, he made Randy an offer. Hutchins revealed that he was the secret author of a banking rootkit called Kronos. Knowing that Randy had been looking for bank fraud malware in the past, he offered Randy a free copy. Randy, always understanding, called it even.This was the first time Hutchins had divulged his work on Kronos to anyone. When he woke up the next day with a clearer head, he knew that he had made a terrible mistake. Sitting in his bedroom, he thought of all the personal information that Randy had so casually shared with him over the previous months, and he realized that he had just confided his most dangerous secret to someone whose operational security was deeply flawed. Sooner or later, Randy would be caught by law enforcement, and he would likely be just as forthcoming with the cops.Hutchins had already come to view his eventual arrest for his cybercrimes as inevitable. But now he could see the Feds' path to his door. “Shit,” Hutchins thought to himself. “This is how it ends.”ILLUSTRATION: JANELLE BARONEWhen Hutchins graduated from college in the spring of 2015, he felt it was time to give up his amphetamine habit. So he decided to quit cold turkey.At first the withdrawal symptoms simply mired him in the usual depressive low that he had experienced many times before. But one evening a few days in, while he was alone in his room watching the British teen drama Waterloo Road, he began to feel a dark sensation creep over him—what he describes as an all-encompassing sensation of “impending doom.” Intellectually, he knew he was in no physical danger. And yet, “My brain was telling me, I'm about to die,” he remembers.He told no one. Instead he just rode out the withdrawal alone, experiencing what he describes as a multiday panic attack. When Vinny demanded to know why he was behind on his Kronos work, Hutchins says he found it was easier to say he was still busy with school, rather than admit that he was caught in a well of debilitating anxiety.But as his symptoms drew on and he became even less productive over the weeks that followed, he found that his menacing business associate seemed to bother him less. After a few scoldings, Vinny left him alone. The bitcoin payments for Kronos commissions ended, and with them went the partnership that had pulled Hutchins into the darkest years of his life as a cybercriminal.For the next months, Hutchins did little more than hide in his room and recover. He played videogames and binge-watched Breaking Bad. He left his house only rarely, to swim in the ocean or join groups of storm chasers who would gather on the cliffs near Ilfracombe to watch 50- and 60-foot waves slam into the rocks. Hutchins remembers enjoying how small the waves made him feel, imagining how their raw power could kill him instantly.It took months for Hutchins' feeling of impending doom to abate, and even then it was replaced by an intermittent, deep-seated angst. As he leveled out, Hutchins began to delve back into the world of hacking. But he had lost his taste for the cybercriminal underworld. Instead, he turned back to a blog that he'd started in 2013, in the period between dropping out of secondary school and starting college.The site was called MalwareTech, which doubled as Hutchins' pen name as he began to publish a slew of posts on the technical minutiae of malware. The blog's clinical, objective analysis soon seemed to attract both blackhat and whitehat visitors. “It was kind of this neutral ground,” he says. “Both sides of the game enjoyed it.”At one point he even wrote a deep-dive analysis of web injects, the very feature of Kronos that had caused him so much anxiety. In other, more impish posts, he'd point out vulnerabilities in competitors' malware that allowed their victims' computers to be commandeered by other hackers. Soon he had an audience of more than 10,000 regular readers, and none of them seemed to know that MalwareTech's insights stemmed from an active history of writing malware himself.During his post-Kronos year of rehabilitation, Hutchins started reverse-engineering some of the largest botnets out in the wild, known as Kelihos and Necurs. But he soon went a step further, realizing he could actually join those herds of hijacked machines and analyze them for his readers from the inside. The Kelihos botnet, for instance, was designed to send commands from one victim computer to another, rather than from a central server—a peer-to-peer architecture designed to make the botnet harder to take down. But that meant Hutchins could actually code his own program that mimicked the Kelihos malware and “spoke” its language, and use it to spy on all the rest of the botnet's operations—once he had broken past all the obfuscation the botnets' designers had devised to prevent that sort of snooping.Using this steady stream of intelligence, Hutchins built a Kelihos botnet “tracker,” mapping out on a public website the hundreds of thousands of computers around the world it had ensnared. Not long after that, an entrepreneur named Salim Neino, the CEO of a small Los Angeles-based cybersecurity firm called Kryptos Logic, emailed MalwareTech to ask if the anonymous blogger might do some work for them. The firm was hoping to create a botnet tracking service, one that would alert victims if their IP addresses showed up in a collection of hacked machines like Kelihos.In fact, the company had already asked one of its employees to get inside Kelihos, but the staffer had told Neino that reverse-engineering the code would take too much time. Without realizing what he was doing, Hutchins had unraveled one of the most inscrutable botnets on the internet.Neino offered Hutchins $10,000 to build Kryptos Logic its own Kelihos tracker. Within weeks of landing that first job, Hutchins had built a tracker for a second botnet too, an even bigger, older amalgamation of hacked PCs known as Sality. After that, Kryptos Logic made Hutchins a job offer, with a six-figure annual salary. When Hutchins saw how the numbers broke down, he thought Neino must be joking. “What?” he remembers thinking. “You're going to send me this much money every month?”It was more than he had ever earned as a cybercriminal malware developer. Hutchins had come to understand, too late, the reality of the modern cybersecurity industry: For a talented hacker in a Western country, crime truly doesn't pay.In his first months at Kryptos Logic, Hutchins got inside one massive botnet after another: Necurs, Dridex, Emotet—malware networks encompassing millions of computers in total. Even when his new colleagues at Kryptos believed that a botnet was impregnable, Hutchins would surprise them by coming up with a fresh sample of the bot's code, often shared with him by a reader of his blog or supplied by an underground source. Again and again, he would deconstruct the program and—still working from his bedroom in Ilfracombe—allow the company to gain access to a new horde of zombie machines, tracking the malware's spread and alerting the hackers' victims.“When it came to botnet research, he was probably one of the best in the world at that point. By the third or fourth month, we had tracked every major botnet in the world with his help,” Neino says. “He brought us to another level.”Hutchins continued to detail his work on his MalwareTech blog and Twitter, where he began to be regarded as an elite malware-whisperer. “He's a reversing savant, when it comes down to it,” says Jake Williams, a former NSA hacker turned security consultant who chatted with MalwareTech and traded code samples with him around that time. “From a raw skill level, he's off the charts. He's comparable to some of the best I've worked with, anywhere.” Yet aside from his Kryptos Logic colleagues and a few close friends, no one knew MalwareTech's real identity. Most of his tens of thousands of followers, like Williams, recognized him only as the Persian cat with sunglasses that Hutchins used as a Twitter avatar.In the fall of 2016, a new kind of botnet appeared: A piece of malware known as Mirai had begun to infect so-called internet-of-things devices—wireless routers, digital video recorders, and security cameras—and was lashing them together into massive swarms capable of shockingly powerful DDoS attacks. Until then, the largest DDoS attacks ever seen had slammed their targets with a few hundred gigabits per second of traffic. Now victims were being hit with more like 1 terabit per second, gargantuan floods of junk traffic that could tear offline anything in their path. To make matters worse, the author of Mirai, a hacker who went by the name Anna-Senpai, posted the code for the malware on HackForums, inviting others to make their own Mirai offshoots.In September of that year, one Mirai attack hit the website of the security blogger Brian Krebs with more than 600 gigabits per second, taking his site down instantly. Soon after, the French hosting company OVH buckled under a 1.1-terabit-per-second torrent. In October, another wave hit Dyn, a provider of the domain-name-system servers that act as a kind of phone book for the internet, translating domain names into IP addresses. When Dyn went down, so did Amazon, Spotify, Netflix, PayPal, and Reddit for users across parts of North America and Europe. Around the same time, a Mirai attack hit the main telecom provider for much of Liberia, knocking most of the country off the internet.Hutchins, always a storm chaser, began to track Mirai's tsunamis. With a Kryptos Logic colleague, he dug up samples of Mirai's code and used them to create programs that infiltrated the splintered Mirai botnets, intercepting their commands and creating a Twitter feed that posted news of their attacks in real time. Then, in January 2017, the same Mirai botnet that hit Liberia began to rain down cyberattacks on Lloyds, the largest bank in the UK, in an apparent extortion campaign that took the bank's website down multiple times over a series of days.Thanks to his Mirai tracker, Hutchins could see which server was sending out the commands to train the botnet's firepower on Lloyds; it appeared that the machine was being used to run a DDoS-for-hire service. And on that server, he discovered contact information for the hacker who was administering it. Hutchins quickly found him on the instant messaging service Jabber, using the name “popopret.”So he asked the hacker to stop. He told popopret he knew that he wasn't directly responsible for the attack on Lloyds himself, that he was only selling access to his Mirai botnet. Then he sent him a series of messages that included Twitter posts from Lloyds customers who had been locked out of their accounts, some of whom were stuck in foreign countries without money. He also pointed out that banks were designated as critical infrastructure in the UK, and that meant British intelligence services were likely to track down the botnet administrator if the attacks continued.The DDoS attacks on the banks ended. More than a year later, Hutchins would recount the story on his Twitter feed, noting that he wasn't surprised the hacker had ultimately listened to reason. In his tweets, Hutchins offered a rare hint of his own secret past—he knew what it was like to sit behind a keyboard, detached from the pain inflicted on innocents far across the internet.“In my career I've found few people are truly evil, most are just too far disconnected from the effects of their actions,” he wrote. “Until someone reconnects them.”Around noon on May 12, 2017, just as Hutchins was starting a rare week of vacation, Henry Jones was sitting 200 miles to the east amid a cluster of a half-dozen PCs in an administrative room at the Royal London Hospital, a major surgical and trauma center in northeast London, when he saw the first signs that something was going very wrong.Jones, a young anesthesiologist who asked that WIRED not use his real name, was finishing a lunch of chicken curry and chips from the hospital cafeteria, trying to check his email before he was called back into surgery, where he was trading shifts with a more senior colleague. But he couldn't log in; the email system seemed to be down. He shared a brief collective grumble with the other doctors in the room, who were all accustomed to computer problems across the National Health Service; after all, their PCs were still running Windows XP, a nearly 20-year-old operating system. “Another day at the Royal London,” he remembers thinking.But just then, an IT administrator came into the room and told the staff that something more unusual was going on: A virus seemed to be spreading across the hospital's network. One of the PCs in the room had rebooted, and now Jones could see that it showed a red screen with a lock in the upper left corner. “Ooops, your files have been encrypted!” it read. At the bottom of the screen, it demanded a $300 payment in bitcoin to unlock the machine.Jones had no time to puzzle over the message before he was called back into the surgical theater. He scrubbed, put on his mask and gloves, and reentered the operating room, where surgeons were just finishing an orthopedic procedure. Now it was Jones' job to wake the patient up again. He began to slowly turn a dial that tapered off the sevoflurane vapor feeding into the patient's lungs, trying to time the process exactly so that the patient wouldn't wake up before he'd had a chance to remove the breathing tube, but wouldn't stay out long enough to delay their next surgery.As he focused on that task, he could hear the surgeons and nurses expressing dismay as they tried to record notes on the surgery's outcome: The operating room's desktop PC seemed to be dead.Jones finished rousing the patient and scrubbed out. But when he got into the hallway, the manager of the surgical theater intercepted him and told him that all of his cases for the rest of the day had been canceled. A cyberattack had hit not only the whole hospital's network but the entire trust, a collection of five hospitals across East London. All of their computers were down.Jones felt shocked and vaguely outraged. Was this a coordinated cyberattack on multiple NHS hospitals? With no patients to see, he spent the next hours at loose ends, helping the IT staff unplug computers around the Royal London. But it wasn't until he began to follow the news on his iPhone that he learned the full scale of the damage: It wasn't a targeted attack but an automated worm spreading across the internet. Within hours, it hit more than 600 doctor's offices and clinics, leading to 20,000 canceled appointments, and wiped machines at dozens of hospitals. Across those facilities, surgeries were being canceled, and ambulances were being diverted from emergency rooms, sometimes forcing patients with life-threatening conditions to wait crucial minutes or hours longer for care. Jones came to a grim realization: “People may have died as a result of this.”Cybersecurity researchers named the worm WannaCry, after the .wncry extension it added to file names after encrypting them. As it paralyzed machines and demanded its bitcoin ransom, WannaCry was jumping from one machine to the next using a powerful piece of code called EternalBlue, which had been stolen from the National Security Agency by a group of hackers known as the Shadow Brokers and leaked onto the open internet a month earlier. It instantly allowed a hacker to penetrate and run hostile code on any unpatched Windows computer—a set of potential targets that likely numbered in the millions. And now that the NSA's highly sophisticated spy tool had been weaponized, it seemed bound to create a global ransomware pandemic within hours.“It was the cyber equivalent of watching the moments before a car crash,” says one cybersecurity analyst who worked for British Telecom at the time and was tasked with incident response for the NHS. “We knew that, in terms of the impact on people's lives, this was going to be like nothing we had ever seen before.”As the worm spread around the world, it infected the German railway firm Deutsche Bahn, Sberbank in Russia, automakers Renault, Nissan, and Honda, universities in China, police departments in India, the Spanish telecom firm Telefónica, FedEx, and Boeing. In the space of an afternoon, it destroyed, by some estimates, nearly a quarter-million computers' data, inflicting between $4 billion and $8 billion in damage.Wannacry seemed poised to spread to the US health care system. "If this happens en masse, how many people die?" Corman remembers thinking. "Our worst nightmare seemed to be coming true."For those watching WannaCry's proliferation, it seemed there was still more pain to come. Josh Corman, at the time a cybersecurity-focused fellow for the Atlantic Council, remembers joining a call on the afternoon of May 12 with representatives from the US Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Health and Human Services, the pharmaceutical firm Merck, and executives from American hospitals. The group, known as the Healthcare Cybersecurity Industry Taskforce, had just finished an analysis that detailed a serious lack of IT security personnel in American hospitals. Now WannaCry seemed poised to spread to the US health care system, and Corman feared the results would be far worse than they had been for the NHS. “If this happens en masse, how many people die?” he remembers thinking. “Our worst nightmare seemed to be coming true.”At around 2:30 on that Friday afternoon, Marcus Hutchins returned from picking up lunch at his local fish-and-chips shop in Ilfracombe, sat down in front of his computer, and discovered that the internet was on fire. “I picked a hell of a fucking week to take off work,” Hutchins wrote on Twitter.Within minutes, a hacker friend who went by the name Kafeine sent Hutchins a copy of WannaCry's code, and Hutchins began trying to dissect it, with his lunch still sitting in front of him. First, he spun up a simulated computer on a server that he ran in his bedroom, complete with fake files for the ransomware to encrypt, and ran the program in that quarantined test environment. He immediately noticed that before encrypting the decoy files, the malware sent out a query to a certain, very random-looking web address: iuqerfsodp9ifjaposdfjhgosurijfaewrwergwea.com.That struck Hutchins as significant, if not unusual: When a piece of malware pinged back to this sort of domain, that usually meant it was communicating with a command-and-control server somewhere that might be giving the infected computer instructions. Hutchins copied that long website string into his web browser and found, to his surprise, that no such site existed.So he visited the domain registrar Namecheap and, at four seconds past 3:08 pm, registered that unattractive web address at a cost of $10.69. Hutchins hoped that in doing so, he might be able to steal control of some part of WannaCry's horde of victim computers away from the malware's creators. Or at least he might gain a tool to monitor the number and location of infected machines, a move that malware analysts call “sinkholing.”Sure enough, as soon as Hutchins set up that domain on a cluster of servers hosted by his employer, Kryptos Logic, it was bombarded with thousands of connections from every new computer that was being infected by WannaCry around the world. Hutchins could now see the enormous, global scale of the attack firsthand. And as he tweeted about his work, he began to be flooded with hundreds of emails from other researchers, journalists, and system administrators trying to learn more about the plague devouring the world's networks. With his sinkhole domain, Hutchins was now suddenly pulling in information about those infections that no one else on the planet possessed.For the next four hours, he responded to those emails and worked frantically to debug a map he was building to track the new infections popping up globally, just as he had done with Kelihos, Necurs, and so many other botnets. At 6:30 pm, around three and a half hours after Hutchins had registered the domain, his hacker friend Kafeine sent him a tweet posted by another security researcher, Darien Huss.The tweet put forward a simple, terse statement that shocked Hutchins: “Execution fails now that domain has been sinkholed.”In other words, since Hutchins' domain had first appeared online, WannaCry's new infections had continued to spread, but they hadn't actually done any new damage. The worm seemed to be neutralized.Huss' tweet included a snippet of WannaCry's code that he'd reverse-engineered. The code's logic showed that before encrypting any files, the malware first checked if it could reach Hutchins' web address. If not, it went ahead with corrupting the computer's contents. If it did reach that address, it simply stopped in its tracks. (Malware analysts still debate what the purpose of that feature was—whether it was intended as an antivirus evasion technique or a safeguard built into the worm by its author.)Hutchins hadn't found the malware's command-and-control address. He'd found its kill switch. The domain he'd registered was a way to simply, instantly turn off WannaCry's mayhem around the world. It was as if he had fired two proton torpedoes through the Death Star's exhaust port and into its reactor core, blown it up, and saved the galaxy, all without understanding what he was doing or even noticing the explosion for three and a half hours.When Hutchins grasped what he'd done, he leaped up from his chair and jumped around his bedroom, overtaken with joy. Then he did something equally unusual: He went upstairs to tell his family.Janet Hutchins had the day off from her job as a nurse at a local hospital. She had been in town catching up with friends and had just gotten home and started making dinner. So she had only the slightest sense of the crisis that her colleagues had been dealing with across the NHS. That's when her son came upstairs and told her, a little uncertainly, that he seemed to have stopped the worst malware attack the world had ever seen.“Well done, sweetheart,” Janet Hutchins said. Then she went back to chopping onions.ILLUSTRATION: JANELLE BARONEIt took a few hours longer for Hutchins and his colleagues at Kryptos Logic to understand that WannaCry was still a threat. In fact, the domain that Hutchins had registered was still being bombarded with connections from WannaCry-infected computers all over the globe as the remnants of the neutered worm continued to spread: It would receive nearly 1 million connections over the next two days. If their web domain went offline, every computer that attempted to reach the domain and failed would have its contents encrypted, and WannaCry's wave of destruction would begin again. “If this goes down, WannaCry restarts,” Hutchins' boss, Salim Neino, remembers realizing. “Within 24 hours, it would have hit every vulnerable computer in the world.”Almost immediately, the problem grew: The next morning, Hutchins noticed a new flood of pings mixed into the WannaCry traffic hitting their sinkhole. He quickly realized that one of the Mirai botnets that he and his Kryptos colleagues had monitored was now slamming the domain with a DDoS attack—perhaps as an act of revenge for their work tracking Mirai, or simply out of a nihilistic desire to watch WannaCry burn down the internet. “It was like we were Atlas, holding up the world on our shoulders,” Neino says. “And now someone was kicking Atlas in the back at the same time.”For days afterward, the attacks swelled in size, threatening to bring down the sinkhole domain. Kryptos scrambled to filter and absorb the traffic, spreading the load over a collection of servers in Amazon data centers and the French hosting firm OVH. But they got another surprise a few days later, when local police in the French city of Roubaix, mistakenly believing that their sinkhole domain was being used by the cybercriminals behind WannaCry, physically seized two of their servers from the OVH data center. For a week, Hutchins slept no more than three consecutive hours as he struggled to counter the shifting attacks and keep the WannaCry kill switch intact.Meanwhile, the press was chipping away at Hutchins' carefully maintained anonymity. On a Sunday morning two days after WannaCry broke out, a local reporter showed up at the Hutchins' front door in Ilfracombe. The reporter's daughter had gone to school with Hutchins, and she recognized him in a Facebook photo that named him in its caption as MalwareTech.Soon more journalists were ringing the doorbell, setting up in the parking lot across the street from their house, and calling so often that his family stopped answering the phone. British tabloids began to run headlines about the “accidental hero” who had saved the world from his bedroom. Hutchins had to jump over his backyard's wall to avoid the reporters staking out his front door. To defuse the media's appetite, he agreed to give one interview to the Associated Press, during which he was so nervous that he misspelled his last name and the newswire had to run a correction.In those chaotic first days, Hutchins was constantly on edge, expecting another version of WannaCry to strike; after all, the hackers behind the worm could easily tweak it to remove its kill switch and unleash a sequel. But no such mutation occurred. After a few days, Britain's National Cybersecurity Center reached out to Amazon on Kryptos' behalf and helped the firm negotiate unlimited server capacity in its data centers. Then, after a week, the DDoS mitigation firm Cloudflare stepped in to offer its services, absorbing as much traffic as any botnet could throw at the kill-switch domain and ending the standoff.When the worst of the danger was over, Neino was concerned enough for Hutchins' well-being that he tied part of his employee's bonus to forcing him to get some rest. When Hutchins finally went to bed, a week after WannaCry struck, he was paid more than $1,000 for every hour of sleep.As uncomfortable as the spotlight made Hutchins, his newfound fame came with some rewards. He gained 100,000 Twitter followers virtually overnight. Strangers recognized him and bought him drinks in the local pub to thank him for saving the internet. A local restaurant offered him free pizza for a year. His parents, it seemed, finally understood what he did for a living and were deeply proud of him.But only at Defcon, the annual 30,000-person Las Vegas hacker conference that took place nearly three months after WannaCry hit, did Hutchins truly allow himself to enjoy his new rock star status in the cybersecurity world. In part to avoid the fans who constantly asked for selfies with him, he and a group of friends rented a real estate mogul's mansion off the strip via Airbnb, with hundreds of palm trees surrounding the largest private pool in the city. They skipped the conference itself, with its hordes of hackers lining up for research talks. Instead they alternated between debaucherous partying—making ample use of the city's marijuana dispensaries and cybersecurity firms' lavish open-bar events—and absurd daytime acts of recreation.One day they went to a shooting range, where Hutchins fired a grenade launcher and hundreds of high-caliber rounds from an M134 rotary machine gun. On other days they rented Lamborghinis and Corvettes and zoomed down Las Vegas Boulevard and through the canyons around the city. At a performance by one of Hutchins' favorite bands, the Chainsmokers, he stripped down to his underwear and jumped into a pool in front of the stage. Someone stole his wallet out of the pants he'd left behind. He was too elated to care.Three years had passed since Hutchins' work on Kronos, and life was good. He felt like a different person. And as his star rose, he finally allowed himself—almost—to let go of the low-lying dread, the constant fear that his crimes would catch up with him.Then, on his last morning in Vegas, Hutchins stepped barefoot onto the driveway of his rented mansion and saw a black SUV parked across the street.Almost immediately, Hutchins gave his FBI interrogators a kind of half-confession. Minutes after the two agents brought up Kronos in the McCarran Airport interrogation room, he admitted to having created parts of the malware, though he falsely claimed to have stopped working on it before he turned 18. Some part of him, he says, still hoped that the agents might just be trying to assess his credibility as a witness in their WannaCry investigation or to strong-arm him into giving them control of the WannaCry sinkhole domain. He nervously answered their questions—without a lawyer present.His wishful thinking evaporated, however, when the agents showed him a printout: It was the transcript of his conversation with “Randy” from three years earlier, when 20-year-old Hutchins had offered his friend a copy of the banking malware he was still maintaining at the time.As his star rose, he finally allowed himself—almost—to let go of the low-lying dread, the constant fear that his crimes would catch up with him.Finally, the red-headed agent who had first handcuffed him, Lee Chartier, made the agents' purpose clear. “If I'm being honest with you, Marcus, this has absolutely nothing to do with WannaCry,” Chartier said. The agents pulled out a warrant for his arrest on conspiracy to commit computer fraud and abuse.Hutchins was driven to a Las Vegas jail in a black FBI SUV that looked exactly like the one he'd spotted in front of his Airbnb that morning. He was allowed one phone call, which he used to contact his boss, Salim Neino. Then he was handcuffed to a chair in a room full of prisoners and left to wait for the rest of the day and the entire night that followed. Only when he asked to use the bathroom was he let into a cell where he could lie down on a concrete bed until someone else asked to use the cell's toilet. Then he'd be moved out of the cell and chained to the chair again.Instead of sleep, he mostly spent those long hours tumbling down the bottomless mental hole of his imagined future: months of pretrial detention followed by years in prison. He was 5,000 miles from home. It was the loneliest night of his 23-year-old life.Unbeknownst to Hutchins, however, a kind of immune response was already mounting within the hacker community. After receiving the call from jail, Neino had alerted Andrew Mabbitt, one of Hutchins' hacker friends in Las Vegas; Mabbitt leaked the news to a reporter at Vice and raised the alarm on Twitter. Immediately, high-profile accounts began to take up Hutchins' cause, rallying around the martyred hacker hero.“The DoJ has seriously fucked up,” tweeted one prominent British cybersecurity researcher, Kevin Beaumont. “I can vouch for @MalwareTechBlog being a really nice guy and also for having strong ethics,” wrote Martijn Grooten, the organizer of the Virus Bulletin cybersecurity conference, using Hutchins' Twitter handle. Some believed that the FBI had mistakenly arrested Hutchins for his WannaCry work, perhaps confusing him with the hackers behind the worm: “It's not often I see the entire hacker community really get this angry, but arresting @MalwareTechBlog for stopping an attack [is] unacceptable,” wrote Australian cypherpunk activist Asher Wolf.Not everyone was supportive of Hutchins: Ex-NSA hacker Dave Aitel went so far as to write in a blog post that he suspected Hutchins had created WannaCry himself and triggered his own kill switch only after the worm got out of control. (That theory would be deflated eight months later, when the Justice Department indicted a North Korean hacker as an alleged member of a state-sponsored hacking team responsible for WannaCry.) But the overwhelming response to Hutchins' arrest was sympathetic. By the next day, the representative for Hutchins' region in the UK parliament, Peter Heaton-Jones, issued a statement expressing his “concern and shock,” lauding Hutchins' work on WannaCry and noting that “people who know him in Ilfracombe, and the wider cyber community, are astounded at the allegations against him.”Mabbitt found Hutchins a local attorney for his bail hearing, and after Hutchins spent a miserable day in a crowded cage, his bail was set at $30,000. Stripped of his computers and phones, Hutchins couldn't get access to his bank accounts to cover that cost. So Tor Ekeland, a renowned hacker defense attorney, agreed to manage a legal fund in Hutchins' name to help cover the bond. Money poured in. Almost immediately, stolen credit cards began to show up among the sources of donations, hardly a good look for a computer fraud defendant. Ekeland responded by pulling the plug, returning all the donations and closing the fund.But the hacker community's goodwill toward Hutchins hadn't run out. On the day he was arrested, a pair of well-known cybersecurity professionals named Tarah Wheeler and Deviant Ollam had flown back to Seattle from Las Vegas. By that Sunday evening, the recently married couple were talking to Hutchins' friend Mabbitt and learning about the troubles with Hutchins' legal fund.Wheeler and Ollam had never met Hutchins and had barely even interacted with him on Twitter. But they had watched the Justice Department railroad idealistic young hackers for years, from Aaron Swartz to Chelsea Manning, often with tragic consequences. They imagined Hutchins, alone in the federal justice system, facing a similar fate. “We basically had a young, foreign, nerdy person of color being held in federal detention,” Wheeler says. “He was the closest thing to a global hero the hacker community had. And no one was there to help him.”Wheeler had just received a five-figure severance package from the security giant Symantec because her division had been shuttered. She and Ollam had been planning to use the money as a down payment on a home. Instead, on a whim, they decided to spend it bailing out Marcus Hutchins.Within 24 hours of leaving Las Vegas, they got on a flight back to the city. They landed on Monday afternoon, less than 90 minutes before the courthouse's 4 pm deadline for bail payments. If they didn't make it in time, Hutchins would be sent back to jail for another night. From the airport, they jumped in a Lyft to a bank where they took out a $30,000 cashier's check. But when they arrived at the courthouse, a court official told them it had to be notarized. Now they had only 20 minutes left until the court's office closed.Wheeler was wearing Gucci loafers. She took them off and, barefoot in a black sweater and pencil skirt, sprinted down the street in the middle of a scorching Las Vegas summer afternoon, arriving at the notary less than 10 minutes before 4 pm. Soaked in sweat, she got the check notarized, flagged down a stranger's car, and convinced the driver to ferry her back to the courthouse. Wheeler burst through the door at 4:02 pm, just before the clerk closed up for the day, and handed him the check that would spring Marcus Hutchins from jail.Illustration: Janelle BaroneFrom there, Hutchins was bailed to a crowded halfway house, while even more forces in the hacker community were gathering to come to his aid. Two well-known veteran lawyers, Brian Klein and hacker defense attorney Marcia Hofmann, took his case pro bono. At his arraignment he pleaded not guilty, and a judge agreed that he could be put under house arrest in Los Angeles, where Klein had an office. Over the next two months, his lawyers chipped away at his pretrial detainment conditions, allowing him to travel beyond his Marina del Rey apartment and to use computers and the internet—though the court forbade him access to the WannaCry sinkhole domain he had created. Eventually, even his curfew and GPS monitoring ankle bracelet were removed.Hutchins got the news that those last pretrial restrictions were being lifted while attending a bonfire party on the beach with friendly hackers from the LA cybersecurity conference Shellcon. Somehow, getting indicted for years-old cybercrimes on a two-week trip to the US had delivered him to the city where he'd always dreamed of living, with relatively few limits on his freedom of movement. Kryptos Logic had put him on unpaid leave, so he spent his days surfing and cycling down the long seaside path that ran from his apartment to Malibu.And yet he was deeply depressed. He had no income, his savings were dwindling, and he had charges hanging over him that promised years in prison.Beyond all of that, he was tormented by the truth: Despite all the talk of his heroics, he knew that he had, in fact, done exactly what he was accused of. A feeling of overwhelming guilt had set in the moment he first regained access to the internet and checked his Twitter mentions a month after his arrest. “All of these people are writing to the FBI to say ‘you've got the wrong guy.’ And it was heartbreaking,” Hutchins says. “The guilt from this was a thousand times the guilt I'd felt for Kronos.” He says he was tempted to publish a full confession on his blog, but was dissuaded by his lawyers.Many supporters had interpreted his not-guilty plea as a statement of innocence rather than a negotiating tactic, and they donated tens of thousands of dollars more to a new legal fund. Former NSA hacker Jake Williams had agreed to serve as an expert witness on Hutchins' behalf. Tarah Wheeler and Deviant Ollam had become almost foster parents, flying with him to Milwaukee for his arraignment and helping him get his life set up in LA. He felt he deserved none of this—that everyone had come to his aid only under the mistaken assumption of his innocence.In fact, much of the support for Hutchins was more nuanced. Just a month after his arrest, cybersecurity blogger Brian Krebs delved into Hutchins' past and found the chain of clues that led to his old posts on HackForums, revealing that he had run an illegal hosting service, maintained a botnet, and authored malware—though not necessarily Kronos. Even as the truth started to come into focus, though, many of Hutchins' fans and friends seemed undeterred in their support for him. “We are all morally complex people,” Wheeler says. “For most of us, anything good we ever do comes either because we did bad before or because other people did good to get us out of it, or both.”But Hutchins remained tortured by a kind of moral impostor syndrome. He turned to alcohol and drugs, effacing his emotions with large doses of Adderall during the day and vodka at night. At times, he felt suicidal. The guilt, he says, “was eating me alive.”In the spring of 2018, nearly nine months after his arrest, prosecutors offered Hutchins a deal. If he agreed to reveal everything he knew about the identities of other criminal hackers and malware authors from his time in the underworld, they would recommend a sentence of no prison time.Hutchins hesitated. He says he didn't actually know anything about the identity of Vinny, the prosecutors' real target. But he also says that, on principle, he opposed snitching on the petty crimes of his fellow hackers to dodge the consequences of his own actions. Moreover, the deal would still result in a felony record that might prevent him from ever returning to the US. And he knew that the judge in his case, Joseph Stadtmueller, had a history of unpredictable sentencing, sometimes going well below or above the recommendations of prosecutors. So Hutchins refused the deal and set his sights on a trial.Soon afterward, prosecutors hit back with a superseding indictment, a new set of charges that brought the total to 10, including making false statements to the FBI in his initial interrogation. Hutchins and his lawyers saw the response as a strong-arm tactic, punishing Hutchins for refusing to accept their offer of a deal.After losing a series of motions—including one to dismiss his Las Vegas airport confession as evidence—Hutchins finally accepted a plea bargain in April 2019. This new deal was arguably riskier than the one he'd been offered earlier: After nearly a year and a half of wrangling with prosecutors, they now agreed only to make no recommendation for sentencing. Hutchins would plead guilty to two of the 10 charges, and would face as much as 10 years in prison and a half-million-dollar fine, entirely up to the judge's discretion.Along with his plea, Hutchins finally offered a public confession on his website—not the full, guts-spilling one he wanted, but a brief, lawyerly statement his attorneys had approved. “I've pleaded guilty to two charges related to writing malware in the years prior to my career in security,” he wrote. “I regret these actions and accept full responsibility for my mistakes.”Then he followed up with a more earnest tweet, intended to dispel an easy story to tell about his past immorality: that the sort of whitehat work he'd done was only possible because of his blackhat education—that a hacker's bad actions should be seen as instrumental to his or her later good deeds.“There's [a] misconception that to be a security expert you must dabble in the dark side,” Hutchins wrote. “It's not true. You can learn everything you need to know legally. Stick to the good side.”Illustration: Janelle BaroneOn a warm day in July, Hutchins arrived at a Milwaukee courthouse for his sentencing. Wearing a gray suit, he slipped in two hours early to avoid any press. As he waited with his lawyers in a briefing room, his vision tunneled; he felt that familiar sensation of impending doom begin to creep over him, the one that had loomed periodically at the back of his mind since he first went through amphetamine withdrawal five years earlier. This time, his anxiety wasn't irrational: The rest of his life was, in fact, hanging in the balance. He took a small dose of Xanax and walked through the halls to calm his nerves before the hearing was called to order.When Judge Stadtmueller entered the court and sat, the 77-year-old seemed shaky, Hutchins remembers, and he spoke in a gravelly, quavering voice. Hutchins still saw Stadtmueller as a wild card: He knew that the judge had presided over only one previous cybercrime sentencing in his career, 20 years earlier. How would he decipher a case as complicated as this one?But Hutchins remembers feeling his unease evaporate as Stadtmueller began a long soliloquy. It was replaced by a sense of awe.Stadtmueller began, almost as if reminiscing to himself, by reminding Hutchins that he had been a judge for more than three decades. In that time, he said, he had sentenced 2,200 people. But none were quite like Hutchins. “We see all sides of the human existence, both young, old, career criminals, those like yourself,” Stadtmueller began. “And I appreciate the fact that one might view the ignoble conduct that underlies this case as against the backdrop of what some have described as the work of a hero, a true hero. And that is, at the end of the day, what gives this case in particular its incredible uniqueness.”The judge quickly made clear that he saw Hutchins as not just a convicted criminal but as a cybersecurity expert who had “turned the corner” long before he faced justice. Stadtmueller seemed to be weighing the deterrent value of imprisoning Hutchins against the young hacker's genius at fending off malevolent code like WannaCry. “If we don't take the appropriate steps to protect the security of these wonderful technologies that we rely upon each and every day, it has all the potential, as your parents know from your mom's work, to raise incredible havoc,” Stadtmueller said, referring obliquely to Janet Hutchins' job with the NHS. “It's going to take individuals like yourself, who have the skill set, even at the tender age of 24 or 25, to come up with solutions.” The judge even argued that Hutchins might deserve a full pardon, though the court had no power to grant one.Then Stadtmueller delivered his conclusion: “There are just too many positives on the other side of the ledger,” he said. “The final call in the case of Marcus Hutchins today is a sentence of time served, with a one-year period of supervised release.”Hutchins could hardly believe what he'd just heard: The judge had weighed his good deeds against his bad ones and decided that his moral debt was canceled. After a few more formalities, the gavel dropped. Hutchins hugged his lawyers and his mother, who had flown in for the hearing. He left the courtroom and paid a $200 administrative fee. And then he walked out onto the street, almost two years since he had first been arrested, a free man.After five months of long phone calls, I arranged to meet Marcus Hutchins in person for the first time at a Starbucks in Venice Beach. I spot his towering mushroom cloud of curls while he's still on the crowded sidewalk. He walks through the door with a broad smile. But I can see that he's still battling an undercurrent of anxiety. He declines a coffee, complaining that he hasn't been sleeping more than a few hours a night.We walk for the next hours along the beach and the sunny backstreets of Venice, as Hutchins fills in some of the last remaining gaps in his life story. On the boardwalk, he stops periodically to admire the skaters and street performers. This is Hutchins' favorite part of Los Angeles, and he seems to be savoring a last look at it. Despite his sentence of time served, his legal case forced him to overstay his visa, and he's soon likely to be deported back to England. As we walk into Santa Monica, past rows of expensive beach homes, he says his goal is to eventually get back here to LA, which now feels more like home than Devon. “Someday I'd like to be able to live in a house by the ocean like this,” he says, “Where I can look out the window and if the waves are good, go right out and surf.”Despite his case's relatively happy ending, Hutchins says he still hasn't been able to shake the lingering feelings of guilt and impending punishment that have hung over his life for years. It still pains him to think of his debt to all the unwitting people who helped him, who donated to his legal fund and defended him, when all he wanted to do was confess.I point out that perhaps this, now, is that confession. That he's cataloged his deeds and misdeeds over more than 12 hours of interviews; when the results are published—and people reach the end of this article—that account will finally be out in the open. Hutchins' fans and critics alike will see his life laid bare and, like Stadtmueller in his courtroom, they will come to a verdict. Maybe they too will judge him worthy of redemption. And maybe it will give him some closure.He seems to consider this. “I had hoped it would, but I don't really think so anymore,” he says, looking down at the sidewalk. He's come to believe, he explains, that the only way to earn redemption would be to go back and stop all those people from helping him—making sacrifices for him—under false pretenses. “The time when I could have prevented people from doing all that for me has passed.”His motives for confessing are different now, he says. He's told his story less to seek forgiveness than simply to have it told. To put the weight of all those feats and secrets, on both sides of the moral scale, behind him. And to get back to work. “I don't want to be the WannaCry guy or the Kronos guy,” he says, looking toward the Malibu hills. “I just want to be someone who can help make things better.”Update 5/12/20, 6:25pm ET: This story has been updated to clarify that Lloyds Banking Group was targeted in a 2017 cyberattack, not Lloyd's of London as previously stated. In addition, the story's description of Hutchins' attorneys' legal advice has been clarified.Let us know what you think about this article. Submit a letter to the editor at mail@wired.com. The Confessions of Marcus Hutchins, the Hacker Who Saved the Internet At around 7 am on a quiet Wednesday in August 2017, Marcus Hutchins walked out the front door of the Airbnb mansion in Las Vegas where he had been partying for the past week and a half. A gangly, 6'4", 23-year-old hacker with an explosion of blond-brown curls, Hutchins had emerged to retrieve his order of a Big Mac and fries from an Uber Eats deliveryman. But as he stood barefoot on the mansion's driveway wearing only a T-shirt and jeans, Hutchins noticed a black SUV parked on the street—one that looked very much like an FBI stakeout. He stared at the vehicle blankly, his mind still hazed from sleep deprivation and stoned from the legalized Nevada weed he'd been smoking all night. For a fleeting moment, he wondered: Is this finally it? But as soon as the thought surfaced, he dismissed it. The FBI would never be so obvious, he told himself. His feet had begun to scald on the griddle of the driveway. So he grabbed the McDonald's bag and headed back inside, through the mansion's courtyard, and into the pool house he'd been using as a bedroom. With the specter of the SUV fully exorcised from his mind, he rolled another spliff with the last of his weed, smoked it as he ate his burger, and then packed his bags for the airport, where he was scheduled for a first-class flight home to the UK. Hutchins was coming off of an epic, exhausting week at Defcon, one of the world's largest hacker conferences, where he had been celebrated as a hero. Less than three months earlier, Hutchins had saved the internet from what was, at the time, the worst cyberattack in history: a piece of malware called WannaCry. Just as that self-propagating software had begun exploding across the planet, destroying data on hundreds of thousands of computers, it was Hutchins who had found and triggered the secret kill switch contained in its code, neutering WannaCry's global threat immediately. This legendary feat of whitehat hacking had essentially earned Hutchins free drinks for life among the Defcon crowd. He and his entourage had been invited to every VIP hacker party on the strip, taken out to dinner by journalists, and accosted by fans seeking selfies. The story, after all, was irresistible: Hutchins was the shy geek who had single-handedly slain a monster threatening the entire digital world, all while sitting in front of a keyboard in a bedroom in his parents' house in remote western England. Still reeling from the whirlwind of adulation, Hutchins was in no state to dwell on concerns about the FBI, even after he emerged from the mansion a few hours later and once again saw the same black SUV parked across the street. He hopped into an Uber to the airport, his mind still floating through a cannabis-induced cloud. Court documents would later reveal that the SUV followed him along the way—that law enforcement had, in fact, been tracking his location periodically throughout his time in Vegas. When Hutchins arrived at the airport and made his way through the security checkpoint, he was surprised when TSA agents told him not to bother taking any of his three laptops out of his backpack before putting it through the scanner. Instead, as they waved him through, he remembers thinking that they seemed to be making a special effort not to delay him. He wandered leisurely to an airport lounge, grabbed a Coke, and settled into an armchair. He was still hours early for his flight back to the UK, so he killed time posting from his phone to Twitter, writing how excited he was to get back to his job analyzing malware when he got home. “Haven't touched a debugger in over a month now,” he tweeted. He humblebragged about some very expensive shoes his boss had bought him in Vegas and retweeted a compliment from a fan of his reverse-engineering work. Hutchins was composing another tweet when he noticed that three men had walked up to him, a burly redhead with a goatee flanked by two others in Customs and Border Protection uniforms. “Are you Marcus Hutchins?” asked the red-haired man. When Hutchins confirmed that he was, the man asked in a neutral tone for Hutchins to come with them, and led him through a door into a private stairwell. Then they put him in handcuffs. In a state of shock, feeling as if he were watching himself from a distance, Hutchins asked what was going on. “We'll get to that,” the man said. Hutchins remembers mentally racing through every possible illegal thing he'd done that might have interested Customs. Surely, he thought, it couldn't be the thing, that years-old, unmentionable crime. Was it that he might have left marijuana in his bag? Were these bored agents overreacting to petty drug possession? The agents walked him through a security area full of monitors and then sat him down in an interrogation room, where they left him alone. When the red-headed man returned, he was accompanied by a small blonde woman. The two agents flashed their badges: They were with the FBI. For the next few minutes, the agents struck a friendly tone, asking Hutchins about his education and Kryptos Logic, the security firm where he worked. For those minutes, Hutchins allowed himself to believe that perhaps the agents wanted only to learn more about his work on WannaCry, that this was just a particularly aggressive way to get his cooperation into their investigation of that world-shaking cyberattack. Then, 11 minutes into the interview, his interrogators asked him about a program called Kronos. “Kronos,” Hutchins said. “I know that name.” And it began to dawn on him, with a sort of numbness, that he was not going home after all. Fourteen years earlier, long before Marcus Hutchins was a hero or villain to anyone, his parents, Janet and Desmond, settled into a stone house on a cattle farm in remote Devon, just a few minutes from the west coast of England. Janet was a nurse, born in Scotland. Desmond was a social worker from Jamaica who had been a firefighter when he first met Janet in a nightclub in 1986. They had moved from Bracknell, a commuter town 30 miles outside of London, looking for a place where their sons, 9-year-old Marcus and his 7-year-old brother, could grow up with more innocence than life in London's orbit could offer. At first the farm offered exactly the idyll they were seeking: The two boys spent their days romping among the cows, watching farmhands milk them and deliver their calves. They built tree houses and trebuchets out of spare pieces of wood and rode in the tractor of the farmer who had rented their house to them. Hutchins was a bright and happy child, open to friendships but stoic and “self-contained,” as his father, Desmond, puts it, with “a very strong sense of right and wrong.” When he fell and broke his wrist while playing, he didn't shed a single tear, his father says. But when the farmer put down a lame, brain-damaged calf that Hutchins had bonded with, he cried inconsolably. Hutchins didn't always fit in with the other kids in rural Devon. He was taller than the other boys, and he lacked the usual English obsession with soccer; he came to prefer surfing in the freezing waters a few miles from his house instead. He was one of only a few mixed-race children at his school, and he refused to cut his trademark mop of curly hair. But above all, what distinguished Hutchins from everyone around him was his preternatural fascination and facility with computers. From the age of 6, Hutchins had watched his mother use Windows 95 on the family's Dell tower desktop. His father was often annoyed to find him dismantling the family PC or filling it with strange programs. By the time they moved to Devon, Hutchins had begun to be curious about the inscrutable HTML characters behind the websites he visited, and was coding rudimentary “Hello world” scripts in Basic. He soon came to see programming as “a gateway to build whatever you wanted,” as he puts it, far more exciting than even the wooden forts and catapults he built with his brother. “There were no limits,” he says. In computer class, where his peers were still learning to use word processors, Hutchins was miserably bored. The school's computers prevented him from installing the games he wanted to play, like Counterstrike and Call of Duty, and they restricted the sites he could visit online. But Hutchins found he could program his way out of those constraints. Within Microsoft Word, he discovered a feature that allowed him to write scripts in a language called Visual Basic. Using that scripting feature, he could run whatever code he wanted and even install unapproved software. He used that trick to install a proxy to bounce his web traffic through a faraway server, defeating the school's attempts to filter and monitor his web surfing too. On his 13th birthday, after years of fighting for time on the family's aging Dell, Hutchins' parents agreed to buy him his own computer—or rather, the components he requested, piece by piece, to build it himself. Soon, Hutchins' mother says, the computer became a “complete and utter love” that overruled almost everything else in her son's life. Hutchins still surfed, and he had taken up a sport called surf lifesaving, a kind of competitive lifeguarding. He excelled at it and would eventually win a handful of medals at the national level. But when he wasn't in the water, he was in front of his computer, playing videogames or refining his programming skills for hours on end. Janet Hutchins worried about her son's digital obsession. In particular, she feared how the darker fringes of the web, what she only half-jokingly calls the “internet boogeyman,” might influence her son, who she saw as relatively sheltered in their rural English life. So she tried to install parental controls on Marcus' computer; he responded by using a simple technique to gain administrative privileges when he booted up the PC, and immediately turned the controls off. She tried limiting his internet access via their home router; he found a hardware reset on the router that allowed him to restore it to factory settings, then configured the router to boot her offline instead. “After that we had a long chat,” Janet says. She threatened to remove the house's internet connection altogether. Instead they came to a truce. “We agreed that if he reinstated my internet access, I would monitor him in another way,” she says. “But in actual fact, there was no way of monitoring Marcus. Because he was way more clever than any of us were ever going to be.” Many mothers' fears of the internet boogeyman are overblown. Janet Hutchins' were not. Within a year of getting his own computer, Hutchins was exploring an elementary hacking web forum, one dedicated to wreaking havoc upon the then-popular instant messaging platform MSN. There he found a community of like-minded young hackers showing off their inventions. One bragged of creating a kind of MSN worm that impersonated a JPEG: When someone opened it, the malware would instantly and invisibly send itself to all their MSN contacts, some of whom would fall for the bait and open the photo, which would fire off another round of messages, ad infinitum. Hutchins didn't know what the worm was meant to accomplish—whether it was intended for cybercrime or simply a spammy prank—but he was deeply impressed. “I was like, wow, look what programming can do,” he says. “I want to be able to do this kind of stuff.” Around the time he turned 14, Hutchins posted his own contribution to the forum—a simple password stealer. Install it on someone's computer and it could pull the passwords for the victim's web accounts from where Internet Explorer had stored them for its convenient autofill feature. The passwords were encrypted, but he'd figured out where the browser hid the decryption key too. Hutchins' first piece of malware was met with approval from the forum. And whose passwords did he imagine might be stolen with his invention? “I didn't, really,” Hutchins says. “I just thought, ‘This is a cool thing I've made.’” As Hutchins' hacking career began to take shape, his academic career was deteriorating. He would come home from the beach in the evening and go straight to his room, eat in front of his computer, and then pretend to sleep. After his parents checked that his lights were out and went to bed themselves, he'd get back to his keyboard. “Unbeknownst to us, he'd be up programming into the wee small hours,” Janet says. When she woke him the next morning, “he'd look ghastly. Because he'd only been in bed for half an hour.” Hutchins' mystified mother at one point was so worried she took her son to the doctor, where he was diagnosed with being a sleep-deprived teenager. One day at school, when Hutchins was about 15, he found that he'd been locked out of his network account. A few hours later he was called into a school administrator's office. The staff there accused him of carrying out a cyberattack on the school's network, corrupting one server so deeply it had to be replaced. Hutchins vehemently denied any involvement and demanded to see the evidence. As he tells it, the administrators refused to share it. But he had, by that time, become notorious among the school's IT staff for flouting their security measures. He maintains, even today, that he was merely the most convenient scapegoat. “Marcus was never a good liar,” his mother agrees. “He was quite boastful. If he had done it, he would have said he'd done it.” Hutchins was suspended for two weeks and permanently banned from using computers at school. His answer, from that point on, was simply to spend as little time there as possible. He became fully nocturnal, sleeping well into the school day and often skipping his classes altogether. His parents were furious, but aside from the moments when he was trapped in his mother's car, getting a ride to school or to go surfing, he mostly evaded their lectures and punishments. “They couldn't physically drag me to school,” Hutchins says. “I'm a big guy.” Hutchins' family had, by 2009, moved off the farm, into a house that occupied the former post office of a small, one-pub village. Marcus took a room at the top of the stairs. He emerged from his bedroom only occasionally, to microwave a frozen pizza or make himself more instant coffee for his late-night programming binges. But for the most part, he kept his door closed and locked against his parents, as he delved deeper into a secret life to which they weren't invited. Around the same time, the MSN forum that Hutchins had been frequenting shut down, so he transitioned to another community called HackForums. Its members were a shade more advanced in their skills and a shade murkier in their ethics: a Lord of the Flies collection of young hackers seeking to impress one another with nihilistic feats of exploitation. The minimum table stakes to gain respect from the HackForums crowd was possession of a botnet, a collection of hundreds or thousands of malware-infected computers that obey a hacker's commands, capable of directing junk traffic at rivals to flood their web server and knock them offline—what's known as a distributed denial of service, or DDoS, attack. There was, at this point, no overlap between Hutchins' idyllic English village life and his secret cyberpunk one, no reality checks to prevent him from adopting the amoral atmosphere of the underworld he was entering. So Hutchins, still 15 years old, was soon bragging on the forum about running his own botnet of more than 8,000 computers, mostly hacked with simple fake files he'd uploaded to BitTorrent sites and tricked unwitting users into running. Even more ambitiously, Hutchins also set up his own business: He began renting servers and then selling web hosting services to denizens of HackForums for a monthly fee. The enterprise, which Hutchins called Gh0sthosting, explicitly advertised itself on HackForums as a place where “all illegal sites” were allowed. He suggested in another post that buyers could use his service to host phishing pages designed to impersonate login pages and steal victims' passwords. When one customer asked if it was acceptable to host “warez”—black market software—Hutchins immediately replied, “Yeah any sites but child porn.” But in his teenage mind, Hutchins says, he still saw what he was doing as several steps removed from any real cybercrime. Hosting shady servers or stealing a few Facebook passwords or exploiting a hijacked computer to enlist it in DDoS attacks against other hackers—those hardly seemed like the serious offenses that would earn him the attention of law enforcement. Hutchins wasn't, after all, carrying out bank fraud, stealing actual money from innocent people. Or at least that's what he told himself. He says that the red line of financial fraud, arbitrary as it was, remained inviolable in his self-defined and shifting moral code. In fact, within a year Hutchins grew bored with his botnets and his hosting service, which he found involved placating a lot of “whiny customers.” So he quit both and began to focus on something he enjoyed far more: perfecting his own malware. Soon he was taking apart other hackers' rootkits—programs designed to alter a computer's operating system to make themselves entirely undetectable. He studied their features and learned to hide his code inside other computer processes to make his files invisible in the machine's file directory. When Hutchins posted some sample code to show off his growing skills, another HackForums member was impressed enough that he asked Hutchins to write part of a program that would check whether specific antivirus engines could detect a hacker's malware, a kind of anti-antivirus tool. For that task, Hutchins was paid $200 in the early digital currency Liberty Reserve. The same customer followed up by offering $800 for a “formgrabber” Hutchins had written, a rootkit that could silently steal passwords and other data that people had entered into web forms and send them to the hacker. He happily accepted. Hutchins began to develop a reputation as a talented malware ghostwriter. Then, when he was 16, he was approached by a more serious client, a figure that the teenager would come to know by the pseudonym Vinny. Vinny made Hutchins an offer: He wanted a multifeatured, well-maintained rootkit that he could sell on hacker marketplaces far more professional than HackForums, like Exploit.in and Dark0de. And rather than paying up front for the code, he would give Hutchins half the profits from every sale. They would call the product UPAS Kit, after the Javanese upas tree, whose toxic sap was traditionally used in Southeast Asia to make poison darts and arrows. Vinny seemed different from the braggarts and wannabes Hutchins had met elsewhere in the hacker underground—more professional and tight-lipped, never revealing a single personal detail about himself even as they chatted more and more frequently. And both Hutchins and Vinny were careful to never log their conversations, Hutchins says. (As a result, WIRED has no record of their interactions, only Hutchins' account of them.) Hutchins says he was always careful to cloak his movements online, routing his internet connection through multiple proxy servers and hacked PCs in Eastern Europe intended to confuse any investigator. But he wasn't nearly as disciplined about keeping the details of his personal life secret from Vinny. In one conversation, Hutchins complained to his business partner that there was no quality weed to be found anywhere in his village, deep in rural England. Vinny responded that he would mail him some from a new ecommerce site called Silk Road. This was 2011, early days for Silk Road, and the notorious dark-web drug marketplace was mostly known only to those in the internet underground, not the masses who would later discover it. Hutchins himself thought it had to be a hoax. “Bullshit,” he remembers writing to Vinny. “Prove it.” So Vinny asked for Hutchins' address—and his date of birth. He wanted to send him a birthday present, he said. Hutchins, in a moment he would come to regret, supplied both. On Hutchins' 17th birthday, a package arrived for him in the mail at his parents' house. Inside was a collection of weed, hallucinogenic mushrooms, and ecstasy, courtesy of his mysterious new associate. Hutchins finished writing UPAS Kit after nearly nine months of work, and in the summer of 2012 the rootkit went up for sale. Hutchins didn't ask Vinny any questions about who was buying. He was mostly just pleased to have leveled up from a HackForums show-off to a professional coder whose work was desired and appreciated. The money was nice too: As Vinny began to pay Hutchins thousands of dollars in commissions from UPAS Kit sales—always in bitcoin—Hutchins found himself with his first real disposable income. He upgraded his computer, bought an Xbox and a new sound system for his room, and began to dabble in bitcoin day trading. By this point, he had dropped out of school entirely, and he'd quit surf lifesaving after his coach retired. He told his parents that he was working on freelance programming projects, which seemed to satisfy them. With the success of UPAS Kit, Vinny told Hutchins that it was time to build UPAS Kit 2.0. He wanted new features for this sequel, including a keylogger that could record victims' every keystroke and the ability to see their entire screen. And most of all, he wanted a feature that could insert fake text-entry fields and other content into the pages that victims were seeing—something called a web inject. Vinny added that he knew Hutchins' identity and address. If their business relationship ended, perhaps he would share that information with the FBI. That last demand in particular gave Hutchins a deeply uneasy feeling, he says. Web injects, in Hutchins' mind, had a very clear purpose: They were designed for bank fraud. Most banks require a second factor of authentication when making a transfer; they often send a code via text message to a user's phone and ask them to enter it on a web page as a double check of their identity. Web injects allow hackers to defeat that security measure by sleight of hand. A hacker initiates a bank transfer from the victim's account, and then, when the bank asks the hacker for a confirmation code, the hacker injects a fake message onto the victim's screen asking them to perform a routine reconfirmation of their identity with a text message code. When the victim enters that code from their phone, the hacker passes it on to the bank, confirming the transfer out of their account. Over just a few years, Hutchins had taken so many small steps down the unlit tunnel of online criminality that he'd often lost sight of the lines he was crossing. But in this IM conversation with Vinny, Hutchins says, he could see that he was being asked to do something very wrong—that he would now, without a doubt, be helping thieves steal from innocent victims. And by engaging in actual financial cybercrime, he'd also be inviting law enforcement's attention in a way he never had before. Until that point, Hutchins had allowed himself to imagine that his creations might be used simply to steal access to people's Facebook accounts or to build botnets that mined cryptocurrency on people's PCs. “I never knew definitively what was happening with my code,” he says. “But now it was obvious. This would be used to steal money from people. This would be used to wipe out people's savings.” He says he refused Vinny's demand. “I'm not fucking working on a banking trojan,” he remembers writing. Vinny insisted. And he added a reminder, in what Hutchins understood as equal parts joke and threat, that he knew Hutchins' identity and address. If their business relationship ended, perhaps he would share that information with the FBI. As Hutchins tells it, he was both scared and angry at himself: He had naively shared identifying details with a partner who was turning out to be a ruthless criminal. But he held his ground and threatened to walk away. Vinny, knowing that he needed Hutchins' coding skills, seemed to back down. They reached an agreement: Hutchins would work on the revamped version of UPAS Kit, but without the web injects. As he developed that next-generation rootkit over the following months, Hutchins began attending a local community college. He developed a bond with one of his computer science professors and was surprised to discover that he actually wanted to graduate. But he strained under the load of studying while also building and maintaining Vinny's malware. His business partner now seemed deeply impatient to have their new rootkit finished, and he pinged Hutchins constantly, demanding updates. To cope, Hutchins began turning back to Silk Road, buying amphetamines on the dark web to replace his nighttime coffee binges. After nine months of all-night coding sessions, the second version of UPAS Kit was ready. But as soon as Hutchins shared the finished code with Vinny, he says, Vinny responded with a surprise revelation: He had secretly hired another coder to create the web injects that Hutchins had refused to build. With the two programmers' work combined, Vinny had everything he needed to make a fully functional banking trojan. Hutchins says he felt livid, speechless. He quickly realized he had very little leverage against Vinny. The malware was already written. And for the most part, it was Hutchins who had authored it. In that moment, all of the moral concerns and threats of punishment that Hutchins had brushed off for years suddenly caught up with him in a sobering rush. “There is no getting out of this,” he remembers thinking. “The FBI is going to turn up at my door one day with an arrest warrant. And it will be because I trusted this fucking guy.” Still, as deep as Hutchins had been reeled in by Vinny, he had a choice. Vinny wanted him to do the work of integrating the other programmer's web injects into their malware, then test the rootkit and maintain it with updates once it launched. Hutchins says he knew instinctively that he should walk away and never communicate with Vinny again. But as Hutchins tells it, Vinny seemed to have been preparing for this conversation, and he laid out an argument: Hutchins had already put in nearly nine months of work. He had already essentially built a banking rootkit that would be sold to customers, whether Hutchins liked it or not. Besides, Hutchins was still being paid on commission. If he quit now, he'd get nothing. He'd have taken all the risks, enough to be implicated in the crime, but would receive none of the rewards. As angry as he was at having fallen into Vinny's trap, Hutchins admits that he was also persuaded. So he added one more link to the yearslong chain of bad decisions that had defined his teenage life: He agreed to keep ghostwriting Vinny's banking malware. Hutchins got to work, stitching the web inject features into his rootkit and then testing the program ahead of its release. But he found now that his love of coding had evaporated. He would procrastinate for as long as possible and then submerge into daylong coding binges, overriding his fear and guilt with amphetamines. In June 2014, the rootkit was ready. Vinny began to sell their work on the cybercriminal marketplaces Exploit.in and Dark0de. Later he'd also put it up for sale on AlphaBay, a site on the dark web that had replaced Silk Road after the FBI tore the original darknet market offline. After arguments with jilted customers, Vinny had decided to rebrand and drop the UPAS label. Instead, he came up with a new moniker, a play on Zeus, one of the most notorious banking trojans in the history of cybercrime. Vinny christened his malware in the name of a cruel giant in Greek mythology, the one who had fathered Zeus and all the other vengeful gods in the pantheon of Mount Olympus: He called it Kronos. When Hutchins was 19, his family moved again, this time into an 18th-century, four-story building in Ilfracombe, a Victorian seaside resort town in another part of Devon. Hutchins settled into the basement of the house, with access to his own bathroom and a kitchen that had once been used by the house's servants. That setup allowed him to cut himself off even further from his family and the world. He was, more than ever, alone. When Kronos launched on Exploit.in, the malware was only a modest success. The largely Russian community of hackers on the site were skeptical of Vinny, who didn't speak their language and had priced the trojan at an ambitious $7,000. And like any new software, Kronos had bugs that needed fixing. Customers demanded constant updates and new features. So Hutchins was tasked with nonstop coding for the next year, now with tight deadlines and angry buyers demanding he meet them. To keep up while also trying to finish his last year of college, Hutchins ramped up his amphetamine intake sharply. He would take enough speed to reach what he describes as a state of euphoria. Only in that condition, he says, could he still enjoy his programming work and stave off his growing dread. “Every time I heard a siren, I thought it was coming for me,” he says. Vanquishing those thoughts with still more stimulants, he would stay up for days, studying and coding, and then crash into a state of anxiety and depression before sleeping for 24-hour stretches. All that slingshotting between manic highs and miserable lows took a toll on Hutchins' judgment—most notably in his interactions with another online friend he calls Randy. When Hutchins met Randy on a hacker forum called TrojanForge after the Kronos release, Randy asked Hutchins if he'd write banking malware for him. When Hutchins refused, Randy instead asked for help with some enterprise and educational apps he was trying to launch as legitimate businesses. Hutchins, seeing a way to launder his illegal earnings with legal income, agreed. Randy proved to be a generous patron. When Hutchins told him that he didn't have a MacOS machine to work on Apple apps, Randy asked for his address—which again, Hutchins provided—and shipped him a new iMac desktop as a gift. Later, he asked if Hutchins had a PlayStation console so that they could play games together online. When Hutchins said he didn't, Randy shipped him a new PS4 too. Unlike Vinny, Randy was refreshingly open about his personal life. As he and Hutchins became closer, they would call each other or even video chat, rather than interact via the faceless instant messaging Hutchins had become accustomed to. Randy impressed Hutchins by describing his philanthropic goals, how he was using his profits to fund charities like free coding education projects for kids. Hutchins sensed that much of those profits came from cybercrime. But he began to see Randy as a Robin Hood-like figure, a model he hoped to emulate someday. Randy revealed that he was based in Los Angeles, a sunny paradise where Hutchins had always dreamed of living. At some points, they even talked about moving in together, running a startup out of a house near the beach in Southern California. Randy trusted Hutchins enough that when Hutchins described his bitcoin daytrading tricks, Randy sent him more than $10,000 worth of the cryptocurrency to trade on his behalf. Hutchins had set up his own custom-coded programs that hedged his bitcoin buys with short selling, protecting his holdings against bitcoin's dramatic fluctuations. Randy asked him to manage his own funds with the same techniques. One morning in the summer of 2015, Hutchins woke up after an amphetamine bender to find that there had been an electrical outage during the night. All of his computers had powered off just as bitcoin's price crashed, erasing close to $5,000 of Randy's savings. Still near the bottom of his spasmodic cycle of drug use, Hutchins panicked. He says he found Randy online and immediately admitted to losing his money. But to make up for the loss, he made Randy an offer. Hutchins revealed that he was the secret author of a banking rootkit called Kronos. Knowing that Randy had been looking for bank fraud malware in the past, he offered Randy a free copy. Randy, always understanding, called it even. This was the first time Hutchins had divulged his work on Kronos to anyone. When he woke up the next day with a clearer head, he knew that he had made a terrible mistake. Sitting in his bedroom, he thought of all the personal information that Randy had so casually shared with him over the previous months, and he realized that he had just confided his most dangerous secret to someone whose operational security was deeply flawed. Sooner or later, Randy would be caught by law enforcement, and he would likely be just as forthcoming with the cops. Hutchins had already come to view his eventual arrest for his cybercrimes as inevitable. But now he could see the Feds' path to his door. “Shit,” Hutchins thought to himself. “This is how it ends.” When Hutchins graduated from college in the spring of 2015, he felt it was time to give up his amphetamine habit. So he decided to quit cold turkey. At first the withdrawal symptoms simply mired him in the usual depressive low that he had experienced many times before. But one evening a few days in, while he was alone in his room watching the British teen drama Waterloo Road, he began to feel a dark sensation creep over him—what he describes as an all-encompassing sensation of “impending doom.” Intellectually, he knew he was in no physical danger. And yet, “My brain was telling me, I'm about to die,” he remembers. He told no one. Instead he just rode out the withdrawal alone, experiencing what he describes as a multiday panic attack. When Vinny demanded to know why he was behind on his Kronos work, Hutchins says he found it was easier to say he was still busy with school, rather than admit that he was caught in a well of debilitating anxiety. But as his symptoms drew on and he became even less productive over the weeks that followed, he found that his menacing business associate seemed to bother him less. After a few scoldings, Vinny left him alone. The bitcoin payments for Kronos commissions ended, and with them went the partnership that had pulled Hutchins into the darkest years of his life as a cybercriminal. For the next months, Hutchins did little more than hide in his room and recover. He played videogames and binge-watched Breaking Bad. He left his house only rarely, to swim in the ocean or join groups of storm chasers who would gather on the cliffs near Ilfracombe to watch 50- and 60-foot waves slam into the rocks. Hutchins remembers enjoying how small the waves made him feel, imagining how their raw power could kill him instantly. It took months for Hutchins' feeling of impending doom to abate, and even then it was replaced by an intermittent, deep-seated angst. As he leveled out, Hutchins began to delve back into the world of hacking. But he had lost his taste for the cybercriminal underworld. Instead, he turned back to a blog that he'd started in 2013, in the period between dropping out of secondary school and starting college. The site was called MalwareTech, which doubled as Hutchins' pen name as he began to publish a slew of posts on the technical minutiae of malware. The blog's clinical, objective analysis soon seemed to attract both blackhat and whitehat visitors. “It was kind of this neutral ground,” he says. “Both sides of the game enjoyed it.” At one point he even wrote a deep-dive analysis of web injects, the very feature of Kronos that had caused him so much anxiety. In other, more impish posts, he'd point out vulnerabilities in competitors' malware that allowed their victims' computers to be commandeered by other hackers. Soon he had an audience of more than 10,000 regular readers, and none of them seemed to know that MalwareTech's insights stemmed from an active history of writing malware himself. During his post-Kronos year of rehabilitation, Hutchins started reverse-engineering some of the largest botnets out in the wild, known as Kelihos and Necurs. But he soon went a step further, realizing he could actually join those herds of hijacked machines and analyze them for his readers from the inside. The Kelihos botnet, for instance, was designed to send commands from one victim computer to another, rather than from a central server—a peer-to-peer architecture designed to make the botnet harder to take down. But that meant Hutchins could actually code his own program that mimicked the Kelihos malware and “spoke” its language, and use it to spy on all the rest of the botnet's operations—once he had broken past all the obfuscation the botnets' designers had devised to prevent that sort of snooping. Using this steady stream of intelligence, Hutchins built a Kelihos botnet “tracker,” mapping out on a public website the hundreds of thousands of computers around the world it had ensnared. Not long after that, an entrepreneur named Salim Neino, the CEO of a small Los Angeles-based cybersecurity firm called Kryptos Logic, emailed MalwareTech to ask if the anonymous blogger might do some work for them. The firm was hoping to create a botnet tracking service, one that would alert victims if their IP addresses showed up in a collection of hacked machines like Kelihos. In fact, the company had already asked one of its employees to get inside Kelihos, but the staffer had told Neino that reverse-engineering the code would take too much time. Without realizing what he was doing, Hutchins had unraveled one of the most inscrutable botnets on the internet. Neino offered Hutchins $10,000 to build Kryptos Logic its own Kelihos tracker. Within weeks of landing that first job, Hutchins had built a tracker for a second botnet too, an even bigger, older amalgamation of hacked PCs known as Sality. After that, Kryptos Logic made Hutchins a job offer, with a six-figure annual salary. When Hutchins saw how the numbers broke down, he thought Neino must be joking. “What?” he remembers thinking. “You're going to send me this much money every month?” It was more than he had ever earned as a cybercriminal malware developer. Hutchins had come to understand, too late, the reality of the modern cybersecurity industry: For a talented hacker in a Western country, crime truly doesn't pay. In his first months at Kryptos Logic, Hutchins got inside one massive botnet after another: Necurs, Dridex, Emotet—malware networks encompassing millions of computers in total. Even when his new colleagues at Kryptos believed that a botnet was impregnable, Hutchins would surprise them by coming up with a fresh sample of the bot's code, often shared with him by a reader of his blog or supplied by an underground source. Again and again, he would deconstruct the program and—still working from his bedroom in Ilfracombe—allow the company to gain access to a new horde of zombie machines, tracking the malware's spread and alerting the hackers' victims. “When it came to botnet research, he was probably one of the best in the world at that point. By the third or fourth month, we had tracked every major botnet in the world with his help,” Neino says. “He brought us to another level.” Hutchins continued to detail his work on his MalwareTech blog and Twitter, where he began to be regarded as an elite malware-whisperer. “He's a reversing savant, when it comes down to it,” says Jake Williams, a former NSA hacker turned security consultant who chatted with MalwareTech and traded code samples with him around that time. “From a raw skill level, he's off the charts. He's comparable to some of the best I've worked with, anywhere.” Yet aside from his Kryptos Logic colleagues and a few close friends, no one knew MalwareTech's real identity. Most of his tens of thousands of followers, like Williams, recognized him only as the Persian cat with sunglasses that Hutchins used as a Twitter avatar. In the fall of 2016, a new kind of botnet appeared: A piece of malware known as Mirai had begun to infect so-called internet-of-things devices—wireless routers, digital video recorders, and security cameras—and was lashing them together into massive swarms capable of shockingly powerful DDoS attacks. Until then, the largest DDoS attacks ever seen had slammed their targets with a few hundred gigabits per second of traffic. Now victims were being hit with more like 1 terabit per second, gargantuan floods of junk traffic that could tear offline anything in their path. To make matters worse, the author of Mirai, a hacker who went by the name Anna-Senpai, posted the code for the malware on HackForums, inviting others to make their own Mirai offshoots. In September of that year, one Mirai attack hit the website of the security blogger Brian Krebs with more than 600 gigabits per second, taking his site down instantly. Soon after, the French hosting company OVH buckled under a 1.1-terabit-per-second torrent. In October, another wave hit Dyn, a provider of the domain-name-system servers that act as a kind of phone book for the internet, translating domain names into IP addresses. When Dyn went down, so did Amazon, Spotify, Netflix, PayPal, and Reddit for users across parts of North America and Europe. Around the same time, a Mirai attack hit the main telecom provider for much of Liberia, knocking most of the country off the internet. Hutchins, always a storm chaser, began to track Mirai's tsunamis. With a Kryptos Logic colleague, he dug up samples of Mirai's code and used them to create programs that infiltrated the splintered Mirai botnets, intercepting their commands and creating a Twitter feed that posted news of their attacks in real time. Then, in January 2017, the same Mirai botnet that hit Liberia began to rain down cyberattacks on Lloyds, the largest bank in the UK, in an apparent extortion campaign that took the bank's website down multiple times over a series of days. Thanks to his Mirai tracker, Hutchins could see which server was sending out the commands to train the botnet's firepower on Lloyds; it appeared that the machine was being used to run a DDoS-for-hire service. And on that server, he discovered contact information for the hacker who was administering it. Hutchins quickly found him on the instant messaging service Jabber, using the name “popopret.” So he asked the hacker to stop. He told popopret he knew that he wasn't directly responsible for the attack on Lloyds himself, that he was only selling access to his Mirai botnet. Then he sent him a series of messages that included Twitter posts from Lloyds customers who had been locked out of their accounts, some of whom were stuck in foreign countries without money. He also pointed out that banks were designated as critical infrastructure in the UK, and that meant British intelligence services were likely to track down the botnet administrator if the attacks continued. The DDoS attacks on the banks ended. More than a year later, Hutchins would recount the story on his Twitter feed, noting that he wasn't surprised the hacker had ultimately listened to reason. In his tweets, Hutchins offered a rare hint of his own secret past—he knew what it was like to sit behind a keyboard, detached from the pain inflicted on innocents far across the internet. “In my career I've found few people are truly evil, most are just too far disconnected from the effects of their actions,” he wrote. “Until someone reconnects them.” Around noon on May 12, 2017, just as Hutchins was starting a rare week of vacation, Henry Jones was sitting 200 miles to the east amid a cluster of a half-dozen PCs in an administrative room at the Royal London Hospital, a major surgical and trauma center in northeast London, when he saw the first signs that something was going very wrong. Jones, a young anesthesiologist who asked that WIRED not use his real name, was finishing a lunch of chicken curry and chips from the hospital cafeteria, trying to check his email before he was called back into surgery, where he was trading shifts with a more senior colleague. But he couldn't log in; the email system seemed to be down. He shared a brief collective grumble with the other doctors in the room, who were all accustomed to computer problems across the National Health Service; after all, their PCs were still running Windows XP, a nearly 20-year-old operating system. “Another day at the Royal London,” he remembers thinking. But just then, an IT administrator came into the room and told the staff that something more unusual was going on: A virus seemed to be spreading across the hospital's network. One of the PCs in the room had rebooted, and now Jones could see that it showed a red screen with a lock in the upper left corner. “Ooops, your files have been encrypted!” it read. At the bottom of the screen, it demanded a $300 payment in bitcoin to unlock the machine. Jones had no time to puzzle over the message before he was called back into the surgical theater. He scrubbed, put on his mask and gloves, and reentered the operating room, where surgeons were just finishing an orthopedic procedure. Now it was Jones' job to wake the patient up again. He began to slowly turn a dial that tapered off the sevoflurane vapor feeding into the patient's lungs, trying to time the process exactly so that the patient wouldn't wake up before he'd had a chance to remove the breathing tube, but wouldn't stay out long enough to delay their next surgery. As he focused on that task, he could hear the surgeons and nurses expressing dismay as they tried to record notes on the surgery's outcome: The operating room's desktop PC seemed to be dead. Jones finished rousing the patient and scrubbed out. But when he got into the hallway, the manager of the surgical theater intercepted him and told him that all of his cases for the rest of the day had been canceled. A cyberattack had hit not only the whole hospital's network but the entire trust, a collection of five hospitals across East London. All of their computers were down. Jones felt shocked and vaguely outraged. Was this a coordinated cyberattack on multiple NHS hospitals? With no patients to see, he spent the next hours at loose ends, helping the IT staff unplug computers around the Royal London. But it wasn't until he began to follow the news on his iPhone that he learned the full scale of the damage: It wasn't a targeted attack but an automated worm spreading across the internet. Within hours, it hit more than 600 doctor's offices and clinics, leading to 20,000 canceled appointments, and wiped machines at dozens of hospitals. Across those facilities, surgeries were being canceled, and ambulances were being diverted from emergency rooms, sometimes forcing patients with life-threatening conditions to wait crucial minutes or hours longer for care. Jones came to a grim realization: “People may have died as a result of this.” Cybersecurity researchers named the worm WannaCry, after the .wncry extension it added to file names after encrypting them. As it paralyzed machines and demanded its bitcoin ransom, WannaCry was jumping from one machine to the next using a powerful piece of code called EternalBlue, which had been stolen from the National Security Agency by a group of hackers known as the Shadow Brokers and leaked onto the open internet a month earlier. It instantly allowed a hacker to penetrate and run hostile code on any unpatched Windows computer—a set of potential targets that likely numbered in the millions. And now that the NSA's highly sophisticated spy tool had been weaponized, it seemed bound to create a global ransomware pandemic within hours. “It was the cyber equivalent of watching the moments before a car crash,” says one cybersecurity analyst who worked for British Telecom at the time and was tasked with incident response for the NHS. “We knew that, in terms of the impact on people's lives, this was going to be like nothing we had ever seen before.” As the worm spread around the world, it infected the German railway firm Deutsche Bahn, Sberbank in Russia, automakers Renault, Nissan, and Honda, universities in China, police departments in India, the Spanish telecom firm Telefónica, FedEx, and Boeing. In the space of an afternoon, it destroyed, by some estimates, nearly a quarter-million computers' data, inflicting between $4 billion and $8 billion in damage. Wannacry seemed poised to spread to the US health care system. "If this happens en masse, how many people die?" Corman remembers thinking. "Our worst nightmare seemed to be coming true." For those watching WannaCry's proliferation, it seemed there was still more pain to come. Josh Corman, at the time a cybersecurity-focused fellow for the Atlantic Council, remembers joining a call on the afternoon of May 12 with representatives from the US Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Health and Human Services, the pharmaceutical firm Merck, and executives from American hospitals. The group, known as the Healthcare Cybersecurity Industry Taskforce, had just finished an analysis that detailed a serious lack of IT security personnel in American hospitals. Now WannaCry seemed poised to spread to the US health care system, and Corman feared the results would be far worse than they had been for the NHS. “If this happens en masse, how many people die?” he remembers thinking. “Our worst nightmare seemed to be coming true.” At around 2:30 on that Friday afternoon, Marcus Hutchins returned from picking up lunch at his local fish-and-chips shop in Ilfracombe, sat down in front of his computer, and discovered that the internet was on fire. “I picked a hell of a fucking week to take off work,” Hutchins wrote on Twitter. Within minutes, a hacker friend who went by the name Kafeine sent Hutchins a copy of WannaCry's code, and Hutchins began trying to dissect it, with his lunch still sitting in front of him. First, he spun up a simulated computer on a server that he ran in his bedroom, complete with fake files for the ransomware to encrypt, and ran the program in that quarantined test environment. He immediately noticed that before encrypting the decoy files, the malware sent out a query to a certain, very random-looking web address: iuqerfsodp9ifjaposdfjhgosurijfaewrwergwea.com. That struck Hutchins as significant, if not unusual: When a piece of malware pinged back to this sort of domain, that usually meant it was communicating with a command-and-control server somewhere that might be giving the infected computer instructions. Hutchins copied that long website string into his web browser and found, to his surprise, that no such site existed. So he visited the domain registrar Namecheap and, at four seconds past 3:08 pm, registered that unattractive web address at a cost of $10.69. Hutchins hoped that in doing so, he might be able to steal control of some part of WannaCry's horde of victim computers away from the malware's creators. Or at least he might gain a tool to monitor the number and location of infected machines, a move that malware analysts call “sinkholing.” Sure enough, as soon as Hutchins set up that domain on a cluster of servers hosted by his employer, Kryptos Logic, it was bombarded with thousands of connections from every new computer that was being infected by WannaCry around the world. Hutchins could now see the enormous, global scale of the attack firsthand. And as he tweeted about his work, he began to be flooded with hundreds of emails from other researchers, journalists, and system administrators trying to learn more about the plague devouring the world's networks. With his sinkhole domain, Hutchins was now suddenly pulling in information about those infections that no one else on the planet possessed. For the next four hours, he responded to those emails and worked frantically to debug a map he was building to track the new infections popping up globally, just as he had done with Kelihos, Necurs, and so many other botnets. At 6:30 pm, around three and a half hours after Hutchins had registered the domain, his hacker friend Kafeine sent him a tweet posted by another security researcher, Darien Huss. The tweet put forward a simple, terse statement that shocked Hutchins: “Execution fails now that domain has been sinkholed.” In other words, since Hutchins' domain had first appeared online, WannaCry's new infections had continued to spread, but they hadn't actually done any new damage. The worm seemed to be neutralized. Huss' tweet included a snippet of WannaCry's code that he'd reverse-engineered. The code's logic showed that before encrypting any files, the malware first checked if it could reach Hutchins' web address. If not, it went ahead with corrupting the computer's contents. If it did reach that address, it simply stopped in its tracks. (Malware analysts still debate what the purpose of that feature was—whether it was intended as an antivirus evasion technique or a safeguard built into the worm by its author.) Hutchins hadn't found the malware's command-and-control address. He'd found its kill switch. The domain he'd registered was a way to simply, instantly turn off WannaCry's mayhem around the world. It was as if he had fired two proton torpedoes through the Death Star's exhaust port and into its reactor core, blown it up, and saved the galaxy, all without understanding what he was doing or even noticing the explosion for three and a half hours. When Hutchins grasped what he'd done, he leaped up from his chair and jumped around his bedroom, overtaken with joy. Then he did something equally unusual: He went upstairs to tell his family. Janet Hutchins had the day off from her job as a nurse at a local hospital. She had been in town catching up with friends and had just gotten home and started making dinner. So she had only the slightest sense of the crisis that her colleagues had been dealing with across the NHS. That's when her son came upstairs and told her, a little uncertainly, that he seemed to have stopped the worst malware attack the world had ever seen. “Well done, sweetheart,” Janet Hutchins said. Then she went back to chopping onions. It took a few hours longer for Hutchins and his colleagues at Kryptos Logic to understand that WannaCry was still a threat. In fact, the domain that Hutchins had registered was still being bombarded with connections from WannaCry-infected computers all over the globe as the remnants of the neutered worm continued to spread: It would receive nearly 1 million connections over the next two days. If their web domain went offline, every computer that attempted to reach the domain and failed would have its contents encrypted, and WannaCry's wave of destruction would begin again. “If this goes down, WannaCry restarts,” Hutchins' boss, Salim Neino, remembers realizing. “Within 24 hours, it would have hit every vulnerable computer in the world.” Almost immediately, the problem grew: The next morning, Hutchins noticed a new flood of pings mixed into the WannaCry traffic hitting their sinkhole. He quickly realized that one of the Mirai botnets that he and his Kryptos colleagues had monitored was now slamming the domain with a DDoS attack—perhaps as an act of revenge for their work tracking Mirai, or simply out of a nihilistic desire to watch WannaCry burn down the internet. “It was like we were Atlas, holding up the world on our shoulders,” Neino says. “And now someone was kicking Atlas in the back at the same time.” For days afterward, the attacks swelled in size, threatening to bring down the sinkhole domain. Kryptos scrambled to filter and absorb the traffic, spreading the load over a collection of servers in Amazon data centers and the French hosting firm OVH. But they got another surprise a few days later, when local police in the French city of Roubaix, mistakenly believing that their sinkhole domain was being used by the cybercriminals behind WannaCry, physically seized two of their servers from the OVH data center. For a week, Hutchins slept no more than three consecutive hours as he struggled to counter the shifting attacks and keep the WannaCry kill switch intact. Meanwhile, the press was chipping away at Hutchins' carefully maintained anonymity. On a Sunday morning two days after WannaCry broke out, a local reporter showed up at the Hutchins' front door in Ilfracombe. The reporter's daughter had gone to school with Hutchins, and she recognized him in a Facebook photo that named him in its caption as MalwareTech. Soon more journalists were ringing the doorbell, setting up in the parking lot across the street from their house, and calling so often that his family stopped answering the phone. British tabloids began to run headlines about the “accidental hero” who had saved the world from his bedroom. Hutchins had to jump over his backyard's wall to avoid the reporters staking out his front door. To defuse the media's appetite, he agreed to give one interview to the Associated Press, during which he was so nervous that he misspelled his last name and the newswire had to run a correction. In those chaotic first days, Hutchins was constantly on edge, expecting another version of WannaCry to strike; after all, the hackers behind the worm could easily tweak it to remove its kill switch and unleash a sequel. But no such mutation occurred. After a few days, Britain's National Cybersecurity Center reached out to Amazon on Kryptos' behalf and helped the firm negotiate unlimited server capacity in its data centers. Then, after a week, the DDoS mitigation firm Cloudflare stepped in to offer its services, absorbing as much traffic as any botnet could throw at the kill-switch domain and ending the standoff. When the worst of the danger was over, Neino was concerned enough for Hutchins' well-being that he tied part of his employee's bonus to forcing him to get some rest. When Hutchins finally went to bed, a week after WannaCry struck, he was paid more than $1,000 for every hour of sleep. As uncomfortable as the spotlight made Hutchins, his newfound fame came with some rewards. He gained 100,000 Twitter followers virtually overnight. Strangers recognized him and bought him drinks in the local pub to thank him for saving the internet. A local restaurant offered him free pizza for a year. His parents, it seemed, finally understood what he did for a living and were deeply proud of him. But only at Defcon, the annual 30,000-person Las Vegas hacker conference that took place nearly three months after WannaCry hit, did Hutchins truly allow himself to enjoy his new rock star status in the cybersecurity world. In part to avoid the fans who constantly asked for selfies with him, he and a group of friends rented a real estate mogul's mansion off the strip via Airbnb, with hundreds of palm trees surrounding the largest private pool in the city. They skipped the conference itself, with its hordes of hackers lining up for research talks. Instead they alternated between debaucherous partying—making ample use of the city's marijuana dispensaries and cybersecurity firms' lavish open-bar events—and absurd daytime acts of recreation. One day they went to a shooting range, where Hutchins fired a grenade launcher and hundreds of high-caliber rounds from an M134 rotary machine gun. On other days they rented Lamborghinis and Corvettes and zoomed down Las Vegas Boulevard and through the canyons around the city. At a performance by one of Hutchins' favorite bands, the Chainsmokers, he stripped down to his underwear and jumped into a pool in front of the stage. Someone stole his wallet out of the pants he'd left behind. He was too elated to care. Three years had passed since Hutchins' work on Kronos, and life was good. He felt like a different person. And as his star rose, he finally allowed himself—almost—to let go of the low-lying dread, the constant fear that his crimes would catch up with him. Then, on his last morning in Vegas, Hutchins stepped barefoot onto the driveway of his rented mansion and saw a black SUV parked across the street. Almost immediately, Hutchins gave his FBI interrogators a kind of half-confession. Minutes after the two agents brought up Kronos in the McCarran Airport interrogation room, he admitted to having created parts of the malware, though he falsely claimed to have stopped working on it before he turned 18. Some part of him, he says, still hoped that the agents might just be trying to assess his credibility as a witness in their WannaCry investigation or to strong-arm him into giving them control of the WannaCry sinkhole domain. He nervously answered their questions—without a lawyer present. His wishful thinking evaporated, however, when the agents showed him a printout: It was the transcript of his conversation with “Randy” from three years earlier, when 20-year-old Hutchins had offered his friend a copy of the banking malware he was still maintaining at the time. As his star rose, he finally allowed himself—almost—to let go of the low-lying dread, the constant fear that his crimes would catch up with him. Finally, the red-headed agent who had first handcuffed him, Lee Chartier, made the agents' purpose clear. “If I'm being honest with you, Marcus, this has absolutely nothing to do with WannaCry,” Chartier said. The agents pulled out a warrant for his arrest on conspiracy to commit computer fraud and abuse. Hutchins was driven to a Las Vegas jail in a black FBI SUV that looked exactly like the one he'd spotted in front of his Airbnb that morning. He was allowed one phone call, which he used to contact his boss, Salim Neino. Then he was handcuffed to a chair in a room full of prisoners and left to wait for the rest of the day and the entire night that followed. Only when he asked to use the bathroom was he let into a cell where he could lie down on a concrete bed until someone else asked to use the cell's toilet. Then he'd be moved out of the cell and chained to the chair again. Instead of sleep, he mostly spent those long hours tumbling down the bottomless mental hole of his imagined future: months of pretrial detention followed by years in prison. He was 5,000 miles from home. It was the loneliest night of his 23-year-old life. Unbeknownst to Hutchins, however, a kind of immune response was already mounting within the hacker community. After receiving the call from jail, Neino had alerted Andrew Mabbitt, one of Hutchins' hacker friends in Las Vegas; Mabbitt leaked the news to a reporter at Vice and raised the alarm on Twitter. Immediately, high-profile accounts began to take up Hutchins' cause, rallying around the martyred hacker hero. “The DoJ has seriously fucked up,” tweeted one prominent British cybersecurity researcher, Kevin Beaumont. “I can vouch for @MalwareTechBlog being a really nice guy and also for having strong ethics,” wrote Martijn Grooten, the organizer of the Virus Bulletin cybersecurity conference, using Hutchins' Twitter handle. Some believed that the FBI had mistakenly arrested Hutchins for his WannaCry work, perhaps confusing him with the hackers behind the worm: “It's not often I see the entire hacker community really get this angry, but arresting @MalwareTechBlog for stopping an attack [is] unacceptable,” wrote Australian cypherpunk activist Asher Wolf. Not everyone was supportive of Hutchins: Ex-NSA hacker Dave Aitel went so far as to write in a blog post that he suspected Hutchins had created WannaCry himself and triggered his own kill switch only after the worm got out of control. (That theory would be deflated eight months later, when the Justice Department indicted a North Korean hacker as an alleged member of a state-sponsored hacking team responsible for WannaCry.) But the overwhelming response to Hutchins' arrest was sympathetic. By the next day, the representative for Hutchins' region in the UK parliament, Peter Heaton-Jones, issued a statement expressing his “concern and shock,” lauding Hutchins' work on WannaCry and noting that “people who know him in Ilfracombe, and the wider cyber community, are astounded at the allegations against him.” Mabbitt found Hutchins a local attorney for his bail hearing, and after Hutchins spent a miserable day in a crowded cage, his bail was set at $30,000. Stripped of his computers and phones, Hutchins couldn't get access to his bank accounts to cover that cost. So Tor Ekeland, a renowned hacker defense attorney, agreed to manage a legal fund in Hutchins' name to help cover the bond. Money poured in. Almost immediately, stolen credit cards began to show up among the sources of donations, hardly a good look for a computer fraud defendant. Ekeland responded by pulling the plug, returning all the donations and closing the fund. But the hacker community's goodwill toward Hutchins hadn't run out. On the day he was arrested, a pair of well-known cybersecurity professionals named Tarah Wheeler and Deviant Ollam had flown back to Seattle from Las Vegas. By that Sunday evening, the recently married couple were talking to Hutchins' friend Mabbitt and learning about the troubles with Hutchins' legal fund. Wheeler and Ollam had never met Hutchins and had barely even interacted with him on Twitter. But they had watched the Justice Department railroad idealistic young hackers for years, from Aaron Swartz to Chelsea Manning, often with tragic consequences. They imagined Hutchins, alone in the federal justice system, facing a similar fate. “We basically had a young, foreign, nerdy person of color being held in federal detention,” Wheeler says. “He was the closest thing to a global hero the hacker community had. And no one was there to help him.” Wheeler had just received a five-figure severance package from the security giant Symantec because her division had been shuttered. She and Ollam had been planning to use the money as a down payment on a home. Instead, on a whim, they decided to spend it bailing out Marcus Hutchins. Within 24 hours of leaving Las Vegas, they got on a flight back to the city. They landed on Monday afternoon, less than 90 minutes before the courthouse's 4 pm deadline for bail payments. If they didn't make it in time, Hutchins would be sent back to jail for another night. From the airport, they jumped in a Lyft to a bank where they took out a $30,000 cashier's check. But when they arrived at the courthouse, a court official told them it had to be notarized. Now they had only 20 minutes left until the court's office closed. Wheeler was wearing Gucci loafers. She took them off and, barefoot in a black sweater and pencil skirt, sprinted down the street in the middle of a scorching Las Vegas summer afternoon, arriving at the notary less than 10 minutes before 4 pm. Soaked in sweat, she got the check notarized, flagged down a stranger's car, and convinced the driver to ferry her back to the courthouse. Wheeler burst through the door at 4:02 pm, just before the clerk closed up for the day, and handed him the check that would spring Marcus Hutchins from jail. From there, Hutchins was bailed to a crowded halfway house, while even more forces in the hacker community were gathering to come to his aid. Two well-known veteran lawyers, Brian Klein and hacker defense attorney Marcia Hofmann, took his case pro bono. At his arraignment he pleaded not guilty, and a judge agreed that he could be put under house arrest in Los Angeles, where Klein had an office. Over the next two months, his lawyers chipped away at his pretrial detainment conditions, allowing him to travel beyond his Marina del Rey apartment and to use computers and the internet—though the court forbade him access to the WannaCry sinkhole domain he had created. Eventually, even his curfew and GPS monitoring ankle bracelet were removed. Hutchins got the news that those last pretrial restrictions were being lifted while attending a bonfire party on the beach with friendly hackers from the LA cybersecurity conference Shellcon. Somehow, getting indicted for years-old cybercrimes on a two-week trip to the US had delivered him to the city where he'd always dreamed of living, with relatively few limits on his freedom of movement. Kryptos Logic had put him on unpaid leave, so he spent his days surfing and cycling down the long seaside path that ran from his apartment to Malibu. And yet he was deeply depressed. He had no income, his savings were dwindling, and he had charges hanging over him that promised years in prison. Beyond all of that, he was tormented by the truth: Despite all the talk of his heroics, he knew that he had, in fact, done exactly what he was accused of. A feeling of overwhelming guilt had set in the moment he first regained access to the internet and checked his Twitter mentions a month after his arrest. “All of these people are writing to the FBI to say ‘you've got the wrong guy.’ And it was heartbreaking,” Hutchins says. “The guilt from this was a thousand times the guilt I'd felt for Kronos.” He says he was tempted to publish a full confession on his blog, but was dissuaded by his lawyers. Many supporters had interpreted his not-guilty plea as a statement of innocence rather than a negotiating tactic, and they donated tens of thousands of dollars more to a new legal fund. Former NSA hacker Jake Williams had agreed to serve as an expert witness on Hutchins' behalf. Tarah Wheeler and Deviant Ollam had become almost foster parents, flying with him to Milwaukee for his arraignment and helping him get his life set up in LA. He felt he deserved none of this—that everyone had come to his aid only under the mistaken assumption of his innocence. In fact, much of the support for Hutchins was more nuanced. Just a month after his arrest, cybersecurity blogger Brian Krebs delved into Hutchins' past and found the chain of clues that led to his old posts on HackForums, revealing that he had run an illegal hosting service, maintained a botnet, and authored malware—though not necessarily Kronos. Even as the truth started to come into focus, though, many of Hutchins' fans and friends seemed undeterred in their support for him. “We are all morally complex people,” Wheeler says. “For most of us, anything good we ever do comes either because we did bad before or because other people did good to get us out of it, or both.” But Hutchins remained tortured by a kind of moral impostor syndrome. He turned to alcohol and drugs, effacing his emotions with large doses of Adderall during the day and vodka at night. At times, he felt suicidal. The guilt, he says, “was eating me alive.” In the spring of 2018, nearly nine months after his arrest, prosecutors offered Hutchins a deal. If he agreed to reveal everything he knew about the identities of other criminal hackers and malware authors from his time in the underworld, they would recommend a sentence of no prison time. Hutchins hesitated. He says he didn't actually know anything about the identity of Vinny, the prosecutors' real target. But he also says that, on principle, he opposed snitching on the petty crimes of his fellow hackers to dodge the consequences of his own actions. Moreover, the deal would still result in a felony record that might prevent him from ever returning to the US. And he knew that the judge in his case, Joseph Stadtmueller, had a history of unpredictable sentencing, sometimes going well below or above the recommendations of prosecutors. So Hutchins refused the deal and set his sights on a trial. Soon afterward, prosecutors hit back with a superseding indictment, a new set of charges that brought the total to 10, including making false statements to the FBI in his initial interrogation. Hutchins and his lawyers saw the response as a strong-arm tactic, punishing Hutchins for refusing to accept their offer of a deal. After losing a series of motions—including one to dismiss his Las Vegas airport confession as evidence—Hutchins finally accepted a plea bargain in April 2019. This new deal was arguably riskier than the one he'd been offered earlier: After nearly a year and a half of wrangling with prosecutors, they now agreed only to make no recommendation for sentencing. Hutchins would plead guilty to two of the 10 charges, and would face as much as 10 years in prison and a half-million-dollar fine, entirely up to the judge's discretion. Along with his plea, Hutchins finally offered a public confession on his website—not the full, guts-spilling one he wanted, but a brief, lawyerly statement his attorneys had approved. “I've pleaded guilty to two charges related to writing malware in the years prior to my career in security,” he wrote. “I regret these actions and accept full responsibility for my mistakes.” Then he followed up with a more earnest tweet, intended to dispel an easy story to tell about his past immorality: that the sort of whitehat work he'd done was only possible because of his blackhat education—that a hacker's bad actions should be seen as instrumental to his or her later good deeds. “There's [a] misconception that to be a security expert you must dabble in the dark side,” Hutchins wrote. “It's not true. You can learn everything you need to know legally. Stick to the good side.” On a warm day in July, Hutchins arrived at a Milwaukee courthouse for his sentencing. Wearing a gray suit, he slipped in two hours early to avoid any press. As he waited with his lawyers in a briefing room, his vision tunneled; he felt that familiar sensation of impending doom begin to creep over him, the one that had loomed periodically at the back of his mind since he first went through amphetamine withdrawal five years earlier. This time, his anxiety wasn't irrational: The rest of his life was, in fact, hanging in the balance. He took a small dose of Xanax and walked through the halls to calm his nerves before the hearing was called to order. When Judge Stadtmueller entered the court and sat, the 77-year-old seemed shaky, Hutchins remembers, and he spoke in a gravelly, quavering voice. Hutchins still saw Stadtmueller as a wild card: He knew that the judge had presided over only one previous cybercrime sentencing in his career, 20 years earlier. How would he decipher a case as complicated as this one? But Hutchins remembers feeling his unease evaporate as Stadtmueller began a long soliloquy. It was replaced by a sense of awe. Stadtmueller began, almost as if reminiscing to himself, by reminding Hutchins that he had been a judge for more than three decades. In that time, he said, he had sentenced 2,200 people. But none were quite like Hutchins. “We see all sides of the human existence, both young, old, career criminals, those like yourself,” Stadtmueller began. “And I appreciate the fact that one might view the ignoble conduct that underlies this case as against the backdrop of what some have described as the work of a hero, a true hero. And that is, at the end of the day, what gives this case in particular its incredible uniqueness.” The judge quickly made clear that he saw Hutchins as not just a convicted criminal but as a cybersecurity expert who had “turned the corner” long before he faced justice. Stadtmueller seemed to be weighing the deterrent value of imprisoning Hutchins against the young hacker's genius at fending off malevolent code like WannaCry. “If we don't take the appropriate steps to protect the security of these wonderful technologies that we rely upon each and every day, it has all the potential, as your parents know from your mom's work, to raise incredible havoc,” Stadtmueller said, referring obliquely to Janet Hutchins' job with the NHS. “It's going to take individuals like yourself, who have the skill set, even at the tender age of 24 or 25, to come up with solutions.” The judge even argued that Hutchins might deserve a full pardon, though the court had no power to grant one. Then Stadtmueller delivered his conclusion: “There are just too many positives on the other side of the ledger,” he said. “The final call in the case of Marcus Hutchins today is a sentence of time served, with a one-year period of supervised release.” Hutchins could hardly believe what he'd just heard: The judge had weighed his good deeds against his bad ones and decided that his moral debt was canceled. After a few more formalities, the gavel dropped. Hutchins hugged his lawyers and his mother, who had flown in for the hearing. He left the courtroom and paid a $200 administrative fee. And then he walked out onto the street, almost two years since he had first been arrested, a free man. After five months of long phone calls, I arranged to meet Marcus Hutchins in person for the first time at a Starbucks in Venice Beach. I spot his towering mushroom cloud of curls while he's still on the crowded sidewalk. He walks through the door with a broad smile. But I can see that he's still battling an undercurrent of anxiety. He declines a coffee, complaining that he hasn't been sleeping more than a few hours a night. We walk for the next hours along the beach and the sunny backstreets of Venice, as Hutchins fills in some of the last remaining gaps in his life story. On the boardwalk, he stops periodically to admire the skaters and street performers. This is Hutchins' favorite part of Los Angeles, and he seems to be savoring a last look at it. Despite his sentence of time served, his legal case forced him to overstay his visa, and he's soon likely to be deported back to England. As we walk into Santa Monica, past rows of expensive beach homes, he says his goal is to eventually get back here to LA, which now feels more like home than Devon. “Someday I'd like to be able to live in a house by the ocean like this,” he says, “Where I can look out the window and if the waves are good, go right out and surf.” Despite his case's relatively happy ending, Hutchins says he still hasn't been able to shake the lingering feelings of guilt and impending punishment that have hung over his life for years. It still pains him to think of his debt to all the unwitting people who helped him, who donated to his legal fund and defended him, when all he wanted to do was confess. I point out that perhaps this, now, is that confession. That he's cataloged his deeds and misdeeds over more than 12 hours of interviews; when the results are published—and people reach the end of this article—that account will finally be out in the open. Hutchins' fans and critics alike will see his life laid bare and, like Stadtmueller in his courtroom, they will come to a verdict. Maybe they too will judge him worthy of redemption. And maybe it will give him some closure. He seems to consider this. “I had hoped it would, but I don't really think so anymore,” he says, looking down at the sidewalk. He's come to believe, he explains, that the only way to earn redemption would be to go back and stop all those people from helping him—making sacrifices for him—under false pretenses. “The time when I could have prevented people from doing all that for me has passed.” His motives for confessing are different now, he says. He's told his story less to seek forgiveness than simply to have it told. To put the weight of all those feats and secrets, on both sides of the moral scale, behind him. And to get back to work. “I don't want to be the WannaCry guy or the Kronos guy,” he says, looking toward the Malibu hills. “I just want to be someone who can help make things better.” Update 5/12/20, 6:25pm ET: This story has been updated to clarify that Lloyds Banking Group was targeted in a 2017 cyberattack, not Lloyd's of London as previously stated. In addition, the story's description of Hutchins' attorneys' legal advice has been clarified. Let us know what you think about this article. Submit a letter to the editor at mail@wired.com. © 2026 Condé Nast. All rights reserved. WIRED may earn a portion of sales from products that are purchased through our site as part of our Affiliate Partnerships with retailers. The material on this site may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used, except with the prior written permission of Condé Nast. Ad Choices |
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[SOURCE: https://www.mako.co.il/entertainment-celebs/local-2026/Article-0d25adc96067c91027.htm] | [TOKENS: 1844] |
רגע לפני: דנה פרידר חוגגת 39 עם יהודה לוי בתמונות היריון חדשותפרידר, שחוגגת ממש היום את יום הולדתה, מספקת לנו כעת רגע של נחת: לרגל החגיגה היא ולוי הצטלמו לבוק היריון מעלף - שבו נראים השניים מאוהבים מאי פעם, ופרידר עם בטן של היריון מתקדם. "הלב שלי שלם", כתבה במתיקות לצד התיעודלילך מרקוביץ'makoפורסם: 19.02.26, 15:44 | עודכן: 19.02.26, 19:01צילום: שי פרנקוהקישור הועתקלראשונה בחייהם, דנה פרידר ויהודה לוי עומדים ממש בקרוב להיות הורים. ובזמן שההכנות בוודאי בעיצומן ליום הגדול, שבו יבואו לעולם יורש או יורשת עצר - שכן השניים לא חשפו את מין העובר, בינתיים פרידר ההריונית חוגגת היום (חמישי) יום הולדת 39 - ואיזו תקופה לחגיגות.לרגל המאורע בני הזוג עמדו מול המצלמה לסשן צילומים מקצועי - שיישמר להם למזכרת לשנים רבות וטובות. "היום הולדת הכי שמח שהיה לי בחיים", כתבה פרידר לצד התיעוד החדש, והוסיפה אמוג'י של לב אדום, איך לא.בתיעוד - במספר תמונות לוי גם מנשק לה את הבטן במתיקות, נראית פרידר קורנת מאי פעם. הכיתוב שהוסיפה בהמשך לסשן הצילומים גם מעיד על כך: "הלב שלי שלם", תיארה והוסיפה "תודה לאל". בהחלט. מזל טוב.דנה פרידריהודה לוימצאתם טעות לשון? רגע לפני: דנה פרידר חוגגת 39 עם יהודה לוי בתמונות היריון חדשות פרידר, שחוגגת ממש היום את יום הולדתה, מספקת לנו כעת רגע של נחת: לרגל החגיגה היא ולוי הצטלמו לבוק היריון מעלף - שבו נראים השניים מאוהבים מאי פעם, ופרידר עם בטן של היריון מתקדם. "הלב שלי שלם", כתבה במתיקות לצד התיעוד לראשונה בחייהם, דנה פרידר ויהודה לוי עומדים ממש בקרוב להיות הורים. ובזמן שההכנות בוודאי בעיצומן ליום הגדול, שבו יבואו לעולם יורש או יורשת עצר - שכן השניים לא חשפו את מין העובר, בינתיים פרידר ההריונית חוגגת היום (חמישי) יום הולדת 39 - ואיזו תקופה לחגיגות. לרגל המאורע בני הזוג עמדו מול המצלמה לסשן צילומים מקצועי - שיישמר להם למזכרת לשנים רבות וטובות. "היום הולדת הכי שמח שהיה לי בחיים", כתבה פרידר לצד התיעוד החדש, והוסיפה אמוג'י של לב אדום, איך לא. בתיעוד - במספר תמונות לוי גם מנשק לה את הבטן במתיקות, נראית פרידר קורנת מאי פעם. הכיתוב שהוסיפה בהמשך לסשן הצילומים גם מעיד על כך: "הלב שלי שלם", תיארה והוסיפה "תודה לאל". בהחלט. מזל טוב. |
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[SOURCE: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trans-Karakoram_Tract] | [TOKENS: 1871] |
Contents Trans-Karakoram Tract The Trans-Karakoram Tract (Chinese: 喀喇昆仑走廊; pinyin: Kālǎkūnlún zǒuláng), also known as the Shaksgam Tract (Urdu: شکسگام, romanized: Shaksgām), is an area of approximately 5,200 km2 (2,000 sq mi) north of the Karakoram watershed, including the Shaksgam Valley. The tract is administered by China as part of its Taxkorgan and Yecheng counties in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region. Following the accession of Jammu and Kashmir to India in 1947, India claimed sovereignty over all its territory. At that time the northern boundary of Jammu and Kashmir was marked along the Yarkand River. In the 1950 border definition, India retracted the northern border south of the Yarkand River, but included the Shaksgam Valley within Jammu and Kashmir. However, the adjoining Gilgit-Baltistan region came under Pakistan's control through the First Kashmir War. Pakistan ceded the Shaksgam Tract to China through the 1963 Sino-Pakistan Agreement, and a border based on actual ground positions was recognized as the international border by China and Pakistan. India has never accepted the Sino-Pakistan Agreement, asserting that Islamabad "unlawfully" attempted to cede the area to Beijing. Most of the tract is composed of the Shaksgam Valley and was formerly administered as part of Shigar, a district (formerly a tehsil) in the Baltistan region. A polo ground in Shaksgam was built by the Amacha Royal family of Shigar, and the Rajas of Shigar used to invite the Amirs of Hotan to play polo there. Most of the names of the mountains, lakes, rivers and passes are in Balti/Ladakhi, suggesting that this land had been part of Baltistan/Ladakh region for a long time. The tract is one of the most inhospitable areas of the world, with some of the highest mountains of the Karakoram Range, including Broad Peak, K2 and Gasherbrum. On the southeast, it is adjacent to the highest battlefield in the world on the Siachen Glacier region which is controlled by India. History Historically the people of Hunza cultivated and grazed areas to the north of the Karakoram, and the Mir of Hunza claimed those areas as part of Hunza's territories. Those areas included the Raskam Valley, north of the Shaksgam Valley. In 1889 the first expedition to the Shaksgam Valley by a European was undertaken by Francis Younghusband (who referred to the Shaksgam as the Oprang). In March 1899 the British proposed, in a formal Note from Sir Claude MacDonald to China, a new boundary between China and British India. The Note proposed that China should relinquish its claims to suzerainty over Hunza, and in return Hunza should relinquish its claims to most of the Taghdumbash and Raskam districts. It further outlined a border broadly following the main Karakoram crest, dividing the watersheds of the Indus and Tarim rivers, with a deviation to pass through a Hunza post at Darwaza near the Shimshal Pass. The Chinese did not respond to the Note and the Indian government never revisited the boundary in the same form again. The MacDonald line was modified in 1905 to include in India a small area east of the Shimshal Pass, to put the border on a stretch of the Shaksgam River. At the same time, in view of "The Great Game", Britain was concerned at the danger of Russian expansion as Qing dynasty China weakened and so adopted a policy of claiming a border north of the Shaksgam River. This followed a line proposed by Sir John Ardagh in a Memorandum of 1897. That border included the Mir of Hunza's claim over the Raskam Valley. However, British administration never extended north of the Karakoram watershed. The Gazetteer of Kashmír and Ladákh, first published in 1890 and compiled under the direction of the Quarter Master General in India in the Intelligence Branch, gives a description and details of places inside Kashmir. It includes a description of the Híñdutásh Pass in north eastern Kashmir in the Aksai Chin. The Gazetteer states in pages 520 and 364 that "The eastern (Kuenlun) range forms the southern boundary of Khotan", "and is crossed by two passes, the Yangi or Elchi Diwan, .... and the Hindutak (i.e. Híñdutásh ) Díwán". It describes Khotan as "A province of the Chinese Empire lying to the north of the Eastern Kuenlun range, which here forms the boundary of Ladák". From 1899 until the independence of India and creation of Pakistan in 1947, the representation of the border on maps varied. In 1926 Kenneth Mason explored and surveyed the Shaksgam Valley. In 1927 the Government of British India abandoned any claim to the area north of the MacDonald line, but the decision did not find its way on to British maps. By 1959, however, Chinese maps were published showing large areas west and south of the MacDonald line in China. That year, the Government of Pakistan announced its willingness to consult on the boundary question. Since 1947, India has claimed sovereignty over the entire area of the pre-1947 independent state of Jammu and Kashmir and maintains that Pakistan and China do not share a common border. In 1954 the Times Atlas predominantly depicted the Cis-Kuen Lun Tract (the region between the Karakoram and Kuen Lun mountains) as a part of Kashmir under the caption "Undefined Frontier area". The northern border published by the 1954 Times Atlas more or less followed the watershed of the Kuen Lun range from the Taghdumbash Pamir to the Yangi Dawan pass north of Kulanaldi, but east of the Yangi Dawan Pass, the border deviated from the watershed of the Kuen Lun range on the edge of the highlands of Kashmir. Sino-Pakistan Frontier Agreement In 1959, the Pakistani government became concerned over Chinese maps that showed areas the Pakistanis considered their own as part of China. In 1961, Ayub Khan sent a formal note to China; there was no reply. It is thought that the Chinese might not have been motivated to negotiate with Pakistan because of Pakistan's relations with India. In 1962 the Government of Pakistan published an official map depicting the alignment of the northern border of Kashmir, which depicted much of the Cis-Kuen Lun Tract as part of Kashmir. The alignment published by the Government of Pakistan was mostly similar to the portrayal of the northern Border of Kashmir depicted in the 1954 Times Atlas, though in places, the Government of Pakistan's position deviated from the 1954 Times Atlas, and included areas as part of Kashmir which were to the north of the border of Kashmir shown in the Times Atlas. Thus the official position of the Government of Pakistan prior to the 1963 Sino-Pakistan Agreement was that the northern border of Pakistan was on the Kuen Lun range, and the territory ceded by the Government of Pakistan was not just restricted to the Shaksgam Valley but extended to the Kuen Lun range. For an idea of the extent of the Trans-Karakoram Tract or the Cis-Kuen Lun Tract, a view the map (C) from the Joe Schwartzberg's Historical Atlas of South Asia at DSAL in Chicago with the caption, "The boundary of Kashmir with China as portrayed and proposed by Britain prior to 1947" would show that the geographical and territorial extent of the Trans-Karakoram Tract or the Cis-Kuen Lun Tract is more or less the territory enclosed between the northernmost line and the innermost lines. After Pakistan voted to grant China a seat in the United Nations, the Chinese withdrew the disputed maps in January 1962, agreeing to enter border talks in March. Negotiations between the nations officially began on October 13, 1962, and resulted in the Sino-Pakistan Agreement signed on 2 March 1963 by foreign ministers Chen Yi of China and Zulfikar Ali Bhutto of Pakistan. The Indian government took the view that the agreement resulted in the surrendering of a significant area to China. In the opinion of Jawaharlal Nehru, "According to the survey of Pakistan maps, even those published in 1962, about 11,000 square miles [28,000 km2] of Sinkiang territory formed part of Kashmir. If one goes by these maps, Pakistan has obviously surrendered over 12,810.87 square miles [33,180.0 km2] of territory". See also Notes References Bibliography External links |
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[SOURCE: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerusalem_Talmud] | [TOKENS: 4673] |
Contents Jerusalem Talmud The Jerusalem Talmud (Hebrew: תַּלְמוּד יְרוּשַׁלְמִי, romanized: Talmud Yerushalmi, often Yerushalmi for short), also known as the Talmud of the Land of Israel or Palestinian Talmud, is a collection of rabbinic notes on the second-century Jewish oral tradition known as the Mishnah. Naming this version of the Talmud after Palestine or the Land of Israel—rather than Jerusalem—is considered more accurate, as the text originated mainly from Galilee in Byzantine Palaestina Secunda rather than from Jerusalem, where no Jews were allowed to live at the time. The Jerusalem Talmud predates its counterpart, the Babylonian Talmud (known in Hebrew as the Talmud Bavli), by about a century. It was written primarily in Galilean Aramaic. It was compiled between the late fourth century to the first half of the fifth century. Both versions of the Talmud have two parts, the Mishnah (of which there is only one version), which was finalized by Judah ha-Nasi around the year 200 CE, and either the Babylonian or the Jerusalem Gemara. The Gemara is what differentiates the Jerusalem Talmud from its Babylonian counterpart. The Jerusalem Gemara contains the written discussions of generations of rabbis of the Talmudic academies in Syria Palaestina at Tiberias and Caesarea. Name This version of the Talmud is frequently named the Jerusalem Talmud or the Palestinian Talmud. The latter name, after the region of Palestine – or the Land of Israel – is considered more accurate, as the text originated mainly from Galilee in Byzantine Palaestina Secunda rather than from Jerusalem, where no Jews were allowed to live at the time. The use of the parallel terms dates to the period of the geonim (6th–11th century CE), alongside other terms such as "Talmud of the Land of Israel", "Talmud of the West", and "Talmud of the Western Lands". Origins and historical context The Jerusalem Talmud probably originated in Tiberias in the School of Johanan bar Nappaha as a compilation of teachings of the schools of Tiberias, Caesarea, and Sepphoris.[citation needed] It is written largely in Galilean Aramaic, a Western Aramaic dialect that differs from its Babylonian counterpart. This Talmud is a synopsis of the analysis of the Mishnah that was developed for nearly 200 years by the Talmudic academies in Syria Palaestina (principally those of Tiberias and Caesarea). Because of their location, the sages of these Academies devoted considerable attention to the analysis of the agricultural laws of the Land of Israel. Manuscripts The Leiden Jerusalem Talmud (Or. 4720) is today the only extant complete manuscript of the Jerusalem Talmud and available at Leiden University Libraries. It was copied in 1289 by Jehiel ben Jekuthiel Anav and shows elements of a later recension. The additions which are added in the biblical glosses of the Leiden manuscript do not appear in extant fragments of the same Talmudic tractates found in Yemen, additions which are now incorporated in every printed edition of the Jerusalem Talmud. These Yemenite fragments, a consequence of isolation the Yemenite community, are important as source material (as evidenced below). The Leiden manuscript is important in that it preserves some earlier variants to textual readings, such as in Tractate Pesachim 10:3 (70a), which brings down the old Hebrew word for charoset (the sweet relish eaten at Passover), viz. dūkeh (Hebrew: דוכה), instead of rūbeh/rabah (Hebrew: רובה), saying with a play on words: "The members of Isse's household would say in the name of Isse: Why is it called dūkeh? It is because she pounds [the spiced ingredients] with him." The Hebrew word for "pound" is dakh (דך), which rules out the spelling of rabah (רבה), as found in the printed editions. Yemenite Jews still call it dūkeh. Leiden University Libraries has digitised both volumes of the manuscript and made it available in its Digital Collections. Among the Hebrew manuscripts held in the Vatican Library is a late 13th-century – early 14th-century copy of Tractate Sotah and the complete Zeraim for the Jerusalem Talmud (Vat. ebr. 133): Berakhot, Peah, Demai, Kilayim, Sheviit, Terumot, Maaserot, Maaser Sheni, Ḥallah and Orlah (without the Mishnah for the Tractates, excepting only the Mishnah to the 2nd chapter of Berakhot). L. Ginzberg printed variant readings from this manuscript on pp. 347–372 at the end of his Fragments of the Yerushalmi (New York 1909). Saul Lieberman printed variants at the end of his essay, ʿAl ha-Yerushalmi (Hebrew), Jerusalem 1929. Both editors noted that this manuscript is full of gross errors but also retains some valuable readings. Dating Traditionally, the redaction of this Talmud was thought to have been brought to an abrupt end around 425, when Theodosius II suppressed the Nasi of the Sanhedrin and put an end to the practice of semikhah (formal scholarly ordination). The redaction of the Jerusalem Talmud was done to codify the laws of the Sanhedrin as the redaction of the Mishnah had similarly done during the time of Judah ha-Nasi. It was thought that the compilers of the Jerusalem Talmud worked to collect the rulings of the Sanhedrin and lacked the time to produce a work of the quality they had intended and that this is the reason why the Gemara do not comment upon the whole Mishnah, or that certain sections were lost. Current perspectives on the dating of the closure of the text of the Palestinian Talmud rely on an understanding of activity of rabbinic scholarship and literary production, identifying datable historical datapoints mentioned by the text, and its reliance on and citation by other datable (or roughly datable) texts. Broadly, the Palestinian Talmud is dated at some time from the second half of the fourth century to the first half of the fifth century. Christine Hayes has argued that a lack of evidence for Amoraim activity in Syria Palaestina after the 370s implies that the text was closed by around 370. However, reference to historical events from around or even slightly after 370 may push the earliest possible date to the late 4th century. For example, the Roman general Ursicinus, who had a public role between 351 and 359, is mentioned several times in a legendary context, suggesting that these references are somewhat later than his public career. Furthermore, there is also a reference to the Persian campaign of the Roman emperor Julian from 363. While less clear, there is also confidence that the Roman official "Proclus" named by the Palestinian Talmud corresponds to a Roman official also named Proclus, who became the governor of Palestine around 380 and eventually climbed to the position of praefectus urbi Constantinopolis (Prefect of Constantinople) which he held between 388 and 392. The final generation of rabbis whose opinions are found in the text belong to the second half of the fourth century. The time of the editing and compilation of these opinions would likely have occurred in the generation of their disciples, again leading to a date of the text during the late fourth or the early fifth century. The dating of the Palestinian Talmud is definitively prior to that of the Babylonian Talmud, which relies heavily on it. The Babylonian Talmud was composed at some time between the mid-sixth century to the early-seventh century, but prior to the onset of the Arab conquests. This provides an upper absolute boundary as to when the Palestinian Talmud could have been compiled. To further push down the upper boundary, some lines (Demai 2:1; Shevi'it 6:1) of the Palestinian Talmud are also extant in the Tel Rehov inscription which dates to the 6th or 7th century.: 182 Contents and pagination In the initial Venice edition, the Jerusalem Talmud was published in four volumes, corresponding to separate sedarim of the Mishnah. Page numbers are by volume as follows: Each page was printed as a folio, thus it contains four sub-pages (i.e., 7a, 7b, 7c, 7d), in contrast to the Babylonian Talmud which only has two sub-pages (7a, 7b). In addition, each chapter of the Jerusalem Talmud (paralleling a chapter of Mishnah) is divided into "halachot"; each "halacha" is the commentary on a single short passage of Mishnah. Passages in the Jerusalem Talmud are generally references by a combination of chapter and halacha (i.e., Yerushalmi Sotah 1:1), by a page in the Venice edition (i.e., Yerushalmi Sotah 15a), or both (Yerushalmi Sotah 1:1 15a). In addition to the sedarim of Tohorot (except part of Niddah) and Kodashim, several tractates and parts of tractates are missing from the Jerusalem Talmud. The last four chapters of Shabbat, and the last chapter of Makkot, are missing. Niddah ends abruptly after the first lines of chapter 4. Tractates Avot and Eduyot are missing from both the Jerusalem and Babylonian Talmuds. Tractate Shekalim from the Jerusalem Talmud is printed in printings of both the Jerusalem and the Babylonian Talmud. According to the Jewish Encyclopedia, Yerushalmi has not been preserved in its entirety; large portions of it were entirely lost at an early date, while other parts exist only in fragments. The editio princeps (ed. Bomberg, Venice, 1523 et seq.), based on the Leiden manuscript and on which all later editions are based, terminates with the following remark: "Thus far we have found what is contained in this Talmud; and we have endeavored in vain to obtain the missing portions." Of the four manuscripts used for this first edition (comp. the note at the conclusion of Shab. xx. 17d and the passage just cited), only one is now in existence; it is preserved in the library of the University of Leyden (see below). Of the six orders of the Mishnah, the fifth, Ḳodashim, is missing entirely from the Palestinian Talmud, while the sixth, Ṭohorot, contains only the first three chapters of the treatise Niddah (iv. 48d–51b). Occasionally, the rishonim quote passages from the "Yerushalmi" which are not found in extant versions of the Jerusalem Talmud. Proposed explanations for this include the following: Comparison to Babylonian Talmud There are significant differences between the two Talmud compilations. The language of the Jerusalem Talmud is Galilean Aramaic, a Western Aramaic dialect which differs from that of the Babylonian. The Jerusalem Talmud is often fragmentary and difficult to read, even for experienced Talmudists. The redaction of the Babylonian Talmud, on the other hand, is more careful and precise. The traditional explanation for this difference was the idea that the redactors of the Jerusalem Talmud had to finish their work abruptly. A more probable explanation is the fact that the Babylonian Talmud was not redacted for at least another 200 years, in which a broad discursive framework was created. In a novel view, David Weiss Halivni describes the longer discursive passages in the Babylonian Talmud as the "Stammaitic" layer of redaction, and believe that it was added later than the rest: if one were to remove the "Stammaitic" passages, the remaining text would be quite similar in character to the Jerusalem Talmud. The two compilations are similar in examining the Mishnah according to rabbinic tradition, but numerous differences exist in the details in their interpretations. Such differences are listed and examined in depth in the modern works Amrei Bemaarava and Darkhei Hatalmudim. Neither the Jerusalem nor the Babylonian Talmud covers the entire Mishnah: for example, a Babylonian Gemara exists only for 37 out of the 63 tractates of the Mishnah. In particular: The Babylonian Talmud records the opinions of the rabbis of Israel as well as of those of Babylonia, while the Jerusalem Talmud seldom cites the Babylonian rabbis. The Babylonian version contains the opinions of more generations because of its later date of completion. For both these reasons, it is regarded as a more comprehensive collection of the opinions available. On the other hand, because of the centuries of redaction between the composition of the Jerusalem and the Babylonian Talmud, the opinions of early amoraim might be closer to their original form in the Jerusalem Talmud. Influence The Jerusalem Talmud, and other classical rabbinic sources from the Land of Israel, strongly influenced Jewish practice there and in lands further west for many centuries, even forming the basis of many customs of early Ashkenaz. This influence is attested to in the works of Pirqoi ben Baboi (8th–9th century) and Sherira Gaon (10th century). Some traditions associated with the Jerusalem Talmud have been retained to this day, for example in the liturgy of the Italian Jews and Romaniotes. In time, though, the Babylonian Talmud came to be seen as the canonical work of rabbinic tradition across the entire Jewish world. As such, the Babylonian Talmud has traditionally been studied more widely and has had a greater influence on the halakhic tradition than the Jerusalem Talmud. Already in the 11th century, the great works of Rashi and Isaac Alfasi were based on the Babylonian Talmud, not the Jerusalem Talmud. The shift to Babylonian authority occurred mainly because the influence and prestige of the Jewish community of Israel steadily declined in contrast with the Babylonian community in the years after the redaction of the Talmud and continuing until the Gaonic era. Furthermore, the editing of the Babylonian Talmud was superior to that of the Jerusalem version, making it more accessible and readily usable. Hai ben Sherira, on the preeminence of the Babylonian Talmud, wrote: Anything that has been decided halachically in our Talmud (i.e. the Babylonian Talmud), we do not rely on [any contradictory view found in] the Jerusalem Talmud, seeing that many years have passed since instruction coming from there (i.e. the Land of Israel) had ceased on account of persecution, whereas here (i.e. in Babylonia) is where the final decisions were clarified. Nevertheless, the Jerusalem Talmud was still accorded a certain status as a secondary work useful for the clarification of halakha. Regarding the Jerusalem Talmud's continued importance for the understanding of arcane matters, Hai ben Sherira wrote: Whatever we find in the Jerusalem Talmud and there is nothing that contradicts it in our own Talmud (i.e. the Babylonian Talmud), or which gives a nice explanation for its matters of discourse, we can hold-on to it and rely upon it, for it is not to be viewed as inferior to the commentaries of the rishonim (i.e. the early exponents of the Torah). A similar judgment was made by Ritva: "We always rely on their Talmud (i.e. the Jerusalem Talmud) and interpret and codify our Talmud (the Babylonian) based on their (the scholars of Yerushalmi) words." It was also an important resource in the study of the Babylonian Talmud by the Kairouan school of Chananel ben Chushiel and Nissim ben Jacob, with the result that opinions ultimately based on the Jerusalem Talmud found their way into both the Tosafot and the Mishneh Torah of Maimonides. Following the formation of the modern state of Israel, there was some interest in restoring Jerusalem Talmud's traditions. For example, David Bar-Hayim of the Machon Shilo institute has issued a siddur reflecting the practices found in the Jerusalem Talmud and other sources. In addition, from a historical perspective, the Jerusalem Talmud remains an indispensable source of knowledge of the development of the Jewish Law in the Holy Land. Commentators There is no comprehensive commentary to the Jerusalem Talmud by any of the Rishonim, but explanations of many individual passages can be found in the literature of the Rishonim. Most significantly, Rabbi Samson ben Abraham of Sens (c. 1150 – c. 1230), known as the Rash, excerpts and explains many sections of the Jerusalem Talmud in his commentary to the Mishnah of Seder Zeraim. His work, however, is focused on the Mishnah and is not a comprehensive commentary on the entire Jerusalem Talmud. Judah ben Yakar (died c. 1210) wrote a commentary to much of the Jerusalem Talmud, which was quoted by other rishonim but has now been lost. Kaftor VaFerach, by Rabbi Ishtori Haparchi (1280–1355), a disciple of Rabbi Asher ben Jehiel, the Rosh, is one of the few surviving compositions of the Rishonim about all of Seder Zeraim. However it is a Halachic work and not per se a commentary on the Jerusalem Talmud. The only surviving commentaries of Rishonim on the Jerusalem Talmud are the commentaries to Tractate Shekalim of Menachem Meiri, Meshulam ben David and Shemuel ben Shniur. All three of these commentaries are reprinted in the Mutzal Mi'Eish edition of the Jerusalem Talmud Tractate Shekalim. Many Acharonim, however, wrote commentaries on all or major portions of the Jerusalem Talmud, and as with the Babylonian Talmud, many also wrote on individual tractates of the Jerusalem Talmud. One of the first of the Acharonim to write a commentary on the Jerusalem Talmud was Solomon Sirilio (1485–1554), also known as Rash Sirilio, whose commentaries cover only the Seder Zeraim and the tractate Shekalim of Seder Moed. Sirilio's commentary remained in manuscript form until it was first printed in 1875. In the Vilna edition of the Jerusalem Talmud, Rash Sirilio appears only for tractates Berakhot and Pe'ah, but the commentary for the entire Seder Zeraim appears in the Mutzal Mi'Eish and Oz Vehadar editions. In addition to his commentary, Sirilio worked to remove mistakes made by manuscript copyists that over time had slipped into the text of the Jerusalem Talmud, and his amended text of the Gemara is reproduced alongside his commentary in the Vilna and Mutzal Mi'Eish editions. Another 16th century commentary on the Yerushalmi is Rabbi Elazar ben Moshe Azikri's commentary to Tractates Berakhot and Betzah. Today's modern printed editions almost all carry the commentaries, Korban ha-Eida, by David ben Naphtali Fränkel (c. 1704–1762) of Berlin on the orders of Moed, Nashim and parts of Nezikin, and Pnei Moshe, by Moses Margolies (c.1710?–1781) of Amsterdam on the entire Talmud. The Vilna edition also includes the Ridvaz by Rabbi Yaakov Dovid Wilovsky on most of the Talmud. The goal of all three of these commentaries is to explain the simple meaning of the Talmud similar to Rashi's commentary on the Bavli, and the authors each wrote an additional commentary—Sheyarei ha-Korban, Marei ha-Panim and Tosefot Rid respectively—that is meant to be a similar style to Tosafot. Rabbi Chaim Kanievsky published a commentary on tractates Berakhot through Nedarim (roughly 70% of the Jerusalem Talmud), considered by many to be the clearest commentary. Most of it is reprinted in the Oz Vehadar edition of the Yerushalmi. Rabbi Yitzchok Isaac Krasilschikov wrote the Toledot Yitzchak and Tevuna commentaries on tractates Berakhot through Rosh Hashanah (roughly 50% of the Jerusalem Talmud), which was published from his manuscript by the Mutzal Me-esh Institute. A modern edition and commentary, known as Or Simchah, is currently being prepared in Arad; another edition in preparation, including paraphrases and explanatory notes in modern Hebrew, is Yedid Nefesh. The Jerusalem Talmud has also received some attention from Adin Steinsaltz, who planned a translation into modern Hebrew and accompanying explanation similar to his work on the Babylonian Talmud before his death. So far only Tractates Pe'ah and Shekalim have appeared. Translations into English References Further reading External links |
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[SOURCE: https://www.theverge.com/transportation/881991/judge-rejects-teslas-effort-to-overturn-243-million-jury-verdict] | [TOKENS: 646] |
Posted Feb 20, 2026 at 3:58 PM UTCAExternal LinkAndrew J. HawkinsJudge rejects Tesla’s effort to overturn $243 million jury verdict.A federal jury in Florida last year found Tesla partly liable for a deadly 2019 crash involving the company’s Autopilot driver assist software, and ordered the company to pay the families $243 million. Tesla appealed the ruling, but now a judge has dismissed that effort. In her ruling, US District Court Judge Beth Bloom stated that Tesla’s arguments “were already considered and rejected” and that the evidence at trial “more than supports the jury verdict and does not find it committed any error.”US judge upholds $243 million verdict against Tesla over fatal Autopilot crash[Reuters]Follow topics and authors from this story to see more like this in your personalized homepage feed and to receive email updates.Andrew J. HawkinsCloseAndrew J. HawkinsTransportation editorPosts from this author will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.FollowFollowSee All by Andrew J. HawkinsElectric CarsCloseElectric CarsPosts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.FollowFollowSee All Electric CarsTeslaCloseTeslaPosts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.FollowFollowSee All TeslaTransportationCloseTransportationPosts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.FollowFollowSee All TransportationCommentsLoading commentsGetting the conversation ready...Most PopularMost PopularXbox chief Phil Spencer is leaving MicrosoftRead Microsoft gaming CEO Asha Sharma’s first memo on the future of XboxThe RAM shortage is coming for everything you care aboutAmazon blames human employees for an AI coding agent’s mistakeWill Stancil, man of the people or just an annoying guy?The Verge DailyA free daily digest of the news that matters most.Email (required)Sign UpBy submitting your email, you agree to our Terms and Privacy Notice. This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply. A federal jury in Florida last year found Tesla partly liable for a deadly 2019 crash involving the company’s Autopilot driver assist software, and ordered the company to pay the families $243 million. Tesla appealed the ruling, but now a judge has dismissed that effort. In her ruling, US District Court Judge Beth Bloom stated that Tesla’s arguments “were already considered and rejected” and that the evidence at trial “more than supports the jury verdict and does not find it committed any error.” [Reuters] Posts from this author will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. See All by Andrew J. Hawkins Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. See All Electric Cars Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. See All Tesla Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. See All Transportation Most Popular The Verge Daily A free daily digest of the news that matters most. More in Transportation This is the title for the native ad Top Stories © 2026 Vox Media, LLC. All Rights Reserved |
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[SOURCE: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlayStation_(console)#cite_ref-controllersquare_174-0] | [TOKENS: 10728] |
Contents PlayStation (console) The PlayStation[a] (codenamed PSX, abbreviated as PS, and retroactively PS1 or PS one) is a home video game console developed and marketed by Sony Computer Entertainment. It was released in Japan on 3 December 1994, followed by North America on 9 September 1995, Europe on 29 September 1995, and other regions following thereafter. As a fifth-generation console, the PlayStation primarily competed with the Nintendo 64 and the Sega Saturn. Sony began developing the PlayStation after a failed venture with Nintendo to create a CD-ROM peripheral for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System in the early 1990s. The console was primarily designed by Ken Kutaragi and Sony Computer Entertainment in Japan, while additional development was outsourced in the United Kingdom. An emphasis on 3D polygon graphics was placed at the forefront of the console's design. PlayStation game production was designed to be streamlined and inclusive, enticing the support of many third party developers. The console proved popular for its extensive game library, popular franchises, low retail price, and aggressive youth marketing which advertised it as the preferable console for adolescents and adults. Critically acclaimed games that defined the console include Gran Turismo, Crash Bandicoot, Spyro the Dragon, Tomb Raider, Resident Evil, Metal Gear Solid, Tekken 3, and Final Fantasy VII. Sony ceased production of the PlayStation on 23 March 2006—over eleven years after it had been released, and in the same year the PlayStation 3 debuted. More than 4,000 PlayStation games were released, with cumulative sales of 962 million units. The PlayStation signaled Sony's rise to power in the video game industry. It received acclaim and sold strongly; in less than a decade, it became the first computer entertainment platform to ship over 100 million units. Its use of compact discs heralded the game industry's transition from cartridges. The PlayStation's success led to a line of successors, beginning with the PlayStation 2 in 2000. In the same year, Sony released a smaller and cheaper model, the PS one. History The PlayStation was conceived by Ken Kutaragi, a Sony executive who managed a hardware engineering division and was later dubbed "the Father of the PlayStation". Kutaragi's interest in working with video games stemmed from seeing his daughter play games on Nintendo's Famicom. Kutaragi convinced Nintendo to use his SPC-700 sound processor in the Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES) through a demonstration of the processor's capabilities. His willingness to work with Nintendo was derived from both his admiration of the Famicom and conviction in video game consoles becoming the main home-use entertainment systems. Although Kutaragi was nearly fired because he worked with Nintendo without Sony's knowledge, president Norio Ohga recognised the potential in Kutaragi's chip and decided to keep him as a protégé. The inception of the PlayStation dates back to a 1988 joint venture between Nintendo and Sony. Nintendo had produced floppy disk technology to complement cartridges in the form of the Family Computer Disk System, and wanted to continue this complementary storage strategy for the SNES. Since Sony was already contracted to produce the SPC-700 sound processor for the SNES, Nintendo contracted Sony to develop a CD-ROM add-on, tentatively titled the "Play Station" or "SNES-CD". The PlayStation name had already been trademarked by Yamaha, but Nobuyuki Idei liked it so much that he agreed to acquire it for an undisclosed sum rather than search for an alternative. Sony was keen to obtain a foothold in the rapidly expanding video game market. Having been the primary manufacturer of the MSX home computer format, Sony had wanted to use their experience in consumer electronics to produce their own video game hardware. Although the initial agreement between Nintendo and Sony was about producing a CD-ROM drive add-on, Sony had also planned to develop a SNES-compatible Sony-branded console. This iteration was intended to be more of a home entertainment system, playing both SNES cartridges and a new CD format named the "Super Disc", which Sony would design. Under the agreement, Sony would retain sole international rights to every Super Disc game, giving them a large degree of control despite Nintendo's leading position in the video game market. Furthermore, Sony would also be the sole benefactor of licensing related to music and film software that it had been aggressively pursuing as a secondary application. The Play Station was to be announced at the 1991 Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas. However, Nintendo president Hiroshi Yamauchi was wary of Sony's increasing leverage at this point and deemed the original 1988 contract unacceptable upon realising it essentially handed Sony control over all games written on the SNES CD-ROM format. Although Nintendo was dominant in the video game market, Sony possessed a superior research and development department. Wanting to protect Nintendo's existing licensing structure, Yamauchi cancelled all plans for the joint Nintendo–Sony SNES CD attachment without telling Sony. He sent Nintendo of America president Minoru Arakawa (his son-in-law) and chairman Howard Lincoln to Amsterdam to form a more favourable contract with Dutch conglomerate Philips, Sony's rival. This contract would give Nintendo total control over their licences on all Philips-produced machines. Kutaragi and Nobuyuki Idei, Sony's director of public relations at the time, learned of Nintendo's actions two days before the CES was due to begin. Kutaragi telephoned numerous contacts, including Philips, to no avail. On the first day of the CES, Sony announced their partnership with Nintendo and their new console, the Play Station. At 9 am on the next day, in what has been called "the greatest ever betrayal" in the industry, Howard Lincoln stepped onto the stage and revealed that Nintendo was now allied with Philips and would abandon their work with Sony. Incensed by Nintendo's renouncement, Ohga and Kutaragi decided that Sony would develop their own console. Nintendo's contract-breaking was met with consternation in the Japanese business community, as they had broken an "unwritten law" of native companies not turning against each other in favour of foreign ones. Sony's American branch considered allying with Sega to produce a CD-ROM-based machine called the Sega Multimedia Entertainment System, but the Sega board of directors in Tokyo vetoed the idea when Sega of America CEO Tom Kalinske presented them the proposal. Kalinske recalled them saying: "That's a stupid idea, Sony doesn't know how to make hardware. They don't know how to make software either. Why would we want to do this?" Sony halted their research, but decided to develop what it had developed with Nintendo and Sega into a console based on the SNES. Despite the tumultuous events at the 1991 CES, negotiations between Nintendo and Sony were still ongoing. A deal was proposed: the Play Station would still have a port for SNES games, on the condition that it would still use Kutaragi's audio chip and that Nintendo would own the rights and receive the bulk of the profits. Roughly two hundred prototype machines were created, and some software entered development. Many within Sony were still opposed to their involvement in the video game industry, with some resenting Kutaragi for jeopardising the company. Kutaragi remained adamant that Sony not retreat from the growing industry and that a deal with Nintendo would never work. Knowing that they had to take decisive action, Sony severed all ties with Nintendo on 4 May 1992. To determine the fate of the PlayStation project, Ohga chaired a meeting in June 1992, consisting of Kutaragi and several senior Sony board members. Kutaragi unveiled a proprietary CD-ROM-based system he had been secretly working on which played games with immersive 3D graphics. Kutaragi was confident that his LSI chip could accommodate one million logic gates, which exceeded the capabilities of Sony's semiconductor division at the time. Despite gaining Ohga's enthusiasm, there remained opposition from a majority present at the meeting. Older Sony executives also opposed it, who saw Nintendo and Sega as "toy" manufacturers. The opposers felt the game industry was too culturally offbeat and asserted that Sony should remain a central player in the audiovisual industry, where companies were familiar with one another and could conduct "civili[s]ed" business negotiations. After Kutaragi reminded him of the humiliation he suffered from Nintendo, Ohga retained the project and became one of Kutaragi's most staunch supporters. Ohga shifted Kutaragi and nine of his team from Sony's main headquarters to Sony Music Entertainment Japan (SMEJ), a subsidiary of the main Sony group, so as to retain the project and maintain relationships with Philips for the MMCD development project. The involvement of SMEJ proved crucial to the PlayStation's early development as the process of manufacturing games on CD-ROM format was similar to that used for audio CDs, with which Sony's music division had considerable experience. While at SMEJ, Kutaragi worked with Epic/Sony Records founder Shigeo Maruyama and Akira Sato; both later became vice-presidents of the division that ran the PlayStation business. Sony Computer Entertainment (SCE) was jointly established by Sony and SMEJ to handle the company's ventures into the video game industry. On 27 October 1993, Sony publicly announced that it was entering the game console market with the PlayStation. According to Maruyama, there was uncertainty over whether the console should primarily focus on 2D, sprite-based graphics or 3D polygon graphics. After Sony witnessed the success of Sega's Virtua Fighter (1993) in Japanese arcades, the direction of the PlayStation became "instantly clear" and 3D polygon graphics became the console's primary focus. SCE president Teruhisa Tokunaka expressed gratitude for Sega's timely release of Virtua Fighter as it proved "just at the right time" that making games with 3D imagery was possible. Maruyama claimed that Sony further wanted to emphasise the new console's ability to utilise redbook audio from the CD-ROM format in its games alongside high quality visuals and gameplay. Wishing to distance the project from the failed enterprise with Nintendo, Sony initially branded the PlayStation the "PlayStation X" (PSX). Sony formed their European division and North American division, known as Sony Computer Entertainment Europe (SCEE) and Sony Computer Entertainment America (SCEA), in January and May 1995. The divisions planned to market the new console under the alternative branding "PSX" following the negative feedback regarding "PlayStation" in focus group studies. Early advertising prior to the console's launch in North America referenced PSX, but the term was scrapped before launch. The console was not marketed with Sony's name in contrast to Nintendo's consoles. According to Phil Harrison, much of Sony's upper management feared that the Sony brand would be tarnished if associated with the console, which they considered a "toy". Since Sony had no experience in game development, it had to rely on the support of third-party game developers. This was in contrast to Sega and Nintendo, which had versatile and well-equipped in-house software divisions for their arcade games and could easily port successful games to their home consoles. Recent consoles like the Atari Jaguar and 3DO suffered low sales due to a lack of developer support, prompting Sony to redouble their efforts in gaining the endorsement of arcade-savvy developers. A team from Epic Sony visited more than a hundred companies throughout Japan in May 1993 in hopes of attracting game creators with the PlayStation's technological appeal. Sony found that many disliked Nintendo's practices, such as favouring their own games over others. Through a series of negotiations, Sony acquired initial support from Namco, Konami, and Williams Entertainment, as well as 250 other development teams in Japan alone. Namco in particular was interested in developing for PlayStation since Namco rivalled Sega in the arcade market. Attaining these companies secured influential games such as Ridge Racer (1993) and Mortal Kombat 3 (1995), Ridge Racer being one of the most popular arcade games at the time, and it was already confirmed behind closed doors that it would be the PlayStation's first game by December 1993, despite Namco being a longstanding Nintendo developer. Namco's research managing director Shegeichi Nakamura met with Kutaragi in 1993 to discuss the preliminary PlayStation specifications, with Namco subsequently basing the Namco System 11 arcade board on PlayStation hardware and developing Tekken to compete with Virtua Fighter. The System 11 launched in arcades several months before the PlayStation's release, with the arcade release of Tekken in September 1994. Despite securing the support of various Japanese studios, Sony had no developers of their own by the time the PlayStation was in development. This changed in 1993 when Sony acquired the Liverpudlian company Psygnosis (later renamed SCE Liverpool) for US$48 million, securing their first in-house development team. The acquisition meant that Sony could have more launch games ready for the PlayStation's release in Europe and North America. Ian Hetherington, Psygnosis' co-founder, was disappointed after receiving early builds of the PlayStation and recalled that the console "was not fit for purpose" until his team got involved with it. Hetherington frequently clashed with Sony executives over broader ideas; at one point it was suggested that a television with a built-in PlayStation be produced. In the months leading up to the PlayStation's launch, Psygnosis had around 500 full-time staff working on games and assisting with software development. The purchase of Psygnosis marked another turning point for the PlayStation as it played a vital role in creating the console's development kits. While Sony had provided MIPS R4000-based Sony NEWS workstations for PlayStation development, Psygnosis employees disliked the thought of developing on these expensive workstations and asked Bristol-based SN Systems to create an alternative PC-based development system. Andy Beveridge and Martin Day, owners of SN Systems, had previously supplied development hardware for other consoles such as the Mega Drive, Atari ST, and the SNES. When Psygnosis arranged an audience for SN Systems with Sony's Japanese executives at the January 1994 CES in Las Vegas, Beveridge and Day presented their prototype of the condensed development kit, which could run on an ordinary personal computer with two extension boards. Impressed, Sony decided to abandon their plans for a workstation-based development system in favour of SN Systems's, thus securing a cheaper and more efficient method for designing software. An order of over 600 systems followed, and SN Systems supplied Sony with additional software such as an assembler, linker, and a debugger. SN Systems produced development kits for future PlayStation systems, including the PlayStation 2 and was bought out by Sony in 2005. Sony strived to make game production as streamlined and inclusive as possible, in contrast to the relatively isolated approach of Sega and Nintendo. Phil Harrison, representative director of SCEE, believed that Sony's emphasis on developer assistance reduced most time-consuming aspects of development. As well as providing programming libraries, SCE headquarters in London, California, and Tokyo housed technical support teams that could work closely with third-party developers if needed. Sony did not favour their own over non-Sony products, unlike Nintendo; Peter Molyneux of Bullfrog Productions admired Sony's open-handed approach to software developers and lauded their decision to use PCs as a development platform, remarking that "[it was] like being released from jail in terms of the freedom you have". Another strategy that helped attract software developers was the PlayStation's use of the CD-ROM format instead of traditional cartridges. Nintendo cartridges were expensive to manufacture, and the company controlled all production, prioritising their own games, while inexpensive compact disc manufacturing occurred at dozens of locations around the world. The PlayStation's architecture and interconnectability with PCs was beneficial to many software developers. The use of the programming language C proved useful, as it safeguarded future compatibility of the machine should developers decide to make further hardware revisions. Despite the inherent flexibility, some developers found themselves restricted due to the console's lack of RAM. While working on beta builds of the PlayStation, Molyneux observed that its MIPS processor was not "quite as bullish" compared to that of a fast PC and said that it took his team two weeks to port their PC code to the PlayStation development kits and another fortnight to achieve a four-fold speed increase. An engineer from Ocean Software, one of Europe's largest game developers at the time, thought that allocating RAM was a challenging aspect given the 3.5 megabyte restriction. Kutaragi said that while it would have been easy to double the amount of RAM for the PlayStation, the development team refrained from doing so to keep the retail cost down. Kutaragi saw the biggest challenge in developing the system to be balancing the conflicting goals of high performance, low cost, and being easy to program for, and felt he and his team were successful in this regard. Its technical specifications were finalised in 1993 and its design during 1994. The PlayStation name and its final design were confirmed during a press conference on May 10, 1994, although the price and release dates had not been disclosed yet. Sony released the PlayStation in Japan on 3 December 1994, a week after the release of the Sega Saturn, at a price of ¥39,800. Sales in Japan began with a "stunning" success with long queues in shops. Ohga later recalled that he realised how important PlayStation had become for Sony when friends and relatives begged for consoles for their children. PlayStation sold 100,000 units on the first day and two million units within six months, although the Saturn outsold the PlayStation in the first few weeks due to the success of Virtua Fighter. By the end of 1994, 300,000 PlayStation units were sold in Japan compared to 500,000 Saturn units. A grey market emerged for PlayStations shipped from Japan to North America and Europe, with buyers of such consoles paying up to £700. "When September 1995 arrived and Sony's Playstation roared out of the gate, things immediately felt different than [sic] they did with the Saturn launch earlier that year. Sega dropped the Saturn $100 to match the Playstation's $299 debut price, but sales weren't even close—Playstations flew out the door as fast as we could get them in stock. Before the release in North America, Sega and Sony presented their consoles at the first Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) in Los Angeles on 11 May 1995. At their keynote presentation, Sega of America CEO Tom Kalinske revealed that their Saturn console would be released immediately to select retailers at a price of $399. Next came Sony's turn: Olaf Olafsson, the head of SCEA, summoned Steve Race, the head of development, to the conference stage, who said "$299" and left the audience with a round of applause. The attention to the Sony conference was further bolstered by the surprise appearance of Michael Jackson and the showcase of highly anticipated games, including Wipeout (1995), Ridge Racer and Tekken (1994). In addition, Sony announced that no games would be bundled with the console. Although the Saturn had released early in the United States to gain an advantage over the PlayStation, the surprise launch upset many retailers who were not informed in time, harming sales. Some retailers such as KB Toys responded by dropping the Saturn entirely. The PlayStation went on sale in North America on 9 September 1995. It sold more units within two days than the Saturn had in five months, with almost all of the initial shipment of 100,000 units sold in advance and shops across the country running out of consoles and accessories. The well-received Ridge Racer contributed to the PlayStation's early success, — with some critics considering it superior to Sega's arcade counterpart Daytona USA (1994) — as did Battle Arena Toshinden (1995). There were over 100,000 pre-orders placed and 17 games available on the market by the time of the PlayStation's American launch, in comparison to the Saturn's six launch games. The PlayStation released in Europe on 29 September 1995 and in Australia on 15 November 1995. By November it had already outsold the Saturn by three to one in the United Kingdom, where Sony had allocated a £20 million marketing budget during the Christmas season compared to Sega's £4 million. Sony found early success in the United Kingdom by securing listings with independent shop owners as well as prominent High Street chains such as Comet and Argos. Within its first year, the PlayStation secured over 20% of the entire American video game market. From September to the end of 1995, sales in the United States amounted to 800,000 units, giving the PlayStation a commanding lead over the other fifth-generation consoles,[b] though the SNES and Mega Drive from the fourth generation still outsold it. Sony reported that the attach rate of sold games and consoles was four to one. To meet increasing demand, Sony chartered jumbo jets and ramped up production in Europe and North America. By early 1996, the PlayStation had grossed $2 billion (equivalent to $4.106 billion 2025) from worldwide hardware and software sales. By late 1996, sales in Europe totalled 2.2 million units, including 700,000 in the UK. Approximately 400 PlayStation games were in development, compared to around 200 games being developed for the Saturn and 60 for the Nintendo 64. In India, the PlayStation was launched in test market during 1999–2000 across Sony showrooms, selling 100 units. Sony finally launched the console (PS One model) countrywide on 24 January 2002 with the price of Rs 7,990 and 26 games available from start. PlayStation was also doing well in markets where it was never officially released. For example, in Brazil, due to the registration of the trademark by a third company, the console could not be released, which was why the market was taken over by the officially distributed Sega Saturn during the first period, but as the Sega console withdraws, PlayStation imports and large piracy increased. In another market, China, the most popular 32-bit console was Sega Saturn, but after leaving the market, PlayStation grown with a base of 300,000 users until January 2000, although Sony China did not have plans to release it. The PlayStation was backed by a successful marketing campaign, allowing Sony to gain an early foothold in Europe and North America. Initially, PlayStation demographics were skewed towards adults, but the audience broadened after the first price drop. While the Saturn was positioned towards 18- to 34-year-olds, the PlayStation was initially marketed exclusively towards teenagers. Executives from both Sony and Sega reasoned that because younger players typically looked up to older, more experienced players, advertising targeted at teens and adults would draw them in too. Additionally, Sony found that adults reacted best to advertising aimed at teenagers; Lee Clow surmised that people who started to grow into adulthood regressed and became "17 again" when they played video games. The console was marketed with advertising slogans stylised as "LIVE IN YUR WRLD. PLY IN URS" (Live in Your World. Play in Ours.) and "U R NOT E" (red E). The four geometric shapes were derived from the symbols for the four buttons on the controller. Clow thought that by invoking such provocative statements, gamers would respond to the contrary and say "'Bullshit. Let me show you how ready I am.'" As the console's appeal enlarged, Sony's marketing efforts broadened from their earlier focus on mature players to specifically target younger children as well. Shortly after the PlayStation's release in Europe, Sony tasked marketing manager Geoff Glendenning with assessing the desires of a new target audience. Sceptical over Nintendo and Sega's reliance on television campaigns, Glendenning theorised that young adults transitioning from fourth-generation consoles would feel neglected by marketing directed at children and teenagers. Recognising the influence early 1990s underground clubbing and rave culture had on young people, especially in the United Kingdom, Glendenning felt that the culture had become mainstream enough to help cultivate PlayStation's emerging identity. Sony partnered with prominent nightclub owners such as Ministry of Sound and festival promoters to organise dedicated PlayStation areas where demonstrations of select games could be tested. Sheffield-based graphic design studio The Designers Republic was contracted by Sony to produce promotional materials aimed at a fashionable, club-going audience. Psygnosis' Wipeout in particular became associated with nightclub culture as it was widely featured in venues. By 1997, there were 52 nightclubs in the United Kingdom with dedicated PlayStation rooms. Glendenning recalled that he had discreetly used at least £100,000 a year in slush fund money to invest in impromptu marketing. In 1996, Sony expanded their CD production facilities in the United States due to the high demand for PlayStation games, increasing their monthly output from 4 million discs to 6.5 million discs. This was necessary because PlayStation sales were running at twice the rate of Saturn sales, and its lead dramatically increased when both consoles dropped in price to $199 that year. The PlayStation also outsold the Saturn at a similar ratio in Europe during 1996, with 2.2 million consoles sold in the region by the end of the year. Sales figures for PlayStation hardware and software only increased following the launch of the Nintendo 64. Tokunaka speculated that the Nintendo 64 launch had actually helped PlayStation sales by raising public awareness of the gaming market through Nintendo's added marketing efforts. Despite this, the PlayStation took longer to achieve dominance in Japan. Tokunaka said that, even after the PlayStation and Saturn had been on the market for nearly two years, the competition between them was still "very close", and neither console had led in sales for any meaningful length of time. By 1998, Sega, encouraged by their declining market share and significant financial losses, launched the Dreamcast as a last-ditch attempt to stay in the industry. Although its launch was successful, the technically superior 128-bit console was unable to subdue Sony's dominance in the industry. Sony still held 60% of the overall video game market share in North America at the end of 1999. Sega's initial confidence in their new console was undermined when Japanese sales were lower than expected, with disgruntled Japanese consumers reportedly returning their Dreamcasts in exchange for PlayStation software. On 2 March 1999, Sony officially revealed details of the PlayStation 2, which Kutaragi announced would feature a graphics processor designed to push more raw polygons than any console in history, effectively rivalling most supercomputers. The PlayStation continued to sell strongly at the turn of the new millennium: in June 2000, Sony released the PSOne, a smaller, redesigned variant which went on to outsell all other consoles in that year, including the PlayStation 2. In 2005, PlayStation became the first console to ship 100 million units with the PlayStation 2 later achieving this faster than its predecessor. The combined successes of both PlayStation consoles led to Sega retiring the Dreamcast in 2001, and abandoning the console business entirely. The PlayStation was eventually discontinued on 23 March 2006—over eleven years after its release, and less than a year before the debut of the PlayStation 3. Hardware The main microprocessor is a R3000 CPU made by LSI Logic operating at a clock rate of 33.8688 MHz and 30 MIPS. This 32-bit CPU relies heavily on the "cop2" 3D and matrix math coprocessor on the same die to provide the necessary speed to render complex 3D graphics. The role of the separate GPU chip is to draw 2D polygons and apply shading and textures to them: the rasterisation stage of the graphics pipeline. Sony's custom 16-bit sound chip supports ADPCM sources with up to 24 sound channels and offers a sampling rate of up to 44.1 kHz and music sequencing. It features 2 MB of main RAM, with an additional 1 MB of video RAM. The PlayStation has a maximum colour depth of 16.7 million true colours with 32 levels of transparency and unlimited colour look-up tables. The PlayStation can output composite, S-Video or RGB video signals through its AV Multi connector (with older models also having RCA connectors for composite), displaying resolutions from 256×224 to 640×480 pixels. Different games can use different resolutions. Earlier models also had proprietary parallel and serial ports that could be used to connect accessories or multiple consoles together; these were later removed due to a lack of usage. The PlayStation uses a proprietary video compression unit, MDEC, which is integrated into the CPU and allows for the presentation of full motion video at a higher quality than other consoles of its generation. Unusual for the time, the PlayStation lacks a dedicated 2D graphics processor; 2D elements are instead calculated as polygons by the Geometry Transfer Engine (GTE) so that they can be processed and displayed on screen by the GPU. While running, the GPU can also generate a total of 4,000 sprites and 180,000 polygons per second, in addition to 360,000 per second flat-shaded. The PlayStation went through a number of variants during its production run. Externally, the most notable change was the gradual reduction in the number of external connectors from the rear of the unit. This started with the original Japanese launch units; the SCPH-1000, released on 3 December 1994, was the only model that had an S-Video port, as it was removed from the next model. Subsequent models saw a reduction in number of parallel ports, with the final version only retaining one serial port. Sony marketed a development kit for amateur developers known as the Net Yaroze (meaning "Let's do it together" in Japanese). It was launched in June 1996 in Japan, and following public interest, was released the next year in other countries. The Net Yaroze allowed hobbyists to create their own games and upload them via an online forum run by Sony. The console was only available to buy through an ordering service and with the necessary documentation and software to program PlayStation games and applications through C programming compilers. On 7 July 2000, Sony released the PS One (stylised as "PS one" or "PSone"), a smaller, redesigned version of the original PlayStation. It was the highest-selling console through the end of the year, outselling all other consoles—including the PlayStation 2. In 2002, Sony released a 5-inch (130 mm) LCD screen add-on for the PS One, referred to as the "Combo pack". It also included a car cigarette lighter adaptor adding an extra layer of portability. Production of the LCD "Combo Pack" ceased in 2004, when the popularity of the PlayStation began to wane in markets outside Japan. A total of 28.15 million PS One units had been sold by the time it was discontinued in March 2006. Three iterations of the PlayStation's controller were released over the console's lifespan. The first controller, the PlayStation controller, was released alongside the PlayStation in December 1994. It features four individual directional buttons (as opposed to a conventional D-pad), a pair of shoulder buttons on both sides, Start and Select buttons in the centre, and four face buttons consisting of simple geometric shapes: a green triangle, red circle, blue cross, and a pink square (, , , ). Rather than depicting traditionally used letters or numbers onto its buttons, the PlayStation controller established a trademark which would be incorporated heavily into the PlayStation brand. Teiyu Goto, the designer of the original PlayStation controller, said that the circle and cross represent "yes" and "no", respectively (though this layout is reversed in Western versions); the triangle symbolises a point of view and the square is equated to a sheet of paper to be used to access menus. The European and North American models of the original PlayStation controllers are roughly 10% larger than its Japanese variant, to account for the fact the average person in those regions has larger hands than the average Japanese person. Sony's first analogue gamepad, the PlayStation Analog Joystick (often erroneously referred to as the "Sony Flightstick"), was first released in Japan in April 1996. Featuring two parallel joysticks, it uses potentiometer technology previously used on consoles such as the Vectrex; instead of relying on binary eight-way switches, the controller detects minute angular changes through the entire range of motion. The stick also features a thumb-operated digital hat switch on the right joystick, corresponding to the traditional D-pad, and used for instances when simple digital movements were necessary. The Analog Joystick sold poorly in Japan due to its high cost and cumbersome size. The increasing popularity of 3D games prompted Sony to add analogue sticks to its controller design to give users more freedom over their movements in virtual 3D environments. The first official analogue controller, the Dual Analog Controller, was revealed to the public in a small glass booth at the 1996 PlayStation Expo in Japan, and released in April 1997 to coincide with the Japanese releases of analogue-capable games Tobal 2 and Bushido Blade. In addition to the two analogue sticks (which also introduced two new buttons mapped to clicking in the analogue sticks), the Dual Analog controller features an "Analog" button and LED beneath the "Start" and "Select" buttons which toggles analogue functionality on or off. The controller also features rumble support, though Sony decided that haptic feedback would be removed from all overseas iterations before the United States release. A Sony spokesman stated that the feature was removed for "manufacturing reasons", although rumours circulated that Nintendo had attempted to legally block the release of the controller outside Japan due to similarities with the Nintendo 64 controller's Rumble Pak. However, a Nintendo spokesman denied that Nintendo took legal action. Next Generation's Chris Charla theorised that Sony dropped vibration feedback to keep the price of the controller down. In November 1997, Sony introduced the DualShock controller. Its name derives from its use of two (dual) vibration motors (shock). Unlike its predecessor, its analogue sticks feature textured rubber grips, longer handles, slightly different shoulder buttons and has rumble feedback included as standard on all versions. The DualShock later replaced its predecessors as the default controller. Sony released a series of peripherals to add extra layers of functionality to the PlayStation. Such peripherals include memory cards, the PlayStation Mouse, the PlayStation Link Cable, the Multiplayer Adapter (a four-player multitap), the Memory Drive (a disk drive for 3.5-inch floppy disks), the GunCon (a light gun), and the Glasstron (a monoscopic head-mounted display). Released exclusively in Japan, the PocketStation is a memory card peripheral which acts as a miniature personal digital assistant. The device features a monochrome liquid crystal display (LCD), infrared communication capability, a real-time clock, built-in flash memory, and sound capability. Sharing similarities with the Dreamcast's VMU peripheral, the PocketStation was typically distributed with certain PlayStation games, enhancing them with added features. The PocketStation proved popular in Japan, selling over five million units. Sony planned to release the peripheral outside Japan but the release was cancelled, despite receiving promotion in Europe and North America. In addition to playing games, most PlayStation models are equipped to play CD-Audio. The Asian model SCPH-5903 can also play Video CDs. Like most CD players, the PlayStation can play songs in a programmed order, shuffle the playback order of the disc and repeat one song or the entire disc. Later PlayStation models use a music visualisation function called SoundScope. This function, as well as a memory card manager, is accessed by starting the console without either inserting a game or closing the CD tray, thereby accessing a graphical user interface (GUI) for the PlayStation BIOS. The GUI for the PS One and PlayStation differ depending on the firmware version: the original PlayStation GUI had a dark blue background with rainbow graffiti used as buttons, while the early PAL PlayStation and PS One GUI had a grey blocked background with two icons in the middle. PlayStation emulation is versatile and can be run on numerous modern devices. Bleem! was a commercial emulator which was released for IBM-compatible PCs and the Dreamcast in 1999. It was notable for being aggressively marketed during the PlayStation's lifetime, and was the centre of multiple controversial lawsuits filed by Sony. Bleem! was programmed in assembly language, which allowed it to emulate PlayStation games with improved visual fidelity, enhanced resolutions, and filtered textures that was not possible on original hardware. Sony sued Bleem! two days after its release, citing copyright infringement and accusing the company of engaging in unfair competition and patent infringement by allowing use of PlayStation BIOSs on a Sega console. Bleem! were subsequently forced to shut down in November 2001. Sony was aware that using CDs for game distribution could have left games vulnerable to piracy, due to the growing popularity of CD-R and optical disc drives with burning capability. To preclude illegal copying, a proprietary process for PlayStation disc manufacturing was developed that, in conjunction with an augmented optical drive in Tiger H/E assembly, prevented burned copies of games from booting on an unmodified console. Specifically, all genuine PlayStation discs were printed with a small section of deliberate irregular data, which the PlayStation's optical pick-up was capable of detecting and decoding. Consoles would not boot game discs without a specific wobble frequency contained in the data of the disc pregap sector (the same system was also used to encode discs' regional lockouts). This signal was within Red Book CD tolerances, so PlayStation discs' actual content could still be read by a conventional disc drive; however, the disc drive could not detect the wobble frequency (therefore duplicating the discs omitting it), since the laser pick-up system of any optical disc drive would interpret this wobble as an oscillation of the disc surface and compensate for it in the reading process. Early PlayStations, particularly early 1000 models, experience skipping full-motion video or physical "ticking" noises from the unit. The problems stem from poorly placed vents leading to overheating in some environments, causing the plastic mouldings inside the console to warp slightly and create knock-on effects with the laser assembly. The solution is to sit the console on a surface which dissipates heat efficiently in a well vented area or raise the unit up slightly from its resting surface. Sony representatives also recommended unplugging the PlayStation when it is not in use, as the system draws in a small amount of power (and therefore heat) even when turned off. The first batch of PlayStations use a KSM-440AAM laser unit, whose case and movable parts are all built out of plastic. Over time, the plastic lens sled rail wears out—usually unevenly—due to friction. The placement of the laser unit close to the power supply accelerates wear, due to the additional heat, which makes the plastic more vulnerable to friction. Eventually, one side of the lens sled will become so worn that the laser can tilt, no longer pointing directly at the CD; after this, games will no longer load due to data read errors. Sony fixed the problem by making the sled out of die-cast metal and placing the laser unit further away from the power supply on later PlayStation models. Due to an engineering oversight, the PlayStation does not produce a proper signal on several older models of televisions, causing the display to flicker or bounce around the screen. Sony decided not to change the console design, since only a small percentage of PlayStation owners used such televisions, and instead gave consumers the option of sending their PlayStation unit to a Sony service centre to have an official modchip installed, allowing play on older televisions. Game library The PlayStation featured a diverse game library which grew to appeal to all types of players. Critically acclaimed PlayStation games included Final Fantasy VII (1997), Crash Bandicoot (1996), Spyro the Dragon (1998), Metal Gear Solid (1998), all of which became established franchises. Final Fantasy VII is credited with allowing role-playing games to gain mass-market appeal outside Japan, and is considered one of the most influential and greatest video games ever made. The PlayStation's bestselling game is Gran Turismo (1997), which sold 10.85 million units. After the PlayStation's discontinuation in 2006, the cumulative software shipment was 962 million units. Following its 1994 launch in Japan, early games included Ridge Racer, Crime Crackers, King's Field, Motor Toon Grand Prix, Toh Shin Den (i.e. Battle Arena Toshinden), and Kileak: The Blood. The first two games available at its later North American launch were Jumping Flash! (1995) and Ridge Racer, with Jumping Flash! heralded as an ancestor for 3D graphics in console gaming. Wipeout, Air Combat, Twisted Metal, Warhawk and Destruction Derby were among the popular first-year games, and the first to be reissued as part of Sony's Greatest Hits or Platinum range. At the time of the PlayStation's first Christmas season, Psygnosis had produced around 70% of its launch catalogue; their breakthrough racing game Wipeout was acclaimed for its techno soundtrack and helped raise awareness of Britain's underground music community. Eidos Interactive's action-adventure game Tomb Raider contributed substantially to the success of the console in 1996, with its main protagonist Lara Croft becoming an early gaming icon and garnering unprecedented media promotion. Licensed tie-in video games of popular films were also prevalent; Argonaut Games' 2001 adaptation of Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone went on to sell over eight million copies late in the console's lifespan. Third-party developers committed largely to the console's wide-ranging game catalogue even after the launch of the PlayStation 2; some of the notable exclusives in this era include Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, Fear Effect 2: Retro Helix, Syphon Filter 3, C-12: Final Resistance, Dance Dance Revolution Konamix and Digimon World 3.[c] Sony assisted with game reprints as late as 2008 with Metal Gear Solid: The Essential Collection, this being the last PlayStation game officially released and licensed by Sony. Initially, in the United States, PlayStation games were packaged in long cardboard boxes, similar to non-Japanese 3DO and Saturn games. Sony later switched to the jewel case format typically used for audio CDs and Japanese video games, as this format took up less retailer shelf space (which was at a premium due to the large number of PlayStation games being released), and focus testing showed that most consumers preferred this format. Reception The PlayStation was mostly well received upon release. Critics in the west generally welcomed the new console; the staff of Next Generation reviewed the PlayStation a few weeks after its North American launch, where they commented that, while the CPU is "fairly average", the supplementary custom hardware, such as the GPU and sound processor, is stunningly powerful. They praised the PlayStation's focus on 3D, and complemented the comfort of its controller and the convenience of its memory cards. Giving the system 41⁄2 out of 5 stars, they concluded, "To succeed in this extremely cut-throat market, you need a combination of great hardware, great games, and great marketing. Whether by skill, luck, or just deep pockets, Sony has scored three out of three in the first salvo of this war." Albert Kim from Entertainment Weekly praised the PlayStation as a technological marvel, rivalling that of Sega and Nintendo. Famicom Tsūshin scored the console a 19 out of 40, lower than the Saturn's 24 out of 40, in May 1995. In a 1997 year-end review, a team of five Electronic Gaming Monthly editors gave the PlayStation scores of 9.5, 8.5, 9.0, 9.0, and 9.5—for all five editors, the highest score they gave to any of the five consoles reviewed in the issue. They lauded the breadth and quality of the games library, saying it had vastly improved over previous years due to developers mastering the system's capabilities in addition to Sony revising their stance on 2D and role playing games. They also complimented the low price point of the games compared to the Nintendo 64's, and noted that it was the only console on the market that could be relied upon to deliver a solid stream of games for the coming year, primarily due to third party developers almost unanimously favouring it over its competitors. Legacy SCE was an upstart in the video game industry in late 1994, as the video game market in the early 1990s was dominated by Nintendo and Sega. Nintendo had been the clear leader in the industry since the introduction of the Nintendo Entertainment System in 1985 and the Nintendo 64 was initially expected to maintain this position. The PlayStation's target audience included the generation which was the first to grow up with mainstream video games, along with 18- to 29-year-olds who were not the primary focus of Nintendo. By the late 1990s, Sony became a highly regarded console brand due to the PlayStation, with a significant lead over second-place Nintendo, while Sega was relegated to a distant third. The PlayStation became the first "computer entertainment platform" to ship over 100 million units worldwide, with many critics attributing the console's success to third-party developers. It remains the sixth best-selling console of all time as of 2025[update], with a total of 102.49 million units sold. Around 7,900 individual games were published for the console during its 11-year life span, the second-most games ever produced for a console. Its success resulted in a significant financial boon for Sony as profits from their video game division contributed to 23%. Sony's next-generation PlayStation 2, which is backward compatible with the PlayStation's DualShock controller and games, was announced in 1999 and launched in 2000. The PlayStation's lead in installed base and developer support paved the way for the success of its successor, which overcame the earlier launch of the Sega's Dreamcast and then fended off competition from Microsoft's newcomer Xbox and Nintendo's GameCube. The PlayStation 2's immense success and failure of the Dreamcast were among the main factors which led to Sega abandoning the console market. To date, five PlayStation home consoles have been released, which have continued the same numbering scheme, as well as two portable systems. The PlayStation 3 also maintained backward compatibility with original PlayStation discs. Hundreds of PlayStation games have been digitally re-released on the PlayStation Portable, PlayStation 3, PlayStation Vita, PlayStation 4, and PlayStation 5. The PlayStation has often ranked among the best video game consoles. In 2018, Retro Gamer named it the third best console, crediting its sophisticated 3D capabilities as one of its key factors in gaining mass success, and lauding it as a "game-changer in every sense possible". In 2009, IGN ranked the PlayStation the seventh best console in their list, noting its appeal towards older audiences to be a crucial factor in propelling the video game industry, as well as its assistance in transitioning game industry to use the CD-ROM format. Keith Stuart from The Guardian likewise named it as the seventh best console in 2020, declaring that its success was so profound it "ruled the 1990s". In January 2025, Lorentio Brodesco announced the nsOne project, attempting to reverse engineer PlayStation's motherboard. Brodesco stated that "detailed documentation on the original motherboard was either incomplete or entirely unavailable". The project was successfully crowdfunded via Kickstarter. In June, Brodesco manufactured the first working motherboard, promising to bring a fully rooted version with multilayer routing as well as documentation and design files in the near future. The success of the PlayStation contributed to the demise of cartridge-based home consoles. While not the first system to use an optical disc format, it was the first highly successful one, and ended up going head-to-head with the proprietary cartridge-relying Nintendo 64,[d] which the industry had expected to use CDs like PlayStation. After the demise of the Sega Saturn, Nintendo was left as Sony's main competitor in Western markets. Nintendo chose not to use CDs for the Nintendo 64; they were likely concerned with the proprietary cartridge format's ability to help enforce copy protection, given their substantial reliance on licensing and exclusive games for their revenue. Besides their larger capacity, CD-ROMs could be produced in bulk quantities at a much faster rate than ROM cartridges, a week compared to two to three months. Further, the cost of production per unit was far cheaper, allowing Sony to offer games about 40% lower cost to the user compared to ROM cartridges while still making the same amount of net revenue. In Japan, Sony published fewer copies of a wide variety of games for the PlayStation as a risk-limiting step, a model that had been used by Sony Music for CD audio discs. The production flexibility of CD-ROMs meant that Sony could produce larger volumes of popular games to get onto the market quickly, something that could not be done with cartridges due to their manufacturing lead time. The lower production costs of CD-ROMs also allowed publishers an additional source of profit: budget-priced reissues of games which had already recouped their development costs. Tokunaka remarked in 1996: Choosing CD-ROM is one of the most important decisions that we made. As I'm sure you understand, PlayStation could just as easily have worked with masked ROM [cartridges]. The 3D engine and everything—the whole PlayStation format—is independent of the media. But for various reasons (including the economies for the consumer, the ease of the manufacturing, inventory control for the trade, and also the software publishers) we deduced that CD-ROM would be the best media for PlayStation. The increasing complexity of developing games pushed cartridges to their storage limits and gradually discouraged some third-party developers. Part of the CD format's appeal to publishers was that they could be produced at a significantly lower cost and offered more production flexibility to meet demand. As a result, some third-party developers switched to the PlayStation, including Square and Enix, whose Final Fantasy VII and Dragon Quest VII respectively had been planned for the Nintendo 64 (both companies later merged to form Square Enix). Other developers released fewer games for the Nintendo 64 (Konami, releasing only thirteen N64 games but over fifty on the PlayStation). Nintendo 64 game releases were less frequent than the PlayStation's, with many being developed by either Nintendo themselves or second-parties such as Rare. The PlayStation Classic is a dedicated video game console made by Sony Interactive Entertainment that emulates PlayStation games. It was announced in September 2018 at the Tokyo Game Show, and released on 3 December 2018, the 24th anniversary of the release of the original console. As a dedicated console, the PlayStation Classic features 20 pre-installed games; the games run off the open source emulator PCSX. The console is bundled with two replica wired PlayStation controllers (those without analogue sticks), an HDMI cable, and a USB-Type A cable. Internally, the console uses a MediaTek MT8167a Quad A35 system on a chip with four central processing cores clocked at @ 1.5 GHz and a Power VR GE8300 graphics processing unit. It includes 16 GB of eMMC flash storage and 1 Gigabyte of DDR3 SDRAM. The PlayStation Classic is 45% smaller than the original console. The PlayStation Classic received negative reviews from critics and was compared unfavorably to Nintendo's rival Nintendo Entertainment System Classic Edition and Super Nintendo Entertainment System Classic Edition. Criticism was directed at its meagre game library, user interface, emulation quality, use of PAL versions for certain games, use of the original controller, and high retail price, though the console's design received praise. The console sold poorly. See also Notes References |
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Daniel OberhausThe Big StorySep 3, 2020 7:00 AMGravity, Gizmos, and a Grand Theory of Interstellar TravelFor decades, Jim Woodward dreamed of a propellantless engine to take humans to the stars. Now he thinks he’s got it. But is it revolutionary—or illusory?Jim Woodward’s peers have long dismissed his ideas about gravity and inertia. Now he believes he has the data that will prove him right—and could make interstellar travel possible for humans.Photograph: Rozette RagoCommentLoaderSave StorySave this storyCommentLoaderSave StorySave this storyIt was a warm afternoon in July, and Hal Fearn was sitting in his camouflage jeep in the parking lot of a mostly empty IHOP in Southern California. Fearn, a physicist at California State University, Fullerton, bided his time by singing along to the a cappella covers pumping through his stereo. He hadn’t loitered long before he spotted a silver minivan easing into the lot. Behind the wheel was Jim Woodward, large gold-framed glasses and a surgical mask adorning his gaunt face.Woodward, a physics professor emeritus at Fullerton, slid his van beside the jeep and rolled down his window to pass a box to Fearn. Inside was a collection of metallic devices with wires protruding from their exposed electromechanical guts. They looked like the type of gadgets an action movie villain might carry in his pocket to blow up a city, but their actual function is even more improbable. Woodward believes these devices—he calls them his “gizmos”—may set humans on the path to interstellar travel.As the pandemic raged across the globe, Woodward and Fearn met regularly in the pancake house parking lot to keep their experiments going. Funded by a grant from a NASA program that also supports research on far-out concepts such as inflatable telescopes and exoplanet photography, the duo has been developing what they call a Mach-effect gravitational assist (MEGA) drive, a propulsion system designed to produce thrust without propellant.Every spacecraft that has ever left Earth has relied on some type of propellant to get it to its destination. Typically a spacecraft moves by igniting its fuel in a combustion chamber and expelling hot gases. (Even more exotic forms of propulsion, such as ion thrusters, still require propellant.) That’s why humans have remained stuck so close to home. A spacecraft can only accelerate as long as it has fuel to burn or a planet to loop around for a gravitational assist. Those methods can’t even carry a vehicle all the way to Alpha Centauri, our closest neighbor, in any reasonable amount of time. The fastest spacecraft ever built, the Parker Solar Probe, which will hit speeds over 400,000 miles per hour, would take thousands of years to get there.Woodward’s MEGA drive is different. Instead of propellant, it relies on electricity, which in space would come from solar panels or a nuclear reactor. His insight was to use a stack of piezoelectric crystals and some controversial—but he believes plausible—physics to generate thrust. The stack of crystals, which store tiny amounts of energy, vibrates tens of thousands of times per second when zapped with electric current. Some of the vibrational frequencies harmonize as they roll through the device, and when the oscillations sync up in just the right way, the small drive lurches forward.This might not sound like the secret to interstellar travel, but if that small lurch can be sustained, a spacecraft could theoretically produce thrust for as long as it had electric power. It wouldn’t accelerate quickly, but it could accelerate for a long time, gradually gaining in velocity until it was whipping its way across the galaxy. An onboard nuclear reactor could supply it with electric power for decades, long enough for an array of MEGA drives to reach velocities approaching the speed of light. If Woodward’s device works, it’d be the first propulsion system that could conceivably reach another solar system within the lifespan of an astronaut. How does it work? Ask Woodward and he’ll tell you his gizmo has merely tapped into the fabric of the universe and hitched a ride on gravity itself.Sound impossible? A lot of theoretical physicists think so too. In fact, Woodward is certain most theoretical physicists think his propellantless thruster is nonsense. But in June, after two decades of halting progress, Woodward and Fearn made a minor change to the configuration of the thruster. Suddenly, the MEGA drive leapt to life. For the first time, Woodward seemed to have undeniable evidence that his impossible engine really worked. Then the pandemic hit.Woodward turns 80 next year. He is a survivor of stage IV lung cancer living with COPD, and he is being treated for relapsed Hodgkin's lymphoma. That puts him in the high-risk category for Covid-19, so when cases in California started climbing, he grudgingly left his lab at Fullerton and hunkered down at home. But he wasn’t going to let a global pandemic stymie his progress.Over the summer, Woodward gradually turned the office he shares with his partner, Carole, into a den that would be the envy of any mad scientist. Hand tools are scattered around Woodward’s desk among boxes full of new ball bearings, stacks of crystalline disks, and scraps of metal shim that Woodward has cut into electrodes. There’s lubricant that costs $175 a bottle, for greasing the bearing rods, and a special glue that has a number for a name. It’s a stark contrast to Carole’s neat desk on the other side of the room, but Woodward says she’s so far tolerated his ad hoc thruster factory. “I should think that having a partner like me would be very trying,” he says. “She has been astonishingly good about it over the years.”Woodward and Fearn film and record the displacement registered by the torsion balance from every test of their Mach-effect thruster. Photograph: Rozette RagoWoodward built a dozen or so devices and handed some of them off to Fearn, who tested them in their shared lab at Fullerton. Later this fall, they’ll send a device to an independent researcher in Toronto named George Hathaway, an experimentalist with ties to NASA whom Woodward described as “probably the finest experimentalist in the world for this type of work.” Woodward prepared another thruster for the US Naval Research Laboratory, which will also try to replicate the duo’s results.The amount of thrust Woodward appears to have coaxed out of his MEGA drive is tiny even compared to the puniest satellite thrusters in orbit today. But if other engineers can confirm his results, it could be our best bet yet for a human mission to the stars.Scientists have long dreamed of seeing an alien sunrise. Our sun is just an average star, one of billions like it in our galaxy. Many of those stars also have planets, some of which might have the right conditions to support life. In 1911 the Russian scientist Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, generally regarded as the father of rocket science, was the first to outline how an interstellar spacecraft might go about exploring them. Since then, scientists have proposed using fusion engines, wormholes, massive lasers, and hydrogen bombs to whisk humans across the deepest of deep space.Only two spacecraft—Voyager 1 and Voyager 2—have ever entered interstellar space. Like every spacecraft to date, they were hurled into the void by a rocket and then used small liquid-fueled thrusters to navigate the solar system. They’re now booking it through the cosmos at more than 35,000 miles per hour. NASA has contemplated an uncrewed interstellar mission for years, but the only one under active development today is an independent effort called Breakthrough Starshot. It aims to use exceptionally powerful lasers to propel a spacecraft the size of a fingernail up to 20 percent the speed of light. For humans to make the trip, they’d need a much larger craft—and a propulsion system that, ideally, could get them there within a generation. That species-defining challenge was what captivated Woodward as a young man.Woodward was born in Boston in 1941, the eldest son of a patent lawyer and an astronomer. His mother, the astronomer, gave him a basic fluency in the language of the universe and stoked his curiosity about the cosmos. As a child, Woodward tinkered with homemade rockets, but he didn’t get very far. His younger brother, Paul Woodward, an astrophysicist at the University of Minnesota, recalls a time when his older brother pilfered potassium nitrate from his childhood chemistry set and used it to make a homebrew rocket that exploded spectacularly over their neighborhood.“The story was that my father got on some sort of list for doing that and could not buy me any more chemicals for my experiments,” Paul recalls. “So the launch was the end of Jim's career in rocketry and my career as a chemist.” Still, Woodward followed his childhood interest into a physics undergraduate program at Middlebury College, a small liberal arts school in Vermont. But it was an experience he had a few years after graduating that changed the course of his life.Woodward has been developing his Mach-effect thrusters for nearly 30 years. Photograph: Rozette RagoOn a clear night in March 1967, Woodward was stargazing on the rooftop of Pensión Santa Cruz, a hotel in the heart of Seville, in Spain. The 26-year-old physicist was struggling with his chosen profession and had taken a break from graduate work at New York University. He found himself drawn to fringe research topics, particularly those having to do with gravity, which he knew would make it hard to get a job. “It became clear to me simply by looking at the physics department around me that a bunch of people like that were unlikely to hire someone like me,” Woodward says. So he decided to try something else. He had picked up flamenco guitar as an undergrad and even performed in clubs in New York. Inspired by his aunt, a CIA officer who had learned to play the instrument while stationed in Madrid, he headed to Spain to pursue a career in it.At the time, the space race was only a decade old and satellite spotting was a popular sport. As Woodward gazed up from atop his Spanish hotel, he saw a speck of light arcing across the sky and mentally calculated its path. But as he watched the satellite, it began deviating from its expected trajectory—first by a little and then by a lot.Everything Woodward knew about satellites told him that what he was seeing should be impossible. It would take too much energy for a satellite to change its orbit like that, and most satellites weren’t able to shift more than a couple of degrees. And yet, he had just seen a satellite double back with his own eyes. He didn't conclude that engineers at NASA or in the Soviet Union must have secretly achieved a breakthrough in satellite propulsion. Instead, he believes he saw a spacecraft of extraterrestrial origin. “Critters at least as clever as us had figured out how to get around spacetime far better than we are capable of doing,” Woodward says. That changed the question, he says, from if it was possible to how.Never one to doubt the power of the human intellect, especially his own, Woodward reckoned he could build a similar interstellar propulsion system if he put his mind to it. “If somebody figured out how the hell to do something like that, they probably aren’t an awful lot smarter than I am,” Woodward recalls thinking at the time. “So I thought maybe I should devote a little time to trying to do that.” It was a project that would occupy him for the rest of his life.Woodward completed his master’s degree in physics at NYU in 1969, and he left to do a PhD in history at the University of Denver shortly after. His decision to pivot from physics to history was a pragmatic one. As a master’s student, he spent a lot of his time combing through old scientific journals in search of promising gravitational research that had been abandoned or hit a dead end so he could pick up the torch. “I was doing the history of science already, so I might as well get a degree in it,” Woodward says. “It was an obvious thing to do.” As an academic historian, he’d enjoy the job security that comes with uncontroversial research and still have the freedom to study fringe gravitational topics as an avocation. He accepted a position in the Cal State Fullerton history department in 1972.It’s not like Woodward’s passion for fringe physics was a secret. In addition to a trickle of historical research, he regularly published technical papers in mainstream science journals on arcane gravitational subjects. “It is unusual that a professor of history would set up a research lab in physics, but Jim was recognized as a serious scholar and committed researcher,” says Dorothy Woolum, a physicist who arrived at Fullerton shortly after Woodward. He was particularly interested in using pulsars, a type of rapidly spinning neutron star that had only recently been discovered, to try to detect an unknown and exotic coupling between electromagnetism and gravity predicted by the Nobel Prize–winning physicist Patrick Blackett. Alas, Woodward’s work on pulsars only managed to raise skepticism among his peers. “Many people looked at me as a crank and blew me off,” Woodward says. “I wouldn’t recommend it as a career path.”The electromagnetism stuff was bad enough, but it was Woodward’s emerging ideas about inertia that really got them riled up. Inertia is the resistance you feel whenever you push on an object. (Or, as Newton put it, inertia is why an object at rest tends to stay at rest.) Though ubiquitous and fundamental, no one has penned a full explanation of it. Woodward inherits his ideas about inertia from Einstein, who was inspired by the 19th-century physicist Ernst Mach. Mach posited that inertia is the result of the gravitational interactions of everything in the universe. In other words, the resistance from the sidewalk when someone walks on it or from a pool wall when a swimmer executes a tumble turn is partly due to starstuff billions of light years away. Einstein called this idea “Mach’s principle” and incorporated it into general relativity, his theory of gravity.From the start, Mach’s principle was a controversial addendum to general relativity. Some of Einstein’s contemporaries, especially the Dutch mathematician Willem de Sitter, labored to show that his concept of inertia was inconsistent with other mathematical implications of general relativity. But it was the physicist Carl Brans who finally expelled the idea from respectable physics. In Brans’ PhD thesis, published in 1961, he used mathematics to demonstrate that inertia could not be explained by the gravitational influence of distant matter in the universe. After Brans’ paper, “everybody assumed that inertia à la Einstein was not contained in general relativity,” Woodward says. “That’s still the view of most general relativists.”But as Woodward dug deeper into the history and science of general relativity, he couldn’t shake the feeling that Brans had gotten it all wrong. And as he discovered in the autumn of 1989, if you accepted Einstein’s view that inertia was inextricably linked to gravity, it opened up the possibility for propellantless propulsion.Woodward’s views on gravity and inertia aren’t mainstream, but it’s not crazy to think Einstein might have been right all along. “I'm pretty comfortable with Jim's take on it, because it's very historically oriented,” says Daniel Kennefick, an astrophysicist and historian of science at the University of Arkansas, who has collaborated with Woodward. “He is very much motivated by Einstein's understanding of Mach’s principle. It's not at all unusual for an idea to be discovered, rejected, and then later make a comeback.”In Einstein’s famous equation, E=mc2, an object’s energy, E, is equal to its mass, m, multiplied by the speed of light squared. That means if you change an object’s energy, you will also change its mass. An object’s mass is a measure of its inertia—that’s why it takes greater force to push a more massive object than a less massive one—so changing its energy will also change its inertia. And if, per Mach’s principle, inertia and gravity are one and the same, then changing an object’s energy means messing with the very fabric of spacetime. In theory, anyway.Woodward realized that if Einstein was right and inertia really is gravity in disguise, it should be possible to detect these brief changes in an object’s mass as its energy fluctuates. If part of an object accelerated at the exact moment when it became a little heavier, it would pull the rest of the object along with it. In other words, it would create thrust without propellant.Woodward called these temporary changes in mass “Mach effects,” and the engine that could use them a Mach-effect thruster. By combining hundreds or thousands of these drives, they could conceivably produce enough thrust to send a spaceship to the stars in less than a human lifetime. How to keep a person alive in space for decades is still an enormous question. But it is a mere footnote to the more fundamental issue of figuring out how to cross a void trillions of miles wide in any reasonable amount of time.By 1995, Woodward’s ideas about Mach effects had coalesced into a full theory, and he turned his attention to building a thruster to prove it. The design he settled on was simple and opportunistic. A local electronics manufacturer was relocating, and an employee had alerted the university it had some leftover materials on offer. Woodward swung by its old office and snapped up a pile of piezoelectric disks the company had left behind.To build his interstellar engine, Woodward mounted the piezoelectric disks to a block of brass and put a cap on the other end to hold it all in place. When piezoelectric disks are hit with a pulse of electricity, they bulge slightly. This expansion causes them to push off of the brass block and accelerate in the opposite direction. According to Woodward’s theory of Mach effects, the electric current would also make the piezoelectric disks ever-so-slightly heavier. This causes them to pull the brass block toward them. When the electricity stops flowing, the whole ensemble will have scooted slightly forward. By repeating this process over and over, Woodward figured, the Mach-effect thruster should accelerate. Fearn, his closest collaborator, compares it to rowing a boat on the ocean of spacetime.Over the next few years, he managed to coax a few hundred nanonewtons of thrust out of his Mach-effect drive. Most of Woodward’s peers dismissed his nearly imperceptible results as a measurement error. It is not hard to see why—when you blow out candles on a birthday cake, you produce around three orders of magnitude more force than what Woodward was reporting. Even if the device did work, it wouldn’t be enough to move a small satellite, much less a starship.Nevertheless, Woodward’s Mach-effect thrusters attracted the attention of researchers in government and industry. In 1997 he gave a presentation on his work at Lockheed Martin, and a few months later officials from the Department of Energy and Sandia National Laboratories paid a visit to his lab. But funding never materialized. So he pressed forward on his own, assisted by his graduate student Tom Mahood and a handful of other collaborators. Then he found out about the cancer.In 2005, doctors found a 2-inch tumor in Woodward’s left lung. The cancer had spread to his lymphatic system, causing the left part of his face and neck to swell. His prognosis was bleak. His doctors told him his odds of surviving the year were 1 in 3; the odds that he’d live five years were 1 in 100. He enrolled in a few clinical trials to try experimental therapies and had extraordinary results. Within months, the cancerous mass in his lungs had virtually disappeared. The treatments came with complications—Woodward experienced heart failure and lost the ability to walk without a pair of canes—but he survived.Woodward beat stage IV lung cancer, but the therapies left him unable to walk without two canes. Photograph: Rozette RagoWoodward’s favorite Einstein quote is “Coincidence is God’s way of remaining anonymous,” and his cancer ordeal only reinforced his belief in its fundamental truth. “There was just one coincidence after another,” Woodward says. “By all rights, I should have been dead and gone 15 years ago.”Reckoning with his mortality only strengthened his resolve. On the days when he wasn’t in a doctor’s office, he was in the lab trying to breathe life into his machines. Then a twist of fate led him to team up with Fearn. For 20 years Woodward had had an expansive lab in the physics department, but Cal State Fullerton now needed the space to open a new Center for Gravitational-Wave Physics and Astronomy. “If it had been anything other than gravitational physics, I probably would have resisted,” Woodward says. “But since it was gravitational physics, I was delighted to move.”Woodward found some space in an empty back office that technically belonged to Fearn, who was on sabbatical. When Fearn returned, he discovered he was now roommates with the university’s most eccentric scientist. “I was really pissed off, because everything was a jumbled mess with these big computers stacked on top of each other, and all my books had been shoved into my room,” Fearn recalls. “And here's this strange guy in my back room doing these weird experiments.”At first, Fearn took only a casual interest in Woodward’s experiments. But as time passed, he couldn’t help noticing his roommate’s results were improving. “That’s when I started to get interested and talk to him about what he was doing,” he says.Soon, he was hooked. He offered to help, and the duo quickly became inseparable, a professional relationship that’s part The Odd Couple, part Watson and Crick. Although he didn’t fully buy into Woodward’s theoretical explanation for his Mach-effect thrusters, Fearn couldn’t resist the challenge. “How many people can say they’re trying to build a propulsion system to send spaceships to the stars?” Fearn says. “That’s what we’re doing here.”Woodward and Fearn have collaborated on the Mach-effect thruster for a decade. Photograph: Rozette RagoThe advanced propulsion community is a small one. Perhaps a few dozen physicists and engineers around the world are working on problems such as fusion-powered rockets and faster-than-light travel. Everybody knows everybody, and as in any small community, there’s infighting and gossip. But there’s also a deep bond that comes with having to convince the rest of the scientific establishment that you’re not that crazy. “People will get into shouting matches,” says Greg Meholic, an engineer at the Aerospace Corporation working on advanced propulsion. “But then, when the workday is done or there's a break, everybody's friends.”Meholic says he first met Woodward at an advanced propulsion conference in the ’90s. “The self-skepticism he had at the time was very appealing,” says Meholic. “He didn't ever make the claim that he had the revolutionary thing and we’re going to be flying to the stars in 10 years.” After one of Woodward’s presentations, Meholic offered his engineering perspective on his thruster designs, and they’ve been friends and collaborators ever since. So in 2016, when Meholic heard that Woodward and Fearn had teamed up with the Space Studies Institute, a nonprofit founded by the physicist Gerard O’Neill, to start a conference for advanced propulsion, he knew he had to be there. “Everybody who's ever done any research at all in this kind of work was invited to come,” he says.The workshop was held that September in Estes Park, Colorado. It was good timing. Shortly before the conference began, a research paper leaked on an online space forum that purported to show the first strong results from experiments on another approach to propellantless propulsion, called the EmDrive. Designed by a NASA research group led by physicist Sonny White, the EmDrive was supposed to produce thrust by essentially bouncing microwaves around a closed, conical cavity. It’s the closest thing Woodward’s thrusters have to a rival.Woodward and Fearn also had exciting results to share. Their Mach-effect thruster appeared to be producing a few micronewtons of thrust, a record for the device. Even better, three other researchers who had tried out a Mach-effect thruster in their own labs confirmed they had seen it produce thrust, though not as much as Woodward and Fearn saw.The work was enough to earn Woodward and Fearn a coveted spot in NASA’s Innovative Advanced Concepts program. In 2017 the duo secured a $125,000 grant from the space agency. It was the first funding Woodward had ever received to work on his device. Over the years, he had poured about $200,000 of his own money into building the thrusters. “Jim is a master of doing amazing things with next to nothing,” says Mahood, his former graduate student who helped him design and build many of the early devices.As part of the NASA grant, Woodward and Fearn were tasked with both boosting the performance of their thrusters and finding a way to put them to practical use. So they collaborated with the physicist Marshall Eubanks, an expert on interstellar mission concepts, to design an uncrewed spacecraft that could reach a nearby star system.Their design, called the SSI Lambda in homage to the Space Studies Institute, is an alien-looking craft that consists of a long triangular truss flanked by three heat radiators that protrude from its body like feathers on an arrow. An array of roughly 1,500 scaled-up MEGA drives situated around its middle provide thrust. A small modular nuclear reactor would power the thrusters.“The SSI Lambda probe using MEGA drive thrusters is a truly propellantless-propulsion spacecraft,” the team wrote of the design in its report to NASA. “It can travel at speeds up to the speed of light in a vacuum with only consumption of electric power. No other method for travelling to the stars and braking into the target system has been put forward to date, which also has credible physics to back it up.”In 2018, NASA awarded Woodward and Fearn a larger grant worth $500,000. But that welcome development coincided with some bad news from Germany: Martin Tajmar, a physicist at the Dresden University of Technology who had earlier replicated Woodward’s work, had tried again and this time failed to detect thrust. Woodward counters that Tajmar was missing a critical piece of equipment. Tajmar isn’t convinced. “I always had the suspicion that the thrust could be some thermal or vibration artifact,” says Tajmar. “My conclusion after many years is that it’s just vibration.”In early 2019, Fearn flew to Germany to deliver another thruster to Tajmar. He stayed long enough to help Tajmar and his team set up the thruster and run some preliminary tests. Although these tests registered thrust, they were much smaller than what Woodward and Fearn had detected in their own lab. Tajmar visited Woodward and Fearn in California later that summer with more bad news. After Fearn had left, he’d run more tests in different configurations and again failed to detect thrust. “We tested it in his original configuration and we tested it by changing their mounting,” Tajmar says. “You can easily change your vibration artifacts by introducing some rubber or changing a screw, and that's exactly what Jim Woodward is doing now.”But while investigating Tajmar’s results, Woodward discovered Fearn had made a miscalculation that caused the thrust to appear several times larger than it really was. He took it in stride. “Everybody makes mistakes,” says Woodward. Although it explained the discrepancy between their results and what Tajmar saw in his lab, it also made their promise to NASA—to reliably produce tens of micronewtons of thrust by the end of the grant—seem downright impossible.They spent the next six months struggling to get their device to put out more thrust. Then last spring, Woodward realized the way they had mounted the thruster was damping the harmonized vibrations that are the key to producing thrust. So he built a new kind of mount that positions the stack of piezoelectric disks in the center of two rods riding on ball bushings.The results were apparent immediately. The MEGA drive started regularly producing tens of micronewtons of thrust and before long it was producing more than 100 micronewtons, orders of magnitude larger than anything Woodward had ever built before. “I never thought I would see the day that I would be saying this to anyone,” Woodward says. “I figured we'd still be struggling along in the 1- to 5-micronewton range.” For the first time, the pair could see the MEGA thruster lurch forward with their own eyes. Sure, it was only scooting a half millimeter, but at least it was visible.Seeing may be believing, but Woodward and Fearn both say they reacted to their results with more suspicion than jubilance. “I was shocked at the huge increase in measured force,” says Fearn. He initially thought that the movement might be due to the device’s balance recalibrating, but he says that doesn’t explain how the device is generating enough force to overcome the friction in the ball bearings so that it could move forward. Woodward is also suspicious, although less than Fearn. The movement is what his theory predicts, after all.“I am confident that a real force is present, but I sometimes wonder if it isn’t accompanied by a spurious part,” says Woodward. Whence the suspicion? “Just years of tracking down false positives, I guess,” he says.With ample new data in hand, they’re now focused on getting their device into the hands of other researchers so they can independently replicate their results. Mike McDonald, an aerospace engineer at the Naval Research Laboratory in Maryland, will be among the first to do so. He leads an internal program for independently testing advanced propulsion systems, which has previously shot down promising results from the EmDrive. Like any good experimentalist , he’s skeptical—but it’s an optimistic sort of skepticism. “I'd say there's between a 1-in-10 and 1-in-10,000,000 chance that it’s real, and probably toward the higher end of that spectrum,” says McDonald. “But imagine that one chance; that would be amazing. That's why we do high-risk, high-reward work. That’s why we do science.”McDonald is waiting for his lab to resume normal operation next year, once the pandemic eases, to begin testing. He says the first step will involve simply replicating Woodward’s experiments and seeing if he observes the same signal. Then he’ll begin weeding out possible sources of false positives, such as vibration or the thermal expansion of components. One test will be to let the device run at its resonant vibrational frequency for minutes or hours at a time. If the signal persists, there’s a good chance it’s legit.There’s a problem, though: No one is sure what the right vibration frequency is for the device. When Woodward and Fearn conduct their tests, they cycle through a broad spectrum of frequencies, and it’s only when they pass a resonant frequency that they detect thrust. But that resonant frequency constantly shifts as the device heats up. It also varies with the experimental setup. One of their collaborators, the engineer Chip Akins, is building a custom amplifier that will track the resonant frequency as it changes. So rather than producing a split second of thrust as Woodward and Fearn cycle through the frequencies, the MEGA drive will, in theory, be able to produce a sustained thrust.If McDonald and other researchers are able to replicate Woodward and Fearn’s results, the next big step would be an in-space demonstration of the device. He and Fearn hope to have a flight-ready version of the thruster finished within a year. If an in-space demonstration on a small satellite around Earth goes well, more ambitious missions might await. “Do I feel vindicated? No, not really,” Woodward says. “I’ll feel vindicated if I live long enough to see someone publicly say, ‘Yes, these things really work.’”But even if the community accepts that the thrusters work, that doesn’t mean they’ll accept Woodward’s explanation of why they work. “In my opinion there is no merit to Woodward's theory,” says Mike McCulloch, a physicist at the University of Plymouth who has advanced an alternate idea called quantised inertia that he purports can also explain some of Woodward’s results. “I think the experimental results are more interesting than the theory.” Even Fearn, Woodward’s closest collaborator, has his doubts. But he also doesn’t have any other way to explain what he and Woodward are seeing in the lab. “I haven't been able to disprove it, and believe me, I've been trying to disprove it for the last 10 years,” he says.Woodward’s at peace with his critics. If what he’s seeing is real—if his MEGA drive really produces thrust—he is convinced that his theory is the only one that can explain it.“That’ll sort itself out eventually,” he says.But if he was once a skeptic’s skeptic, Woodward now seems almost religious in his faith that what he’s seeing is real. Some of his supporters can’t help but wonder if it’s led him astray. “As time has gone on, Jim has gotten much more staunch in his approach,” says Meholic. “He's literally come out and said at some point that the textbooks are wrong and I'm right.”If it all turns out to be an illusion and Woodward has spent his life chasing vibrations, his colleagues are the first to admit it wasn’t for nothing. “There is a worldwide effort looking at Jim’s devices, because this is really the only game in town at this point,” says Meholic. “It's been wonderful to have someone like him in the community that actually is doing something to advance these things, because that’s what’s really critical."Whether you think Woodward is a lunatic or a visionary is mostly a matter of your perspective on gravity. A kiss on the cheek or a shot from a gun or a vibration in a stack of piezoelectric crystals either implicates a galaxy billions of light years away, or it doesn’t. The experimental data won’t lie, but if Woodward hasn’t discovered the interstellar engine we’ve been waiting for, he’s kept the dream alive for the next generation of would-be star surfers who might. Gravity, Gizmos, and a Grand Theory of Interstellar Travel It was a warm afternoon in July, and Hal Fearn was sitting in his camouflage jeep in the parking lot of a mostly empty IHOP in Southern California. Fearn, a physicist at California State University, Fullerton, bided his time by singing along to the a cappella covers pumping through his stereo. He hadn’t loitered long before he spotted a silver minivan easing into the lot. Behind the wheel was Jim Woodward, large gold-framed glasses and a surgical mask adorning his gaunt face. Woodward, a physics professor emeritus at Fullerton, slid his van beside the jeep and rolled down his window to pass a box to Fearn. Inside was a collection of metallic devices with wires protruding from their exposed electromechanical guts. They looked like the type of gadgets an action movie villain might carry in his pocket to blow up a city, but their actual function is even more improbable. Woodward believes these devices—he calls them his “gizmos”—may set humans on the path to interstellar travel. As the pandemic raged across the globe, Woodward and Fearn met regularly in the pancake house parking lot to keep their experiments going. Funded by a grant from a NASA program that also supports research on far-out concepts such as inflatable telescopes and exoplanet photography, the duo has been developing what they call a Mach-effect gravitational assist (MEGA) drive, a propulsion system designed to produce thrust without propellant. Every spacecraft that has ever left Earth has relied on some type of propellant to get it to its destination. Typically a spacecraft moves by igniting its fuel in a combustion chamber and expelling hot gases. (Even more exotic forms of propulsion, such as ion thrusters, still require propellant.) That’s why humans have remained stuck so close to home. A spacecraft can only accelerate as long as it has fuel to burn or a planet to loop around for a gravitational assist. Those methods can’t even carry a vehicle all the way to Alpha Centauri, our closest neighbor, in any reasonable amount of time. The fastest spacecraft ever built, the Parker Solar Probe, which will hit speeds over 400,000 miles per hour, would take thousands of years to get there. Woodward’s MEGA drive is different. Instead of propellant, it relies on electricity, which in space would come from solar panels or a nuclear reactor. His insight was to use a stack of piezoelectric crystals and some controversial—but he believes plausible—physics to generate thrust. The stack of crystals, which store tiny amounts of energy, vibrates tens of thousands of times per second when zapped with electric current. Some of the vibrational frequencies harmonize as they roll through the device, and when the oscillations sync up in just the right way, the small drive lurches forward. This might not sound like the secret to interstellar travel, but if that small lurch can be sustained, a spacecraft could theoretically produce thrust for as long as it had electric power. It wouldn’t accelerate quickly, but it could accelerate for a long time, gradually gaining in velocity until it was whipping its way across the galaxy. An onboard nuclear reactor could supply it with electric power for decades, long enough for an array of MEGA drives to reach velocities approaching the speed of light. If Woodward’s device works, it’d be the first propulsion system that could conceivably reach another solar system within the lifespan of an astronaut. How does it work? Ask Woodward and he’ll tell you his gizmo has merely tapped into the fabric of the universe and hitched a ride on gravity itself. Sound impossible? A lot of theoretical physicists think so too. In fact, Woodward is certain most theoretical physicists think his propellantless thruster is nonsense. But in June, after two decades of halting progress, Woodward and Fearn made a minor change to the configuration of the thruster. Suddenly, the MEGA drive leapt to life. For the first time, Woodward seemed to have undeniable evidence that his impossible engine really worked. Then the pandemic hit. Woodward turns 80 next year. He is a survivor of stage IV lung cancer living with COPD, and he is being treated for relapsed Hodgkin's lymphoma. That puts him in the high-risk category for Covid-19, so when cases in California started climbing, he grudgingly left his lab at Fullerton and hunkered down at home. But he wasn’t going to let a global pandemic stymie his progress. Over the summer, Woodward gradually turned the office he shares with his partner, Carole, into a den that would be the envy of any mad scientist. Hand tools are scattered around Woodward’s desk among boxes full of new ball bearings, stacks of crystalline disks, and scraps of metal shim that Woodward has cut into electrodes. There’s lubricant that costs $175 a bottle, for greasing the bearing rods, and a special glue that has a number for a name. It’s a stark contrast to Carole’s neat desk on the other side of the room, but Woodward says she’s so far tolerated his ad hoc thruster factory. “I should think that having a partner like me would be very trying,” he says. “She has been astonishingly good about it over the years.” Woodward and Fearn film and record the displacement registered by the torsion balance from every test of their Mach-effect thruster. Woodward built a dozen or so devices and handed some of them off to Fearn, who tested them in their shared lab at Fullerton. Later this fall, they’ll send a device to an independent researcher in Toronto named George Hathaway, an experimentalist with ties to NASA whom Woodward described as “probably the finest experimentalist in the world for this type of work.” Woodward prepared another thruster for the US Naval Research Laboratory, which will also try to replicate the duo’s results. The amount of thrust Woodward appears to have coaxed out of his MEGA drive is tiny even compared to the puniest satellite thrusters in orbit today. But if other engineers can confirm his results, it could be our best bet yet for a human mission to the stars. Scientists have long dreamed of seeing an alien sunrise. Our sun is just an average star, one of billions like it in our galaxy. Many of those stars also have planets, some of which might have the right conditions to support life. In 1911 the Russian scientist Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, generally regarded as the father of rocket science, was the first to outline how an interstellar spacecraft might go about exploring them. Since then, scientists have proposed using fusion engines, wormholes, massive lasers, and hydrogen bombs to whisk humans across the deepest of deep space. Only two spacecraft—Voyager 1 and Voyager 2—have ever entered interstellar space. Like every spacecraft to date, they were hurled into the void by a rocket and then used small liquid-fueled thrusters to navigate the solar system. They’re now booking it through the cosmos at more than 35,000 miles per hour. NASA has contemplated an uncrewed interstellar mission for years, but the only one under active development today is an independent effort called Breakthrough Starshot. It aims to use exceptionally powerful lasers to propel a spacecraft the size of a fingernail up to 20 percent the speed of light. For humans to make the trip, they’d need a much larger craft—and a propulsion system that, ideally, could get them there within a generation. That species-defining challenge was what captivated Woodward as a young man. Woodward was born in Boston in 1941, the eldest son of a patent lawyer and an astronomer. His mother, the astronomer, gave him a basic fluency in the language of the universe and stoked his curiosity about the cosmos. As a child, Woodward tinkered with homemade rockets, but he didn’t get very far. His younger brother, Paul Woodward, an astrophysicist at the University of Minnesota, recalls a time when his older brother pilfered potassium nitrate from his childhood chemistry set and used it to make a homebrew rocket that exploded spectacularly over their neighborhood. “The story was that my father got on some sort of list for doing that and could not buy me any more chemicals for my experiments,” Paul recalls. “So the launch was the end of Jim's career in rocketry and my career as a chemist.” Still, Woodward followed his childhood interest into a physics undergraduate program at Middlebury College, a small liberal arts school in Vermont. But it was an experience he had a few years after graduating that changed the course of his life. Woodward has been developing his Mach-effect thrusters for nearly 30 years. On a clear night in March 1967, Woodward was stargazing on the rooftop of Pensión Santa Cruz, a hotel in the heart of Seville, in Spain. The 26-year-old physicist was struggling with his chosen profession and had taken a break from graduate work at New York University. He found himself drawn to fringe research topics, particularly those having to do with gravity, which he knew would make it hard to get a job. “It became clear to me simply by looking at the physics department around me that a bunch of people like that were unlikely to hire someone like me,” Woodward says. So he decided to try something else. He had picked up flamenco guitar as an undergrad and even performed in clubs in New York. Inspired by his aunt, a CIA officer who had learned to play the instrument while stationed in Madrid, he headed to Spain to pursue a career in it. At the time, the space race was only a decade old and satellite spotting was a popular sport. As Woodward gazed up from atop his Spanish hotel, he saw a speck of light arcing across the sky and mentally calculated its path. But as he watched the satellite, it began deviating from its expected trajectory—first by a little and then by a lot. Everything Woodward knew about satellites told him that what he was seeing should be impossible. It would take too much energy for a satellite to change its orbit like that, and most satellites weren’t able to shift more than a couple of degrees. And yet, he had just seen a satellite double back with his own eyes. He didn't conclude that engineers at NASA or in the Soviet Union must have secretly achieved a breakthrough in satellite propulsion. Instead, he believes he saw a spacecraft of extraterrestrial origin. “Critters at least as clever as us had figured out how to get around spacetime far better than we are capable of doing,” Woodward says. That changed the question, he says, from if it was possible to how. Never one to doubt the power of the human intellect, especially his own, Woodward reckoned he could build a similar interstellar propulsion system if he put his mind to it. “If somebody figured out how the hell to do something like that, they probably aren’t an awful lot smarter than I am,” Woodward recalls thinking at the time. “So I thought maybe I should devote a little time to trying to do that.” It was a project that would occupy him for the rest of his life. Woodward completed his master’s degree in physics at NYU in 1969, and he left to do a PhD in history at the University of Denver shortly after. His decision to pivot from physics to history was a pragmatic one. As a master’s student, he spent a lot of his time combing through old scientific journals in search of promising gravitational research that had been abandoned or hit a dead end so he could pick up the torch. “I was doing the history of science already, so I might as well get a degree in it,” Woodward says. “It was an obvious thing to do.” As an academic historian, he’d enjoy the job security that comes with uncontroversial research and still have the freedom to study fringe gravitational topics as an avocation. He accepted a position in the Cal State Fullerton history department in 1972. It’s not like Woodward’s passion for fringe physics was a secret. In addition to a trickle of historical research, he regularly published technical papers in mainstream science journals on arcane gravitational subjects. “It is unusual that a professor of history would set up a research lab in physics, but Jim was recognized as a serious scholar and committed researcher,” says Dorothy Woolum, a physicist who arrived at Fullerton shortly after Woodward. He was particularly interested in using pulsars, a type of rapidly spinning neutron star that had only recently been discovered, to try to detect an unknown and exotic coupling between electromagnetism and gravity predicted by the Nobel Prize–winning physicist Patrick Blackett. Alas, Woodward’s work on pulsars only managed to raise skepticism among his peers. “Many people looked at me as a crank and blew me off,” Woodward says. “I wouldn’t recommend it as a career path.” The electromagnetism stuff was bad enough, but it was Woodward’s emerging ideas about inertia that really got them riled up. Inertia is the resistance you feel whenever you push on an object. (Or, as Newton put it, inertia is why an object at rest tends to stay at rest.) Though ubiquitous and fundamental, no one has penned a full explanation of it. Woodward inherits his ideas about inertia from Einstein, who was inspired by the 19th-century physicist Ernst Mach. Mach posited that inertia is the result of the gravitational interactions of everything in the universe. In other words, the resistance from the sidewalk when someone walks on it or from a pool wall when a swimmer executes a tumble turn is partly due to starstuff billions of light years away. Einstein called this idea “Mach’s principle” and incorporated it into general relativity, his theory of gravity. From the start, Mach’s principle was a controversial addendum to general relativity. Some of Einstein’s contemporaries, especially the Dutch mathematician Willem de Sitter, labored to show that his concept of inertia was inconsistent with other mathematical implications of general relativity. But it was the physicist Carl Brans who finally expelled the idea from respectable physics. In Brans’ PhD thesis, published in 1961, he used mathematics to demonstrate that inertia could not be explained by the gravitational influence of distant matter in the universe. After Brans’ paper, “everybody assumed that inertia à la Einstein was not contained in general relativity,” Woodward says. “That’s still the view of most general relativists.” But as Woodward dug deeper into the history and science of general relativity, he couldn’t shake the feeling that Brans had gotten it all wrong. And as he discovered in the autumn of 1989, if you accepted Einstein’s view that inertia was inextricably linked to gravity, it opened up the possibility for propellantless propulsion. Woodward’s views on gravity and inertia aren’t mainstream, but it’s not crazy to think Einstein might have been right all along. “I'm pretty comfortable with Jim's take on it, because it's very historically oriented,” says Daniel Kennefick, an astrophysicist and historian of science at the University of Arkansas, who has collaborated with Woodward. “He is very much motivated by Einstein's understanding of Mach’s principle. It's not at all unusual for an idea to be discovered, rejected, and then later make a comeback.” In Einstein’s famous equation, E=mc2, an object’s energy, E, is equal to its mass, m, multiplied by the speed of light squared. That means if you change an object’s energy, you will also change its mass. An object’s mass is a measure of its inertia—that’s why it takes greater force to push a more massive object than a less massive one—so changing its energy will also change its inertia. And if, per Mach’s principle, inertia and gravity are one and the same, then changing an object’s energy means messing with the very fabric of spacetime. In theory, anyway. Woodward realized that if Einstein was right and inertia really is gravity in disguise, it should be possible to detect these brief changes in an object’s mass as its energy fluctuates. If part of an object accelerated at the exact moment when it became a little heavier, it would pull the rest of the object along with it. In other words, it would create thrust without propellant. Woodward called these temporary changes in mass “Mach effects,” and the engine that could use them a Mach-effect thruster. By combining hundreds or thousands of these drives, they could conceivably produce enough thrust to send a spaceship to the stars in less than a human lifetime. How to keep a person alive in space for decades is still an enormous question. But it is a mere footnote to the more fundamental issue of figuring out how to cross a void trillions of miles wide in any reasonable amount of time. By 1995, Woodward’s ideas about Mach effects had coalesced into a full theory, and he turned his attention to building a thruster to prove it. The design he settled on was simple and opportunistic. A local electronics manufacturer was relocating, and an employee had alerted the university it had some leftover materials on offer. Woodward swung by its old office and snapped up a pile of piezoelectric disks the company had left behind. To build his interstellar engine, Woodward mounted the piezoelectric disks to a block of brass and put a cap on the other end to hold it all in place. When piezoelectric disks are hit with a pulse of electricity, they bulge slightly. This expansion causes them to push off of the brass block and accelerate in the opposite direction. According to Woodward’s theory of Mach effects, the electric current would also make the piezoelectric disks ever-so-slightly heavier. This causes them to pull the brass block toward them. When the electricity stops flowing, the whole ensemble will have scooted slightly forward. By repeating this process over and over, Woodward figured, the Mach-effect thruster should accelerate. Fearn, his closest collaborator, compares it to rowing a boat on the ocean of spacetime. Over the next few years, he managed to coax a few hundred nanonewtons of thrust out of his Mach-effect drive. Most of Woodward’s peers dismissed his nearly imperceptible results as a measurement error. It is not hard to see why—when you blow out candles on a birthday cake, you produce around three orders of magnitude more force than what Woodward was reporting. Even if the device did work, it wouldn’t be enough to move a small satellite, much less a starship. Nevertheless, Woodward’s Mach-effect thrusters attracted the attention of researchers in government and industry. In 1997 he gave a presentation on his work at Lockheed Martin, and a few months later officials from the Department of Energy and Sandia National Laboratories paid a visit to his lab. But funding never materialized. So he pressed forward on his own, assisted by his graduate student Tom Mahood and a handful of other collaborators. Then he found out about the cancer. In 2005, doctors found a 2-inch tumor in Woodward’s left lung. The cancer had spread to his lymphatic system, causing the left part of his face and neck to swell. His prognosis was bleak. His doctors told him his odds of surviving the year were 1 in 3; the odds that he’d live five years were 1 in 100. He enrolled in a few clinical trials to try experimental therapies and had extraordinary results. Within months, the cancerous mass in his lungs had virtually disappeared. The treatments came with complications—Woodward experienced heart failure and lost the ability to walk without a pair of canes—but he survived. Woodward beat stage IV lung cancer, but the therapies left him unable to walk without two canes. Woodward’s favorite Einstein quote is “Coincidence is God’s way of remaining anonymous,” and his cancer ordeal only reinforced his belief in its fundamental truth. “There was just one coincidence after another,” Woodward says. “By all rights, I should have been dead and gone 15 years ago.” Reckoning with his mortality only strengthened his resolve. On the days when he wasn’t in a doctor’s office, he was in the lab trying to breathe life into his machines. Then a twist of fate led him to team up with Fearn. For 20 years Woodward had had an expansive lab in the physics department, but Cal State Fullerton now needed the space to open a new Center for Gravitational-Wave Physics and Astronomy. “If it had been anything other than gravitational physics, I probably would have resisted,” Woodward says. “But since it was gravitational physics, I was delighted to move.” Woodward found some space in an empty back office that technically belonged to Fearn, who was on sabbatical. When Fearn returned, he discovered he was now roommates with the university’s most eccentric scientist. “I was really pissed off, because everything was a jumbled mess with these big computers stacked on top of each other, and all my books had been shoved into my room,” Fearn recalls. “And here's this strange guy in my back room doing these weird experiments.” At first, Fearn took only a casual interest in Woodward’s experiments. But as time passed, he couldn’t help noticing his roommate’s results were improving. “That’s when I started to get interested and talk to him about what he was doing,” he says. Soon, he was hooked. He offered to help, and the duo quickly became inseparable, a professional relationship that’s part The Odd Couple, part Watson and Crick. Although he didn’t fully buy into Woodward’s theoretical explanation for his Mach-effect thrusters, Fearn couldn’t resist the challenge. “How many people can say they’re trying to build a propulsion system to send spaceships to the stars?” Fearn says. “That’s what we’re doing here.” Woodward and Fearn have collaborated on the Mach-effect thruster for a decade. The advanced propulsion community is a small one. Perhaps a few dozen physicists and engineers around the world are working on problems such as fusion-powered rockets and faster-than-light travel. Everybody knows everybody, and as in any small community, there’s infighting and gossip. But there’s also a deep bond that comes with having to convince the rest of the scientific establishment that you’re not that crazy. “People will get into shouting matches,” says Greg Meholic, an engineer at the Aerospace Corporation working on advanced propulsion. “But then, when the workday is done or there's a break, everybody's friends.” Meholic says he first met Woodward at an advanced propulsion conference in the ’90s. “The self-skepticism he had at the time was very appealing,” says Meholic. “He didn't ever make the claim that he had the revolutionary thing and we’re going to be flying to the stars in 10 years.” After one of Woodward’s presentations, Meholic offered his engineering perspective on his thruster designs, and they’ve been friends and collaborators ever since. So in 2016, when Meholic heard that Woodward and Fearn had teamed up with the Space Studies Institute, a nonprofit founded by the physicist Gerard O’Neill, to start a conference for advanced propulsion, he knew he had to be there. “Everybody who's ever done any research at all in this kind of work was invited to come,” he says. The workshop was held that September in Estes Park, Colorado. It was good timing. Shortly before the conference began, a research paper leaked on an online space forum that purported to show the first strong results from experiments on another approach to propellantless propulsion, called the EmDrive. Designed by a NASA research group led by physicist Sonny White, the EmDrive was supposed to produce thrust by essentially bouncing microwaves around a closed, conical cavity. It’s the closest thing Woodward’s thrusters have to a rival. Woodward and Fearn also had exciting results to share. Their Mach-effect thruster appeared to be producing a few micronewtons of thrust, a record for the device. Even better, three other researchers who had tried out a Mach-effect thruster in their own labs confirmed they had seen it produce thrust, though not as much as Woodward and Fearn saw. The work was enough to earn Woodward and Fearn a coveted spot in NASA’s Innovative Advanced Concepts program. In 2017 the duo secured a $125,000 grant from the space agency. It was the first funding Woodward had ever received to work on his device. Over the years, he had poured about $200,000 of his own money into building the thrusters. “Jim is a master of doing amazing things with next to nothing,” says Mahood, his former graduate student who helped him design and build many of the early devices. As part of the NASA grant, Woodward and Fearn were tasked with both boosting the performance of their thrusters and finding a way to put them to practical use. So they collaborated with the physicist Marshall Eubanks, an expert on interstellar mission concepts, to design an uncrewed spacecraft that could reach a nearby star system. Their design, called the SSI Lambda in homage to the Space Studies Institute, is an alien-looking craft that consists of a long triangular truss flanked by three heat radiators that protrude from its body like feathers on an arrow. An array of roughly 1,500 scaled-up MEGA drives situated around its middle provide thrust. A small modular nuclear reactor would power the thrusters. “The SSI Lambda probe using MEGA drive thrusters is a truly propellantless-propulsion spacecraft,” the team wrote of the design in its report to NASA. “It can travel at speeds up to the speed of light in a vacuum with only consumption of electric power. No other method for travelling to the stars and braking into the target system has been put forward to date, which also has credible physics to back it up.” In 2018, NASA awarded Woodward and Fearn a larger grant worth $500,000. But that welcome development coincided with some bad news from Germany: Martin Tajmar, a physicist at the Dresden University of Technology who had earlier replicated Woodward’s work, had tried again and this time failed to detect thrust. Woodward counters that Tajmar was missing a critical piece of equipment. Tajmar isn’t convinced. “I always had the suspicion that the thrust could be some thermal or vibration artifact,” says Tajmar. “My conclusion after many years is that it’s just vibration.” In early 2019, Fearn flew to Germany to deliver another thruster to Tajmar. He stayed long enough to help Tajmar and his team set up the thruster and run some preliminary tests. Although these tests registered thrust, they were much smaller than what Woodward and Fearn had detected in their own lab. Tajmar visited Woodward and Fearn in California later that summer with more bad news. After Fearn had left, he’d run more tests in different configurations and again failed to detect thrust. “We tested it in his original configuration and we tested it by changing their mounting,” Tajmar says. “You can easily change your vibration artifacts by introducing some rubber or changing a screw, and that's exactly what Jim Woodward is doing now.” But while investigating Tajmar’s results, Woodward discovered Fearn had made a miscalculation that caused the thrust to appear several times larger than it really was. He took it in stride. “Everybody makes mistakes,” says Woodward. Although it explained the discrepancy between their results and what Tajmar saw in his lab, it also made their promise to NASA—to reliably produce tens of micronewtons of thrust by the end of the grant—seem downright impossible. They spent the next six months struggling to get their device to put out more thrust. Then last spring, Woodward realized the way they had mounted the thruster was damping the harmonized vibrations that are the key to producing thrust. So he built a new kind of mount that positions the stack of piezoelectric disks in the center of two rods riding on ball bushings. The results were apparent immediately. The MEGA drive started regularly producing tens of micronewtons of thrust and before long it was producing more than 100 micronewtons, orders of magnitude larger than anything Woodward had ever built before. “I never thought I would see the day that I would be saying this to anyone,” Woodward says. “I figured we'd still be struggling along in the 1- to 5-micronewton range.” For the first time, the pair could see the MEGA thruster lurch forward with their own eyes. Sure, it was only scooting a half millimeter, but at least it was visible. Seeing may be believing, but Woodward and Fearn both say they reacted to their results with more suspicion than jubilance. “I was shocked at the huge increase in measured force,” says Fearn. He initially thought that the movement might be due to the device’s balance recalibrating, but he says that doesn’t explain how the device is generating enough force to overcome the friction in the ball bearings so that it could move forward. Woodward is also suspicious, although less than Fearn. The movement is what his theory predicts, after all. “I am confident that a real force is present, but I sometimes wonder if it isn’t accompanied by a spurious part,” says Woodward. Whence the suspicion? “Just years of tracking down false positives, I guess,” he says. With ample new data in hand, they’re now focused on getting their device into the hands of other researchers so they can independently replicate their results. Mike McDonald, an aerospace engineer at the Naval Research Laboratory in Maryland, will be among the first to do so. He leads an internal program for independently testing advanced propulsion systems, which has previously shot down promising results from the EmDrive. Like any good experimentalist , he’s skeptical—but it’s an optimistic sort of skepticism. “I'd say there's between a 1-in-10 and 1-in-10,000,000 chance that it’s real, and probably toward the higher end of that spectrum,” says McDonald. “But imagine that one chance; that would be amazing. That's why we do high-risk, high-reward work. That’s why we do science.” McDonald is waiting for his lab to resume normal operation next year, once the pandemic eases, to begin testing. He says the first step will involve simply replicating Woodward’s experiments and seeing if he observes the same signal. Then he’ll begin weeding out possible sources of false positives, such as vibration or the thermal expansion of components. One test will be to let the device run at its resonant vibrational frequency for minutes or hours at a time. If the signal persists, there’s a good chance it’s legit. There’s a problem, though: No one is sure what the right vibration frequency is for the device. When Woodward and Fearn conduct their tests, they cycle through a broad spectrum of frequencies, and it’s only when they pass a resonant frequency that they detect thrust. But that resonant frequency constantly shifts as the device heats up. It also varies with the experimental setup. One of their collaborators, the engineer Chip Akins, is building a custom amplifier that will track the resonant frequency as it changes. So rather than producing a split second of thrust as Woodward and Fearn cycle through the frequencies, the MEGA drive will, in theory, be able to produce a sustained thrust. If McDonald and other researchers are able to replicate Woodward and Fearn’s results, the next big step would be an in-space demonstration of the device. He and Fearn hope to have a flight-ready version of the thruster finished within a year. If an in-space demonstration on a small satellite around Earth goes well, more ambitious missions might await. “Do I feel vindicated? No, not really,” Woodward says. “I’ll feel vindicated if I live long enough to see someone publicly say, ‘Yes, these things really work.’” But even if the community accepts that the thrusters work, that doesn’t mean they’ll accept Woodward’s explanation of why they work. “In my opinion there is no merit to Woodward's theory,” says Mike McCulloch, a physicist at the University of Plymouth who has advanced an alternate idea called quantised inertia that he purports can also explain some of Woodward’s results. “I think the experimental results are more interesting than the theory.” Even Fearn, Woodward’s closest collaborator, has his doubts. But he also doesn’t have any other way to explain what he and Woodward are seeing in the lab. “I haven't been able to disprove it, and believe me, I've been trying to disprove it for the last 10 years,” he says. Woodward’s at peace with his critics. If what he’s seeing is real—if his MEGA drive really produces thrust—he is convinced that his theory is the only one that can explain it.“That’ll sort itself out eventually,” he says. But if he was once a skeptic’s skeptic, Woodward now seems almost religious in his faith that what he’s seeing is real. Some of his supporters can’t help but wonder if it’s led him astray. “As time has gone on, Jim has gotten much more staunch in his approach,” says Meholic. “He's literally come out and said at some point that the textbooks are wrong and I'm right.” If it all turns out to be an illusion and Woodward has spent his life chasing vibrations, his colleagues are the first to admit it wasn’t for nothing. “There is a worldwide effort looking at Jim’s devices, because this is really the only game in town at this point,” says Meholic. “It's been wonderful to have someone like him in the community that actually is doing something to advance these things, because that’s what’s really critical." Whether you think Woodward is a lunatic or a visionary is mostly a matter of your perspective on gravity. A kiss on the cheek or a shot from a gun or a vibration in a stack of piezoelectric crystals either implicates a galaxy billions of light years away, or it doesn’t. The experimental data won’t lie, but if Woodward hasn’t discovered the interstellar engine we’ve been waiting for, he’s kept the dream alive for the next generation of would-be star surfers who might. Comments You Might Also Like In your inbox: Upgrade your life with WIRED-tested gear A wave of unexplained bot traffic is sweeping the web Big Story: The women training for pregnancy like it’s a marathon Iran’s digital surveillance machine is almost complete Listen: Silicon Valley tech workers are trying to stop ICE © 2026 Condé Nast. All rights reserved. WIRED may earn a portion of sales from products that are purchased through our site as part of our Affiliate Partnerships with retailers. 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