In all of the de­bates about the value of AI-assistance in soft­ware de­vel­op­ment there’s one de­press­ing anec­dote that I keep on see­ing: the ju­nior en­gi­neer, em­pow­ered by some class of LLM tool, who de­posits gi­ant, untested PRs on their cowork­ers—or open source main­tain­ers—and ex­pects the “code re­view” process to han­dle the rest.

This is rude, a waste of other peo­ple’s time, and is hon­estly a dere­lic­tion of duty as a soft­ware de­vel­oper.

Your job is to de­liver code you have proven to work.

As soft­ware en­gi­neers we don’t just crank out code—in fact these days you could ar­gue that’s what the LLMs are for. We need to de­liver code that works—and we need to in­clude proof that it works as well. Not do­ing that di­rectly shifts the bur­den of the ac­tual work to who­ever is ex­pected to re­view our code.

There are two steps to prov­ing a piece of code works. Neither is op­tional.

The first is man­ual test­ing. If you haven’t seen the code do the right thing your­self, that code does­n’t work. If it does turn out to work, that’s hon­estly just pure chance.

Manual test­ing skills are gen­uine skills that you need to de­velop. You need to be able to get the sys­tem into an ini­tial state that demon­strates your change, then ex­er­cise the change, then check and demon­strate that it has the de­sired ef­fect.

If pos­si­ble I like to re­duce these steps to a se­quence of ter­mi­nal com­mands which I can paste, along with their out­put, into a com­ment in the code re­view. Here’s a re­cent ex­am­ple.

Some changes are harder to demon­strate. It’s still your job to demon­strate them! Record a screen cap­ture video and add that to the PR. Show your re­view­ers that the change you made ac­tu­ally works.

Once you’ve tested the happy path where every­thing works you can start try­ing the edge cases. Manual test­ing is a skill, and find­ing the things that break is the next level of that skill that helps de­fine a se­nior en­gi­neer.

The sec­ond step in prov­ing a change works is au­to­mated test­ing. This is so much eas­ier now that we have LLM tool­ing, which means there’s no ex­cuse at all for skip­ping this step.

Your con­tri­bu­tion should bun­dle the change with an au­to­mated test that proves the change works. That test should fail if you re­vert the im­ple­men­ta­tion.

The process for writ­ing a test mir­rors that of man­ual test­ing: get the sys­tem into an ini­tial known state, ex­er­cise the change, as­sert that it worked cor­rectly. Integrating a test har­ness to pro­duc­tively fa­cil­i­tate this is an­other key skill worth in­vest­ing in.

Don’t be tempted to skip the man­ual test be­cause you think the au­to­mated test has you cov­ered al­ready! Almost every time I’ve done this my­self I’ve quickly re­gret­ted it.

The most im­por­tant trend in LLMs in 2025 has been the ex­plo­sive growth of cod­ing agents—tools like Claude Code and Codex CLI that can ac­tively ex­e­cute the code they are work­ing on to check that it works and fur­ther it­er­ate on any prob­lems.

To mas­ter these tools you need to learn how to get them to prove their changes work as well.

This looks ex­actly the same as the process I de­scribed above: they need to be able to man­u­ally test their changes as they work, and they need to be able to build au­to­mated tests that guar­an­tee the change will con­tinue to work in the fu­ture.

Since they’re ro­bots, au­to­mated tests and man­ual tests are ef­fec­tively the same thing.

They do feel a lit­tle dif­fer­ent though. When I’m work­ing on CLI tools I’ll usu­ally teach Claude Code how to run them it­self so it can do one-off tests, even though the even­tual au­to­mated tests will use a sys­tem like Click’s CLIRunner.

When work­ing on CSS changes I’ll of­ten en­cour­age my cod­ing agent to take screen­shots when it needs to check if the change it made had the de­sired ef­fect.

The good news about au­to­mated tests is that cod­ing agents need very lit­tle en­cour­age­ment to write them. If your pro­ject has tests al­ready most agents will ex­tend that test suite with­out you even telling them to do so. They’ll also reuse pat­terns from ex­ist­ing tests, so keep­ing your test code well or­ga­nized and pop­u­lated with pat­terns you like is a great way to help your agent build test­ing code to your taste.

Developing good taste in test­ing code is an­other of those skills that dif­fer­en­ti­ates a se­nior en­gi­neer.

A com­puter can never be held ac­count­able. That’s your job as the hu­man in the loop.

Almost any­one can prompt an LLM to gen­er­ate a thou­sand-line patch and sub­mit it for code re­view. That’s no longer valu­able. What’s valu­able is con­tribut­ing code that is proven to work.

Next time you sub­mit a PR, make sure you’ve in­cluded your ev­i­dence that it works as it should.

Although Viktor Zhdanov’s name is lit­tle known to­day, he spear­headed one of the great­est pro­jects in his­tory. Who was he and what did he do?Read more →It is of­ten sug­gested that mod­ern view­ers dis­like painted re­con­struc­tions of Greek and Roman stat­ues be­cause our taste dif­fers from that of the an­cients. This es­say pro­poses an al­ter­na­tive ex­pla­na­tion.

This is a Roman statue lo­cated in the British Museum.

It de­picts the god­dess Venus, per­haps orig­i­nally hold­ing a mir­ror. Something you will no­tice about it is that it looks great. Sub­scribe for $100 to re­ceive six beau­ti­ful is­sues per year.

Below is a Greek sculp­ture from half a mil­len­nium ear­lier.

One of the trea­sures re­cov­ered from the first-cen­tury BC Antikythera ship­wreck, this statue is com­posed of bronze with in­laid stone eyes. It has been var­i­ously in­ter­preted as rep­re­sent­ing Paris, Perseus, or a youth­ful Heracles. What­ever in­ter­pre­ta­tion is cor­rect, it is a stun­ning work of art.

Here is a de­tail from a wall paint­ing in Rome. This has un­der­gone two thou­sand years of wear and tear, but it is still beau­ti­ful to us.

Detail from the Villa of Livia. First cen­tury BC.

There is a gen­eral pat­tern to these ob­ser­va­tions. Ancient Greek and Roman art tends to look re­ally good to­day.

This is not a uni­ver­sal rule. The Greeks weren’t al­ways the mas­ters of nat­u­ral­ism that we know: early Archaic kouroi now seem rather stilted and un­easy. As in all so­ci­eties, cruder work was pro­duced at the lower end of the mar­ket. Art in the pe­riph­eral provinces of the Roman Empire was of­ten clearly a clumsy im­i­ta­tion of work at the cen­ter. Even so, mod­ern view­ers tend to be struck by the ex­cel­lence of Greek and Roman art. The ex­am­ples I have given here are far from ex­cep­tions. Explore the Naples Archa­eological Museum, the British Museum, the Louvre, or the Metropolitan Museum and you will see that they had tons of this stuff. Still more re­mark­able, in a way, is the abun­dance of good work dis­cov­ered in Pompeii, a provin­cial town of per­haps 15,000 peo­ple.

Here is an­other Roman statue, this time de­pict­ing the Emperor Augustus. It is called the Augustus of the Prima Porta af­ter the site where it was dis­cov­ered. Something in­ter­est­ing about this statue is that traces of paint sur­vive on its sur­face. This is be­cause, like most though not all an­cient stat­ues, it was orig­i­nally painted.

You were prob­a­bly al­ready aware of this. The col­or­ing of an­cient sculp­ture has be­come widely known in re­cent years as a re­sult of sev­eral high pro­file pro­jects pur­port­ing to re­con­struct the orig­i­nal ap­pear­ance of these works — most fa­mously, Vinzenz Brinkmann’s trav­el­ling Gods in Color ex­hi­bi­tion. This was not news to his­to­ri­ans, who have been aware that an­cient sculp­ture was col­ored (polychromatic) since the 1800s. But it took these strik­ing re­con­struc­tions to gal­vanize pub­lic in­ter­est.

Here is Brinkmann’s well-known re­con­struc­tion of the Augustus of the Prima Porta.

Reconstruction of the Augustus of the Prima Porta, Vinzenz Brinkmann. First ex­hib­ited 2003

What do you no­tice about this re­con­struc­tion? That’s right, it looks aw­ful. In the eyes of mod­ern view­ers, at least, the ad­di­tion of this matte, heav­ily sat­u­rated color has turned a re­ally good work of art into a re­ally bad one.

Look at this archer, from the ped­i­ment of the late ar­chaic tem­ple of Aphaia on Aegina.

Colored re­con­struc­tions of the archer from the Temple of Aphaia in Aegina, c. 500 BC. As with a num­ber of the re­con­struc­tions, this dif­fers some­what from the orig­i­nal in form as well as in hav­ing been re­col­ored, which may add to the odd ef­fect.

I have not said any­thing novel here. Everybody knows these re­con­struc­tions look aw­ful. The dif­fi­cult and in­ter­est­ing ques­tion is why this is so.

The ex­pla­na­tion usu­ally given is that mod­ern taste dif­fers from that of the an­cient Greeks and Romans. It fol­lows that, if the re­con­struc­tions are ac­cu­rate, their taste must be very alien to ours. The ap­par­ent hideous­ness of an­cient col­ored sculp­ture strikes us partly be­cause of what it seems to show about the pro­foundly change­able char­ac­ter of hu­man taste.

It is usu­ally added that we are the vic­tims, here, of a his­tor­i­cal ac­ci­dent. Paints de­te­ri­o­rate much more eas­ily than mar­ble. So, when we re­dis­cov­ered clas­si­cal sculp­ture in the Renai­s­sance, we took the mono­chrome aes­thetic to be in­ten­tional. As a re­sult, we in­ter­nal­ized a deep-seated at­tach­ment to an un­blem­ished white im­age of Greek and Roman art. We be­came, to use David Bachelor’s term, chromo­phobes. It is this ac­ci­den­tal as­so­ci­a­tion be­tween Greek and Roman art and pris­tine white mar­ble, we are told, that ac­counts for the dis­plea­sure we feel when we see the stat­ues re­stored to color.

At least two things about this expla­nation should strike us as odd. First, there ac­tu­ally ex­ist some con­tem­po­rary im­ages of stat­ues, show­ing how they ap­peared in the an­cient world. The re­sem­blance be­tween the stat­ues in these pic­tures and the mod­ern re­con­struc­tions is slight. The stat­ues de­picted in the an­cient art­works ap­pear to be very del­i­cately painted, of­ten with large por­tions of the sur­face left white. A well-known ex­am­ple is the de­pic­tion of a statue of Mars at the House of Venus in Pompeii.

House of Venus in the Shell, Pompeii. First cen­tury AD.

The stat­ues de­picted on the north wall of the frigi­dar­ium in the House of the Cryptoporticus have an even gen­tler fin­ish:

In other cases the col­ors are richer. Here too, how­ever, the ef­fect is far from ugly. I have given an ex­am­ple of this be­low a fa­mous mo­saic de­pict­ing a statue of a boxer, from the Villa San Marco in Stabiae. Note the sub­tlety of color recorded by the mo­saic, in which the boxer is red­dened and sun­burned on his shoul­ders and up­per chest, but not his pale up­per thighs. There is noth­ing here to sug­gest that the stat­ues de­picted would have struck a mod­ern viewer as gar­ish.

Is there any sculp­ture de­picted in an­cient Greek and Roman vi­sual art that re­sem­bles the mod­ern re­con­struc­tions? To the best of my knowl­edge, the clos­est ex­am­ple is the red, blue and yel­low vis­age from the Villa Poppaea at Oplontis.

The tragic mask in the Villa Poppaea, Oplontis, 1st cen­tury AD.

In that case, the treat­ment re­ally does re­sem­ble the ap­proach fa­vored in mod­ern re­con­struc­tions. However, the face be­longs not to a clas­si­cal statue but to a the­atri­cal mask, and is grotesque in form as well as in color. It is not strong ev­i­dence that a sim­i­lar ap­proach was taken with nor­mal clas­si­cal stat­u­ary.

Depictions of peo­ple in paint­ings and mo­saics also use color very dif­fer­ently to the mod­ern re­con­struc­tions of poly­chrome an­cient sculp­ture. Here are two ex­am­ples, each of which show a sen­si­tive nat­u­ral­ism that is, if any­thing, sur­pris­ingly close to mod­ern taste. Again, these are not one-offs: count­less fur­ther ex­am­ples could be given.

The Sappho fresco, National Archaeological Museum, Naples, 1st cen­tury AD, and Mona Lisa of Galilee, Amos Gal, 3rd-4th cen­tury AD

Classical art evolved over the cen­turies, and some of it looks quite dif­fer­ent from these ex­am­ples. But it is dif­fi­cult or im­pos­si­ble to find an an­cient pic­ture from any pe­riod whose col­or­ing re­sem­bles the Brinkmann re­con­struc­tions. Of course, we can­not be sure that the Ro­mans col­ored their stat­ues in the same way they col­ored their pic­tures. But it is surely sus­pi­cious that their use of color in pic­tures tends to be beau­ti­ful and in­tu­itive to us.

Some in­di­rect ev­i­dence is also pro­vided by the uses of color in an­cient in­te­rior de­sign, as seen be­low. The in­ten­sity of red on the Farnesia walls is strik­ing, but these cases rarely seem grotesque in the way that the sculp­tural re­con­struc­tions do, nor do they seem to man­i­fest a rad­i­cally for­eign taste in color. In all these cases, an­cient art is en­joy­able de­spite hav­ing re­tained its orig­i­nal color.

Neither, it might be added, do we find it im­pos­si­ble to ap­pre­ci­ate the painted stat­ues of cul­tures be­yond an­cient Greece and Rome.2 It is true that poly­chrome sculp­ture of­ten verges on an un­canny val­ley ef­fect, but it sel­dom looks as bad to us as the clas­si­cal re­con­structions. This is true not only of the poly­chrome sculp­ture from post-clas­sic Europe, like that of the Middle Ages, the Renaissance and the Spanish and German Baroque, but of poly­chrome sculp­ture from pre-clas­si­cal and non-West­ern cul­tures, like dy­nas­tic Egypt or me­dieval Nepal. Many of these sculp­tures have an eerie qual­ity. It is per­haps no ac­ci­dent that they were of­ten used in reli­gious rit­u­als, as were the sculp­tures of an­tiq­uity. But they sel­dom seem dis­tract­ingly ugly.

Clockwise from top left: Virgen de Belen by Pietro Torrigiano; Cabeza de San Pedro de Alcántara; a 14th cen­tury BC bust of Nefertiti; and a 16th-century AD statue of the Nepalese Goddess of Dance.

Jl FilpoC via Wikimedia Commons;José Luis Filpo Cabana via Wikimedia Commons; Metropolitan Museum of Art; Azoor Photo via Alamy.

We are thus asked to be­lieve not only that the col­ored sculp­ture of Greek and Roman an­tiq­uity was dis­tinc­tive among its art forms in seem­ing con­sis­tently ugly to us, but also that it is dis­tinc­tive among the col­ored sculp­tural tradi­tions of the world in do­ing so. This seems un­likely to be true.

We should be doubt­ful, then, of the idea that mod­ern re­con­struc­tions of col­ored an­cient stat­ues seem ugly to us be­cause we do not share Graeco-­Roman taste in color. Ancient de­pict­ions of stat­ues, other an­cient depict­ions of peo­ple, and other an­cient uses of color, all sug­gest that their feel­ing for color was not so dif­fer­ent to ours. It is also sus­pi­cious that other cul­tures have pro­duced col­ored sculp­ture that we read­ily ap­pre­ci­ate. Is there a bet­ter ex­pla­na­tion of what is go­ing on here?

There is a sin­gle ex­pla­na­tion for the fact that the re­con­struc­tions do not re­sem­ble the stat­ues de­picted in an­cient art­works, the fact that their use of color is un­like that in an­cient mo­saics and fres­coes, and the fact that mod­ern view­ers find them ugly. It is that the re­con­struc­tions are painted very badly. There is no rea­son to posit that an­cient Europeans had tastes rad­i­cally un­like ours to ex­plain our dis­like of the re­con­struc­tions. The Greeks and Romans would have dis­liked them too, be­cause the re­con­structed poly­chromy is no good.

Two ob­jec­tions might be raised to my pro­posal. They are, how­ever, eas­ily an­swered.

First, it might be thought that my ex­pla­na­tion can­not be right be­cause the ex­perts who pro­duce the re­con­struc­tions know that this is what the stat­ues orig­i­nally looked like. After all, it might be rea­soned that their work is based on a sci­en­tific analy­sis of the paint residues left over from the orig­i­nal fin­ish.

This ob­jec­tion should not worry us. Nobody, to my knowl­edge, se­ri­ously claims that the meth­ods used to pro­duce the re­con­struc­tions guar­an­tee a high de­gree of ac­cu­racy. And this should come as no sur­prise. The paints used in the re­con­struc­tions are chem­i­cally sim­i­lar to the trace pig­ments found on parts of the sur­face of the orig­i­nals. However, those pig­ments formed the un­der­layer of a fin­ished work to which they bear a very con­jec­tural re­la­tion­ship. Imagine a mod­ern his­to­rian try­ing to re­con­struct the Mona Lisa on the ba­sis of a few resid­ual pig­ments here and there on a largely fea­ture­less can­vas.

How con­fi­dent could we be that the re­sult ac­cu­rately re­pro­duces the orig­i­nal?

This point is not ac­tu­ally dis­puted by sup­port­ers of the re­con­struc­tions. For ex­am­ple, Cecilie Brøns, who leads a pro­ject on an­cient poly­chromy at the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek in Copenhagen, praises the re­con­struc­tions but notes that ‘reconstructions can be dif­fi­cult to ex­plain to the pub­lic — that these are not ex­act copies, that we can never know ex­actly how they looked’.

Second, it might be urged that it makes no dif­fer­ence whether the re­con­struc­tions are ac­cu­rate be­cause there is sim­ply no way to paint the stat­ues, con­sis­tent with the pig­ments that have been left be­hind, that mod­ern view­ers will find beau­ti­ful.

But this just is­n’t true. It is man­i­festly pos­si­ble to paint a clas­si­cal statue in a man­ner con­sis­tent with the ev­i­dence that will look in­com­pa­ra­bly more beau­ti­ful to the mod­ern viewer than the typ­i­cal re­con­struc­tions do. The tri­umphant ex­am­ples above from Egypt and Nepal above prove this in­con­tro­vert­ibly.

Why, then, are the re­con­struc­tions so ugly? One fac­tor may be that the spe­cial­ists who ex­e­cute them lack the skill of clas­si­cal artists, who had many years of train­ing in a great tra­di­tion.

Another may be that they are ham­pered by con­ser­va­tion doc­trines that for­bid in­clud­ing any fea­ture in a re­con­struc­tion for which there is no di­rect ar­chae­o­log­i­cal ev­i­dence. Since un­der­lay­ers are gen­er­ally the only el­e­ment of which traces sur­vive, such doc­trines lead to all-un­der­layer re­con­struc­tions, with the over­lay­ers that were ob­vi­ously orig­i­nally pre­sent ex­cluded for lack of ev­i­dence.

If that is the ex­pla­na­tion, though, re­con­struc­tion spe­cial­ists have been no­tably un­suc­cess­ful in alert­ing the pub­lic to the fact that col­ored clas­si­cal sculp­ture bore no more re­sem­blance to these re­con­struc­tions than the Mona Lisa would to a re­con­struc­tion that in­cluded only its un­der­lay­ers. Much of the ed­u­cated pub­lic be­lieves that an­cient sculp­ture looked some­thing like these re­con­struc­tions, not that these re­con­struc­tions are a highly ar­ti­fi­cial ex­er­cise in re­con­struct­ing el­e­ments of an­cient poly­chromy for which we have di­rect ar­chae­o­log­i­cal ev­i­dence.

One won­ders if some­thing else is go­ing on here. The enor­mous pub­lic in­ter­est gen­er­ated by gar­ish re­con­struc­tions is surely be­cause of and not in spite of their ug­li­ness. It is hard to be­lieve that this is en­tirely ac­ci­den­tal. One pos­si­bil­ity is that the re­con­struc­tors are en­gaged in a kind of trolling. In this in­ter­pre­ta­tion, they know per­fectly well that an­cient sculp­tures did not look like the re­con­struc­tions, and prob­a­bly in­cluded the sub­tle vari­a­tion of color tones that an­cient paint­ings did. But they fail to cor­rect the be­lief that peo­ple nat­u­rally form given what is placed be­fore them: that the prof­fered re­con­struc­tion of an­cient sculp­ture is roughly what an­cient sculp­ture ac­tu­ally looked like.

A painted Doric entab­la­ture, as re­con­structed by a German il­lus­tra­tor in the 1880s. How come the color looks re­ally good here?

It is a fur­ther ques­tion whether such trolling would be deeply ob­jec­tion­able. Brinkmann has pro­duced a mas­sively suc­cess­ful ex­hi­bi­tion, which has more than ac­com­plished its aim of mak­ing the fact that an­cient stat­ues were painted more widely known. The re­con­struc­tions are of­ten very funny and are not all as bad as the best-known ex­am­ples.3 There is gen­uine in­tel­lec­tual value in the pro­ject and what could be seen as mean-spir­ited icon­o­clasm could equally be em­braced as harm­less fun.

On the other hand, at a time when trust in the hon­est in­ten­tions of ex­perts is at a low, it may be un­wise for ex­perts to troll the pub­lic.

Note how eas­ily the statue of a pa­gan god in the fresco at the House of the Surgeon in Pompeii, men­tioned above, might serve in place of a me­dieval de­vo­tional statue like this St Anthony — some­thing Brinkmann’s re­con­struc­tions could never do. The re­con­structed Venus Lovatelli is rather lovely. It is no co­in­ci­dence that this is based on an orig­i­nal whose color scheme has sur­vived un­usu­ally well, min­i­miz­ing the op­por­tu­nity for mis­chief.Why do some neigh­bor­hoods get gar­den squares and grace­ful streets, while oth­ers don’t? The an­swer is­n’t zon­ing or taste, it’s who owns the land, and how uni­fied that own­er­ship is.

Read more →Ordinary yel­low pineap­ples were once so pre­cious they were rented for dis­play at din­ner par­ties, but cen­turies of in­no­va­tion made them com­mon­place.

Read more →Many women face a choice be­tween ca­reer ad­vance­ment or moth­er­hood. But emerg­ing fer­til­ity tech­nolo­gies could al­low women to have it all.

Read more →

Demonstration that nat­ural bac­te­ria iso­lated from am­phib­ian and rep­tile in­testines achieve com­plete tu­mor elim­i­na­tion with sin­gle ad­min­is­tra­tion

Combines di­rect bac­te­r­ial killing of can­cer cells with im­mune sys­tem ac­ti­va­tion for com­pre­hen­sive tu­mor de­struc­tion

Outperforms ex­ist­ing chemother­apy and im­munother­apy with no ad­verse ef­fects on nor­mal tis­sues

Expected ap­pli­ca­tions across di­verse solid tu­mor types, open­ing new av­enues for can­cer treat­ment

A re­search team of Prof. Eijiro Miyako at the Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (JAIST) has dis­cov­ered that the bac­terium Ewingella amer­i­cana, iso­lated from the in­testines of Japanese tree frogs (Dryophytes japon­i­cus), pos­sesses re­mark­ably po­tent an­ti­cancer ac­tiv­ity. This ground­break­ing re­search has been pub­lished in the in­ter­na­tional jour­nal Gut Microbes.

While the re­la­tion­ship be­tween gut mi­cro­biota and can­cer has at­tracted con­sid­er­able at­ten­tion in re­cent years, most ap­proaches have fo­cused on in­di­rect meth­ods such as mi­cro­biome mod­u­la­tion or fe­cal mi­cro­biota trans­plan­ta­tion. In con­trast, this study takes a com­pletely dif­fer­ent ap­proach: iso­lat­ing, cul­tur­ing, and di­rectly ad­min­is­ter­ing in­di­vid­ual bac­te­r­ial strains in­tra­venously to at­tack tu­mors–- rep­re­sent­ing an in­no­v­a­tive ther­a­peu­tic strat­egy.

The re­search team iso­lated a to­tal of 45 bac­te­r­ial strains from the in­testines of Japanese tree frogs, Japanese fire belly newts (Cynops pyrrhogaster), and Japanese grass lizards (Takydromus tachy­dro­moides). Through sys­tem­atic screen­ing, nine strains demon­strated an­ti­tu­mor ef­fects, with E. amer­i­cana ex­hibit­ing the most ex­cep­tional ther­a­peu­tic ef­fi­cacy.

Remarkable Therapeutic Efficacy

In a mouse col­orec­tal can­cer model, a sin­gle in­tra­venous ad­min­is­tra­tion of E. amer­i­cana achieved com­plete tu­mor elim­i­na­tion with a 100% com­plete re­sponse (CR) rate. This dra­mat­i­cally sur­passes the ther­a­peu­tic ef­fi­cacy of cur­rent stan­dard treat­ments, in­clud­ing im­mune check­point in­hibitors (anti-PD-L1 an­ti­body) and li­po­so­mal dox­oru­bicin (chemotherapy agent) (Figure 1).

Figure 1. Anticancer ef­fi­cacy: Ewingella amer­i­cana ver­sus con­ven­tional ther­a­pies. Tumor re­sponse: sin­gle i.v. dose of E. amer­i­cana (200 µL, 5 × 10⁹ CFU/mL); four doses of dox­oru­bicin or anti-PD-L1 (200 µL, 2.5 mg/​kg per dose); PBS as con­trol. Data: mean ± SEM (n = 5). ****, p < 0.0001 (Student’s two-sided t-test).

Direct Cytotoxic Effect: As a fac­ul­ta­tive anaer­o­bic bac­terium, E. amer­i­cana se­lec­tively ac­cu­mu­lates in the hy­poxic tu­mor mi­croen­vi­ron­ment and di­rectly de­stroys can­cer cells. Bacterial counts within tu­mors in­crease ap­prox­i­mately 3,000-fold within 24 hours post-ad­min­is­tra­tion, ef­fi­ciently at­tack­ing tu­mor tis­sue.

Immune Activation Effect: The bac­te­r­ial pres­ence pow­er­fully stim­u­lates the im­mune sys­tem, re­cruit­ing T cells, B cells, and neu­trophils to the tu­mor site. Pro-inflammatory cy­tokines (TNF-α, IFN-γ) pro­duced by these im­mune cells fur­ther am­plify im­mune re­sponses and in­duce can­cer cell apop­to­sis.

E. amer­i­cana se­lec­tively ac­cu­mu­lates in tu­mor tis­sues with zero col­o­niza­tion in nor­mal or­gans. This re­mark­able tu­mor speci­ficity arises from mul­ti­ple syn­er­gis­tic mech­a­nisms:

Zero bac­te­r­ial col­o­niza­tion in nor­mal or­gans in­clud­ing liver, spleen, lung, kid­ney, and heart

This re­search has es­tab­lished proof-of-con­cept for a novel can­cer ther­apy us­ing nat­ural bac­te­ria. Future re­search and de­vel­op­ment will fo­cus on:

Expansion to Other Cancer Types: Efficacy val­i­da­tion in breast can­cer, pan­cre­atic can­cer, melanoma, and other ma­lig­nan­cies

Optimization of Administration Methods: Development of safer and more ef­fec­tive de­liv­ery ap­proaches in­clud­ing dose frac­tion­a­tion and in­tra­tu­moral in­jec­tion

Combination Therapy Development: Investigation of syn­er­gis­tic ef­fects with ex­ist­ing im­munother­apy and chemother­apy

This re­search demon­strates that un­ex­plored bio­di­ver­sity rep­re­sents a trea­sure trove for novel med­ical tech­nol­ogy de­vel­op­ment and holds promise for pro­vid­ing new ther­a­peu­tic op­tions for pa­tients with re­frac­tory can­cers.

Facultative Anaerobic Bacteria: Bacteria ca­pa­ble of grow­ing in both oxy­gen-rich and oxy­gen-de­pleted en­vi­ron­ments, en­abling se­lec­tive pro­lif­er­a­tion in hy­poxic tu­mor re­gions.

Complete Response (CR): Complete tu­mor elim­i­na­tion con­firmed by di­ag­nos­tic ex­am­i­na­tion fol­low­ing treat­ment.

Immune Checkpoint Inhibitor: Drugs that re­lease can­cer cell-me­di­ated im­mune sup­pres­sion, en­abling T cells to at­tack can­cer cells.

CD47: A cell sur­face pro­tein that emits “don’t eat me” sig­nals; can­cer cells over­ex­press this to evade im­mune at­tack.

Discovery and char­ac­ter­i­za­tion of an­ti­tu­mor gut mi­cro­biota from am­phib­ians and rep­tiles: Ewingella amer­i­cana as a novel ther­a­peu­tic agent with dual cy­to­toxic and im­munomod­u­la­tory prop­er­ties

This re­search was sup­ported by:

Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS) KAKENHI Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (A) (Grant No. 23H00551)

Japan Science and Technology Agency (JST) Program for Co-creating Startup Ecosystem (Grant No. JPMJSF2318)

You will re­call the Apple Account fi­asco of Paris Buttfield-Addison, whose en­tire iCloud ac­count and li­brary of iTunes and App Store me­dia pur­chases were lost when his Apple Account was locked, seem­ingly af­ter he at­tempted to re­deem a tam­pered $500 Apple Gift Card that he pur­chased from a ma­jor re­tailer. I wrote about it, as did Michael Tsai, Nick Heer, Malcom Owen at AppleInsider, and Brandon Vigliarolo at The Register. Buttfield-Addison has up­dated his post a few times, in­clud­ing a note that Executive Relations — Apple’s top-tier sup­port SWAT team — was look­ing into the mat­ter. To no avail, at least yet, alas.

There is one way the Apple com­mu­nity could ex­ert some lever­age over Apple. Since in­no­cently re­deem­ing a com­pro­mised Apple Gift Card can have se­ri­ous neg­a­tive con­se­quences, we should all avoid buy­ing Apple Gift Cards and spread the word as widely as pos­si­ble that they could es­sen­tially be mal­ware. Sure, most Apple Gift Cards are prob­a­bly safe, but do you re­ally want to be the per­son who gives a close friend or beloved grand­child a com­pro­mised card that locks their Apple Account? And if some­one gives you one, would you risk re­deem­ing it? It’s dig­i­tal Russian roulette.

I sus­pect that one part of Buttfield-Addison’s fi­asco is the fact that his seem­ingly prob­lem­atic gift card was for $500, not a typ­i­cal amount like $25, but that’s just a sus­pi­cion on my part. We don’t know — be­cause key to the Kafka-esque na­ture of the whole night­mare is that his ac­count can­cel­la­tion was a black box. Not only has Apple not yet re­stored his de­ac­ti­vated Apple Account, at no point in the process have they ex­plained why it was de­ac­ti­vated in the first place. We’re left to guess that it was re­lated to the tam­pered gift card and that the rel­a­tively high value of the card in ques­tion was re­lated. $500 is a higher value than av­er­age for an Apple gift card, but that amount is less than the av­er­age price for a sin­gle iPhone. Apple it­self sets a limit of $2,000 on gift cards in the US, so $500 should­n’t be con­sid­ered an in­her­ently sus­pi­cious amount.

The whole thing does make me ner­vous about re­deem­ing, or giv­ing, Apple gift cards. Scams in gen­eral seem to be get­ting more so­phis­ti­cated. Buttfield-Addison says he bought the card di­rectly from “a ma­jor brick-and-mor­tar re­tailer (Australians, think Woolworths scale; Americans, think Walmart scale)”. Until we get some clar­ity on this I feel like I’d only re­deem Apple gift cards at an Apple re­tail store, for pur­chases not tied to my Apple Accounts. (I’ve still got two — one for iCloud, one for me­dia pur­chases.)

In ad­di­tion to the un­cer­tainty this leaves us with re­gard­ing the re­demp­tion of Apple gift cards, I have to won­der what the hell hap­pens to these Apple Accounts that are de­ac­ti­vated for sus­pected fraud. You would think that once es­ca­lated high enough in Apple’s cus­tomer sup­port sys­tem, some­one at Apple could just flip a switch and re-ac­ti­vate the ac­count. The fact that Buttfield-Addison’s ac­count has not yet been re­stored, de­spite the pub­lic­ity and ap­par­ent es­ca­la­tion to Executive Relations, makes me think it can’t be re­stored. I don’t know how that can be, but it sure seems like that’s the case. Darth Vader’s “And no dis­in­te­gra­tions” ad­mo­ni­tion ought to be in ef­fect for some­thing like this. I have the sink­ing feel­ing that the best Apple is able to do is some­thing seem­ingly ridicu­lous, like re­fund Buttfield-Addison for every pur­chase he ever made on the ac­count and tell him to start over with a new one.

My other ques­tion: Were any hu­mans in­volved in the de­ci­sion to de­ac­ti­vate (disintegrate?) his ac­count, or was it de­ter­mined purely by some sort of fraud de­tec­tion al­go­rithm?

Update: Very shortly af­ter I posted the above, Buttfield-Addison posted an up­date that his ac­count was suc­cess­fully re­stored by the ninja on Apple’s Executive Relations team as­signed to his case. That’s great. But that still leaves the ques­tion of how safe Apple gift cards are to re­deem on one’s Apple Account. It also leaves the ques­tion of how this hap­pened in the first place, and why it took the bet­ter part of a week to re­solve.

* Encrypted mes­sag­ing de­vel­op­ers may be con­sid­ered hos­tile ac­tors in the UK

* An in­de­pen­dent re­view of na­tional se­cu­rity law warns of over­reach

Developers of apps that use end-to-end en­cryp­tion to pro­tect pri­vate com­mu­ni­ca­tions could be con­sid­ered hos­tile ac­tors in the UK.

That is the stark warn­ing from Jonathan Hall KC, the gov­ern­men­t’s Independent Reviewer of State Threats Legislation and Independent Reviewer of Terrorism Legislation, in a new re­port on na­tional se­cu­rity laws.

In his in­de­pen­dent re­view of the Counter-Terrorism and Border Security Act and the newly im­ple­mented National Security Act, Hall KC high­lights the in­cred­i­bly broad scope of pow­ers granted to au­thor­i­ties.

He warns that de­vel­op­ers of apps like Signal and WhatsApp could tech­ni­cally fall within the le­gal de­f­i­n­i­tion of “hostile ac­tiv­ity” sim­ply be­cause their tech­nol­ogy “make[s] it more dif­fi­cult for UK se­cu­rity and in­tel­li­gence agen­cies to mon­i­tor com­mu­ni­ca­tions.”

He writes: “It is a rea­son­able as­sump­tion that this would be in the in­ter­ests of a for­eign state even if though the for­eign state has never con­tem­plated this po­ten­tial ad­van­tage.”

The re­port also notes that jour­nal­ists “carrying con­fi­den­tial in­for­ma­tion” or ma­te­r­ial “personally em­bar­rass­ing to the Prime Minister on the eve of im­por­tant treaty ne­go­ti­a­tions” could face sim­i­lar scrutiny.

While it re­mains to be seen how this re­port will in­flu­ence fu­ture amend­ments, it comes at a time of in­creas­ing pres­sure from law­mak­ers against en­cryp­tion.

While the re­port’s strong word­ing may come as a shock, it does­n’t ex­ist in a vac­uum. Encrypted apps are in­creas­ingly in the crosshairs of UK law­mak­ers, with sev­eral pieces of leg­is­la­tion tar­get­ing the tech­nol­ogy.

Most no­tably, Apple was served with a tech­ni­cal ca­pa­bil­ity no­tice un­der the Investigatory Powers Act (IPA) de­mand­ing it weaken the en­cryp­tion pro­tect­ing iCloud data. That le­gal stand­off led the tech gi­ant to dis­able its Advanced Data Protection in­stead of cre­at­ing a back­door.

The Online Safety Act is al­ready well known for its con­tro­ver­sial age ver­i­fi­ca­tion re­quire­ments. However, its most con­tentious pro­vi­sions have yet to be fully im­ple­mented, and ex­perts fear these could un­der­mine en­cryp­tion even fur­ther.

On Monday, Parliament de­bated the Act fol­low­ing a pe­ti­tion call­ing for its re­peal. Instead of rolling back the law, how­ever, MPs pushed for stricter en­force­ment. During the dis­cus­sion, law­mak­ers specif­i­cally called for a re­view of other en­crypted tools, like the best VPNs.

The po­ten­tial risks of the Act’s tougher stance on en­cryp­tion were only briefly men­tioned dur­ing the dis­cus­sion, sug­gest­ing a stark dis­con­nect be­tween MPs and se­cu­rity ex­perts.

Olivier Crépin-Leblond, of the Internet Society, told TechRadar he was dis­ap­pointed by the out­come of the de­bate. “When it came to Client Side Scanning (CSS), most felt this could be one of the ‘easy tech­no­log­i­cal fix­es’ that could help law en­force­ment greatly, es­pe­cially when they showed their frus­tra­tion at Facebook rolling end-to-end en­cryp­tion,” he said.

“It’s clearly not un­der­stood that any such soft­ware could fall prey to hack­ers.”

It is clear that for many law­mak­ers, en­cryp­tion is viewed pri­mar­ily as an ob­sta­cle to law en­force­ment. This stands in sharp con­trast to the view of dig­i­tal rights ex­perts, who stress that the tech­nol­ogy is vi­tal for pro­tect­ing pri­vacy and se­cu­rity in an on­line land­scape where cy­ber­at­tacks are ris­ing.

“The gov­ern­ment sign­posts end-to-end en­cryp­tion as a threat, but what they fail to con­sider is that break­ing it would be a threat to our na­tional se­cu­rity too,” Jemimah Steinfeld, CEO of Index on Censorship, told TechRadar.

She also added that this ig­nores en­cryp­tion’s vi­tal role for dis­si­dents, jour­nal­ists, and do­mes­tic abuse vic­tims, “not to men­tion the gen­eral pop­u­la­tion who should be af­forded ba­sic pri­vacy.”

With the bat­tle lines drawn, we can ex­pect a chal­leng­ing year ahead for ser­vices like Signal and WhatsApp. Both com­pa­nies have pre­vi­ously pledged to leave the UK mar­ket rather than com­pro­mise their users’ pri­vacy and se­cu­rity.

Follow TechRadar on Google News and add us as a pre­ferred source to get our ex­pert news, re­views, and opin­ion in your feeds. Make sure to click the Follow but­ton!

A mea­sured-yet-opin­ion­ated plea from some­one who’s tired of watch­ing you suf­fer

Look. I’m not go­ing to call you a fuck­ing mo­ron every other sen­tence. That’s been done. It’s a whole genre now. And hon­estly? HTMX does­n’t need me to scream at you to make its point.

The sweary web man­i­festo thing is fun—I’ve en­joyed read­ing them—but let’s be real: yelling “JUST USE HTML” or “JUST FUCKING USE REACT” has­n’t ac­tu­ally changed any­one’s stack. People nod, chuckle, and then go right back to fight­ing their raw JS or their web­pack con­fig.1

So I’m go­ing to try some­thing dif­fer­ent. I’ll still swear (I’m not a fuck­ing saint), but I’m also go­ing to show you some­thing, in the course of im­plor­ing you, for your own san­ity and hap­pi­ness, to at least please just try htmx.

Right now, the shouters are of­fer­ing you two op­tions:

Option A: “Just use HTML!” And they’re not wrong. HTML is shock­ingly ca­pa­ble. Forms work. Links work. The el­e­ment ex­ists now. The web was built on this stuff and it’s been chug­ging along since Tim Berners-Lee had hair. And a lit­tle taste­ful CSS can go a long moth­er­fuck­ing way.

But some­times—and here’s where it gets un­com­fort­able—you ac­tu­ally do need a but­ton that up­dates part of a page with­out re­load­ing the whole damn thing. You do need a search box that shows re­sults as you type. You do need in­ter­ac­tiv­ity.

So you turn to:

Option B: React (or Vue, or Svelte, or Angular if you’re be­ing pun­ished for some­thing).

* A build step that takes 45 sec­onds (if the CI gods are mer­ci­ful)

* Junior devs los­ing their minds over why use­Ef­fect runs twice

For what? A to-do list? A con­tact form? A dash­board that dis­plays some num­bers from a data­base?

This is the false choice: raw HTML’s lim­i­ta­tions or JavaScript frame­work pur­ga­tory.

There’s a third op­tion. I’m beg­ging you, please just try it.

What if I told you:

* Any HTML el­e­ment can make an HTTP re­quest

* The server just re­turns HTML (not JSON, ac­tual HTML)

* That HTML gets swapped into the page wher­ever you want

* The whole li­brary is ~14kb gzipped

That’s HTMX. That’s lit­er­ally the whole thing.

Here’s a but­ton that makes a POST re­quest and re­places it­self with the re­sponse:

When you click it, HTMX POSTs to /clicked, and what­ever HTML the server re­turns re­places the but­ton. No fetch(). No set­State(). No npm in­stall. No fuck­ing web­pack con­fig.

The server just re­turns HTML. Like it’s 2004, ex­cept your users have fast in­ter­net and your server can ac­tu­ally han­dle it. It’s the hy­per­me­dia ar­chi­tec­ture the en­tire freak­ing web was de­signed for, but with mod­ern con­ve­niences.

This page uses HTMX. These demos ac­tu­ally work.

This but­ton makes a POST re­quest and swaps in the re­sponse:

This but­ton fetches ad­di­tional con­tent and ap­pends it be­low:

Type some­thing—re­sults up­date as you type (debounced, of course):

That’s HTMX. I did­n’t write JavaScript to make those work. I wrote HTML at­trib­utes. The “server” (mocked client-side for this demo, but the htmx code is real) re­turns HTML frag­ments, and HTMX swaps them in. The be­hav­ior is right there in the markup—you don’t have to hunt through com­po­nent files and state man­age­ment code to un­der­stand what a but­ton does. HTMX folks call this “Locality of Behavior” and once you have it, you’ll miss it every­where else.

Anecdotes are nice. Data is bet­ter.

A com­pany called Contexte re­built their pro­duc­tion SaaS app from React to Django tem­plates with HTMX. Here’s what hap­pened:

They deleted two-thirds of their code­base and the app got bet­ter. Every de­vel­oper be­came “full-stack” be­cause there was­n’t a sep­a­rate fron­tend to spe­cial­ize in any­more.

Now, they note this was a con­tent-fo­cused app and not every pro­ject will see these ex­act num­bers. Fair. But even if you got half these im­prove­ments, would­n’t that be worth a week­end of ex­per­i­men­ta­tion?

“But what about com­plex client-side state man­age­ment?”

You prob­a­bly don’t have com­plex client-side state. You have forms. You have lists. You have things that show up when you click other things. HTMX han­dles all of that.

If you’re build­ing Google Docs, sure, you need com­plex state man­age­ment. But you’re not build­ing Google Docs. You’re build­ing a CRUD app that’s con­vinced it’s Google Docs.

The ecosys­tem is why your node_­mod­ules folder is 2GB. The ecosys­tem is why there are 14 ways to style a com­po­nent and they all have trade­offs. The ecosys­tem is why “which state man­age­ment li­brary” is some­how still a de­bate.

HTMX’s ecosys­tem is: your server-side lan­guage of choice. That’s it. That’s the ecosys­tem.

After the user down­loads 2MB of JavaScript, waits for it to parse, waits for it to ex­e­cute, waits for it to hy­drate, waits for it to fetch data, waits for it to ren­der… yes, then sub­se­quent nav­i­ga­tions feel snappy. Congratulations.

HTMX pages load fast the first time be­cause you’re not boot­strap­ping an ap­pli­ca­tion run­time. And sub­se­quent re­quests are fast be­cause you’re only swap­ping the parts that changed.

Maybe you do. I’m not say­ing React is never the an­swer. I’m say­ing it’s the an­swer to about 10% of the prob­lems it’s used for, and the costs of reach­ing for it re­flex­ively are stag­ger­ing.

Most teams don’t fail be­cause they picked the wrong frame­work. They fail be­cause they picked too much frame­work. HTMX is a bet on sim­plic­ity, and sim­plic­ity tends to win over time.

I’m not a zealot. HTMX is­n’t for every­thing.

* Offline-first ap­pli­ca­tions (though you can com­bine ap­proaches)

* Genuinely com­plex UI state (not “my form has val­i­da­tion” com­plex—ac­tu­ally com­plex)

But be hon­est with your­self: is that what you’re build­ing?

Or are you build­ing an­other dash­board, an­other ad­min panel, an­other e-com­merce site, an­other blog, an­other SaaS app that’s fun­da­men­tally just forms and ta­bles and lists? Be hon­est. I won’t tell any­one. We all have to pay the bills.

For that stuff, HTMX is em­bar­rass­ingly good. Like, “why did we make it so com­pli­cated” good. Like, “oh god, we wasted so much time” good.

You’ve tried React. You’ve tried Vue. You’ve tried Angular and re­gret­ted it. You’ve tried what­ever meta-frame­work is trend­ing on Hacker News this week.

Just try HTMX. One week­end. Pick a side pro­ject. Pick that in­ter­nal tool no­body cares about. Pick the thing you’ve been mean­ing to re­build any­way.

Add one tag. Write one hx-get at­tribute. Watch what hap­pens.

If you hate it, you’ve lost a week­end. But you won’t hate it. You’ll won­der why you ever thought web de­vel­op­ment had to be so fuck­ing com­pli­cated.

Learn more:

htmx.org — The of­fi­cial site and docs

hy­per­me­dia.sys­tems — The free book on hy­per­me­dia-dri­ven apps

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Iran is look­ing to re­lo­cate the na­tion’s cap­i­tal be­cause of se­vere wa­ter short­ages that make Tehran un­sus­tain­able. Experts say the cri­sis was caused by years of ill-con­ceived dam pro­jects and over­pump­ing that de­stroyed a cen­turies-old sys­tem for tap­ping un­der­ground re­serves.

Iran is look­ing to re­lo­cate the na­tion’s cap­i­tal be­cause of se­vere wa­ter short­ages that make Tehran un­sus­tain­able. Experts say the cri­sis was caused by years of ill-con­ceived dam pro­jects and over­pump­ing that de­stroyed a cen­turies-old sys­tem for tap­ping un­der­ground re­serves.

More than in­ter­na­tional sanc­tions, more than its sti­fling theoc­racy, more than re­cent bom­bard­ment by Israel and the U. S. — Iran’s great­est cur­rent ex­is­ten­tial cri­sis is what hy­drol­o­gists are call­ing its rapidly ap­proach­ing “water bank­ruptcy.” It is a cri­sis that has a sad ori­gin, they say: the de­struc­tion and aban­don­ment of tens of thou­sands of an­cient tun­nels for sus­tain­ably tap­ping un­der­ground wa­ter, known as qanats, that were once the envy of the arid world. But calls for the Iranian gov­ern­ment to re­store qanats and recharge the un­der­ground wa­ter re­serves that once sus­tained them are falling on deaf ears.Af­ter a fifth year of ex­treme drought, Iran’s long-run­ning wa­ter cri­sis reached un­prece­dented lev­els in November. The coun­try’s pres­i­dent, Ma­soud Pezeshkian, warned that Iran had “no choice” but to move its cap­i­tal away from arid Tehran, which now has a pop­u­la­tion of about 10 mil­lion, to wet­ter coastal re­gions — a pro­ject that would take decades and has a price es­ti­mated by an­a­lysts at po­ten­tially $100 bil­lion.While failed rains may be the im­me­di­ate cause of the cri­sis, hy­drol­o­gists say, the root cause is more than half a cen­tury of of­ten fool­hardy mod­ern wa­ter en­gi­neer­ing — ex­tend­ing back to be­fore the coun­try’s Islamic rev­o­lu­tion of 1979, but ac­cel­er­ated by the Ayatollahs’ poli­cies since.

To meet grow­ing wa­ter short­ages in the coun­try’s bur­geon­ing cities, “Iran was one of the top three dam-builders in the world” in the late 20th cen­tury, says Penelope Mitchell, a ge­o­g­ra­pher at the University of Alabama’s Global Water Security Center. Dozens were built on rivers too small to sus­tain them. Rather than fix­ing short­ages, the reser­voirs have in­creased the loss of wa­ter due to evap­o­ra­tion from their large sur­face ar­eas, she says, while low­er­ing river flows down­stream and dry­ing up wet­lands and un­der­ground wa­ter re­serves. To­day, many of the reser­voirs be­hind those dams are all but empty. Iran’s pres­i­dent made his call to re­lo­cate the cap­i­tal af­ter wa­ter lev­els in Tehran’s five reser­voirs plunged to 12 per­cent of ca­pac­ity last month.

Iran’s neigh­bors are ex­ac­er­bat­ing the cri­sis. In Afghanistan, the source of two rivers im­por­tant to Iran’s wa­ter sup­plies (the Helmand and Harirud), the Taliban are on their own dam-build­ing spree that is re­duc­ing cross-bor­der flows. The Pashdan Dam, which went into op­er­a­tion in August, “means Afghanistan can con­trol up to 80 per­cent of the av­er­age stream flow of the Harirud,” says Mitchell, threat­en­ing wa­ter sup­plies to much of east­ern Iran, in­clud­ing Iran’s sec­ond largest city, Mashhad. While sur­face wa­ters suf­fer, the sit­u­a­tion un­der­ground is even worse. In the past 40 years, Iranians have sunk more than a mil­lion wells fit­ted with pow­er­ful pumps. The aim has been to ir­ri­gate arid farm­land to meet the coun­try’s goal of food self-suf­fi­ciency in a hos­tile world of trade sanc­tions. But the re­sult has been ram­pant over­pump­ing of aquifers that once held co­pi­ous amounts of wa­ter.  The ma­jor­ity of Iran’s pre­cious un­der­ground wa­ter re­serves have been pumped dry, says Madani. He es­ti­mates a loss of more than 210 cu­bic kilo­me­ters [50 cu­bic miles] of stored wa­ter in the first two decades of this cen­tury. Iran is far from alone in over­pump­ing its pre­cious na­tional wa­ter stores. But a re­cent in­ter­na­tional study of 1,700 un­der­ground wa­ter re­serves in 40 coun­tries found that a stag­ger­ing 32 of the world’s 50 most over­pumped aquifers are in Iran. “The biggest alarm bells are in Iran’s West Qazvin Plain, Arsanjan Basin, Baladeh Basin, and Rashtkhar aquifers,” says coau­thor Richard Taylor, ge­o­g­ra­pher at University College London. In each, wa­ter ta­bles are falling by up to 10 feet a year.

Agriculture is the prime cul­prit, says Mitchell. In Iran, some 90 per­cent of the wa­ter ab­stracted from rivers and un­der­ground aquifers is taken for agri­cul­ture. But as ever more pumped wells are sunk, their re­turns are di­min­ish­ing. Analyzing the most re­cently pub­licly avail­able fig­ures, Roohollah Noori, a fresh­wa­ter ecol­o­gist un­til re­cently at the University of Tehran, found that the num­ber of wells and other ab­strac­tion points had al­most dou­bled since 2000. But the amount of wa­ter suc­cess­fully brought to the sur­face fell by 18 per­cent. In many places, for­merly ir­ri­gated fields lie bar­ren and aban­doned.As reser­voirs empty and wells fail, the coun­try’s hy­drol­o­gists say Iran is on the verge of “water bank­ruptcy.” They fore­cast food short­ages, a rep­e­ti­tion of wa­ter protests that spread across the coun­try in the sum­mer of 2021, and even a wa­ter war with Afghanistan over its dam-build­ing. And a long-dis­cussed plan to move the cap­i­tal from Tehran to the wet­ter south of the coun­try is now “no longer op­tional” but a ne­ces­sity, be­cause of wa­ter short­ages, says Iran’s pres­i­dent. No de­tailed plans have yet been drawn up, but the Makran re­gion on the shores of the Gulf of Oman is seen as the most likely lo­ca­tion for the pro­ject.

This is a tragic turn­around for an arid coun­try with a proud tra­di­tion of so­phis­ti­cated man­age­ment of its mea­ger wa­ter re­sources. Iran is the ori­gin and cul­tural and en­gi­neer­ing heart­land of an­cient wa­ter-col­lect­ing sys­tems known as qanats. Qanats are gen­tly slop­ing tun­nels dug into hill­sides in river­less re­gions to tap un­der­ground wa­ter, al­low­ing it to flow out into val­leys us­ing grav­ity alone. They have long sus­tained the coun­try’s farm­ers, as well as be­ing un­til re­cently the main source of wa­ter for cities such as Tehran, Yazd, and Isfahan. But to­day only one in seven fields are ir­ri­gated by the tun­nels. Iran has an es­ti­mated 70,000 of these struc­tures, most of which are more than 2,500 years old. Their ag­gre­gate length has been put at more than 250,000 miles. The Gonabad qanat net­work, re­put­edly the world’s largest, ex­tends for more than 20 miles be­neath the Barakuh Mountains of north­east Iran. The tun­nels are more than 3 feet high, reach a depth of a thou­sand feet, and are sup­plied by more than 400 ver­ti­cal wells for main­te­nance. Un­like pumped wells, qanats are an in­her­ently sus­tain­able source of wa­ter. They can only take as much wa­ter as is re­plen­ished by the rain. Yet such has been their dura­bil­ity that they were of­ten called “everlasting springs.”

But in their home­land, there is no such ac­tion. Iranian hy­drol­o­gists es­ti­mate that in the past half cen­tury, around half of Iran’s qanats have been ren­dered wa­ter­less through poor main­te­nance or as pumped wells have low­ered wa­ter ta­bles within hill­sides. Noori found that ground­wa­ter de­ple­tion be­gan in the early 1950s and “coincided with the grad­ual re­place­ment of Persian qanats… with deep wells”.“His­tory will never for­give us for what [deep wells] have done to our qanats,” says Mohammad Barshan, di­rec­tor of the Qanats Center in Kerman. Besides over­pump­ing, a sec­ond rea­son why Iran’s un­der­ground wa­ter re­serves are slip­ping away is that less wa­ter is seep­ing down from sur­face wa­ter bod­ies and soils to re­plen­ish them. Noori found a 35 per­cent de­cline in aquifer recharge since 2002.

One rea­son is cli­mate change. Droughts have com­bined with warmer tem­per­a­tures that re­duce win­ter snow cover, which is a ma­jor means of ground­wa­ter re­plen­ish­ment in the moun­tains. But Noori iden­ti­fies “human in­ter­ven­tion” as the main cause — es­pe­cially dams and ab­strac­tions for ir­ri­ga­tion that dry up rivers, nat­ural lakes, and wet­lands, whose seep­age is an­other ma­jor source of recharge.  Lake Urmia in north­west Iran was once the Middle East’s largest lake, cov­er­ing more than 2,300 square miles. But NASA satel­lite im­ages taken in 2023 showed it had al­most com­pletely dried up. Similarly, the Hamoun wet­land, strad­dling the Iran-Afghan bor­der on the Helmand River, once cov­ered some 1,500 square miles and was home to abun­dant wildlife, in­clud­ing a pop­u­la­tion of leop­ards. Now it is mostly life­less salt flats.  The loss of such eco­log­i­cal jew­els makes a mock­ery of Iran’s sta­tus as the host of the 1971 treaty to pro­tect in­ter­na­tion­ally im­por­tant wet­lands, named af­ter Ramsar, the Iranian city where it was signed.

Another fac­tor in the re­duced recharge, says Noori, is the in­tro­duc­tion of more mod­ern ir­ri­ga­tion meth­ods aimed at get­ting more crops from less wa­ter. Farmers are be­ing en­cour­aged to line canals and ir­ri­gate crops more ef­fi­ciently. But this greater “efficiency” has a per­verse con­se­quence: It re­sults in less wa­ter seep­ing be­low ground to top up aquifers. Hy­drol­o­gists warn that much of the dam­age to aquifers is per­ma­nent. As they dry out, their wa­ter-hold­ing pores col­lapse. As qanats dry up, they too cave in. At the sur­face, this is caus­ing an epi­demic of sub­si­dence. Ac­cord­ing to Iranian re­mote sens­ing ex­pert Mahmud Haghshenas Haghighi, now at Leibniz University in Germany, sub­si­dence af­fects more than 3.5 per­cent of the coun­try. Ancient cities once re­liant on qanats, such as Isfahan and Yazd, are see­ing build­ings and in­fra­struc­ture dam­aged on a huge scale. Geologists call it a “silent earth­quake.” But, while sur­face struc­tures can be re­paired, the ge­o­log­i­cal wreck­age un­der­ground can­not. “Once sig­nif­i­cant sub­si­dence and com­pres­sion oc­curs, much of the… wa­ter stor­age ca­pac­ity is per­ma­nently lost and can­not be re­stored, even if wa­ter lev­els later rise,” says Mitchell.

Critics such as Kowsar’s son Nik, a wa­ter an­a­lyst now work­ing in the U. S., say of­fi­cials are closely aligned with po­lit­i­cally well-con­nected en­gi­neers bent on con­struct­ing ever more big pro­jects such as dams. Their lat­est is a com­plex and ex­pen­sive scheme to de­sali­nate sea­wa­ter from the Persian Gulf and pump it through some 2,300 miles of pipelines to parched provinces. A link to Isfahan opened this month. But, while the wa­ter is valu­able for heavy in­dus­tries such as steel, the high cost of de­sali­na­tion, pipes, and pump­ing makes it far too ex­pen­sive for agri­cul­ture.Some­thing has to give. More dams make no sense when the rivers are al­ready run­ning dry. More pumped wells make no sense when there is no wa­ter left to tap. They just has­ten wa­ter bank­ruptcy.

Politically, the coun­try’s am­bi­tion for food se­cu­rity through self-re­liance needs to be rethought, hy­drol­o­gists say. There is sim­ply not enough wa­ter to achieve it in the long run. Madani and oth­ers call for farm­ers to switch from grow­ing thirsty sta­ple crops such as rice to higher-value, less wa­ter-in­ten­sive crops that can be sold in­ter­na­tion­ally in ex­change for sta­ples. But that re­quires Iran to lose its cur­rent po­lit­i­cal sta­tus as an in­ter­na­tional pariah and re­join the global trad­ing com­mu­nity. Correction, December 18, 2025: An ear­lier ver­sion of this ar­ti­cle in­cor­rectly stated that Penelope Mitchell is af­fil­i­ated with the University of Arizona. She is at the University of Alabama.

Iran is look­ing to re­lo­cate the na­tion’s cap­i­tal be­cause of se­vere wa­ter short­ages that make Tehran un­sus­tain­able. Experts say the cri­sis was caused by years of ill-con­ceived dam pro­jects and over­pump­ing that de­stroyed a cen­turies-old sys­tem for tap­ping un­der­ground re­serves.

Iran is look­ing to re­lo­cate the na­tion’s cap­i­tal be­cause of se­vere wa­ter short­ages that make Tehran un­sus­tain­able. Experts say the cri­sis was caused by years of ill-con­ceived dam pro­jects and over­pump­ing that de­stroyed a cen­turies-old sys­tem for tap­ping un­der­ground re­serves.

More than in­ter­na­tional sanc­tions, more than its sti­fling theoc­racy, more than re­cent bom­bard­ment by Israel and the U. S. — Iran’s great­est cur­rent ex­is­ten­tial cri­sis is what hy­drol­o­gists are call­ing its rapidly ap­proach­ing “water bank­ruptcy.” It is a cri­sis that has a sad ori­gin, they say: the de­struc­tion and aban­don­ment of tens of thou­sands of an­cient tun­nels for sus­tain­ably tap­ping un­der­ground wa­ter, known as qanats, that were once the envy of the arid world. But calls for the Iranian gov­ern­ment to re­store qanats and recharge the un­der­ground wa­ter re­serves that once sus­tained them are falling on deaf ears.Af­ter a fifth year of ex­treme drought, Iran’s long-run­ning wa­ter cri­sis reached un­prece­dented lev­els in November. The coun­try’s pres­i­dent, Ma­soud Pezeshkian, warned that Iran had “no choice” but to move its cap­i­tal away from arid Tehran, which now has a pop­u­la­tion of about 10 mil­lion, to wet­ter coastal re­gions — a pro­ject that would take decades and has a price es­ti­mated by an­a­lysts at po­ten­tially $100 bil­lion.While failed rains may be the im­me­di­ate cause of the cri­sis, hy­drol­o­gists say, the root cause is more than half a cen­tury of of­ten fool­hardy mod­ern wa­ter en­gi­neer­ing — ex­tend­ing back to be­fore the coun­try’s Islamic rev­o­lu­tion of 1979, but ac­cel­er­ated by the Ayatollahs’ poli­cies since.

To meet grow­ing wa­ter short­ages in the coun­try’s bur­geon­ing cities, “Iran was one of the top three dam-builders in the world” in the late 20th cen­tury, says Penelope Mitchell, a ge­o­g­ra­pher at the University of Arizona’s Global Water Security Center. Dozens were built on rivers too small to sus­tain them. Rather than fix­ing short­ages, the reser­voirs have in­creased the loss of wa­ter due to evap­o­ra­tion from their large sur­face ar­eas, she says, while low­er­ing river flows down­stream and dry­ing up wet­lands and un­der­ground wa­ter re­serves. To­day, many of the reser­voirs be­hind those dams are all but empty. Iran’s pres­i­dent made his call to re­lo­cate the cap­i­tal af­ter wa­ter lev­els in Tehran’s five reser­voirs plunged to 12 per­cent of ca­pac­ity last month.

Iran’s neigh­bors are ex­ac­er­bat­ing the cri­sis. In Afghanistan, the source of two rivers im­por­tant to Iran’s wa­ter sup­plies (the Helmand and Harirud), the Taliban are on their own dam-build­ing spree that is re­duc­ing cross-bor­der flows. The Pashdan Dam, which went into op­er­a­tion in August, “means Afghanistan can con­trol up to 80 per­cent of the av­er­age stream flow of the Harirud,” says Mitchell, threat­en­ing wa­ter sup­plies to much of east­ern Iran, in­clud­ing Iran’s sec­ond largest city, Mashhad. While sur­face wa­ters suf­fer, the sit­u­a­tion un­der­ground is even worse. In the past 40 years, Iranians have sunk more than a mil­lion wells fit­ted with pow­er­ful pumps. The aim has been to ir­ri­gate arid farm­land to meet the coun­try’s goal of food self-suf­fi­ciency in a hos­tile world of trade sanc­tions. But the re­sult has been ram­pant over­pump­ing of aquifers that once held co­pi­ous amounts of wa­ter.  The ma­jor­ity of Iran’s pre­cious un­der­ground wa­ter re­serves have been pumped dry, says Madani. He es­ti­mates a loss of more than 210 cu­bic kilo­me­ters [50 cu­bic miles] of stored wa­ter in the first two decades of this cen­tury. Iran is far from alone in over­pump­ing its pre­cious na­tional wa­ter stores. But a re­cent in­ter­na­tional study of 1,700 un­der­ground wa­ter re­serves in 40 coun­tries found that a stag­ger­ing 32 of the world’s 50 most over­pumped aquifers are in Iran. “The biggest alarm bells are in Iran’s West Qazvin Plain, Arsanjan Basin, Baladeh Basin, and Rashtkhar aquifers,” says coau­thor Richard Taylor, ge­o­g­ra­pher at University College London. In each, wa­ter ta­bles are falling by up to 10 feet a year.

Agriculture is the prime cul­prit, says Mitchell. In Iran, some 90 per­cent of the wa­ter ab­stracted from rivers and un­der­ground aquifers is taken for agri­cul­ture. But as ever more pumped wells are sunk, their re­turns are di­min­ish­ing. Analyzing the most re­cently pub­licly avail­able fig­ures, Roohollah Noori, a fresh­wa­ter ecol­o­gist un­til re­cently at the University of Tehran, found that the num­ber of wells and other ab­strac­tion points had al­most dou­bled since 2000. But the amount of wa­ter suc­cess­fully brought to the sur­face fell by 18 per­cent. In many places, for­merly ir­ri­gated fields lie bar­ren and aban­doned.As reser­voirs empty and wells fail, the coun­try’s hy­drol­o­gists say Iran is on the verge of “water bank­ruptcy.” They fore­cast food short­ages, a rep­e­ti­tion of wa­ter protests that spread across the coun­try in the sum­mer of 2021, and even a wa­ter war with Afghanistan over its dam-build­ing. And a long-dis­cussed plan to move the cap­i­tal from Tehran to the wet­ter south of the coun­try is now “no longer op­tional” but a ne­ces­sity, be­cause of wa­ter short­ages, says Iran’s pres­i­dent. No de­tailed plans have yet been drawn up, but the Makran re­gion on the shores of the Gulf of Oman is seen as the most likely lo­ca­tion for the pro­ject.

This is a tragic turn­around for an arid coun­try with a proud tra­di­tion of so­phis­ti­cated man­age­ment of its mea­ger wa­ter re­sources. Iran is the ori­gin and cul­tural and en­gi­neer­ing heart­land of an­cient wa­ter-col­lect­ing sys­tems known as qanats. Qanats are gen­tly slop­ing tun­nels dug into hill­sides in river­less re­gions to tap un­der­ground wa­ter, al­low­ing it to flow out into val­leys us­ing grav­ity alone. They have long sus­tained the coun­try’s farm­ers, as well as be­ing un­til re­cently the main source of wa­ter for cities such as Tehran, Yazd, and Isfahan. But to­day only one in seven fields are ir­ri­gated by the tun­nels. Iran has an es­ti­mated 70,000 of these struc­tures, most of which are more than 2,500 years old. Their ag­gre­gate length has been put at more than 250,000 miles. The Gonabad qanat net­work, re­put­edly the world’s largest, ex­tends for more than 20 miles be­neath the Barakuh Mountains of north­east Iran. The tun­nels are more than 3 feet high, reach a depth of a thou­sand feet, and are sup­plied by more than 400 ver­ti­cal wells for main­te­nance. Un­like pumped wells, qanats are an in­her­ently sus­tain­able source of wa­ter. They can only take as much wa­ter as is re­plen­ished by the rain. Yet such has been their dura­bil­ity that they were of­ten called “everlasting springs.”

But in their home­land, there is no such ac­tion. Iranian hy­drol­o­gists es­ti­mate that in the past half cen­tury, around half of Iran’s qanats have been ren­dered wa­ter­less through poor main­te­nance or as pumped wells have low­ered wa­ter ta­bles within hill­sides. Noori found that ground­wa­ter de­ple­tion be­gan in the early 1950s and “coincided with the grad­ual re­place­ment of Persian qanats… with deep wells”.“His­tory will never for­give us for what [deep wells] have done to our qanats,” says Mohammad Barshan, di­rec­tor of the Qanats Center in Kerman. Besides over­pump­ing, a sec­ond rea­son why Iran’s un­der­ground wa­ter re­serves are slip­ping away is that less wa­ter is seep­ing down from sur­face wa­ter bod­ies and soils to re­plen­ish them. Noori found a 35 per­cent de­cline in aquifer recharge since 2002.

One rea­son is cli­mate change. Droughts have com­bined with warmer tem­per­a­tures that re­duce win­ter snow cover, which is a ma­jor means of ground­wa­ter re­plen­ish­ment in the moun­tains. But Noori iden­ti­fies “human in­ter­ven­tion” as the main cause — es­pe­cially dams and ab­strac­tions for ir­ri­ga­tion that dry up rivers, nat­ural lakes, and wet­lands, whose seep­age is an­other ma­jor source of recharge.  Lake Urmia in north­west Iran was once the Middle East’s largest lake, cov­er­ing more than 2,300 square miles. But NASA satel­lite im­ages taken in 2023 showed it had al­most com­pletely dried up. Similarly, the Hamoun wet­land, strad­dling the Iran-Afghan bor­der on the Helmand River, once cov­ered some 1,500 square miles and was home to abun­dant wildlife, in­clud­ing a pop­u­la­tion of leop­ards. Now it is mostly life­less salt flats.  The loss of such eco­log­i­cal jew­els makes a mock­ery of Iran’s sta­tus as the host of the 1971 treaty to pro­tect in­ter­na­tion­ally im­por­tant wet­lands, named af­ter Ramsar, the Iranian city where it was signed.

Another fac­tor in the re­duced recharge, says Noori, is the in­tro­duc­tion of more mod­ern ir­ri­ga­tion meth­ods aimed at get­ting more crops from less wa­ter. Farmers are be­ing en­cour­aged to line canals and ir­ri­gate crops more ef­fi­ciently. But this greater “efficiency” has a per­verse con­se­quence: It re­sults in less wa­ter seep­ing be­low ground to top up aquifers. Hy­drol­o­gists warn that much of the dam­age to aquifers is per­ma­nent. As they dry out, their wa­ter-hold­ing pores col­lapse. As qanats dry up, they too cave in. At the sur­face, this is caus­ing an epi­demic of sub­si­dence. Ac­cord­ing to Iranian re­mote sens­ing ex­pert Mahmud Haghshenas Haghighi, now at Leibniz University in Germany, sub­si­dence af­fects more than 3.5 per­cent of the coun­try. Ancient cities once re­liant on qanats, such as Isfahan and Yazd, are see­ing build­ings and in­fra­struc­ture dam­aged on a huge scale. Geologists call it a “silent earth­quake.” But, while sur­face struc­tures can be re­paired, the ge­o­log­i­cal wreck­age un­der­ground can­not. “Once sig­nif­i­cant sub­si­dence and com­pres­sion oc­curs, much of the… wa­ter stor­age ca­pac­ity is per­ma­nently lost and can­not be re­stored, even if wa­ter lev­els later rise,” says Mitchell.

Critics such as Kowsar’s son Nik, a wa­ter an­a­lyst now work­ing in the U. S., say of­fi­cials are closely aligned with po­lit­i­cally well-con­nected en­gi­neers bent on con­struct­ing ever more big pro­jects such as dams. Their lat­est is a com­plex and ex­pen­sive scheme to de­sali­nate sea­wa­ter from the Persian Gulf and pump it through some 2,300 miles of pipelines to parched provinces. A link to Isfahan opened this month. But, while the wa­ter is valu­able for heavy in­dus­tries such as steel, the high cost of de­sali­na­tion, pipes, and pump­ing makes it far too ex­pen­sive for agri­cul­ture.Some­thing has to give. More dams make no sense when the rivers are al­ready run­ning dry. More pumped wells make no sense when there is no wa­ter left to tap. They just has­ten wa­ter bank­ruptcy.

Politically, the coun­try’s am­bi­tion for food se­cu­rity through self-re­liance needs to be rethought, hy­drol­o­gists say. There is sim­ply not enough wa­ter to achieve it in the long run. Madani and oth­ers call for farm­ers to switch from grow­ing thirsty sta­ple crops such as rice to higher-value, less wa­ter-in­ten­sive crops that can be sold in­ter­na­tion­ally in ex­change for sta­ples. But that re­quires Iran to lose its cur­rent po­lit­i­cal sta­tus as an in­ter­na­tional pariah and re­join the global trad­ing com­mu­nity.

Back in 2016, af­ter six-and-a-half years spent work­ing on puz­zle-ad­ven­ture opus The Witness, Jonathan Blow says he needed a break. He tells Ars that the pro­ject he started in The Witness’ wake was meant to serve as a quick proof of con­cept for a new en­gine and pro­gram­ming lan­guage he was work­ing on. “It was sup­posed to be a short game,” that could be fin­ished in “like a year and a half or two years,” he said.

Now, af­ter nine years of de­vel­op­ment—and his fair share of out­spo­ken, con­tro­ver­sial state­ments—Blow is fi­nally ap­proach­ing the fin­ish line on that “short game.” He said Order of the Sinking Star—which was an­nounced Thursday via a Game Awards trailer ahead of a planned 2026 re­lease—now en­com­passes around 1,400 in­di­vid­ual puz­zles that could take com­ple­tion­ists 400 to 500 hours to fully con­quer.

“I don’t know why I con­vinced my­self it was go­ing to be a small game,” Blow told me while demon­strat­ing a pre­view build to Ars last week. “But once we start things, I just want to do the good ver­sion of the thing, right? I al­ways make it as good as it can be.”

Just as The Witness was based around mul­ti­ple vari­a­tions of the out­wardly sim­ple con­cept of line-trac­ing puz­zles, Order of the Sinking Star is built around the kind of 2D, grid-based nav­i­ga­tion puz­zles that date back to video game proto-his­tory. From a cen­tral­ized start­ing point in the mid­dle of a sprawl­ing map, play­ers can choose to wan­der in four car­di­nal di­rec­tions to ex­plore four dis­tinct vari­a­tions on that ba­sic con­cept.

In one di­rec­tion, “the hearty he­roes of haul­ing” use D&D-esque abil­i­ties to com­pul­sively push and pull care­fully arranged blocks in spe­cific pat­terns. In an­other di­rec­tion, the “Mirror Isles” let play­ers po­si­tion look­ing glasses to tele­port and/​or clone them­selves across the screen at dif­fer­ent an­gles. Then there’s a whole set of puz­zles fo­cused on skip­ping step­ping-stones across wa­ter to build paths, and an­other built around an ex­oskele­ton that gains new abil­i­ties in the path of a move­able en­ergy beam.