As passengers return to the US from the cruise that saw a rare hantavirus outbreak, much of the country is lacking a basic public health tool: a test to diagnose the illness in the earliest stages of infection. Nebraska may be the first state with the ability to do so.

In just a few days, a lab at the University of Nebraska Medical Center in Omaha developed its own diagnostic test for the Andes virus in anticipation of receiving 16 American passengers from the ship.

“I believe we might be the only lab in the nation that has this test available at the moment,” Peter Iwen, director of the Nebraska Public Health Laboratory tells WIRED, referring to polymerase chain reaction (PCR) testing, which was important during the Covid-19 pandemic. Its ability to detect tiny quantities of the virus before patients have full-blown symptoms makes it crucial for identifying cases quickly, getting patients prompt medical treatment, and preventing the spread of disease.

The university’s medical center is home to a highly specialized biocontainment unit designed to care for patients with severe infectious diseases that lack vaccines or treatments. Staff members previously treated patients during the 2014 Ebola outbreak and cared for some of the first Americans diagnosed with Covid in 2020.

When Nebraska was notified that it would be receiving some of the passengers, Iwen contacted the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to see if it had tests on hand. He learned that the CDC has the ability to run a serological test, which looks for the presence of hantavirus antibodies. But people don’t develop antibodies until they are actively sick and their body has had time to mount an immune response.

Andrew Nixon, a spokesperson for the US Department of Health and Human Services, told WIRED that the CDC has a PCR test for the Andes virus but that it’s a research test that cannot be used for patient management. Research tests are used in scientific experiments, while diagnostic tests that are meant to confirm or rule out a disease in patients need to be rigorously tested, or validated, to make sure they are capable of producing consistent results. Nixon said the agency is working on validating its PCR test.

Iwen’s lab mobilized quickly to track down the materials needed to build and validate a PCR test from scratch. They called a lab in California—a state that has previously seen hantavirus cases—but their test was for a specific strain found in the US. Andes virus has previously only been detected in South America and isn’t found in rodents native to the US.

“Tests that we have available in the US will not detect that virus that’s found in South America,” he says, noting that the Andes virus is very different genetically from the primary hantavirus strain found in the US, known as the Sin Nombre virus.

The Nebraska team reached out to Steven Bradfute, a hantavirus scientist at the University of New Mexico. Frannie Twohig, a graduate student in Bradfute’s lab, had developed an Andes virus PCR test for research purposes as part of her PhD work. Bradfute’s lab also has genetic material of the Andes virus that’s not capable of causing disease which the Nebraska lab would need to validate its test.

On Friday, Bradfute shipped the genetic material and a box of chemical reagents needed to detect the virus in blood samples overnight to Nebraska. By Saturday morning, Iwen’s team had what it needed to start assembling and validating its test.

It was enough to run about 300 tests, which took all day Saturday and Sunday, Iwen says. His team added Andes genetic material in various concentrations to samples of healthy human blood to see if their test could detect it. Then, they compared the results to control samples. The team used up about a third of its tests on the validation process and now has the capacity to conduct a few hundred tests on patient samples.

While it has enabled many exciting discoveries, the Curiosity Rover has also encountered its share of setbacks. The latest left NASA engineers speechless.

On April 25, Curiosity drilled into a rock nicknamed “Atacama” to collect a sample. When the rover retracted the robotic arm after drilling, the entire rock unexpectedly lifted off the Martian surface—all 28.6 pounds of it. While other Curiosity drilling operations have caused cracks or breaks in the upper layers of Martian rocks during the rover’s nearly 14-year mission, this is the first time one has remained stuck to the sleeve that surrounds the drill’s rotating tip.

As the space agency itself recounts, it was the black-and-white obstacle-detection cameras mounted on the front of the rover’s chassis that captured this peculiar “accident” in a sequence of images that allowed engineers to get to work immediately to free it, moving its robotic arm and operating the drill repeatedly over several days.

Engineers initially tried to remove the rock by vibrating the drill, to no avail. On April 29, they adjusted the position of the robotic arm and tried vibration again, but only managed to knock some sand off the rock. On May 1, the team gave it another try by tilting the drill more, rotating and vibrating it, and spinning the drill bit. The team expected to have to repeat these operations several times, but instead the rock broke loose on the first attempt, shattering into a multitude of pieces when it hit the Martian soil.

NASA’s Curiosity rover was developed by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and landed on Mars in August 2012 with the purpose of looking for evidence that the Red Planet might have once had conditions that could support microbial life. In 2020, it conducted an experiment in the Glen Torridon region within Gale Crater, an area rich in clay minerals that strongly indicate the presence of water in the past and that it collected using onboard instruments known as Sample Analysis on Mars.

This story originally appeared in WIRED Italia and has been translated from Italian.

Electricity grid “land grabs” to ensure capacity ahead of graphics processing unit (GPU) shipments. Additions to capacity as ever-larger datacentres switch on. And the arrival, deployment and “burning in” of Hopper and Blackwell GPUs. 

These are some of the things we can see in data from electricity grid provider UK Power Networks (UKPN), which provides electricity utilisation rates taken half hourly for 96 datacentre sites within its region. This stretches from the datacentre hotspots of west London and Docklands, south-eastwards to Kent, Surrey and Sussex, and includes all of Essex and East Anglia. 

Computer Weekly research conducted in March 2026 analysed Electricity Performance Certificate data to identify datacentre locations and capacities, finding 80 datacentres in the UKPN region with a combined capacity of 798MW.

The UKPN dataset starts at the beginning of 2023 and runs to April 2026. Altogether, it comprises almost 5.4 million rows and covers datacentres categorised by the voltage they import from the grid: extra-high voltage (12 sites), high voltage (60), and low voltage (24).

Utilisation ratios are calculated by comparing actual electricity import – measured half-hourly by smart meter – against the maximum capacity booked by the customer. 

Site voltage corresponds to the likely size of the datacentre. Low-voltage (LV) sites are typically 400V connections for smaller enterprises, edge datacentres and server rooms. High voltage (HV) in the UKPN data likely refers to 11kV or 33kV connections to colocation hubs and mid-range datacentres. Extra-high-voltage (EHV) connections are 33kV, 66kV, or 132kV, and cover hyperscale campuses and emerging artificial intelligence (AI) factories.

The average utilisation rate for all UKPN data is just over 20% of booked capacity. Extra-high-voltage sites use the least of their allotted supply (12%), while low-voltage sites use more (18%).

We have taken the data points and split them by voltage levels that correspond to datacentre size. These are then shown in a chart where dips, plateaus, spikes, and so on are visible. These correspond to real-world events that include activation of new datacentre capacity, increases in booked capacity in advance of AI GPU deployments, the heatwave of July and August 2025, actual deployment and “burning in” of AI datacentre infrastructure, and a rush to beat Ofgem’s “use it or lose it” directive in early 2026.

Bear in mind that the chart shows utilisation rate, so while in some cases the cause of a spike might be obvious – such as increased power draw for cooling during a heatwave – other changes might not be so obvious, such as an increase in booked capacity that changes the ratio.  

Now let’s look at some of the key events that show up in the data.