News & Updates
The latest news and updates from companies in the WLTH portfolio.
Piers Morgan Decries Cenk Uygur and Hasan Piker's UK Visa Ban: 'A Colossal Embarrassment'
"By this standard, half of the guests on the show would be banned from Britain," the conservative news host says Piers Morgan criticized the British government for banning controversial internet personalities Cenk Uygur and Hasan Piker from entering the United Kingdom over their anti-Israel sentiments. "There is a huge difference between criticizing the actions of a nationstate and its government and the hate-filled diatribes of Kanye West or Valentina Gomez," he said on Monday's episode of "Piers Morgan Uncensored." "But my country is losing the ability to see that difference. It won't be long before that's something, which threatens all of us." Uygur and his nephew Piker were banned from traveling to the U.K. just days ahead of their scheduled appearance at SXSW London, stating that British authorities cited their public criticisms of Israel. Uygur, co-founder of The Young Turks and a resolute critic of Israel, has been a regular guest on Morgan's program. The British conservative news host even posited that some of Uygur's comments made on the show may have led to him being banned from entering the county. "You may not agree with any of Cenk's positions, but anyone with even the faintest grasp on popular discourse will know they are mainstream opinions, which are freely debated almost every single day," Morgan said. "By this standard, half of the guests on the show would be banned from Britain." Uygur had previously appeared on Morgan's show and said he intended to "greatly offend Israel" and was not sure if he would be arrested for his views. Morgan further defended his repeat guest saying that his rhetoric is not that of "an extremist or a dangerous purveyor of threatening hate speech." "He's mainstream enough to appear along leading Democrats like Ro Khanna and AOC but apparently he's too hot for we Brits to handle," Morgan said. Uygur appeared on "Piers Morgan Uncensored" Monday claiming that the British government claimed he criticized Israel "in the wrong ways." "Over 60% of Americans are critical of Israel, will we all be banned from the U.K.?" he asked. "Can they put out a list of things you're not allowed to say about Israel?" He also pointed at the irony that the British government banned him for entering the country for saying that their government was "controlled by Israel." "Didn't you just prove it?" he said. His nephew, and left-wing political commentator, Piker criticized SXSW for not coming to his defense after being banned from entering the country. Piker said on a Twitch stream Monday that the festival removed his speaker page from the website. "SXSW was a minor part of my trip to the U.K.," Piker wrote on X Monday. "They totally didn't defend me or Cenk at all, they're actual f-king losers and I will never work with them for the rest of my life. If you bought a ticket expecting to see me you should demand a refund." Both SXSW London and the U.K.'s Parliament as the Home Department have issued statements following Uygur and Piker's posts. The Home Office explained that the decision was based "on the grounds that their presence in the U.K. may not be conducive to the public good," adding, "decisions to refuse or cancel an ETA on these grounds are based solely on an assessment of the potential risk an individual may pose to U.K. society." You can watch the full segment in the video above.
Young star lights up the Milky Way with colossal jets
Today's Image of the Day from the European Space Agency features an incredible phenomenon that was captured on the far outskirts of the Milky Way. A young, massive star has announced its arrival with a dramatic display. It has fired off twin jets of gas so powerful they stretch across eight light-years - about twice the distance from our Sun to the Alpha Centauri system. These streams are confined to narrow beams by the star's magnetic fields and launched along its spin axis. The jets of a young star The James Webb Space Telescope captured the event in remarkable infrared detail, showing the jets carving their way through interstellar gas and dust. The stellar outburst belongs to a rare class of cosmic displays known as Herbig-Haro objects. They form when material falling onto a newborn star is shot back out into space at incredible speeds. The star at the heart of this spectacle lies in a cluster about 15,000 light-years away. The star has a mass that is already ten times greater than the Sun's. The outflow is hurtling through space at hundreds of thousands of miles per hour, leaving behind a trail that astronomers can now study as a record of the star's growth. An unexpected discovery The discovery took astronomers by surprise, including Yu Cheng of the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan (NAOJ). "We didn't really know there was a massive star with this kind of super-jet out there before the observation. Such a spectacular outflow of molecular hydrogen from a massive star is rare in other regions of our galaxy," said Cheng. More than 300 Herbig-Haro objects are known, but most of them come from stars much smaller than this one. Webb's sharp images reveal not just the scale but also the delicate structure of this jet, including knots, shocks, and filaments where the stream slams into surrounding material. "I was really surprised at the order, symmetry, and size of the jet when we first looked at it," said Jonathan Tan of the University of Virginia. The perfect alignment of the opposite streams suggests the process fueling this star's growth has been steady for more than 100,000 years. Mystery of massive star formation The new observation has reopened one of the longest-running debates in astronomy: how do massive stars form? For decades, scientists have been split between two main ideas. One theory suggests that stars this large form through a steady process called core accretion, where gas builds up in a stable disk and launches outflows in predictable directions. The other theory, known as competitive accretion, involves a chaotic tug-of-war in which streams of gas fall in from all sides, twisting the orientation of the jets. The Webb data now tilt the balance toward the first explanation. The opposing jets are nearly 180 degrees apart, showing that the central disk has remained steady throughout the star's lifetime. "What we've seen here, because we've got the whole history - a tapestry of the story - is that the opposite sides of the jets are nearly 180 degrees apart from each other," said Tan. "That tells us that this central disc is held steady and validates a prediction of the core accretion theory." Conditions of the early universe The star's home lies in a cluster called Sharpless 2-284, a relatively pristine region on the galaxy's periphery. Because it is far from the Milky Way's busy center, its stars formed in an environment low in heavy elements. Astronomers call this property metallicity, and it mirrors the conditions of the early universe, before multiple generations of stars had enriched space with the products of nuclear fusion. "Webb's exquisite data have also shown us that relatively more stars seem to form at lower masses in Sh2-284 than in closer, more metal-rich clusters," said Morten Andersen of the European Southern Observatory. "This cluster is an excellent region to help us understand star formation throughout the Universe." Image Credit: ESA -- - Like what you read? Subscribe to our newsletter for engaging articles, exclusive content, and the latest updates. Check us out on EarthSnap, a free app brought to you by Eric Ralls and Earth.com.
Colossal Hatches Chicks, Cracks the Egg Problem for Giant Bird De‑Extinction
Colossal Biosciences has re-engineered the egg. The company's shell-less artificial egg system is shown alongside a developing embryo and one of the chicks successfully hatched from the 3D-printed incubation device. Colossal says the platform could support future conservation efforts and the de-extinction of giant birds such as the South Island Giant Moa. [Image: Colossal Biosciences] The eggs Colossal Biosciences ultimately hopes to hatch may one day be the size of basketballs. That challenge is driving one of the company's most unusual engineering projects yet: building a shell-less egg. The Dallas-based de-extinction startup announced it has successfully hatched live chicks using a 3D-printed shell system designed to support full avian embryo development outside a natural eggshell -- a technology Colossal says could eventually enable the return of giant extinct birds such as the South Island Giant Moa. After decades of failed attempts by researchers to culture bird embryos outside their natural shells, Colossal says its new artificial egg system avoids one of the biggest historical problems: the need for pure-oxygen environments that could damage DNA and complicate long-term development. Instead, the company said its shell-less platform uses a bioengineered silicone-based membrane that mimics the gas exchange of a natural eggshell under normal atmospheric conditions. The 3D-printed lattice shell is designed to regulate oxygen, humidity, and temperature while remaining compatible with standard commercial incubators. The engineering challenge becomes more complicated as eggs scale up in size. During a recent lab tour, Colossal researchers said South Island Giant Moa eggs were estimated to be about eight times the volume of an emu egg -- well beyond the capacity of any living avian surrogate. "We're working with our exogenous development group to develop an artificial egg that will be able to accommodate Moa," one Colossal scientist said during the tour. "Every new scalable system for de-extinction is ultimately a biology problem wrapped in an engineering problem," Ben Lamm, Colossal's co-founder and CEO, said in a statement. "The artificial egg is a perfect example." Lamm said restoring species such as the South Island Giant Moa requires more than reconstructing ancient genomes and editing primordial germ cells, or PGCs. "It requires building an entirely new incubation system where no surrogate exists and scales in ways that ordinary biology simply doesn't," he said. Lamm called the artificial shell system "a major milestone" for Colossal and "a foundational technology" for the company's de-extinction efforts. "This is what multidisciplinary science makes possible -- bringing together biology, materials science, and engineering to solve one of nature's most elegant systems," he said. The 3D-printed lattice shell was designed for eventual transition to injection molding for low-cost, high-volume production. The shell size can be adjusted, with additional versions already under development that exceed the dimensions of any available surrogate species, Colossal said. Researchers first attempted shell-less avian culture in the 1980s, but earlier systems required large volumes of pure oxygen, which Colossal said caused DNA damage and affected long-term animal health. Those systems also were incompatible with standard commercial incubators and difficult to scale for conservation or industrial use. "We've created a novel shell-less culture system that is fully scalable and biologically accurate," said Andrew Pask, Colossal's chief biology officer. "It's a new system designed for long-term, healthy avian embryo development." The result, the company said, is a system compatible with standard commercial incubators, manufacturable at scale, and adaptable to eggs of different sizes. Pask said the platform is designed to operate independently of surrogate species while scaling across different egg sizes. "The artificial egg gives us that platform: controlled, scalable, and completely independent of a surrogate," he said. "It's species-agnostic, size-scalable, and unlocks entirely new pathways -- from rescuing endangered birds with low hatch success to enabling de-extinction where no surrogate exists." "We designed it with one priority," Pask added: "Producing healthy animals that can thrive, not just hatch." Beyond conservation and de-extinction, Colossal said the platform could also have applications in biotechnology research involving genome-edited birds. The company said the system's transparent, modular design allows continuous access to developing embryos during incubation, which could support gene-editing workflows used in areas such as therapeutic protein production and other forms of avian biotech research. "Any field that needs precise, scalable access to developing avian embryos now has a tool that didn't exist before," Lamm said. Track Dallas-Fort Worth's business and innovation landscape with our curated news in your inbox Tuesday-Thursday.
