21st-century science has all the necessary principles to create a working Star Wars lightsaber, but not the know-how.
A few years ago, Swiss fusion physicist Federico Felici explained in detail to The Science Museum blog how hot plasma contorted into an elongated, 3,100-degree Fahrenheit toroidal cylinder (think of a doughnut stretched into a long tube) by powerful magnets and contained in an insulated handle could make a working lightsaber.
The problem is much of this technology, at least at that pint-sized scale, is theoretical and there are still huge issues to work out like how to keep the plasma beam in one piece. One theory is to use AI (!) to learn plasma fluctuations and use the magnets to counter them on the fly.
So now we have a microcomputer and a fusion system that somehow generates massive amounts of fusion energy inside a device no larger than a standard flashlight. Oh, and it needs tiny magnets that are exponentially more powerful than their size would indicate.
In the real world, that’s no moon
Joel Pinkham’s “Light Saber Blade” is really just a toy lightsaber. (Image credit: USPTO)
In my quest to find a single working or under-development lightsaber, I turned to the US Patent and Trademark Office where I found a pair of intriguing patent applications. Both mention lightsabers and each tries to make something workable. However, sadly, neither is intended to be the real deal, just workable props.
Joel Pinkham’s “Light Saber Blade” (AKA Patent Application US 2023/390661 ), published in December 2023, looked promising. However, as I read it, I realized that Pinkham was simply suggesting better housings for toy lightsabers that use lights and extended tubes to fake the Lightsaber experience. His innovation is a new way to connect disparate lightsaber toy elements.
Slightly more promising was Michael Chau’s clunkily-named “Apparatus for generating three-dimensional visual effects and smoke-generating device for such an apparatus.” Right, that sounds nothing like a Jedi Knight’s go-to weapon, However, in the abstract, Chau writes, “Application in particular to the production of ‘lightsaber’ visual effects.”
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Chau’s idea in the now four-year-old patent application is to build a cylinder with a powerful LED light source, a heating element, and a small fan inside. The heating element would cook up glycerol, which makes dense smoke, while the fan propels that smoke out of the business end of the ‘lightsaber” and the LED light illuminates the gas. The “plume” as Chau described it would look like a “beam of light” similar to the plasma beam out of a real lightsaber.
It’s just a visual effect, but we give Chau points for an impressively innovative approach.
There are, however, a few-not-quite-real lightsabers both for sale and in use that may offer enough sparks and excitement to satisfy most Star Wars and May the Fourth devotees.
I want to be a Jedi like…
YouTuber and engineer Hacksmith built, perhaps, the most famous lightsaber device and maybe the only one that uses what may be a real plasma flame (regular fire can be considered “plasma’ if it’s hot enough and messes with surrounding ions).
As he says in his video, “My team and I make the most realistic and functional lightsabers the world has ever seen.”
His blades burn at a metal-cooking 4,500 degrees Fahrenheit and, as Hackmsith claims, they can “cut through almost anything.”
In his videos, Hacksmith shows off full-sized lightsabers that look like they might satisfy Luke Skywalker or Kylo-Ren. But if you look at the end of the plasma blades, you’ll notice that they look more like blowtorches than blades of light.
The mini ones he sells resemble fancy lighters, but at least the flames can burn in accurate Jedi knight colors. Hacksmith’s last major lightsaber update was almost a year ago. I wonder if they’ll introduce something even more eye-popping in 2024.
When you wish upon a Star Wars
Perhaps the most exciting fake lightsaber comes from the House of Mouse. Last year, Disney, which owns the Star Wars franchise, showed up at the SXSW Conference in Texas and demonstrated a retractable lightsaber that looks and works pretty much like every lightsaber you’ve ever seen in at least Episode IV, V, and VI.
Just about the only record we have of it is a 15-second video in which a Disney exec casually extends and retracts a white lightsaber blade from a metal hilt. It even makes the iconic lightsaber extension sound.
While there were rumors Disney might eventually sell the lightsaber in stores or at least at Galaxy’s Edge in Disney Land and Disney World theme parks, it’s looking like that won’t be the case.
If a blade that generates extreme heat or can cut through metal doors is not a requirement, you could build your own or buy one of the countless screen-accurate lightsaber replicas on the market. The blades are usually made of plastic and embedded with a series of LED lights. Obi-Wan wouldn’t approve but then he’s just a force ghost now, so you do you.
Samsung Australia is rolling out a new Fortnite Creative map for mobile gamers. The new experience called Clash of Commuters features “a uniquely Australian and public transport-inspired map.” And for a limited time, players will have the opportunity to win Samsung prizes.
The new map features Australian icons, including so-called bin chickens and the Sydney train. Clash of Commuters has a post-apocalyptic theme, and gamers will be tasked with defending an Aussie public bus across 5 checkpoints.
Virtual Galaxy S24 Ultra phones will also be hidden throughout the post-apocalyptic Australia Fortnite map, and players finding these hidden objects can unlock special bonuses.
As for the Australian player base, Samsung Electronics research suggests that 48% of Aussies most frequently use smartphones as their gaming devices. Meanwhile, 26% of Australians use consoles, and 24% use desktop PCs and laptops.
Play the map for real prizes
Clash of Commuters players have the chance to win prizes if they participate in the event before May 30.
This Fortnite Creative campaign consists of five rounds, and players who complete all five in the shortest amount of time will be eligible to win a Samsung gaming pack worth over $8,000.
This gaming pack prize consists of a 55-inch OLED TV, an Odyssey OLED G9 monitor, the Galaxy Buds 2 Pro earbuds, and the Galaxy S24 Ultra.
Samsung Australia offers additional prizes for players who compete in the event exclusively on mobile devices, and for players who complete the most side quest phones. Lastly, four winners will be picked at random from all completed time submissions.
Through this event, Samsung also invites Australians to experience the game on the Galaxy S24 Ultra at interactive pop-up locations in Melbourne and Sydney.
Fujifilm’s Instax cameras have been around for a while. They offer instant photo printouts in cute frames, taking over where Polaroid left. Over the years, the company has experimented with pastel colorways, retro styles, hybrid digital and manual photography, and even collaborations with Pokèmon and Taylor Swift.
The new Instax mini 99, which was released this month, comes in black. It looks more like my X-T2 and other Fujifilm models than a Polaroid. From a distance, it looks like a pricey digital camera, although it costs only $200. When you get to handle it though, you might be a little disappointed by the plasticky build. Still, there are parts where Fuji has lavished the camera with machined elements, like a tripod stand converter and some of the controls.
With a matte finish, the Instax mini 99 looks more professional, even cooler, than most of its predecessors. While there are no hybrid digital camera features, it delivers far more versatility than pretty much any other instant camera.
Mat Smith for Engadget
There are a lot of controls here for an instant camera, including three shooting options with different focal lengths. You twist the lens to switch between landscape, macro and standard settings, and each is (fortunately) labeled with a distance marker so you can best eyeball your shot. While there is a viewfinder, it won’t scale based on your shooting mode. Again, let’s not forget this is an instant camera. Having said that, with the mini 99 you do get access to filters and some basic exposure options.
Those filters attempt to strike those nostalgia chords. Normal is your typical shooting mode, and there’s faded green, soft magenta, light blue, warm tone and of course, sepia.
Light leak, meanwhile, sort of messes up your shots with LEDs built inside the camera, adding a burnout effect to your photos as they’re captured. What impressed me further were even more shooting modes, adding the ability to capture double-exposure shots, a manual vignette switch – which was nearly always on when I was shooting – and even fill-in flash, red-eye removal and automatic flash options. There’s also a sports mode that attempts to avoid blur when capturing moving subjects. Photos weren’t pin-sharp, but the mode seemed to capture things a little bit more crisply than in auto mode.
It’s an awful lot for an instant camera, and I found half the fun was in experimenting with modes and shooting effects. While I wouldn’t go so far as to call each shot a risk, it’s been so long since I’ve used film of any kind that each time I reached for the shutter button (of which there are two), I tried extra hard to nail framing and composition – probably more than I would with digital.
A lot of the shots I took (at a family birthday party with constantly moving babies and toddlers) were in ideal sunny outdoor lighting, but when I was indoors or areas with less light in general, I leaned heavily on the flash, which muddied a lot of the photos.
Mat Smith for Engadget
The learning curve is a bit steep if you haven’t owned an Instax over the last decade(or three). Each messed-up shot is roughly a dollar down the drain. But with each attempt, you begin to gauge lighting and focal distances better. An hour and ten photos later, I got nice shots of my nieces’ birthday party, even catching them looking at the camera on a few instances. Some photos I seemed to nail the correct focal distance, but that was the exception rather than the rule. Fortunately, half the appeal is off-focus moments, off-center framing and other happy accidents. I chose to apply a light leak effect – why would I complain if it’s not as pin-sharp as my iPhone 15 Pro?
There are a few things I’d love to see Fujifilm tackle if it attempts to make another premium Instax mini. First, add a small mirror for taking photos of yourself with the lens facing you. Many cameras offer a tiny mirrored surface so you can loosely tell you’re pointing in the right direction. One selfie attempt with my niece cropped her almost entirely from the shot. Also, to recharge the Instax mini 99, you must take out the battery and put it into the included charger with a USB cable. That’s too much of a hassle, and Fujifilm should offer a simpler method in future. Fortunately, I didn’t ever need to recharge the camera as I captured over 20 shots.
The Instax mini 99 uses the same smallish Instax film as other models, but with more controls, options and effects, it delivers on its attempt to be the premium instant camera. The film is still expensive, yes, and the device feels a little cheap for the price, but ultimately it delivers satisfying instant photo moments.
In Frank Herbert’s Dune, the Fremen natives who inhabit the desert planet Arrakis wear moisture-capturing stillsuits to survive the sweltering conditions. Now, living in London, I have little need for a full-blown stillsuit, but if you’ve ever attempted to ride the Central Line at peak commuting hours in summertime, you’ll share my wish for a better way – any way! – to deal with the downright suffocating heat.
Enter the Sony Reon Pocket 5, a wearable thermo device that cools or warms your body, depending on the conditions of your environment. Designed to sit neatly on the back of your neck, the Reon Pocket 5 uses a plate-like “thermos module” and five sensors – three for temperature, one for humidity, and one for motion – to determine optimal body temperature and, hopefully, make you more comfortable while moving, standing or sitting.
The Reon Pocket 5 offers five levels of cooling and four levels of warmth, meaning – in theory – it’s just as useful on a toasty commuter train as it is on a chilly flight. The device works automatically when paired with the included wearable Reon Pocket Tag, which senses outside conditions and feeds information back to the neck device. The Reon Pocket 5 still works without this pin-like accessory, mind, but it’ll only detect your body’s temperature, rather than that of your environment (thus reacting to – rather than pre-empting – changes in body temperature).
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The Reon Pocket 5 and Reon Pocket Tag(Image credit: Future / Axel Metz)
The Reon Pocket 5 thermos module(Image credit: Future / Axel Metz)
The Reon Pocket 5 and Reon Pocket Tag(Image credit: Future / Axel Metz)
The Reon Pocket 5 on a dummy’s neck(Image credit: Future / Axel Metz)
The Reon Pocket 5 on a dummy’s neck(Image credit: Future / Axel Metz)
The Reon Pocket Tag displayed on a dummy(Image credit: Future / Axel Metz)
If you’d rather take a manual approach, the Reon Pocket 5 can be controlled using Sony’s new Reon Pocket App, which is compatible with both iOS and Android devices. Helpfully, you’ll be able to slide through those aforementioned temperature levels via Bluetooth, so the device should work anytime, anywhere (hikers, rejoice!). You’ll also get up to 17 hours of rechargeable battery life.
Incidentally, Sony’s remote air conditioning technology isn’t new; the first Reon Pocket device launched in Japan way back in 2019, while subsequent iterations have since gone on sale in Japan and Hong Kong. The Reon Pocket 5, however, is the first device of its kind to be made available outside of Asia, with the UK market getting first dibs.
The Reon Pocket 5 is available to pre-order now for £139 (that’s around $170 / AU$260) from Sony’s website, and is set to begin shipping on May 15. The Reon 5T package includes the device itself, a Reon Pocket Tag, and a white neckband, though Sony is also offering a beige-colored neckband for £25, should you wish to swap out the white for something more muted.
Sony Reon Pocket 5: hands-on impressions
The Reon Pocket 5 Android app (Image credit: Future / Axel Metz)
I had the chance to go hands-on (or neck-on?) with the Reon Pocket 5 at a recent Sony demo event, and was pleasantly surprised by how effective the device was at reducing (or increasing) my body’s temperature at the touch of a button.
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The thermos module is basically a hot plate for your neck, and despite its small size, the increased sensitivity to temperature in that area of the body means that heating it up or cooling it down makes your entire body feel more comfortable.
Weighing just 116g, the device itself isn’t a nuisance to wear, either – I forgot it was strapped to my neck during an hour-long sit-down meal with the Sony team – though I will say that no amount of tucking makes it invisible. At the front, the neckband sits just above the collar, and at the back, the thermos module juts up and out, so you’ll no doubt get some “what the heck is that?” looks while wearing the Reon Pocket 5 in public places (that said, Apple’s AirPods were ridiculed when they first released, and look at them now…).
The question of when and where this product should be worn is altogether larger; I’m not convinced that seeking the perfect body temperature all the time is a good thing. But as a means of simply making travel more comfortable, the Sony Reon Pocket 5 delivers on its promise. Kudos to the first person who wears this and the Dyson Zone air-purifying headphones at the same time.
Netflix has been accused of using AI-manipulated imagery in the true crime documentary What Jennifer Did, Futurism has reported. Several photos show typical signs of AI trickery, including mangled hands, strange artifacts and more. If accurate, the report raises serious questions about the use of such images in documentaries, particularly since the person depicted is currently in prison awaiting retrial.
In one egregious image, the left hand of the documentary’s subject Jennifer Pan is particularly mangled, while another image shows a strange gap in her cheek. Netflix has yet to acknowledge the report, but the images show clear signs of manipulation and were never labeled as AI-generated.
Netflix
The AI may be generating the imagery based on real photos of Pan, as PetaPixel suggested. However, the resulting output may be interpreted as being prejudicial instead of presenting the facts of the case without bias.
A Canadian court of appeal ordered Pan’s retrial because the trial judge didn’t present the jury with enough options, the CBC reported.
One critic, journalist Karen K. HO, said that the Netflix documentary is an example of the “true crime industrial complex” catering to an “all-consuming and endless” appetite for violent content. Netflix’s potential use of AI manipulated imagery as a storytelling tool may reinforce that argument.
Regulators in the US, Europe and elsewhere have enacted laws on the use of AI, but so far there appears to be no specific laws governing the use of AI images or video in documentaries or other content.
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A consortium of Japanese technology behemoths, including NTT DOCOMO, NTT, NEC, and Fujitsu, have revealed the results of their real-world 6G speed tests.
The ground-breaking achievement shows the group’s ability to achieve ultra-high-speed 100Gb/s data transmission, marking a pivotal moment in the advent of the 6G wireless communication era.
The four firms, which have been working together on the project since 2021, jointly developed a sub-terahertz 6G device and demonstrated its proficiency in 100Gb/s transmissions in the 100GHz and 300GHz bands over distances of up to 100 meters. The achievement is exceptionally noteworthy as it is approximately 20 times faster than the current 5G maximum data rate of 4.9Gb/s.
(Image credit: Fujitsu)
Setting the 6G standard
Each of the four companies brings a particular expertise to the project: DOCOMO developed the wireless equipment capable of handling these enormous data rates, NTT developed a device capable of transmitting 100Gb/s per channel, NEC contributed a multi-element active phased array antenna, and Fujitsu showcased world-leading efficiency in a high-output power amplifier.
Despite the hurdles associated with the higher frequencies of the sub-terahertz band, the companies believe high-capacity wireless communication is obtainable. Leveraging each company’s strengths, they pledge to continue their collaborative R&D efforts to set the standard for 6G telecommunications.
When 6G eventually becomes mainstream, it is predicted to support diverse applications such as ultra-HD video streaming and real-time control in autonomous vehicles. 6G technology like this could see 100Gb/s transmission speeds potentially becoming the new norm.
The key assumption for these findings is uncontested achievement in 100Gbps transmission over a distance of 100 meters in the 100GHz and 300GHz bands, and the attainment of an equivalent isotropic radiation power of 50 dBm. It’s important to note that the actual data rates may vary based on the communication environment and network congestion.
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If you’ve never seen a total eclipse in person, whatever you’ve seen and what you imagine don’t come close. The best photos, the most stunning video, they won’t match the silent, dazzling fury of the real thing. Your phone or monitor won’t capture the infinite diamond brilliance of the Sun’s corona twinkling around the black Moon. I set out to shoot the total eclipse with my three best camera phones and my Nikon DSLR, but I am thankful that I decided to enjoy the eclipse in the scant three minutes I was under its totality.
Before I talk tech, I’ll do my best to describe the total solar eclipse if you’ve never seen one in person. April 8 was my first total eclipse, and before that day I thought it would be my last. Now I’m sure that I’ll find another opportunity. I’ve already spotted an upcoming eclipse over Tunis, Tunisia, and Luxor, Egypt in 2027. That could be an incredible trip.
After seeing the total solar eclipse live, I felt like I can’t live the rest of my life without seeing one again. I’ve never seen a photo that was equally compelling. Seeing the real eclipse in person, it was so gloriously beautiful that I was immediately sad that it was so fleeting.
Here’s what a total solar eclipse really looks like
I was not shocked to hear the crowd around me erupt into spontaneous applause.
There is a bright flash in the instant before the Sun goes dark. The world gets colder suddenly, but the landscape is not pitch dark. Watching the eclipse from the shore of Lake Champlain in Burlington, Vermont, the view of Mount Marcy and the Adirondacks presented a panoramic sunset, with waning light surrounding me at the horizon on all sides, and the black eclipse at the center.
The Sun’s corona dazzles and flares with wisps of magic. You’ve never seen any light move in such a way. The contrast between the shockingly dark moon and the incredibly bright corona makes the halo seem brilliant and crisply present, as though the Sun is just beyond your grasp, and not seven light-minutes away.
The corona is bright, but not as bright as the face of the Sun. It reaches the limit of what my eyes could tolerate without causing pain. To see something so shockingly intense, after avoiding the painfully bright Sun for the previous hour, is a revelation. It feels like a gift being unwrapped in the sky above. It is a surprise and a joy, and I was not shocked to hear the crowd around me erupt into spontaneous applause.
I was awestruck. I forgot everything I was supposed to do at that moment. I’m now grateful that I decided at the last minute to drive all the way up to Burlington, where the clouds were wispy and few and the totality lasted more than three whole minutes. A good friend traveled farther to experience just over thirty seconds of totality in the Ozarks. Neither of us regrets taking our trip.
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Ruining a solar eclipse with too much tech
The eclipse shot with iPhone 15 Pro Max and Vaonis Hestia telescope (Image credit: Philip Berne/ Future)
Back to the tech. My plan was … too much. I brought a telescope, and a DSLR, and three phones, and even smart glasses on my face. I don’t know what I was thinking. The eclipse lasted three minutes. I barely had time to focus one camera, let alone try to shoot with five. My plans fell to pieces, and I gave up quickly. I got a few good shots, then I turned my attention to the sky and just allowed myself to soak it in.
Seeing the eclipse was more rewarding than the best photo I’ve seen of the eclipse.
Here’s the gear I brought to shoot the solar eclipse. I borrowed a Vaonis Hestia telescope, which uses your phone as the viewfinder. I used an iPhone 15 Pro Max to take photos and view the eclipse through that telescope, with a solar filter provided by Vaonis. Those photos turned out pretty good, but it isn’t the most powerful telescope. Plus, an eclipse is a very complicated scene for lighting, especially for a phone camera.
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(Image credit: Philip Berne / Future)
(Image credit: Philip Berne / Future)
(Image credit: Philip Berne / Future)
I also had a Google Pixel 8 Pro and a Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra. I already decided I was not going to try to take telephoto zoom shots of the eclipse with these phones. The 5X range is simply not enough to capture any detail, and the sensor for the longest lens is also the smallest, lowest-quality sensor on the phone. Better to take wide-angle photos.
I set up the Galaxy S24 Ultra to shoot a time-lapse (Samsung calls it Hyperlapse) video of the entire event. I was pretty disappointed with the results. The sun was too high in the sky for even the widest lens to capture the scene around me as well as the eclipse in progress. The camera had trouble balancing the incredibly bright partial eclipse with the surroundings, so it just looks like a sunny day until totality occurs. When the eclipse happens, the camera balances the light in a way that doesn’t present the sunset colors and the changing light in the way I remember it.
The eclipse shot with Pixel 8 Pro and a solar filter (Image credit: Philip Berne/ Future)
I attached a solar filter to the Google Pixel 8 Pro, hoping I would be able to see more of the partial eclipse as it happened. Nope, the filter cut out too much light for the phone to handle. I was barely able to see the Sun through the filter, let alone capture great shots.
At the last minute, I decided to also bring my Nikon D750 camera with a Nikon 80-400mm lens. I don’t have a solar filter for that huge lens, so I planned on shooting only the totality of the eclipse, when it is safe to look at the sun without glasses. I got some pretty good shots, but I was rushing around too much, juggling too many chores. I should have reduced the exposure levels, or used a manual mode to dial back the shutter speed. The photos were blurry and blown out, not very good.
Eclipse shot with Nikon D750 at 400mm (Image credit: Philip Berne / Future)
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(Image credit: Philip Berne / Future)
(Image credit: Philip Berne / Future)
(Image credit: Philip Berne / Future)
(Image credit: Philip Berne / Future)
In the end, I got a couple of good shots from the iPhone on the telescope. They were better than the shots my friends took with their phones, and they impressed the people I shared them with. From my own perfectionist standards, I was disappointed with my pics, but I wasn’t disappointed at all with the experience.
In fact, I’m happy that I didn’t try much harder to take great photos, because at the last minute I chose to sacrifice the pics and enjoy the eclipse. It was amazing. It was the greatest natural phenomena I’ve ever seen. For the next eclipse, I’ll bring only one camera, and only one easy plan, and if I screw it up then I won’t even care. The best photo I could get would pale in comparison to the totality of the real thing.
The Dell XPS 14 is the newest entrant into an already storied line of laptops, and it is arguably the best laptop of this newest crop of XPS devices thanks to its powerful new processor, stunning OLED display, and a design that looks better than just about any other Windows laptop on the market.
The XPS 14 9440 starts at a somewhat pricey $1,499 / £1,599 / AU$2,998.60, and it lacks the dedicated Nvidia RTX 4050 GPU and OLED display, so you’ll want to upgrade these two specs in particular, though it will end up costing you much more for the privilege.
To be clear, Dell XPS laptops have never been cheap, but my recommended configuration, the same as the one I reviewed, will set you back nearly $2,400 / £2,650 / AU$4,300. For the hardware packed into such a slim 14-inch form factor, it’s more than worth the investment as this laptop will last for years before it becomes obsolete.
In terms of design, the XPS 14 fully commits to the design changes that the Dell XPS 13 Plus introduced back in 2022, but introduces a couple of quality-of-life improvements on its smaller cousin.
For one, the down-firing speakers have been moved up top alongside the keyboard, producing far better sound in exchange for diminishing the XPS 13 Plus’s infinity edge-style keyboard. This is a much better design choice, ultimately, and you don’t sacrifice much in the way of key space on the deck itself.
The display is what really steals the show here: a gorgeous 3.2K OLED display with super-slim bezels. This latter feature is impressive because Dell has somehow managed to squeeze in a 1080p webcam. There’s no physical privacy shutter, but that’s never really been Dell’s thing, unfortunately.
The Dell XPS 14’s Intel Core Ultra 7 155H and the Nvidia RTX 4050 deliver powerful performance across all workloads, and in some cases can even match or exceed what you’d get from a MacBook Pro 14-inch, especially for gaming (though the RTX 4050 isn’t nearly powerful enough to keep up with the best gaming laptops).
Overall, the Dell XPS 14 9440 is a powerful performer for everything from everyday computing use to 1080p gaming to moderate content creation. It’s an expensive investment, but on balance, it’s one of the best Windows laptops you can buy right now.
Dell XPS 14 9440: Price and availability
(Image credit: Future / John Loeffler)
How much does it cost? Starting at $1,499 / £1,599 / AU$2,998.60
When is it out? It’s available right now
Where can you get it? You can get it in the US, UK, and Australia
The Dell XPS 14 9440 is available now in the US, UK, and Australia, starting at $1,499 / £1,599 / AU$2,998.60. For that price, you get an Intel Core Ultra 7 155H processor with integrated Arc graphics, 16GB LPDDR5x memory, 512GB M.2 PCIe SSD storage, and a 14.5-inch full HD+ (1920x1200p) non-touch display.
My review unit, which sells for $900 / £1,050 / AU$1,300 more, upgrades to discrete graphics with an Nvidia RTX 4050 (30W) GPU, 32GB LPDDR5x memory, 1TB M.2 PCIe SSD, and a 14.5-inch 3.2K (3200x2000p) OLED display.
You can max out your configuration with 64GB LPDDR5x RAM and 4TB M.2 PCIe SSD, in addition to the above, for $3,399 / £3,238.99 / AU$5,999.40.
Dell XPS 14 9440: Specs
(Image credit: Future / John Loeffler)
Swipe to scroll horizontally
Dell XPS 14 9440
Header Cell – Column 0
Base configuration
Review configuration
Max configuration
Price
$1,499 / £1,599 / AU$2,998.60
$2,399 / £2,649 / AU$4,298.80
$3,399 / £3,238.99 / AU$5,999.40
CPU
Intel Core Ultra 7 155H
Intel Core Ultra 7 155H
Intel Core Ultra 7 155H
GPU
Intel Arc Graphics
Nvidia RTX 4050 (30W)
Nvidia RTX 4050 (30W)
Memory
16GB LPDDR5x
32GB LPDDR5x
64GB LPDDR5x
Storage
512GB PCIe SSD
1TB PCIe SSD
4TB PCIe SSD
Display
14.5-inch FHD+ (1920 x 1200) InfinityEdge, 500-nits
14.5-inch 3.2K 93200 x 2000) OLED Infinity Edge Touch
14.5-inch 3.2K 93200 x 2000) OLED Infinity Edge Touch
Dell XPS 14 9440: Design
(Image credit: Future / John Loeffler)
Gorgeous design
OLED display is stunning
Upfiring speakers
The Dell XPS 14 doesn’t shy away from the design choices that the XPS 13 Plus introduced, for better or for worse, but it does make some very important improvements to the previous design iterations.
For one, let’s talk about top-firing speakers. Down-firing speakers are genuinely terrible. They might be necessary, but they’re terrible, and any time we can get top-firing speakers on a laptop, your audio experience is automatically going to improve substantially.
(Image credit: Future / John Loeffler)
The exterior finish comes in two colors: Platinum or Graphite. The finish is a CNC machined aluminum with a glass palm rest, and everything about it feels premium. The chasis itself isn’t all that heavy, but it’s not as light as something like the LG Gram or some of the best ultrabooks that prioritize portability over performance.
(Image credit: Future / John Loeffler)
For ports, you have three Thunderbolt 4 ports with power delivery and DisplayPort output, a 3.5mm combo jack, and a microSD slot. Given its size, I’m not expecting all that much on the ports front, but it’s good to see the microSD slot included since this at least gives some flexibility for creative professionals or those who might have a device that saves to microSD, like one of the best drone models.
(Image credit: Future / John Loeffler)
As for the keyboard, this is one area that’s not so great, since the nearly flat surface of the keys makes it difficult for touch typers who are used to a bit more definition to find their place among the keys. You’ll get used to it, but it’s not the best typing experience I’ve ever had on a keyboard out of the box.
(Image credit: Future / John Loeffler)
Another major issue is the trackpad, in that it’s invisible. This does give the laptop a bit of a ‘future’ feel to it, but at the cost of accessibility. Likewise, the touchbar along the top is in place of actual function keys. All of these features work fine enough for me, but I can see someone with reduced vision struggling with this keyboard and trackpad.
(Image credit: Future / John Loeffler)
Next, you have the webcam. Somehow, Dell managed to fit a 1080p webcam into the narrow top bezel of the display panel, and it’s a welcome addition. Too many laptops skip the 1080p webcam in order to retain the thin bezels, and that was fine in the pre-work-from-home era, but nowadays, you need a quality webcam, there’s just no getting around it.
(Image credit: Future / John Loeffler)
Finally, the air intake on the Dell XPS 14 comes in from the side and bleeds out the back though a vent underneath the display hinge. The heat management is ok, but given its thin form factor, the underside can get hot under load.
(Image credit: Future / John Loeffler)
As far as Windows laptops go, this is possibly one of the best-looking laptops going. There are some who won’t love—or even like—the planar-leveled keyboard and lack of physical function keys or clearly defined trackpad, but overall, there is way more to like here than to nitpick, especially if you’re opting for the OLED display.
Dell XPS 14 9440: Performance
(Image credit: Future / John Loeffler)
Excellent all-around performance
Surprisingly competitive against the MacBook Pro for creative work
Fantastic productivity and solid gaming performance
Finally we come down to the performance of the Dell XPS 14, and I can definitely say that it is among the best you’re going to get on a laptop right now.
The direct rival of the Dell XPS 14 is the Apple MacBook Pro 14-inch with M3 Pro, and the XPS 14 holds its own against the best Apple has to offer in terms of general performance, features superior gaming performance, and also manages to battle the MacBook Pro 14 to a draw for some typical creative workloads.
While the MacBook Pro 14-inch ultimately offers better single-core performance and slightly better multicore performance, the Intel Core Ultra 7 155H paired with an Nvidia RTX 4050 GPU does an admirable job against one of Apple’s best processors.
In terms of overall system performance, the MacBook Pro 14 with M3 Pro (11-core) does manage to score about 23% better in our Crossmark benchmark, as well as scoring about 12% better in Geekbench 6.2’s multicore performance test.
The two laptops are evenly matched for SSD performance, and the MacBook Pro 14-inch scores better in 3DMark’s Wildlife Extreme and Wildlife Extreme Unlimited. The RTX 4050 in the XPS 14, meanwhile, pulls ahead of the M3 Pro’s GPU in Solar Bay and Solar Bay Unlimited, which are ray-tracing workloads, so this shouldn’t be surprising as Nvidia’s hardware can handle ray tracing far better than Apple’s chips right now.
In terms of creative performance, the Nvidia RTX GPU in the XPS 14 will outperform pretty much any comparable Apple device when it comes to 3D modeling, since just about every 3D modeling tool relies on Nvidia’s CUDA instruction set, so Apple, AMD, and Intel will always be at a disadvantage.
When it comes to video encoding, the XPS 14 manages to encode a 4K video into 1080p about 7% faster in Handbrake 1.7, though depending on the app you’re using, Apple’s specialized encoding engine might be determinative. If you’re a creative pro working in film and video, you’ll know which tools play best with Apple and which lean towards Nvidia, so which is better will come down to the tools you’ll ultimately need to use.
(Image credit: Future / John Loeffler)
Finally, taking the average 1200p gaming performance on Max settings, the Dell XPS 14 does a better job than the MacBook Pro 14 across the board. The XPS 14 does about 62% better with Civilization VI, getting nearly 90 fps at 1200p with performance and memory impact set to max. In Total War: Warhammer III’s battle benchmark, the XPS 14 gets around 40 fps, which is about 25% higher than the MacBook Pro 14-inch’s 32 fps. It’s only in Shadow of the Tomb Raider that the MacBook Pro 14-inch scores a win, getting 48 fps at 1200p on highest settings, while the Dell XPS 14 manages to get 47 fps, but there’s a huge caveat there.
This doesn’t factor in the RTX 4050’s DLSS upscaler, which can push the XPS 14’s fps much higher than that, depending on the settings you select. This is a huge advantage for the XPS 14 that, for right now at least, Apple’s best MacBook struggles to counter since its upscaler, Apple MetalFX, is developer-dependent, and not a lot of games include it as an option.
In the end, then, the Dell XPS 14 manages to go toe-to-toe with the venerable MacBook Pro 14 and comes out with some very important wins in the process.
Dell XPS 14 9440: Battery life
(Image credit: Future / John Loeffler)
Intel Evo is back, baby!
Charges to full in less than 90 minutes
Intel chips have not had good battery life for years. Back in 2020, Intel Evo was a big deal, and one of its biggest qualifiers was achieving more than 9 hours of battery life on a standard battery test. With the 12th-gen Intel Alder Lake laptop processors released in 2021, battery life on Intel laptops absolutely tanked, and Intel Evo faded away for a few years as Intel went through Alder Lake, Raptor Lake, and Raptor Lake Refresh, all of which had generally terrible battery life (even on an ultrabook!).
Now, with the Intel Core Ultra 7 155H, Intel seems to have refocused itself on more battery efficiency rather than dumping electrons into maximum performance.
The Dell XPS 14 benefits with a nine-hour 35-minute battery life on our proprietary web surfing test, which is far better than the six or seven hours these laptops were getting just a year or two ago.
Under heavier load, the XPS 14 still struggles to get more than seven hours of battery life on PCMark 10’s Modern Office battery test, and the PCMark 10 Gaming battery test only ran for about one hour 50 minutes before shutting down.
These are a far cry from what Apple is able to pull off with the MacBook Pro 14-inch with M3 Pro, which lasted about 17 hours 32 minutes in our battery tests, but knowing where Windows laptops have been in the past couple of years, I’ll gladly take a laptop that can last a full workday without a charge.
Should you buy a Dell XPS 14 9440?
(Image credit: Future / John Loeffler)
Buy the Dell XPS 14 9440 if…
Don’t buy it if…
Also consider
Dell XPS 14 9440: Report card
Swipe to scroll horizontally
Value
While it can get very expensive, the Dell XPS 14 starts at a fairly reasonable price and gives you good specs for the investment.
4 / 5
Design
This is easily one of the best looking Windows laptops you can buy, even if some of its design quirks will irk some and will be a deal breaker for a few people.
4.5 / 5
Performance
The XPS 14 goes toe-to-toe with the MacBook Pro 14-inch with M3 Pro and manages to walk away with its head held high.
5 / 5
Battery Life
While not nearly as long-lasting as the MacBook Pro 14-inch, the Dell XPS 14 gets decent battery life for a Windows laptop.
4 / 5
Total
The Dell XPS 14 is one of the best laptops I’ve tested this year, and while it’s an investment, it’ll pay dividends for many years to come.
4.38 / 5
First reviewed April 2024
We pride ourselves on our independence and our rigorous review-testing process, offering up long-term attention to the products we review and making sure our reviews are updated and maintained – regardless of when a device was released, if you can still buy it, it’s on our radar.
She was taller than me. Prettier and with better muscle tone. Shinier hair and perfect skin and teeth. Which was odd because she claimed she was me — from the future.
“Mmmmf!” I said.
“Sorry about the gag. Let me loosen it.”
“What the hell!? You’re here to kill me — won’t that kill you, too?”
She rolled her eyes. “No, it didn’t. I’m here, aren’t I?”
I scoffed. “I might not be a time-travelling assassin supermodel —”
“Yet,” she interjected with a smile.
“— but even I know that’s impossible. It’s a time whatchamacallit … a paradox!”
Read more science fiction from Nature Futures
She leant forward with a gleam in her eyes like I was 101 puppies, and she was in the market for a winter coat. “Yes, exactly! I need a paradox, a large one. Killing myself is the biggest event I can put into motion at such short notice.”
I struggled against the plastic straps that bound my hands behind my kitchen-table chair. “That doesn’t make any sense!”
“Sorry, I don’t have the time to explain the general theory of paradoxity or walk you through my calculations.”
“Calculations about what?” I asked — as long as I kept her talking, she wasn’t murdering me.
“About how much energy the death will release. Don’t worry — it will have been enough.”
“Energy for what?”
She let out an exasperated sigh. “Let me make it simple: what’s the biggest paradox you’ve heard of?”
“I don’t know — everything I say is a lie?”
“No, that just means you don’t understand set theory. The greatest one is existence itself: why is there something instead of nothing? It gave rise to everything, and — together with other, smaller paradoxes — keeps everything going.
“Uh huh,” I said, humouring my future self.
“But those bastards from the CCCCCC — the Chronological Continuum Consistency Coordinated Consortium Confederacy — are obsessed with timescape integrity. They’ve pushed my team back everywhen, undoing our efforts to make the timeline a better place to live in. They will even make sure World War Three — which we’d managed to avoid, you’re welcome — will begin right on time next Tuesday. I need to finish them once and for all. They’re out of control. They’ll go too far back; undo the Paradox of Life itself —”
“Life’s a paradox?”
“Duh!” — I hadn’t realized how obnoxious it is when I do that — “Why else would dumb, entropic matter organize itself into something that can laugh, love and fart?”
I looked around and saw an old family picture. “Why kill me? Wouldn’t killing somebody like … not mum or dad, um … would grandma Georgina work? We never liked her.”
“No, we didn’t. Remember the haircut incident in third grade?” She chuckled softly. “But no, sorry, it must be me, or it won’t have enough juice. A tight timeloop like this should release ten-to-the-twelfth-power chronojoules. The CCCCCC bastards will never see it coming!”
I grasped for something, anything to distract her. “Aren’t you supposed to be older? Why do you look better than me?”
She looked down at her body. “It’s a back-echo of the energy release. It rearranges nearby systems into their optimal state. And this,” she waved at herself, “is more optimal than, well, that.” She pointed at me.
“Thanks so much for taking the time to insult me before killing me.”
“No problem.” She looked at some glowing numbers on her wrist. “This will have been fun but time has run out of time — we have to do this now.”
She pulled out a knife and slipped behind me.
“Stop!” I said, but she didn’t. I felt something shift and fell forward. There was a flash of something much brighter than ordinary light could ever be.
My hands weren’t tied behind me any more. I leapt up, trying to remember the three weeks of taekwondo I’d taken back in high school — and hoping she didn’t. I turned and saw a hotter version of myself lying on the floor with a gash on the side of her throat. Blood was spreading out on the white carpet my ex-boyfriend had picked out. Good, I never liked it, or him — wait, why was I still breathing?
I looked down — my body had changed. I looked like her now. I felt the energy and knowledge move through me. I knew what I had to do — fight those bastards from the CCCCCC and win.
There was just one thing I didn’t understand. I knelt beside her. “This doesn’t make any sense. I thought you had to kill me?”
She looked up with a small, weak smile. I leant in to hear her say, “If it made sense, it wouldn’t be a paradox, would it?”
The story behind the story
Rodrigo Culagovski reveals the inspiration behindThe real time-travel paradox was the friends we made along the way.
My offspring and I love to watch superhero team TV series. They usually feature some — or a lot — of time travel, and are full of plot holes and paradoxes, to the point where we joke that time-travel paradoxes are their real super power.
I’m also a member of Codex, an SFF writers community. We hold flash-fiction contests twice a year. Last year, one of the prompts was “Road trip! Where are you going and who are you bringing with?” I didn’t use it as is, but it got me thinking of my favourite snowclone, “The Real X Was the Friends We Made Along the Way”.
It was a call from a reporter that first made ecologist Jason Hoeksema think things had gone too far. The journalist was asking questions about the wood wide web — the idea that trees communicate with each other through an underground fungal network — that seemed to go well beyond what Hoeksema considered to be the facts.
Hoeksema discovered that his colleague, Melanie Jones, was becoming restive as well: her peers, she says, “had been squirming for a while and feeling uncomfortable with how the message had morphed in the public literature”. Then, a third academic, mycorrhizal ecologist Justine Karst, took the lead. She thought speaking out about the lack of evidence for the wood wide web had become an ethical obligation: “Our job as scientists is to present the truth, as close as we can get to it”.
Their concerns lay predominantly with a depiction of the forest put forward by Suzanne Simard, a forest ecologist at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, in her popular work. Her book Finding the Mother Tree, for example, was published in 2021 and swiftly became a bestseller. In it she drew on decades of her own and others’ research to portray forests as cooperating communities. She said that trees help each other out by dispatching resources and warning signals through fungal networks in the soil — and that more mature individuals, which she calls mother trees, sometimes prioritize related trees over others.
The idea has enchanted the public, appearing in bestselling books, films and television series. It has inspired environmental campaigners, ecology students and researchers in fields including philosophy, urban planning and electronic music. Simard’s ideas have also led to recommendations on forest management in North America.
It takes a wood to raise a tree: a memoir
But in the ecology community there is a groundswell of unease with the way in which the ideas are being presented in popular forums. Last year, Karst, at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada; Hoeksema, at the University of Mississippi in Oxford; and Jones, at the University of British Columbia in Kelowna, Canada, challenged Simard’s ideas in a review1, digesting the evidence and suggesting that some of Simard’s descriptions of the wood wide web in popular communications had “overlooked uncertainty” and were “disconnected from evidence”. They were later joined by other researchers, including around 30 forest and fungal scientists, who published a separate paper that questioned the scientific credibility2 of two popular books about forests — one of them Simard’s — saying that some of the claims in her book “do not correctly reflect, and even contradict, the data”. The article warns of “the perils of plant personification”, saying that the desire to humanize plant life “may eventually harm rather than help the commendable cause of preserving forests”. Another review of the evidence appeared in May last year3.
Simard, however, disagrees with these characterizations of her work and is steadfast about the scientific support for her idea that trees cooperate through underground fungal networks. “They’re reductionist scientists,” she says when asked about criticism of her work. “They’ve missed the forest for the trees.” She is concerned that the debate over the details of the theory diminishes her larger goal of forest protection and renewal. “The criticisms are a distraction, to be honest, from what’s happening in our ecosystems.”
Robert Kosak, dean of the faculty of forestry at the University of British Columbia, supports Simard and calls her “a world-renowned scientist, a strong advocate for science-based environmental solutions, an amazing communicator, mentor, and teacher, and a wonderful colleague”.
The dispute offers a window into how scientific ideas take shape and spread in popular culture — and raises questions about what the responsibilities of scientists are as they communicate their ideas more widely.
Conversation starter
In her book, Simard tells of an idyllic childhood, with summers spent in the ancient forests of British Columbia. While an undergraduate, she worked at a forestry company, witnessing clear-cut logging at first hand. The experience set the course of her career. On graduating, she took a government forest-service post, and joined the University of British Columbia in 2002. She still works there, running a research programme called the Mother Tree Project, which develops sustainable forest-renewal practices.
One of Simard’s earliest papers appeared in Nature4 in 1997, describing evidence that carbon could travel underground between trees of different species, and suggesting that this could be through an underground fungal network. Nature put the paper on its cover and dubbed the idea the wood wide web — a term that quickly caught on and is now widely used to describe the idea (Nature’s news team is editorially independent of its journal team).
Tree leaves turn sunshine and carbon dioxide into sugars, and some of this flows to their roots and into mycorrhizal fungi, which grow into the root tip and donate water and nutrients in return. There was already evidence, from a laboratory study5, that carbon can move through the tendrils of the fungi that link seedling roots together. But Simard’s approach, a controlled experiment in clear-cut forest, was “groundbreaking”, says David Johnson, who studies the ecology of soil microbes at the University of Manchester, UK.
Forest ecologist Suzanne Simard’s 1997 study looked at carbon transfer between Douglas fir (Pseudotsuga menziesii) and paper birch trees (Betula papyrifera, pictured).Credit: Steve Gettle/Nature Picture Library
She planted pairs of seedlings — one paper birch (Betula papyrifera) and one Douglas fir (Pseudotsuga menziesii) — close to one another. She shaded the Douglas fir to prevent it from manufacturing sugars. Then she bathed the air surrounding each seedling with traceable, labelled carbon dioxide. She found carbon in sugars made by the birch in the needles of the shaded Douglas fir. Smaller quantities of sugars from the fir were found in the birch.
A third seedling in each group — western red cedar (Thuja plicata) — which is not colonized by the same types of mycorrhizal fungi, absorbed less carbon than did the other seedlings. The results, the authors concluded4, suggest that carbon transfer between birch and Douglas fir “is primarily through the direct hyphal pathway”. That is, there could be an active fungal pipeline connecting the roots of both trees.
Over the years, Simard and other researchers developed in published work the idea that there could be a common mycorrhizal network in the forest soil, connecting many trees of the same and different species.
About a decade ago, Simard began to take the idea further, and into the media. In a short film called Mother Trees Connect the Forest, she said of forest trees: “These plants are really not individuals in the sense that Darwin thought they were individuals competing for survival of the fittest. In fact, they’re interacting with each other, trying to help each other survive.”
In 2016, in a TED talk that has had more than 5.6 million views, she portrayed forest trees as “not just competitors” — competition being foundational to the understanding of how ecosystems work — “but as cooperators”. Her 1997 experiment, she said, had revealed evidence for a “massive underground communications network”. Her later work, she added in the TED talk, found that some bigger, older “mother trees”, as she called them, are particularly well connected. They nurture their young — preferentially sending them carbon and making space for them in their root systems. What’s more, “when mother trees are injured or dying, they also send messages of wisdom on to the next generation of seedlings.”
Then came her book — a memoir and detailed account of her work. It has been praised for its vivid and personal depiction of the scientific life.
The book concludes that to escape environmental devastation, humans should adopt attitudes to nature that are similar to those of Indigenous people. “This begins by recognizing that trees and plants have agency,” she writes.
Simard has worked to change forestry practices in North America in line with her ideas, for example by sparing the oldest trees during clear-cutting so that they can provide an infrastructure for the next generation of planted trees.
Challenging ideas
But academics were increasingly concerned that the ideas and the publicity that they were attracting had moved beyond what was warranted by the scientific evidence.
The disquiet came to a head when the 2023 scientific review1 was published. The authors, Hoeksema, Jones and Karst, have all collaborated scientifically with Simard in the past; Jones was an author of the 1997 paper. The review considers the evidence for popular claims made about the wood wide web.
‘We are killing this ecosystem’: the scientists tracking the Amazon’s fading health
Their review has drawn praise for its scholarship. It is “the gold standard of how one should tackle a contentious and important field”, says James Cahill, who studies plant behaviour at the University of Alberta.
Simard takes the opposite view: the paper, she says, fails to see the bigger picture, and its prominence is “an injustice to the whole world”.
The review laid out what the authors regard as the three key claims underlying the popular idea of the ‘mother tree’: that networks of different fungi linking the roots of different trees — known as common mycorrhizal networks (CMNs) — are widespread in forests; that resources pass through such networks, benefiting seedlings; and that mature trees preferentially send resources along the networks to their kin. The scientists concluded that the first two are insufficiently supported by the scientific evidence, and that the last “has no peer-reviewed, published evidence”.
Some elements of the wood-wide-web idea are not in dispute, they say. For instance, mycorrhizal fungi can latch onto multiple roots of the same plant; one species of fungus can connect with the roots of different species of plant; and mycelia — a cobweb of fungal tendrils — can spread over large distances.
But evidence for a CMN in trees — one in which an individual fungus links the roots of the same or different tree species — is patchy, the review authors say. There are well-documented CMNs that link certain plants together: some orchids use CMNs to connect with trees, for instance, so that the orchids can feed on tree sugars when they can’t make their own.
And lab studies have shown that a single fungus can link seedlings of different tree species. But, the authors say, the lab studies compare with the forest in the same way that human cells grown in a dish compare with human bodies.
The review authors found that the strongest evidence for a CMN among trees in the field comes from five studies published between 2006 and 2020 — some led by ecologist Kevin Beiler, when he was a PhD student in Simard’s group. Beiler, who is now at the University for Sustainable Development in Eberswalde, Germany, used DNA techniques to map the networks of genetically distinct fungi in patches of old-growth forest, and found that they linked many trees of different ages, all Douglas fir — and the larger the tree, the greater the extent of its connections.
Suzanne Simard is the scientist most closely associated with the idea of the ‘wood wide web’.Credit: PA Images/Alamy
But Karst says that this doesn’t prove that the fungus was simultaneously connecting different trees, because mycelia decay easily and the technique would have picked up strands that are defunct, as well as alive. And that arduous mapping exercise has been repeated for just two tree species — hardly grounds for generalization, she says.
So, do these common networks exist? “The consensus seems to be they are probably there but we do need more people to go out and map them at a fine scale to show that,” says Jones.
The second claim explored by the review is that resources travel through the CMN and benefit seedlings. It has three parts. The first — that resources do, by some means, travel through the soil between plants, commands some support, say the review authors. For example, they highlight research in a Swiss forest in which the canopies of certain trees had been bathed in labelled carbon dioxide. The experiment showed that carbon ended up in the roots of nearby trees.
But the authors say that proving the second two parts of the claim — that a CMN is the major conduit, and that seedlings typically benefit — is tricky. Lab and field studies often cannot rule out that resources moved through the soil for at least part of the way. The review highlighted three lab studies that directly observed carbon moving from one tree seedling to another through a mycorrhizal link, and these “are still the best evidence for the movement of resources within a CMN formed by woody plant species”, say the authors.
In the forest, the authors found 26 experiments reporting carbon transfer, but for each transfer, there was an alternative explanation for how the carbon travelled.
Some studies don’t look for a CMN but simply assess whether growing a seedling next to an adult tree improves its performance. For every instance in which a seedling benefited, the review states, there was another study in which its growth was inhibited. The results are “a huge smear from positive effects to negative effects and mostly neutral”, says Hoeksema.
The third claim is that mature trees communicate preferentially with offspring through CMNs, for example sending warning signals after an attack.
“When I heard that out in public I thought ‘Holy cow, that’s extraordinary’,” says Karst.
The team did find one lab experiment, published in 2017 and led by Brian Pickles, who did the work as a postdoc in Simard’s department, that found that if seedlings were related then more carbon was transferred between them. But it happened in only two of the four lineages of seedlings, and it happened even when fungi were prevented from making links with each other — suggesting that one fungus exuded it into the soil and the other picked it up, the researchers say. In the review, the authors write that, for the third claim, “there is no current evidence from peer-reviewed, published field studies”.
We must get a grip on forest science — before it’s too late
Karst says that one reason why ideas about mother trees and their kin have traction in the public domain is that Simard, in media interviews and her book, has implied that findings made in the greenhouse were actually made in the forest, making the evidence seem stronger than it is. Simard disagrees. “I do not, and would never, imply anything misleading when presenting research.”
Karst gives the example of a passage from Simard’s book that describes a visit to a field site made by Simard and her master’s student, Amanda Asay. In October 2012, Asay was exploring a question that is important for forestry — do seedlings stand a better chance of survival if they grow near their mother tree, and, if so, is this because they receive preferential help through a common mycorrhizal network? Asay had blocked such connections in control seedlings by planting them in mesh bags with pores too small for fungi to fit through. What she found in that forest experiment, Simard says in her book, matched the theory that trees help their kin through networks. “Seedlings that were [the mother tree’s] kin survived better and were noticeably bigger than those that were strangers linked into the network, a strong hint that Douglas-fir mother trees could recognize their own.” Yet, when the review authors accessed Asay’s master’s thesis6, they found that her field work had discovered the opposite: that more non-kin seedlings survived than did kin (although the trend was not significant). As for the role of networks, the thesis states: “Our hypothesis that kin recognition is facilitated by mycorrhizal networks, however, was not supported”.
When asked about the discrepancy, Simard says that Asay also did greenhouse experiments for her master’s thesis, which used pairs of older and younger tree seedlings, and showed that older seedlings recognized younger kin and sent them more resources than they did to non-kin. After that, Asay and others in the team did find evidence that “there are responses that clearly show kin selection in those trees”.
Simard says that, when describing Asay’s findings in the forest in 2012, she made a writer’s choice to situate other findings as if they were discovered in the forest on that day. “I situated the story in the field, because that’s where the question came from.” That description, she says, encompasses “the whole body of work”.
A spruce tree root with ectomycorrhizal fungi.Credit: Eye of Science/Science Photo Library
Asay’s subsequent work has not yet been published, for a tragic reason: she died in an accident in 2022. Her death was devastating for the group and publication stalled, Simard says. “We’re about to publish those papers,” she says.
Karst, Jones and Hoeksema’s overall conclusion is that CMNs do exist in the plant kingdom, and that resources can travel along them, benefiting at least one party, and sometimes both. In the forest, myriad mycelia extend through the soil that are capable of linking with trees, including those of different species. Whether they form a live thoroughfare, and whether resources travel through it between trees, has yet to be demonstrated in the field. Whether there are, in general, kin effects between plants was beyond the scope of their review, but the authors found nothing to support the idea that forest trees target kin through common mycorrhizal networks.
Their review also looked at the literature and found that some scientists have selectively cited and quoted from studies, boosting the credibility of the idea. The main problem, the review concludes, is not the quality of the science. “The most concerning issue is the rigour with which the results of these studies have been transmitted and interpreted.”
Rigour and reaction
Most of the response to the review has been positive, says Jones. “We got a lot of letters saying ‘thank you for doing that, it’s such a relief’. But I was really surprised how many of our colleagues said ‘you are brave’. That shouldn’t be, that you would have to be brave.”
But some researchers have taken issue with aspects of the review. Johnson disagrees with the team’s decision to exclude evidence for similar networks elsewhere in the plant kingdom, including between orchids and trees, and in grasslands and heathlands. It means, he says, they were “ignoring 90% of the work … our default position should be that we should expect mycorrhizal fungi to connect many plants”. It’s important, he says, to take a collective view of the evidence.
He agrees with the conclusion, however, that Simard’s idea of the cooperating forest is incompatible with evolutionary theory. “It’s all about the plants supporting each other for these altruistic reasons. I think that’s completely rubbish.”
Johnson’s view is that it “makes complete sense” that there are CMNs linking multiple forest trees and that substances might travel from one to another through them. Crucially, he says, this is not due to the trees supporting one another. A simple explanation, compatible with evolutionary theory, is that the fungi are acting to protect the trees that are their source of energy. It is beneficial for fungi to activate a tree’s defence signals, or to top up food for temporarily ailing trees. Pickles, who spent six years working with Simard before moving to the University of Reading, UK, says Simard’s ideas are not incompatible with competition, but give more weight to well-known phenomena in ecology, such as mutualism, in which organisms cooperate for mutual benefit. “It’s not altruism. It’s not some outrageous idea,” he says. “She certainly focuses more on facilitation and mutualism than is traditional in these fields, and that’s probably why there’s a lot of pushback.”
Other ecologists agree that there is some “polarization” in ecology between cooperative and competitive ideas. “The idea that perhaps not everything is trying to kill everything else is helpful,” says Katie Field, who studies plant-soil processes at the University of Sheffield, UK.
Regardless of the differences of opinion, Pickles says, “It’s good to have this rigorous analysis.”
Frustrating debate
Simard is exasperated by the debate.
Her work, she says, has “changed our whole world view of how the forest works”. There are now “dozens and dozens” of people “who have found that stuff moves through networks and through the soil”.
She says that the quality of her science has been unfairly challenged. To say that her 200 published papers are “not valid science, which I think is what they’re saying … that it was wrong … is not right,” she says. She is in the process of submitting responses to the critical papers to two journals, she says.
She says that she is unfairly accused of claiming CMNs are the only pathway for resources to travel between trees, and that she acknowledges other pathways in her papers and her book.
In media appearances, it’s hard to make that clear, she says: “It’s a very short period of time, and I don’t get into all those other evolutionary reasons for these things.”
Simard maintains that her critics attack her in the academic literature for imagery she has used only in public communication: “I talked about the mother tree as a way of communicating the science and then these other people say it’s a scientific hypothesis. They misuse my words.”
She argues that changing our understanding of how forests work from ‘winner takes all’ to ‘collaborative, integrated network system’ is essential for fixing the rampant destruction of old-growth forest, especially in British Columbia, where her research has focused. Indigenous cultures that have a more sustainable relationship with forests have mother and father trees, she says — “but the European male society hates the mother tree … somebody needs to write a paper on that”.
“I’m putting forward a paradigm shift. And the critics are saying ‘we don’t want a paradigm shift, we’re fine, just the way we are’. We’re not fine.”
Simard also says that Karst held a position partially funded by members of Canada’s Oil Sands Innovation Alliance that constitutes a conflict of interest. Extraction of oil deposits is associated with forest loss and environmental damage, and Karst was studying land reclamation after extraction. Karst says that she held this position until 2021, terminating it before starting work on the review, and that the work it funded did not overlap with the focus of the review on mycorrhizal networks.
Taking the research forwards will be challenging, says Johnson. Karst and her colleagues have produced an agenda for future field research — from mapping the genotypes of trees and fungi in a range of forests to using controls in experiments more stringently. But the agenda doesn’t impress Johnson. “It’s almost impossible to fulfil,” he says, partly because fieldwork is so fiendishly difficult.
Some scientists say that Simard’s popular work has had a positive influence on the field, even if elements of it remain controversial. Her work propelled the mycorrhizal research community from an obscure and underfunded field to one that excites the public, says Field. That has unleashed funding, stimulated researchers’ imaginations and influenced research agendas.
The backlash has further energized the community, she says. There are plans for a special edition of a journal she edits, and sessions have been added to the upcoming meeting of the International Mycorrhizal Society. All of this is helpful, says Field. “Anything that makes people think again and look again at the evidence is good.”