In September of 2017, The Japan Times reported that Japan had successfully mined zinc, gold, and other minerals from a deep-water seabed off the coast of Okinawa. It turned heads in the mining industry, and though the operation was just an initial trial, it pointed the way toward what could become a massive deep-ocean mining industry. And that is sparking renewed concerns among scientists about how this new gold rush will affect the unique creatures living off these ore deposits.

The Okinawa deposits, located over 5,000 feet below the sea surface, are formed by underwater geysers called hydrothermal vents. These are chimneys on the seafloor that spew out hot plumes rife with zinc, nickel, copper, and other rare elements; when the plumes collide against the cold seawater, the metals fall out and accumulate on the seafloor. There are more than 500 hydrothermal vents all over the world, says deep-sea ecologist Andrew Thaler, and they represent some of the last untapped deposits of precious metals on Earth.

As such, countries and mineral extraction companies all over the world have been gearing up for years to tap into these underwater treasure troves, which hold many of the rare elements key to power our smartphones and computers. The deposit mined by Japan is believed to contain an amount of zinc equivalent to the country’s annual consumption, according to The Japan Times. (Japan consumed 470,121 metric tons of refined zinc in 2014, according to the US Geological Survey.) The ore also includes gold, copper, and lead.

“We’ve known that [deep-sea] mining is going to happen for a while now,” says Thaler. Japan’s month-long extraction — dubbed “the largest such extraction of its type” by The Japan Times — is likely still part of an effort to test underwater mining robots rather than a full-blown commercial operation, says Conn Nugent, the director of Pew’s seabed mining project. Still, it’s a step forward in making large-scale seabed mining a reality. “It does appear that a page has been turned and that this baby is gonna go,” Nugent tells The Verge.

Hydrothermal vents were discovered in the 1970s and have fascinated scientists ever since. Each vent system is unique, with different creatures inhabiting its slopes and feeding off the toxic hydrothermal fluids spewing out into the ocean. In the eastern Pacific Ocean, vents are populated by enormous worms that live inside tubes. Two types of snails live around the hydrothermal vents of the southwestern Pacific: one encased in a whitish shell covered with tiny hairs; the other enveloped in a heavy black shell that “almost looks like body armor,” Thaler says. In the Southern Ocean around Antarctica, vents are dominated by yeti crabs, so called because they’re completely white and covered in hair. “There’s so much weird wild stuff,” Thaler says. “It’s the closest thing we’ll ever get to actually interacting with alien life.”

But mining might put this life in peril. Mining the vents involves grinding metal-rich rock into a slurry and sucking it up to ships floating at the surface using gargantuan machines. “There’s no way around it: whatever you’re mining, you’re wiping out all the animals that live there,” Thaler says.

Hydrothermal vents can be resilient to change: Thaler says he’s studied hydrothermal vent systems that were completely wiped out by a volcanic eruption, buried by lava, but began spewing out fluids again after about a decade. “These are ecosystems that can handle occasional catastrophic disruption,” he says.

Other vents, however, are more stable — these vents can slowly accumulate minerals over thousands of years. That makes them particularly valuable to mining operations, but it also means that the life there may be less adapted to disruption. So, it may be that the most fragile species are the ones at greatest risk.

All in all, it’s unclear what level of destruction hydrothermal vents can sustain before they no longer support life — or whether they can recover. Because hydrothermal vents are relatively recent discoveries, scientists don’t have the answers to all these questions. “It could be that [mining] is not a big problem, but until we get those measurements we’re not gonna know,” says Cindy Lee Van Dover, a professor at the Division of Marine Science and Conservation at Duke University.

Hydrothermal vents also contain toxic chemicals like lead and arsenic — and it’s unclear what would happen if mining equipment failed, leading to a spill. Will animals on the seafloor or water column be harmed? What if there’s a spill in waters close to the shore, where people live? Answering those questions falls to the International Seabed Authority (ISA), the United Nations’ independent treaty organization that is tasked with regulating seafloor mining in international waters.

The ISA has granted numerous contracts to countries — including Japan — to explore for minerals. But no large-scale commercial mining operations are taking place just yet, says Nugent. That’s because the ISA is still figuring out how to make sure deep-sea mining is done safely. The agency has committed to develop environmental regulations by 2020 — which means that we can expect big underwater robots mining hydrothermal vents commercially around 2025, Nugent says.

For now, Japan is mining vents in its own coastal waters, called an exclusive economic zone (EEZ). The country’s Economy, Trade and Industry Ministry then plans to commercialize mining at the sites off Okinawa around the middle of 2020, according to The Japan Times. That would fit with the timeline given by Nugent. “If any ISA member state were to conduct large-scale commercial seabed mining within its own EEZ without waiting for the production of the ISA environmental code, that would have diplomatic repercussions,” he says. “And I’m not sure that any member state would want to run that risk.”

Regardless of what Japan’s doing in its own waters, hydrothermal vents — and other underwater mineral deposits — in the high seas may well be opened to mining soon. And the scientific community will be weighing in to determine how to do it best. At stake is one of the most unique ecosystems on our planet. Globally, active vents are estimated to cover about 34 square miles, less than 1 percent of the area of Yellowstone National Park, Lee Van Dover says — they’re very rare. But also very understudied. Deep-sea animals have yielded big discoveries before, including one small organism that contains a compound that could help treat Alzheimer’s. Maybe hydrothermal vents host communities of organisms that may yield the next big drug. And, Thaler says, we should protect them for their own right: these weird, deep-sea creatures exist in pure darkness amidst toxic chemicals that’d be fatal to most animals.

“The deep sea is our outer space,” Thaler says, “but it’s an outer space that’s just full of living things that totally challenge our perception of what it means to be alive.”

Update January 22nd, 2019 10:00 AM ET: This story was originally published on October 3rd, 2017; it’s been updated with more information and video.

Ferrofluid really is the stuff of science fiction. It was created at NASA as a way to move fuel in space, and someday soon, it may be used to pilot medicine through your body.

This bizarre good is made of three ingredients: magnetic nanoparticles, like iron oxide; a special coating that keeps the particles from clumping together; and a water-based or oil-based liquid. What makes ferrofluid “magical” is that you can use a simple magnet to move it around from a distance, without using pumps or wires.

The first ferrofluid was invented by a NASA engineer named Steve Papell in the early 1960s. His idea was that if you add these magnetic nanoparticles to fuel, you can move it around in zero gravity with a magnetic field. That didn’t really pan out. But since then, ferrofluids have been used far and wide. Today, you can find ferrofluids in speakers, hard drives, and skateboards. But the future of biomedicine is where things get really exciting.

Scientists like Thomas Webster, the director of the Nanomedicine Laboratory at Northeastern University, are looking at the ways ferrofluid can kill cancer cells, fight drug-resistant infections, and even help neurons communicate with each other. Watch the video above to delve into the sci-fi world of ferrofluid — and enjoy some hypnotizing goo along the way.

If you want to experiment with ferrofluid, watch the video below, where Verge video director Cory Zapatka and supervising director Tom Connors discuss the process of working with ferrofluid and show some shots that didn’t quite make the cut.

For having only been in office a little over a year, the head of the Environmental Protection Agency, Scott Pruitt, has certainly had an eventful tenure. Hardly one day goes by that the news isn’t awash with some new scandal he’s gotten himself into.

First, it was the unnecessary $43,000 soundproof phone booth he got installed at his office. Then, it was the $50 a night condo deal tied to an energy lobbyist. Lately, however, the scandals have gotten more and more ridiculous — there are reports of Pruitt asking his staffers to scout for a Trump hotel mattress and Ritz-Carlton hotel moisturizing cream. What’s up with this man and his obsession with hotel stuff? It’s all very funny, until you realize your taxes are funding all these laughable extravaganzas — and these extravaganzas might function as a smoke screen for Pruitt’s threats to the environment.

Pruitt is currently under 12 federal investigations for squandering taxpayer money, as well as abusing his power to promote or demote EPA staffers. Meanwhile, President Donald Trump shrugs: “I’m not saying that he’s blameless, but we’ll see what happens,” he told reporters at the White House last week. “Scott Pruitt is doing a great job within the walls of the EPA.”

So, to help you keep track, here’s a list of some of the weirdest scandals that have marred Pruitt’s tenure.

The One With All the Fancy Travels

Who likes to fly in coach? Literally no one, and Pruitt is no exception. The EPA administrator is under investigation for often flying first class and staying at luxury hotels — all on taxpayer money. For example, Pruitt spent over $1,600 on a first-class flight from DC to New York in June 2017, roughly six times the cost of a coach seat, according to The Washington Post. A two-week trip to Italy last year amounted to about $120,000. And tickets to Morocco cost US taxpayers over $17,600, according to The Washington Post.

Pruitt has repeatedly claimed that the first-class flights were a security measure. After all, who likes to be confronted by angry people who accuse you of “fucking up the environment.” The problem is that previous EPA administrators largely flew in coach and didn’t squander public money on security. But Pruitt is so concerned about his safety that he’s spent about $3.5 million for a 24/7 security detail in his first year in office, according to The New York Times. That lavish spending is also under investigation.

The One Where He Bought a $43,000 Phone Booth

After taking office, Pruitt requested his office be equipped with a soundproof phone booth where he could make private calls. Only one problem: the whole installation cost $43,000 — and the EPA headquarters already had two facilities for secure phone calls. (The Government Accountability Office found the phone booth, which was not approved by Congress, broke two federal laws.) In April, at a House Energy and Commerce Committee hearing, Pruitt said those two secure facilities at the EPA HQ are “not right close to my office,” to which Rep. Peter Welch (D-VT) replied: “Is it too much to ask you to walk whatever distance it takes to get to that secure line?” Apparently, it is.

The One Where He Changed the Locks

Aside from the phone booth, Pruitt requested that his office be equipped with another fancy piece of tech: biometric locks, which use things like fingerprints plus a pin code to open doors. Again, just one problem: the locks cost almost $6,000, according to the Associated Press. And Pruitt doesn’t even know what biometric locks are. Consider this exchange between Welch and Pruitt at the same hearing in April:

Welch: “What’s a biometric lock?”

Pruitt: “I’m not entirely sure.”

Welch: “No seriously, what is a biometric lock?”

Pruitt: “I don’t know. I just put a code in.”

After Pruitt confirmed that such locks have been installed in his office, Welch asked: “Why?” Unfortunately, his time was up and the mic was passed to Rep. Dave Loebsack (D-IA). So, we may never know the answer to that question.

The One Where He Wanted to Get to Dinner Fast

When you’re hungry, you’re hungry. And since Pruitt “often ran late,” according to The New York Times, he sometimes requested the use of flashing lights and sirens to avoid DC traffic and get to dinner (or the airport) fast. Pruitt asked for such unorthodox tactics to quickly get to the French restaurant Le Diplomate, for instance. (His driver refused, according to E&E News.) No one likes to eat cold escargots à la Bourguignonne.

The One Where He Looked For a Trump Hotel Mattress

Last week, The Washington Post reported that Pruitt asked an aide to try to secure a used mattress from the Trump International Hotel in Washington, DC. I don’t mean to be judgmental, but who wants a used hotel mattress? They’re a receptacle of dead skin, bodily fluids, bacteria, and sometimes bedbugs. It doesn’t matter that the name of said mattress was “Trump Home Luxury Plush Euro Pillow Top.”

The aide also helped the administrator with other personal tasks, like apartment hunting and organizing a family trip to California. The problem is that “federal rules bar public officials from receiving gifts from subordinates, including unpaid services, and from using their office for private gain,” according to The Washington Post. The sad part of this story? We don’t even know if Pruitt was successful at securing the discount mattress for himself.

The One Where He Craved Luxury Body Lotion

It’s not just old mattresses. Pruitt also tasked staffers in his pricey security detail with finding moisturizing lotion on sale at the Ritz-Carlton hotels, according to The Washington Post. His aides were also asked to pick up his dry cleaning — all on taxpayer dime, of course. As with the Trump mattress debacle, asking subordinates to buy body lotion and pick up the laundry seems to be a violation of federal rules.

The One Where He Job Hunted for His Wife

Pruitt also tried to use his clout as EPA administrator to get his wife a job — as the operator of a Chick-fil-A franchise, according to The Washington Post. That’s problematic because public officials shouldn’t use their power to get favors in return, and as with the Trump mattress and the body lotion, Pruitt had EPA staff help with this private matter; one of his aides emailed the Chick-fil-A chief executive on his behalf, The Washington Post reports. The job hunting didn’t go well, however. Pruitt’s wife never completed her Chick-fil-A application.

The One Where It Never Ends

As Pruitt faces the federal probes, more and more details of his questionable behavior as EPA chief are likely to be made public. That means more ridiculous scandals to discuss at dinner, but also more distraction from Pruitt’s dismantling of environmental regulations. Since taking office, the EPA head has worked to roll back several regulations, such as the Clean Power Plan, which was designed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to tackle climate change. Since Pruitt seems to have the president’s support, he might keep his job for a while longer.

NASA’s Curiosity rover has detected background levels of methane in the atmosphere of Mars, and these concentrations seem to go up in the summer and down in the winter, according to new research. Where the methane is coming from is still a mystery, but scientists have some ideas, including that microbes may be the source of the gas.

Researchers at NASA and other US universities analyzed five years’ worth of methane measurements Curiosity took at Gale Crater, where the rover landed in 2012. Curiosity detected background levels of methane of about 0.4 parts per billion, which is a tiny amount. (In comparison, Earth’s atmosphere has about 1,800 parts per billion of methane.) Those levels of methane, however, were found to range from 0.2 to about 0.7 parts per billion, with concentrations peaking near the end of the summer in the northern hemisphere, according to a study published today in Science. This seasonal cycle repeated through time and could come from an underground reservoir of methane, the study says. Whether that reservoir is a sign that there is or was life on Mars, however, is impossible to say for now.

Methane had been detected before on the Red Planet, but the measurements were all over the place. In 2003, for instance, telescopes from Earth mapped plumes of methane of about 45 parts per billion on Mars. Other measurements were taken by spacecraft orbiting the planet. And then in 2013 and 2014, Curiosity detected plumes of methane of 7 parts per billion. Today’s study is the first one to show that methane in the Martian air seems to follow a pattern: it has a seasonal cycle, and it’s not just random. That is key for finally understanding where this methane is coming from, and whether it’s a sign that there’s life on our neighboring planet.

“Most humans, as we crawled down from trees, have wondered about, ‘Are we alone? Are we the only life form?’” says Mike Mumma, a planetary scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, who’s studied methane on Mars and was not part of today’s research. “If we can identify whether on Mars this methane has originated from life, that would be one way of answering that question.”

Since its arrival on Mars in 2012, Curiosity has been making lots of discoveries, including that there’s a big variety of organic matter in the soil, which could contain signatures of life, according to another study published today in Science. The rover has also been detecting methane, a gas that’s produced by many life forms here on Earth, like bacteria digesting food in the tummies of cows. On Earth, 95 percent of all the methane in the air is made by life, says lead author Chris Webster, a senior research scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL).

“Methane is a signature of biological activity on Earth,” he says. So since methane was first detected on Mars, “There’s been lots of excitement. Could this methane be produced biologically? Could it be produced by subsurface microbes?”

The first detection actually came in 1969, but it was a false alarm. Back then, researchers announced that NASA’s Mariner 7 probe had sniffed the gas while flying by the Red Planet. But it turned out that it was actually carbon dioxide. Since 2004, however, both ground-based telescopes and spacecraft orbiting the planet have found plumes of methane spiking up in the air. All those measurements were random, though, making it really hard to figure out exactly what is happening on the Red Planet, Webster says.

The rover Curiosity has been a game-changer. The bot was equipped with an instrument designed specifically to sniff methane, called the Tunable Laser Spectrometer of the Sample Analysis at Mars (TLS-SAM). The instrument has a chamber that fills with Martian air and then shines a laser through it to determine which compounds, like methane, are present. Now, data collected by TLS-SAM over five years reveal that there’s a background level of about 0.4 parts per billion of methane at Gale Crate, where Curiosity has been exploring the Red Planet. But Webster and his colleagues also realized that the concentrations of the gas went up in the summer and gradually down in the winter. And that’s a key discovery, Webster says.

“All measurements to date have been tenuous: they come and go, they don’t show dependence on anything. It’s been very frustrating for everybody,” he tells The Verge. “This is the first time that any Mars methane measurements have shown any kind of repeatability.” That may help researchers get a sense of where the methane is coming from. “When something has a pattern, we may be able to explain it,” says Renyu Hu, a planetary scientist at NASA’s JPL, who was not involved in the research.

Webster already has an idea. He thinks that the methane may be coming from an underground reservoir that’s slowing seeping through the soil, through pores and cracks, and releasing into the air. “It’s a constant, gentle breathing of the surface into the atmosphere,” Webster says. The methane could be buried in the soil in crystalline ice cages called clathrates, which trap the methane when it’s cold but release it when it’s warm, says Inge Loes ten Kate, assistant professor of Earth Sciences at Utrecht University in the Netherlands, who was not involved in the research. That would explain the seasonal variation as well as the spikes of larger concentrations of methane detected by both Curiosity and other sources. If the methane is seeping through cracks, there could be occasional large bursts of methane, Webster says. “Although they’re very different phenomena, they’re probably related to the same source,” he says.

Here on Earth, in Oman, there’s an area where ancient ocean crust is out in the air and methane seeps through cracks in the ground, Mumma tells The Verge. “You can actually light it with a match and burn it,” he says. “The idea is that, perhaps on Mars, there could be similar kinds of methane coming up from deep down. It still begs the question of what produced it.”

It could be microbes, either living currently on Mars or from an ancient past. Or the methane could be made by rock-forming processes that have nothing to do with biological life. Either way, figuring out the source would be amazing. “If it’s life, that’s a key indication that life is ubiquitous,” says Mumma. “If it’s not life, that’s also important because Mars is geochemically active, and we have a window into the interior now, which is new information about another planet.”

At this stage, these are questions that can’t be answered. The measurements reported in today’s study also come from one area of Mars, and concentrations of methane might be different higher up in the atmosphere or somewhere else on the planet. The seasonal pattern also needs to be confirmed with more measurements. “At the end, the more data points, the better statistics you can do,” ten Kate tells The Verge. “So they just have to keep measuring.”

The findings could soon be confirmed by another source, the ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter, a European Space Agency spacecraft that’s currently circling Mars, sniffing the atmosphere. The probe has been making measurements since March. “The community is waiting with bated breath on what they’re going to find because they’re looking at the whole planet,” Webster says. “Stay tuned, because this European orbiter is about to announce its results, too. So between the two missions, it’s going to be a very exciting time for the Mars methane story.”

The news seems to arrive every few months, sticking in your head like a nightmare that left you drenched in sweat: yet another person found a cockroach in their ear. It happened to a Florida woman just last month: a cockroach crawled inside her ear while she was sleeping, and she lived with the bug lodged there for nine days before it was removed. Then last week, another Florida resident went through the same ordeal. This time, the roach allegedly laid its eggs before dying. So, why does this keep happening? Why do cockroaches wriggle themselves inside people’s ears, where they’ll almost certainly meet their death?

First of all, cockroaches like to go around during the night, which coincidentally is when people sleep. So by virtue of just lying there motionless, we become likely victims. Cockroaches also like small, warm, humid places. And ears qualify as all of the above. “By going into the ear, that’s like a safe place to eat or rest,” says Coby Schal, an entomologist at North Carolina State University. That’s right: “a safe place to eat.” Roaches might wander inside our ears in search of a tasty snack.

See, cockroaches are attracted by certain types of chemicals called volatile fatty acids, which are released by fermented foods like bread and beer, Schal says. And just like cheese, our earwax radiates these cockroach-wooing chemicals as well. “The smell that emanates from the ear is attractive to the cockroach,” Schal tells The Verge.

The problem is that once the roach crawls inside the ear, it’s likely to get stuck. That’s because once the bug is inside, wriggling its legs, people instinctively scratch their ear, pushing the roach deeper inside the ear canal. Sometimes, the cockroach survives and according to Schal, the common household pest called the German cockroach can live for about a week without food and water. But often times, the scratching squishes the roach dead. “Now you have a ruptured cockroach that’s full of bacteria inside the ear,” Schal says.

That’s what leads to ear infections. The outside of cockroaches is actually surprisingly clean, Schal says, unless the roach has been crawling all over your toilet bowl right before coming to your bed. The critters spend lots of time cleaning themselves. But inside, there’s a concentration of bacteria. Roaches also have spiny legs, so if you push the bug too deep down by using tweezers or a Q-tip, you risk tearing apart your eardrum. That is not only painful, it can also lead to infections and hearing loss. So, the first thing to do if you have a roach infestation and think one bug has found its way inside your body is to go see a doctor, says entomologist Joe Ballenger. “The ear is a delicate organ,” he tells The Verge.

Before extracting the roach, doctors will generally kill it if it’s still alive, by either using mineral oils or a numbing drug called lidocaine. That could cause some problems though, says Schal. Some chemicals that kill cockroaches make them poop and barf before they expire their last breath. “It tends to defecate and regurgitate, both of which are not good to be happening inside someone’s ear,” he says. “It emits all sorts of bacteria, fungi, and nasty stuff.” But a doctor will clean the ear after removing the intruder, so roach puke and excrement shouldn’t be a concern.

Cockroaches are obviously not the only bugs that find their ways into our ears — but they are the most common offenders. That’s because roaches live around people, feeding off our garbage. A study published in 2006 reported 24 cases of patients with “ear-invading” bugs over a two-year period in South Africa. Cockroaches accounted for 42 percent of the insects, followed by flies and beetles. (There were also moths and ticks.) Another study published in 1993 listed the objects extracted from the ears of 98 patients at a hospital in Los Angeles county over the course of one year: cockroaches were number one, with 43 cases, followed by bread, cotton, and other objects like “portion of syringe,” a garlic clove, and a popcorn kernel.

For the record, the intruding roaches are usually German cockroaches, which can be up to 0.6 inches long (1.5 centimeters). The larger American cockroaches, which inhabit sewers, are way too big to fit inside an ear, but their young might, Schal says. (Both are found all over the US.)

Fear that a cockroach will crawl into your ear shouldn’t keep you up at night, says Ballenger. “It’s one of those things that’s a little bit of a freak accident,” he says. “It’s not common enough for people to worry about.” It’s a freak accident that makes you shiver, though. And that’s why we keep hearing in the news about (mostly Florida) people getting roaches stuck inside their orifices. “It’s that yuck factor,” says Schal. “It sounds like it’s happening all the time but it’s really not.”

Still, even entomologists — who handle insects for a living — are grossed out by the idea. Ballenger says he sometimes goes “black lighting,” which involves shining a light against a white sheet in the middle of a field at night to attract as many insects as possible. (“Some people like rollercoasters. We like those sorts of things,” he says as an explanation.) In the frenzy of bugs storming by the light, it happens that one bumps against his face, he says. In that context, if one critter got inside his ear, Ballenger says he’d be fine. But having a cockroach crawl inside your ear as you sleep in your bed? That’s another story. It’s like an invasion of privacy, and definitely off limits.

“I get why it freaks people out,” Ballenger says. “Totally understandable.”