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Don’t be fooled—LLMs don’t reason
On an afternoon in Seoul in March 2016, I watched a program I helped build put a stone on the fifth line of a Go board in what looked like a gift to its human opponent. Move 37 in game two of the five-game match looked so absurd that some commentators thought it was a programming glitch.
It wasn’t. AlphaGo won the game, ultimately triumphing 4-1 over Lee Sedol, one of the greatest professional Go players of all time. “I thought AlphaGo was based on probability calculation and that it was merely a machine,” Lee said afterwards. “But when I saw this move, I changed my mind. Surely, AlphaGo is creative.”
When Deep Blue defeated then reigning world chess champion Garry Kasparov in 1997, it did so by looking six to eight moves ahead per player and evaluating 200 million chess positions per second, using rules hard-coded by humans. Go is a vastly more complex game. A stone’s worth depends on how distant groups and territory unfold over dozens of moves. Computing even a fraction of the possible outcomes would take a supercomputer billions of years. To win, AlphaGo had to sense who was ahead at a glance and even invent moves no human had thought to play.
That is why many accounts of AlphaGo’s match against Lee portray move 37 as a flash of pure machine intuition. But that is a misunderstanding. It was actually AlphaGo’s powers of reasoning that made this creative choice—and these are powers that today’s AI lacks. If we want future AI systems to produce trustworthy results and really novel insights in fields like science and medicine, we need to equip them with genuine reasoning capabilities of this kind.
AlphaGo is made up of two systems. The first, its policy network, was trained to guess what move a strong human would play. This “intuitive” part regarded move 37 as nothing special—a play that had a roughly one in 10,000 chance of being made by an expert human player. What made AlphaGo choose it was the program’s search machinery, which looked beyond immediate plausibility and weighed the future consequences of proposed moves. It explicitly constructed and searched a game tree with thousands of branches, each representing a different possible future.
A well-known theory in the behavioral sciences, popularized by Daniel Kahneman, distinguishes between two modes of human thought: System 1 is fast, gut-level, effortless; system 2, slow, step-by-step, and deliberative. AlphaGo offered a striking machine analogue of that split. Its networks supplied the hunches—this move looks promising, this position looks won—and its search supplied the deliberation, testing those hunches against the moves and countermoves that would follow. As in human cognition, neither half works alone. Intuition alone would never have opted for move 37, and brute-force search would have struggled to sieve through all the many possible moves.
This is strikingly different from the way today’s AI models work. A large language model picks the next token, over and over. That amounts to system 1 in action—fast, associative, and surprisingly good pattern completion across almost every subject people write about...
When everyday sounds trigger big feelings: Inside misophonia research
Misophonia causes strong emotions in response to everyday sounds like chewing or sniffing. The condition often involves feelings of immediate distress or anger. This can be confusing and upsetting for children, adults and their families or friends.
Misophonia can disrupt family meals, school, work, friendships and other parts of daily life. At Yale Child Study Center, associate professor Thomas Fernandez, M.D., works with patients who struggle with misophonia.
Fernandez also studies the genetics of misophonia and other conditions. In a recent interview with the Misophonia Research Fund (MRF), he described current research investigating how misophonia is rooted in the brain.
He also discussed how discoveries about underlying biological mechanisms could ultimately lead to more targeted treatments. Read on for key takeaways from the interview and a follow-up with Fernandez about the research.
What is misophonia? Is it real and rooted in the brain?
Misophonia can cause intense feelings of distress, anger or panic when someone hears chewing, sniffing, tapping or other sounds. "The response can feel immediate and involuntary, and some people avoid shared meals, classrooms, workplaces, or social situations to escape triggers," Fernandez says.
He emphasizes that these feelings are real, even if others are not bothered by the same sounds. Misophonia is brain-based. Understanding this can help reduce blame, conflict at home and misunderstandings at school or with friends.
A growing body of research indicates that misophonia reflects differences in how the brain responds to certain sounds. Studies point to networks involved in sound, emotion and salience, the process in the brain that flags something as especially important.
Researchers are still working to understand exactly how these systems interact and develop. What is clear is that the response is not a matter of willpower or simply being "too sensitive"...
A Startup Wants to Power Data Centers With ‘Supercritical’ Carbon Dioxide
A new company has a plan to make the dirty gas turbines powering data centers more efficient: liquid carbon dioxide.
American Supercritical came out of stealth Wednesday, announcing $8 million in funding. It wants to retrofit inefficient gas turbines that many data centers rely on for power with units that can generate more power, without adding more emissions (though the gas-fired turbines will continue to emit carbon pollution). The technology can also theoretically be used on a wide variety of energy sources at a time when power demand is skyrocketing.
“We want to start with gas turbines but eventually expand beyond that,” says cofounder Simon Shuham.
Most large gas-fired power plants in the United States use an array of heat engines in what’s known as a combined-cycle process: First, turbines generate electricity from burning compressed air and natural gas, then a separate engine uses the hot exhaust to make steam and create additional energy. But for a variety of reasons, data centers across the US have opted to power their operations with what are known as simple-cycle turbines, and exclude the steam component.
These turbines are much less efficient than combined-cycle plants. Usually, only about 35 percent of the energy from simple-cycle turbines is converted to electricity, while the rest escapes as exhaust. (In combined-cycle plants, that figure hovers closer to 60 to 65 percent.) That exhaust includes greenhouse gases, making plants that run on simple-cycle turbines a much worse choice for the environment than combined-cycle plants.
The size of some of these plants combined with their inefficiency is a recipe for climate disaster. A massive data-center power plant in Texas that Amazon is building with just simple-cycle turbines, for instance, is permitted to emit more than 33 million tons of greenhouse gases per year—more than the annual total of some small countries.
But all these small, inefficient turbines could be a great match for supercritical CO2 technology, American Supercritical’s founders say. Carbon dioxide becomes supercritical when it’s pressurized and held at a certain temperature. In this state, it gets the density of liquid but still behaves like a gas, meaning it can move energy more efficiently through much smaller amounts of equipment.
American Supercritical wants to attach its units to small gas turbines and help generate more energy. While the turbines themselves would still use gas, the supercritical CO2 unit can use the hot exhaust generated from those turbines to create additional electricity. Instead of using that heat to boil water and create steam, the heat is transferred directly by the pressurized CO2 to generate additional energy with no additional emissions.
“We’re essentially building miniature combined-cycle plants,” says Shuham.
Using supercritical CO2 also can eliminate or greatly reduce water use in the power generation process—something that’s drawn intense scrutiny when it comes to data centers. Importantly, the CO2 involved operates in a closed-loop system, meaning that it doesn’t have to be refilled. Cofounder Matthew Carlson, who researched supercritical CO2 for more than a decade, likens it to refrigeration systems that circulate CO2 to facilitate cooling.
'Everything we know about space travel is going to change within a decade': The fusion breakthrough that could unlock a path to the stars
Fusion-powered space travel has long held the promise of rapid trips across the solar system: Mars in weeks, Saturn in months, Pluto in years.
For decades, such possibilities have remained theoretical, like something plucked out of a science fiction novel. But several companies are now working to build practical nuclear fusion propulsion engines, with significant milestones being hit.
Pulsar Fusion, a U.K.-based startup, hopes to launch a demonstration mission to space in 2027, while Princeton University and Helicity Space in the U.S. are continuing their own work on fusion drives.
If any of these efforts prove successful, missions across the solar system for robots and humans could be unlocked like never before, turning us into a true spacefaring species.
"If we continue on the current trajectory, everything we know about space travel is going to change within a decade," Stephane Lintner, CEO and co-founder of Helicity Space, told Live Science.
But is it too good to be true? Can the dream of nuclear fusion propulsion ever be fully realized, or will it remain a sketchbook fantasy? After decades of dreaming, we might be on the cusp of finding out...
Scientists made a paper battery you can swallow to power internal medical devices
Scientists built a swallowable paper battery that can power medical devices inside the body and then gradually break down after its job is done.
So far, the battery has been tested only in pigs, in which it powered devices for up to three days. If proven safe and effective in people, the battery could someday power temporary devices inside the gut while avoiding surgery to retrieve a conventional battery from the body when the device is no longer needed.
"I'm very excited about this work," said Reza Ghodssi, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Maryland who was not involved in the study. "The battery is one component that takes up most of the space in an ingestible device, so anything that can provide the required power while reducing the size of the capsule is very promising."
Examples of ingestible medical devices include those that detect bleeding, dispense medicines, or stimulate specific tissues or organs.
How does the battery work?
Conventional batteries used in ingestible devices are not only large; they also need to stay sealed to prevent their internal materials from leaking into surrounding tissue and causing damage. The new battery, described Monday (Sept. 21) in the journal Nature Chemical Engineering, is made from materials that gradually dissolve in the acidic gastrointestinal tract and can then be safely absorbed without leaving behind harmful fragments or toxic byproducts...
The hydrogen in your body and present in every molecule of water came from the Big Bang. There are no other appreciable sources of hydrogen in the universe. The carbon in your body was made by nuclear fusion in the interior of stars, as was the oxygen. Much of the iron in your body was made during supernovas of stars that occurred long ago and far away. The gold in your jewelry was likely made from neutron stars during collisions that may have been visible as short-duration gamma-ray bursts or gravitational wave events. Elements like phosphorus and copper are present in our bodies in only small amounts but are essential to the functioning of all known life. The featured periodic table is color coded to indicate humanity's best guess as to the nuclear origin of all known elements. The sites of nuclear creation of some elements, such as copper, are not really well known and are continuing topics of observational and computational research.
Image Credit: NASA's GSFC, SVS
Uncovering gravity's impact on the human genome
The Human Genome Project was launched in 1990, preceded by decades of breakthroughs in genetics. It eventually gave us a sequence of the human genome. Yet, while the physical rules behind the genome's organization remain an active area of research, many questions are still largely unanswered. Among these is the impact of an omnipresent force influencing life on Earth: gravity.
A new study, which appears in the journal Science Advances, addresses some of these weighty questions by using an innovative technique: creating a zero-gravity, or microgravity, environment to reveal gravity's impact on a human cell.
The method serves two purposes: isolating gravity's impact on the genome by removing it as a factor in experiments while, at the same time, showing how the genome functions in outer space, where gravity is nonexistent.
"On Earth, the role of gravity is intriguing—it is a constant mechanical stress on everything," explains Alexandra Zidovska, an associate professor in New York University's Department of Physics, who led the study.
"We wanted to know what gravity's role is in the genome's organization and function here on Earth. To uncover it, you have to remove gravity as a force, so we simulated zero gravity in our experiments."
"Beyond Earth, the question of lack of gravity is also compelling: How will the human genome be affected when in outer space?" she continues.
"We think our findings can be useful in better understanding how space travel affects us."
The human genome has a complex and compact hierarchical organization. It is a one-dimensional sequence encoded in 2 meters (6.6 feet) of DNA molecules packed in three dimensions inside a cell nucleus barely 10 micrometers in size—or about the width of a silk fiber.
Its structure is directly linked to its function, and deviations from it can lead to human diseases, such as cancer and developmental afflictions. Despite their significance, the physical principles governing the genome's organization are not well understood.
"We do not know if or how the presence of gravity affects this organization and if the absence of gravity would cause genomic aberrations," observes Zidovska...
Human brain is two separate organs, Stanford Medicine-led research finds
For centuries, scientists have thought of the brain as a single, unified organ. But new research led by Stanford Medicine reveals that what we call the brain is two distinct organs that evolved independently over hundreds of millions of years.
The discovery overturns a prevailing model of brain development. For decades researchers have subscribed to the theory that there is a single progenitor cell early in development that gives rise to the entire brain. This model suggested all parts of the brain shared a common developmental origin.
The new research finding shows that the human brain consists of two ancient nervous systems cleverly packaged together — a more primitive part that regulates our hearts’ beating, our breathing and other functions, and another that makes us distinctly human, capable of poetry, mathematics and wondering about our own origins.
The discovery could help explain why scientists have struggled for decades to grow certain types of brain cells in the laboratory — and it opens new avenues for studying devastating diseases that affect the brain stem, such as spinal muscular atrophy (also known as SMA) and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (also known as ALS or Lou Gehrig’s disease).
“We’ve shown for the first time that the front of the brain arises from a totally different progenitor cell than the back of the brain,” said Kyle Loh, PhD, associate professor of developmental biology. “Our discovery means that we can now grow neurons from the back of the brain, the hindbrain, in a petri dish and study their functions.”
Two brains
The adult brain has three main regions: the forebrain, midbrain and hindbrain. The forebrain handles higher-level thinking — language, consciousness and abstract reasoning. In contrast, the hindbrain, located at the back of the skull and often called the brain stem, controls essential, automatic functions that keep us alive: breathing, sleeping, and regulating our heartbeat and hunger urges. The hindbrain neurons also control the muscles of the face, tongue and throat, which affect speech and swallowing.
Despite the critical importance of the hindbrain, scientists have struggled for decades to generate human hindbrain neurons in the laboratory. This gap has hampered research into devastating diseases affecting the brain stem, including spinal muscular atrophy and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis...
Webb reveals one of its largest images to date! 😲
This starry view shows the nearby star-forming region IC 348. Here, astronomers searched for brown dwarfs, objects which are less massive than the smallest stars. Read more 👉 esa.int/Science_Explor…
High quality in comments
The Moon’s got a big new crater! 🕳️
Spotted by NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, the McGetchin crater formed when a rock as big as a six-story building crashed into the Moon. It’s 141 feet [43m] deep and wider than the length of two football fields. [219m+] 🪨💥🌕
go.nasa.gov/3TzHqUf
Why is Venus hotter than Mercury, when Mercury is closer to the sun?
Given that it's the closest planet to the sun, Mercury seems like it should be the hottest planet in our solar system.
However, at a blistering 900 degrees Fahrenheit (480 degrees Celsius), Venus tops Mercury's 800 F (430 C) highest surface temperature, despite being an average of 31 million miles (50 million kilometers) farther from the sun. So how can the second planet from our star be hotter than the closest planet to it?
It all comes down to reflectivity, atmospheric composition and geological history, experts told Live Science.
Totally different atmospheres
A planet's distance from its star is not the only factor that influences the planet's temperature.
"Distance tells us how much sunlight arrives at a planet, but it does not tell us how much is reflected … absorbed, how efficiently heat escapes, or how effectively the atmosphere transports heat around the planet," Stephen Kane, an astrophysicist who studies planetary habitability at the University of California, Riverside, told Live Science in an email. "Those properties can be just as important as distance, and sometimes much more important."
Mercury makes the case in miniature. According to Kane, the planet has essentially no atmosphere, so incoming sunlight strikes bare rock directly, heating it to extreme temperatures during the day. But with barely anything overhead to trap that warmth, Mercury radiates it straight back into space the moment the sun sets. As a result, nighttime temperatures plunge from roughly 800 F (430 C) during the day to about minus 290 F (minus 180 C) at night — a swing of well over 1,000 degrees, he added.
Venus tells the opposite story. Wrapped in an atmosphere that's roughly 90 times as dense as Earth's and consists almost entirely of carbon dioxide, Venus traps heat so effectively that its surface temperature barely changes at all, no matter where the sun happens to be, Kane explained...
From 10 to 22 years: The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope's Mission Has Just Been Extended.
The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope hasn't yet reached its Sun-Earth L2 orbit and it already has some good news. NASA has announced that the mission has enough fuel to potentially double its mission length. Though initially scheduled for five years of initial observations, followed by a five year extended mission, the entire mission length could now reach 22 years.
“As a result of exquisite planning by our orbital dynamics team, brilliant execution by the operations team, and a precise launch from SpaceX, Roman has fuel for at least 22 years of potential science operations,” said Jamie Dunn, center director at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.
Fuel is the Roman's only consumable resource and is the limiting factor for mission length. Several things contributed to its new, extended mission length, starting with the precise launch. The SpaceX Falcon Heavy helped set the stage with its accurate low-Earth orbit departure burn. The more accurate this is, the less fuel is required for the Roman's subsequent burns.
The next reason is the spacecraft's actual weight vs planned weight.
“A spacecraft’s mass changes throughout the design and build process, so we base the propellant budget on a set maximum value so we won’t come up short,” said Alison Rao, the Roman propulsion lead at NASA Goddard. “We track the propellant needed based on actual mass throughout integration and testing as well, to make sure we have wiggle room. Since Roman’s was lower than we budgeted for, we were able to fill the propellant tanks to their capacity rather than only filling them as much as we needed to for the 10-year requirement.”
As antibiotic resistance grows, researchers turn to copper to fight infections
When bacteria invade the urinary tract, the body has its own arsenal for fighting back. Among those weapons is an unlikely tool: copper. Researchers at the Texas A&M College of Veterinary Medicine and Biomedical Sciences (VMBS) are investigating how the body uses the essential trace mineral to fight urinary tract infections (UTIs), how bacteria manage to survive that attack and whether those discoveries could eventually lead to new ways of treating infections that are increasingly difficult to control with antibiotics.
The research builds on previous findings from the lab of Dr. Sarguru Subash, an associate professor in the VMBS Department of Veterinary Pathobiology, showing that the body pumps copper into the urinary tract during infection to kill UTI-causing bacteria.
"We know that copper plays an important role, but that also raises so many questions about how these pathogens adapt to the presence of increased copper," Subash said.
"If we better understand how the bacteria overcome the host-imposed copper resistance, then we can develop therapies that make the bacteria more susceptible to copper and, more broadly, to everything that the immune system throws at them."
Turning a nutrient into a weapon
Copper is an essential nutrient for both people and animals, but in the right environment and concentration, it can also be toxic to bacteria.
The immune system takes advantage of that property when responding to infection.
As part of the body's early, or innate, immune response, specialized immune cells can engulf invading bacteria and expose them to an antimicrobial mixture that includes copper. During a UTI, Subash's previous research has shown that the body increases copper levels in the urine.
But bacteria aren't defenseless. Because they encounter copper naturally in the environment, many bacteria have evolved mechanisms that allow them to remove or detoxify the metal.
"Bacteria do have adaptations, but when it's presented in the context of this cocktail, the bacterial defense mechanisms are not as effective," Subash said. "Sometimes the balance tips in favor of the host, so we can control the infections. Other times, the balance tips in favor of pathogens. As a result, we get clinical disease."
That creates what Subash describes as a tug-of-war between the host and pathogen: Sometimes, the immune system successfully controls bacterial growth before it causes noticeable illness; other times, bacteria overcome those defenses, allowing an infection to become established.
Understanding what tips that balance could reveal new vulnerabilities that researchers can target to control bacterial infections.
Learning without a brain—how bacteria store memories and remember the past like artificial neural networks
Learning is often thought to require a brain. But learning is a broad concept that does not necessarily depend on neurons.
If an organism uses information from past experiences to shape its future decisions, it is also learning.
Research from my lab, published in the journal PRX Life, shows that even a single bacterium can learn from experience, store memories of the past and use those memories to prepare for the future.
Keeping track of nutrients
Bacteria live in environments that change constantly and on many different timescales. In the human gut, for example, nutrient levels go up and down, temperatures shift, and antibiotic threats come and go.
To survive, a bacterium has to respond quickly to what is happening right now while still preserving useful information about what it recently experienced. Adapting too quickly leaves the bacterium vulnerable to changing conditions, while forgetting too readily makes it unable to anticipate a recurring threat.
🌐 What is a neural network, and how does it "learn"?
How does a bacterium manage this balancing act? This question interested me as a computational biophysicist who studies how living systems process information and adapt to changing environments.
To investigate whether single-celled organisms such as bacteria can learn from past experience, my colleagues and I used what's called a microfluidic device to track the behavior of tens of thousands of individual E. coli cells as we switched their nutrient supply on and off at different rates.
We found that bacteria not only react to current nutrient levels in their environment, they also keep track of their nutrient history to cope with changing conditions.
If the bacteria were simply reacting to their present environment, they would respond to a sudden pulse of food in exactly the same way, regardless of whether their previous environment was stable or rapidly fluctuating. Instead, when exposed to the same influx of nutrients, bacteria that had just experienced a feast-and-famine environment adapted much faster than bacteria coming from a stable environment.
Because the immediate conditions were identical for both bacteria, we reasoned that the difference in their behavior must originate from a stored internal record of their past rather than a simple reaction to their present...
August hottest month ever recorded globally as huge El Niño emerges
Europe's climate monitor said Thursday that August was the hottest month ever recorded around the world and warned of worse to come as an unprecedented El Niño pattern grows stronger.
Global temperatures over land and sea soared to all-time highs in August and capped an extreme summer of heat waves and wildfires that ranked as the hottest on record for western Europe and the contiguous United States.
The Copernicus Climate Change Service said global average air temperatures in August were 16.96°C (62.5°F)—surpassing the previous record for a single month, set in July 2023, by 0.01°C. The EU monitor said it considered the two months joint-highest given the narrow difference.
Copernicus observations go back to 1940, but evidence from ice cores, tree rings and coral skeletons puts today's climate in a much starker historical context.
"Humans haven't seen temperatures as hot as today for, arguably, at least the last 100,000 years," Samantha Burgess from the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts, which oversees Copernicus, told AFP.
U.N. climate chief Simon Stiell said the "evidence is irrefutable: this is the spiraling price of humanity's fossil fuel addiction."
Striking
The exceptional summer also drove ocean temperatures to record highs for three straight months, said Simon van Gennip from Mercator Ocean International on Thursday.
Marine heat waves have persisted in some overheated basins for more than 60 days, "highlighting just how unusual and persistent" the situation was, he said.
Global sea surface temperatures set a new all-time daily high in August and equaled the hottest month for oceans ever recorded.
Copernicus said the main driver was global heating from burning coal, oil and gas, but also sharply rising temperatures in the Pacific, where a historic El Niño is gaining strength.
El Niño episodes are characterized by unusually warm Pacific waters but trigger major global changes in rainfall and winds, raising the odds of wild weather thousands of miles away.
Global forecasters predict this year's event will peak later this year at an intensity never observed in the modern era.
On Thursday, the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) said there was a 75% chance it "would exceed the strength of previous El Niño events dating back to 1950."
Copernicus said its influence was already being felt in Indonesia, where a long, intense dry season has fed wildfires that have torched swaths of Borneo island.
But climate scientists said the worst was yet to come—and August's extraordinary heat was just a preview
We can finally measure the damage each new coal, gas or oil project will do to people and nature
We have long known every tonne of carbon dioxide matters to the climate. But governments keep approving new fossil fuel projects—even as climate change worsens.
Until now, it's been difficult to say how much damage and extra warming a specific project will cause. Fossil fuel companies—and government agencies approving their projects—have often relied on what's known as the "drop in the ocean" defense.
While backers concede a new project will add more carbon dioxide emissions to the atmosphere, they say those emissions are tiny compared with the global total and that it's almost impossible to track damage attributable to an individual project.
This defense won't work anymore. In recent years, attribution science has advanced rapidly, allowing scientists to pinpoint the role of climate change in making disasters and extreme weather more likely.
Our new open-source climate tool—the Carbon Impacts Tracer—goes one step further. It shows how much a new project will warm the planet and how much damage it will cause across eight areas, from crop losses to heat wave deaths in Europe.
This will help hold fossil fuel companies and governments approving these projects accountable for the damage the projects will cause...
Japan switches on its first full-stack room-temperature quantum computer — and scientists plan to scale it up to 10,000 qubits
Researchers in Japan have switched on "Shunkai," a neutral atom quantum computer that scientists hope to scale into a 10,000-qubit behemoth by March 2031.
Shunkai is the first full-stack system of its kind in Japan, meaning it features the software, control and hardware layers needed to read user inputs and return a result — not unlike a conventional PC. In theory, that means it should be easier for researchers to get some meaningful use out of the machine, with the team behind Shunkai planning to open it up to external users over the coming years.
In a statement, project lead Kenji Ohmori, a professor of photo-molecular science at the Institute for Molecular Science, said researchers' use of Shunkai would "lead to ripple effects on various fields in industry, academia, and government around the world."
The team behind the new machine plans to integrate it into an existing shared supercomputing facility to create a quantum-GPU hybrid computing center.
Quantum computers: Powerful but impractical
Unlike traditional, or "classical," computers, quantum computers operate according to the strange laws of quantum physics. In quantum systems, qubits — in the form of superconducting circuits, trapped ions or photons (among other modalities) — represent the fundamental building blocks of quantum information. These can exist as a 1, 0, or a "superposition" of both states at once...
Researchers Reconstruct Face of Oldest Known Homo sapiens
In the early 1960s, a worker extracting minerals at Jebel Irhoud, in Morocco, uncovered a skull with strikingly human features.
Named Irhoud 1, the fossil was initially identified as an African Neanderthal variant about 40,000 years old.
Later dating studies pushed the age of the find back, to between 100,000 and 200,000 years in 1991 and to about 160,000 years in 2007.
In 2017, two studies reclassified Irhoud 1 and associated remains as Homo sapiens and gave them an age of roughly 315,000 years, making them the oldest known representatives of the species.
“In 2017, the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology (MPI-EVA) publicly released image and video data regarding the three-dimensional digital reconstruction of the Jebel Irhoud skull,” said corresponding author Dr. Johari Yap Abdullah, a researcher at the Universiti Sains Malaysia and Saveetha University, and his colleagues.
“The three-dimensional model in question constitutes a composite skull, structured through the spatial integration of multiple specimens excavated from the same stratigraphic unit.”
The MPI-EVA model is dominated by the Irhoud 1 fossil, the original 1961 find, which supplies the braincase and upper face.
A mandible from another individual, Irhoud 11, and fragments from other specimens fill the gaps...
Biology Might Not Be Quantum, but Its Math Is Quantumlike
Two decades ago, scientists seemed on the verge of understanding biology in a new, quantum way.
Life unfolds over an incomprehensible span of scales, from our planet-enveloping biosphere at one end, to individual cell-building biomolecules at the other. Even at its most microscopic, though, biology doesn’t really reach down to the quantum realm, in which particles act like waves, become entangled with one another, and exist in superpositions of multiple states at once. But scientists in the field of quantum biology are searching for ways that organisms might be able to push quantumness into the space, time, and temperature domains relevant to life, to make use of its strange properties.
In photosynthesis, for example, organisms use specialized pigments and proteins to harvest light with nearly perfect quantum efficiency; they convert almost every incoming photon into useful chemical energy. In 2007, new evidence suggested that life might accomplish this feat by taking advantage of a quantum effect called coherence. The result buoyed the controversial idea that, despite being a warm, wet, and decidedly classical environment, a living cell could maintain — and even exploit — fragile quantum states.
Gregory Scholes, a chemist at Princeton University, was initially enthusiastic about the result. He and colleagues followed up with experiments on photosynthesizing proteins and pigments and came away with similar conclusions. But today, Scholes is skeptical that quantum effects play a role in life. In fact, he’s convinced that the way forward for quantum biology might not be quantum at all. Rather than taking advantage of genuine quantum effects, Scholes proposes, life might be imitating them instead. In several papers published over the past three years, Scholes and colleagues have shown that complex networks of classical objects can conspire to produce phenomena that mathematically mimic quantum objects.
Don’t be fooled: The states that these networks produce are not truly quantum; they’re only “quantumlike.” They arise when many interacting, oscillating parts add up to a collective whole whose behavior obeys the same mathematics that makes predictions about the quantum world.
Could negative mass exist and be observed?
Unlike electric charge, as far as we know all mass is positive, and positive masses attract one another. Could negative mass exist, and if so, what would be the ramifications?
Antigravity between a positive mass and a hypothetical negative mass has received a fair bit of attention in both physics and science fiction over the years. For example, in 1901's "First Men in the Moon" author H. G. Wells imagines a substance he calls "cavorite" which creates a negative force of gravity and thus acts as a gravity shield. In Newton's theory of gravity, negative mass would effectively appear as his same equation but with the gravitational constant G replaced by -G. But Einstein's version of gravity, general relativity, is not so kind, and does not seem to consistently allow anti-gravity.
In a new paper in Physics of the Dark Universe, Shin'ichi Nojiri from Japan and S.D. Odintsovc from Spain dig deeper into the possibility of negative mass objects (NMOs) and conclude that the idea may not be as exotic as is thought. Using theoretical tools, they show that negative mass "does not always lead to any inconsistency."
Where negative mass could arise
Mass comes from a particle's interaction with the Higgs field, and most of a particle's mass is actually binding energy (remember Einstein: m=E/c²) between its constituents. Protons, 1,836 times more massive than electrons, are composed of three quarks and gluons bound together. The quark masses are only about 9% of the proton's mass, according to lattice gauge theories of quantum chromodynamics. The rest comes from the field energy of gluons that mediate the dynamics inside the proton...
Genes that help flatworms regenerate their brains revealed
The human brain is terrible at healing itself from injury or disease. But some animals can harness their own cellular abilities not only to repair injuries but also to regrow their brains entirely. Researchers from the University of Georgia have pinpointed several of the genes that make brain regeneration possible in one type of flatworm.
"Big picture: We would like to come up with ideas for how to better empower the human brain to regenerate itself," said Rachel Roberts-Galbraith, corresponding author of the study and an associate professor in UGA's Franklin College of Arts and Sciences.
"The understanding of brain regeneration that we can develop using simple animals gives us a reason to be optimistic. It's not an inherent property of brains that makes them bad at regeneration. It's something specific to humans."
Flatworm and human brains are both made up of networks of specialized cells called neurons. These cells communicate with each other by sending electrical or chemical signals. Some neurons react to stimuli, such as light or touch, while others control movement.
Flatworms use stem cells to replace neurons after injury. Humans also have stem cells, but they are unable to transform into new neurons effectively enough to heal injuries. The new study sheds light on how shared genes work in flatworms and lays the groundwork for researchers to investigate similar pathways that might be activated in humans to design better therapies for traumatic brain injuries or diseases.
Some flatworms can regrow tissues, muscles and even their brains
Planarians can be found in freshwater, saltwater and even on land. They don't have circulatory or respiratory systems. But they do have stem cells that can change into whatever their body needs at a given time, making them valuable animals for brain and cognitive research.
Using stem cells, planarians can regrow their entire body from just a sliver of a body fragment. They can rebuild tissues, muscles and even their brains.
But how do these tiny creatures know what type of cell to make and where to send it?
The Sun Is Physically Capable of Producing a "Superflare" According To A New Study
We have long known that the Sun is active. It “flares” quite often, sending huge amounts of energy off in a certain direction - sometimes directly at Earth. But we also know that, compared to other Sun-like stars, it seems relatively quiet, and not capable of producing the “superflares” we sometimes see in its stellar equivalents. That sounds like great news for humanity, and some scientists have even argued that lack of superflares was a critical impetus for the development of complex life on Earth. But a new paper from Natalie Krivova of the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research and her co-authors in the journal Philosophical Transactions A calls the assumption that our Sun is incapable of such dramatic outbursts into question. That also means that, eventually, our highly technological society could bear the brunt of one of them.
Scientists have been collecting data on the Sun for decades, and one of the most interesting features they watch out for are solar flares. These massive outbursts of energy occur when the twisted magnetic fields located in what are known as the Sun’s “Active Regions” (ARs) snap and reconnect, releasing a huge amount of stored energy. Commonly known as “sunspots”, ARs also leave behind a residual glowing area known as “flare ribbons” that occur after their high-power snap-back.
Using data collected by NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory between 2010 and 2016, the authors analyzed what they believed to be a critical relationship - between the total area of an Active Region, the size of its resultant flare ribbons, and the total energy released during their creation. They found a very accurate statistical correlation that also makes sense intuitively - the larger the active region, the larger the ribbon area, and the more maximum potential flare energy. And critically, they found the flare energy scales exponentially with the ribbon area...
We may soon be able to read long-lost ancient scrolls damaged by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius
X-ray technology and artificial intelligence—along with the discovery of lead in the ink of fragments from a collection of ancient Roman scrolls—could soon help scientists read long-lost texts buried by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 CE, according to a study published Sept. 16, 2026, in the journal PLOS One by Douglas Seiler, an affiliate of the University of California, Berkeley, U.S.; Jacob Michael LaManna of the National Institute of Standards and Technology, U.S.; David Kreimer of the University of California, Berkeley, U.S.; and colleagues.
The Herculaneum papyri scrolls were discovered in the ruins of the town of Herculaneum, near Naples, Italy. During the volcanic eruption, the scrolls were covered by 65–70 feet (20–21 meters) of rock and ash, "carbonizing" them in the extreme heat and making them very brittle. While some of the scrolls have been opened and read, revealing previously unknown writings by Epicurus and other ancient thinkers, many have proven too fragile to study.
Lead offers a clearer signal
Recently, AI and X-ray tomography have allowed researchers to virtually "unroll" some of the scrolls and read some of the text. That said, X-rays can have a hard time distinguishing the text because the ink and papyrus are made of similar materials: carbon. But some of the Herculaneum scroll letters have been found to contain lead. Since X-rays can more easily distinguish between papyrus and lead, the authors of this new paper suggest scanning the scrolls for lead and then attempting to virtually unroll those that contain it.
To test this, the team recreated some carbonized scrolls by writing on new papyrus using ink with various concentrations of lead, then heating the scrolls in a high-temperature furnace and carbonizing them. X-ray fluorescence was able to detect lead in the scrolls at each lead concentration level, and X-ray tomography, combined with a custom software program, allowed the team to reread some of the words they had written on these scrolls.
How advertising turns our insecurities into profit—and how you can resist the manipulation
Have you ever bought something not because you wanted it, but because you were afraid of what might happen if you didn't? Maybe you worried about looking older, falling behind at work or simply not fitting in.Source: Phys.org
While marketing often promises an aspirational lifestyle, some of the most effective campaigns work in the opposite direction: making you feel bad about your current reality, then presenting a product as the solution.
This is the logic of pain-point advertising, and emotions are central to its effectiveness.
Emotional content in advertising can be framed positively or negatively. When advertisers choose to frame it negatively, they aim to show that not using their product could lead to negative experiences, often illustrated by the characters' negative emotions in the ad.
How pain-point advertising works
Companies that develop goods and services need to establish a presence in the market, stimulate consumer demand and generate profits. Advertising uses a range of strategies to achieve those goals, but emotional content remains a staple across the industry.
Research in cognitive and behavioral science suggests that consumers don't make decisions through rational calculation alone, and that emotions play an important role.
One reason may be the way our brains make sense of the world. The human brain is a predictive machine that constantly uses past experiences to anticipate what will happen next.
Throughout our lives, we accumulate experiences that help us form increasingly accurate expectations and make better decisions. When our experiences confirm those expectations, there is little reason for the brain to change course. We can continue relying on what we already know.
But when reality contradicts what we expected, the mismatch can trigger a negative emotional response. The discrepancy signals that something about our expectations or behavior may need to change.
This is the very mechanism that pain-point advertising exploits. For instance, an advertisement might draw attention to a gap between how we see ourselves and how we believe we should look. The advertised product is then presented as a way to close that gap...
Scientists finally figured out the temperature of T. rex's blood — and it was as hot as ours
Tyrannosaurus rex was a hottie with a body temperature similar to our own, according to a new analysis of their teeth. MThe finding supports the idea that T. rex was a fast, energetic predator and scavenger, not an animal that basked in the sun to gain energy like most modern-day reptiles.
T. rex, which lived between about 68 million and 66 million years ago, at the end of the Cretaceous period (143.1 million to 66 million years ago), was one of the largest carnivorous dinosaurs that ever lived.
Previous studies have already suggested that T. rex and its relatives were warm blooded, but now scientists have estimated the dinosaur's body temperature for the first time by studying different isotopes, or forms, of the same chemical elements in the enamel of three T. rex teeth from specimens found in the Hell Creek Formation in Montana.
Rare, heavy isotopes of carbon and oxygen bond together differently in growing tooth enamel depending on the temperature. The number of bonds formed between these rare isotopes is greater at cooler temperatures than it is at warmer temperatures, which means warm-blooded, or endothermic animals, that can regulate their own body temperature, have fewer of these chemical bonds in their teeth than cold-blooded, or ectothermic, animals, which rely on their environment for warmth...
Human embryo base editing can reach all cells but causes unpredictable genetic changes
A study by researchers at Columbia University Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons has found that new cutting-edge techniques can accurately edit genes in human embryos—giving scientists indispensable tools for understanding normal human development—but has also uncovered important risks that currently preclude the use of the techniques in the clinic.
Editing the genome is an essential technique for scientists seeking to understand the genome. Editing genes in human embryos allows us to understand the earliest steps of human development. Early human embryos accrue a surprising amount of DNA damage as they grow, and most human embryos made with IVF stop their development in the first few days.
"By introducing such damage using editors, we are starting to understand how human embryos handle damage in their genomes. In the long term, we hope to learn how to prevent genetic and developmental abnormalities during IVF to create more efficient, safer and more affordable fertility treatments," says Dieter Egli, the study's leader and associate professor of developmental cell biology in the Department of Pediatrics.
In the study, published Sept. 9 in Nature, Egli's team used base editing—a more meticulous genetic editor than earlier techniques—to make changes in individual letters in the DNA of single-cell human embryos. They then followed each embryo's development for 6–7 days (a stage when IVF embryos can be implanted) to determine if the edit was made correctly and passed on to all cells in the embryo. Remarkably, in some experiments, the editing was 100% successful and development was apparently normal.
But the editing sometimes caused unpredictable changes and is not safe to use in the clinic. Editing human embryos has the potential to give people who carry disease-causing mutations an opportunity to have healthy children through IVF. "But given our findings, it is currently not possible to do so safely," says Egli.
"As a scientist, the first goal is to uncover new knowledge, which we hope will lead to new ways to help people. But identifying the risks is just as important because it draws the boundaries for meaningful use of a powerful technology. I think our study will discourage inappropriate use of these techniques in the clinic because we clearly demonstrate the risks."
Sometimes your eyes need a minute to focus when you wake up. Roman's Wide Field Instrument just woke up for the first time EVER, and scientists have started adjusting its "eyes" so they can focus on the bigger picture. Check out its first test image above.
NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope team has successfully activated the Wide Field Instrument, a 300-megapixel infrared camera that will allow scientists to explore wide swaths of the cosmos very quickly without sacrificing exquisite detail.
Roman’s planet imager — the Coronagraph Instrument — also stretched its digital, electronic, and mechanical “limbs” as part of an initial test after waking up earlier this month.
These steps are part of a monthslong series of calibrations and tests, as Roman continues its million-mile journey to its destination at the second Lagrange point, L2.
Read more go.nasa.gov/4j51w30
Healthy Foods Like Spinach May Worsen Gut Inflammation in IBD
The compound, called oxalate, is abundant in foods such as spinach, almonds, and sweet potatoes. It is best known for contributing to certain kidney stones, but new research suggests that oxalate left inside the digestive tract may also aggravate intestinal inflammation in people with Crohn’s disease or ulcerative colitis.
Published in Cellular and Molecular Gastroenterology and Hepatology (CMGH), the study combined patient data with experiments in mice and cultured immune cells. The work was led by postdoctoral scholar Anna Salvador, PhD, RD, LDN, in the laboratory of Shehzad Z. Sheikh, MD, PhD, professor of medicine and genetics at the UNC School of Medicine.
What to know about Europe's push to compete in space
Key figures from Europe's space industry and other international players have converged on Paris to discuss how to advance the continent's ambitions in a global market dominated by the United States.
The two-day International Space Summit that started Wednesday gathers officials, astronauts, researchers and industry leaders from about 120 countries to discuss the future of the space industry and pursue potential business deals.
"Europe is taking its destiny into its own hands, including in space," French President Emmanuel Macron said in a message posted on X. He called for innovation and investment "to build a powerful Europe, independent even in space."
Here's what to know about Europe's efforts to compete in the global space race.
Europe seeks to build up sovereign space capabilities
Macron's space summit underlines his push to reduce Europe's reliance on the U.S. for vital tech services, which extends to space launches as well as satellites for communications and reconnaissance...
Ice Age origins of one of humanity's oldest drug habits discovered
A team of Griffith University archaeologists has uncovered evidence that humans were using mind-altering substances much earlier than previously supposed.
Led by Professor Adam Brumm from Griffith's Australian Research Centre for Human Evolution (ARCHE), and involving ARCHE colleagues Associate Professors Carney Matheson and Michelle Langley, the team combined biochemical and archaeological evidence to trace the prehistoric roots of one of the world's most popular addictive stimulants, "betel nut," an ancient drug used throughout much of the Asia-Pacific region.
The group's research, conducted in collaboration with Indonesian archaeologists from Makassar's University of Hasanuddin and the National Research and Innovation Agency (BRIN), shows that the use of betel nut as a drug emerged among some Indonesian communities up to 25,000 years ago, predating the previously suggested Neolithic or Bronze Age origins (about 3,500 years ago).