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Scientists Uncover Cause of Inflammatory Bowel Disease Solving Decades-Old Mystery
For decades, inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) has been treated as a single disorder, even though patients often experience dramatically different symptoms, disease courses, and responses to therapy. A new study suggests there may be a good reason for that: what doctors call IBD could actually be a collection of distinct diseases driven by different biological mechanisms.
Researchers from the University of Oxford’s Nuffield Department of Medicine, Newcastle University’s Translational and Clinical Research Institute, and the Department of Immunology at Cambridge University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust have identified a key driver of disease in a subset of patients. Their findings, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, reveal an immune malfunction that not only triggers uncontrolled inflammation but also helps explain one of the strongest genetic risk factors linked to IBD.
The team analyzed more than 4,900 people with Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis, the two main forms of IBD. They discovered that some patients develop autoimmune responses against interleukin-10 (IL-10), a crucial molecule that normally acts as one of the body’s primary brakes on inflammation. They also found that this immune attack is closely tied to a genetic variant long associated with severe IBD.
Under normal circumstances, IL-10 helps prevent the immune system from overreacting and damaging healthy tissue. But when antibodies block IL-10, this protective mechanism is disabled, allowing inflammation to persist unchecked and potentially fueling disease.
What happens to microplastics when swallowed? In earthworms, they do not leave the digestive tract
Globally, humanity now produces a staggering 450 million tonnes of plastic every year. From food and drink containers to cosmetics packaging, sewage pipes, window frames and polyester clothing, we use plastics in almost every area of life. And nearly one-quarter of them end up in the environment, where they very slowly degrade into microscopic pieces.
These microplastics—particles between 1 micrometer and 5 millimeters wide—have been found in the deepest parts of the oceans, at the top of the tallest mountains, at the sparsely populated poles and even inside the human body.
It is very difficult for living organisms, including humans, to avoid ingesting microplastics. If these microplastics cross the lining of the digestive tract to enter the bloodstream or other tissues, they will persist in the body. Until now, it has been difficult for researchers to accurately assess whether this is happening.
Our research team has developed a new technique to identify the location of microplastics within an organism without dissecting it. We tested it on earthworms and discovered that microplastics ranging in size from 5 to 53 micrometers do not readily cross the lining of the gut to enter other tissues in the worms...
A Decade-Long Physics Mystery May Finally Be Solved
Hydrogen is the simplest element in the universe and the first entry on the periodic table. Each hydrogen atom contains just one proton in its nucleus and one electron orbiting around it. Because of this simplicity, hydrogen has long served as an important testing ground for studying the fundamental forces and particles that shape the universe.
Yet one seemingly basic property of hydrogen has puzzled physicists for more than a decade: the exact size of its proton. Known as the proton radius puzzle, the debate centered on conflicting measurements of the proton’s radius.
Researchers at Colorado State University (CSU) now report an exceptionally precise measurement that appears to settle the issue. The results, highlighted in Physical Review Letters, strengthen confidence in the Standard Model of particle physics while providing a foundation for future research.
Precision Measurement Confirms Standard Model
Previous experiments produced conflicting answers. Measurements that used electrons suggested one proton radius, while studies using heavier particles indicated a slightly smaller value. The disagreement was comparable to measuring the same house with two reliable tools and getting different dimensions.
The inconsistency raised important questions. It suggested either that earlier experiments contained hidden sources of error or that physicists might need to revise some of the fundamental principles used to describe the universe.
The new CSU measurement places the proton’s radius at about 0.84 femtometers, compared with the previously accepted value of 0.876 femtometers. Although the difference is extremely small, it is significant for precision physics. An independent team at the Max Planck Institute reached a similar conclusion using a different technique, providing additional confidence that the long-running discrepancy has finally been resolved.
While the adjustment to the proton’s size is tiny, its implications are substantial for our understanding of matter and the laws governing the universe...
The two-part Viking 1 spacecraft reached Mars orbit 50 years ago. A few days later, the images it returned of the proposed Viking 1 landing site were met with both elation and shock.Source: @NASAhistory
Mars as viewed by Viking 1's cameras did not look like the planet Mariner 9 saw. The Viking 1 Lander's proposed landing site, chosen after years of debate, lay on the floor of what looked like a deeply incised river bed. America's first Mars landing—scheduled for July 4, 1976, America's Bicentennial—would have to be delayed so a less risky landing spot could be found.
📷 This mosaic of Mars is a compilation of images captured by the Viking Orbiter 1. The center of the scene shows the entire Valles Marineris canyon system.
Food Waste Becomes a Powerful Carbon Trap in Climate Breakthrough
Keeping global warming below 1.5°C over the long term will require more than major cuts in greenhouse gas emissions. According to climate scenarios outlined in the latest Assessment Report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the world will also need technologies capable of removing and storing hundreds of billions of tons of carbon dioxide (CO2) already in the atmosphere.
One approach receiving increasing attention is “direct air capture” (DAC), a technology that removes CO2 directly from the air. Researchers and startups have spent years trying to improve DAC systems. One of the earliest commercial companies in the field is Climeworks, an ETH Zurich spin-off founded in 2009. Despite progress, direct air capture remains costly and requires significant amounts of energy.
Food Waste Turned Into Carbon Capture Material
Researchers at ETH Zurich have now developed a new DAC approach that could make the process more efficient and sustainable. In a study published in the journal PNAS, a team led by materials scientist Raffaele Mezzenga used waste products from dairy and tofu manufacturing to capture CO2.
Large amounts of protein-rich liquid are generated during the production of dairy products and tofu. Only a small portion is reused in food manufacturing, while much of the rest is discarded. The researchers extracted proteins from this waste stream and assembled them into long, thread-like structures called amyloid fibrils. These fibrils were then combined with potassium hydroxide and formed into porous beads measuring about half a centimeter to one centimeter in diameter.
“The resulting material is like a sponge that can absorb large quantities of CO2 via the potassium hydroxide,” Mezzenga explains.
When exposed to air, the potassium hydroxide inside the beads reacts with CO2 and converts it into hydrogen carbonate, a salt of carbonic acid. This reaction removes carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
“In our tests with ambient air, we were able to extract 97 milligrams of CO2 with one gram of material,” explains Zhou Dong, a postdoctoral researcher in Mezzenga’s group and lead author of the study.
According to Dong, this performance is exceptionally strong, exceeding the capacity of conventional DAC technologies by 10 to 50 percent. Based on the team’s calculations, one kilogram of the protein beads could theoretically capture and isolate 100 grams of CO2 during a single operating cycle.
Lower Energy Carbon Removal
Most existing direct air capture systems rely on heat and negative pressure to release the captured carbon dioxide from the absorbent material. The recovered CO2 can then be stored or converted into other products, allowing it to be removed from the atmosphere over the long term. However, generating the necessary heat requires substantial energy, making DAC economically and environmentally viable mainly in places with abundant renewable energy.
The ETH Zurich team developed a different solution. To release the captured carbon dioxide, the protein beads are sprayed alternately with a mild acid and a mild base for approximately 10 minutes at room temperature. This process breaks the chemical bonds holding the CO2, allowing it to be collected.
The acid, base, and protein beads can all be reused afterward.
TIMELAPSE OF THE UNIVERSE: 13 Billion Years in 10 Minutes • Updated and Remastered
🌐 Watch in 4KSource: melodysheep
What happens if you shrink the entire history of the universe into 10 minutes? Watch as millions of years fly by in seconds, and human history is reduced to just a single frame at the end of the experience, showcasing just how old and vast our universe is.
In 2018 I released Timelapse of the Entire Universe, an experimental video that compressed all of time into a 10 minute scale, pieced together from a spectrum of different visual sources. 8 years later and I have finally developed the skills to reimagine this video in my own style and my own words.
It's narrated by my friend Toby, aka EpicSpaceMan. If you don't know his work please check it out!
I'm also excited to say this video is now becoming a planetarium film. The adaptation process is nearly complete, and will be coming to immersive theaters soon.
Around the World, These Building Solutions Keep Things Local
It is an oft-quoted—and always alarming—statistic that 34 percent of the world’s carbon emissions are caused by the construction industry, with a significant portion borne specifically from the production of concrete required to erect a standard structure today. At the same time, we are facing a global housing crisis, as a large population of people moves from rural towns into cities, outpacing the number of affordable, high-quality units being built to accommodate them.
So how does one put these two crises in alignment? Around the world, innovative architects, scientists, and engineers are exploring building techniques and materials that can create places to live without hastening climate change. The secret? Keeping it local.
The concept of embodied carbon—the emissions released across the lifespan of a material, from extraction, manufacturing, and transportation down to disposal—dictates that the most sustainable architecture is built from its surroundings. Forward-thinking minds are tapping both high- and low-tech building methods and materials in every region of the world. From solar-powered pods that can handle the most extreme weather on Earth to residences built, literally, from the earth that surrounds them, each project presents a solution specific to its site, culture, and vernacular—but that can potentially be adapted for use in farflung places.
The design lessons that can be gleaned from all the examples below are found in their commitment to both planet and people.
Breakthrough Fentanyl Vaccine Could Neutralize Designer Drugs and Prevent Overdoses
Fentanyl has become one of the deadliest drugs in the United States, with fentanyl and related synthetic opioid variants now claiming more lives each year than car crashes and gun violence combined. When taken in excessive amounts, these drugs disrupt critical brain functions and can stop the signals that control breathing. Although existing treatments can reverse an overdose, they must be administered quickly to be effective.
Researchers at Scripps Research are exploring a very different strategy. Instead of treating an overdose after it happens, they have developed an experimental vaccine designed to train the immune system to neutralize fentanyl before the drug can reach the brain. Their findings, published in the Journal of Medicinal Chemistry, suggest the vaccine may protect not only against fentanyl itself but also against many fentanyl-related “designer drugs” that are modified to increase potency or avoid detection.
“What this research shows us is that we don’t have to keep playing catch-up with every new synthetic designer drug that emerges,” says senior author Kim Janda, the Ely R. Callaway, Jr. Professor of Chemistry at Scripps Research. “By training the immune system to recognize the entire fentanyl class—not just individual structures—we can stay ahead of illicit drug traffickers.”
Looking Inside Your Brain to See How Memories Work
Memory is one of the strangest abilities you possess. Your brain uses an incredibly complex biological system to preserve moments from your past that no longer exist, allowing you to revisit experiences from years ago. But memories are not always recordings of reality. In fact, every time a memory comes under the spotlight of your attention, it can melt and change a tiny bit.
What exactly is a memory, how is a moment in time stored inside your brain, and why does remembering something slowly rewrite the story of your life?
Sources & references
Think you'd never eat bugs? Research says you might—and you may even like it
People who are hesitant to try insect-based foods may enjoy the experience more than they expect—and can become more open to expanding their diets in the future, according to research published by the American Psychological Association.
The study, published in the Journal of Neuroscience, Psychology, and Economics, examined how consumers respond emotionally and physically to insect-based foods, which are increasingly being explored as a sustainable alternative to traditional animal protein sources. For example, the European Union officially recognized insects as a novel food source in 2018 and has approved several insect food sources since then. The lineup includes yellow mealworms, migratory locusts, house crickets and lesser mealworms sold frozen, dried or even powdered.
Lead author Andreia C. B. Ferreira, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Beira Interior in Portugal, and her colleagues wanted to find out more about how consumers might respond to these new options. To do so, they combined traditional surveys with neuroscience tools that measured participants' brain activity and heart rate while they sampled insect food products.
The study involved 38 adults in Portugal between the ages of 18 and 55 who had never tried insect-based foods before. Participants first completed a survey about their awareness and opinions of insect-based products. They then sampled both an insect protein bar and a cereal bar while researchers recorded their physiological responses using electroencephalography (EEG) and electrocardiography (ECG).
The researchers expected participants to have low awareness of insect-based foods, prefer the cereal bar and show stronger physiological reactions to the insect-based product. Instead, the findings revealed that people were often more curious and receptive than expected.
Making a big, life‑changing decision? Seven steps to consider
Should you marry that person? Quit a steady career to retrain? Move across the country, away from aging parents? Sit with any of these and watch your mind spin. You weigh what you'd gain against what you'd lose. You run the numbers. And still no answer arrives.
Big decisions do this to us. They are rare, life-shaping and hard to undo, and they refuse to be solved like a sum.
Researchers recently used AI to analyze more than 100,000 real dilemmas posted online. They found choices pulled in dozens of directions at once, far from the tidy two or three variables we imagine. Big decisions are messier than they look.
I study how people make life's biggest decisions. In research, I asked more than 600 people to describe their 10 biggest decisions. Thousands more have since mapped their own choices in an ongoing study. Marriage, children, career changes, house purchases and relocations come up again and again.
My study didn't hand me a checklist you can use when faced with a big decision. But it did show what separates the decisions people are later glad of from those they regretted. Read alongside the wider research, those factors fall into a rough order worth trying.
Ancient Black Holes May Have Survived a Cosmic Era Before the Big Bang
What if some of the Universe’s oldest objects are actually older than the Big Bang itself?
A new study from the University of Portsmouth suggests that ancient black holes may have survived from a time before the Universe as we know it existed. These hypothetical relics, described as “cosmic fossils,” could have endured a dramatic cosmic transition and may still be scattered throughout the cosmos today. If they exist, they could help solve one of astronomy’s biggest mysteries: the identity of dark matter, the invisible substance that appears to outweigh ordinary matter and shape the growth of galaxies.
The research challenges the conventional view that everything began with a singular Big Bang. Instead, it explores a “bounce” scenario in which the Universe was once contracting before reversing into the expansion we observe today. In that picture, some structures may have survived the transition, carrying information from a cosmic era that predates the Universe’s earliest observable light.
MIT Engineers Solve a Major Lidar Problem That Has Stumped Researchers for Years
From self-driving cars navigating busy streets to drones surveying disaster zones, lidar has become one of the most important technologies for helping machines perceive the world in three dimensions. By sending out rapid pulses of infrared light and measuring their reflections, lidar systems can build highly detailed maps of their surroundings in real time.
But today’s most powerful lidar sensors often come with major drawbacks: they are bulky, expensive, and rely on moving mechanical components that can wear out over time.
Researchers at MIT have now demonstrated a potential solution. They developed a new silicon-photonics chip that could enable compact, durable lidar systems with no moving parts. Silicon photonics uses semiconductor technology to manipulate light rather than electricity, opening the door to lidar sensors that are smaller, cheaper, and easier to manufacture at scale.
One of the biggest obstacles facing silicon-photonics lidar has been its limited field of view. Existing chip-based systems struggle to scan wide angles, while methods for expanding their coverage typically introduce noise and reduce measurement accuracy.
To overcome this challenge, the MIT team designed an array of integrated antennas that dramatically reduces unwanted interference, known as crosstalk, between neighboring antennas. Their approach allows a lidar chip to scan a much wider area while maintaining the low-noise, high-precision performance needed for demanding applications such as autonomous vehicles, aerial mapping, and construction-site monitoring.
Solid-State Lidar Could Transform Autonomous Navigation
The breakthrough could support the development of advanced lidar sensors for applications such as autonomous driving, aerial surveying, and construction site monitoring.
“The functionality we demonstrated in this work solves a fundamental problem for integrated optical-phased-array technology, enabling future lidar sensors that can achieve significantly higher performance than we could demonstrate previously,” says Jelena Notaros.
Collapsing stars could spawn mini-universes, offering new path to gravastars
Stars shine because atoms fuse in their interiors, releasing energy. When a very massive star has exhausted its nuclear fuel, radiation pressure can no longer provide sufficient counterforce to gravity. The star then collapses under its own mass until only a single point remains: the singularity.
While the formation of a black hole appears plausible, black holes themselves continue to pose major challenges for science. How can 10 billion solar masses concentrate at a single tiny point? How can spacetime be curved infinitely at that point, the singularity? At this stage, the laws of physics break down, making it impossible to predict what happens. Moreover, black holes conceal all information from observation: Everything, including light, disappears irretrievably beyond the event horizon.
Filled with dark energy
It is therefore possible that black holes are in fact entirely different objects, such as ultra-compact stars, which cannot be seen because of their intense gravity and are therefore also called gravastars. In addition to ordinary matter present in their outer layers, they would be filled with dark energy, which exerts an outward pressure and stabilizes their mass, which wants instead to collapse. Gravastars are easier for physicists to accept than black holes because they do not possess a singularity or an event horizon and yet are almost as massive and compact as black holes. What had remained unclear, however, was how such gravastars could form in practice.
The theoretical physicists Daniel Jampolski and Professor Luciano Rezzolla have now presented, for the first time, a dynamic solution to the field equations of Albert Einstein's general relativity describing the collapse of a star that could lead to the formation of such a gravastar. The solution showed that the collapse may trigger the creation of a mini-universe inside the collapsing matter, not very different from the Big Bang from which our universe emerged. Like our own universe, its expansion is driven by dark energy. The findings are published in the journal Physical Review D.
In this way, the expansion of the new universe counteracts the gravitational forces and halts the collapse of the star before a black hole can form. In this process, an equilibrium is established between the expanding mini-universe and the collapsing matter, and this equilibrium is what leads to a stable gravastar. With this solution to general relativity, the Frankfurt physicists have provided the first answer to a question that scientists have been debating for 25 years: How do gravastars form during the collapse of ordinary matter?
Invisible chemical landscapes shape life
Plants, animals and microorganisms constantly communicate through chemical signals. A research team has now shown that these signals merge in the environment to form complex "chemical landscapes" that have effects far beyond those of their individual components. Published in Nature Ecology & Evolution, the findings open new perspectives on understanding biodiversity, ecosystems and the impacts of global environmental change. The study was coordinated by Bielefeld University.
How does a butterfly find a suitable mate and then the right host plant for its offspring? How do pollinators locate the most attractive flowers? Many organisms rely on chemical signals to accomplish these tasks. These invisible messages permeate air, water and soil, helping organisms navigate complex environments.
Researchers say that these chemical signals do not act in isolation. Instead, compounds released by different organisms mix within their shared environment and form complex chemical patterns. Together, they create a dynamic "chemodiversity landscape"—the total chemical diversity present within a habitat.
"We already know that individual chemical compounds convey important information. Our work shows that when many compounds interact, new properties can emerge that cannot be predicted from the individual components alone," says Dr. Thomas Dussarrat of Bielefeld University, one of the study's lead authors.
When diversity creates new functions
In their review article, the researchers synthesize findings from across the field of chemical ecology. They argue that chemical mixtures operating at the landscape scale can generate novel ecological effects. Scientists refer to these as "emergent functions"—properties that arise only through the interaction of many components. Such effects may influence how plants interact with pollinators, herbivores and microorganisms, thereby shaping entire ecosystems. Such chemical patterns could also arise at the interfaces between terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems, thereby influencing interactions between different habitats.
Relevance for biodiversity and climate change
Another lead author of the study is Dr. Robin Heinen of the Technical University of Munich (TUM). "With the concept of the chemodiversity landscape, we expand our perspective from individual organisms to entire ecological communities. This enables us to better understand ecological processes in natural ecosystems," says Heinen.
The new concept not only advances an understanding of ecological relationships. It may also enable practical applications in the future, for example in biodiversity conservation, the development of sustainable agriculture, and the prediction of climate change impacts.
The researchers therefore see a strong need for further research to better understand the significance of these largely hidden processes. Environmental changes such as drought, climate change and species loss may also alter nature's chemical landscapes, with consequences for numerous interactions among organisms.
Day 127, orbit 1968 — That aurora was absolutely spectacular… shimmering and dancing beneath us, stretching as far as the eye could see, and so intense it lit up the Station in shades of green 💚.
We’ve seen several since the beginning of the mission, but this one was on a completely different level – far too bright for my usual aurora camera settings.
Moments like these never get old up here; the whole crew suddenly find themselves vying for a good spot at a window 😊
📸 European Space Agency / NASA – S. Adenot
Scientists Found a Hidden Brain Signal That Predicts Social Behavior
Why do we decide to approach other people? According to new research, the answer may start unfolding in the brain several seconds before any movement takes place.
A team of scientists from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem has identified a distinctive pattern of brain activity that appears before social interaction begins. Their findings suggest that the brain is already preparing for a social encounter before an individual takes action, and that the strength of this neural activity may reflect how socially motivated someone is.
Tracking Social Decisions in Real Time
To investigate how social decisions are formed, the researchers used zebrafish, a popular model organism that allows scientists to observe activity across the brain at the level of individual cells.
The team created a new experimental system in which one fish watched and responded to another fish that was swimming nearby. While this happened, researchers recorded activity throughout the observing fish’s brain in real time.
This approach allowed them to follow the neural processes involved in social behavior as they unfolded, revealing how the brain transforms social information into action.
A Brain-Wide Signal Before Social Behavior
The researchers discovered that the brain begins shifting into a different state several seconds before a fish moves toward another fish.
Rather than relying on a single region dedicated to social behavior, the process involved coordinated changes across multiple parts of the brain.
Congratulations to the NASA crew of Pegasus, who safely delivered the world’s next great exploration asset, the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, to NASAKennedy. Thank you for your contributions and sacrifice..and thanks John Kraus for delivering the pizza & champagne to the crew-they deserve it!
The Hidden Physics Complicating Interstellar Lightsails
If we’re to reach another star, chemical propulsion will not get us there in any reasonable time frame. We’re going to need a different propulsion technology, and one of the most promising seems to be a solar sail. These giant reflective surfaces form the basis of many interstellar missions. Combined with giant lasers pushing them, they can be accelerated to speeds unreachable by any other current technologies. However, according to a new paper available on arXiv from Chao Shen and Jiaze Li of the Harbin Institute of Technology, once those missions start reaching a significant percentage of the speed of light they’re going to run into a drag force from the light itself.
The paper breaks down the three forces photons hitting a solar sail impart to it. In order of decreasing efficiency they are incident light (that raw momentum of the photons hitting the sail), specular reflection (momentum imparted when photons bounce perfectly off the sail), and diffuse scattering (momentum from photons that are absorbed by the sail then reemitted in random directions).
When the light sail starts to reach relativistic speeds is where the problems start to come in. As it speeds away from its light source it starts to experience a severe Doppler effect. As the frequency of the light drops, the thrust generated by the three components of light rapidly decreases, making it harder and harder to keep accelerating the faster you go.
Many interstellar missions have come and gone - including Breakthrough Starshot
It gets even worse when the light sail hits 75% of the speed of light. At that point, a phenomenon called relativistic light aberration takes over. From the perspective of a stationary observer on Earth, the diffusely scattered light is directed forward towards the sail’s direction of motion. Since every action must have an equal and opposite reaction, that means the diffuse scattering (admittedly the weakest of the three forces) becomes an active drag on the system past 75% of the speed of light.
Admittedly, the net force of the pushing laser remains positive at that point, but the efficiency drop-off is significant. It is worth noting that the paper focuses exclusively on radiative dynamics and does not account for non-radiative factors, such as drag from interstellar gas or dust, nor does it address thermal limitations of sail materials, such as potential melting under high-power lasers. The paper treats the lightsail material as an idealized mirror. In practice, aerospace engineers are exploring advanced metamaterials and photonic crystals tuned to specific laser wavelengths. These materials could potentially leverage the aberration effects discussed in the paper to actively self-correct and stabilize the lightsail’s flight path, ensuring it remains centered in the beam.
The Sun may not engulf Earth after all, scientists say
Need some good news on a Friday after a long week? The Earth may not be engulfed by the expanding fireball of the dying sun, which has long been assumed to be our home planet's ultimate fate, according to scientists.
Don't worry: This is not expected to happen for another 5 billion years, long after all life on Earth has been wiped out.
When the sun burns through all of the hydrogen in its core, it will go through two immense expansion phases: first becoming a red giant, then, when its helium is spent, an "AGB" star. This fiery death will bring about some significant changes back here on Earth. As the sun grows, increasing gravitational forces will pull the Earth toward it.
For the Earth and the moon, this force creates the push and pull of the tides in our oceans. The energy from these tides, which dissipates at the bottom of the ocean, slows Earth's rotation and gradually pushes the moon away from us.
As the sun expands and its blistering surface approaches Earth, intense tidal waves will stir within the star. When they dissipate, they will pull Earth into its doomed embrace. However, the growing sun will also lose a lot of its mass due to stellar wind, which pushes our planet farther away.
"Earth's fate depends on a delicate balance between these two effects," explained Mats Esseldeurs, the lead author of a study published in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics on Friday.
"If tidal interactions predominate, Earth is engulfed by the sun. If the sun's mass loss predominates, Earth escapes into an orbit larger than the radius of its star," the astrophysicist at Belgium's University of Leuven said in a statement.
Until now, scientists had favored the first hypothesis.
Catching some sun
However, their calculations relied on relatively simple descriptions of tidal dissipation within giant stars. Advances made in modeling these tides over the last 15 years have enabled the study's authors to show that "the dissipation is lower than previously expected," Stephane Mathis, an astrophysicist at the CEA Paris-Saclay center in France, told AFP.
To estimate how much mass the sun could lose, the team focused in particular on a nearby star called L2 Puppis that is like the sun's "old cousin," the study's co-author said. "A better understanding of tidal physics and the most advanced constraints we have on mass loss allow us to say that—in the current state of knowledge—Earth could move away from the sun, contrary to what was predicted before," Mathis said.
According to the new modeling, Mars also escapes a death spiral into the sun. But the two planets closest to the sun, Mercury and Venus, are not so lucky. They will be inexorably swallowed by the expanding fireball. After all this, the sun will eventually become an extremely dense star called a white dwarf. No longer capable of fusion reactions, it will slowly become dimmer and cooler over time.
Europe swelters as more heat records set to tumble
Much of Western Europe was sweltering in a grueling heat wave on Friday, with the mercury expected to continue rising in the coming days, likely shattering yet more temperature records.
France was hit hard, forcing hundreds of schools to tweak their timetables to cope. Forecasters warned of an "intense and long-lasting" heat wave that could see temperatures in Paris soar above 40C (104F) for the first time on a June day.
Across the continent, authorities were ramping up warnings of extreme weather. German forecasters said parts of the country needed to be on alert for thunderstorms, hail and heavy rain over the weekend.
Meteorologists confirmed that England and Wales had already experienced the hottest spring ever recorded, though temperatures in Britain were not expected to be as intense as those in continental Europe.
Scientists say human-driven climate change is amplifying such extremes, with heat waves, droughts and floods becoming more intense and frequent.
The current heat wave is already the second of the year for many, and means summer is kicking off for tens of millions of Western Europeans with another spell of extreme heat.
Quantum sensor overcomes major obstacle in search for dark matter and gravitational waves
A prototype quantum sensor developed by researchers at Imperial has demonstrated for the first time that a key principle behind next-generation quantum detectors can work under realistic conditions.Source: Phys.org
The study shows how comparing two long-baseline atom interferometers, instruments that use lasers to precisely measure the behavior of atoms, allows experimental noise to be effectively canceled.
This enables signals to be recovered even when individual measurements are overwhelmed and opens the door to searches for gravitational waves from the early universe and signatures of exotic forms of dark matter.
Canceling noise in quantum measurements
Understanding what the universe is made of and identifying new sources of gravitational waves remain major challenges in modern physics.
Both problems require measuring extremely small signals that can easily be lost in background noise. Finding reliable ways to detect them is essential for exploring parts of the universe that current experiments cannot access.
Scientists Let People Play Video Games Using Only Their Thoughts
Researchers at Yale University have developed a new brain-computer interface (BCI) that allows people to play video games using only their brain activity. By using real-time fMRI (functional MRI), the team demonstrated that users can control a computer efficiently through their thoughts alone.Source: SciTechDaily
The study revealed that brain activity follows established neural pathways. Researchers found that learning to use a BCI becomes much easier when the system is designed to work with those existing pathways rather than against them. When a BCI aligns with the brain’s natural organization, users gain control quickly, and their brain activity adapts to support learning. Systems that do not match this structure produce little or no improvement.
Why Natural Brain Pathways Matter for BCI Learning
“The implications are broad, from helping people with motor or communication disorders to developing treatments for depression or anxiety to building the next generation of consumer games and technologies: interventions designed around the brain’s natural geometry are likely to be faster, more effective, and more accessible,” said Erica Busch, the first author of the study, who recently completed her Ph.D. at Yale.
Although researchers have worked on these systems for years, many human BCIs have had limited success. Earlier fMRI-based systems, which rely on real-time neurofeedback from scans that track changing patterns of brain activity, often required as many as 10 lengthy training sessions. Even then, improvements were relatively small. Roughly one-third of participants never learned to control the system, regardless of how much they practiced.
Busch and her colleagues believed the problem stemmed from how these systems were designed. Often, BCIs required the brain to learn patterns that did not fit its natural organization. The researchers proposed that more advanced tools capable of tailoring neurofeedback to each brain’s underlying structure could significantly improve both learning speed and performance.
“Could we build a system smart enough to discover that geometry in real time, using noninvasive brain imaging?”
'High-res' is the secret to finding alien life with the next great space telescope
In addition to molecules, it can also help scientists track the weather on these exoplanets. By measuring precise Doppler shifts in these spectral lines, researchers can determine orbital velocities—in other words, how weather is moving on a planet light-years away. Doing so will require a coronagraph to block out the light coming directly from the exoplanet's star, but no coronagraph is perfect and will always let some starlight through. Higher-resolution spectrographs will make it much easier to separate that "noise" from the signal of the light from an actual planet.
This all sounds great in theory, so why haven't we done it already? Simply put, the technology was too big, too heavy and too overcome with noise to be useful. Weight is a critical factor in any telescope, as it directly ties to the cost of the mission. And sensitivity to "dark current" (i.e., electric current caused even when there is no light hitting a sensor) made much of the data older generations of higher-resolution sensors collected useless anyway.
According to Jaffe and his team, though, those problems have largely been solved—at least on the ground. The first is by a new technology called silicon immersion gratings and grisms. These force light to diffract from inside a high-refractive material like silicon, compared with traditional gratings that bounce light off a mirrored surface. This allows engineers to drastically reduce the size (and therefore weight) of the spectrograph and has the added bonus of not requiring any moving parts to adjust mirrors.
The second technological breakthrough is in the area of avalanche photodiode arrays (APAs). These new detectors have near-zero "dark current," and the noise introduced by the sensor itself is less than the signal introduced by a single photon. These baselines make it much more feasible to capture the right kind of light from an exoplanet and ensure it can be differentiated from the starlight of its host star.
What early modern literature can teach us about neurodivergence
Does it seem as though more people are coming out as neurodivergent these days? Perhaps you've heard complaints that social media—particularly TikTok—is driving a trend. Or maybe you've encountered the suggestion that neurodivergence has somehow become fashionable, a label people adopt for attention, status or belonging.
For neurodivergent people, these claims can be deeply dismissive. They reduce complex experiences and real struggles to a passing cultural craze.
My research suggests something quite different. Far from being a modern phenomenon, neurodivergence has a long history. In other words, people whose ways of thinking, sensing or behaving differed from social expectations have always existed. Members of my research project have described discovering these historical figures as like finding neurodivergent ancestors.
Of course, this is not about diagnosing people who lived centuries ago with autism, ADHD or other conditions. Diagnostic categories have their own history. They change over time and can be shaped by specific cultural and geographical contexts. Moreover, I am not a doctor or a psychologist, and I am not interested in retrospectively diagnosing historical people.
What interests me is something broader: the many people in the past who were understood—by others or by themselves—as different.
One example is Hannah Allen. She was an English widow who published an account of her experiences in 1683. She wrote about periods of profound melancholy and hearing voices, drawing on journal entries she kept during those difficult years. Stories like Allen's remind us that people have long searched for language to describe minds and experiences that did not fit comfortably within accepted norms.
People have always adapted and reshaped the language available to them. Today, clinical terms regularly spill into everyday conversation. People talk about being "anxious" about an exam or "depressed" by bad weather, without necessarily claiming a diagnosis. Literature has always transformed and enriched our understanding of medical and psychological concepts.
In my work, I define neurodivergence as ways of thinking, sensing or behaving that diverge from social expectations. What's also important is that those expectations vary across time and place. Behavior regarded as unusual in one context may be entirely acceptable in another.
Colossal Squid Are Everywhere. We've Been Looking Wrong
Recently, somewhere in the Southern Ocean, a team of fishermen hauled this up from the deep: an adult colossal squid, an animal the size of a school bus and the biggest invertebrate on the planet. But despite its size, we've never found and filmed a fully grown one alive in its natural habitat. Why? For 100 years, people assumed we hadn't seen a big one in the deep because they were rare, elusive, maybe even close to extinction.
But we were wrong. Sperm whales constantly eat colossal squid. In fact, around 77% of the squid biomass in Antarctic sperm whale stomachs is colossal squid. And if you back-calculate to work out how many colossal squid must exist to sustain that many sperm whales, the answer is tens of millions in the Southern Ocean right now. So, we're talking about an animal the size of a school bus. There are tens of millions of them, and yet they're invisible to us.
I've spent the last few years dropping cameras into the deep ocean and the more I understand about this animal, the more I realize that this isn't really a story about an animal that's hard to find. It's a story about how we've been looking and why pretty much everything we've done in the past has been wrong, and what we could possibly do to fix it.
01:20 - The Mistake
03:17 - Invisible Light
04:37 - The Breakthrough
07:56 - So Many Secrets
09:53 - The Least Explored Place on Earth
13:14 - How to Find a Colossal Squid
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When glaciers vanish, so does the hidden life they support
We often hear about glacier melting and predictions of what climate change could do. But very little is mentioned about the effects on ecosystems or the animals that call them home. To redress some of this imbalance, an international team of researchers set out to map this hidden biodiversity. Their findings are published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Rich glacial ecosystems
Glaciers are more than just massive chunks of moving ice. They are also teeming with a wide variety of terrestrial and freshwater animals. In their study, the team combed through prior research and identified at least 152 species known to live on glaciers. These include rotifers (microscopic animals), springtails (small hexapods closely related to insects) and tardigrades (microscopic, eight-legged invertebrates known as water bears).
To find out exactly what lives in these frozen worlds, the study authors reviewed 2,695 published papers, narrowing them down to 124 studies about terrestrial and freshwater glacier habitats.
They created a global map containing 482 verified records of glacier-dwelling animals, including the name of the glacier where each lived and its habitat type. The organisms were divided into two groups: glacier animals (use glaciers but can live elsewhere) and glacier specialists (found only on glaciers). The researchers then overlaid these maps with predictions of glacier melt from climate change models to estimate how much habitat would disappear by 2100.
A Surprising Discovery Suggests Autism Is Not One Condition
An international team of researchers has identified at least two biologically distinct forms of autism by examining how different regions of the brain communicate with one another. The findings could help advance more precise and personalized approaches to autism care and support.
The researchers found two recurring patterns of brain connectivity. In one group, known as the “hyperconnectivity” subtype, communication between brain regions was stronger than usual. In the other, called the “hypoconnectivity” subtype, communication was reduced.
Brain Connectivity Patterns Reveal Autism Subtypes
According to the research team, this work represents the first systematic attempt to interpret human brain imaging patterns (via fMRI) by tracing them back to underlying biological mechanisms identified in mouse models. By connecting specific brain connectivity patterns to particular biological pathways, the study provides a potential framework for future precision medicine strategies.
To investigate these relationships, the researchers analyzed functional connectivity in 20 mouse models and examined brain scans from 940 children and young adults with autism, along with scans from more than 1,000 neurotypical individuals.
The analysis uncovered two reproducible autism subtypes. The hypoconnectivity subtype was associated with synaptic pathways, while the hyperconnectivity subtype was linked to immune-related biological systems. Together, these two groups represented approximately 25% of the people with autism included in the study.
The world's first nuclear clock just ticked on — and it could help detect a fifth fundamental force of physics
For decades, physicists have pursued a goal that sounds nearly impossible: to build a clock that keeps time using an atom's nucleus rather than the electrons orbiting it.
Now, researchers have demonstrated the first functioning nuclear clock — an advancement that could eventually lead to more robust timekeeping devices and new ways to search for dark matter and physics beyond the Standard Model.
"Having worked in this field for more than 15 years, it is just beautiful, how a very 'wild' idea such as manipulating an atomic nucleus with a laser has turned into reality," Thorsten Schumm, a professor of quantum metrology at the Vienna University of Technology and a member of the research team, told Live Science via email.
How is a nuclear clock different from an atomic clock?
Today's most accurate clocks are optical atomic clocks, which measure the frequency of electrons jumping between different energy levels inside atoms. These clocks are so precise that they would lose less than a second over a 100 million years.
A nuclear clock works similarly, but it uses a transition within the nucleus itself, where the nucleus jumps between energy levels. Because the nucleus sits deep inside the atom, it's far less affected by external disturbances from things like electric or magnetic fields. According to Schumm, the nuclear transition can be 1,000 to 10,000 times less sensitive to environmental noise than atomic transitions are.
Nanomedicine discovery uses salt to overcome major obstacle in gene therapy
Researchers at the University of Houston's College of Pharmacy have discovered an unexpectedly simple strategy to improve the performance of mRNA vaccines and gene therapeutics: adding salt. The findings, published in Small, address one of the biggest challenges facing modern gene medicine—getting fragile therapeutic material to the right place inside cells.Source: Phys.org
"We are introducing salt-loaded lipid nanoparticles as a novel and broadly applicable design principle for gene delivery," said Fanfei Meng, assistant professor and Presidential Frontier Faculty member in the Department of Pharmacological and Pharmaceutical Sciences. "What makes this exciting is that we can significantly improve delivery efficiency without needing to invent entirely new materials."
Lipid nanoparticles, or LNPs, are tiny fat-based delivery vehicles widely used to transport fragile genetic material into cells. They became widely recognized during the COVID-19 pandemic through mRNA vaccines developed by Moderna and Pfizer. Today, scientists are also using LNPs to develop new treatments for cancer, rare diseases and genetic disorders.
Despite their success, a major obstacle has remained. After entering cells, much of the therapeutic cargo becomes trapped inside endosomes—membrane-bound compartments that prevent the genetic material from reaching the interior of the cell, where it must go to function properly.
Researchers have long considered this "endosomal escape" problem one of the major bottlenecks limiting the effectiveness of mRNA vaccines and other gene-based medicines.
"Many gene therapies fail because of this," said Meng. "We found a surprisingly simple way to help more of that cargo escape."
The escape plan
Meng and his research team discovered that loading salt into lipid nanoparticles creates pressure inside the endosomes, helping release the therapeutic material into the cell, where it can become active. The team believes the strategy could eventually help improve a wide range of treatments, including mRNA vaccines, gene-editing technologies and other nucleic acid-based therapeutics.
The approach relies on basic physical principles rather than complex chemical redesigns, making it easier to adapt for future therapies and large-scale manufacturing.