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The central Pacific Ocean just broke a temperature record. Experts say it might signal a new kind of El Niño.
The sea surface temperature in a key section of the central equatorial Pacific Ocean has now surpassed all previous temperatures on record for this region, exceeding 86 degrees Fahrenheit (30 degrees Celsius) for the first time, according to preliminary data released Monday (Oct. 5).
Specifically, these temperatures occurred in the Niño 3.4 region, located between 5 degrees north and 5 degrees south latitude, and 120 degrees west and 170 degrees west longitude. Researchers use this region to monitor the progression of El Niño, the warm phase of a multiyear natural climate pattern that's currently in full swing and steadily intensifying. But how significant is this new record, and could it be a harbinger of increasingly extreme El Niño events in the future?
At this time of the year, sea surface temperatures above 86 F are common in the western Pacific warm pool, a mass of water located northeast of Australia. But the Niño 3.4 region is nowhere near the warm pool and usually has much cooler temperatures. This latest data indicates "an exceptionally warm state for this part of the tropical Pacific," said Jin-Yi Yu, a professor of Earth system science at the University of California, Irvine.
"If the reported daily El Niño 3.4 temperature above 30°C is verified in the observational dataset, it would be an extraordinary record," Yu told Live Science in an email.
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El Niño events happen when warm water in the western tropical Pacific Ocean migrates eastward along the equator, toward South America. This boosts global temperatures, triggering heavy rainfall and floods in regions like East Africa, southern China, the southern U.S. and the Pacific coast of equatorial South America, while places such as Indonesia, the Philippines, southern Africa and northern South America experience drought.
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The world is on the brink of crossing a critical warming threshold, raising the question of whether the current conditions can be considered a new normal for future El Niños.
While it's likely that future El Niños will be more extreme than past ones, on average, not every El Niño will be record-breaking and as dramatic as the one unfolding now, because these events tend to be very variable, Collins said...
NASA Just Made Nearly 1 TB of Artemis II Data Available to the Public
NASA has just released about 800 gigabytes of scientific data generated by the Artemis II mission. The archive documenting the astronauts’ return to the far side of the moon includes 11,000 full-resolution images and videos, 8.5 hours of spoken observations, notes taken by the astronauts, transcripts, and photographs from the cameras aboard the Orion capsule.
The space agency describes this effort as the first set of planetary science data obtained outside Earth and—for the most part—directly by humans in more than half a century. The closest comparable precedent dates back to the Apollo era and its missions to the lunar surface.
In addition to the public database, NASA released three reports summarizing what was learned during the first crewed spacecraft mission to approach the moon in five decades. These are the Artemis II Preliminary Lunar Science Report, the Artemis II Lunar Science Operations Report, and the Artemis II Lunar Science Data User Guide.
Anyone can access the near terabyte of data, though the release is primarily intended for the scientific community. While the astronauts capture and collect the data during the mission, it’s the researchers on Earth who will be able to analyze it and produce new findings about the moon. The information may be particularly useful for planetary geologists, flight engineers, heliophysicists, experts in telecommunications and remote sensing, as well as specialists in meteoroid impacts.
For space and astronomy enthusiasts, some of the most accessible materials include mission transcripts and lunar photographs annotated by the astronauts themselves. NASA has centralized access through its Planetary Data System, the public repository where it stores data from its planetary missions. In the section dedicated to the moon, users can access Artemis II and browse the various available collections, documents, and files...
First Direct Image of Protoplanet Swirling Surrounding Gas
The formation and evolution of planets is the driving force behind both where and how we might find life beyond Earth. This complex and lengthy process first begins with a massive ball of gas and dust that swirls until it flattens into a disk, followed by rocks ranging in size from pebbles to kilometer-scale objects clumping together in a process known as accretion, as they too swirl around within the larger disk and form rocky planets closer to the star and the farther out planets collect the gas, ice, and dust that the star couldn’t evaporate. Until now, researchers have been limited to visualizing the swirling gas and dust forming planets through computer models.
Now, an international team of researchers just announced a remarkable discovery that could change how astronomers understand planetary formation and evolution. This discovery involves the first direct image of a planet forming in a swirling ball of gas and dust, also called a protoplanet. Their discovery, which is discussed in a recent study published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, focused on the protoplanets WISPIT 2b, which is re located about 430 light-years from Earth, is estimated to be about five times as massive as Jupiter, and was directly imaged using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) observatory in northern Chile.
A companion protoplanet, WISPIT 2c, orbits interior of WISPIT 2b at 15 astronomical units (AU) and is estimated to be 8 to 12 Jupiter masses, while WISPIT 2b is located about 57 AU from its host star. While WISPIT 2b’s discovery was announced in August 2025, WISPIT 2c’s discovery was announced shortly afterwards in March 2026.
“We clearly see both planets shaping their environment,” said Dr. Myriam Benisty, who is the Director of the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Germany and lead author of the study. “WISPIT 2c has carved a cavity, and WISPIT 2b a gap. Around WISPIT 2b, we find swirls of gas that had been predicted by simulations of disk-planet interactions, but never actually seen before. Now there is an image of them!”
There is a distinct difference between a cavity and a gap within a protoplanetary disk, as a cavity indicates a total clearing of gas and dust while a gap indicates a decrease in disk material but still enough for a protoplanet to keep forming. The image obtained by ALMA demonstrates these with symbols of the locations of the host star, WISPIT 2c with its cavity, and WISPIT 2b with its gap. The major difference is WISPIT 2b is shown swirling in the gas and dust it is collecting, with blue and red denoting gas that is moving towards us and away from us, respectively...
More cats: The key to happy countries?
National happiness is influenced by complex relationships beyond basic economic factors, according to a study by Javier I. Borráz-León of the Secretariat of Science, Humanities, Technology, and Innovation in Mexico City and colleagues.
Published Sept. 30, 2026, in the journal PLOS One, the study finds that cats and their parasites are strongly correlated with both positive and negative happiness scores worldwide.
The general well-being of a country's populace is often represented by a national happiness score. Such scores are known to be associated with economic factors such as family income and health costs, but other factors have rarely been explored. In this study, researchers investigated the nuanced relationships underlying national well-being by factoring in the presence of domestic cats and their parasites.
The team compiled data from 93 countries, including income, health costs, GDP, domestic cat density and the prevalence of Toxoplasma, a parasite that can be transferred from cats to humans.
The data revealed that greater numbers of cats are associated with higher national happiness—consistent with studies on the benefits of pet ownership—but also that greater Toxoplasma prevalence is associated with lower national happiness, despite the parasite being spread by cats. These counterintuitive results suggest complex factors at work.
This study does not resolve the underlying causes of these associations, but the authors suggest that the influence of cats on happiness might be tied to economic factors; higher income and better public health, for example, might encourage pet ownership while reducing infection rates.
This study demonstrates that biological factors as well as economic ones can correlate with happiness, revealing new avenues for investigating national well-being. The authors note that while this study unveils previously unrecognized relationships, future studies will be needed to determine the underlying mechanisms.
The authors add, "What we found is that countries with more cats tended to report higher levels of happiness, while countries with higher exposure to Toxoplasma gondii tended to report lower levels of happiness. Of course, these are associations at the country level, so we cannot say that having more cats makes people happier or that Toxoplasma makes people less happy, but the patterns are interesting enough to deserve further investigation."
"What we find most interesting is that these results bring together factors that are usually studied separately: wealth, health, human–animal relationships and infectious disease. Our study suggests that understanding why some populations report greater well-being may require us to consider biological and ecological factors alongside the socioeconomic conditions that have traditionally received most attention"...
Switching on brain cells: The Nobel-winning science of optogenetics
In optogenetics, scientists control neurons by stimulating them with light—potentially unlocking breakthroughs for conditions such as dementia, depression and blindness.
Three scientists won the Nobel Prize in medicine on Monday for their work in the field: U.S. neurologist Karl Deisseroth and German scientists Peter Hegemann and Georg Nagel.
"Being able to manipulate cells with a combination of light and genetics has been transformational across the biological sciences," said Simon Schultz, neurotechnology professor at Imperial College London.
Here are some key facts about optogenetics and its uses.
Protein discovery
In a type of green algae, Hegemann and Nagel discovered a light-sensitive protein that they dubbed channelrhodopsin.
Deisseroth introduced it genetically into a cell and stimulated it with light, which triggered a nerve signal in rats and mice.
By controlling the light, scientists can switch a neuron's signal on or off with minute precision.
By turning off some neurons and observing others, they can track which areas affect certain functions.
Introducing the prize, Nobel medicine committee member and neuroscientist Abdel El Manira said the discovery shed light on functions "from parental behavior and aggression to anxiety and fear, as well as fundamental physiological drives such as thirst and water intake."
Memory
Schultz said his own teams had used optogenetics "as a closed-loop treatment for memory disorders" by lengthening the pulses that help the brain store memories.
"The next step is to demonstrate that we can improve learning and memory in complex tasks," he said in comments released by the college...
How to assemble science
When reading the news, you may occasionally be bemused by the flip-flopping science and health stories: one week you’re told coffee is good for you, the next week that it’s bad. Red wine extends your life, then it doesn’t. Over time, new scientific studies seemingly contradict one another, leaving us unsure what evidence to believe.
As a science journalist, I’ve learnt that often the actual problem is that each study is reported in isolation, rather than weighed against everything else we know. And sometimes, the risks of harm are high. For example, in September 2025, I reported on the US Food and Drug Administration’s announcement that it would add a warning label to the painkiller acetaminophen (paracetamol), claiming that taking the drug during pregnancy increased a child’s risk of autism. It made global headlines. Yet looking closer at the science, it was clear that the FDA and its parent health department had cherrypicked a few studies, and downplayed other more robust findings. This was confirmed a couple of months later when researchers published a major review that better represented the full body of knowledge. ‘Existing evidence does not clearly link maternal paracetamol use during pregnancy with autism or ADHD in offspring,’ it concluded. By then, of course, countless women had been needlessly scared about a painkiller that is widely considered one of the safest to take during pregnancy.
In 2025, academics worldwide published about 7 million scholarly articles – that’s more than 19,000 each day. On the surface, that might seem like a number to celebrate, but it also poses a problem. As the volume of research balloons, it can be hard to discern what these millions of papers actually tell us. Within the firehose, there are rigorous methodologies and important findings, but also baffling contradictions, unconfirmed results and sloppy science. And some diverse forms of knowledge, such as lived experience and Indigenous insights, are rarely captured in scholarly articles and databases at all.
The causes are systemic. Scientists publish and promote one paper after another because that’s how they advance in their careers. Journalists breathlessly chase the latest, flashiest studies so their headlines get clicks online. Meanwhile, hardly any of us spend time trying to make sense of what the world already knows by carefully synthesising and taking stock of existing knowledge. Iain Chalmers, a doctor who co-founded the Cochrane Collaboration, an evidence-synthesis group based in London, once called this the ‘scandalous failure of science to cumulate evidence scientifically’.
This failure was a key motivation to write my book Beyond Belief: How Evidence Shows What Really Works (2026). Researching it, I discovered better ways to make sense of the world – but these methods are not as widely known as they should be. If they were, we might pause before believing news stories based on single studies, and instead recognise the real work: finding, sorting and synthesising evidence. This unglamorous labour already shapes our lives far more than any individual study or news headline will. We might also realise that, for many of the wicked problems we face, humans already possess much of the knowledge needed to solve them. All it needs is the ability to assemble it – and then act...
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...
Dragonflies have roamed the Earth for over 300 million years, with ancestors' wingspans reaching up to 70 cm (28 inches). Their unique independent control of each of their wings, due to directly attached muscles, gives them impeccable control in flight. They can hover and move like a helicopter in all directions, and even fly upside down, reaching speeds of roughly 56 km/h (35 mph). Read more
Quantum computer boldly goes where no quantum computer has gone before: Space
There's big news from the quantum world. A quantum computer has been used in space for the first time. The device was aboard a spacecraft in low Earth orbit and demonstrated technology that could eventually help solve a problem that has been bugging satellites for years.
The issue is that when orbiting satellites send their raw data back down to Earth, bottlenecks and bandwidth limits slow everything down. One way to overcome this would be to process the raw data in situ before sending it.
So a team of physicists led by Philip Walther at the University of Vienna came up with a way that could eventually do just that. Their solution was to build a quantum photonic processor that uses individual light particles, or photons, to perform complex operations using compact optical hardware.
But taking the idea from the drawing board to orbit was not without its challenges. Quantum photonic systems are delicate, and radiation, large temperature changes and the vacuum of space could damage their components or disrupt their operation.
Of course, it first had to get there...
Nobel Prize in chemistry awarded to Kagan and Soai for developing 'spectacular' chemical reactions
Scientists Henri B. Kagan and Kenso Soai won the Nobel Prize in chemistry Wednesday for untangling mysterious mirror images in molecules, a discovery that has been used to develop countless drugs and transformed modern medicine.
Many molecules come in versions that look alike but are not exactly identical, like right and left hands. One mirror image of the chemical carvone smells like mint, for example, while the other has a whiff of caraway, a spice often used in rye bread.
Even life itself prefers one mirror image over the other. DNA twists to the right, and the proteins in human bodies are made of mostly left-handed building blocks.
Versions of the same molecule can behave differently when interacting with other chemicals. When designing drugs to treat diseases, scientists want to be choosy about which mirror image they get. They want the version of a molecule to treat a cold, not one that will make the sniffles worse.
Kagan, who is from France, and Soai, from Japan, found ways to make chemistry pick a side, designing and manipulating reactions to produce the desired mirror image.
"The medicines we have today would not be possible without this chemistry," said Rigoberto Hernandez, president of the American Chemical Society.
The discovery enabled most modern medicines
Scientists paid tribute to Kagan and Soai's work, which the Nobel committee described as a feat never previously achieved by anyone "other than life itself."
"It might be difficult to say that this drug, or that drug, was developed using this," said Peter Somfai, a member of the Nobel Committee for Chemistry. "I would say all of them, because we use this as a tool, we use this as an understanding, how to develop catalysts, how they function."
In the 1980s, Kagan's work showed there might be a way to design reactions to produce one form of a molecule over the other. Years later, Soai perfected the process. He created the first-ever chemical reaction to efficiently produce only one of a molecule's mirror images, in what's now known as the Soai reaction.
"This is probably the coolest experiment in organic chemistry," Somfai said.
In addition to developing better medicines or fragrances, deciphering the mirror images of molecules can help scientists understand the chemical architecture of life, said chemist Holden Thorp, editor-in-chief of the journal Science...
Francis Halzen wins Nobel Prize in physics for work on high-energy neutrinos of astrophysical origin
Francis Halzen won the Nobel Prize in physics on Tuesday for his efforts to demystify a rare group of neutrinos, tiny cosmic particles that scientists believe offer clues to how the universe evolved.
"It was a great surprise and I obviously didn't expect it," Halzen said, speaking to the committee by phone from Italy, in a call broadcast at the news conference to announce the winner.
Halzen said it was predicted before that he would win the Nobel Prize but the announcement still made him feel "strange."
"I am working on a proposal, and I hope that this prize will help getting it approved," he said to chuckles from the audience.
Halzen paved the way for a new kind of astronomy
The Nobel Committee for Physics also said Halzen's work was instrumental to the construction of the IceCube Neutrino Observatory in Antarctica.
"Francis Halzen realized that the ice at the South Pole could visualize these neutrino messengers from cosmos," committee member Eva Olsson said during the news conference. "People joined him in the quest for these neutrino messengers. The messenger is bringing information from cosmos. They opened the door to distant galaxies and tell us about the processes of exploding stars."
Born in Belgium, the 82-year-old scientist is affiliated with the University of Wisconsin–Madison in the U.S, which operates the IceCube Neutrino Observatory. Efforts by The Associated Press to reach him were not immediately successful.
Neutrinos are tiny cosmic particles with a mind-bogglingly small mass. Yet they are everywhere: they spew from stars like the sun and trillions zip through our bodies every second.
Scientists can't glimpse the mysterious ghost particles zooming around on their own. Instead, they measure what happens when the tiny particles collide with other bits of matter, producing flashes of light or charged particles.
Halzen helped pull the curtain back on a rare gang of neutrinos that scientists consider messengers from the cosmos, offering clues to how the universe evolved.
"This experiment in the Antarctic is a revolutionary way of understanding the universe that we didn't have before," said Michael Moloney, chief executive officer for the American Institute of Physics...
Our Smile mission is ready for science.
Its ultraviolet camera has already captured this substorm rippling through the northern lights around Earth’s North Pole.
Smile will study how Earth responds to the solar wind, helping us better understand space weather.
Read more: esa.int/Science_Explor…
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…
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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