Mercury has been slowly shrinking for billions of years. But scientists studying the smallest planet in the solar system may have overlooked just how dramatic that transformation has been because some of the evidence has literally been buried.

A new study suggests Mercury’s battered, crater-covered surface has concealed a significant fraction of the faults created as the planet cooled and contracted. After accounting for those hidden geological structures, researchers estimate Mercury may have shrunk by as much as 7.2 miles (11.6 kilometers) in radius—up to 30% more than previous estimates based on the same tectonic record.

The findings could alter models of how Mercury’s interior evolved and raise an interesting possibility beyond the planet itself. For instance, scientists may also be underestimating how much other rocky worlds, particularly the Moon, have contracted.

“Combined with the contractional strain map from Broquet and Andrews-Hanna (2026a), we show that radial contraction may have been underestimated by 10%–30%,” researchers write. “Our radial contraction correction should be considered as a lower bound.”

In the study published in Geophysical Research Letters, researchers led by Dr. Gaku Nishiyama of the German Aerospace Center (DLR) examined a longstanding mystery in Mercury’s geology.

As a rocky planet loses heat, its interior contracts. Much like the skin of a drying fruit, the planet’s rigid exterior must accommodate a shrinking interior, producing faults and enormous cliff-like features known as lobate scarps, along with wrinkle ridges and other shortening structures.

Scientists therefore use the crustal shortening recorded by these structures as a geological ruler to determine how much Mercury has contracted.

The problem is that those structures aren’t distributed across Mercury the way scientists might expect.

If cooling caused the entire planet to contract, the resulting deformation should be comparatively widespread. Instead, previous mapping has revealed regions filled with large scarps alongside enormous areas where surprisingly few contractional structures have been identified.

Dr. Nishiyama and his colleagues investigated whether at least part of that discrepancy could be an illusion created by Mercury’s extraordinarily battered surface.

Mercury’s Craters May Be Hiding Its Wrinkles

The researchers constructed a global map of Mercury’s surface roughness using topographic measurements acquired from NASA’s MESSENGER mission and a global digital terrain model produced from spacecraft imagery.

They then compared that roughness with previously cataloged tectonic structures.

Findings showed that fault scarps and other shortening structures were preferentially identified in smoother terrain, while rougher regions contained substantially fewer detectable structures. The relationship remained apparent across geographic scales extending to roughly 93 miles or about 150 kilometers.

That is counterintuitive because tectonic ridges themselves create topographic roughness. If roughness and plate movements were unrelated, areas with scarps might be expected to be slightly rougher than the surrounding terrain.

Instead, the researchers found the opposite.

One explanation is evident around relatively young impact craters such as Rachmaninoff. Large impacts blasted enormous quantities of debris across the surrounding landscape, producing thick blankets of material and secondary craters. In some locations, long tectonic structures appear to lose relief as they approach these deposits—consistent with the older structures being progressively hidden under impact material.

Other faults may still exist but become difficult to recognize against heavily cratered terrain. Once the surrounding topography becomes rough enough, a weathered ridge only a little higher than the background landscape can effectively disappear into the geological noise.

There is also a third possibility.

Heavily cratered regions may contain thick, porous layers of broken rock called regolith. During planetary contraction, some deformation could be absorbed as pores collapse rather than producing large faults visible from orbit. Alternatively, deformation could create faults too small for current observations to resolve. The researchers say available evidence cannot yet rule out that possibility.

Mercury Could Have Shrunk by More Than 7 Miles

Whatever mechanism is responsible, Dr. Nishiyama and his colleagues argue the relationship creates a systematic bias, where scientists see more evidence of contraction where Mercury’s surface makes that evidence easier to preserve and identify.

The team developed a correction using comparatively smooth regions, where tectonic structures appear less affected by this bias.

Applied to an earlier global estimate of 5.2 miles (8.3 kilometers) of radial contraction, the correction increased Mercury’s estimated shrinkage to roughly 7.2 miles or about 11.6 kilometers.

Depending on which tectonic structures are included, the researchers estimate surface roughness could have caused previous calculations to underestimate Mercury’s contraction by roughly 10% to 30%. They also caution that their corrected figure may itself represent a lower limit.

Ultimately, Mercury’s shrinking surface effectively records what has happened deep inside the planet.

The amount of contraction constrains how quickly Mercury lost heat, the thickness of its insulating regolith, the abundance of heat-producing elements, and even the composition and freezing history of its enormous metallic core. The revised estimate, for example, favors models involving a thinner regolith and lower sulfur content in Mercury’s core than some previous estimates.

Scientists may soon get a much sharper look.

The ESA-JAXA BepiColombo mission’s laser altimeter will eventually measure Mercury’s topography at scales as small as about 330 feet or 100 meters, possibly revealing geological relationships that MESSENGER could not resolve.

And Mercury may not be the only world whose geological record has been hiding in plain sight.

The Moon’s highlands are even rougher than Mercury’s cratered plains—by roughly 40% at the little-over 6-mile (10-kilometer) scale examined by the researchers. Yet evidence suggests the Moon contracted less than some thermal models estimate. If rough terrain similarly hides lunar faults, part of that difference might reflect structures scientists haven’t been able to see.

In other words, Mercury’s missing wrinkles may expose a wider problem in planetary geoscience. The more battered an ancient world becomes, the more effectively its later surface can erase the visible record of what happened before it.

“Investigating roughness alongside tectonic landforms may therefore refine our understanding of the lunar thermal evolution as well,” researchers conclude. “Mars could also be subject to this roughness effect, while topographic smoothing due to fluvial and aeolian processes may introduce more complex correlation between surface roughness and shortening structures.”

Study: Nishiyama, G., Broquet, A., Tosi, N., Preusker, F., Stark, A., Hussmann, H., & Hauber, E. “Underestimation of Planetary Contraction Due to Obscuration by Surface Roughness: The Case of Mercury.” Geophysical Research Letters 53, (2026). 

Tim McMillan is a retired law enforcement executive, investigative reporter and co-founder of The Debrief. His writing typically focuses on defense, national security, the Intelligence Community and topics related to psychology. You can follow Tim on Twitter: @LtTimMcMillan.  Tim can be reached by email: tim@thedebrief.org or through encrypted email: LtTimMcMillan@protonmail.com 

One of the most popular explanations of human behavior has been that somewhere beneath our rational mind lurks an ancient “lizard brain”—a primitive evolutionary holdover responsible for instinct, emotion, fear, and aggression.

There is just one problem. Neuroscientists have long known that the lizard brain story is wrong. Humans did not evolve a sophisticated new brain by simply stacking it on top of an older reptilian one.

But a new study suggests the enduring lizard brain myth may have inadvertently pointed to something more interesting. Mammalian brains do appear to be organized around two broad computational systems—but not an ancient reptilian brain located beneath a newer, more sophisticated one. Instead, the divide appears to reflect two fundamentally different ways of organizing and processing information.

Published in Science Advances, the research combines anatomical measurements from 182 mammalian species with experiments using artificial neural networks. The researchers found a striking evolutionary trade-off between the neocortex and a collection of structures associated with smell, memory, and the limbic system.

Instead of representing “new” and “old” brains, the researchers say these regions may have evolved different wiring styles optimized for solving different kinds of computational problems.

“Rather than an ‘old’ brain and a ‘new’ brain, our results suggest two systems wired for different kinds of computation,” lead author Dr. Nabil Imam, a researcher at the Georgia Institute of Technology, told The Debrief. “The neocortex is wired to preserve spatial relationships—for example, neighboring points in the visual world are analyzed by neighboring parts of the cortex. The limbic system is more diffusely connected and supports holistic associations across different pieces of information.”

“So, the division between the neocortex and limbic system is about how the two systems are wired,” Dr. Imam added.

This distinction offers a very different picture from the famous lizard brain story.

The lizard brain concept grew from the so-called triune brain theory, which portrays the human brain as having evolved in distinct layers. A primitive “lizard brain” handling basic instincts, a mammalian limbic system producing emotion, and, finally, a newer neocortex responsible for higher thought.

The problem is that neuroscience has long since overturned that evolutionary story. Vertebrate brains did not evolve by progressively stacking newer brain regions on top of older, more primitive ones. Instead, vertebrates share essentially the same broad organizational plan, with existing regions changing in size, connectivity, and function over evolutionary time.

The new study suggests, however, that the mammalian brain may be divided very differently—not by evolutionary age, but by how different neural systems are wired to process information.

Across 182 species from 10 taxonomic groups, animals with an unusually large olfactory system tended to have a smaller-than-expected neocortex. Animals with an expanded neocortex tended to show the opposite pattern.

The nine-banded armadillo provides a particularly dramatic example. Armadillos are largely nocturnal and depend heavily on smell while foraging. As researchers note, the armadillo’s olfactory system was approximately 1.5 times larger than expected for its overall brain size. Its hippocampus—a region central to memory and spatial processing—was about twice its expected size.

Its neocortex, meanwhile, was reduced by a factor of 2.8. Primates such as squirrel monkeys sit closer to the other end of the spectrum. They rely heavily on vision and devote a large portion of their expanded neocortex to processing visual information.

At first glance, that could look like evolution trading smell for sight. But the researchers noticed something more intriguing. The hippocampus grew and shrank alongside the olfactory system, even though memory is obviously not another form of smell. Other structures traditionally grouped into the limbic system, including the amygdala and septum, also tended to change together.

That suggested the important difference might not be what these regions process, but how they are wired to process it.

Two Very Different Ways to Build a Brain

Vision offers a relatively straightforward example. Neighboring points in the visual world are generally processed through neighboring areas of the visual system. Touch operates similarly. Locations beside one another on your body retain spatial relationships as the nervous system processes them. Hearing also uses orderly mappings, including those based on sound frequency.

The result is what neuroscientists call “spatiotopic” organization. In simple terms, the brain preserves relationships between incoming information by arranging it into orderly maps.

However, smell works differently. Odors are represented through combinations of activity distributed across networks rather than being laid out in the same neat spatial fashion.

The researchers suspected that this difference might help explain the anatomical trade-off they had identified across mammals. To test the idea, they turned to artificial neural networks trained to handle vision, touch, hearing, and smell.

They then mapped the networks’ internal models onto artificial two-dimensional surfaces resembling sheets of cortex.

Results showed that networks optimized for vision, touch, and hearing produced smooth, highly ordered maps. On a scale in which 1 represented strong spatial order, the visual network scored 0.90, touch scored 0.86, and hearing scored 0.89.

Yet, the smell network scored just 0.11. Rather than producing a smooth map, information was scattered across a fractured, distributed representation. The researchers even found that imposing localized connectivity on the olfactory model harmed its ability to perform its task.

Researchers then examined memory. Using an artificial network designed to reproduce some relational computations associated with the hippocampus and entorhinal cortex, researchers again saw a fractured, distributed representation resembling the olfactory system rather than vision, hearing or touch.

For Dr. Imam, one of the most surprising results was that artificial networks arrived at an organization resembling real brains despite learning in profoundly different ways.

“Artificial networks are trained by an algorithm that propagates errors through the network, whereas brains are shaped by evolution and through localized changes in synapses,” Imam explained. “The fact that both nevertheless arrive at similar organization suggests that the structure of the information itself—whether visual, auditory, tactile, or olfactory—determines what kind of wiring works best.”

No “Lizard Brain,” But Evolution May Be Trading One Kind of Brainpower for Another

Researchers next wanted to know whether competition between these two wiring styles could reproduce the anatomical patterns seen across real mammals.

They created an evolutionary simulation containing five artificial networks. Vision, hearing, and touch occupied one computational domain based on localized, spatial organization. Smell and hippocampal memory occupied another based on distributed connectivity.

Then an evolutionary algorithm redistributed computational resources between them.

When selection favored vision, resources moved toward the spatially organized networks. When selection favored smell, the distributed networks expanded.

But something interesting occurred to the simulated hippocampal network. Even though researchers weren’t directly selecting for memory, the hippocampal network grew along with the olfactory network because both shared the same broad computational architecture. As resources shifted toward the other system, both contracted.

That closely resembled the pattern found across real mammalian brains.

“It suggests that evolution may not be selecting individual brain regions one at a time, but rather the functions produced by whole patterns of wiring,” Dr. Imam explained. “Because regions that share similar wiring tend to grow or shrink together, selection for one kind of function comes at the expense of another, given that the system must operate with limited energy and space.”

That does not mean an animal with a larger neocortex is simply more intelligent than one with a larger limbic system. Nor does the distributed system represent a primitive emotional brain fighting against a rational one.

Instead, the two architectures appear suited to different computational problems. Evolution may have repeatedly adjusted how much neural real estate mammals devote to each.

Nevertheless, researchers caution that their models are intentionally simplified. Anatomical measurements came from several datasets; some taxonomic groups are better represented than others, and artificial neural networks are not replicas of biological brains.

The evolutionary model is intended to demonstrate that a relatively simple developmental mechanism could produce the observed trade-off, not to reconstruct exactly how mammalian brains evolved.

Still, the research raises another interesting possibility extending beyond the demise of the “lizard brain.” Our brains may arrive in the world with considerably more computational structure already built in than the familiar idea of a blank slate implies.

“The brain may be much less of a blank slate than we often imagine,” Dr. Imam told The Debrief. “Evolution and development build useful assumptions into its wiring before experience-driven learning.”

It is also another example of something scientists are increasingly encountering across very different areas of biology: evolution can produce remarkably sophisticated structures and systems that human engineers are just starting to understand, much less reproduce.

In a recent study covered by The Debrief, researchers discovered that cable bacteria construct microscopic electrical pathways from nickel-rich nanoribbons arranged remarkably like braided electrical wires. The naturally grown structures may achieve extraordinary conductivity while remaining flexible, properties that researchers are now interested in replicating for bio-based electronics.

The mammalian brain represents an enormously more complicated example, but the underlying lesson may be similar. Evolution does not begin with a blank slate each generation. It can build useful solutions into biological architecture itself, leaving subsequent learning along with adaptation to operate within structures refined over immense spans of evolutionary time.

That could also help explain one of the most striking differences between biological intelligence and today’s artificial intelligence. Modern AI systems can require enormous datasets to acquire abilities that biological brains learn from comparatively limited experience.

“That built-in structure may explain why brains can learn efficiently from relatively little experience, whereas most artificial networks require enormous datasets to learn useful functions,” Imam said. “The idea has deep roots in philosophy of mind, but only recently have neuroscience and computer science begun to provide concrete demonstrations of how such built-in structure can aid function.”

The recent study, “Dual computational systems in the development and evolution of mammalian brains,” appeared in Science Advances.

Tim McMillan is a retired law enforcement executive, investigative reporter and co-founder of The Debrief. His writing typically focuses on defense, national security, the Intelligence Community and topics related to psychology. You can follow Tim on Twitter: @LtTimMcMillan.  Tim can be reached by email: tim@thedebrief.org or through encrypted email: LtTimMcMillan@protonmail.com 

For more than a decade, scientists have known that strange bacteria living in aquatic mud can conduct electricity along distances thousands of times longer than a single bacterial cell. Such long-range electrical conduction should be extraordinarily difficult for a living organism, and how they accomplish the feat has remained a biological mystery.

Now, researchers say they have found the wiring. Inside so-called cable bacteria, scientists have discovered an elaborate network of nickel-rich nanoribbons arranged into what amounts to a naturally grown electrical cable.

The structure is unlike the conventional machinery biology normally uses to move electrons and may represent the first known example of a metal-organic framework produced by a living organism.

What surprised lead study author Dr. Filip Meysman, a professor at the University of Antwerp in Belgium, most was not how alien the structure looked, but how familiar it was.

“It had a very familiar feeling: a braided wire consisting of thin individual wires surrounded by a protective shell layer,” Meysman told The Debrief. “This is very similar to the power cords that we use to charge our smartphones, only the cable bacterial version is 20,000 times smaller in size. Evolution came up with this design 600 million years earlier than electrical engineers.”

Meysman’s comparison is not simply rhetorical. Molecular-clock estimates suggest the cable bacteria lineage may have diverged roughly 560 million years ago, although when their unusual electrical capabilities evolved is still unknown.

Published in Nature Communications, the findings could eventually provide researchers with a biological blueprint for creating flexible, biodegradable electronics that organisms effectively manufacture themselves.

Cable bacteria first attracted scientific attention because of their outstanding ability to move electrons over centimeter-scale distances. The multicellular organisms live in sediments where different layers offer different chemical resources. Cells buried deeper can harvest electrons from sulfide, while cells closer to oxygen-rich water dispose of them.

The result is an organism that successfully separates parts of its metabolism across space, with electrical current passing along the filament connecting them.

Scientists eventually identified dozens of parallel fibers running through the bacteria’s outer layers as the likely electrical pathways. Measurements later showed conductivity reaching levels unusual for any biological material and, in some experiments, comparable to materials used in electronic inks. The new study notes previously reported conductivity values reaching up to 500 siemens per centimeter.

But knowing where the current traveled was not the same as knowing how it traveled.

Most biological electron conduction relies on proteins containing metal-bearing cofactors, commonly iron-containing structures such as hemes or iron-sulfur clusters. Electrons typically move between those sites in a sequence of molecular transfers often described as “hopping.”

Previous research showed that cable bacteria did not fit neatly into that model. Their conducting fibers were associated with sulfur-bound nickel rather than the usual iron cofactors. At the same time, theoretical work suggested electron movement was too fast to be explained by conventional non-adiabatic hopping alone.

The mystery deepened in 2024, when some of the same researchers examined cable bacteria at temperatures approaching that of liquid helium and found that their electrical behavior matched an unusually efficient multistep hopping mechanism. But even then, the extraordinary conductivity challenged standard models of electrons simply hopping between isolated molecular sites.

The new structural work may help explain why.

Rather than a series of small, separated metal cofactors, the researchers have now found an extended nickel-organic structure running through the conductive fibers.

Using electron microscopy, X-ray fluorescence, Raman spectroscopy, electron paramagnetic resonance, X-ray absorption spectroscopy, and computer modeling, the team found that each conductive fiber contains roughly 11 extraordinarily thin nanoribbons, about 1.4 nanometers across.

Those ribbons pass through the center of the fiber and are built from repeating nickel bis-dithiolene complexes, which the researchers call NiBiD. Nickel atoms are linked through sulfur-containing organic molecules, creating planar units that appear to stack into an extended, highly ordered electrical pathway.

That arrangement may explain the extraordinary conductivity. Rather than electrons simply jumping between isolated metal centers, the stacked structure creates extensive electronic interaction and delocalization, allowing charge to spread across overlapping molecular networks. In that sense, the bacterial wire begins to resemble an organic electronic material more than a conventional biological electron-transfer chain.

The arrangement also appears mechanically well-suited to the bacteria’s lifestyle.

Cable bacteria move through sediment and can bend sharply while maintaining electrical contact between cells. A single rigid conducting strand could be vulnerable to damage. Multiple intertwined nanoribbons, however, offer something closer to braided copper wire: strength, flexibility, and redundancy at the same time.

The discovery also appears to broaden scientists’ understanding of what biology can manufacture.

Metal-organic frameworks, or MOFs, are structures in which organic molecules link together metal centers into larger networks. Chemists have spent years designing them for uses ranging from gas storage and chemical separation to catalysis and electronics.

Until now, the researchers say, no one had observed a metal-organic framework configuration naturally constructed inside a living organism.

Cable bacteria appear to have arrived at the idea on their own, and this natural version appears to conduct electricity exceptionally well.

Previous electrical conductivity measurements of cable bacteria used the entire cross-section of their conductive fibers. But the new structural work indicates that the current is concentrated within a much smaller network of nanoribbons.

Recalculating conductivity based on the estimated dimensions of those conducting channels, the researchers found that an individual nanoribbon could have a conductivity of roughly 150 to 15,000 siemens per centimeter.

That range, the researchers say, ranks among the highest reported for any metal-organic structure. The upper figure remains an estimate, however, instead of a direct measurement of a single nanoribbon.

“We need to be able to isolate the individual nanoribbons from the cable bacteria and connect them electrically with electrodes,” Dr. Meysman explained. “This would provide the direct proof of the high conductivity. We are currently working on such nanoscale electrical measurements.”

Doing so would let researchers determine whether the extraordinary conductivity predicted for an individual nanoribbon holds up experimentally.

If it does, the technological implications could extend well beyond understanding an unusual microbe.

Researchers have long been interested in bio-based electronics because living systems can manufacture sophisticated materials through self-assembly while operating under relatively mild conditions. Biological materials can also be flexible and potentially biodegradable.

Their weakness has usually been electrical performance. Cable bacteria suggest nature may have found a way around that tradeoff.

Scientists still do not know exactly how cable bacteria biosynthesize the nickel-organic framework, and parts of the nanoribbon architecture remain unresolved.

But evolution has already solved one problem materials scientists would like to reproduce: how to build a highly conductive, flexible electrical pathway largely from organic components under biological conditions.

Dr. Meysman says one especially promising possibility is flexible printed electronics, where conductive inks are deposited onto surfaces to create circuits, sensors, and other electronic components.

“The material produced by the bacteria provides a flexible and conductive material, and so flexible printed electronics—conductive inks—emerges as a promising application domain,” Dr. Meysman said.

“The challenge is to demonstrate that the biomaterial can be made in a cost-effective fashion,” Meysman added, “and that it has the same—or even better—properties than the electronic ink materials currently in use.”

Ultimately, for hundreds of millions of years, bacteria buried in mud may have been growing microscopic power cables.

Scientists are only now beginning to understand how they work.

The study, “Highly efficient long-range conduction through a biosynthetic nickel-organic framework,” appeared in Nature Communications.

Tim McMillan is a retired law enforcement executive, investigative reporter and co-founder of The Debrief. His writing typically focuses on defense, national security, the Intelligence Community and topics related to psychology. You can follow Tim on Twitter: @LtTimMcMillan.  Tim can be reached by email: tim@thedebrief.org or through encrypted email: LtTimMcMillan@protonmail.com 

More than 4,000 years ago, an Egyptian official named Sekhentiu-Ptah held a collection of titles that placed him remarkably close to royal power. He oversaw the king’s works and documents, supervised scribes, and even served as the “Keeper of the Secrets of Royal Commands.”

Now, archaeologists have found his tomb. An Egyptian archaeological mission excavating the Saqqara necropolis in Giza has uncovered the Old Kingdom tomb of Sekhentiu-Ptah, including its funerary chapel, an intact false door, and a complete collection of alabaster ritual objects still positioned where they were left thousands of years ago.

Nearby, researchers discovered an interconnected network of burial shafts containing human remains, more than 100 funerary figurines, and three stone sarcophagi that were still sealed when archaeologists found them.

Speaking with The Jerusalem Post, Mohamed Abdel-Badie, head of Egypt’s Antiquities Sector, said finding a complete set of funerary objects still in their original position was “an important discovery, offering valuable information about funerary rituals and practices during the Old Kingdom.”

The discovery was made during the Egyptian mission’s first excavation season in Sector A, west of the Bubasteion at Saqqara, roughly 20 miles south of Cairo. Saqqara served as a major burial ground for ancient Memphis and contains monuments and tombs spanning thousands of years of Egyptian history.

Sekhentiu-Ptah’s tomb dates to the Old Kingdom, the era roughly spanning the third millennium BCE that witnessed the construction of Egypt’s great pyramids.

Inside the remains of his funerary chapel, archaeologists encountered a false door still standing in its original location. Such doors were symbolic thresholds associated with the deceased and the offerings made to sustain them in the afterlife.

Directly in front of the false door was a complete group of alabaster ritual objects that had apparently remained together in their archaeological context. The assemblage includes an offering table and offering disk, purification basin, jug, and another basin.

Hieroglyphic inscriptions on the false door and funerary objects revealed not only Sekhentiu-Ptah’s name but an extraordinary résumé.

He was identified as Royal Chamberlain, Overseer of All the King’s Works, Overseer of Royal Documents, Keeper of the Secrets of Royal Commands, Priest of the goddess Maat, and Overseer of the Scribes. Together, the titles indicate that Sekhentiu-Ptah occupied a prominent position within Egypt’s royal administration.

Archaeologists also uncovered a system of interconnected burial shafts filled with human burials and large quantities of painted funerary cartonnage, a material commonly made from layers of linen or papyrus and plaster and used in funerary coverings.

Archaeologists recovered more than 100 faience ushabti figurines. These small figures were placed in Egyptian tombs to perform work for the deceased in the afterlife symbolically. Archaeologists also found a wooden falcon statue, pottery, and three stone sarcophagi that were kept sealed in their original condition.

The collection is particularly interesting because it captures different chapters in Saqqara’s history. While Sekhentiu-Ptah’s tomb belongs to the Old Kingdom, material from the surrounding shafts provides evidence for funerary practices during the much later Late Period. In essence, the site became a cemetery layered on top of a cemetery, repeatedly returned to and repurposed across Egyptian history.

Not everything survived undisturbed. Archaeologists found openings cut between some burial chambers, evidence that ancient tomb robbers had already penetrated portions of the complex. Even so, enough remained intact to allow researchers to reconstruct how the necropolis changed over time.

The surviving artifacts retain “great archaeological and scientific value, contributing to understanding the site’s internal layout and the development of its architecture through its successive historical phases,” excavation director Dr. Amr El-Tayebi explained.

For now, the discovery is a work in progress. The Egyptian team is continuing to document and compare the artifacts with material recovered elsewhere in Egypt, with plans to publish the results in peer-reviewed scientific journals. Archaeologists also believe Sector A could contain additional structures and artifacts still waiting beneath the sands of Saqqara.

Tim McMillan is a retired law enforcement executive, investigative reporter and co-founder of The Debrief. His writing typically focuses on defense, national security, the Intelligence Community and topics related to psychology. You can follow Tim on Twitter: @LtTimMcMillan.  Tim can be reached by email: tim@thedebrief.org or through encrypted email: LtTimMcMillan@protonmail.com 

Nine centuries ago, people gathered at what is today recognized as the Etowah Indian Mounds site, located roughly 40 miles northwest of Atlanta, Georgia, for enormous community feasts. They ate, drank, and eventually discarded broken pottery into pits that would become part of the foundations of the ancient city’s first monumental mound.

Now, traces hidden inside two pieces of that discarded pottery have revealed something archaeologists never expected to find so far from the tropics: ancient cacao DNA.

Researchers say the discovery provides the first direct evidence that cacao, the plant used to make chocolate, reached the Mississippian civilization of the eastern United States roughly 800 to 900 years ago.

Because cacao cannot grow naturally in Georgia, its presence also points to surprisingly extensive networks capable of moving exotic goods across long stretches of pre-Columbian North America. The findings were published in PLOS One.

“This study presents the first evidence that cacao consumption was part of the Mississippian world at roughly the same time as it appeared at Chaco,” researchers write. “This discovery at Etowah asks us to broaden our understanding of the networks that distributed cacao throughout the Americas before European colonization.”

Chocolate has a deep history in the Americas. Archaeological evidence indicates cacao was being consumed in South America at least 5,000 years ago and later became culturally important throughout Central America.

More surprising was a 2009 discovery indicating that people at Chaco Canyon in modern New Mexico drank cacao between roughly 1050 and 1350 CE. Since cacao only grows in tropical climates, the finding meant long-distance exchange networks had carried the plant hundreds of miles northward.

Whether cacao traveled even farther into what is now the eastern United States remained unclear.

However, Etowah offered an intriguing place to look. Located in modern Georgia, the Indigenous city eventually became one of the most important centers of Mississippian civilization. The pottery examined in the new study came from feasting deposits dating to the 11th and 12th centuries, early in Etowah’s history.

Researchers had previously analyzed residues from 31 Etowah pottery fragments. Twenty-one contained at least two chemical compounds associated with caffeinated beverages, while three contained all four compounds the scientists examined.

Yaupon holly, a native plant used to produce the caffeinated beverage historically known as Black Drink, contains several of the same chemical biomarkers as cacao. Researchers, therefore, concluded that the Etowah vessels most likely contained yaupon rather than cacao.

However, this time, scientists went looking for cacao itself.

Researchers subjected samples from three pottery fragments to ancient DNA analysis, producing more than 502 million useful paired sequences before using successive filters to identify genetic material specific to Theobroma cacao.

Two pottery samples cleared the researchers’ threshold for identifying cacao.

Importantly, the genetic material also displayed telltale characteristics of ancient DNA. The fragments averaged only 84 base pairs long, consistent with the degradation expected after centuries of decay. The researchers also employed strict contamination controls and bioinformatic filtering to distinguish cacao from other organisms present in the samples.

The evidence does not establish exactly how cacao reached Georgia. Preliminary genetic comparisons linked one sample most closely to Amelonado cacao and another to Curaray, both of which also showed similarities to Marañon cacao. Those lineages originated in the Amazon basin, including parts of modern Ecuador, Peru, and Brazil, but also spread into Central America long before cacao appeared at Etowah.

Cacao may have traveled from Central America through long-distance exchange networks or passed indirectly through communities in the American Southwest before reaching the Eastern Woodlands. However, too few genetic markers survived to pinpoint its immediate source, and researchers say no direct archaeological evidence currently establishes either route.

Perhaps more intriguing is where researchers found the cacao.

The pottery came from pits packed with animal bones, ceramics, and organic material interpreted as the remains of communal feasting associated with the construction of Etowah’s first platform mound. Researchers suggest cacao was more than an exotic luxury and could have played a role in ceremonies intended to reinforce social bonds during the city’s formative period.

The discovery also raises the possibility that previously detected chemical residues at other Mississippian sites, including Cahokia, could contain cacao that was mistaken for locally available yaupon. Confirming that possibility will require additional ancient DNA testing.

“These results ask us to reopen lines of research long closed, especially regarding contacts between the impressive civilizations of Central and South America and the great Mississippian civilization of the Eastern Woodlands,” researchers write. “More broadly, our results suggest that it is time to explore the possibility that cacao was distributed more widely in the precontact Americas than we have understood.”

Study: King, A., Powis, T.G., Argout, X., Vignes, H., Utge, J., Rhoné, B., et al. “Cacao in the Mississippian World: Archaeogenomic evidence for T. cacao consumption at the Etowah Site, Georgia.” PLOS One 21(8):(2026). 

Tim McMillan is a retired law enforcement executive, investigative reporter and co-founder of The Debrief. His writing typically focuses on defense, national security, the Intelligence Community and topics related to psychology. You can follow Tim on Twitter: @LtTimMcMillan.  Tim can be reached by email: tim@thedebrief.org or through encrypted email: LtTimMcMillan@protonmail.com 

New research suggests ancient pottery may contain a magnetic “clock,” providing researchers with a lasting record of how long ago ceramic artifacts were created. 

According to scientists at the University of California, San Diego, the newly-developed method allows this lingering magnetic signal to help distinguish genuinely ancient clay artifacts from modern forgeries.

In experiments, clay objects more than 1,000 years old retained a magnetic signature that could only be erased by heating them above 234°F. (112°C). Modern objects lost the same type of magnetism at lower temperatures.

Published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), the research could give archaeologists and museums a new forensic tool for investigating artifacts whose origins are uncertain, while potentially giving law enforcement another way to build cases involving antiquities fraud.

“I hope that our new method will be useful for museum curators, who wish to display only authentic artifacts,” lead author and postdoctoral scholar at UC San Diego, Dr. Yoav Vaknin, said in a press release. “For archaeologists and historians, studying the societies that created them and for law enforcement authorities in their effort to eliminate the illicit antiquities trade, which involves looting archaeological sites and forgery.”

The technique takes advantage of a property baked into clay when it is fired.

As pottery heats in a kiln and then cools, magnetic particles inside the clay correspond to Earth’s magnetic field. Larger particles can preserve that orientation for extremely long periods, producing what geophysicists call thermal remnant magnetization.

But another signature slowly develops afterward. Smaller magnetic particles remain less stable and gradually respond to Earth’s magnetic field, while an artifact sits buried, stored, or displayed. This secondary signal, known as viscous remanent magnetization, effectively accumulates with time.

Instead of trying to determine an artifact’s age simply by measuring which direction its magnetism points, researchers wondered if they could measure how difficult its accumulated magnetic signal is to erase.

Researchers examined ancient and modern clay objects, including known archaeological specimens, objects purchased from souvenir markets around Jerusalem, and known fakes. They progressively reheated samples, starting at 112°F (50°C) and increasing the temperature in 10-degree increments while measuring changes in their magnetic signatures.

All 26 modern objects examined in the study lost their viscous magnetization below around 234°F. (112°C). By contrast, the 19 ancient specimens, each over 1,000 years old, retained the signal until temperatures exceeded that threshold. Computer simulations modeling hundreds to thousands of years of magnetic exposure independently supported the same result.

Researchers also tested the method on three disputed artifacts that the Israel Antiquities Authority obtained in connection with illicit antiquities trafficking. The evidence was consistent with all three being genuinely ancient.

The technique does have limits. It does not reveal an artifact’s exact date of manufacture, and the 234°F threshold cannot simply be applied to every object. Genuine artifacts younger than roughly 1,000 years, and sophisticated forgeries that have aged for decades or centuries, could be harder to distinguish. The researchers, therefore, envision magnetic testing as another line of evidence, not a replacement for existing archaeological authentication methods.

Nevertheless, the breakthrough could still be significant. Forged antiquities have plagued museums, private collections, and archaeological markets for generations.

Researchers note that a recent Israeli prosecution involving allegedly fake artifacts failed in part because investigators lacked sufficiently conclusive evidence. This new approach could eventually provide measurable physical evidence that is harder for a skilled forger to imitate.

Researchers now plan to examine disputed artifacts held by museums worldwide, possibly turning a phenomenon geophysicists have understood for decades into a new form of archaeological forensics.

The study, “Viscous Remanent Magnetization (VRM) Authentication Method for Archaeological Artifacts” appeared in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Tim McMillan is a retired law enforcement executive, investigative reporter and co-founder of The Debrief. His writing typically focuses on defense, national security, the Intelligence Community and topics related to psychology. You can follow Tim on Twitter: @LtTimMcMillan.  Tim can be reached by email: tim@thedebrief.org or through encrypted email: LtTimMcMillan@protonmail.com 

In 2022, when archaeologists uncovered the grave of a young woman buried in 17th-century Pień, Poland, they were confronted with a bizarre scene. Hanging from the big toe of her left foot was an iron padlock. Across her neck lay a large sickle, its blade positioned directly toward her throat.

The strange arrangement suggested that whoever buried her may have feared that, like the vampires of European folklore, she might somehow rise from the grave.

In the four years since “Grave 75” was discovered, scientists have subjected the young woman’s remains, clothing, grave, and the mysterious objects buried with her to an unusually extensive forensic investigation involving ancient DNA, radiocarbon dating, isotope chemistry, X-ray imaging, and microscopic analysis.

Published in the Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports, the findings are beginning to reveal who the mysterious woman was. She was only around 17 to 19 years old when she died, appears to have come from a wealthy or high-status family, and probably spent her childhood in the surrounding region.

Most strikingly, the evidence suggests that local fears surrounding the young woman may have grown after she was already buried.

Researchers believe the padlock was placed on her toe during the first burial. Sometime later, the grave was apparently reopened and the sickle positioned across her neck as an additional safeguard.

The circumstances surrounding the young woman’s death, and why the community apparently feared her enough to take such extraordinary precautions against her trying to return to the land of the living, remain a mystery.

“The burial, uncovered and later disturbed, is distinguished by the co-occurrence of a sickle and a padlock within a single grave, a combination not previously reported in the published archaeological literature,” researchers write. “Ongoing palaeopathological research may shed new light on the cause of death of this young female, which remains a mystery today.”

The grave represents what archaeologists describe as an “anti-demonic” or “anti-vampiric” burial. However, the researchers caution that applying the familiar label of “vampire” to such graves can be misleading.

Although versions of the term vampire can be traced as far back as the Middle Ages, it did not become widespread across Europe until around the 18th century. Earlier Slavic cultures used terms including upiór and strzyga to describe people who, after death, were believed capable of becoming dangerous supernatural beings that could threaten the living.

Researchers have identified several hundred suspected anti-vampire burials dating from the post-medieval period onward across Central and Southeastern Europe.

“Grave 75” was discovered at a cemetery in Pień overlooking the Vistula Valley, where archaeologists have uncovered more than 100 post-medieval graves. Researchers believe the cemetery may have served a Protestant community, and its unusual location away from the village raises the possibility that it was also used to bury people considered social outsiders. Several dozen graves contain unusual features, including deliberately placed stones, coins, sickles, and padlocks.

Sickles and padlocks have both been associated with old European burial practices intended to prevent potentially dangerous dead from returning to harm the living. But finding the two together in one “vampire grave” was unprecedented. No previously published archaeological account had documented a burial containing both a sickle and a padlock.

The woman lay on her back with her legs extended. Around her neck was a 14-inch-long serrated sickle, positioned with its cutting edge toward her throat. Hanging from the big toe of her left foot was a triangular iron padlock. Archaeologists also recovered fragments of an elaborate textile near her skull.

Microscopic analysis showed the material was silk decorated with metal threads made from silver and gilded silver. Such expensive trimmings were generally associated with aristocrats, nobility, and wealthy townspeople. Researchers, therefore, conclude that the teenager likely came from a relatively high social class, making her apparent treatment after death particularly unusual.

Analysis of her skeleton offered few indications about how she died. Researchers estimated that she stood roughly 5 feet 5 inches tall and found no evidence of fatal trauma or skeletal disease that might explain her death. Without any surviving soft tissue, however, determining a definitive cause of death may be impossible.

DNA confirmed the remains belonged to a female and placed her mitochondrial lineage within haplogroup J1c2c1, a lineage found particularly among ancient and modern Scandinavian populations.

Isotope measurements suggest she probably spent her childhood around Pień. One possibility is that she belonged to a family with more distant Scandinavian ancestry, although the researchers caution that genetics and isotopes cannot establish geographic origin with certainty.

More intriguing is evidence that the precautions surrounding her body were not all taken at the same time.

The padlock appears to have been attached when she was originally buried. The sickle may have come later.

Disturbed soil around the vampire grave suggests somebody subsequently reopened it. Because the skeleton remained articulated, researchers believe that, if it were reopened, it probably happened before the body had completely decomposed. At that point, someone may have placed or driven the sickle across her neck as an additional safeguard.

That raises a disturbing possibility that the community already regarded the young woman as potentially dangerous when she died. Yet, for unknown reasons, they became even more frightened of her after her burial.

Historical traditions provide some context. In parts of Poland, a sickle placed across the throat was believed to prevent a strzyga from returning. Birch, one possible wood identified in the sickle’s deteriorated handle, was itself associated with protection against demons and witchcraft.

There may have even been yet another precaution. Extensive green discoloration inside the skull suggests that an object containing copper could have been placed in her mouth. Chemical analysis could not determine what it was, although researchers say it was unlikely to be a coin. Objects inserted into the mouths of suspected revenants are known from other “anti-vampiric” burials.

None of this means the woman was literally considered a “vampire” in the modern Dracula sense. Instead, the evidence points toward a wider fear that certain dead people could return or somehow cause harm.

Why this particular teenager inspired such fear is still a mystery. Researchers suggest her ancestry, young age, an unusual or socially troubling death, disease, or behavior during life could all have contributed.

In periods of epidemic, famine, and other disasters, communities sometimes blamed supposedly dangerous dead people for otherwise inexplicable misfortune. Researchers stress that these explanations remain hypotheses, not proof of what her contemporaries believed.

For now, the only thing that seems certain is that the local community feared this young woman enough to secure her body not only once, but returned to her grave to secure it again.

“Grave 75, as well as other non-normative graves in the cemetery in Pien, demonstrate practices of a protective/anti-demonic nature,” researchers write. “[They] vividly illustrate superstitions, including the tendency to blame the deceased for misfortunes and the fear of the unknown in the 17th-century Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.”

The recent study, “A unique, non-normative burial of a young adult female from a 17th-century cemetery in Pień, north-central Poland. A multidisciplinary approach,” appeared in the Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports.

Tim McMillan is a retired law enforcement executive, investigative reporter and co-founder of The Debrief. His writing typically focuses on defense, national security, the Intelligence Community and topics related to psychology. You can follow Tim on Twitter: @LtTimMcMillan.  Tim can be reached by email: tim@thedebrief.org or through encrypted email: LtTimMcMillan@protonmail.com 

The reason for CIA Director John Ratcliffe’s recent surprise visit to Moscow hasn’t been officially revealed. However, indications suggest that at least part of the unusual trip was meant to warn the Kremlin against possible provocations targeting NATO.

Given its current situation, the idea that Russia might deliberately pick a fight with NATO right now seems, on its face, absolutely insane.

Moscow has failed to achieve anything close to its original objectives in Ukraine. Its military remains heavily committed there, and Kyiv is increasingly taking the war inside Russia, creating additional economic and political pressure on the Kremlin.

Why the hell would Putin want to pick a fight with NATO now?

For starters, there’s an important distinction between provoking NATO and actually wanting to start a war with it. The former may very well be the objective. The latter is something Putin almost certainly wants to avoid.

A deliberately murky incident designed to test NATO’s political resolve and widen the growing divide between the United States and Europe, however, is a different story.

Take, for example, a Ukrainian-made drone, or a convincing Russian copy, that crosses into Lithuania or Latvia and strikes critical infrastructure or a military target. Polish and Baltic intelligence officials have recently warned that Russia could be gearing up for precisely this kind of false-flag operation.

Whatever form the provocation takes, it only needs to be serious enough that NATO cannot ignore it, but ambiguous enough that its members can’t agree on how to respond. And that’s the point.

​Article 5 says an armed attack against one NATO member is considered an attack against them all. However, it neither requires every member to respond in the same way nor automatically commits the alliance to war. Each ally ultimately determines what action it considers necessary. Critically, the treaty itself does not explicitly define what constitutes an “armed attack.”

Create enough ambiguity over whether that threshold has even been crossed, and suddenly 32 governments are left debating not only what happened, but what they are willing to do about it.

This type of hybrid attack would put Washington in an especially uncomfortable position.

With the Iran crisis still ongoing and the midterm elections just months away, the Trump administration would likely be deeply reluctant to risk a direct military confrontation with Russia over an ambiguous incident—even if European governments were pushing for a stronger response.

That alone will deepen political divisions at home while simultaneously widening the existing rift between Washington and Europe.

For Moscow, that’s a hell of a payoff from a relatively small provocation. And ultimately, driving the U.S. and Europe further apart would very likely be the larger strategic objective.

U.S.-European relations are already under extraordinary strain. But one thing often gets overlooked is that for nearly 80 years, the U.S. has served as much of the political glue holding NATO, and indirectly, the wider European security order, together. That role has never been based solely on America’s military strength.

​The United States occupies a distinct position within NATO as one of only two members—along with Canada—located distinctly outside the European sphere. As an “outside” ally, America is powerful enough to help guarantee European security while remaining geographically removed from the historical rivalries that have repeatedly divided the continent.

​Today, Western Europe and the EU can look like a collection of regional best friends. However, historically, they most definitely were not.

​For centuries, European powers competed over territory, resources, influence and security, often with disastrous consequences. One of the great achievements of the post-WWII order was finally breaking that cycle.

In fact, NATO expressly notes that preventing renewed destructive competition in Europe—including “the revival of nationalist militarism in Europe through a strong North American presence”—was one of the founding purposes of the post-World War II transatlantic security order.

We shouldn’t assume Europe’s extraordinary period of tranquility and partnership is somehow its natural state or that it would continue indefinitely under radically different security conditions.

That doesn’t mean European countries will suddenly start shooting at each other if the American “glue” substantially weakens. But national interests, regional rivalries and competing security goals could begin to reemerge. And history gives us plenty of reason to take seriously the possibility that renewed political competition in Europe could eventually become military competition.

In the near term, European governments will begin asking whether resources currently devoted to collective security objectives might eventually be needed closer to home.

And that’s where Ukraine comes into the equation.

If European governments become less certain that the United States will guarantee their security, continued support for Ukraine will look very different in their wider strategic calculations.

Britain, France, Germany, Poland, and the Baltic states will still view Russia as a threat. However, they won’t necessarily agree about how limited defense resources should be allocated, which threats are most urgent, or how much risk each country should accept on Ukraine’s behalf.

​The more national security becomes national again, the harder it is to preserve a unified European position.

​​Russia doesn’t have to defeat NATO militarily. It just has to create a situation where NATO cannot agree on what to do.

That strategy exploits a basic reality of international politics that often gets overlooked because we talk about countries as “friends.” Nations don’t have friends in the same way people do. They have allies with shared strategic interests.

Shift those interests, even slightly, and allies can become competitors. Competitors can become rivals. And history has repeatedly shown what can happen when rivalries in Europe are allowed to spiral out of control.

So if Putin believes he can start pulling at the threads holding NATO together without triggering a war, there is every reason to believe he will try.

The most consequential part of any Russian provocation will not be the incident itself, but how NATO chooses to respond.

​Moscow may be betting that distance, domestic politics, and competing national interests can pull the alliance apart. The best answer would be to prove otherwise.

​The Atlantic may physically separate North America from Europe. Still, in today’s interconnected world, geography provides far less insulation from shared threats than it did 77 years ago when NATO was founded.

Whatever disagreements exist between Washington and European capitals, both sides would do well to remember a fundamental strategic reality. Strong allies make each member stronger, and preserving those relationships remains firmly in everyone’s national interest.

Tim McMillan is a retired law enforcement executive, investigative reporter and co-founder of The Debrief. His writing typically focuses on defense, national security, the Intelligence Community and topics related to psychology. You can follow Tim on Twitter: @LtTimMcMillan.  Tim can be reached by email: tim@thedebrief.org or through encrypted email: LtTimMcMillan@protonmail.com 

A small piece of material sits nearly motionless in the dark. However, shine light on it and within seconds it begins to swell at an extraordinary rate.  Aim the light differently, and the same material can curl itself into a left-handed helix, reverse into a right-handed one, twist into more complicated shapes, or mimic the vines of a climbing plant.

Then turn the lights off, and the instructions disappear.

Researchers at the University of Science and Technology of China have developed a new photoresponsive hydrogel whose 3D shape can effectively expand, change, or even be rewritten into an entirely different configuration depending on where light strikes it.

In experiments reported in Nature Communications, the material expanded more than 80,000% within 40 seconds and could be repeatedly programmed into helices, twists, and hybrid structures.

Researchers also used its light-controlled motion to lift objects and drive a miniature rotary system, pointing toward possible applications in smart materials and soft robotics.

“Reconfiguring handedness in synthetic systems with spatiotemporal control and reversible behavior remains a fundamental challenge in bioinspired robotics and materials science,” researchers write. “Here, we demonstrate homogeneous photoactive hydrogels capable of ultrafast, programmable handed shape-morphing, including helices and twists, through spatially controlled light illumination.”

The ability to program the material after it has already been formed makes the breakthrough especially unusual.

Many shape-changing materials are manufactured with their future behavior already built into them. Different layers, directional fibers, compositional gradients, and pre-patterned structures determine how they will eventually bend, curl, or twist. Once fabricated, those instructions can be difficult, if not impossible, to change.

The new hydrogel begins as a structurally uniform material, with the asymmetry required for complex motion instead created temporarily by the pattern of incoming light. The key to making that possible is an unusually powerful swelling response.

The researchers incorporated a light-sensitive molecule known as spiropyran into a polymer network. When illuminated, the molecule experiences a chemical change that alters the electrical interactions between portions of the polymer. Attractions that normally help keep the network compact weaken or become repulsive, allowing the chains to spread apart and absorb large amounts of water.

The resulting expansion is dramatic. The researchers measured more than 80,000% volume growth after only 40 seconds of irradiation, a combination of speed and magnitude they say exceeds previously reported photoresponsive hydrogels.

Yet, simply making the hydrogel swell was only part of the experiment.

By controlling where the light hits, the team could make some portions of the material expand faster than others. Illuminating one side of a narrow strip creates a swelling gradient through its thickness. The resulting strain mismatch causes the strip to bend first, then curl into a helix.

Illuminating both sides produces a different internal swelling distribution. Rather than curling in the same manner, the strip buckles and rotates along its length, creating a twisted structure. Those shapes are not locked in place. Once the light is removed, the hydrogel relaxes and can later be programmed again.

The direction of the illumination can even determine the material’s “handedness.” Light arriving from one angle can produce a left-handed helix, while lighting the same strip from the opposite direction produces a right-handed one after the material has relaxed in darkness. Researchers repeatedly switched samples back and forth and found that the material retained its reconfigurability after more than 20 consecutive cycles.

More complicated lighting designs produced even stranger results.

By illuminating separate regions of a longer strip independently, researchers created structures containing multiple forms at once. One section could form a helix while another became a twist. Other patterns produced neighboring helices with opposite handedness or helix-twist-helix combinations, creating shapes reminiscent of the spiraling tendrils plants use to wrap around supports.

That ability to rewrite a material’s geometry also translated into mechanical output.

In one demonstration, a 6 mg strip curled into a spring capable of lifting a 50 mg payload or more than eight times its own weight. Researchers also created a light-controlled underwater switch in which the hydrogel moved two conductors into contact, as well as a tendril-like actuator that encircled another object.

The most elaborate demonstration turned the hydrogel’s twisting motion into locomotion.

Researchers connected a floating propeller to a hydrogel strip that served as a rotating shaft, with a paddle attached below the water. When light caused the hydrogel to twist, the paddle rotated, and the propeller began both spinning and traveling around a circular path. Programming the hydrogel’s handedness allowed the system to produce clockwise or counterclockwise motion.

Potentially, the hydrogel breakthrough could lead to soft robots that change shape or movement depending on the task, light-controlled grippers that wrap around delicate objects, or adaptive components that reconfigure themselves without conventional motors and mechanical parts.

Similar hydrogel materials might eventually serve as tiny switches, valves, pumps, or rotating actuators in conditions where running wires or fitting traditional machinery is difficult. Because the same configuration can be reprogrammed rather than permanently locked into one behavior, it could also open the door to devices that perform several different mechanical functions at different times.

However, for now, the experiments remain laboratory demonstrations. Researchers say the material will need faster response times to compete with some other classes of soft actuators.

Further research might improve the efficiency of its molecular photoswitches and redesign the polymer network so water can move through it more quickly.

Still, the wider concept suggests a different way of thinking about programmable matter. Instead of manufacturing a material with one predetermined set of movements, its instructions could arrive afterward as a pattern of light, then disappear and be replaced whenever a different behavior is needed.

“The core innovation of this work lies in the achievement of precise, reversible regulation of structural handedness in homogeneous hydrogels purely via external optical modulation,” researchers write. “The design principle presented here—reversibly encoding spatiotemporally programmable handedness within a homogeneous network through simple light patterns—establishes a method for creating intelligent, adaptive materials with embedded logic and function.”

The study, “Reconfiguring handed shape-morphing and actuation in hydrogels via light-encoded rapid expansion,” appeared in Nature Communications. 

Tim McMillan is a retired law enforcement executive, investigative reporter and co-founder of The Debrief. His writing typically focuses on defense, national security, the Intelligence Community and topics related to psychology. You can follow Tim on Twitter: @LtTimMcMillan.  Tim can be reached by email: tim@thedebrief.org or through encrypted email: LtTimMcMillan@protonmail.com 

Psychedelic drugs are often described as throwing the brain into a state where the usual rules begin to break down. Under psilocybin, neural networks that normally organize perception, thought, and our sense of self loosen, blurring the boundaries between the mind and what we perceive as reality.

Close your eyes, and colors and shapes may appear from nowhere. Music can feel almost physical. Even the familiar boundary between where the self ends and the rest of the world seemingly begins to melt away.

From the outside, this altered state can look a lot like a neurological disorder—a brain becoming less synchronized, less structured, and increasingly chaotic.

But a major new brain-imaging study suggests an unexpected order may be hidden within that apparent chaos. Rather than simply scrambling the brain, psilocybin appears to reorganize its activity, making it unusually sensitive to what a person is experiencing in the moment.

Published in Nature, the study used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), electroencephalography (EEG), and machine learning to examine 62 adults before and after receiving psilocybin.

Researchers say their results uncover a previously hidden form of organization within the psychedelic brain that helps explain why setting and subjective experience can have such a powerful influence on the psychological effects of psychedelics.

“Under psilocybin, brain networks that help us process our inner world and the world around us became less distinct, but reorganized into patterns that reflected what people were experiencing,” lead author and Research Fellow at the Turner Institute for Brain and Mental Health in the Monash School of Psychological Sciences, Dr Devon Stoliker, said in a statement. “We uncovered hidden order within that disruption.”

Past studies have shown that psychedelics disrupt the brain’s usual organization. Psilocybin acts primarily on serotonin 5-HT2A receptors, reshaping communication between sensory regions and higher-level networks involved in cognition, perception, and our sense of self. Researchers have frequently characterized the resulting brain state as more entropic, desynchronized, and disordered.

The new study does not necessarily contradict those findings. Instead, it suggests conventional measurements may have been missing another layer of organization unfolding over time.

Participants, none of whom had previously used psychedelics, underwent both fMRI and EEG while experiencing four different conditions: resting with their eyes closed, guided meditation, listening to music, and watching a silent movie of moving clouds. Researchers recorded their brain activity during a baseline session and again after participants received a 19-milligram dose of psilocybin.

Standard brain-imaging measurements initially produced results consistent with previous psychedelic research. Psilocybin reduced the degree to which the brain remained divided into distinct functional networks. During eyes-closed conditions, connectivity between sensory areas and the wider brain decreased while integration involving associative regions increased.

One especially intriguing change involved the difference between eyes open and eyes closed. Normally, those states produce clearly distinguishable patterns of brain connectivity.

Under psilocybin, however, that distinction narrowed dramatically. In the visual network, the gap in global functional connectivity between eyes-open and eyes-closed conditions fell by 85 percent.

EEG measurements independently showed a similar convergence. Alpha-band activity, normally associated with suppressing visual information while the eyes are closed, decreased under psilocybin, while brain-wide signal complexity increased. Because the effect appeared using two different methods of measuring brain activity, the researchers argue that psychedelic-induced changes in blood flow cannot simply explain it.

Researchers also used machine-learning techniques to follow changes in brain activity over time. Instead of becoming increasingly random, the brain activity of participants experiencing stronger psychedelic effects formed tighter, more clearly distinguishable patterns corresponding to whether they were resting, meditating, listening to music, or watching the movie.

In other words, as the psychedelic experience intensified, researchers became better able to identify what participants were doing simply from the structure of their brain activity. That is essentially the opposite of what would be expected if psilocybin were merely introducing neural noise.

“This shows that context is not just background to the psychedelic experience,” co-author and researcher at the Turner Institute for Brain and Mental Health in the Monash School of Psychological Sciences,  Dr. Adeel Razi, explained. “What a person is doing and focusing on shapes how their brain responds.”

The effect was particularly strong among people reporting positive experiences involving unity, bliss, self-dissolution, and the disappearance of boundaries between themselves and their surroundings. It was weaker for purely sensory or hallucinatory effects and largely absent for negative experiences, such as anxiety or impaired cognition.

Researchers call this phenomenon “context alignment” and describe the corresponding subjective experience as “embeddedness.”

Embeddedness differs subtly from simply feeling connected to something. The researchers use the term to describe an experience in which the distinction itself begins disappearing—a feeling that the person is continuous with, rather than separate from, the surrounding environment.

Two brain systems appeared especially important. The default mode network, heavily involved in internally directed and self-referential processing, and the visual network, representing the opposite end of a broad gradient toward externally directed sensory processing. Together, changes in these systems accounted for nearly half of the machine-learning model’s improvement in distinguishing different contexts under psilocybin.

Those findings could influence psilocybin and psychedelic-assisted therapy, where a person’s mental state and surrounding environment have long been considered important.

Half of the participants later ranked their psilocybin session among the most meaningful experiences of their lives. One month later, the group also showed improvements in measures of personal meaning, acceptance of death, and bond with nature, although there was considerable variation between individuals.

However, the findings also come with important caveats. The study involved healthy volunteers rather than patients being treated for psychiatric disorders, meaning the results do not establish whether “embeddedness” itself contributes to the therapeutic benefits reported in clinical psychedelic research. Participants also knew they were receiving psilocybin.

While the researchers identified machine-learning signatures associated with subjective experience and subsequent psychological changes, they acknowledge that additional research is needed to determine whether those patterns hold across populations.

Nevertheless, the results present a different way of thinking about what psychedelics do to the brain. Psilocybin may loosen ordinary neural boundaries without eliminating organization. Beneath what looks like disorder when averaged across time, the brain may actually be reorganizing itself around the person’s immediate experience.

“Until now, brain-imaging studies have mainly told us what happens on average across a group. Using artificial intelligence, we could measure this reorganization in each person,” Dr. Razi notes. “If translated to patients, this could eventually help clinicians understand how someone is responding and predict who is most likely to benefit.”

The recent study, “Psychedelics Align Brain Activity with Context,” appeared in the journal Nature.

Tim McMillan is a retired law enforcement executive, investigative reporter and co-founder of The Debrief. His writing typically focuses on defense, national security, the Intelligence Community and topics related to psychology. You can follow Tim on Twitter: @LtTimMcMillan.  Tim can be reached by email: tim@thedebrief.org or through encrypted email: LtTimMcMillan@protonmail.com 

Using the same basic physics based on the familiar hollow tone produced by blowing across an empty bottle, researchers in Switzerland have developed a sound-powered propulsion system that can steer microrobots and even lift tiny machines.

In a new study published in Science Advances, engineers at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne (EPFL) demonstrated that 3D-printed cavities known as Helmholtz resonators can convert sound into directed jets of air and usable thrust.

The researchers built devices ranging from centimeters down to micrometers, used sound to propel and steer tiny boats, and created two microscopic flying machines—one microrobot lifted directly by acoustic thrust and another using rapidly spinning rotor blades. One version generated nearly five times its own weight in thrust, while another spun at up to 13,000 revolutions per minute to produce aerodynamic thrust.

The work points to a new way to power small robots without conventional motors, while also exposing the considerable engineering problems that remain before such machines can operate autonomously.

“While acoustic resonators have been extensively studied in liquids for the realization of untethered microrobots, their implementation in air remains largely unexplored,” researchers write. “The actuation scheme is compatible with even further miniaturization, pushing the boundaries of robotics and aeronautics.”

The idea behind the technology is surprisingly familiar. Blow across the top of an empty bottle and you hear a deep, hollow note created as the air trapped inside begins to vibrate.

Known as Helmholtz resonance, the effect happens because the air inside the bottle and its narrow opening behave somewhat like a mass attached to a spring. When sound at the right frequency excites a specially designed resonator, those vibrations become much stronger, forcing air rapidly through the opening. The resulting airflow can form a directional jet powerful enough to generate thrust.

The researchers set out to harness the same physics behind Helmholtz resonance as an unconventional propulsion method for microrobots.

The researchers designed tiny cavities that take advantage of the same principle. When sound hits one of these resonators at just the right frequency, the air in its narrow neck begins moving rapidly back and forth.

Because that airflow is slightly uneven as it enters and exits, it creates a small but focused jet of air. That jet produces thrust, giving the resonator enough force to help move or even lift a microrobot.

The team 3D-printed resonators ranging from centimeter to micrometer scales, designing them to respond to frequencies between roughly 200 hertz and 40 kilohertz. Experiments showed that larger cavities generally produced greater thrust, while the geometry and thickness of the resonator’s neck played a particularly important role in determining performance.

Importantly, researchers could tune different resonators to different frequencies. That means sound does more than supply power; frequency can effectively serve as a control signal.

The researchers demonstrated the concept using miniature boats equipped with acoustic resonators. One early prototype carried a resonator tuned to 1.2 kilohertz and moved only when exposed to sound at that frequency.

More advanced versions used separate resonators for propulsion and steering, allowing the researchers to guide a boat around obstacles remotely and along a figure-eight course with a mean tracking error of just 5.70 millimeters.

The team also showed that an external speaker is not always necessary. By attaching small vibration transducers directly to resonators, they could send sound through the robot’s structure itself.

This approach allowed the researchers to build a fully integrated boat equipped with its own battery, control electronics, and acoustic transducers. Bluetooth commands activated resonators tuned for propulsion and steering, with a total communication latency of about 30 milliseconds. The boat successfully traced the letters “EPFL,” navigated past obstacles, and could be steered back on course after researchers deliberately disturbed it by blowing air or physically pushing it.

However, shrinking the technology into flying microrobots provided the study’s most striking demonstration.

One microflier consisted of three microscopic resonators operating at 40 kilohertz and weighed only about 150 micrograms. Focused ultrasound caused each resonator to eject a tiny jet of air downward. Together, the three produced a thrust-to-weight ratio of approximately 4.9. The machine accelerated upward, climbed roughly 12 millimeters before settling around seven millimeters above its starting position.

A second design took a different approach. Instead of pointing the acoustic jets downward, the researchers used them to spin a rotor fitted with tiny aerodynamic blades. The entire aircraft weighed 184 micrograms.

Once exposed to ultrasound, the rotor accelerated to approximately 13,000 rpm. Its blades generated enough aerodynamic thrust for takeoff before settling to roughly 6,500 rpm while hovering.

Turning the device upside down prevented it from ascending, helping confirm that aerodynamic thrust, rather than acoustic radiation pressure alone, enabled flight.

Researchers demonstrated unconstrained flight with both microrobot designs. The direct-thrust version climbed rapidly but sometimes flipped in the air. The spinning version was more stable, apparently because its swift rotation provided a gyroscopic stabilizing effect similar to that found in helicopters and spinning discs.

Ultimately, the experiments remain proof-of-concept demonstrations rather than prototypes of free-ranging autonomous microrobots. Airborne propulsion requires external acoustic hardware capable of keeping a sufficiently strong sound field focused on a tiny moving object. That essentially limits the robot’s operating area. Putting the acoustic source onboard offers greater autonomy but might significantly increase the robot’s weight.

The current flying system also operates at a single 40-kilohertz frequency, restricting how independently its resonators can be controlled. The researchers suggest future multifrequency ultrasonic arrays could selectively activate different resonators, allowing small aircraft to steer and coordinate their movement through sound alone.

Further miniaturization is technically possible. Modern 3D nanoprinting can fabricate structures with resolutions around 700 nanometers, possibly allowing resonators only several micrometers across. However, at those scales, viscous forces become increasingly important and may dramatically reduce thrust, meaning simply shrinking the existing design may eventually stop working.

Still, the wider concept could go beyond flying machines. Researchers envision flexible structures containing many differently tuned resonators that can bend, vibrate, or change shape depending on the applied sound frequency, possibly resulting in shape-morphing microrobots and mechanical metamaterials.

“Our work extends the concept of acoustic manipulation toward active propulsion by harnessing cavity resonance to generate directional thrust and controlled motion,” the researchers write. “This approach broadens the scope of airborne acoustic actuation toward small-scale robots capable of autonomous operation in open environments.”

The recent study, “Acoustic Resonators as Wireless Actuators in Air for Small-Scale Robots,” was published in Science Advances. 

Tim McMillan is a retired law enforcement executive, investigative reporter and co-founder of The Debrief. His writing typically focuses on defense, national security, the Intelligence Community and topics related to psychology. You can follow Tim on Twitter: @LtTimMcMillan.  Tim can be reached by email: tim@thedebrief.org or through encrypted email: LtTimMcMillan@protonmail.com 

One of the biggest challenges in the search for alien life is that Earth remains the only example of life we know. As a result, nearly every attempt to identify biology elsewhere starts, at least partly, by looking for chemistry that resembles life here.

Researchers at the University of Glasgow are exploring a different strategy. Rather than asking whether an alien molecule looks biological by Earth standards, they propose asking a more fundamental question: How difficult was that molecule to make?

In a new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers demonstrate a method that combines mass spectrometry with machine learning to estimate what researchers call “molecular assembly,” or MA.

The concept comes from Assembly Theory, which attempts to quantify molecular complexity by identifying the minimum number of construction steps needed to build a molecule. Researchers argue that when highly complex molecules appear repeatedly and in abundance, their existence may point to a process that is consistently steering chemistry down particular pathways.

That could make molecular assembly useful as an “agnostic” biosignature—one that does not depend on alien life sharing Earth’s chemistry.

“There is a growing interest in ‘agnostic’ life detection strategies: methods that can identify molecular signs of life without needing an exact understanding of what that life might look like, or how it might interact with a complex, poorly characterized environment,” the researchers write. “The measured assembly index, defined as the number of steps along the shortest construction pathway, is fixed for each molecule and does not depend on external conditions, such as the environment in which the molecule might be detected or the specific ‘alien’ biochemistry from which it might arise.”

The researchers’ proposed “agnostic” approach could become increasingly important as scientists encounter tantalizing, but often ambiguous, chemical signals in the search for alien life.

Methane on Mars, phosphine reported in Venus’s atmosphere, and dimethyl sulfide proposed as a possible biosignature within exoplanet atmospheres have all attracted attention because living organisms can produce those compounds.

However, biology is not the only way to make them. Methane, for example, can emerge from geologic processes. Dimethyl sulfide is strongly associated with life on Earth, yet it has also been detected in cometary material and produced in laboratory experiments simulating primordial chemistry.

The presence of a particular molecule, in other words, does not necessarily tell scientists what produced it. Molecular assembly approaches the problem from a different angle. Under Assembly Theory, researchers calculate the shortest possible pathway for constructing a molecule from simpler building blocks. A molecule with an MA of 40, for example, has a shortest construction pathway twice as long as one with an MA of 20.

The reasoning is rooted in probability. Undirected chemistry has an enormous range of possible molecular structures. As molecules become more complex, the odds of repeatedly producing the same highly elaborate structure shrink unless something constrains the process.

Biological systems store and use information to direct chemical reactions toward particular outcomes, permitting organisms to manufacture the same complicated molecules again and again instead of wandering randomly through the immense space of possible chemistry.

Previous experiments cited in the study found an approximate dividing line between abiotic and biological samples at an assembly index of around 15.

Perhaps more importantly, in the search for alien life, scientists would not necessarily need to know what a molecule is before recognizing that it is unusually complex.

That could be especially useful on worlds such as Mars, Europa, Enceladus, or Titan, where spacecraft may encounter compounds unlike anything commonly found on Earth.

Several proposed planetary missions use, or could use, mass spectrometers. These instruments analyze molecules by measuring ions’ mass-to-charge ratios.

More sophisticated multistage mass spectrometers can repeatedly break molecules apart, giving indications of their structure and assembly history. But spacecraft operate under severe limits on power, mass, computing capacity, and instrument complexity. Many planetary missions, therefore, rely on simpler, single-stage mass spectrometry.

To close that gap, the researchers trained an XGBoost model on standardized mass spectra from the National Institute of Standards and Technology Chemistry WebBook. The model learned to estimate molecular assembly directly from single-stage spectra.

According to the study, it reduced relative mean squared error threefold compared with the best-performing baseline model, cutting the figure from 0.12 to 0.04.

The model also tended to underestimate molecules with especially high MA values. For a life-detection system, that bias could be preferable. It means the model was more likely to be conservative than to classify a molecule as an unusually strong biosignature mistakenly.

Researchers envision future spacecraft using this kind of analysis autonomously. A rover or lander that detects molecules with unusually high assembly scores might flag the surrounding area for closer inspection, prioritize certain samples, or identify material worth returning to Earth.

The study explicitly evaluated conditions designed to resemble instruments proposed for missions to Titan and Europa.

The same framework also raised another, more speculative possibility: when the researchers compared very large molecular databases, they identified several medical compounds with unusually high MA values. Their complexity was not the product of biology alone, but of deliberate human synthesis.

That led the team to suggest that particularly complex artificial molecules might serve as “molecular technosignatures”—chemical evidence oftechnology, rather than life itself.

For now, however, the method remains far from being a ready-to-fly alien-life detector. Instrument settings strongly affected performance. In simulated experiments, changing impact energies could nearly double prediction error, while one comparison increased it by more than 2.3 times. Molecules that break apart unusually easily can also cause the model to overestimate assembly, while molecules that resist fragmentation may be underestimated.

The researchers therefore describe the study as a proof of concept. Turning the approach into an effective tool for planetary investigation would require standardized databases, careful instrument calibration, and chromatographic separation to isolate individual molecules before analysis.

Future versions could also combine mass spectrometry with other techniques, including nuclear magnetic resonance or infrared spectroscopy. Infrared measurements, the researchers suggest, extend aspects of the approach to the remote study of exoplanet atmospheres.

Yet the wider goal is significant. Instead of deciding beforehand what alien biology should produce, scientists could search for evidence that a process has persistently directed chemistry toward highly specific, complex outcomes.

“In this work, we presented a proof-of-concept demonstrating the potential use of ML to predict the MA molecular complexity as a biosignature from in situ mass spectrometers during future space missions,” the researchers write. “Although the application of ML in life detection remains a nascent endeavor, it holds significant promise.”

The recent study, “Molecular Assembly as a Universal Biosignature Measurable by Mass Spectrometry,” appeared in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Tim McMillan is a retired law enforcement executive, investigative reporter and co-founder of The Debrief. His writing typically focuses on defense, national security, the Intelligence Community and topics related to psychology. You can follow Tim on Twitter: @LtTimMcMillan.  Tim can be reached by email: tim@thedebrief.org or through encrypted email: LtTimMcMillan@protonmail.com 

A material that normally blocks the flow of electricity can suddenly begin behaving like a metal when exposed to remarkably weak light, according to a new experiment involving one of the strangest forms of graphene ever created. The breakthrough reveals that an unusual quantum effect could eventually provide a new way to detect some of the faintest radiation around us.

Researchers working with “magic-angle” twisted bilayer graphene found that faint, long-wavelength radiation can effectively melt the material’s fragile correlated insulating state, causing its electrical resistance to plummet. Remarkably, the experiments showed that even relatively weak radiation could trigger a dramatic transition from an insulator to a metal.

Beyond revealing an unusual way that light can manipulate matter, the discovery could provide the foundation for extremely sensitive detectors capable of spotting faint terahertz and far-infrared radiation.

With further development, detectors operating at these wavelengths could have applications ranging from security imaging and material inspection to astronomy and environmental sensing.

The study, published in Nature Communications, centers on magic-angle twisted bilayer graphene, or MATBG—a material produced by stacking two sheets of graphene and rotating them relative to one another at a carefully controlled angle.

Under the right conditions, interactions between electrons can cause magic-angle graphene to enter exotic collective states, including superconducting and insulating phases.

“Here we show that this expectation does not apply to magic-angle twisted bilayer graphene (MATBG) and demonstrate giant photoresponse of MATBG to low-intensity long-wavelength photons when it is tuned to half filling of the moiré band,” researchers write. “Far-infrared photons selectively overheat the low-heat-capacity electronic subsystem, driving a collapse of the correlated order and producing a giant photoresistive response.”

Ordinarily, changing an insulator into a conductor with light requires supplying enough energy to alter how electrons can move through the material fundamentally. Previous experiments involving light-induced insulator-to-metal transitions have frequently depended on intense, ultrafast excitation.

Magic-angle graphene offers another route.

Twisting graphene sheets at carefully controlled angles creates a larger repeating structure known as a moiré superlattice, dramatically changing how electrons within the material interact. Those interactions have already produced some remarkable results.

As The Debrief reported last year, researchers studying magic-angle twisted trilayer graphene uncovered new evidence of unconventional superconductivity, including unusually tightly bound electron pairs and a distinctive superconducting energy gap.

That work was part of a greater effort to understand whether these exotic materials could eventually help scientists design superconductors capable of operating at much higher temperatures.

In the new study, researchers exploited another unusual state that can emerge in magic-angle graphene. At certain electron densities, interactions between electrons become unusually important, allowing them to organize into what physicists call a “correlated insulator.”

That collective state is extremely fragile. The correlated insulating gap exists at an energy scale of only a few millielectronvolts. Previous measurements cited by the researchers indicate that a gap of approximately 1 millielectronvolt at very low temperatures gradually closes as the material warms and disappears around 10 kelvin.

The researchers realized that weakness could become an advantage.

Their experimental device consisted of magic-angle graphene sandwiched between layers of hexagonal boron nitride and configured as a field-effect transistor. A graphite back gate allowed them to precisely control the number of charge carriers and tune the graphene into its correlated insulating state.

They then exposed it to millimeter-wave and far-infrared radiation.

Instead of needing to inject large numbers of charge carriers, the incoming photons heated the graphene’s low-heat-capacity electronic system. That relatively small temperature increase was enough to destabilize the cooperative electronic order, retaining the insulating state.

The gap collapsed, resistance dropped dramatically, and the material became metallic.

Measurements in darkness and under illumination reinforced that interpretation. Without radiation, the graphene displayed the temperature-sensitive resistance expected from an insulator. Under millimeter-wave illumination, it instead exhibited behavior representative of a metal.

Researchers compare the mechanism to superconducting bolometers, highly sensitive radiation detectors in which incoming energy interrupts a superconducting state. But their graphene device essentially operates in reverse: instead of destroying a zero-resistance state, approaching photons destroy a high-resistance correlated insulating state and turn it metallic.

That makes the insulator-to-metal transition more than an unusual demonstration of quantum physics. It becomes the detector’s signal.

The team found that the device responded across wavelengths ranging from 85 to 2,140 micrometers, encompassing far-infrared and millimeter-wave radiation.

That portion of the electromagnetic spectrum is particularly interesting because it can reveal things ordinary cameras cannot. Terahertz radiation can penetrate some materials opaque to visible light, while interactions between this radiation and matter can provide information about a material’s composition.

More capable detectors could therefore eventually contribute to technologies such as security scanners looking for concealed objects, systems inspecting manufactured components without cutting them open, or sensors identifying substances using characteristic spectral markers.

Astronomy offers another potential application. Cold dust, star-forming regions, and other objects that may be faint or obscured at visible wavelengths emit radiation in the far-infrared. Detecting those extremely weak signals requires exceptionally sensitive instruments, making improved detector technology valuable for future astronomical observatories.

The experimental graphene detector exhibited considerable intrinsic sensitivity. The researchers measured an internal voltage responsivity of approximately 17 million volts per watt of absorbed power. They note that its internal responsivity exceeds that of many commercial bolometers operating in the same spectral region.

However, researchers caution that practical external performance is presently limited partly by how efficiently radiation is absorbed, meaning the experimental device is not equivalent to a finished commercial detector. Better antennas, cavities, metamaterials, or other structures designed to funnel radiation into the graphene could potentially improve its performance considerably.

There are other hurdles. The effect currently requires ultra-low temperatures, and the unusually strong response depends upon generating high-quality magic-angle graphene structures. Those requirements mean practical security scanners or telescope cameras based on the technology remain prospective rather than imminent.

Still, there are encouraging characteristics. The photoresponse persisted at temperatures around 6 to 7 kelvin and remained robust in magnetic fields of several tesla, with substantial reduction appearing only above roughly 4 tesla. That magnetic-field tolerance could make the technology attractive for specialized scientific instruments where superconducting detectors may meet limitations.

The current device also has an estimated practical response time of roughly 50 nanoseconds, largely because of its electrical design. The underlying electron cooling occurs much faster, and researchers estimate that smaller devices could reduce that practical limit by at least an order of magnitude. They also envision twisted multilayer materials, wafer-scale growth, and large-format detector arrays as potential directions for future development.

For now, the experiment demonstrates that in certain quantum materials, changing electrical behavior does not necessarily require pumping large amounts of energy into individual electrons. Sometimes, a small amount of light only needs to destabilize the collective state that those electrons have constructed together.

For physicists, the discovery offers a new way to investigate how fragile collective states of matter collapse and recover. For engineers, that same fragility could become useful precisely because extraordinarily weak radiation can trigger an extraordinarily large electrical response.

“Our experiments can be further generalized for time-domain interrogation of the CI state itself,” researchers write. “Radiation-driven excitation confined within the flat band, combined with time-resolved monitoring of the CI photoresistance, would allow direct access to the intrinsic timescale of correlated-order suppression and recovery, thereby probing the collective dynamics within the ground state.”

Study: Elesin, L., Shilov, A. L., Kravtsov, M. et al. “Correlated Insulator Moiré Bolometer.” Nature Communications (2026).

Tim McMillan is a retired law enforcement executive, investigative reporter and co-founder of The Debrief. His writing typically focuses on defense, national security, the Intelligence Community and topics related to psychology. You can follow Tim on Twitter: @LtTimMcMillan.  Tim can be reached by email: tim@thedebrief.org or through encrypted email: LtTimMcMillan@protonmail.com 

Humanity’s greatest challenge in becoming a multi-planet species may not be building bigger rockets or landing astronauts on Mars. Instead, it could come down to the question: Can humans safely conceive, carry pregnancies, and raise healthy children off Earth?

A new review published in Frontiers in Space Technologies argues that the answer to this question remains unclear. Drawing on decades of research on animal reproduction in space alongside emerging advances in artificial intelligence, biotechnology, synthetic biology, and cybernetic systems, the researchers suggest that future generations born off Earth may require technologies far beyond today’s medical capabilities.

In the most speculative sections of the paper, researchers even envision a scenario in which reproduction itself acts as a tool for helping humans gradually adapt to life in space.

Rather than presenting new experiments, the paper synthesizes existing evidence while outlining possible technological pathways that could someday enable permanent human settlements on the Moon, Mars, or even deeper into the solar system.

The central message is that surviving in space is only the first hurdle. Establishing self-sustaining civilizations will ultimately depend on whether human reproduction can succeed under conditions of microgravity, radiation, isolation, and other environmental stresses that evolution never prepared us to face.

“It is proposed that prenatal and early postnatal developmental stages may constitute critical biological windows for facilitating long-term adaptation to space,” researchers write. “Such interactions could ultimately transform reproduction and early development into active drivers of human evolution, contributing to the emergence of biologically distinct populations progressively adapted to diverse space environments.”

Despite more than six decades of human spaceflight, no human has ever conceived or carried a pregnancy in space. Therefore, science has little direct evidence about what would happen if astronauts attempted to start families off Earth. Nearly everything researchers know comes from studies involving animals ranging from sea urchins and fish to frogs, birds, mice, and rats.

The results are encouraging in some respects but troubling in others.

Several non-mammalian species have successfully reproduced in orbit. Medaka fish, for example, became the first vertebrates to reproduce in space, with fertilization rates comparable to those seen on Earth. Yet, even when reproduction occurs successfully, researchers have documented developmental abnormalities in some species, suggesting that space environments can slightly modify embryonic development.

Rodent studies paint an even more complicated picture. Fertilization is not impossible under microgravity, but early embryonic development frequently suffers. Experiments have shown reduced blastocyst formation, slower embryo development, lower live birth rates, and changes in gene expression. Other studies have linked space radiation to DNA damage, genomic instability, and developmental defects affecting the nervous system.

At the same time, some findings show surprising resilience. Mouse embryos cultured aboard the International Space Station have developed into apparently normal blastocysts under certain conditions. In contrast, freeze-dried mouse sperm stored in orbit for months later produced healthy offspring after returning to Earth.

These mixed findings suggest that reproduction may be biologically possible, but far from routine, under space conditions.

In their review, researchers also examined growing evidence that spaceflight affects male and female reproductive health even before conception occurs.

Microgravity and radiation appear capable of disrupting sperm production, reducing testosterone levels, altering ovarian function, impairing egg maturation, and interfering with hormone regulation.

Some studies suggest sperm can still swim under simulated microgravity, but lose their capability to navigate effectively toward an egg. Others report that radiation accelerates the depletion of ovarian follicles and increases DNA damage in reproductive cells.

More concerning is the possibility that some biological changes could be passed to future generations through epigenetic mechanisms. Experiments involving mice have suggested that spaceflight may alter gene regulation in sperm and influence gene expression in offspring, although the long-term significance is still unknown.

For women, pregnancy itself could present an even greater challenge. On Earth, pregnancy requires profound cardiovascular changes that help deliver oxygen and nutrients to a growing fetus. Microgravity, however, causes fluid redistribution, muscle loss, reduced blood volume, bone demineralization, and changes in cardiovascular function that could interfere with placental development and fetal growth. Radiation exposure, oxidative stress, circadian disruption, and limited medical support would only add to those risks.

Researchers argue that simply shielding astronauts from radiation may not be enough. Gravity itself appears to function as a biological signal that influences everything from cell organization to tissue development. That realization carries renewed interest in artificial gravity as a potential solution.

Instead of depending solely on habitats built on the Moon or Mars, future space settlements could include rotating structures that generate centrifugal force to recreate Earth-like gravity.

Such habitats have appeared in science fiction for decades, but researchers suggest they may ultimately become essential for healthy conception, pregnancy, childhood development, and multigenerational life off Earth.

Researchers propose dedicated orbital research platforms where scientists could systematically study reproduction under lunar, Martian, or custom-designed gravity levels before humans attempt permanent settlements.

Artificial intelligence also features prominently in the researchers’ vision of the future. They propose AI-powered “digital twins” capable of integrating biological, physiological, and environmental data to simulate how embryos, pregnancies, and developing children might respond to different gravitational and radiation environments. These computer simulations could help researchers examine scenarios that would be difficult, or ethically impossible, to test directly in humans.

Perhaps the paper’s most futuristic proposal is something the researchers call Synthetic Reproductive Adaptive Enhancement Technology, or SRAET. This speculative concept envisions highly automated reproductive systems combining artificial wombs, advanced reproductive biotechnology, biosensors, AI-assisted monitoring, and predictive developmental modeling into a closed-loop environment capable of supporting conception through birth under carefully controlled conditions.

The framework explores the controversial possibility that future advances in gene editing and synthetic biology could one day help humans adapt biologically to off-world environments.

Researchers emphasize that such ideas are still speculative and acknowledge the enormous ethical, biological, and safety concerns surrounding germline modification, off-target mutations, and multigenerational consequences. Rather than advocating immediate implementation, they present these possibilities as conceptual pathways that justify careful scientific and ethical discussion.

For fans of science fiction, many of these concepts may sound remarkably familiar. Yet, researchers attempt to ground their arguments in existing developmental biology, reproductive medicine, aerospace engineering, and space medicine while clearly distinguishing current evidence from future speculation.

In the end, researchers suggest that the future of human space travel may depend less on propulsion systems than on understanding how life develops under entirely new environmental conditions. If humanity hopes to establish permanent settlements off Earth, science will first need to ensure that future generations are able to begin life safely under alien skies.

“Ultimately, the greatest challenge of human expansion beyond Earth may not be transporting humans into space, but understanding how life itself can develop, adapt, and evolve under space conditions,” researchers write. “In this sense, SRAET would not merely support reproduction beyond Earth; it would represent a developmental biotechnology through which humanity may begin to actively participate in shaping its own evolutionary future.”

Study: Ferraz M, Moeharram L. “Past, present and future of human reproduction and development in space.” Frontiers in Space Technologies. 2026.

Tim McMillan is a retired law enforcement executive, investigative reporter and co-founder of The Debrief. His writing typically focuses on defense, national security, the Intelligence Community and topics related to psychology. You can follow Tim on Twitter: @LtTimMcMillan.  Tim can be reached by email: tim@thedebrief.org or through encrypted email: LtTimMcMillan@protonmail.com 

Researchers have demonstrated an unusual new form of 3D printing capable of building entirely new structures directly onto—and even around—existing objects in just seconds. In a series of experiments, the technique printed microscopic fluid channels around embedded glass spheres, fabricated precision gears onto polished steel rods, and even built a miniature lens directly onto the surface of a working LED.

The breakthrough, described in a paper published in Nature Communications, relies on an advanced form of tomographic volumetric additive manufacturing (TVAM) that allows researchers to “overprint” new structures onto components made from a wide range of materials, including metal, glass, and preassembled microfluidic components. Instead of constructing objects layer by layer like conventional 3D printers, the system projects precisely calculated light patterns into a rotating vat of photosensitive resin, causing an entire three-dimensional object to solidify almost simultaneously within seconds.

The advancement could represent a major step toward making volumetric 3D printing practical in real-world manufacturing environments, where new components often must be integrated with parts that already exist.

It additionally highlights the growing sophistication of computational techniques that can accurately model how light behaves as it passes through materials that absorb, scatter, refract, or reflect light.

“Tomographic Volumetric Additive Manufacturing (TVAM) is a light-based 3D printing technique capable of producing centimeter-scale objects within seconds,” researchers write. “This work demonstrates a broad range of overprinting scenarios, where new structures are directly printed onto or around pre-existing components made from different materials.”

Unlike conventional stereolithography or fused-filament printers that gradually build an object from one direction, tomographic volumetric printing projects hundreds of two-dimensional light patterns into a rotating container filled with liquid resin.

As the resin accumulates enough light energy, the desired three-dimensional structure appears almost simultaneously throughout the volume rather than emerging layer by layer. The approach can produce centimeter-scale objects in mere seconds.

However, until now, one of the technology’s greatest challenges has been accurately calculating how light travels through complicated environments.

Existing objects inside the resin can block, scatter, or bend incoming light, degrading print quality. Conventional models often assume these objects are either completely transparent or completely opaque. This is an oversimplification that breaks down in realistic manufacturing scenarios.

To overcome those limitations, the team developed an upgraded computational framework called Dr.TVAM. Built upon physically based ray tracing, the software models how light propagates through materials with different optical properties while simultaneously optimizing the projected light patterns needed to create the desired object.

Because the framework accounts for reflection, refraction, scattering, absorption, and arbitrary container shapes, it can successfully print structures around components that previously would have interfered with the process.

One of the study’s most compelling demonstrations involved manufacturing microfluidic channels directly inside sealed, preassembled square chambers. Microfluidic devices contain microscopic channels that transport tiny volumes of liquids and are widely used in biomedical research, diagnostics, and organ-on-a-chip systems.

Instead of fabricating the channels separately and assembling the device afterward—a process that can introduce contamination or leaks—the researchers successfully printed perfusable channels directly inside an already assembled chamber while accounting for inlet and outlet structures that would otherwise obstruct the light.

They demonstrated straight channels, branching networks, and spiral geometries capable of carrying fluid after fabrication. Supplementary demonstrations showed colored dye successfully flowing through the finished structures.

The researchers then pushed the concept even further by creating what they describe as context-aware printing. In this experiment, they embedded two tiny glass spheres inside a hydrogel-filled chamber, rapidly determined each sphere’s three-dimensional position using two camera images, and generated customized print patterns in less than a minute.

Those optimized projections produced hollow channels connecting each sphere to inlet and outlet ports while simultaneously printing protective cavities around the spheres themselves. The complete workflow—from detecting the embedded objects to generating printing instructions and fabricating the final structure—required less than three minutes.

That ability could eventually enable highly customized biomedical manufacturing, where printers automatically adapt to the precise location of living tissues, organoids, or other biological materials rather than requiring perfect positioning beforehand.

Another experiment highlighted why precisely modeling light matters.

Previous demonstrations of volumetric overprinting treated metal components as though they completely absorbed incoming light. In reality, polished metal reflects and scatters significant amounts of light, creating distortions that reduce print quality.

Researchers tested both assumptions by printing a gear directly onto a polished steel rod. When the software ignored scattered light, the gear’s fine holes became over-polymerized and poorly defined.

After including realistic scattering behavior into the optical model, however, the resulting gear preserved those elaborate features far more accurately, increasing simulated print fidelity substantially. The improvement was confirmed experimentally.

Researchers even went as far as demonstrating that the process could print directly onto an electronic component.

Using an LED-based volumetric printing system, the researchers fabricated both a miniature lens and a small cross-shaped symbol directly onto the surface of a red LED. When illuminated, the printed lens projected the symbol onto a screen, successfully transforming the LED into a tiny optical projector without requiring additional assembly. The experiment showcased how optical elements themselves could potentially be integrated directly onto existing electronic hardware during manufacturing.

Beyond the individual demonstrations, the work additionally underscores an important trend in additive manufacturing: increasingly sophisticated software is becoming just as important as advances in hardware.

Instead of relying on simplified mathematical approximations, the new framework performs physically based optical simulations capable of modeling arbitrary geometries along with material properties.

The software has been released as open source, along with configuration files and experimental data, allowing other researchers to reproduce and expand upon the 3D printing work.

Although the current demonstrations remain laboratory-scale, the possible implications could extend well beyond experimental 3D printing. Biomedical researchers could eventually fabricate sterile microfluidic systems without multi-step assembly. Optical engineers may integrate lenses directly onto light sources. Manufacturers could add custom features to finished components without redesigning entire production processes.

Researchers also note that future improvements could further increase realism through incorporating additional physical effects, including changes in refractive index during polymerization and the diffusion of chemical inhibitors during printing. Those refinements could expand the technology’s accuracy and enable even more complex manufacturing scenarios.

“In summary, Dr.TVAM, our computational framework, has shown to be capable of modeling different optical situations for TVAM,” researchers write. “We believe this significantly expands the application space for TVAM, enabling the creation of complex, functionalized, and multi-component devices from applications in mechanics, optics, or biofabrication.”

Study: Wechsler F, et al. “Overprinting with tomographic volumetric additive manufacturing.” Nature Communications (2026).

Tim McMillan is a retired law enforcement executive, investigative reporter and co-founder of The Debrief. His writing typically focuses on defense, national security, the Intelligence Community and topics related to psychology. You can follow Tim on Twitter: @LtTimMcMillan.  Tim can be reached by email: tim@thedebrief.org or through encrypted email: LtTimMcMillan@protonmail.com 

In recent years, advances in ancient DNA sequencing have redefined our understanding of human evolution, revealing that our species did not emerge in isolation but repeatedly interbred with close evolutionary relatives like Neanderthals and Denisovans.

Yet one of the field’s greatest mysteries has remained unanswered: What if some of our ancestors also encountered extinct human groups whose DNA has never been recovered from fossils? Now, a recent study published in Science suggests researchers may finally have found a way to detect those long-lost relatives.

Instead of relying on ancient bones or preserved genomes, researchers developed a powerful computational approach capable of identifying genetic traces of previously unknown archaic humans using only the genomes of living people.

Applying the technique to modern populations around the world, the researchers uncovered evidence that an unidentified “ghost” hominin contributed DNA to the ancestors of all living humans before the great migration out of Africa.

Researchers also found new evidence providing evidence for the existence of an even older “super-archaic” human lineage whose genetic legacy may survive today through Denisovan ancestry in Oceania.

“Admixture between modern humans and extinct hominins has shaped the genomes of present-day individuals, but reconstructing this history has been constrained by the scarcity of archaic samples and unadmixed outgroup populations,” researchers write. “We introduce TRACE, a reference- and outgroup-free approach that uses features of ancestral recombination graphs to identify archaic ancestry.”

Past research has sequenced only a handful of high-quality archaic human genomes, all from Eurasia. While those genomes have revealed that most people outside Africa carry roughly 1 to 2 percent Neanderthal DNA and that many Asian and Oceanian populations also inherited Denisovan ancestry, scientists have long suspected those known groups represented only part of humanity’s evolutionary history.

Previous genetic studies had hinted that modern humans, especially African populations, contained fragments of DNA from unidentified archaic relatives. However, because no fossil genomes exist for those populations, proving their existence has been extraordinarily difficult.

The new method, called TRACE, short for “TRacking Archaic Contributions via ARG Estimation,” takes a fundamentally different approach. Rather than comparing modern DNA against known Neanderthal or Denisovan genomes, it reconstructs ancestral recombination graphs. These enormous evolutionary family trees trace how pieces of DNA have been inherited over hundreds of thousands of years.

These ancestral graphs preserve signatures left behind when deeply divergent human lineages interbred. Such events create unusually long branches and distinctive genetic patterns that can persist in descendants for hundreds of thousands of years. By searching for those signatures, TRACE can identify archaic ancestry even when no reference genome exists.

To test the system, the researchers first ran extensive computer simulations modeling ancient human populations and known episodes of Neanderthal interbreeding. The method consistently revealed high accuracy while producing very low false-positive rates.

The team then applied TRACE to genomes from the 1000 Genomes Project, encompassing hundreds of individuals representing populations across Africa, Europe, Asia, and elsewhere.

The program successfully recovered well-established Neanderthal ancestry in Europeans and Asians, along with Denisovan ancestry concentrated primarily in Asian populations. More intriguing, however, was the discovery of an additional category of DNA that matched neither Neanderthals nor Denisovans.

TRACE identified between roughly 0.5 and 1.1 percent “ghost” ancestry across all modern populations examined. The genetic evidence suggests these segments originated from an unknown archaic human lineage that diverged from our ancestors roughly 830,000 years ago, before later contributing DNA to the ancestors of modern humans.

Perhaps most surprising was where that ancestry appeared.

Rather than being confined to African populations, as several earlier hypotheses proposed, the researchers found remarkably similar ghost ancestry in both Africans and non-Africans.

Most of the segments detected outside Africa were shared with African populations, suggesting the interbreeding event occurred before modern humans started dispersing across the globe roughly 50,000 to 70,000 years ago.

The findings point toward a previously unrecognized chapter of human evolution in which an unidentified human population mixed with the common ancestors of everyone alive today.

The researchers also explored where these ancient genetic fragments survive in the modern genome.

They found ghost ancestry spread across more than 70 percent of the accessible human genome, although it was far from evenly distributed. Some regions contained unusually high concentrations of ghost DNA, including genes involved in immune function and metabolism.

Even more unexpectedly, ghost ancestry persisted inside genomic regions previously believed to be largely devoid of archaic DNA.

These regions, known as “Neanderthal and Denisovan ancestry deserts,” have often been interpreted as places where natural selection eliminated archaic genetic variants because uniquely modern human versions proved advantageous.

The presence of ghost ancestry inside many of those same regions suggests the story may be more complicated. Rather than rejecting all archaic DNA equally, natural selection may have acted differently depending on which ancient human lineage contributed the genes.

The study also ventured even farther back in evolutionary time.

Focusing on genomes from Papua New Guinea, Vanuatu, and the Santa Cruz Islands, the researchers searched for evidence of “super-archaic” ancestry—genetic contributions from a lineage that diverged long before Neanderthals, Denisovans, and modern humans separated.

Previous studies had suggested Denisovans themselves may have inherited DNA from such an ancient population. TRACE now provides additional support for that hypothesis.

The team identified deeply divergent genetic segments embedded explicitly within Denisovan-derived DNA in Oceanian populations. Based on their analyses, those ancient lineages may have split from the ancestors of modern humans approximately 1.77 million years ago.

While the researchers stress this represents a conservative estimate of surviving super-archaic ancestry, the findings strengthen the idea that modern humans indirectly inherited DNA from a much older human lineage through Denisovan interbreeding.

The identity of both the ghost lineage and the super-archaic population remains unknown.

The ghost population may represent Middle Pleistocene human groups or African populations of Homo heidelbergensis that encountered the ancestors of modern humans before the Out-of-Africa migration. For the older super-archaic lineage, the researchers note that Homo erectus remains one plausible candidate given its estimated divergence time and broad geographic distribution.

Although the new method cannot yet identify specific fossil species, it provides researchers with an entirely new tool for investigating chapters of human evolution that may never yield recoverable ancient DNA.

Because DNA older than roughly one million years is extraordinarily unlikely to survive outside permanently frozen environments, computational approaches like TRACE are becoming increasingly important for reconstructing humanity’s deepest evolutionary history.

“We find evidence for at least one ghost introgression predating the OOA expansion that contributed ancestry to all present-day populations,” researchers write. “These results point to multiple layers of introgression—both direct and mediated through other archaic groups—shaping modern human genomes.”

The study, “Recovering signatures of archaic hominin introgression using ancestral recombination graphs,” was published in the journal Science.

Tim McMillan is a retired law enforcement executive, investigative reporter and co-founder of The Debrief. His writing typically focuses on defense, national security, the Intelligence Community and topics related to psychology. You can follow Tim on Twitter: @LtTimMcMillan.  Tim can be reached by email: tim@thedebrief.org or through encrypted email: LtTimMcMillan@protonmail.com 

Beneath the seemingly unbroken canopy of the southwestern Amazon rainforest lies evidence of one of the largest monumental landscapes ever discovered in the ancient Americas.

According to new research published in Nature, what archaeologists once believed were scattered ceremonial sites are instead part of an enormous precolonial civilization that may have changed vast stretches of the Amazon nearly 2,000 years ago.

Using airborne LiDAR capable of penetrating forest cover, an international team of researchers says they have identified hundreds of previously unknown earthworks, estimating that more than 20,000, and perhaps as many as 30,000, remain spread across southwestern Amazonia.

The findings dramatically expand the known scale of the so-called Aquiry civilization and suggest that millions may have inhabited the region during its peak nearly 2,000 years ago, forcing a reconsideration of how densely populated and intensively managed the ancient Amazon may have been.

“We also propose that the total human population of the area in 100–300 AD was 1.25–3 million people,” researchers write. “If similar results are found elsewhere in Amazonia, the total precolonial population density and its effect on the current Amazonian soil and forest structure, biodiversity, and even some modeling of the global climate should be re-evaluated.”

The study represents one of the most ambitious archaeological surveys ever conducted in the Amazon. Researchers flew more than 2,700 miles across the forests of Brazil’s Acre and Amazonas states using airborne LiDAR, a laser-mapping technology able to see through gaps in the dense treetops to produce detailed maps of the landscape below. Those maps revealed hundreds of geometric earthworks that had remained hidden for centuries.

The newly discovered structures include squares, circles, rectangles, and multilateral enclosures connected by roads and clustered into monumental complexes.

Some feature ditches up to 43 feet wide and more than 16 feet deep, with towering earthen embankments rising alongside them. Although a handful of these earthworks had previously been identified in deforested areas using satellite imagery, LiDAR revealed that those earlier surveys had dramatically underestimated just how many remained obscured beneath the forest.

One of the study’s most striking findings was that LiDAR scanning uncovered roughly five times more earthworks than satellite imagery had detected across the same landscapes.

In one survey block, researchers had previously identified only 30 structures using conventional imagery. Meanwhile, LiDAR revealed 156. Assuming similar results across the wider region suggests that between roughly 24,000 and 30,000 earthworks may exist within the estimated boundaries of the Aquiry civilization.

Those numbers alone would rank the region among the most monument-rich archaeological landscapes in the world.

For decades, archaeologists have debated whether much of Amazonia could have maintained large, complex societies before European contact. Prevailing interpretations portrayed much of the rainforest as environmentally limiting, capable of sustaining only relatively small and dispersed populations. However, more recent discoveries, including ancient cities in Bolivia and Ecuador, have steadily challenged that assumption.

Now, these latest findings suggest the region may have supported an even larger and more sophisticated society than researchers once imagined.

Rather than representing isolated ceremonial sites scattered through an otherwise untouched forest, the researchers argue the earthworks belonged to a civilization extending about 71,000 square miles, representing about three times larger than previous estimates of the Aquiry cultural area.

Many of the geometric enclosures appear not to have been permanent settlements themselves. Instead, researchers believe they served as ceremonial, political, and public gathering places where dispersed communities periodically assembled.

Similar patterns of temporary gathering centers are known from the Inca Empire, where populations converged for rituals, governance, and communal events despite living across broad landscapes.

Constructing these massive earthworks would have demanded sophisticated planning, organized labor, mathematical knowledge, and long-term social coordination. According to the study, some of these ceremonial centers remained in use for nearly 1,500 years, indicating remarkable cultural continuity across generations.

Estimating how many people actually lived within this landscape presented a separate challenge.

Rather than simply multiplying earthworks by a fixed population estimate, the researchers combined several independent lines of evidence. They examined radiocarbon dates to determine how many sites were occupied simultaneously, compared the earthworks with later mound villages built in the same region, incorporated ethnographic information from Indigenous communities, and evaluated the labor required to construct and maintain the monumental enclosures.

Their study indicates the civilization reached its greatest extent between approximately A.D. 100 and 300. During that period, somewhere between one-quarter and roughly 60 percent of the known ceremonial centers may have been active simultaneously.

Assuming each ceremonial center served communities of roughly 300 people, the researchers estimate the region’s population reached between about 1.25 and 3 million people during its peak. After accounting for earthworks that LiDAR may have missed beneath dense forest, they conclude the total could have been as high as 3.8 million.

Those estimates substantially exceed many previous reconstructions of southwestern Amazonia and imply population densities rivaling or exceeding some later historical agricultural societies.

Equally significant is what these discoveries reveal about how ancient Amazonians altered their environment.

The study points to fertile soils rich in nutrients, evidence of extensive cultivation of maize, squash, manioc, beans, peanuts, sweet potatoes, and chili peppers, as well as widespread management of Brazil nut groves and numerous economically important palm species.

Rather than exhausting the rainforest, researchers contend these communities actively managed forests, soils, and waterways throughout centuries, creating ecological legacies that remain visible today in the composition and biodiversity of Amazonian forests.

Present-day ecological studies have increasingly shown that many Amazonian forests long regarded as pristine wilderness actually bear the imprint of thousands of years of Indigenous landscape management. If similar densities of monumental earthworks are identified elsewhere across Amazonia, researchers argue that assumptions about precolonial population sizes, biodiversity patterns, soil formation, and even climate models may need substantial revision.

The work additionally underscores the key role of LiDAR in modern archaeology. Over the past decade, the technology has revealed hidden Maya cities beneath Central American jungles, extensive urban complexes in the Bolivian Amazon, and extensive settlements in Ecuador’s Upano Valley.

Nevertheless, researchers caution that important questions remain unanswered. The southeastern limits of the Aquiry civilization are still poorly understood because large portions of Rondônia have yet to receive comparable archaeological investigation. Dense vegetation also continues to obscure portions of the landscape, meaning many earthworks almost certainly remain undiscovered even after LiDAR surveys.

“These ancient achievements constitute an important legacy that is still observable in the soil, and the composition and biodiversity of the contemporary tropical forest,” researchers write. “This legacy should be fully considered in future studies of Amazonia, including climate modeling and sustainable land-use planning.”

The recent study, “Over 20,000 precolonial earthworks in the Southwest Amazonia,” by Martti Pärssinen et al., appeared in Nature.

Tim McMillan is a retired law enforcement executive, investigative reporter and co-founder of The Debrief. His writing typically focuses on defense, national security, the Intelligence Community and topics related to psychology. You can follow Tim on Twitter: @LtTimMcMillan.  Tim can be reached by email: tim@thedebrief.org or through encrypted email: LtTimMcMillan@protonmail.com 

For more than two millennia, astronomers have puzzled over a stellar mystery recorded by some of history’s greatest skywatchers. Hipparchus, Ptolemy, and the Persian astronomer al-Sufi—all separated by more than 1,000 years—each described Theta Eridani as one of the brightest stars in the night sky. Yet today, the previously celebrated star barely ranks among the more noticeable stars visible to the naked eye.

A new astronomical study published on arXiv suggests that those ancient observers may have unknowingly recorded an extraordinarily rare stellar event. The star system remained dramatically brighter than normal for roughly a millennium before fading back to its present appearance sometime between the 10th and 16th centuries.

If confirmed, the finding would be among the longest-lived stellar transients ever proposed, fusing modern astrophysics with historical astronomy to reconstruct an event spanning centuries rather than days or months.

The study combines historical star catalogs with state-of-the-art observations from the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope Interferometer (VLTI), high-definition spectroscopy, and NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS).

Together, those observations allowed the researchers to reconstruct the architecture and evolutionary state of the Theta Eridani system and to propose a physical mechanism that could explain its mysterious ancient brilliance.

“The remarkable combination of orbital and stellar parameters hints that the historical brightening of Theta Eridani was due to a millenary transient phase,” researchers write. “This strengthens the case that the apparent brightening was real and not due to an error by three different ancient observers, as has been commonly claimed in the past.”

Today, Theta Eridani, also known by its traditional name Acamar, shines at approximately magnitude 2.9, making it a respectable but hardly spectacular star marking the end of the constellation Eridanus. Yet ancient records tell a very different story.

Hipparchus described it as an exceptionally bright star around 129 BC. Roughly 250 years later, Ptolemy ranked it among only fifteen first-magnitude stars in the Almagest, effectively placing it among the thirteen brightest stars visible in the night sky.

More than 800 years afterward, the Persian astronomer al-Sufi independently retained that same first-magnitude classification while revising the brightness estimates of many other stars toward values that closely match modern observations.

The sharp contrast between the historical accounts and Theta Eridani’s modest appearance today has made the star one of astronomy’s most enduring and compelling mysteries.

Researchers examined long-standing alternative explanations, including simple observational mistakes, copyist errors in ancient manuscripts, confusion with the much brighter star Achernar farther south, and even errors caused by atmospheric extinction near the horizon. One by one, they argue the evidence weighs against those explanations.

Theta Eridani would not even have been visible to the Greek and Arab astronomers because of Earth’s changing orientation over time. Likewise, statistical analyses of nearly 1,000 stars contained in the Almagest show that Theta Eridani represents the single largest discrepancy between ancient and modern brightness estimates, rather than part of a wider systematic mistake.

The historical trail eventually changes around the dawn of the Age of Exploration. By the late 1500s and early 1600s, after European navigators began mapping the southern skies, star catalogs consistently described Theta Eridani as only a third-magnitude star—essentially the same brightness observed today.

That suggests the bright phase had already ended.

To investigate whether Theta Eridani itself could plausibly have undergone such a transformation, the team turned to modern astronomical observations.

Rather than a single star, Theta Eridani consists of three stars. The primary component itself is a remarkably tight binary whose two stars orbit one another every 4.1077 days at a separation of just 0.083 astronomical units—roughly one-fifth the distance between Mercury and the Sun.

Using interferometric measurements from the VLTI, together with spectroscopy and precision photometry from TESS, the researchers determined that the two stars each contain just over twice the Sun’s mass and have swollen to approximately 4.3 and 4.0 solar radii.

Those enlarged sizes are significant because both stars have expanded to nearly 80 percent of the volume where gravity from one star begins pulling material toward the other, a region around a star in a binary system known as the Roche lobes. The close gravitational interaction also produces measurable ellipsoidal distortions that TESS detects as subtle, rhythmic brightness variations every orbit.

Researchers’ evolutionary modeling further revealed that the primary star occupies an unusually brief stage within stellar evolution, having only recently exhausted hydrogen in its core and begun transitioning into a subgiant. That evolutionary timing may be critical.

According to the researchers, Theta Eridani may once have possessed a much more elongated orbit. As the primary expanded, it could have begun overflowing its Roche lobe during each close approach, transferring material toward its companion and possibly generating an extended common envelope surrounding both stars.

Unlike the violent stellar explosions astronomers typically classify as transients, this proposed event would have evolved extraordinarily slowly. Instead of lasting weeks or years, the researchers suggest the envelope may have persisted for roughly a thousand years while gradually extracting orbital energy from the binary.

Because the surrounding envelope would have remained optically thick, it could have radiated from an area far larger than either star individually, making the entire system appear nearly ten times brighter than it does today.

Researchers’ calculations suggest that such an envelope could have reached roughly 20 times the Sun’s radius while needing only a tiny amount of encircling material, because that material would be continually replenished and slowly ejected over hundreds of thousands of orbits.

Importantly, researchers stress that this is still a proposed physical explanation rather than a demonstrated one. Modeling the detailed hydrodynamics of eccentric mass transfer and long-lived common envelopes remains beyond the scope of the current work.

Nevertheless, they argue that the unusual combination of orbital geometry, stellar evolution, and historical observations makes the scenario physically plausible.

The study of Theta Eridani also raises wider implications for time-based astronomy.

Modern astronomical surveys are exceptionally good at finding dramatic events that unfold over minutes, days, or years. A stellar brightening lasting centuries, or even a millennium, would be almost impossible to recognize within a human lifetime. Researchers suggest there may be other long-duration stellar transients hidden among ordinary-looking stars whose histories have been forgotten.

If their interpretation proves correct, some of humanity’s earliest astronomers may have unknowingly documented one of the most unusual stellar phenomena ever proposed—not an exploding star, but a binary system trapped in an exceptionally slow evolutionary episode which lit up the night sky for generations before quietly receding into obscurity.

“Although modern photometric surveys have had an observational coverage of a few years to a few decades rather than two millennia like Theta Eridani, they are sensitive to objects up to 14 magnitudes fainter than the naked eye limit,” researchers write. “Therefore, there could be unexplored or unexplained Theta Eridani-like transients that either brightened or faded in current data.”

The team’s new study, The Forgotten Bright Star: Theta Eridani as a Millenary Stellar Transient Observed by Hipparchus, Ptolemy and al-Sufi, is currently available on the arXiv.org preprint server.

Tim McMillan is a retired law enforcement executive, investigative reporter and co-founder of The Debrief. His writing typically focuses on defense, national security, the Intelligence Community and topics related to psychology. You can follow Tim on Twitter: @LtTimMcMillan.  Tim can be reached by email: tim@thedebrief.org or through encrypted email: LtTimMcMillan@protonmail.com 

For decades, Washington has assumed that military aid translates into political influence. If the United States provides the weapons, intelligence, training, and diplomatic backing that keep an ally fighting, conventional wisdom suggests it should also have considerable leverage over when, and how, that war ends.

Yet, a sweeping new analysis published by the Brookings Institution and authored by Dr. Dafna Rand, a senior fellow at Brookings, the Federation for American Scientists, and the Council on Foreign Relations, argues that the opposite has increasingly become true.

Whether in Ukraine, Gaza, Yemen, or Afghanistan, the U.S. has repeatedly discovered that sustaining an ally’s war effort is often far easier than steering its ultimate direction. Instead of conclusive victories followed by lasting peace, modern conflicts are increasingly settling into drawn-out stalemates, frozen conflicts, or recurring cycles of violence that resist outside pressure—even from Washington.

Dr. Rand’s report examines one of the defining strategic dilemmas confronting American foreign policy in the 21st century: why the world’s most powerful military and diplomatic actor has struggled to shape the decisions of partners whose war efforts depend heavily on U.S. support.

Drawing on more than 30 interviews with senior American officials involved in decision-making throughout four major conflicts, alongside hundreds of government documents, the analysis shows recurring patterns that appear independent of geography or the adversary involved.

“Wars, whether between or within states, are not ending in the 21st century,” Dr. Rand writes. “Frozen conflicts, on-again-off-again fighting, and stalemates have become the norm.”

Dr. Rand argues that this changing nature of warfare has profoundly changed the assumptions underpinning American security strategy.

Following the costly wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Washington increasingly shifted toward supporting partners rather than committing large numbers of U.S. troops directly to combat. The expectation was that supplying allies with military assistance would provide the United States with considerable influence over battlefield strategy and political consequences.

Instead, Dr. Rand says that American leverage consistently diminishes as conflicts drag on.

One of the study’s central conclusions is that Washington and its partners frequently begin wars without agreeing on what victory actually means. At the outset of each conflict examined—including Ukraine’s defense against Russia, Israel’s campaign against Hamas, the Saudi-led intervention in Yemen, and America’s withdrawal from Afghanistan—American and partner governments shared broad objectives, though often failed to establish detailed political end states.

That omission, Dr. Rand argues, becomes increasingly costly as wars continue.

Early battlefield success frequently encourages partners to pursue more ambitious goals than originally envisioned. At the same time, Washington gradually becomes more interested in negotiated settlements as financial costs mount, domestic political support declines, and wider strategic priorities begin competing for attention.

According to Dr. Rand, many officials interviewed expressed regret that these conversations about political objectives, postwar governance, and acceptable settlement terms did not occur before military campaigns gained momentum.

The report also highlights an uncomfortable reality of modern alliances. Although the United States provides enormous military assistance, it does not exercise command over allied governments or their armed forces. As a result, disagreements naturally emerge over strategy, operational design, and acceptable risks.

Ukraine provides one of the clearest examples. Initially, Washington and Kyiv shared an overriding objective of preventing Russia from conquering the country. However, over time, American officials became increasingly divided over whether continued fighting or eventual negotiations better served long-term U.S. interests.

Some officials viewed prolonging the conflict as strategically beneficial because it weakened Russia’s military while strengthening Ukraine’s defense capabilities. Others believed diplomatic attempts should have begun earlier, particularly after Ukraine’s battlefield gains in 2022 created what they viewed as an opportunity to negotiate from a stronger position.

Dr. Rand notes that internal disagreements within the U.S. government complicated communication with Ukrainian leaders, in particular regarding expectations for territorial objectives and the role military offensives were intended to play in eventually creating conditions for diplomacy.

The Gaza conflict exposed a different, but related, collection of challenges.

Following Hamas’ October 7, 2023, attacks, President Joe Biden’s administration moved rapidly to reassure Israel of unshakable American support while simultaneously urging restraint based on lessons learned from America’s own post-9/11 military campaigns.

Dr. Rand concludes that Israeli leaders largely heard the reassurances while failing to fully internalize Washington’s accompanying warnings about civilian casualties, operational design, and the long-term strategic consequences of an extended campaign.

As the war progressed, American officials increasingly concluded that humanitarian concerns and mounting civilian casualties were not exclusively moral issues but strategic ones as well, arguing that prolonged destruction could ultimately strengthen Hamas’ long-term recruitment and undermine Israel’s own security objectives.

Despite this growing divergence, the report suggests Washington hesitated to use its available leverage aggressively, partly because of domestic political sensitivities surrounding support for Israel.

Another recurring finding centers on American public opinion.

Support for allies often begins overwhelmingly strong immediately after major attacks or invasions. But that support steadily erodes as wars lengthen, casualties mount, humanitarian problems increase, or questions come up regarding the conduct of partner governments.

Dr. Rand says this pattern appears across Yemen, Afghanistan, Gaza, and, increasingly, Ukraine.

Importantly, she argues this erosion can occur even when Americans continue believing the underlying cause remains just. Instead, fatigue over prolonged commitments, concerns about costs, or doubts regarding the likelihood of decisive success gradually reshape political calculations in Washington.

Those changing domestic dynamics, in turn, reduce America’s leverage abroad.

Once congressional debates begin questioning military assistance or public enthusiasm declines, allied governments recognize that Washington’s ability to maintain long-term support has become less certain.

Dr. Rand argues this weakens American bargaining power precisely when policymakers most need it.

Among the study’s most significant recommendations is that future administrations should treat leverage as a rapidly diminishing resource.

Rather than assuming influence will expand alongside continued military assistance, Dr. Rand contends the opposite usually occurs. The strongest opportunity to shape an ally’s political objectives exists during the opening weeks of conflict, before battlefield realities, domestic politics, and diverging national interests begin pulling partners in different directions.

To address this, the report proposes forming formal “security contracts,” or a memorandum of understanding, early in future conflicts that clearly define shared political objectives, expected end states, standards for humanitarian conduct, and mechanisms for periodically reassessing strategy.

Dr. Rand also recommends keeping consistent communication across the entire U.S. national security apparatus, warning that mixed signals from different agencies make it easier for partners to ignore American advice or exploit disagreements inside Washington.

Perhaps most notably, the report argues that future administrations should not focus solely on influencing allies. Even in conflicts involving close partners, Washington should simultaneously pursue diplomatic means with adversaries whenever possible, recognizing that negotiated settlements often require engaging both sides rather than relying exclusively on pressure directed at friendly governments.

Ultimately, the analysis shows that the challenge confronting U.S. policymakers goes beyond any single conflict. As interstate wars, civil wars, and proxy wars become increasingly protracted, America’s ability to translate military assistance into political influence may continue shrinking unless it fundamentally rethinks how partnerships are managed from the very beginning of a war.

“The United States must be brutally honest with its partners,” Dr. Rand writes. “The United States must recognize that pressuring its partners to end wars will get harder, not easier, as time passes and the partner grows better able to resist U.S. pressure.”

Study: Dr. Dafna H. Rand, Why can’t the United States end allies’ wars?, Brookings Institution Foreign Policy at Brookings (2026).

Tim McMillan is a retired law enforcement executive, investigative reporter and co-founder of The Debrief. His writing typically focuses on defense, national security, the Intelligence Community and topics related to psychology. You can follow Tim on Twitter: @LtTimMcMillan.  Tim can be reached by email: tim@thedebrief.org or through encrypted email: LtTimMcMillan@protonmail.com 

When NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft delivered pristine samples from the asteroid Bennu back to Earth in 2023, scientists knew they were receiving one of the most chemically untouched collections of material ever recovered from the Solar System.

Since then, the returned grains have steadily transformed researchers’ understanding of how asteroids formed, how water altered primitive worlds, and even how the ingredients for life may have spread through the early Solar System.

Now, a new study, published in Nature Communications, has uncovered another surprise hidden inside those microscopic particles. Embedded within Bennu are tiny mineral fragments that formed during the Solar System’s earliest moments—less than 100,000 years after its birth—and they may reveal that the asteroid’s ancient parent body formed much farther from the Sun than scientists once suspected.

The research suggests that Bennu inherited some of the oldest surviving solids ever created, while simultaneously preserving evidence that Jupiter’s formation may have acted as an enormous cosmic filter, separating different populations of dust before planets had even fully formed.

“Our observations of phyllosilicates replacing olivine and interstitial phyllosilicates between olivine grains within AOAs… collectively indicate that these refractory inclusions experienced aqueous alteration on Bennu’s parent planetesimal,” researchers write. “Therefore, they were incorporated into the parent planetesimal before the onset of aqueous alteration, during which phyllosilicates and magnetite formed.”

“These mineralogical, isotopic, and chronological similarities among refractory inclusions in Bennu samples, Ryugu samples, and CI chondrites provide evidence that their parent planetesimal(s) accreted a common suite, and likely similar relative abundances, of high-temperature refractory inclusions and their fragments,” researchers write.

The research concentrates on “refractory inclusions”—tiny mineral-rich objects known as calcium-aluminum-rich inclusions (CAIs) and amoeboid olivine aggregates (AOAs). These objects are widely considered the oldest solid materials to condense from the hot gas surrounding the newborn Sun.

Long before planets existed, the infant Solar System consisted of a rotating disk of gas coupled with dust known as the protoplanetary disk. Temperatures near the young Sun exceeded 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit (roughly 1,100 degrees Celsius), allowing only the most heat-resistant minerals to crystallize.

These refractory inclusions were among the very first solids to emerge from that environment before eventually being transported throughout the growing Solar System.

Although scientists have found such inclusions in meteorites for decades, Bennu offered an unprecedented opportunity to examine them in material collected directly from an asteroid rather than from meteorites that survived passage through Earth’s atmosphere.

To investigate, researchers analyzed polished sections prepared from 12 Bennu particles using scanning electron microscopy, transmission electron microscopy, oxygen isotope measurements, and radioactive aluminum-magnesium dating techniques.

The team identified six amoeboid olivine aggregates and three calcium-aluminum-rich inclusions, all remarkably small—none exceeding roughly 100 micrometers across, or about the thickness of a human hair. This turned out to be one of the study’s most important discoveries.

The mineral chemistry and oxygen isotopes showed these inclusions formed in an extremely hot, oxygen-16-rich environment during the Solar System’s earliest stages. Radioactive dating using aluminum-26 indicated at least one inclusion formed essentially at the very beginning of Solar System history, within roughly the first 100,000 years after the earliest known solids condensed.

In other words, Bennu contains fragments that have survived for approximately 4.567 billion years with surprisingly little alteration. Yet, those ancient relics also preserve evidence that they later encountered liquid water.

Several inclusions show minerals partially replaced by phyllosilicates—water-bearing clay minerals—while magnetite and other alteration products reveal that water once circulated through Bennu’s ancient parent body after these primordial objects had already become incorporated into it.

For scientists, that sequence helps establish a timeline. First, the earliest high-temperature solids formed close to the newborn Sun. Later, they were transported outward through the protoplanetary disk. Only after they became part of Bennu’s larger parent asteroid did liquid water alter portions of the rock.

Researchers found distinct similarities between Bennu’s inclusions and those previously identified in samples returned from Japan’s Hayabusa2 mission to asteroid Ryugu, as well as in rare CI carbonaceous chondrite meteorites found on Earth.

The oxygen isotopes, crystal chemistry, and formation ages all closely match, suggesting these seemingly distant objects inherited material from the same population of ancient Solar System building blocks.

That mutual heritage points toward a surprisingly interconnected early Solar System, where material formed close to the Sun was efficiently transported across enormous distances before eventually becoming incorporated into multiple asteroid populations.

However,  the absence of something proved just as revealing as what scientists found.

Unlike many carbonaceous meteorites, Bennu contains no large refractory inclusions larger than about one-tenth of a millimeter. Other meteorites frequently preserve inclusions ranging from submillimeter sizes up to several centimeters across.

According to the researchers, the missing population may reflect the increasing influence of the Solar System’s first giant planet.

As proto-Jupiter accumulated mass, its gravity likely created a pressure bump within the gas disk encircling the young Sun. Such pressure bumps act as natural traffic jams for dust, trapping larger particles while allowing much smaller grains to continue drifting through the disk.

Under this scenario, larger refractory inclusions became concentrated closer to Jupiter’s orbit. At the same time, only the smallest particles were able to migrate farther outward into the distant regions where Bennu’s parent body eventually formed.

If correct, Bennu’s microscopic inclusions effectively record the influence of Jupiter before the giant planet had even fully matured.

The hypothesis also helps explain why Bennu, Ryugu, and CI meteorites all possess nearly identical populations of tiny refractory inclusions while lacking the larger varieties commonly found elsewhere.

Rather than showing different source materials, the distinction may instead reflect where—and perhaps when—their parent bodies assembled within the developing protoplanetary disk.

The findings similarly reinforce earlier studies suggesting Bennu is among the Solar System’s most chemically primitive objects. Because large refractory inclusions contain unusually high concentrations of certain elements, their absence helps preserve Bennu’s overall composition close to that of the earliest solar nebula from which the planets formed.

That makes the asteroid an unusually valuable time capsule. Every new microscopic grain examined inside the OSIRIS-REx collection provides another insight into processes that occurred billions of years before Earth existed as a habitable world.

Rather than simply representing rubble from a small asteroid, Bennu appears to preserve a remarkably faithful record of how the Solar System sorted, mixed, transported, and assembled its earliest building materials.

The study also demonstrates why sample-return missions have grown increasingly important to planetary science. Laboratory instruments on Earth can perform measurements impossible for spacecraft operating millions of miles away, letting researchers reconstruct events that occurred within the Solar System’s first fractions of a million years.

“We conclude that Bennu’s parent planetesimal, like those of Ryugu and CI chondrites, accreted small refractory inclusions that persisted in the outer Solar System beyond the influence of the proto-Jupiter-induced pressure bump,” researchers write. “Taken together, these findings highlight the need to integrate Bennu samples into comparative studies of early Solar System solids to better constrain the diversity and possible genetic links among planetesimal formation pathways,” researchers write.

The study, “Refractory inclusions in Bennu samples indicative of outer Solar System accretion,” appeared in Nature Communications.

Tim McMillan is a retired law enforcement executive, investigative reporter and co-founder of The Debrief. His writing typically focuses on defense, national security, the Intelligence Community and topics related to psychology. You can follow Tim on Twitter: @LtTimMcMillan.  Tim can be reached by email: tim@thedebrief.org or through encrypted email: LtTimMcMillan@protonmail.com