In March 1869, Dmitri Mendeleev presented to the Russian Chemical Society a way of laying out around sixty elements then known. He ordered them by atomic weight and broke the line into rows so that elements with similar chemical behaviour fell into the same columns. Where the pattern called for an element that no one had found, he did not close the line up. He left the space empty and described what should eventually fill it.

The arrangement is now so familiar that the gaps are easy to overlook. They are the part worth dwelling on. Other people had already noticed that the elements repeat their properties at regular intervals. What Mendeleev did with the repetition was different in degree: he trusted the pattern enough to bet against the existing inventory, and to say, in print, that the inventory was incomplete in specific places by specific amounts.

What the table was built on

The organising idea was periodicity. Run through the elements in order of increasing atomic weight and their properties do not change steadily; they cycle. A reactive light metal is followed some steps later by another reactive light metal, a pungent gas by another pungent gas. Mendeleev arranged the rows so that these recurrences stacked into vertical groups, lithium above sodium above potassium, and so on.

Atomic weight was the only quantity he had to order by. He did not know what caused the periodicity, because the structure of the atom was still decades away. He was working from measured weights and observed chemistry, and arranging both until the columns made chemical sense. In a few cases the weights and the chemistry disagreed, and he chose the chemistry, placing an element where its behaviour fit even when its measured weight argued for somewhere else.

The gaps and the predictions

For three of the empty spaces, Mendeleev went further than leaving a blank. He gave the missing elements provisional names built from the Sanskrit prefix eka, meaning one, so that eka-aluminium meant the element one place below aluminium. For each he estimated an atomic weight, a density, and a set of chemical properties, reading them off the neighbours that surrounded the hole.

The estimates were close enough to be checked. Eka-aluminium arrived in 1875, when the French chemist Paul-Émile Lecoq de Boisbaudran isolated a new metal he called gallium; its density, once measured carefully, matched Mendeleev’s figure. Eka-boron arrived in 1879 as scandium, identified by Lars Fredrik Nilson in Sweden. Eka-silicon arrived in 1886 as germanium, found by Clemens Winkler in Germany, and its properties tracked the prediction closely enough that the agreement is still the standard example taught from the episode.

Three confirmed predictions within seventeen years did more for the table than any argument could. A scheme that merely tidied the known elements would have been one convenience among several. A scheme that named absent elements and described them before anyone had seen them was harder to dismiss.

He was not the only one, and that matters

Mendeleev did not invent the idea that the elements form a periodic series. Alexandre-Émile Béguyer de Chancourtois had plotted them on a spiral in 1862. John Newlands, in London, had published his “law of octaves” in the mid-1860s, noting that every eighth element resembled the first, and had been mocked for it. The German chemist Lothar Meyer was developing his own table at almost the same time as Mendeleev and arguably had the periodicity of physical properties drawn more cleanly.

What separated Mendeleev’s version was not priority but nerve. Newlands had let the known elements set the length of his pattern. Mendeleev let the pattern set the length, and treated mismatches as evidence that an element was missing or that a measured weight was wrong, rather than as evidence against the scheme. The historian Eric Scerri, who has written the standard modern account of the table’s development, has argued that this willingness to subordinate the data to the system, and then to stake testable predictions on it, is the better explanation for why Mendeleev’s name attached to the result.

Where the 1869 table was wrong

The story is usually told as a clean run of successful forecasts. It was not clean. Mendeleev predicted elements that were never found, including light elements he expected to sit before hydrogen, tied later to his mistaken belief in a luminiferous ether. Several of his other interpolations did not pan out as described.

Two larger problems sat outside the 1869 table entirely. The noble gases, argon and its relatives, were discovered in the 1890s and formed a whole column that the original scheme had not anticipated; Mendeleev was at first reluctant to accept them. And the ordering principle itself was incomplete. A handful of pairs, tellurium and iodine among them, sat in the right chemical place but the wrong weight order. The reason became clear only in 1913, after Mendeleev’s death, when Henry Moseley showed that the elements are properly ordered not by weight but by nuclear charge, the atomic number. The table Mendeleev built by chemical intuition turned out to be tracking a physical quantity he had no way to measure.

That is the honest shape of it. The gaps were the achievement, and the parts he filled wrongly belong in the same account as the parts he filled before anyone else could.

The part worth keeping

The detail in the headline is fair: by 1869 the chemistry of the elements had become ordered enough that a missing piece could be described before it was found. That is a particular kind of confidence, and it is rarer than the finished table makes it look. It requires a pattern reliable enough to extrapolate from, and someone prepared to be checked against an empty square.

Mendeleev was prepared to be checked, and within his lifetime three of the squares filled in close to where he had said they would. The ones that did not fill in, and the deeper rule that only emerged after he was gone, are part of why the table is interesting rather than merely useful. It was right enough to predict, and wrong in ways that pointed at the physics underneath.

The post In 1869, Dmitri Mendeleev arranged the known elements into a table and left gaps for what had not yet been discovered, but the detail that makes the periodic table remarkable is that chemistry became organized enough to predict missing pieces of reality appeared first on Space Daily.

Research Opportunities in Space and Earth Sciences (ROSES)-2025 is an ongoing “omnibus” or “umbrella” solicitation meaning that it includes many individual program elements each with its own topics and due dates. Refer to Table 3 of ROSES-25 for a list of those program elements. The ROSES-25 “Summary of Solicitation” is the front matter that sets the default backstop rules for each of the program elements in ROSES-25.

ROSES-25 Amendment 59 makes several additions, changes, and clarifications to the ROSES-25 Summary of Solicitation to conform with Agency and administration priorities, see Sections I, I(g), II(a), II(b), III(b), III(d), V(b)ii, VI(c) & VIII(b). New text is in bold.

Important and substantial revisions to 2 CFR 200, the government-wide guidance for grants and cooperative agreements are proposed to take effect October 1, 2026, see https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2026/05/29/2026-10817/regulation-for-federal-financial-assistance#h-8. Many types of currently allowable costs, such as but not limited to publications, research or events outside the United States, and domestic conferences may be restricted, denied, or may be allowable by legal exception or special award conditions only. Public comments on the revisions to 2 CFR 200 may be submitted until July 13, 2026, at https://www.regulations.gov/commenton/OMB-2026-0034-0001

On or about June 15, 2026, this Amendment to the NASA Research Announcement “Research Opportunities in Space and Earth Sciences (ROSES) 2025” (NNH25ZDA001N) will be posted on the NASA research opportunity homepage at https://solicitation.nasaprs.com/ROSES2025 and will appear on SARA’s ROSES blog at: https://science.nasa.gov/researchers/solicitations/roses-2025/

Questions concerning this amendment to ROSES-25 may be directed to SARA@nasa.gov.

The post Amendment 59: Several Updates to the ROSES-25 Summary of Solicitation appeared first on NASA Science.

Copper diacetyl bis(4-methyl-3-thiosemicarbazone), or Cu(ATSM), restored a key waste-removal system in the brain, reducing toxic amyloid-beta buildup and improving spatial memory in lab models of Alzheimer’s disease, according to a team of researchers at Monash University.

The post Experimental Copper-Based Drug Clears Alzheimer’s Plaques and Boosts Memory in Mice appeared first on Sci.News: Breaking Science News.

For centuries, the Aurora Borealis has captivated skywatchers with its shimmering curtains of green, red, and purple light. Yet despite being one of Earth’s most recognizable natural phenomena, the Northern Lights remain surrounded by misconceptions. 

Some believe they occur only near the North Pole, while others assume they are caused by weather or that they always appear green. In reality, auroras are the result of complex interactions between the Sun and Earth’s magnetic field, and scientists continue to uncover new details about how they form. Here are seven common myths about the Northern Lights and the facts behind one of nature’s most spectacular displays.

1. Myth: The Northern Lights make no sound

Fact: Most auroras occur too high in the atmosphere for sound to travel directly to the ground. However, some observers have reported hearing faint crackling or hissing noises during intense displays. The phenomenon remains debated, but researchers have investigated possible explanations involving electrical activity close to the Earth’s surface. While not fully understood, reports of auroral sounds are not dismissed as pure imagination.

2. Myth: The aurora is always green

Fact: Green is the most common aurora color, but it is far from the only one. Different atmospheric gases and altitudes produce different colors. Oxygen can create green or red displays, while nitrogen can produce blue, purple, and pink hues. During powerful geomagnetic storms, observers may see multiple colors at once, creating the spectacular multicolored curtains often captured in photographs.

3. Myth: Auroras only happen at the North Pole

Fact: The Aurora Borealis is most common near the Arctic, but powerful solar storms can push auroral activity much farther south. During major geomagnetic events, the lights have been observed across Europe, Asia, and even parts of the continental United States. There is also a southern counterpart known as the Aurora Australis, which occurs around Antarctica and southern high-latitude regions.

4. Myth: Auroras are unique to Earth

Fact: Earth is not the only world with auroras. Scientists have observed auroral activity on Jupiter, Saturn, Mars, and several other bodies in the Solar System. While the underlying mechanism is similar, charged particles interact with an atmosphere and a magnetic environment. The appearance and behavior of auroras vary significantly from planet to planet. Studying these alien auroras helps researchers better understand planetary atmospheres and magnetic fields.

5. Myth: The Northern Lights are caused by Earth’s weather

Fact: Auroras are actually a form of space weather. They occur when charged particles from the Sun interact with Earth’s magnetic field and collide with gases in the upper atmosphere. These collisions release energy in the form of colorful light. While clouds can block your view of an aurora, the phenomenon itself originates hundreds of miles above normal weather systems. Strong solar storms can even make the lights visible far beyond the Arctic.

6. Myth: If an aurora forecast is good, you’ll definitely see it

Fact: A strong aurora forecast is only part of the equation. Visibility also depends on cloud cover, light pollution, moonlight, and your geographic location. Even during powerful geomagnetic storms, thick clouds can completely hide the display. This is why experienced aurora chasers pay as much attention to weather forecasts as they do to solar activity predictions.

7. Myth: The aurora is a modern phenomenon

Fact: Humans have been observing auroras for thousands of years. Ancient cultures across Scandinavia, North America, Asia, and Europe developed myths and legends to explain the mysterious lights. Long before scientists understood solar wind or magnetism, people associated auroras with spirits, omens, warriors, or celestial beings. Modern science has explained the mechanism behind the lights, but the sense of wonder they inspire remains unchanged.

Listening to someone who disagrees with you on a controversial topic, but shares basic values, might not change your mind—but it could moderate an extreme position, reducing polarization, new Cornell economics research finds.

It’s a bit worrying when a scientific paper begins, “How long will life on Earth survive?” But in this case—a study by Jacob Haqq‐Misra of Blue Marble Space and Eric Wolf at the University of Colorado Boulder—the billion-plus-year timeline under consideration shouldn’t cause you too much existential panic.

The context for this question is that we understand the Sun will brighten as it eventually matures into a red giant that swallows the Earth in a solar furnace. So, where along that 5 billion-year path will life on Earth, in fact, be cooked?

Weathering and the weather

This isn’t just a question of incoming radiation. Among the thermostat-like stabilizing feedback loops in Earth’s climate, the cycling of CO₂ through the solid Earth is a major factor over timescales this long. The weathering of silicate rocks at the surface converts atmospheric CO₂ into carbonate that ends up on the seafloor, where it can be subducted into the mantle with tectonic plates. (And eventually, it can cycle back out to the atmosphere through volcanoes.)

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Food waste may become a powerful climate tool thanks to tiny reusable beads that capture carbon directly from the air. Keeping global warming below 1.5°C over the long term will require more than major cuts in greenhouse gas emissions. According to climate scenarios outlined in the latest Assessment Report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate [...]

One of nature’s most mysterious predators isn’t a mammal stalking remote forests or jungles, nor any large, finned creature lurking in the ocean depths: it is a bizarre little plant that grows only in certain wetland areas along the East Coast of the United States.

With the distinctive hinged leaves that it uses to capture insects, the Venus flytrap is one of nature’s most curious offerings. The small bog-dwelling plant owes its success to the way it can generate an inviting aroma with the nectar it produces, which lures insects. Then, with the help of tiny follicles that act as triggers, the insects become trapped within the flytrap’s leaves as they close like jaws around its prey.

Scientists have long been perplexed by exactly how these plants can react quickly enough to capture even some of the fastest flying insects. Even Charles Darwin seemed baffled by these curious examples of carnivorous flora, describing them as “a plant [that] should secrete, when properly excited, a fluid containing an acid and ferment, closely analogous to the digestive fluid of an animal.”

While the exact mechanism that allows the mysterious Venus flytrap to carry out its distinctive method of feeding has long remained unknown, new research is finally shedding light on the mystery.

The Venus Flytrap’s Secret is Finally Revealed

According to recent experiments detailed in a new study, when the hair-trigger mechanism is activated on these plants, cells on the jaw-like leaves soften, which initiates the closing movement within fractions of a second, trapping any insects unlucky enough to have landed searching for nectar.

Dr Yoël Forterre, a physicist at the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) and Aix-Marseille University, says that this movement had been so mysterious to Darwin that “he was convinced that the plant had a muscle inside, but plants do not have muscles and they do not have nerves.”

“For more than a century there have been many hypotheses,” Forterre, senior author of the recent study, said. “It’s very surprising that plant cell walls can tune their mechanical properties so fast.”

The Challenge of Measurement

One of the primary issues with resolving the plant’s curious mechanism involved overcoming challenges associated with measuring such a remarkably fast system of movement, let alone one in a plant, which possesses none of the usual mechanisms nature relies on for such activities.

Equally perplexing is that the Venus flytrap seemingly recognizes when an accidental trigger has been initiated, rather than a successful capture of an insect.

“If you close it accidentally with a drop of water, it will close and then reopen the next day,” Forterre says. “If it catches an insect, it has to digest it and dissolve the skeleton, which will take several weeks.”

In experiments Forterre and his colleagues performed, dental glue was used to secure the plant’s leaves, which allowed for the normal trigger mechanisms to be engaged, but left the plant’s leaves open throughout the process.

Past research had already shown that electrical signals had been detected coinciding with the manipulation of the trigger hairs present on the plant’s leaves, in which this sudden surge of electricity “activates” the plant’s closing mechanism within a fraction of a second.

Solving the Flytrap’s Mystery

Applying a new approach, Forterre and colleagues used the metallic tip of a nanoindenter, devices used to make very small mechanical measurements. Applying the device to the outer leaves revealed that its normal stiffness appeared to soften significantly once the hair mechanisms were triggered.

The reason this occurs, according to Forterre, is that the cells themselves temporarily become more flexible. Past theories suggested that the movement was initiated by the movement of water contained within the leaf.

The newly-identified mechanism reveals a process very similar to the function of a plunger, which, if inverted, will flip back to its normal position when pressure is applied.

Forterre says he is unaware of any similar plant in nature that displays such unusual mechanical properties, which he says allows the Venus flytrap to initiate a “very rapid change of mechanical properties of the cells.”

“I’ve been obsessed by this for 20 years,” Forterre recently told The Guardian, noting that “as a physicist, I thought we should understand the motor, the forces.”

Now, thanks to his team’s findings, one of the plant kingdom’s strangest inhabitants has finally revealed its secrets.

The team’s new study, “Fast cell wall softening causes Venus flytrap closure,” appeared in Science on June 11, 2026.

Micah Hanks is the Editor-in-Chief and Co-Founder of The Debrief. A longtime reporter on science, defense, and technology with a focus on space and astronomy, he can be reached at micah@thedebrief.org. Follow him on X @MicahHanks, and at micahhanks.com.

New research suggests this unique geological site was formed by a "globally significant volcanic event."

A self-regulating artificial photosynthesis system makes solar fuel without batteries, offering a simpler and potentially cheaper path to clean energy storage. Researchers at Osaka Metropolitan University have created a new artificial photosynthesis system that can produce solar fuel more consistently while eliminating the need for battery-based control systems. The advance comes from incorporating a self-regulating [...]

A major security flaw that allowed attackers to impersonate other people in text message conversations has finally been fixed across the United States, thanks to the work of computer scientists at the University of California San Diego. The vulnerability affected both Android and iPhone users and involved nearly all major wireless carriers, including Verizon, T-Mobile, […]

The post Hidden texting flaws let attackers impersonate contacts on iPhones and Androids appeared first on Knowridge Science Report.

Roopkund Lake sits more than 5,000 metres up in the Indian Himalayas, a shallow body of meltwater that stays frozen for much of the year. When the ice and snow retreat, bones appear: skulls, ribs, and limb fragments belonging to several hundred people, scattered along the shore and resting on the lake bottom. For most of the twentieth century, the favoured explanation was a single disaster, often told as a sudden, violent hailstorm that killed a group of travellers in one terrible afternoon.

A 2019 genetic study took that story apart. Researchers recovered genome-wide ancient DNA from 38 of the skeletons and found that the dead did not belong to one population, and did not die at one time. They fell into three genetically distinct groups, and radiocarbon dating placed two of those groups roughly a thousand years apart. One group carried ancestry typical of the eastern Mediterranean, thousands of kilometres from a remote Himalayan shrine.

What the bones actually held

The team reported ancestry that clustered cleanly into three sets. Twenty-three individuals had ancestry that falls within the range of present-day South Asians. Fourteen more had ancestry typical of the eastern Mediterranean, the kind seen today in people from places such as Greece and Crete. A single individual carried Southeast Asian-related ancestry.

The radiocarbon dates were the surprise that reframed everything. The South Asian group dated to around 800 CE, with evidence that they were deposited in more than one event rather than all at once. Every other sampled individual dated to around 1800 CE. Two clusters of dead, separated by something close to a thousand years, had come to rest in the same small lake.

That single result rules out any explanation that depends on one moment. A storm, a battle, a mass illness: whatever happened at Roopkund, it did not happen once.

The split showed up in more than the genes. Stable isotope measurements, which read the chemical traces of a person’s diet from their bones, revealed distinct dietary profiles for the two main groups. The DNA and the chemistry agreed: these were different people, living different lives, who happened to end up in the same place.

Where the hailstorm story came from

The disaster version was not invented from nothing. An earlier bioarchaeological survey of the site identified three individuals with unhealed compression fractures, injuries to the top of the skull and shoulders consistent with a sudden blow from above. From this, investigators floated the idea of a violent hailstorm, the sort that does occur near Roopkund, while openly noting that other scenarios were plausible.

The same survey had already sensed that more than one kind of person lay at the lake. It described both very robust, tall individuals, outside the range of almost all South Asians, and more gracile ones, and suggested at least two distinct groups were present. The genetics later confirmed that intuition, and then went further than any survey of bone shape could.

Crucially, even if a hailstorm did kill some of the people whose remains date to around 800 CE, it cannot account for a separate group who died near 1800 CE. The compression-fracture evidence, real as it is, covers a fraction of the dead and a fraction of the timeline.

A group from the far side of the ancient world

The hardest finding to explain is the Mediterranean-ancestry group. These were not local people, and the study found no genetic signal that they had mixed substantially with South Asian populations. Their chemistry pointed the same way: a predominantly terrestrial rather than marine-based diet, which suggested they had lived somewhere inland before travelling to the mountains.

Why they came remains genuinely unresolved. Local folklore tells of a pilgrimage to the shrine of the mountain goddess Nanda Devi, and pilgrimage is a real and recurring feature of the region. But the study’s authors point out that it would be surprising for a large group of eastern Mediterranean travellers to be undertaking a Hindu pilgrimage, in a tradition where such practices have not been common. Whether they were pilgrims, or were drawn to the lake for some other reason, the paper calls a mystery.

The explanations that do not fit

Other tidy stories failed too. One long-standing guess was that the dead were a single party travelling together, perhaps a family group or a military expedition caught by disaster. The genetics found no relative pairs of the third degree or closer among the sequenced individuals, which is evidence against the idea that the skeletons represent groups of families, and it sits awkwardly with the notion of one tight-knit company dying together.

The Mediterranean ancestry also tempted a romantic explanation: that these were descendants of Indo-Greek populations established in the region after the campaigns of Alexander the Great, the same deep history that left a genetic mark on some present-day groups such as the Kalash. The study found this unlikely. A community with that history would be expected to carry South Asian admixture built up over many generations, and the eastern Mediterranean individuals at Roopkund show no such mixing. Genetically, they look less like long-settled locals of distant Greek descent and more like people who arrived from the eastern Mediterranean not long before they died.

What this does and does not prove

It is worth being precise about what the DNA settles and what it leaves open. The genetics firmly establish that the Roopkund dead are not a single population and were not deposited in a single event. That much is hard to argue with once the radiocarbon dates are on the table.

It does not, however, tell us how any of these people died. Ancient DNA reports ancestry and, in some cases, kinship; it does not record a cause of death. The team also tested for disease and found no evidence that the individuals carried bacterial pathogens, which offers no support for the idea that they died in an epidemic. The authors add the honest caveat that absence of pathogen DNA in bone powder can simply mean it was present at too low a level to detect, so even “not an epidemic” is a soft conclusion rather than a closed case.

The site itself works against certainty. Roopkund is frequently disturbed by rockslides, and for many years visited by pilgrims and hikers who have handled the bones and carried off artifacts. Much of the context an archaeologist would normally rely on has been scrambled. The study analysed 38 individuals out of several hundred, so the three-group picture may yet gain a fourth or fifth as more remains are sampled.

What is left standing

Strip away the parts that cannot be confirmed, and a stranger story survives than the one it replaced. A high, frozen lake on a Himalayan ridge collected the dead across at least a thousand years. Some were South Asians who died around the ninth century, possibly in more than one episode. Others, centuries later, were people whose ancestors lived near the eastern Mediterranean, who somehow ended their journeys at the same waterline.

The neat single-disaster ending turned out to be the easy version. What the DNA left in its place is messier, older, and harder to close.

The post The hundreds of skeletons in a frozen Himalayan lake were blamed on one ancient disaster, until DNA showed some of the dead came from the eastern Mediterranean and died about a thousand years apart appeared first on Space Daily.

Stonehenge’s giant Altar Stone likely traveled about 700 kilometers from Scotland through a carefully planned human effort. New research from Curtin University is shedding new light on one of Stonehenge’s biggest mysteries: how a massive stone weighing around six tons made its way across Britain thousands of years ago. The focus of the study is [...]

And one of them was putting on a show

The post ISS Astronaut Shares Incredible Photos of Volcanoes Taken From Space appeared first on Nautilus.

A home machinist and microscopy enthusiast has documented a detailed technical conversion of a scanning electron microscope (SEM) into a transmission electron microscope (TEM), demonstrating that sub-nanometer resolution imaging is not strictly confined to professional laboratory settings.

The project walks through the mechanical, electronic, and optical modifications required to redirect the SEM’s focused electron beam through an ultrathin specimen rather than bouncing it off a surface.

SEM versus TEM

In a conventional SEM, a focused electron beam rasters across the surface of a sample and detectors collect secondary and backscattered electrons to construct a three-dimensional surface image.

A TEM, by contrast, accelerates electrons through a thin specimen—typically below 100 nanometers—and a detector or phosphor screen on the far side captures the transmitted beam, yielding internal structural information at atomic or near-atomic resolution.

The two modalities require fundamentally different sample preparation, detector geometry, and beam alignment strategies, which makes the conversion non-trivial.

The modification involved fabricating a custom specimen holder stage capable of holding electron-transparent samples, repositioning a scintillator-based detector beneath the sample plane, and carefully adjusting beam convergence angles to suit transmission geometry.

Beam energy in the converted system reportedly remained in the range typical of low-voltage SEMs—roughly 5 to 30 kiloelectron volts—which is lower than the 80–300 keV found in dedicated TEMs.

That energy gap has direct consequences for penetration depth and contrast, meaning the converted instrument is better suited to very thin biological or polymer films than to hard crystalline materials.

Specimen preparation constraints

At 30 keV, electron penetration through matter is substantially reduced compared to a 200 keV research-grade TEM. Specimens must be prepared to thicknesses well below 50 nanometers to achieve meaningful transmission contrast, which demands either focused ion beam (FIB) thinning or careful ultramicrotome sectioning.

The project does not sidestep this limitation; the builder acknowledges that sample preparation remains the most labor-intensive part of the workflow and that certain dense or thick materials will simply block the beam entirely at these voltages.

Achieving proper alignment in a converted system also presents practical difficulties. Commercial TEMs incorporate sophisticated electromagnetic lens alignment systems, stigmators, and beam-tilt controls that are absent in most SEMs. The DIY conversion relies on mechanical stage adjustment and iterative beam tuning to compensate, which increases setup time per sample significantly.

Detector configuration and image acquisition

The transmitted electron signal was captured using a scintillator coupled to a camera placed below the sample stage. This configuration is conceptually similar to a bright-field TEM detector arrangement, where areas of the specimen that scatter or absorb electrons appear darker against a bright background.

The resolution achievable with this setup is constrained not only by beam energy but also by the point spread function of the scintillator material and the pixel pitch of the camera sensor used.

For engineers interested in electron optics at the amateur level, projects like this one sit alongside other low-cost electron beam experiments that have appeared in the maker community.

DIY scanning electron microscope builds have previously demonstrated that fundamental vacuum and high-voltage engineering skills can be acquired outside institutional settings, though always with serious attention to X-ray shielding and high-voltage safety protocols.

Safety and practical risk factors

Operating any electron beam instrument outside a certified laboratory introduces real hazards. Bremsstrahlung X-ray emission is an inherent byproduct of electron deceleration in the target and chamber walls.

SEMs are shielded from the factory, but any modification to the chamber geometry—including cutting ports for a transmission detector—requires careful verification that shielding integrity is maintained. The builder’s documentation should be read with this in mind by anyone considering replication.

The conversion represents a technically detailed exercise in applied electron optics and vacuum engineering, and it offers a practical reference point for understanding the design constraints that separate entry-level and research-grade electron microscopy instruments.

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For five years, the leading story about Kamoʻoalewa, a small asteroid that travels alongside Earth, was that it might be a stray piece of the Moon. A new peer-reviewed study argues it is probably something far more ordinary: a fragment of a distant asteroid family, weathered until its surface only looks lunar.

The timing is sharp. On or around June 7, after a 13-month cruise, China’s Tianwen-2 spacecraft slipped into orbit around Kamoʻoalewa, a maneuver tracked by independent radio astronomers even before China’s space agency formally confirmed it. Sample collection is expected within weeks. The asteroid that may decide a long-running debate about its own origin is now being circled by the machine built to bring a piece of it home.

Why the Moon theory took hold

Kamoʻoalewa was found in 2016 by the Pan-STARRS survey in Hawaiʻi, and it is one of a small set of asteroids called quasi-satellites: rocks that orbit the Sun but stay close enough to Earth to seem like loose companions. This one is the most stable of the bunch, expected to linger near us for a few hundred years. It is small, somewhere between roughly 40 and 100 metres across, and it spins fast, turning about once every 28 minutes.

Quasi-satellites are faint and awkward to observe, which is part of why this one drew such outsized attention once a clue to its makeup appeared. It sits close, it stays put for centuries, and it is bright enough to study with large telescopes during its annual passes. For an object that might preserve a record of the early Solar System, that combination is rare.

In 2021, astronomers reported that its reflected light was a closer match to lunar-like silicates than to any common asteroid type, with an unusual extra redness. That resemblance was the spark for the lunar-fragment idea. A 2024 study went further, proposing a specific birthplace: the young Giordano Bruno crater on the Moon’s far side, from which an impact could have flung debris into an Earth-like orbit.

It was a tidy and romantic picture. A souvenir of the Moon, looping around its parent planet, waiting to be collected.

What the new study actually did

Writing in Nature Communications, a large international team led from the Chinese Academy of Sciences reopened the case from three directions. First, they reanalyzed the asteroid’s spectrum and pinned down a key absorption feature at a wavelength of 1.001 micrometres, a value they report as consistent not with lunar material but with LL chondrites, a common type of stony meteorite.

Then they tested whether ordinary meteorite could be made to look like Kamoʻoalewa. In the lab, the team blasted LL chondrite samples with laser pulses to mimic space weathering, the slow darkening and reddening that solar wind and tiny impacts inflict on any airless surface over millions of years. Heavily weathered chondrite powder, they found, reproduced the asteroid’s spectrum. Solid chips of the same meteorite did not.

Finally, they traced where such an object could have come from. Their modeling points to the ν6 secular resonance, a gravitational escape route in the inner asteroid belt, and more specifically to the Flora family, a cluster of asteroids born from an ancient collision. Kamoʻoalewa’s makeup, they write, resembles the well-studied asteroid Itokawa and seven Flora-family members, only more weathered.

The resonance matters because it offers a plausible delivery route. Rocks that drift into it can have their orbits stretched until they cross Earth’s path, which is one way an inner-belt fragment could end up as a quasi-satellite rather than a lunar one. The argument, in short, is that you do not need the Moon to explain Kamoʻoalewa. An ordinary asteroid nudged out of the Flora family and aged in sunlight can account for the same colour, the same orbit, and the same odd companionship with Earth.

Why a powder, not a slab, is the key detail

That powder-versus-chip result is the quiet heart of the paper. A fresh asteroid surface and a deeply weathered one can be the same rock and still reflect light differently, and grain size matters as much as chemistry. The team’s reading is that Kamoʻoalewa is coated in fine, long-exposed dust, which is exactly what would redden an ordinary asteroid until its colour drifts toward the lunar range.

If that holds, the redness that first suggested the Moon is not a fingerprint of lunar rock at all. It is what time does to a small, slow-tumbling asteroid that has been left out in the solar wind for ages. The comparison with Itokawa carries weight here, because Japan’s Hayabusa mission already returned grains from Itokawa and confirmed it as an ordinary chondrite body. The new study places Kamoʻoalewa in that same broad company.

What this does and does not prove

This is a competing explanation, not a verdict. The authors are careful to say Kamoʻoalewa probably came from the Flora family, and the hedge is doing real work. Reflectance spectra are notoriously slippery; weathering, grain size, viewing angle and composition can all nudge an asteroid’s colour in similar directions, which is why two capable teams can look at the same faint object and reach different conclusions.

The lunar-origin case has not been withdrawn, and the dynamical argument for a recent lunar escape still has its defenders. It is also worth noting that the new paper is an early-access version of an accepted manuscript, released ahead of final editing, so small details may still change. What the study does is weaken the single strongest pillar of the Moon theory, the matching red spectrum, by showing that a plain meteorite can be pushed to look the same.

In other words, the resemblance to the Moon is real. The new work simply argues it is a coincidence of weathering rather than a sign of shared birth.

The sample that will end the argument

What makes this debate unusual is that it has an expiration date. Most arguments about an asteroid’s origin are settled, if at all, by ever-finer remote measurements. This one will be settled by holding the rock.

The stakes are not trivial. If the grains turn out to be lunar, Kamoʻoalewa becomes a free sample of the Moon’s far side, delivered to Earth’s neighbourhood without a crewed landing. If they are ordinary chondrite, the asteroid becomes a well-preserved relic of the early Solar System and a test case for how badly space weathering can disguise a familiar rock. Those are two very different prizes, and the same capsule settles which one we get.

Tianwen-2 is expected to collect material from Kamoʻoalewa within weeks and send a capsule back toward Earth in 2027, after which the spacecraft heads onward to a comet. A returned sample can be measured for the isotopes and minerals that distinguish lunar rock from a chondrite asteroid, the kind of test no telescope can perform from afar. For once, a question about where a space rock came from will be answered by the rock itself, and the answer is already on its way.

The post An asteroid long thought to be a chunk of the Moon may be ordinary space rock instead, a new study finds, as China’s Tianwen-2 circles it to grab a sample appeared first on Space Daily.

Ancient mycorrhizal fungal networks, consisting of a billion astronomical units’ worth of roots, have finally been mapped by scientists, providing insight into their connections, which are essential to climate regulation and plant sustenance.

Mycorrhizal fungi grow in an arbuscular formation, meaning they take on a branching tree-like structure of tubular cells called hyphae, which pull carbon from the atmosphere to aid in climate regulation.

The international team presented their work in a recent paper published in Science, which estimates the distribution and mass of these enormous fungal networks and provides an interactive visualization tool that offers crucial insight into threats to these systems, which are essential to Earth’s health.

Mapping Fungal Networks

The new research brings both encouraging and concerning findings, highlighting regions where fungal networks remain robust while also identifying areas under increasing threat.

Although previous studies have attempted to map the diversity of these fungi across the globe, this is the first effort to predict and visualize their density and biomass on a planetary scale. According to the team’s estimates, the network extends for approximately 110 quadrillion kilometers, with roughly 40% located beneath grasslands.

Using more than 16,000 soil cores collected worldwide, researchers assembled a massive fungal dataset. They then employed machine-learning models that combined data from multiple biomes to predict the density of arbuscular mycorrhizal fungal networks in unsampled regions. Robotic imaging of more than 300,000 living, laboratory-grown hyphae allowed the team to calibrate and validate their models.

“It is hard to overstate the importance and enormity of these fungi,” said lead author Dr. Justin Stewart, with the Society for the Protection of Underground Networks (SPUN). “There could be up to 10 meters (32 feet) of mycorrhizal network in just a teaspoon of soil.”

Earth’s Circulatory System

Because it transports carbon, water, and nutrients underground, scientists have likened the network to our planet’s circulatory system, with a flow rate of up to 120 micrometers per second. About 70% of Earth’s plant species thrive on a symbiotic relationship with the arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi network.  The network can provide over 80% of a plant’s phosphorus and increase the root foraging area 100-fold. 

The network subsists on carbon waste produced by plants, while providing them with water and nutrients in return. By pulling in roughly 4 billion tons of CO2 into the ground every year, mycorrhizal fungi mitigate an amount corresponding to roughly 11% of human emissions.

Unfortunately, grasslands, where the network thrives most, are among the least protected environments on Earth and are being rapidly converted to farmland. According to the study team, cropland has only about half the lower network density of regular land, which the researchers worry may negatively affect how soil stores carbon, cycles nutrients, and resists stress.

Continuing Fungal Network Research

“It is important to remember that these maps are living documents. This is a first attempt at building a foundational model of Earth’s fungal networks infrastructure, but it is not complete,” Stewart recently told The Debrief. “There are other types of mycorrhizal fungi that still need to be mapped in more detail, and other fungal structures, such as spores, that are also critical to understanding how these organisms persist, move, and respond to environmental change. Likewise, we need more data in regions that have been poorly sampled.”

The team says the study represents a major advance for climate science, a field in which fungi have often been overlooked in discussions about conservation and resilience. Researchers hope the findings will encourage a more comprehensive understanding of the role fungi play in maintaining healthy ecosystems.

“A major goal now is to make these kinds of data useful for decision makers. Fungi are still rarely included explicitly in climate, biodiversity, and land-use agendas, even though they are central to how ecosystems move carbon and nutrients,” Stewart adds. “We want to help ‘course-correct’ by building a clearer picture of the underground systems that support life aboveground.”

The paper, “Global Density and Biomass of Arbuscular Mycorrhizal Fungal Networks,” appeared in Science on June 11, 2026.

Ryan Whalen covers science and technology for The Debrief. He holds an MA in History and a Master of Library and Information Science with a certificate in Data Science. He can be contacted at ryan@thedebrief.org, and follow him on Twitter @mdntwvlf.

In 2021, scientists detected a cosmic ray entering Earth’s atmosphere with as much kinetic energy as a fast-moving tennis ball, all contained in a single subatomic particle. Named the “Amaterasu particle” after the Japanese sun goddess, the event left researchers questioning its origin because its arrival direction pointed to a region of space with no known source capable of producing such energy.

Researchers at Penn State now suggest that the puzzle may stem more from assumptions about the particle’s composition rather than its missing source.

A recent study in Physical Review Letters suggests that the Amaterasu particle, along with other extremely energetic cosmic rays, may actually be atomic nuclei heavier than iron. If correct, the idea could change how researchers search for the sources of cosmic rays.

A Particle of Unknown Origins

Ultrahigh-energy cosmic rays are some of the rarest and most violent phenomena in nature. These particles slam into Earth’s atmosphere with more than 100 exa-electron volts of energy, which is about 10 million times more than what the Large Hadron Collider can produce. The Amaterasu particle, found by the Telescope Array in Utah in May 2021 and reported in Science in 2023, had about 244 exa-electron volts of energy. This makes it one of the most energetic natural events ever recorded.

The mystery extended not only to the particle’s energy, but also to its origin. It came from the direction of the Local Void, which is an almost empty area of space next to the Milky Way, where there is no known source that could create such a powerful particle.

“The origins and acceleration mechanisms of ultrahigh-energy cosmic rays have been among the biggest mysteries in the field for more than 60 years, since the first example was reported,” said Kohta Murase, professor of physics and astronomy at Penn State’s Eberly College of Science and the study’s lead researcher.

The Heavy Nucleus Hypothesis

The Penn State team ran computational simulations to study how particles of different masses travel through intergalactic space. They found that atomic nuclei heavier than iron, known as ultraheavy nuclei, lose energy much more slowly than protons or lighter nuclei as they move through the radiation fields of deep space.

Most research on cosmic rays has assumed that the most extreme events involve protons, which are the simplest and lightest atomic nuclei. Ultraheavy nuclei lose energy much more slowly during their journey, allowing them to reach Earth carrying far more energy than lighter particles traveling similar distances. That makes them strong candidates for the most powerful cosmic ray events we’ve seen, including the Amaterasu particle.

“When we detect individual cosmic-ray particles such as the Amaterasu particle here on Earth, we can often use their energies, arrival directions and expected magnetic deflections to infer their possible cosmic sources,” Murase said.

New Theoretical Limits

The hypothesis that these particles are ultraheavy nuclei also changes the range of possible sources. If the particles are indeed heavier nuclei rather than protons, their production would require some of the most extreme environments in the universe. The researchers identify collapsars, which are massive stars collapsing directly into black holes, and binary neutron-star mergers as likely candidates. Both phenomena are also associated with gamma-ray bursts, which are among the most energetic explosions known to science.

The team’s calculations set new theoretical limits on how much ultraheavy nuclei may contribute to the overall population of ultrahigh-energy cosmic rays. Murase also noted that these sources could help explain a possible asymmetry in the ultrahigh-energy cosmic-ray spectrum between the northern and southern hemispheres.

“The most promising sites for producing and accelerating such ultraheavy nuclei are massive star deaths involving explosive collapse into black holes or strongly magnetized neutron stars, as well as binary neutron-star mergers known to be powerful gravitational-wave emitters,” Murase said.

Testing the Idea

The researchers stress that they are not saying all ultrahigh-energy cosmic rays are ultraheavy nuclei, but some of the most extreme ones might be. This could change what scientists look for in future studies. New observatories and upgrades, like AugerPrime in Argentina and the planned Global Cosmic Ray Observatory, could test these ideas. If ultraheavy nuclei are important, future observations should find evidence that protons alone cannot explain.

More than six decades after scientists first detected ultrahigh-energy cosmic rays, researchers may finally have a new clue about what the most extreme particles in the universe are made of.

Austin Burgess is a writer and researcher with a background in sales, marketing, and data analytics. He holds an MBA, a Bachelor of Science in Business Administration, and a data analytics certification. His work focuses on breaking scientific developments, with an emphasis on emerging biology, cognitive neuroscience, and archaeological discoveries.

Einstein’s equations have withstood every experimental test for more than a century. However, according to one philosopher, they have not withstood careful scrutiny of the language used to describe them.

Daryl Janzen, an astronomer and instructor at the University of Saskatchewan, recently published a philosophical challenge in The Conversation. Janzen’s critique does not question the mathematics but instead focuses on how physicists and philosophers describe the nature of space-time itself. He argues that over the past century, the language used to describe space-time has gradually merged two separate concepts into one.

Existence vs. Occurrence

The main focus of this argument is the idea of the “block universe.” In this view, also known as eternalism, space-time is a fixed, four-dimensional structure. All past, present, and future events are equally real within this block, according to this interpretation. Time does not flow, and there is no single present moment. The block contains everything that has ever occurred.

Janzen does not object to the geometry itself. His concern lies with the way the word “exists” is used in this context.

Janzen distinguishes between existence and occurrence. Objects exist because they endure through time. Events occur at a specific place and moment, and then they are over. For example, an elephant standing in a room exists. A cross-sectional snapshot of that elephant, representing a single instant removed from its timeline and frozen in place, does not exist in the same way; it only occurs.

In the block universe model, space-time holds every moment of the elephant’s existence as a four-dimensional world line. This world line shows the animal’s full path through space and time. A single cross-section, or one slice of that path, is not the elephant itself; it is only a record of what the elephant was doing at a certain moment. Janzen says the block is better understood as a representational framework rather than a physical object in the usual sense.

A Problem of When

This confusion leads to a fundamental problem. The entire block universe is said to exist, but it is unclear when it exists. A timeless structure that never unfolds cannot endure as the elephant endures from moment to moment. Meanwhile, if the whole block occurs at once, like a single flash, there is no internal experience of time that could be considered an illusion. 

To keep the sense of time passing in a block universe, the four-dimensional structure would need to endure in some sense. This would mean adding a fifth dimension, a second time axis outside the block, for the block itself to exist within; however, this extra axis is not part of Einstein’s original theory.

Janzen uses a simpler analogy. He compares the situation to describing a song that exists all at once, complete but unperformed. A song only becomes a song when it unfolds over time.

Austrian-British philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein warned that philosophical problems arise when “language goes on holiday.” Janzen argues that physics has been in this situation for decades, reusing words such as “timeless,” “exist,” and “become” in technical senses without considering their everyday connotations.

Implications for Physics and Philosophy

One of the biggest unsolved problems in physics is how to bring together general relativity, which explains gravity and the large-scale universe, with quantum mechanics, which describes matter at the smallest scales. These two frameworks do not fit together, and every real attempt to unify them demands a clear definition of what space-time actually is.

If the language physicists use to describe space-time has been internally inconsistent for more than a century, Janzen suggests the resulting confusion may extend beyond philosophy. Clarifying what physicists mean when they talk about space-time could influence how researchers think about attempts to reconcile general relativity and quantum mechanics.

Janzen does not propose a replacement for the current framework but instead suggests that the fundamental question is not how space-time curves, but how to properly define them in the first place.

Austin Burgess is a writer and researcher with a background in sales, marketing, and data analytics. He holds an MBA, a Bachelor of Science in Business Administration, and a data analytics certification. His work focuses on breaking scientific developments, with an emphasis on emerging biology, cognitive neuroscience, and archaeological discoveries.

For about twenty years now, biologists have known that a small number of specific proteins can take a fully-developed adult cell — a skin cell, a kidney cell, a fully-specialized worker bee of a cell that has spent its working life doing one specific job — and send it backward in developmental time, all the way back to the embryonic state from which it originally came. The phenomenon is real, repeatable, and won Shinya Yamanaka of Kyoto University the 2012 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for the discovery. The four proteins involved — known thereafter as the Yamanaka factors — function in the lab as a kind of factory-reset button for any vertebrate cell, capable of stripping away decades of acquired identity and aging signatures and returning the cell to a younger, more flexible state. The procedure works on cells in petri dishes. It works on mice. It works on non-human primates. What no one had yet attempted, until January 2026, was to apply it to a living human being.

According to MIT Technology Review’s coverage of the announcement, the FDA in January 2026 granted Investigational New Drug clearance to Life Biosciences, a Boston-based biotech founded on the research of Harvard Medical School professor David Sinclair, to begin a Phase 1 clinical trial of an experimental therapy called ER-100. The trial will enrol patients with two age-related forms of optic nerve damage — glaucoma and non-arteritic anterior ischemic optic neuropathy (NAION) — and will deliver, via injection into the eye, a modified adeno-associated virus carrying the genes for three of the four Yamanaka factors. The genes will remain inactive in the patient’s cells until the patient takes an oral dose of doxycycline, which switches them on. Once activated, the proteins are expected to partially reset the epigenetic markers of the patient’s optic nerve cells, restoring them to a younger configuration without erasing the underlying identity that makes them optic nerve cells in the first place. If it works, the patients should regain at least some of the vision they have lost. If it works well, it will demonstrate something more substantial: that cellular aging in living humans is, in principle, reversible.

What partial reprogramming actually is

The original Yamanaka procedure used four transcription factors — OCT-4, SOX-2, KLF-4, and c-Myc — to convert adult cells into induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs), which behave essentially like embryonic stem cells and can develop into any tissue type. The conversion is complete: an adult skin cell, after exposure to all four factors, loses its identity as a skin cell and becomes a generic precursor cell that could, in principle, develop into any other cell type in the body. This is what stem-cell biologists call “full reprogramming.” It is extraordinarily useful in the laboratory, where iPSCs can be grown into any tissue of interest for research or transplantation. It is also extraordinarily dangerous in a living body. When all four Yamanaka factors are activated in adult mice, the animals develop teratomas — chaotic tumours containing hair, bone, muscle, and other tissue types — within weeks. The cells lose their identity. The body cannot tolerate it.

The advance that made human trials conceivable was the development of what is called “partial” or “transient” reprogramming. Per Scientific American’s coverage of the underlying science, partial reprogramming limits the exposure to the Yamanaka factors — either by using only a subset of them, or by switching them on for short periods rather than continuously, or both. The goal is to reset the cell’s epigenetic age markers — the chemical tags on its DNA that accumulate with age and govern which genes are switched on or off — without erasing the cell’s underlying identity as a specific type of cell. As reported in BBC Science Focus’s coverage of the broader field, Life Biosciences CEO Jerry McLaughlin describes the company’s approach as operating “in a space called partial epigenetic reprogramming,” in which the chemical tags that control which genes are active and which are silent are selectively rewritten without resetting the cell’s whole identity. A 2020 paper in Nature by Yuancheng Lu, then a graduate student in David Sinclair’s lab, demonstrated this principle in mice by using just three of the four factors (OCT-4, SOX-2, and KLF-4 — excluding c-Myc, which is the one most strongly associated with cancer). The treated mice, whose optic nerves had been deliberately damaged, recovered substantial visual function. Their optic nerve cells had been partially reset to a younger state without losing their identity as optic nerve cells.

Why the eye

The choice of optic nerve disease for the first human trial was deliberate and reflects a careful series of safety calculations. The eye is one of the few organs in the human body that can be treated with a localised injection without the therapy spreading to other tissues. The interior of the eye is partially walled off from the general bloodstream by the blood-retinal barrier, which means that the modified virus carrying the three Yamanaka factor genes stays largely confined to the area where it is injected. If something goes wrong — if cells start dividing inappropriately or losing their identity — the consequences are limited to the eye rather than spreading through the body. Vision loss, while serious for the affected patient, is not life-threatening in the way that systemic effects elsewhere in the body could be.

The eye also provides a clear, measurable endpoint. Vision can be quantified objectively — visual acuity, contrast sensitivity, visual field, optic nerve thickness — in ways that “biological aging” more broadly cannot. If ER-100 restores vision in the trial patients, the result will be unambiguous. If it does not, the result will also be unambiguous. The Phase 1 study is primarily focused on safety and tolerability, which is standard for first-in-human trials of novel gene therapies, but the visual outcomes will provide an early signal of whether the underlying biological premise — that partial epigenetic reprogramming can restore function to aged tissue — translates from mice and monkeys to human beings.

The control mechanism

One of the technical features distinguishing ER-100 from earlier attempts at cellular reprogramming is the use of a doxycycline-inducible switch. The genes carried by the viral vector are placed under the control of a regulatory sequence that responds to doxycycline, a common oral antibiotic. In the absence of doxycycline, the genes remain inactive. When the patient takes a dose of doxycycline, the genes switch on for a limited window of time. When the doxycycline clears the patient’s system, the genes switch off again. The mechanism provides a level of control that earlier cellular reprogramming approaches lacked — if the treatment produces concerning effects, the patient simply stops taking doxycycline, and the activated cellular reprogramming should cease.

The combination of three safety features — local delivery to the eye, exclusion of the most dangerous Yamanaka factor (c-Myc), and the doxycycline-inducible on/off switch — is what convinced the FDA that ER-100 was safe enough to test in humans. As reported in Nature Biotechnology’s coverage of the FDA approval, Life Biosciences’ preclinical work in non-human primates showed that the therapy was well tolerated with no systemic toxicities. Whether the same will be true in human patients, with their longer lifespans and more complex disease backgrounds, is a question the Phase 1 trial is designed to answer.

What this is and what it is not

What ER-100 is not: a proven anti-aging therapy. The Phase 1 trial will involve approximately a dozen patients, will run for one to two years, and is primarily designed to detect safety problems rather than to demonstrate effectiveness. Even if the trial succeeds completely, it will only establish that partial epigenetic reprogramming is safe enough to test in larger Phase 2 and Phase 3 trials, which would themselves take additional years to complete. The pathway from “first human trial” to “approved therapy for general use” typically runs 8 to 12 years for novel drug classes. The trial does not establish that humans can live longer. It does not establish that cellular aging can be reversed in tissues outside the eye. It does not establish that ER-100 will become a routine medical treatment for anything.

What ER-100 is: the first formal attempt, in any human being, to test whether the molecular machinery of cellular reprogramming can be safely applied to living people. The trial follows two decades of laboratory work — Yamanaka’s original 2006 discovery, the subsequent demonstrations in mice and non-human primates, the development of partial reprogramming techniques, the engineering of the doxycycline-inducible viral vector — and it represents the moment at which the underlying science crosses from animal models into human medicine. Several other companies are working on similar approaches; Altos Labs, backed by Jeff Bezos, and Retro Biosciences, backed by Sam Altman, are among the better-known competitors. The Life Biosciences trial is simply the first one to clear the FDA. The next several years will determine whether cellular reprogramming becomes a new category of medicine or remains a laboratory curiosity. The answer will not come immediately, but the experiment is now finally underway in the species the experiment was always ultimately about.

The post The first human trial of a therapy designed to partially reset the biological age of human cells was approved in January 2026 — using molecular switches that scientists have already shown can reverse the aging of cells in the laboratory — meaning humanity has, for the first time, formally entered the era of testing whether cellular aging can be reversed in living people. appeared first on Space Daily.