JCMT0402-0424, a dusty starburst galaxy around 11 billion light-years away, is the strongest candidate yet for the source of the high-energy neutrino event IC 210922A, according to a team of astronomer led by Yuji Urata of MITOS Science Co.
The post Astronomers Trace Elusive High-Energy Neutrino to Star-Forming Galaxy in Early Universe appeared first on Sci.News: Breaking Science News.
An Ariane 6 with upgraded solid rocket boosters successfully launched three dozen Amazon Leo satellites June 17 as ESA weighs options for increasing the vehicle’s launch rate.
The post Upgraded Ariane 6 launches Amazon Leo satellites appeared first on SpaceNews.
Using NASA’s Goldstone Solar System Radar and NSF’s Green Bank Telescope, astronomers from the University of California, Los Angeles, confirmed that the icy surface of Jupiter’s moon Europa scatters radio energy in an unusually strong and complex way not seen on rocky worlds.
The post Radar Observations Reveal New Clues about Europa’s Hidden Interior appeared first on Sci.News: Breaking Science News.
In a groundbreaking series of experiments conducted by researchers at the University of Jena, scientists have revisited and expanded upon a century-old discovery that shapes our understanding of embryonic development. Originally unearthed by Hans Spemann and his student Hilde Mangold in 1924, the concept of the “organiser” is a pivotal developmental mechanism that directs the formation of body axes during the early stages of an embryo’s growth. Spemann and Mangold’s pioneering work involved tissue transplantation between amphibian embryos, revealing the presence of a group of cells within the blastopore that orchestrate the development of a secondary body axis. This discovery earned Spemann a Nobel Prize in 1935 but tragically Mangold passed away young, never witnessing the lasting impact of their findings.
The new research from Jena not only reaffirms these foundational insights but extends them dramatically into the early evolutionary origins of metazoans. Using delicate microsurgical manipulation, the team studied the ribbed comb jelly Mnemiopsis leidyi, a member of the ancient phylum Ctenophora. This lineage diverged from that of other animals approximately 700 million years ago, according to the latest evolutionary models. By transplanting small portions of blastoporal tissue from one comb jelly embryo into another, Jena researchers induced a secondary body axis, effectively recapitulating Spemann and Mangold’s classic findings but now in one of the earliest-diverging animal lineages. The experiment demonstrated that the organiser’s developmental blueprint is deeply conserved across vast evolutionary time frames.
What makes these experiments particularly astounding is the technical difficulty involved. Comb jelly embryos measure only about 120 micrometers in diameter—just a fraction larger than the width of a human hair—while the transplanted tissue samples were barely 20 micrometers in size. Dr. Stanislav Kremnyov, the lead experimentalist, had to master an extraordinary level of manual dexterity to integrate these tiny groups of cells into host embryos without triggering rejection or other developmental derailments. To an outside observer, it appeared as if the researchers were “dissecting clouds,” a vivid metaphor used by Prof. Andreas Hejnol, who leads the research team at Jena.
The functional transplantation of organising tissue between individuals of the same species was spectacular enough. Yet the Jena team dared to push further by performing xenotransplantations, transferring organiser tissue across animal orders into the sea anemone, a cnidarian species that diverged from ctenophores roughly 60 million years later. Remarkably, the transplanted organiser tissue also initiated axis formation in the sea anemone embryos. This unprecedented success underscores the extraordinary evolutionary conservation of developmental mechanisms underpinning animal body plans. Xenotransplantation of organiser tissues across distinct phyla had never before been demonstrated, marking this as a historic advance in developmental biology.
Beyond the cellular choreography, the study also zeroed in on genetic underpinnings. The team identified, for the first time, the specific gene responsible for organiser formation in the sea anemone, bridging molecular mechanisms across species boundaries. This gene appears to regulate the signalling networks critical to early embryonic axis determination, providing a molecular anchor to the organiser’s functional role. Such findings hint that the genetic toolkit necessary for complex body plan organisation was already present in the earliest multicellular ancestors of modern animals.
These discoveries overturn previous assumptions that organiser-driven axis formation was a feature exclusive to more recently evolved animal groups such as bilaterians. Instead, the findings position the organiser as a primordial control system in multicellular organism development, dating back to the dawn of animal evolution itself. It suggests a remarkable evolutionary continuity where the fundamental blueprints for constructing the three-dimensional architecture of multicellular animals remained largely stable across hundreds of millions of years.
The implications of this research extend far beyond ctenophores and sea anemones. Since the organiser guides the spatial coordination of cell fate during development, understanding its origins and conservation sheds light on the evolutionary emergence of animal diversity and complexity. It also offers potential new perspectives for biomedical research, particularly in regenerative medicine and congenital defect studies, where guiding axis formation and tissue patterning is critical.
Technical mastery was central to these findings. The researchers employed advanced microscopy and vital cell staining techniques allowing them to trace transplanted cells dynamically within host embryos. Coupling this with precise microsurgical transplantation provided not only functional but also visual confirmation of organiser activity. This combination of cutting-edge experimental methods enabled insights previously thought unattainable in such fragile and inaccessible embryonic systems.
Prof. Andreas Hejnol reflects on the evolutionary significance with enthusiasm: “Our data demonstrate that this organizer mechanism coordinates the entire body axis and is conserved among one of the earliest-diverging animal lineages, suggesting that complex body plan organisation arose very early in metazoan evolution.” His team’s work bridges developmental biology with evolutionary biology, providing a vivid example of how ancient developmental principles underpin the incredible diversity of life forms on Earth today.
This research, published in the prestigious journal Nature, represents a milestone in understanding early animal evolution and embryogenesis. It dramatically shifts the paradigm surrounding the origins of the organiser and prompts reconsideration of the molecular and cellular processes foundational to animal multicellularity. As scientists continue to explore these ancient mechanisms, further revelations about the building blocks of life’s complexity are eagerly anticipated.
Subject of Research: Animals
Article Title: A blastoporal organiser in a ctenophore
News Publication Date: 17-Jun-2026
Web References: http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41586-026-10643-z
Image Credits: Lisa-Marie Barf
Keywords: embryonic development, organiser, blastopore, ctenophore, Mnemiopsis leidyi, evolutionary biology, axis formation, multicellularity, xenotransplantation, sea anemone, cnidaria, developmental genetics
One of the most hotly anticipated electric vehicles makes its formal debut next week. It's the Blank Slate, a refreshingly simple pickup truck EV designed by Slate Auto, which is trying to take some of the soaring cost out of a new car with a back-to-basics approach that means even electric windows are an optional extra. Of course, a crucial aspect of this pared-back approach is pricing.
Plenty of people are attracted to the idea of a truck with a compact footprint, no infotainment system or embedded modem, and the option to upconvert it later into an SUV or fastback. In the abstract, at least, people aren't going to jump at the prospect of a truck with 150 miles (241 km) of range if it costs too much.
When Slate broke cover in 2025, it was targeting a price of around $20,000, assuming the $7,500 IRS clean vehicle tax credit would remain in effect, but it was abolished later that year.
© Slate Auto
Pedro Rocha avalia as várias abordagens das empresas na procura de um modelo de IA, assumindo que não há soluções perfeitas e que o futuro passa por uma stack, com ecossistemas modulares.
The post Um modelo não vos vai salvar: como se constrói realmente uma stack de IA appeared first on Tek Notícias.
Um robot-bicicleta desenvolvido por um estudante de doutoramento do Instituto de Tecnologia de Georgia, nos Estados Unidos, conseguiu realizar uma manobra acrobática de grande relevo e, agora, é uma "celebridade" na comunidade robótica.
The post Robot surpreende com salto mortal (sem precisar de ajuda) e torna-se uma estrela das demonstrações robóticas appeared first on Tek Notícias.
An ancient Maya settlement, lost to the forest for centuries, was unexpectedly discovered by a Ph.D. student who fell down an internet rabbit hole.
Tulane University Ph.D. candidate Luke Auld-Thomas was more than a dozen pages into Google search results when he came across a laser survey conducted in Mexico by CartoData for environmental monitoring purposes.
Published in the journal Antiquity, Auld-Thomas and his colleagues reported the discovery of an ancient Maya site hidden within neglected LiDAR data, buried at the bottom of a Google search query.
While advances in remote sensing technology have transformed archaeology over the last two decades, Maya archaeology is often imagined as the result of laborious expeditions through dense jungle terrain in search of long-lost ruins. Instead, Auld-Thomas made a major discovery from the comfort of home.
LiDAR creates a 3D map by firing laser pulses at a landscape from above using drones, aircraft, or other aerial platforms. In this case, the original survey data showed only a dense forest canopy, making the site indistinguishable from the surrounding terrain. However, once that upper layer was digitally removed, a sophisticated settlement came into view.
Located in Mexico’s southeastern state of Campeche, the lost city contains plazas, causeways, ball courts, and pyramids that had remained unseen for centuries. Although the LiDAR operators were focused on environmental monitoring and did not investigate the data at this level, Auld-Thomas and a colleague recognized the archaeological significance of what they were seeing and identified the site, naming it Valeriana.
During their classic period, between 250 and 900 AD, the Maya developed the rugged Campeche landscape into complex urban environments.
The city of Valeriana, which the team found in the data, turned out to be the second-largest Maya site in North America, eclipsing Calakmul, some 100 kilometers distant. According to the researchers’ estimate, 30,000 to 50,000 people resided in the city between 750 and 850 AD, and it possibly served as a regional capital.
The site’s tropical setting has been a subject of debate among archaeologists, who question whether the population density of typical tropical settlements is skewed by the overrepresentation of large, dense settlements in the data. The team’s discovery of a dense and sophisticated urban environment comprised of nearly 7,000 buildings suggests that such dense sites are not unusual.
While the site contains many features typical of Maya cities, one unusual element particularly intrigued the researchers, consisting a sinkhole leading to a partially collapsed cave system, surrounded by a narrow quatrefoil-shaped ditch—a form frequently used in Mesoamerican art to symbolize caves and sinkholes.
Because the feature lacks substantial embankments and is relatively small in scale, the team does not believe it served a defensive purpose. However, its unusual design may warrant further investigation.
Remote-sensing technologies such as LiDAR have transformed archaeology in recent decades, allowing researchers to identify hidden sites across vast and inaccessible landscapes without setting foot on the ground.
In 2013, LiDAR surveys revealed extensive urban networks surrounding Cambodia’s Angkor region, once the heart of the Khmer Empire. Researchers later used the technology to digitally strip away the Guatemalan rainforest canopy, uncovering more than 60,000 previously unknown structures. Using traditional survey methods, discoveries on that scale would likely have taken generations to achieve.
Remarkably, Valeriana itself has yet to be surveyed in person. At present, LiDAR imagery remains the only detailed view of the site. The researchers note that field investigations in Mesoamerica rarely result in fewer structures being identified than LiDAR suggests. In many cases, apparent false positives are offset by previously overlooked features discovered during ground surveys.
For now, Valeriana remains concealed beneath the forest canopy much as it has been for centuries. The researchers hope these remote sensing technologies will reveal more such hidden sites in the coming decades; if funding is sufficient to cover more area with drone-based LiDAR systems, they are almost certain that more discoveries similar to Valeriana could await discovery.
The paper, “Running Out of Empty Space: Environmental Lidar and the Crowded Ancient Landscape of Campeche, Mexico,” appeared in Antiquity on October 29, 2024.
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.
Há novas burlas a circular em Portugal, com alertas deixados pelo Portal da Queixa, assim como pelo Ministério Público. Os esquemas fraudulentos, que incluem táticas de phishing e engenharia social, fazem-se passar pelo Ministério da Saúde e por instituições bancárias.
The post Há novas burlas a circular em Portugal. Esquemas imitam Ministério da Saúde e bancos para roubar dinheiro appeared first on Tek Notícias.
In an ambitious collaboration bridging continents and disciplines, researchers from the University of Vienna and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory have revisited one of astrophysics’ most enigmatic phenomena—the Galactic Center Excess (GCE). For over a decade, the GCE, a subtle yet pervasive gamma-ray glow enveloping the Milky Way’s core, has stimulated intense debate and exploration within the scientific community. This new study, leveraging cutting-edge machine learning methodologies, offers fresh perspectives that reinvigorate the dark matter hypothesis as a viable explanation for the GCE, a prospect previously challenged by conventional analyses.
The Galactic Center Excess presents itself as a roughly spherical halo of gamma-ray emission, extending over thousands of light years around our galaxy’s nucleus. This faint glow eludes straightforward interpretation, primarily due to the complexities of the astronomical environment it inhabits. The region is not only densely packed with astrophysical sources but also exhibits extraordinarily bright and intricately structured gamma-ray emissions, complicating efforts to disentangle the origins of the GCE signal.
Before this study, two primary interpretations vied for dominance in explaining the GCE. One posited that the excess emanates from annihilations of dark matter particles, hypothetical constituents of the universe that interact weakly with ordinary matter and light. Dark matter, while composing approximately 85% of the universe’s matter content, remains elusive, and detecting its indirect signatures through gamma-ray emissions has been a tantalizing goal. The second hypothesis attributes the gamma-ray glow to a population of millisecond pulsars—rapidly rotating neutron stars known for their intense electromagnetic emissions. These pulsars, if sufficiently numerous and faint, could collectively mimic the characteristics of the observed GCE.
However, the astrophysical scenario faced a significant analytical hurdle. Earlier statistical approaches, while sophisticated, did not fully incorporate a vital dimension of the observed data: the energy spectrum of individual gamma-ray photons. Prior analyses predominantly focused on spatial distribution patterns, searching for point sources that could represent pulsars or diffuse emissions consistent with dark matter annihilation. Without the spectral dimension, conclusions remained inconclusive, often biased toward interpretations favoring bright unresolved sources.
The breakthrough in this new research is the implementation of an advanced machine-learning framework that simultaneously evaluates the spatial location and energy distribution of gamma-ray photons captured by telescopes. Training this model required generating over a million simulated gamma-ray skies, replicating a diverse range of scenarios that include both dark matter and pulsar contributions. By synthesizing these rich datasets, the model attains unprecedented sensitivity and discrimination power, uniquely capable of parsing subtle differences in the gamma-ray energy patterns correlated with different source populations.
The enriched analysis dramatically alters the interpretation landscape. The findings demonstrate that the putative point sources—if responsible for the GCE—would need to be extraordinarily faint, to the point where their individual characteristics blur into a diffuse glow nearly indistinguishable from what dark matter annihilation models predict. This faintness requirement for pulsars implies an astronomical population count exceeding 35,000 millisecond pulsars in the central Milky Way region. Such a number challenges existing astrophysical models and contrasts with previous studies that suggested only a few hundred to a few thousand such sources would suffice to explain the gamma-ray excess.
This new quantitative insight reopens the door for dark matter as a plausible explanation. While previous evidence tended to discount dark matter in favor of point sources, the subtlety revealed by including photon energy analysis counters these assertions. It underscores the present limitations in conclusively resolving the GCE’s origin, emphasizing that the dark matter scenario remains firmly on the table alongside pulsar hypotheses.
The difficulty in resolving the GCE nature also reflects broader challenges in high-energy astrophysics—particularly in crowded celestial environments like our galaxy’s core, where overlapping emissions from stars, supernova remnants, and other celestial objects confound the interpretation of indirect dark matter signals. Machine learning, as applied here, represents a transformative tool, capable of synthesizing immense, multidimensional datasets to disentangle complex astrophysical phenomena.
Scientists caution that these findings do not constitute direct evidence for dark matter annihilation; instead, they highlight the incomplete nature of current data interpretations. The inability to definitively favor pulsars over dark matter annihilation underscores the need for next-generation gamma-ray observatories and continued advances in modeling techniques that can incorporate even more nuanced data features, such as temporal variability and polarization signatures.
This research embodies the synergy between theoretical physics, computational innovation, and observational astrophysics, demonstrating how modern data-driven approaches can revitalize longstanding scientific debates. As gamma-ray detection technologies evolve and more data become available, the methodology pioneered here promises further refinement, potentially leading to breakthroughs in identifying signals from the elusive dark sector of the universe.
The Galactic Center Excess remains one of the most compelling mysteries in contemporary astrophysics, symbolizing the frontier where known astrophysical processes intersect with profound questions about the fundamental composition of the universe. Whether future research will tilt the scales decisively in favor of dark matter or pulsars, this study exemplifies the power of interdisciplinary collaboration and sophisticated computational methods to deepen our cosmic understanding.
Moreover, the implications extend beyond academic curiosity. Deciphering the GCE carries the promise of shedding light on the nature of dark matter, a cornerstone of cosmological structure formation and evolution. Success in this endeavor could unveil new physics beyond the Standard Model, revolutionizing our conception of the universe’s fabric and the forces that govern it at the most fundamental level.
As researchers continue to probe the galactic center’s gamma-ray glow, the intellectual journey itself enriches science, reflecting a profound human drive to illuminate the obscure workings of the cosmos. This study marks a significant stride in that journey, blending technology, theory, and observation to navigate a complex astrophysical puzzle whose solution may redefine our place in the universe.
Subject of Research: The Galactic Center Excess in gamma-ray observations and its implications for dark matter and millisecond pulsar populations.
Article Title: Energy Distribution of the Galactic Center Excess’s Sources
News Publication Date: 12-Jun-2026
Web References:
DOI link
Galactic Center Excess, gamma rays, Milky Way, dark matter, millisecond pulsars, machine learning, astrophysics, high-energy astrophysics, neutron stars, indirect dark matter detection, gamma-ray astronomy, astrophysical sources
Um novo inquérito da Comissão Europeia, divulgado nesta terça-feira, traça um retrato detalhado da relação dos adolescentes europeus com os ecrãs e as redes sociais. Os dados do Eurobarómetro revelam que Portugal está entre os países com mais horas de exposição.
The post Adolescentes portugueses passam mais de 6 horas por dia em frente a ecrãs durante o fim de semana appeared first on Tek Notícias.
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