When a team of physicists in Paris fabricated the world’s first temporal photonic crystal, they added a new dimension to humanity’s quest to control light: time. From lighting our homes to advanced fiber optics and lasers, humans have long worked to control light, and now researchers say that can be achieved in a fourth dimension.

Yannis Laplace led the team at the Laboratory of Irradiated Solids (LSI) in demonstrating the temporal photonic crystal, with the help of other European institutions, which was revealed in a recent paper published in Nature.

As light hits the crystal, a terahertz electromagnetic wave rapidly modulates its optical properties, producing a device that controls light over time without expending energy.

Crystal Power

Controlling the properties of light for applications in telecommunications, sensors, and light sources is an active research field and is often reliant on crystals. In technical terms, a crystal is simply a regularly and periodically organized system. While we primarily think of translucent, shining crystals, they can be constructed of other forms of matter, such as gas or liquids, so long as their atoms arrange into regular, well-defined intervals.

How atoms arrange to form crystals grants their electrons and the photons they emit unique properties, including color and energy. Targeting photons specifically became an interest of scientists in the 1980s, with the development of photonic crystals, whose alternating materials each had unique effects on photons. These photonics gave rise to modern lasers, optical fibers, and photodetectors, technologies that have advanced considerably in recent decades.

Into the Time Dimension

In the last decade, researchers have experimented with a new kind of crystal: the time crystal. They are comprised of a unique form of matter in which particles repeat a continuous sequence—not just in the three physical dimensions, but also in time, without expending any energy.

The LSI team sought to combine photonic crystals with time crystals to develop a temporal photonic crystal that would control a light-matter interaction by alternating over time. Their work represents the first time such an idea has moved from the theoretical realm into the physical.

The device the researchers constructed operates in the high terahertz range, pushing light to oscillate 1000 billion times a second. It consists of micrometer-scale gold structures, shaped like battlements, leaving open cavities separated from an indium-antimony semiconductor by an insulating layer. The cavities between the gold structures trap light photons.

Testing a Temporal Photonic Crystal

To demonstrate their device in the real world, the LSI team bombarded it with terahertz laser pulses and recorded the material’s optical properties, modulating light over time. The effect was incredibly powerful, creating a strong modulation that alternated one billionth of a billionth of a second.

At the semiconductor layer, the researchers observed electrons forming from the light waves in what are called “surface plasmons,” oscillating with their effective mass. The greater their speed, the heavier these electrons become, producing the device’s optical modulations.

Beyond this observed phenomenon, the researchers suspect other interesting conditions may be occurring within the crystal. Some indirect evidence suggests that photons trapped inside the structure are amplified, although presently no direct observations have confirmed this. The team is continuing with experiments in hopes of eventually capturing this photon trapping phenomenon.

Laplace and his colleagues see these unique time crystals as eventually being a pathway toward the creation of terahertz-scale light sources and detectors, which would fit between those of electronics and visible light frequencies.

The paper, “Plasmonic Metamaterial Time Crystal,” appeared in Nature on July 29, 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.

As new observations reveal the outer edges of IC 1101 for the first time, scientists have confirmed it is the largest known galaxy. The galaxy’s statistics are staggering, containing an estimated 3.4 trillion solar masses of stars and spanning roughly 1.7 million light-years, eclipsing every other known galaxy.

IC 1101 belongs to a class known as brightest cluster galaxies (BCGs), which form as massive galaxies spend billions of years absorbing smaller neighboring galaxies.

The new images are the deepest ever taken of the galaxy, and were revealed in a recent paper accepted for publication in a future issue of Astronomy and Astrophysics, but available now in preprint form on the arXiv server.

Blending into the Cosmic Background

Despite their enormous sizes, BCGs are notoriously difficult for astronomers to study. Because they are built through the gradual merger of many smaller galaxies, their outer regions are extremely faint, containing diffuse stellar halos and tidal tails left behind by ancient collisions. These wispy edges often blend into the free-floating gas and stars that fill galaxy clusters, making it difficult to determine precisely where the galaxy ends and the surrounding cluster begins.

Carlos Marrero-de la Rosa of the Astrophysical Institute of the Canary Islands led the new study, focusing on IC 1101, the dominant galaxy at the center of the Abell 2029 galaxy cluster.

The research relied on ultra-deep images captured with the Wide Field Camera at the Isaac Newton Telescope, allowing astronomers to resolve the galaxy’s diffuse outer boundary in unprecedented detail.

Battling Light Pollution

With the number of satellites orbiting Earth increasing dramatically in recent years, astronomers have raised concerns about artificial light pollution. In this case, however, the researchers faced interference from a far more distant source: foreground stars within our own galaxy.

These stars, located between Earth and IC 1101, scatter light across telescope images, washing out the extremely faint structures astronomers are attempting to detect. Since the galaxy’s outermost regions are already difficult to distinguish, any additional scattered light significantly reduces image contrast.

To overcome this problem, the researchers constructed a detailed model of how the telescope spreads light using dozens of calibration stars. The model allowed the team to accurately subtract scattered light from more than 250 foreground stars, bringing IC 1101’s faintest structures into much sharper contrast and enabling a more precise measurement of its true extent.

The Largest Known Galaxy

IC 1101’s immense scale becomes even more striking when compared with our own Milky Way. The astronomers measured IC 1101 at roughly 520 kiloparsecs across—about 17 times wider than the Milky Way’s approximately 30-kiloparsec diameter. Even after accounting for all forms of mass, including elusive dark matter, scientists estimate that the Milky Way contains only about 1 to 1.5 trillion solar masses of material, compared with the 3.4 trillion solar masses contained in the stars of IC 1101 alone.

Researchers also found evidence that the giant galaxy continues to grow. They identified eight structures beyond its main edge, two of which align with previously observed X-ray disturbances that suggest ongoing accretion. According to the team, IC 1101 likely collided with another galaxy group between two and three billion years ago, producing a merger that continues to shape the galaxy today.

The paper, “How Large Can Galaxies Be? Ultra-Deep Imaging of IC 1101, the Most Extended Known Galaxy,” is available on arXiv, ahead of later publication in Astronomy and Astrophysics.

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.

A teleoperated centaur robot dubbed “Threehalves” could represent the future of manual work in some of our planet’s most dangerous environments, according to Satyress Robotics, the California startup behind the project. In disasters such as mudslides, wildfires, and rubble searches, the company says its robot can keep workers safe from on-site hazards.

The other side of the story is the robot’s creepy, almost demonic appearance, as conveyed on the provocative Satyress Robotics website, the imagery for which is so unusual that it almost gives the impression of being a parody—particularly in an age of breathless reporting on corporate claims, and sudden appearances of “viral” news stories.

Therefore, The Debrief decided to take a deeper look at this mechanical oddity that more closely resembles something out of Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey than a project in development in a California robotics lab.

An Unsettling Robot

Threehalves isn’t exactly news; all of the available information on the robot was posted on the company website over a year ago, around the time of their only post on X. Yet it’s recently been discovered by internet outlets noting the creepy design of this robot that the company claims is here to help.

“It’s obviously quite over the top, but ultimately, this is at the extreme end of humanoid robotics in size and capability,” a company representative told The Debrief.

“People may be familiar with humanoid robots from TV/movies or product videos, but likely don’t understand just how powerful and heavy they are (especially ours, which is coming in at just under 7ft tall and 240 lbs currently),” the rep added. “Our thought is someone who didn’t know what it is should definitely stay away from it, and those that do know or are operating the machine should be reminded it’s quite dangerous.” 

“If you look at something like a lathe or mill, they generally look intimidating, for good reason, even though they could be dressed up to look friendly and soft,” the rep concluded. “We’ll point out, though, that the ‘evil’ look is mostly from it being pitch black; with different colors or a wrap on it, it does not put off that vibe.”

Robot “Superpowers”

Part of Threehalves’ sales pitch is that it won’t replace jobs, but instead will merely transfer them to robotic operators using a joystick to guide Threehalves through manual work in dangerous environments. The website claims that this amounts to granting workers “superpowers,” allowing them to focus on honing their craft in new extreme situations. However, while the operator won’t have to directly get their hands dirty, Satyress Robotics told The Debrief that Threehalves is designed for line-of-sight, close-proximity operation.

“We don’t have any plans to develop much autonomy above what’s needed to keep the robot from damaging itself,” the Satyress Robotics representative said. “Our goal is to have experienced trade experts in control of the bots at all times. Forestry, for instance, is the deadliest job in the US – our goal is to save lives first and foremost, and we believe that is also enough economically to justify the cost of the bot without any autonomous productivity gain.”

Two of the robots can fit in a standard truck bed, allowing them to be easily transported to remote locations. Lacking hands, the robot can be fitted with a variety of unique attachments to hold various tools from chainsaws to drills. Of note, the robot is shown holding a gas-powered chainsaw. Exactly how it would manage to get the chainsaw started without an obvious way to pull the ripcord is unclear.

Safety First

With fears of a demonic Terminator immediately conjured up by Threehalves’ appearance, the company informs us that although “this robot is more dangerous than it looks,” the same is true of any humanoid robot, and this one comes equipped with a variety of safety features.

Ironically, one of these is the robot’s menacing horns, which significantly slow the robot down in moving through standard-size door frames, and can even be replaced with larger horns that make traversing such portals impossible.

“It’s another way to make it clear this isn’t a toy, [a] security guard, etc,” the Satyress Robotics representative said. “It’s built for one reason, for a teleoperator to do dangerous work or heavy lifting from a safe, in line of sight distance.”

“We are not looking at any use cases in commercial buildings, and certainly not residential,” they added.

A Violent Stop

Additionally, air reservoirs in the chest cavity and on the robot’s back are designed to activate pin locks on all its joints, rendering the robot immobile if air pressure is lost. Imagery on the website suggests this can seemingly be accomplished by stabbing Threehalves with a knife or shooting it with a gun. Fortunately, a more pacifist option to halt the robot also exists: simply by hitting an e-stop button located on its stomach.

When pressed on why the company would design their robot to be susceptible to gunfire specifically, the representative didn’t seem to find this the least bit unusual.

“Nothing software wise/control wise, whether autonomous or teleoperated, can be guaranteed to never have any kind of control issue,” the Satyress Robotics representative said. “This gives a means to lock the brakes remotely without necessarily damaging the robot beyond repair.”

Robot Reality or Hoax?

With the unsettling design and suggestion that the robot may eventually have to be shot to stop it from injuring a human, one of this reporter’s main questions became: “Is this a joke?” The outlandish nature of the project reminds one of prankster Joey Skaggs’ tricks on the media, such as the time he convinced WNBC-TV in New York and United Press International that he had recently developed a cure-all derived from roach hormones, which he was injecting into his followers.

However, the Satyress Robotics representative confirmed that the company’s new quadrupedal working robot is no joke.

“It’s not a prank. Also, we’re building it with the goal of keeping workers safe, so we just want to make it clear we’re thinking of every edge case and looking for ways to solve them outside of software,” the representative explained. “We are quite a ways away from showing the robot in any kind of elegant motion, thus the static renders/photos.”

Given that the company hasn’t posted on social media in over a year and has no LinkedIn presence, it was unclear who was behind the operation and if it was still underway. According to the company, they will shortly be making a video to introduce themselves.

While one picture on the website appears to show a live test with a joystick, there are no videos of Threehalves in motion on the website, and our email conversation confirmed it is not yet a functional robot.

For now, the company tells The Debrief that they are currently working on component-level testing and any commercial version of the Threehalves is more than two years away.

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.

Chinese researchers are using laser technology to vastly extend the flight time of drones, marking a significant shift in UAV capabilities.

The achievement was reported by researchers from China’s Civil Aviation University, who reported their findings in laser-based drone charging technology in a recent article published in Matter & Light.

The new drone concept utilizes a lightweight receiver, repurposing solar cell technology to absorb laser light and convert it into electricity to power a device.

Endless Drones

“Imagine a future where drones inspecting forests, monitoring disasters, or delivering packages no longer need to land frequently to replace batteries,” said senior author Jianhua Han of Civil Aviation University of China. “As drones take on longer missions, battery life has become one of the biggest barriers.”

At the core of the breakthrough is perovskite, a class of synthetic compounds with a crystalline structure highly conducive to solar power applications. The team developed a perovskite laser cell-thermoelectric (PLC-TE) tandem device that optimizes a solar cell to accept laser energy.

The cell’s perovskite converts laser energy into electricity, which can be a messy process, as some of the power is lost as heat. The thermoelectric layer addresses this problem by capturing heat and converting it into electricity via the temperature differential between its warmer, laser-facing side and its cooler side. However, that contrast requirement can be an issue when the laser uniformly heats the entire drone, reducing the efficiency of that heat-to-energy conversion.

Managing Overheating

“When we tested the device under a high-power laser, the thermal camera showed temperatures of 80 to 90 degrees Celsius,” Han said. “That was much higher than we expected and made us realize that heat buildup was a far more serious problem than we had imagined.”

To mitigate overheating concerns, the receiver was mounted on the drone’s wings, kept separate from other components, and paired with heat-blocking technology to enable laser-to-electric energy conversion without overheating sensitive electronics.

This heat-blocking technology included nanocrystals embedded in the PLC-TE tandem device, which acted as a thermal barrier due to their poor thermal conductivity. With the nanocrystals in place, the researchers tested the conversion device on its own and observed a significant slowdown in heat flow during prolonged laser exposure, which would cool the drone overall.

This PLC-TE device was bombarded with a green laser in a laboratory experiment and converted 38.49% of the beam’s energy into electricity, a high percentage compared to other wireless charging systems in similar scenarios.

Drone Tests

Next, the team integrated the energy conversion system onto a stationary lab drone and also added airflow channels to the wings. In subsequent laboratory tests, laser bombardment supplied sufficient energy to power the drone’s propeller, while the airflow channels effectively cooled the thermoelectric layer’s cold side, maximizing heat-to-electricity conversion.

“Previous studies largely focused on the materials or the device itself,” Han explained. “We wanted to think beyond the laboratory, to how the system could actually be integrated into an aircraft, cooled during operation, and made compatible with flight. It isn’t just a materials science problem; it’s an engineering one.”

Work continues on this wireless drone charging system, with outdoor flight tests on a lightweight frame scheduled. These will be paying particular attention to the system’s reliability under real-world outdoor conditions. However, the team notes that energy conversion efficiency will not be their sole research area, as the accuracy of laser tracking will be essential to the system’s safe operation.

“Our work demonstrates the possibility of ‘refueling aircraft with light,’” Han concluded. “Going from 1 to 100 will require solving many engineering challenges, but we hope this provides a starting point for future development.”

The paper, “Sb2Se3 Nanocrystals Enable Efficient Perovskite-Thermoelectric Tandem Devices for Laser-Powered Unmanned Aerial Vehicles,” appeared in Matter & Light on July 29, 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.

The cosmic violence of a black hole tearing apart a star produced a brilliant burst of radio light, which has been observed by astronomers thanks to a new international collaboration.

The U.S. National Science Foundation’s Very Large Array (NSF VLA) captured an off-axis afterglow that the researchers believe was left behind by a powerful jet produced by the star’s destruction. The black hole event was dubbed AT2019ijn by the Chinese research team that made the observation using U.S. equipment, and was described in a recent paper published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

Intriguingly, this explosive cosmic event provides astronomers with important new clues in the search for some of the universe’s rarest types of black holes.

A Bright Blue Flash

Various optical surveys of the cosmos detected the bright blue flash of AT2019ijn. For a few days, it continued to grow in brilliance before oddly fading at a rate far slower than is typical of similar transients.

Yet the optical spectrum did not tell the full story. As researchers combed through radio observations, they unexpectedly discovered that the radio emission did not peak within mere days but continued growing for two years before decaying over the next four. Also notable was the intensity of the emission, which was far more luminous than is typically seen during these phases of a stellar explosion.

Its 3-gigahertz luminosity was more than 100 times greater than signals typically observed from supernovae or fast blue optical transients.

Understanding the event required researchers to combine optical data with radio observations from the NSF VLA, India’s Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope, and Australia’s ASKAP. By expanding their radio view with these various facilities, the researchers were able to observe how the event changed over time, allowing them to develop and test various models.

A Black Hole Explanation

The Chinese astronomers identified a black hole as the most likely cause of these strange observations. Their focus was on a tidal disruption event, which occurs when a star wanders too close to a black hole and is torn apart by the incredibly powerful gravitational forces it encounters. Intriguingly, the researchers found that an event matching the observed optical brightness would require an extremely rare class of black hole.

Black holes are among the most extreme objects in the universe and tend to occupy opposite ends of a mass spectrum. The smaller variety is known as a “stellar-mass” black hole, since these objects form from the collapse of stars. At the other end are supermassive black holes, which anchor entire galaxies. However, intermediate-mass black holes have largely eluded astronomers, partly because their presence can be difficult to detect.

Detecting Intermediate-Mass Black Holes

Crucially, AT2019ijn allowed researchers to identify a new avenue for detecting these rare black holes.

Perspective is important in these detections. When an intermediate-mass black hole’s jet is not aimed directly toward Earth, the event may appear far less intense at optical wavelengths than expected. However, continued observation at radio wavelengths can reveal a much more intense afterglow as the jet evolves. This delayed brightening could therefore provide an important new clue for identifying potential intermediate-mass black holes.

Looking more broadly, the astronomers contend that many extreme black hole events may be missed because observations cease after the initial optical flash, leaving potentially intense radio peaks unobserved. As even more advanced observational platforms come online, such as the upcoming Next Generation Very Large Array, future radio surveys may reveal more such events, potentially illuminating a previously unrecognized class of transients similar to AT2019ijn.

The paper, “AT2019ijn: A Fast-rising, Slow-decaying Blue Optical Transient with Exceptionally Bright Radio Emission,” appeared in Astrophysical Journal Letters on July 6, 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.

An unexpected transmissible cancer has been detected in North American waterways, prompting new concerns about how the disease developed.

Beginning with discoveries in Lake Memphremagog, a glacial lake spanning both Quebec and Vermont, researchers have found strange black cancerous lesions on fish in the waterways of New England and Canada, revealing an environmental mystery.

University of Vermont researchers announced the startling cancer discovery in a recent paper published in Nature, describing how the cells act similarly to a parasite, transmitting between hosts.

This discovery marks the first time a freshwater species has been identified as afflicted with a transmissible cancer, whose long-term population effects are a major concern.

Fish Cancer

Many questions swirl around this discovery, which go far beyond the specific locations and even species affected—such as how cancer operates and how this transmissible form could have originated.

The first indications that something was amiss came from anglers and biologists who both noticed more brown bullhead catfish with raised black patches coming out of Lake Memphremagog. From their first identifications in 2012 to 2014, the prevalence of the disease increased to one in three of these fish.

These particular catfish are often used as a barometer for environmental health, leading the University of Vermont team to consider a pollution-related pathogen after they had ruled out a viral one. Yet under close examination, they discerned the lesions were something even less expected: a type of skin cancer called melanoma, typically caused by sunlight, and therefore, exceedingly rare in bottom-dwelling fish.

Genetic Research

The melanoma finding set the team on a research course looking to identify whether a genetic mutation had left this catfish population particularly susceptible to skin cancer. What they found was surprising: these cancer cells were more closely related to one another than to their host fish’s healthy cells, suggesting transmission.

These transmissible cancers are extremely unusual, with only three types having been discovered previously. None have been found in freshwater or fish species before this; they have been relegated to Tasmanian devils, dogs, and mollusks.

So far, researchers have only identified the malady in larger, spawning-age fish, leading the team to suspect that transmission occurs during spawning behavior. These events do appear to be a likely candidate, as the fish cluster tightly together in shallow water, providing ample opportunity for physical contact among many fish. Furthermore, due to their lack of scales and bottom-dwelling nature, they are more susceptible to the sediment, which could harbor free-floating cancer cells.

In other species, these transmissible cancers may or may not have devastating population-scale effects. Currently, how the Lake Memphremagog catfish population will fare is unknown, although some fish appear to survive years after the infection is first noted.

The University of Vermont team says that the cancer cannot affect humans, and the lake’s drinking water is safe, but they would caution against eating the cancerous fish.

The Root of Cancer

While the Coventry Landfill is in close proximity to the lake, the cancer is spread evenly along the 32-mile-long lake, instead of concentrating near the landfill. Additionally, water tests show that contamination levels are no higher than those of similar North American waterbodies such as Lake Champlain.

Instead, more concerning than a single source of pollution, the team says they have now discovered this cancer in fish located in other ponds and lakes in this region, none of which were close to pollution sources and had pristine water quality.

The one correlation identified so far is that the cancer cells have high arsenic levels, an element naturally found in the region’s soil in high concentrations. Along with this possible link to a natural cause, the researchers are beginning to suspect that the cancer has existed for quite some time, but has simply gone unrecognized. A potential line of evidence for this hypothesis comes from the journals of Henry David Thoreau, who noted a catfish with a similar condition back in the summer of 1852. He even noted that he had come across the fish disease previously, and again wrote of it in 1858.

“By studying how cancers survive and spread outside their original host, we can learn a great deal about what keeps cancers contained—and what happens when those boundaries break down,” co-author Julie Dragon concluded. “These fish provide an opportunity to look at the evolution of cancer.”

The paper, “Brown Bullhead Catfish Melanoma Represents a Novel Transmissible Cancer,” appeared in Nature on July 22, 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.

The small exoplanets of our Sun’s second-nearest neighbor, Barnard’s Star, are inhospitable wastelands, British astronomers say.

Located six light-years from Earth, Barnard’s Star is separated from our closest neighbor, Alpha Centauri, by about 66° in our sky. Now, University of Cambridge researchers have revealed their findings on this exosolar system in a recent paper published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

After careful analysis, the astronomers announced that the exoplanets are unlike any in our solar system, presenting a brutal and barren environment.

Barnard’s Star Exoplanets

Scientists only discovered these four small planets orbiting Barnard’s Star in 2025. Unlike anything in our solar system, these orbital bodies fit into a size range larger than Mars, but smaller than Earth or Venus.

Like a peeled onion, these smaller planets are rich in a mineral only found deep below the Earth’s surface. Chemical analysis revealed large amounts of the mineral periclase on the surface of these planets, something typically only found hundreds of kilometers deep on our planet.

“Barnard’s Star has an enormous amount of the element magnesium compared to other stars, so its planets are likely to be rich in magnesium too,” said lead author Xander Byrne from Cambridge’s Institute of Astronomy. “On Earth, that magnesium goes into making minerals called olivines, which are really important for storing water within the planet.”

A Lack of Water and Atmosphere

Unfortunately for those looking for extraterrestrial life, magnesium serves a different purpose on these exoplanets. Instead of water-storing olivine, it produces the abundant periclase, which is a poor store of water.

Even worse, these inhospitable exoplanets likely no longer have an atmosphere. According to the University of Cambridge team, these ten-billion-year-old planets probably only managed to hold an atmosphere for two billion years at most.

“These planets were always going to be hostile, because they’re really close to their star,” said Byrne. “Even the outermost planet orbits ten times closer than Mercury orbits the Sun. When you’re that close to your star, and have such little gravity, your atmosphere just gets blown off.”

In addition to the lack of atmosphere, the planets’ proximity to Barnard’s Star leaves them tidally locked, like our Moon, with one side always facing toward the star.

Exoplanet Stability

However, there is one positive element to these small planets. Typically, such close-orbiting systems are highly unstable, with the planets shooting out from the system, falling into their host star, or catastrophically colliding. Yet in this case, the system is as ordered as a piece of music. 

The three inner planets of the exosolar system have years in a 9:12:16 ratio, producing two of what is known as a “perfect fourth” in music. This musical harmony is known as an orbital resonance, with the same type of effect stabilizing Jupiter’s moons in their orbits around that planet. 

While our ability to view Barnard’s Star from Earth may be limited, the European Space Agency’s upcoming Plato mission may allow astronomers to discover ever smaller worlds orbiting in the nearby exosolar system.

“Larger planets are much easier to detect than small ones, so we know about very few sub-Earth planets like the ones in this system,” said Byrne. “But the sensitivity of these new missions will help to reduce this bias, allowing us to discover more and more planets that are small and rocky, like Earth.”

The true significance of the research may lie in the value of a null result. While these planets are bleakly hostile to life, observing this exosolar system’s composition can aid future astronomers in narrowing down the search for extraterrestrial life.

The paper, “The Barnard’s Star Planetary System: Stability, Composition, and Evolution of Four Sub-Earth Exoplanets,” appeared in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society on June 24, 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.

For the last 22 years, one of the most bizarre true crime stories ever to grace the program Unsolved Mysteries has confounded amateur investigators and spawned hundreds of pages of online speculation. Who was behind the decade-long torment of Bill and Dorthy Wacker in the 80s and 90s, which included allegations of stalking, robberies, and even assaults?

While any internet true crime enthusiast knows Unsolved Mysteries frequently left out interesting details that can create a rabbit hole of alternative explanations, in this case, the show has been the sole source of information, with no other known period news coverage of the harassment.

That is, until recently, when this author acquired the original police records, spanning almost 100 pages of material, while researching for my podcast, Cease to Exist. The records reveal a wealth of new information, including potential leads on suspects, and answers to questions true crime fans have speculated about for years.

Unsolved Mysteries

In the Unsolved Mysteries season 6 two-hour finale, airing in the spring of 1994, the public met Bill and Dorthy Wacker, an elderly couple from Massillon, Ohio, who claimed to be victims of a bizarre string of harassment stretching back years. Since then, their story has been the subject of considerable speculation, with some believing the whole affair was so unbelievable that the Wackers must have been making it up. On the other hand, Dorothy herself did seem to bear injuries consistent with the couple’s claims. Without any further information, true crime fans dissected every available scrap of evidence, including the accuracy of the reenactments, for possible clues.

“The Wackers are quiet, unassuming people who tend to mind their own business. Hardly the type to draw the wrath of an unseen enemy,” Unsolved Mysteries host Robert Stack said at the beginning of the segment.

The scene then opens with the couple returning to find their home ransacked on January 16, 1985. This was the third claimed incident, but according to the program, the first that was reported.

“After nearly 10 years, Dorothy and Bill Wacker still wonder who and why,” Stock intoned.

The Wacker’s Story

In interview footage with the couple, Bill speculates that someone may be attempting to force the couple to move, although why that would be was unclear, and refers to the perpetrator as “a kook,” which becomes a bit of a meme in online discourse about the case.

Six months after the previous break-in, Dorothy was home alone recovering from heart surgery when she heard a knock at the door. She found a young man who claimed his car had broken down and that he needed to use her telephone. Although she didn’t see a car anywhere, she let the polite stranger in. He made a call, thanked her, and appeared to leave.

Before she knew what had happened, Dorothy awoke tied up on her kitchen floor after having been struck in the head. A neighbor heard her cries through an open window and came to her aid. Although Dorothy’s injury was not serious, there were two strange elements to the crime. First was the graffiti “cheaper, but will do,” shown in the reenactment as having been left on the kitchen wall. Second was the variety of items stolen from the home, including a gun and radio receiver, which were later returned to the Wackers’ porch. Police were baffled by the return of a stolen gun and distributed fliers featuring a sketch of the suspect, but no identification was ever made.

Harassment continued with a series of threatening phone calls that persisted even after the family changed their number, according to Dorothy and her daughter Peggy Hoover. Additionally, nocturnal banging on the outside of the house began, which led the couple to install lights. The only result was a strange note on the front porch reading “your lights are a laugh,” and subsequent notes such as “you scum I’ll get even,” with a backside reading “this time ha ha.” The police never found any fingerprints on the notes and suggested they may have been made by someone using their opposite hand to disguise their handwriting.

Second Attack and Stake Out

The most dramatic events yet occurred in the fall of 1993. Dorothy was walking her dog outside of their home on October 27th when she was attacked again. The segment claimed she suffered “skull lacerations” and was taken to the hospital, but there were no witnesses to the event. 

Notably, Sheriff Bruce W Umpleby says that after interviewing neighbors, no one had any information that led them to believe there was a person there. He continued that most crimes have simple motives and there has never been one identified for the strange periodic flurries of activity around the Wackers.

Things reached a climax when the family conducted a stakeout, hoping to finally capture the stalker one November evening. Bill hid inside a trailer in the driveway, while Dorothy and their daughter Cathy stayed inside the home. Across the street, their sons-in-law Dan and Clay sat in a vehicle in a neighbor’s driveway. After almost four hours, they decided to end the stakeout around 10:30 p.m., when they heard a loud bump on the porch. Incredibly, the stalker had apparently evaded the surveillance and thrown a rock onto the Wackers’ front porch with a note reading “get the message.”

At the conclusion of the segment, Bill says he hopes whoever is responsible is caught soon because, if the Wackers were no longer the targets, he feared the individual would simply target someone else.

Unsolved Mysteries Online Speculation

Besides noting that the sheriff’s department had asked Dorothy after the second attack whether Bill could have been the attacker, the series plays the events fairly straight, without directly questioning the couple’s story. The eerie music and Stack’s gravelly voice convey a feeling of serious menace. True crime fans are more divided, with some arguing that the events were too implausible to be real, while others find it unlikely that an elderly couple would fabricate such a wild tale. Notably, another popular Unsolved Mysteries segment, involving the stalking of Cindy James, is also widely believed to have involved a hoax.

Unfortunately, Newspapers.com’s archive of the local paper, The Massillon Independent, has a large gap between the early 1970s and the 2020s. The only other known media appearance by Bill Wacker before his death was in an unrelated citizen-reaction piece about Connie Chung interviewing Newt Gingrich’s mother in the Akron Beacon Journal, although he is wearing an Unsolved Mysteries hat in the picture. The only other items recovered were obituaries stating that Bill had died in 1999 at age 79 and Dorothy in 2020 at age 83. This left armchair sleuths to rely primarily on what appeared in the episode itself, which does raise questions.

One notable detail is that, in the reenactment, Dorothy’s dog doesn’t bark to alert her to the intruder, which seemed uncharacteristic of a small dog. People debated whether this was merely a quirk of the reenactment or reflected how the event actually occurred, with some questioning whether this provided evidence that Bill was behind the assault. Additionally, some found it odd that the stakeout was called off at the relatively early hour of 10:30 p.m. and found the return of stolen items completely unbelievable. Another oddity was the wording of the letters, with phrases like “you scum” and “no junk,” which sounded to some like older adults attempting to mimic the speech of teenagers while using outdated phraseology.

Among those who believe the Wackers, suspicion has frequently fallen on the daughters, who would presumably inherit the home and were not mentioned as suspects in the episode. Particular suspicion has fallen on Peggy, who was not present for the stakeout. Some have also pointed to the phone calls continuing after the Wackers changed their number as possible evidence of an inside job.

One Redditor, sovietbabyy, claimed to be a relative of the Wackers who stumbled upon the case, although they were too young to have ever met Bill and Dorothy themselves. They claimed Bill and his siblings were all dead but asked other family members for more information and were told that the extended family believed the story and that Bill was usually secluded but would help anyone in need. Five years later, a poster using the screen name goawaycommies followed up, claiming to be the same person. In these new posts, the author claimed that Stark County was a high-crime area and that the police were known to be ineffective; therefore, it shouldn’t be surprising that no one was caught.

While it could be debated whether these two posters are actually the same person, the goawaycommies post provided one essential detail that led to a major breakthrough: the Wackers’ address.

Finding the Wackers

In late December, I wrote to the Massillon County Sheriff requesting any files they had on the Wackers. They granted my request in early January, providing 94 pages of documents. Follow-up requests to the North Lawrence Fire Department, who responded to the assaults, as well as inquiries to two of the responding officers and Ricky Lee Pegido, were fruitless. The Sheriff’s office maintains that these documents are all that were found in the file, despite some appearing to be missing, such as a cover sheet without a report and references to a “phone trap” that is not followed up on.

While the officers may not have wanted to talk about these events, what was contained inside was fascinating, providing the names of suspects, neighbors’ opinions on the Wackers, incidents that were not included in the Unsolved Mysteries segment, and another 90s-era “classic” addition: records involving consultation with a psychic about the crimes.

The Reports

Right from the beginning, the documents tell a slightly different story from the television segment. Instead of waiting until the third event, in January 1985, to call police, there was a report concerning the initial August 1984 break-in. This one was different from the others, with gold and diamond jewelry stolen that was not returned and police noting that a credit card may have been used to force the lock.

The police report for the January 1985 break-in contained two notable details: the method of entry and the first-named suspect. Despite having their locked home broken into previously, the Wackers had left a side door unlocked, allowing the burglar to gain entry. Additionally, the report lists a “Randy” as a possible suspect, a young man whose aunt had previously cared for Mrs. Wacker’s elderly mother in the home.

Next, the first assault report appears, which is similar to what was shown in the episode, except that “CHEAPER, BUT WILL DO” was written in a bathroom instead of the kitchen. Additionally, a basement window was cut, through which the perpetrator may have escaped. The man who came to her aid is named here as Jim Pedigo, who says he and his brother had been working in their backyard all morning without seeing or hearing a thing until Dorothy’s cries became evident. In this report, the name is given as “Pedigl,” and it switches back and forth between that and “Pedigo” in the reports (the name “Pedigo” appears in print as a family name in the area in obituaries). When Bill returned, he found items that appeared to have been staged to be taken later from the robbery around the perimeter of the house.

Following this, there is a series of minor reports of items being stolen and returned—oddly, with the Wackers still not locking their doors, despite the first report indicating that had been their former habit.

The Second Assault

The report of the second assault does closely match the program, even down to the controversial dog not barking when the assailant came after Dorothy. Although the Wackers claimed the dog normally ignored its surroundings as it relieved itself, the officer noted on a follow-up visit to the residence that the dog barked when he arrived, which he found suspicious. In the report, Dorothy claimed she had to crawl to the back door to get help from Bill after the attacker fled, which was supported by dirt and scratch marks on her forearms noted by the officer. The officer gave Bill some suggestions, such as installing a light on that side of the house and trimming some trees to remove hiding places.

A lengthy segment of the report regarding the Sheriff’s canvassing of the neighborhood provides some interesting insight into the Wackers’ relationship with their neighbors. This portion notes that:

The neighbors collectively agreed that none of them have had any type of problems. Nor, have they seen or heard any form of disturbance in the area. In fact, several of the neighbors stated that they don’t even lock their doors. Further stated by the neighboring community, most of the neighbors stay to themselves, however, ‘the Wackers bring most of their problems on themselves.’ Apparently the Wackers aren’t the most congenial of persons in the neighborhood, especially with the Shillings and Maddox’s.

The Maddox family is the same household as the Pedigo family, a notable change of relations since Jim Pedigo aided Dorothy. On the other hand, another couple in the neighborhood stated that they regularly played cards with the Wackers, providing a nuanced image of them as people who got along with some but not others.

Suspects Not Named on Unsolved Mysteries

Following this event, both of the daughters began continually contacting the Stark County Sheriff’s office, demanding more attention be paid to their parents’ harassment. One of the items introduced here, but oddly never followed up on, is a “phone trap” put on the Wackers’ phone by their telephone company, Ameritech, to monitor all incoming calls. Although the reports say this is activated, there is no information on whether any claims of harassing calls were ever compared against the phone trap.

There appears to be a missing report explaining where the tip originates from, but officers speak with the son residing at the Maddox/Pedigo residence, Ricky Lee Pedigo, about whether he is aware of an individual by the name of “Shriner” on his mother’s side of the family, which he was not. When they later return to speak with his mother, Barbara Maddox, she claims she is not related to anyone by that name and flippantly remarks that the composite of the suspect in the first attack on Dorothy looks like a young dick Van Dyke, but no one she’s ever seen before.

Next, officers follow up on a tip from daughter Peggy Hoover that a woman named Debbie Shriver’s (not Shriner) ex-husband may be the suspect. After tracing this woman through a former landlord and then her own father, Debbie, now going by Debbie Pedigo, agrees to speak with the Stark County Sheriff’s. She says the composite bears no resemblance to her ex-husband, James Shriver.

Peggy then returns with another tip that a psychic told her the suspect lives within a twelve-mile radius of the Wacker home.

Finally, Peggy provides one last suspect: Barbara Maddox’s stepson, Johnny Lee, whom she says may be because her parents didn’t pay enough attention to him as a boy. At this point, Barbara Maddox has had enough, saying that her stepson hasn’t been to visit in years, and she is going to put up a privacy fence to keep away from the Wackers.

Final Events

From this point on, the banging and rocks being thrown at the home continued. At one point, the Wackers claimed someone had tried to gain entrance to their locked home, but the police report casts suspicion on this. The appraisal was that it appeared as though someone was attempting to make it look like the house was being broken into without causing too much damage, and it was inconsistent with typical burglary techniques.

The final report is from October 1997, when Dorothy heard a loud banging on the house while seated in the living room. An officer responded but could find no damage.

All the reports are bizarre. The daughters appear to be very invested in the case, yet Peggy ultimately seems to be throwing around claims that don’t add up to anything. Was she letting her imagination run away with her, using the events as a cover to harass people she had personal grievances against, or was she really on to something? The “Shriner/Shriver” discrepancy speaks to a minor issue prevalent in the police’s investigations: not confirming the spelling of names, which also occurs with “Pedigl/Pedigo.” Does this indicate the sheriff’s department is generally performing sloppy work, as the Reddit poster implied? While there is room to speculate here, the constantly changing accusations may have undermined Peggy’s credibility with law enforcement.

One possible conclusion is that the very earliest break-in was real, since the stolen items were not returned and the report is consistent with a typical forced entry. Perhaps after that, the Wackers developed a taste for the excitement and attention and hoaxed the rest of it. This would explain the incongruities of items being returned, no one ever seeing anything, their continuing to leave their doors unlocked, and the strange attempt to create the appearance of a forced entry without damaging the home.

But then again, officers reported witnessing injuries to Dorothy after both assaults. Could she have been willing to take things that far? Could the couple have truly been victims? Could one of the children be behind it? Was Bill assaulting her?

None of these questions can clearly be answered from the available evidence; and so, decades after the strange story of the Wackers first came to public attention, the case rests—and another relic of the 1990s remains an unsolved mystery.

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.

A new type of synthetic motion developed at City University of New York (CUNY) gives physicists access to impossible, faster-than-light speeds in an experimental environment. Previously, for researchers to explore such extremes of physics, their only option was simulations, and such real-world effects could not be studied in any practical sense.

In a recent paper published in Nature, scientists from CUNY’s Advanced Science Research Center (ASRC) revealed their new wave amplification technique, which mimics motion without any physical movement.

The synthetic motion machine relies on radio frequencies modulated around a ring-shaped structure to create the illusion of motion.

Extreme Black Holes

The SUNY team traces its inspiration back to the work of Sir Roger Penrose more than fifty years ago, when the scientists proposed a scenario in which a particle could leech energy from a black hole.

Frame-dragging measurements, which involve the pull on spacetime around the edge of a black hole’s ultra-fast rotation, have become a major focus for astrophysics in recent years. Penrose was interested in the region where this pull occurs, known as the ergosphere. He suggested that a particle entering the ergosphere may be torn into two pieces, one of which would fall into the black hole, while the half that escaped would contain even greater energy than the original particle.

Another physicist, Yakov Zel’dovich, built on Penrose’s work to describe a more general version of this effect. He predicted that a sufficiently fast-rotating object could transfer energy to a wave, amplifying it.

A Synthetic Motion Machine

In their quest to study how a rotating body can amplify a wave, the researchers produced a radio-frequency device that mimics a spinning motion. Crucially, this mimicry is unbound by certain physical constraints on motion, allowing for incredible speeds beyond what can be mechanically produced, opening up new experimental possibilities.

“Our approach facilitates a new method of wave–matter interaction in which waves with selected rotational properties extract energy from synthetic time-engineered rotation, producing a form of broadband selective amplification,” said principal investigator Andrea Alù, Distinguished Professor and Einstein Professor of Physics at the CUNY Graduate Center and founding director of the CUNY ASRC’s Photonics Initiative.

“This successful experiment moves ideas about extreme rotational dynamics from theory to practice and creates a versatile experimental platform for exploring a broad range of phenomena at the intersection of astrophysics, wave physics, and quantum science,” said lead author Hadiseh Nasari, a postdoctoral researcher with the CUNY ASRC’s Photonics Initiative. “The work has implications for advances in fundamental science and in communications, optics, and photonics.”

Mimicking Motion

For the project, the CUNY team constructed a ring of networked electronic resonators, whose properties were rapidly modulated in a precisely timed sequence, producing a traveling pattern around the ring. The device itself is stationary, yet the modulated pattern led electromagnetic waves to react as though the device were spinning at the speed of the pattern.

“Waves with the appropriate rotational characteristics extracted energy from the system and became amplified, reproducing the essential physics of the Penrose–Zel’dovich process,” said co-lead author Hady Moussa, a former PhD student with the CUNY ASRC Photonics Initiative. “Our approach relies on engineered metamaterials that are designed to control how waves propagate.

This work in developing synthetic motion has implications far beyond just a single theory on wave amplification. Researchers can now access previously unattainable rotational speeds in experimental physics work thanks to the new device.

Beyond those experimental possibilities, this technique could be used in communication and optics applications, including quantum systems. Future work will involve adapting this revolutionary technique beyond the initial problem into practical technologies for information processing and exploring the universe’s most extreme physics.

The paper, “Observation of Floquet Rotational Super-Radiance,” appeared in Nature on July 8, 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.

The problem of per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS, a group of potentially cancer-causing “forever chemicals,” may finally have a solution, thanks to German scientists.

The PFAS group contains more than 10,000 synthetic substances that refuse to break down, leading to the term “forever chemicals,” and which instead build up in the body to cause developmental issues, immune problems, and even cancer.

Now, Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf (HZDR) researchers have reported not one, but two new solutions to the forever chemical problem in recent papers published in the journals Chemical Engineering Journal Advances and Scientific Reports.

One of these new processes for addressing this long-standing environmental problem employs hydrodynamic cavitation, while the other employs cold atmospheric plasma combined with gas dispersion.

Forever Chemicals Explained

PFAS have exceptionally stable carbon-fluorine bonds, which make them difficult to break down. Through industrial wastewater, these forever chemicals are released into oceans and rivers, where they can accumulate in plants, animals, and humans. While some of them are tied to specific health risks, many are still question marks, with their health consequences unclear.

The work at HZDR is part of Germany’s “National Water Strategy,” aimed at protecting the country’s water supplies. In a 2022 preliminary study that the new work built on, researchers degraded PFAS chemicals through a hydrodynamic cavitation process.

Work on these new processes was conducted at the Helmholtz Center for Environmental Research (UFZ), confirming that both processes degrade PFAS and produce fluoride, which the researchers hope will soon be adopted in industry.

The First Solution

“In hydrodynamic cavitation, we pass PFAS-enriched water through a constriction, generating small vapor bubbles,” explained co-author Dr. Sebastian Reinecke, head of the Department of Water and Environmental Technologies at HZDR. “When the bubbles burst under the rising ambient pressure in the water downstream of the constriction, the PFAS that are attached to the bubbles are exposed to local temperature spikes of several thousand degrees Celsius.”

While this occurs, highly reactive hydroxyl radicals form during cavitation, which the team believes then attack intermediate products, hastening the breakdown of PFAS.

The researchers demonstrated that PFAS chemicals in tap water were broken down, with higher concentrations of fluoride produced as treatment duration increased. A persistent and well-studied PFAS, perfluorooctane sulfonate (PFOS), was used in the research, with 37% of the dissolved chemical eventually breaking down.

“We are now conducting follow-up experiments to increase the degradation rate,” Reinecke added. “Our goal is to improve the process to a degradation rate of more than 80 percent of the PFAS in the solution and mineralizing more than 50 percent of the fluorine that is bound in the chemicals – that means, breaking down the carbon-fluorine bonds that are typical of PFAS.”

Plasma Vs. PFAS

Dr. Amit Kumar, an environmental engineer at HZDR, led another series of experiments on cold atmospheric plasma and gas dispersion, which offered the advantage of not requiring catalysts or additional chemicals. Kumar applied some of his previous research on breaking down micropollutants to the problem of forever chemicals. 

“We generated plasma at the water surface while simultaneously introducing gas into the PFAS-contaminated water,” Reinecke explained. “The PFAS attach to the surface of the gas bubbles. As they rise, the water is constantly circulated. This brings the PFAS to the surface, where they are broken down in the plasma.”

Roughly 35% of the fluorine atoms in these forever chemicals were released as fluoride salts in the process, almost completely degrading long- and short-chain PFAS. 

“While this method has significantly faster reaction kinetics than cavitation, it also consumes far more energy per volume unit,” Reinecke notes. “In addition, the process generates numerous transformation products that we have not yet been able to investigate in detail – for instance, gaseous compounds that form during the reaction.” 

Scaling PFAS Degradation

With their central ideas proven, the researchers are now focused on scaling up these processes for industrial-scale wastewater applications. Part of this involves increasing the reaction volume from 50 milliliters to 5 liters and combining the two separate processes.

“I believe we’ll achieve high degradation rates by combining the highly reactive species from the plasma with the effects of cavitation,” says Reinecke.

Additionally, follow-up work is currently investigating whether any byproducts of the plasma process are harmful and how to mitigate those effects.

Merging the techniques could lead to a highly efficient new PFAS removal technology, providing a powerful tool for dealing with one of the most significant threats to clean water supplies.

The paper, “Enhanced Degradation and Defluorination of Perfluorooctane Sulfonate (PFOS) in Tap Water Using Gas-Dispersed Cold Atmospheric Plasma,” appeared in Scientific Reports on June 13, 2026, and the second study, “Degradation and Defluorination of Perfluorooctane Sulfonate (PFOS) Forever Chemical in Water Using Hydrodynamic Cavitation Treatment,” appeared in Chemical Engineering Journal Advances on March 26, 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.

Our modern society depends heavily on communications and power networks that are highly susceptible to interference from solar storms, making these volatile space weather events a paramount concern for scientists.

Now, it turns out there may be more to fear than previously realized. Scientists are discovering that there may be no ceiling to the devastating effects solar storms may have on Earth, overturning what little sense of security may exist as a mere mathematical anomaly.

In a recent paper published in Nature, a NASA-led team discovered that the potential impact of solar storms on our technological infrastructure could be substantially more severe than currently recognized.

Solar Storms Reconsidered

According to new research, any past limitations perceived regarding the impact of solar storms on our planet are purely an illusion, which arises from imprecise data collection.

Previous observations of electric currents in the Earth’s upper atmosphere during solar storm events suggested a ceiling to how far they could increase. Yet the new paper claims that uncertainties in solar wind data are falsely giving rise to this idea.

The researchers say that the distance of the spacecraft taking solar wind measurements is the issue. Those spacecraft are millions of miles closer to the Sun than the Earth is, meaning that by the time those winds reach Earth, they have weakened considerably. Additionally, instrument error and the effects of the local plasma and field conditions all come into play.

All this, the researchers say, creates a mismatch between the measured strength of the wind and its effects on our planet’s electrical currents.

Correcting For Distance

The new findings contain one significant difference from existing research: they relied on observation platforms much closer to Earth to collect data, which included spacecraft such as NASA’s MMS and THEMIS.

Launched in 2007, THEMIS consists of five satellites that target the Earth, rather than the Sun, to study our planet’s magnetosphere and auroras. MMS consists of four spacecraft that also study the Earth’s magnetosphere.

Existing charts show the impact of solar winds on Earth leveling off at a certain threshold, which scientists had believed was the maximum saturation possible. However, in new solar wind strength data collected much closer to Earth, more accurately reflecting power at the time of impact, this saturation point disappeared. Instead, this data revealed that there is no ceiling on how heavily solar storms can charge the Earth’s electrical currents.

Solar Storm Impacts

Another crucial element in the NASA-led research is the statistical concept of regression to the mean, which holds that extreme measurements often change as more data come in. In this case, as more data on solar storm impacts on Earth recorded from various distances were collected, the plating effect disappeared. The authors note that similar effects occur in other areas of research, such as climate studies and chronic medical pain.

These new findings present a major challenge to our understanding of space weather. Scientists will now need to conduct many further observations to determine if any such ceiling exists. The threat to our infrastructure may be severe, as satellite communication underpins our modern society, not to mention the power grid, which keeps our world running.

For now, NASA continues to monitor solar storms to prepare for their potentially dangerous effects on our infrastructure, and in light of the new research, the potential for future challenges ahead may be greater than previously realized.

The paper, “Regression to the Mean Can Explain Saturation of Geomagnetic Storms,” appeared in Nature on July 15, 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.

For centuries, ancient seafarers have told tales of fabled lost lands. They have been known by many names—Ultima Thule, Hy-Brasil, the Fortunate Isles, and of course, the legendary lost city of Atlantis.

Now, scientists say Earth’s hidden plumbing system may be feeding one of its strangest ecosystems—an area on the Atlantic seafloor that conjures images of such legendary landscapes lost to time and memory.

Known as the Lost City hydrothermal field, this ancient Atlantic oddity is doing more than just broadening our view on how extremophiles thrive in some of our planet’s least hospitable environments: it offers a potential model for how extraterrestrial life may thrive elsewhere in our solar system.

In a recent paper published in Geophysics, Geochemistry, and Geosystems, an international team of researchers finally discovered the system behind these hydrogen- and methane-rich alkaline hot springs that feed the Lost City ecosystem. 

The white carbonate chimneys that emit these gases provide an alternative to sunlight as the Lost City’s primary energy source, allowing life to thrive in a challenging deep ocean environment.

Searching Near The Lost City

Those precious nutrients coming from these vents were created by underground reactions. It turns out that the water feeding the Lost City is likely part of a larger underground system, where extreme processes imbue the liquid with essential nutrients.

The discovery came from nearly a mile below the Atlantis Massif, a large block of Earth’s crust that forms an underwater mountain range. This dome-shaped region stretches for 10 miles and rises 14,000 feet above the ocean floor.

Geologists believe this formation originated between 1.5 and 2 million years ago, as tectonic plate movement pulled it out from beneath the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, forming a new feature on the ocean floor.

From aboard the Joint Oceanographic Institutions for Deep Earth Sampling (JOIDES) ship Resolution, scientists drilled their 4,160-foot-deep hole about 2,600 feet north of the Lost City. They were intrigued to find that the water recovered from the hole had a chemical composition extremely similar to that of water emerging from the Lost City vents.

Beneath The Ocean Floor

From their drill site, they pumped water from varying depths up to the surface for examination.

Roughly the first 1,500 feet consisted primarily of seawater and freshwater from the drilling process, yet at lower depths, they found water that had risen from beneath the rock. At the deepest depths, up to 80% of the sample came from these subterranean regions.

Their detailed analyses revealed that the water had reacted with the surrounding minerals to gain calcium while losing magnesium, a reaction that would require prolonged exposure to rocks at a temperature of at least 572°F. Despite this finding, the hole was much cooler when the team took their samples.

Typically, a water-rock reaction with gabbroic and ultramafic rock would produce such results that are high in calcium, yet with no magnesium. Other components, such as lithium, rubidium, cesium, and strontium, were found in the water at both the bore site and Lost City.

The findings are consequential for providing the first direct evidence of this extremely hot water circulating beneath the Atlantis Massif through gabbroic and ultramafic rock. In this hidden plumbing system, seawater reaches deep within oceanic plates, providing energy to these deep-sea environments and potentially supporting their microbial life.

Feeding The Lost City

As researchers have now demonstrated that hydrogen-enriched water can naturally form deep within the Earth through rock reactions, researchers say there are major implications for our understanding of the Earth and beyond. 

For one, it adds a new element to Earth’s energy cycles, explaining how life persists under such difficult, dark conditions. Secondly, it offers intriguing new ideas about how life might persist in extraterrestrial environments, as humans continue to search for it elsewhere in the cosmos. The strange conditions of the Lost City ecosystem are thought to be a potential model for how life could persist in the global oceans of ice-covered worlds such as Jupiter’s moon Europa or Saturn’s moon Enceladus.

However, some uncertainty about the samples does remain. Seawater, freshwater, and drilling contaminants were present in the samples, and the exact proportions attributable to gabbro or ultramafic rock are unknown. Also, while this is evidence for an underground connection between the borehole and the Lost City chimneys, it is not conclusive proof that they are connected.

Plans are already underway to return once the borehole has stabilized to collect pristine samples that will allow researchers to answer questions about where and how these reactions occur, as well as the amount of energy they add to the water. From the most inhospitable regions on Earth to the quest for organisms among the stars, the research underway deep within our oceans is providing new answers to how such life persists.

The recent paper, “Borehole Waters From Hole U1601C (Atlantis Massif) Provide Constraints for a Deep-Sourced Formation Water That (Could) Feed the Lost City Hydrothermal Field,” appeared in Geophysics, Geochemistry, and Geosystems on July 12, 2026.

Micah Hanks, Editor in Chief of The Debrief, also contributed to this reporting. 

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.

An innovative new drone dubbed the “Phantom Twist” can seemingly disappear from view, in a major new robotics advancement offering a close-to-invisible aerial platform.

Its name describes the drone’s rapid spinning motion, which rotates 25 times per second—too fast for the human eye to resolve—thereby acting as a sort of cloak shielding it from visible detection.

The Northwestern University engineering team behind the Phantom Twist revealed their drone during a recent talk at the Sydney, Australia, Robotics: Science and Systems 2026 conference on July 16.

Stealth Drones

“Most efforts to hide drones focus on making them look like their surroundings,” said Northwestern’s Michael Rubenstein, who led the work. “Instead, we asked whether we could design the drone itself around the way humans perceive motion. This idea of low visibility through persistent motion is something few people have explored.”

Hiding drones is not a new idea. Other engineers have attempted a variety of techniques, including camouflage, transparent materials, and light-bending to obscure the presence of drones and robots. However, all of those focused on the material the drone’s exterior was constructed from, allowing it to blend into the background. The Northwestern team’s innovation was in how the object moves.

To our eyes, fan blades disappear because they are moving so fast that our eyes cannot track them. The “motion blur” created at these speeds allows the Phantom Twist to almost disappear, leaving only a faint apparition perceptible to the eye. 

Nature Drones

While several military applications are immediately obvious, the team instead says their work could be useful in developing noninvasive wildlife and environmental monitoring. Loud drones can scare wildlife, disrupting them as they scatter, but by blending in, the Phantom Twist could capture a much more accurate picture of natural behaviors.

Their perception-based design eschews the traditional quadcopter design for a single propeller, with a body that spins in the opposite direction, creating the optical illusion that the drone essentially disappears.

“For a typical quadrotor drone, the propellers are spinning, but the robot is stationary,” Rubenstein said. “So, you still see its body. For our drone, the whole thing is rotating, so there are no stationary parts.”

Creating the Phantom Twist

Using AI and optimization algorithms, the Northwestern team began by generating 20,000 different arrangements of a drone’s propeller, motor, circuit board, and other necessary components. Eventually, the algorithm landed on the most promising configurations, after which the researchers simulated and superimposed them onto real-world backgrounds. 

Another computer model mimicked human perception, allowing the engineers to assign a perception score for how visible each design would be to human eyes. An algorithm then optimized those designs by moving components to minimize the visibility score even further.

“The design process was fully automated,” Rubenstein said. “Then, when we were confident that a drone met all our criteria, we built it.”

A Revised Drone

The key feature of this design is that the individual components are at such varying heights and angles that they do not overlap as it spins, maximizing the motion-blur effect and creating the appearance of a faint cloud rather than a solid object.

“The human eye takes time to accumulate signals, roughly analogous to the exposure time of a camera,” said Alexander, an expert in computer vision. “When an object spins quickly, we perceive it as blurring out and losing distinct features. Because this new drone is almost entirely transparent, its few opaque components are visually averaged with the background for an overall appearance of a slight haze.”

Currently impeding the drone from being even more imperceptible to the eye are the wires and support rods that remain visible, as well as the engine noise it produces, which is readily discernible. Going forward, the team plans to continue improving Phantom Twist in future iterations to incorporate more transparent materials and reduce the noise it produces.

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.

Egyptian princesses may have trained extensively with weapons, according to a new archaeological assessment that suggests the weapons buried with their mummies were more than mere symbols.

The researchers examined five mummies of Egyptian Middle Kingdom royal women for a new paper published in Frontiers in Environmental Archaeology, finding that their musculature indicates they led physically active lives.

Their work offers new insight into a long-standing question: whether the weapons buried with these royal women served a practical purpose or were simply symbolic grave goods.

Discovering Egypt’s Mummies

“Members of the royal family, especially the women, were active participants in skilled, physically demanding activities such as archery and hunting,” said lead author Dr Zeinab Hashesh. “This conclusion is supported by the way their bones developed to sustain heavy muscle use, which corresponds directly to the weapons discovered in their tombs.”

On a western plateau overlooking the Nile Valley lies the Memphis Necropolis, a 19-mile-long series of funerary complexes. One of these, a collection of pyramids and shaft tombs known as Dahshur, includes the pyramid of Amenemhat III, where two of the mummies were recovered during excavations begun in 1894 by Jacques de Morgan. These first discoveries were King Hor and Princess Noub-Hotep.

Later in 1894, de Morgan began excavating Amenemhat II’s pyramid complex at Dahshur. There, in early 1895, he discovered what would later be identified as four daughters of the pharaoh: Princesses Ita and Khenmet, buried together in one chamber, and Princesses Itaweret and Sathathormeryt in another.

Only the remains of King Hor and Princess Noub-Hotep underwent scientific examination at the time of their discovery. Eventually, all six sets of remains were transferred to the Egyptian Museum in 1915, where they remained lost until their rediscovery in 2020.

Weapons of the Egyptian Dead

The complex was unusual because these women were buried with objects typically associated with men, including bows and arrows, and a dagger placed inside Princess Ita’s coffin.

The mummification techniques used on the remains were relatively crude compared with those employed in later Theban burials. As a result, the remains are poorly preserved, with soft tissues reduced to powder, some bones entirely missing, and the princesses’ skulls lost during the early 1900s. Fortunately, enough skeletal material survived to allow researchers to estimate their height, sex, age at death, illnesses, and injuries.

“Princess Ita was a young woman aged between 28 and 34 with strong upper-body muscle attachments, suggesting she habitually used weapons like maces or daggers,” said Hashesh. “Princess Khenmet was a woman in her late 30s or 40s who showed signs of thinning bones, but had very robust ligament attachments. Princess Itaweret was a young woman aged between 20 and 34 who survived broken ribs and foot fractures; her skeleton shows she was a skilled archer.” 

All four sisters’ bones showed signs of physically active lifestyles consistent with weapons training.

“We found pronounced development in the upper limbs of these individuals, which correlates to repetitive, high-intensity actions like pulling a bowstring or stabilizing a weapon, proving these activities were habitual throughout their lives,” explained Hashesh. “This directly explains the presence of bows, arrows, and maces in the women’s tombs; these were not just symbolic gifts but tools they actively used.”

A Hard Life, Even for Royalty

The researchers suspect that either a blow or a fall caused Princess Itaweret’s broken ribs, and noted that such injuries were common across all the sets of remains. They also discovered evidence of inbreeding, as the sisters’ spinal abnormalities suggest their parents were closely related.

“These injuries were most likely caused by accidents, falls, hard blows, or other impacts linked to an active lifestyle, whether through hunting, military training, or other demanding activities,” said Hashesh. “What is remarkable is that the injuries healed well, which suggests they had access to advanced medical care for their time.”

Work on these mummies remains incomplete, however, hampered by the loss of the skulls. Moving forward, the researchers would like to conduct a stable isotope analysis to better understand the nutritional deficiencies detected in the bones. 

“Our dream would be to go far beyond simply identifying the Dahshur royals,” said Hashesh. “We would try to tell their full life stories, their families, health, and even their political roles, with as much detail as possible. Beyond the science, we would preserve the remains, create 3D prints for teaching and virtual exhibitions, and display them alongside their jewelry, weapons, and funerary objects. All of this would be done with respect, ensuring the remains are presented ethically, just as they were originally buried.”

“Their objects and jewelry are truly fascinating, breathtaking in their craftsmanship. Yet, while archaeologists have long focused on preserving these treasures, the people themselves were often forgotten. Our study seeks to change that.”

The paper, “Bioarcheological Reassessment of Dahshur Royal Skeletal Remains from the Late Middle Kingdom (c. 1850 to 1700 BCE),” appeared in Frontiers in Environmental Archaeology on July 17, 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 a major new confirmation of Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, the LARES-2 (Laser Relativity Satellite 2) has measured frame dragging around Earth with unprecedented precision.

Ignazio Ciufolini of China’s Wuhan Institute of Physics and Mathematics led the team behind a new paper published in Nature reporting the most precise measurement of the effect to date. The researchers reduced the uncertainty to just 0.2 percent, compared with several percent—and in some cases as much as 10 percent—in previous measurements.

Also known as the Lense-Thirring effect, named for the physicists who modeled it in 1918, frame dragging is the pull of a rotating mass on spacetime. The phenomenon was first predicted in Einstein’s Theory of Relativity.

Seeking Frame Dragging

Frame dragging becomes more pronounced around faster-spinning and more massive objects. For this reason, its effects are far stronger around black holes than around comparatively small bodies such as Earth. Some black holes possess millions or even billions of times the Sun’s mass, producing an immense distortion of the surrounding spacetime.

LARES-2, a satellite developed by the Italian Space Agency, made the new measurement possible. Its appearance has been compared to a golf ball or a disco ball, with its 303 corner-cube retroreflectors creating golf-ball-like divots on its surface, which is composed of a nickel-chromium alloy called Inconel 718.

The spacecraft is remarkably simple, with no thrusters, solar panels, or onboard electronics cluttering its compact, 16-inch-wide frame. Despite its small size, LARES-2 weighs roughly 650 pounds. This combination gives it the lowest area-to-mass ratio of any satellite in medium Earth orbit, minimizing the influence of nongravitational forces on its motion.

Measuring Frame Dragging

The effect of gravitation on the object was then measured by bombarding it with ground-based lasers, which the retroreflectors bounce back to the surface. Ciufolini’s team collected roughly 200,000 of these observations between July 2022 and June 2025, with one-millimeter precision, forming the dataset from which they calculated the frame-dragging effect.

The method presents a significant challenge, however. Earth is an oblate spheroid, with bulging sides created by centrifugal force, rather than a perfect sphere, which produces Newtonian forces that interfere with the frame-dragging signal. To mitigate this issue, the researchers used another satellite in a supplementary orbit, canceling out the effect of the opposing Newtonian forces.

That second satellite was NASA’s LAGEOS, launched in 1976. The orbital planes of LAGEOS and LARES-2 differ by 180.01 degrees—remarkably close to the ideal separation of 180 degrees.

A Final Challenge

One additional complication remained: the K1 lunisolar tide, a variation in Earth’s gravitational field produced by the combined influence of the Moon and Sun. Time provided the solution. Over the tide’s 1,050-day precession cycle, its effects average out and can be removed from the data.

After accounting for these sources of interference, the researchers measured a drift of 61.3 milliarcseconds per year in the satellites’ orbits caused by Earth’s frame dragging. The result closely matches the value predicted by general relativity, with only a narrow margin of uncertainty.

The researchers say the true value of their finding lies not just in confirming general relativity, but also in limiting the scope of the Chern-Simons theory, which seeks to reconcile general relativity with quantum mechanics for a Theory of Everything. Of more limited concern, the work also provided the most precise K1 tide measurement ever recorded, which could prove important to future Earth science research.

The paper, “LARES-2 Satellite Measures Frame-Dragging Effect Around the Earth,” appeared in Nature on July 8, 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.

James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) observations have astronomers on the brink of solving another long-standing astronomical mystery: how do supermassive black holes feed?

Astronomers from the Université de Montréal led an international team in the new research, reported in a recent paper in The Astrophysical Journal, which presents the clearest images ever recorded of gaseous filaments connecting a galaxy’s atmosphere to the rotating disk that the supermassive black hole feeds on.

The team’s analysis of the data paves the way toward understanding how black holes consume matter, a mystery that has stumped astronomers for decades.

Strange Black Hole Feeding

“JWST observations are offering us thousands of new facts and measurements, and I can report it’s a lot to absorb,” said co-author Megan Donahue, MSU University Distinguished Professor of physics and astronomy. “We are all working together to solve the astrophysics questions about how these black holes get their fuel and how they interact with their host galaxy.”

Supermassive black holes anchor most galaxies in the universe, with masses ranging from millions to billions of times that of the Sun. In active galactic nuclei (AGN), these central black holes both consume enormous amounts of surrounding material and unleash powerful jets that shape the galaxies around them.

This activity presents a longstanding puzzle. Because an AGN’s jets heat the surrounding gas, they should effectively cut off the black hole’s fuel supply, leaving astronomers to wonder how it continues to accrete matter.

Testing a Hypothesis

To investigate, the researchers tested the leading explanation: that heated gas eventually cools, condenses into long filaments, and falls back toward the galactic center, replenishing the black hole’s supply of material.

They turned JWST toward one of the best natural laboratories for studying AGN: the galaxy NGC 4696, located at the heart of the Centaurus Cluster, roughly 145 million light-years from Earth.

Using JWST’s NIRSpec instrument, the team collected eight hours of observations, mapping the motion of gas deep within the galaxy—where the black hole’s gravitational influence dominates—at a resolution of about 30 light-years.

Their observations revealed an 800-light-year-wide disk of gas orbiting the supermassive black hole at roughly 600 kilometers per second. Connected to this rapidly rotating disk was a large infalling filament, funneling gas inward to feed the AGN.

Feeding Cycle of the Black Hole

The discovery fills in a crucial missing piece of the puzzle surrounding how supermassive black holes sustain themselves. The researchers propose that after the black hole injects energy into the surrounding gas, heating it, that material eventually cools and collapses into thin filaments stretching hundreds of thousands of light-years. Guided by magnetic fields, these filaments then fall toward the galaxy’s center, where they accumulate in the rotating accretion disk.

The team also ran a series of computer simulations based on this model and found that the predicted behavior closely matched what JWST observed. While additional observations will be needed to confirm the results, the findings provide strong support for the filament-feeding hypothesis.

“It’s been really exciting to participate in this project,” co-author Mark Voit, an MSU Physics and Astronomy Professor, said in a statement.

“Calculations done by our Michigan State group predict that magnetic fields should help feed the universe’s biggest black holes by channeling cool gas toward them, and it’s amazing to see that happening in these JWST images,” he added.

The paper, “JWST Reveals How Lack Holes Are Fed: Kiloparsec-Scale Multiphase Filaments Feed Sub-Kiloparsec Circumnuclear Disks,” appeared in The Astrophysical Journal Letters on July 14, 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.

A Maya astronomer’s identity has been revealed for the first time, discovered in an inscription at the Xultun site in Guatemala, finally revealing a name behind their storied knowledge.

Despite the Maya’s renowned knowledge of math and astronomy, no individual had ever been directly associated with those accomplishments, unlike figures such as the Greek scholars Ptolemy or Archimedes.

Now, in a recent paper published in Antiquity, an international team of archaeologists has identified a name linked to the Maya’s sophisticated mathematical knowledge: Sak Tahn Waax.

Advanced Maya Knowledge

From around 2000 BCE until the Spanish conquest in the 16th century, the Maya flourished across the Yucatán Peninsula, building a civilization renowned not only for its political and economic power, but also for its remarkable scientific and mathematical achievements. Although relatively few Maya texts survived the Spanish conquest, those that remain—along with archaeological evidence—show that the Maya precisely calculated the length of the solar year and carefully tracked the movements of the Moon and Venus across the sky.

The art, architecture, and glyphic texts of the Classic Maya likewise reflect a sophisticated understanding of the natural world, interwoven with Indigenous cosmological traditions.

That expertise shaped nearly every aspect of Maya society. Their intricate calendars guided agriculture, informed religious observances, and influenced political life. Yet despite the importance of this knowledge, the individuals responsible for developing it have largely remained anonymous.

A Name Revealed

Meaning “white-chested fox,” the name Sak Tahn Waax appears on a wall engraved with mathematical formulas, which archaeologists dated to the eighth century CE using inscribed dates and radiocarbon analysis. Researchers believe the room likely served as either a classroom or a workshop for producing books.

The inscription was first documented shortly after excavations began at Xultun in 2011. Although the team initially focused on other priorities at the site, deciphering the text remained an enduring objective.

Reading the inscription required years of laboratory work using color scans and multispectral imaging. After reconstructing the wall’s faded engravings, the researchers determined that the text contained instructions for synchronizing the planetary cycles of Mars and Venus with the Maya calendar, concluding with the signature, “so says Sak Tahn Waax.”

“It’s really elegant, complex math,” said co-author Heather Hurst, an archaeologist at Skidmore College. “That’s why he’s signing it.”

Maya Signatures

The strangest thing about the discovery may be how common signatures are in other elements of Maya life. Artists and scribes often signed ceramics, while important political and military figures’ names often adorn stelae and buildings. Despite this propensity to name individual Maya on things, those responsible for their legendary knowledge of math and science largely remain unknown.

The archaeologists behind this new study now suggest that those names may be available after all; it is only that researchers have not known where to look.

“There’s good evidence for codex book production,” said lead author Franco Rossi, an archaeologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “So if there’s going to be a name … this would be the most logical place.”

The researchers hope the discovery will inspire a deeper appreciation for Maya history and for the scholars whose work shaped the civilization.

“I would have loved to see Sak Tahn Waax and Ptolemy hanging out,” Hurst concluded. “They would have had a great discussion.”

The paper, “The Identification and Work of an Eighth-Century Maya Mathematician,” appeared in Antiquity on July 14, 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.

For decades, physicists have debated Richard Feynman’s famous Sprinkler Problem—the question of how a reverse sprinkler would behave—and now researchers may have finally found the answer.

Made famous in Feynman’s 1985 memoir, Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!, the problem concerns the spin direction of a sprinkler-like device inside a pool that draws water inward instead of spreading it out. The researchers revealed their experimental results, based on tests with a variety of custom sprinklers, in a recent paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, adding new life to the long-standing physics debate.

Feynman Experiments

“This work provides the experimental answer for Feynman’s Sprinkler Problem by showing, across several sprinkler types, how the angular momentum of water flows drives sprinklers’ rotation,” said senior author Leif Ristroph, an associate professor at New York University’s Courant Institute School of Mathematics, Computing, and Data Science.

The significance of the work extends well beyond an esoteric question about a hypothetical device, providing new insights into the physics of fluid dynamics. Feynman famously attempted to investigate the problem experimentally during the 1940s, though his apparatus reportedly failed dramatically before producing a definitive result. During his lifetime, Feynman discouraged naming the problem after himself, noting that it built upon ideas first explored by physicist Ernst Mach in the 1880s.

“Our findings provide a firmer understanding of how components respond to fluid flows—knowledge that can guide future engineering and technological advances for devices, such as turbines, that convert these flows into energy,” said co-author Brennan Sprinkle, an assistant professor at Colorado School of Mines.

Exploring Feynman

This isn’t the team’s first work on Feynman’s Sprinkler Problem, as it builds on what they reported in an earlier 2024 paper. Unlike Feynman himself, the researchers managed to make their reverse sprinkler rotate, leading to intriguing new physics discoveries. In that work, they discovered that a reverse sprinkler would operate much like a conventional one, though at about 50 times the slower rate.

While traditional sprinklers act like a rocket of water, the Feynman sprinkler is comparable to an inside-out rocket, shooting towards the junction of the arms at the device’s center. Inside that central chamber, the team discovered something interesting: the water jets do not collide head-on, which produces the sprinkler’s reverse rotation, in what the researchers dubbed the momentum flux theory.

That 2024 study was limited to traditional sprinklers with S-shaped arms, leaving the researchers to ponder how alternate shapes would impact the water flow. After fabricating their own series of sprinkler designs, the researchers tested water flow in both forward and reverse directions, measuring torque, flow rate, and rotational motion.

Testing Theories

One of the theories they tested was Ernest Mach’s 1883 theory that the fluid and sprinkler would swirl in opposite directions, but they found it did not align with the reverse rotations and torques observed in their experiments. They also tested a theory originally attributed to Feynman and later refined by others, which suggested that water flow at the outer edges of the sprinkler arms drove rotation; however, the team’s observations showed this is not the case.

Their observations supported the team’s existing momentum flux theory in both the forward and reverse directions, across all sprinkler shapes. According to their work, the shape of the sprinkler arms controls the flow of the water jet.

“By showing that momentum flux is the answer to Feynman’s Sprinkler Problem,” Ristroph concluded, “our findings address a long-standing open problem in flow physics and provide useful knowledge about how these devices work and their effectiveness.

The paper, “Geometry Controls Momentum Flux in the Sprinkler Problem,” appeared in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on July 13, 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 Israel’s Qafzeh cave, archaeologists have discovered an intriguing set of ancient human remains that reveal a story of illness, violence, death, and survival in the remote past.

The international team of archaeologists from Centro Nacional de Investigación sobre la Evolución Humana (CENIEH) and Tel Aviv University revealed their analysis of ancient human fossil remains, known as Qafzeh 25, in a recent paper published in Scientific Reports. 

The findings provide rare evidence of interpersonal violence, care for the injured, and early funerary practices in a human population that lived between 92,000 and 145,000 years ago.

Analyzing Ancient Human Remains

The researchers used a range of techniques to examine one particularly intriguing skull, including high-resolution micro-computed tomography (microCT) alongside macroscopic and microscopic analyses. Their investigation revealed a linear lesion across the mandible and lower premolars, with characteristics consistent with trauma inflicted by a sharp object.

Despite the severity of the injury, the researchers concluded that the individual survived the ordeal based on evidence of bone remodeling. The extent of healing suggests the person lived for a considerable period after suffering the wound.

Although the available evidence does not allow archaeologists to determine exactly how the injury occurred, they consider interpersonal violence the most likely explanation. The discovery is particularly significant because evidence of sharp-force trauma in Middle Paleolithic human remains is exceedingly rare.

Never-Before-Seen Conditions

Beyond the apparent head injury, the Qafzeh 25 skull yielded another remarkable discovery. Detailed examination of the teeth revealed dental conditions that had not previously been documented in humans of this antiquity.

The microCT scan revealed a hidden carious lesion in a lower premolar, along with enamel defects. These sorts of tooth decay issues are uncommon in early homo sapiens, as they are largely caused by bacteria that thrive on sugars. Before the advent of agriculture and later processed carbohydrates and refined sugars, such tooth decay was rare due to diets high in meats, nuts, and fibrous vegetables, which helped clean the teeth.

Ancient Human Funerary Practices

Looking beyond the skull, the researchers also examined the broader funerary context of the skeleton in an effort to reconstruct the burial practices of these ancient humans.

A broader analysis of the entire skeleton suggests it was deliberately buried, as it lacks evidence of carnivore predation or damage consistent with exposure to the elements. According to the researchers, this makes Qafzeh Cave one of the most important sites in the world for studying Homo sapiens’ earliest internment practices and the relationship not just between the living and the dead, but also between the living and the dying.

“These findings provide new evidence in the ongoing debate about the origins of complex behaviours such as interpersonal violence, the care of injured or ill individuals, and funerary practices—fundamental aspects for understanding the social and cultural evolution of our species,” said lead author Ana Pantoja Pérez, a member of the DEATHREVOL research group.

The find represents one of the earliest known well-preserved human populations outside of Africa at this time, residing in the Levant at least 90,000 years ago. With evidence of a healed traumatic injury, unusual dental disease, and intentional burial, the Qafzeh 25 skeleton offers a rare glimpse into the lives—and deaths—of some of our earliest ancestors.

The paper, “A Taphonomic Reassessment of Qafzeh 25 and Its Implications for Violence, Health and Funerary Practices,” appeared in Scientific Reports on June 30, 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.

NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is celebrating four years of unexpectedly strong performance by providing a deep new view into one of the universe’s most familiar galaxies: Centaurus A.

Typically, Centaurus A’s thick dust obscures astronomers’ attempts to peer into it, yet the JWST’s near- and mid-infrared sensitivity allows scientists to see more of the galaxy than ever before. 

In new images released by NASA to celebrate JWST’s four years of impressive discoveries, the most powerful telescope ever constructed reveals the dense collection of stars that make up the ever-changing Centaurus A galaxy.

Inside Centaurus A

Due to two crucial factors, Centaurus A is an extremely interesting galaxy for astronomers. It is highly active, offering an important opportunity to monitor galaxy and black hole growth while being relatively close by, at just 11 million light-years away—a highly unusual combination.

The history of imaging Centaurus A is marked by questions, which JWST has now begun to answer. Webb’s predecessor, Hubble, could only view visible light in its examinations, leaving the galaxy’s central regions obscured by dust. Additionally, the Spitzer Space Telescope lacked sufficient resolution to resolve individual stars in infrared, although the data it collected provided new discoveries of massive dust structures.

Powerful events are on display in Centaurus A, the aftermath of a collision with another galaxy and a supermassive black hole’s active feeding. As the black hole releases powerful jets and gushes energy, it shapes the surrounding galaxy, which still retains an unusual shape left by its two-billion-year-old merger.

“No single telescope tells the whole story,” said Shawn Domagal-Goldman, division director, Astrophysics, NASA Headquarters in Washington. “Discoveries build over time, and new observatories expand on the foundations laid by earlier missions. Webb represents the most powerful step forward yet, opening a window into wavelengths and details never before accessible. This allows astronomers to examine structures and processes that other telescopes could not see.”

JWST Reveals Amazing Structures

Thanks to JWST’s mid-infrared capabilities, astronomers captured detailed images of Centaurus A’s dust structures and were surprised and confused by the glowing shapes revealed. One unusual feature is a band cutting across the galactic center, shaped like a warped parallelogram, with wispy tendrils stretching out of it.

Another feature, shaped like the letter “S,” also confounds astronomers, leaving many questions about the influence of both the central black hole and the galactic merger on its shape and evolution. 

A large portion of the red glowing dots in the image above represent dusty areas, either dust-rich stars or stellar nurseries, both important sources of dust for star formation, and therefore, the continuance of the galaxy.

Single Stars and JWST

The JWST’s incredible resolution is allowing astronomers to study the galaxy star by star for the first time. Combining images from the MIRI (Mid-Infrared Instrument) and the NIRCam (Near-Infrared Camera) revealed tightly packed individual stars.

This view of individual stars is essential for what some astronomers call “galactic archaeology,” by providing important clues that help scientists reconstruct the galaxy’s formation and evolution. This galactic timeline is made up of many important pieces revealed by individual stars, such as when the oldest stars formed, when star formation slowed, when the merger reignited a powerful burst of star formation, and how that collision stirred the galaxy’s gases, further accelerating star formation.

Capturing these details requires spectroscopy, a technique where light is broken down to reveal detailed information about distant stars. Also using this technique, researchers can gain important information about the central black hole, identifying that it can both compress gas to accelerate star formation and push gas away to limit it.

On its fourth anniversary, the unprecedented details now revealed about one of our most interesting galactic neighbors continue to underscore the JWST’s incredible promise as NASA’s premier space observatory.

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.