Astronomers searching for extraterrestrial intelligence have traditionally focused on a specific, narrow band of the radio spectrum. However, a new survey presented at the Royal Astronomical Society‘s National Astronomy Meeting (NAM2026) in Birmingham suggests that this approach may overlook a significant portion of the available frequencies.

The frequencies most often investigated by SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) programs are those between 1.42 and 1.66 GHz. This range, known as the ‘water hole’, is situated between the natural radio emissions of hydrogen and hydroxyl, the two molecules that make up water. Astronomers have regarded this quiet section of the spectrum as a reasonable place for interstellar communication, because any civilization acquainted with these molecules would probably also decide to send and receive signals in search of in that specific region.

Louisa Mason, who is carrying out research as a PhD student at the University of Manchester, focused on investigating frequencies outside the water hole range. To carry out the first SETI survey with that telescope, she used archived data from the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) in Chile. She analyzed data originally collected for other astronomical studies instead of requesting new observation time.

Hunting for Signals in Unclaimed Territory

Mason focused on two narrow frequency bands in the ALMA Band 3 data, looking for narrowband signals that might be the result of technology rather than natural astrophysical origins. In the four observations that she examined, she did not discover any candidates for technosignatures above her detection threshold.

“For decades, SETI searches have concentrated on a relatively small part of the radio spectrum. We wanted to ask what might happen if we looked somewhere very different,” Mason said. “The millimetre and submillimetre radio bands remain almost completely unexplored for SETI, so this is really about opening up a new area of parameter space to search.”

A lack of results does not rule out the possibility of alien transmitters. It only means that none appeared in this specific region of the sky and frequency range. Mason describes the survey as a proof of concept, showing that high-frequency telescopes like ALMA could play a much larger role in future SETI efforts.

A Much Bigger Haystack Than Anyone Realized

The research also revealed a gap in how astronomers count the stars they have actually examined. Each time a telescope observes a single target, it also collects light from many other stars in the same field of view. Researchers refer to this as “stellar bycatch.”

Previous SETI surveys have made this bycatch estimate based on the Gaia catalog, which is the European Space Agency‘s survey of the stars. However, Gaia has certain limitations such as its magnitude cutoffs, uncertainties when measuring distant stars, and difficulties in crowded areas. To overcome these limitations, Mason used the Besançon Galactic Model, a simulation of the Milky Way’s stellar population that includes stars that are too faint or too far away for Gaia to detect.

When Mason applied the model to a previous survey of 1,327 telescope observations, the estimated number of stars observed increased from about 288,000 with Gaia to over 6.1 million with the galactic simulation.

“One of the most exciting things about this work is realizing that we’ve surveyed many more stars than initially thought,” Mason said. “Even a very small observation can contain a huge number and diversity of stars that we might never have intended to study. By combining high-frequency observations with galactic simulations, we can better understand exactly what we’ve searched and where we should look next.”

Recommendations for SETI

Mason carried out this research in collaboration with Professor Michael Garrett, Dr. Andrew Siemion, and Dr. Kelvin Wandia. The team argues that expanding both the radio frequencies searched and the number of stars included could reduce the influence of human assumptions on SETI strategies. Whether these broader searches will detect technosignatures missed by traditional water-hole surveys remains unknown.

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

In May 2024, the strongest geomagnetic storm in two decades pushed the Northern Lights far enough south to become visible across much of the UK and beyond. Now, a study that appeared in Royal Society Open Science reveals that the incident also exposed important gaps in how the UK monitors and prepares its power grid, satellites, and aviation for future extreme space weather.

The storm reached a G5 rating, which is the highest level on the geomagnetic storm scale used by NOAA, as a result of five coronal mass ejections reaching Earth within a period of two days. Researchers with the Space Environment Impacts Expert Group (SEIEG) stated that although the storm caused only relatively minor disruption, it revealed shortcomings in the UK’s capacity to monitor and prepare for more severe space weather events.

The SEIEG then made 14 recommendations to the UK government addressing matters such as grid monitoring, satellite operations, and space weather forecasting. Richard Horne, chair of SEIEG and head of space weather at the British Antarctic Survey, recently gave a presentation on the findings at the Royal Astronomical Society’s National Astronomy Meeting in Birmingham.

A Storm That Tested the Limits

Researchers estimate that the May 2024 storm was a one-in-13-year event. By contrast, a Carrington-class storm, like the 1859 event that defines the standard for extreme space weather, has about a 1% chance of occurring in any given year. This means that a much more disruptive storm is still possible. The SEIEG report uses the 2024 storm as a practical example to assess how prepared the UK is for a more severe event.

“The Northern Lights were the most visible sign of the May 2024 storm, but they were only one part of a much broader space weather event that tested the UK’s critical infrastructure. The storm highlighted where we need better monitoring, better forecasting and more research so we’re prepared for a more severe event in the future,” Horne said.

The Blind Spot in Britain’s Power Grid

Geomagnetic storms create electric fields at Earth’s surface that can drive geomagnetically induced currents (GICs) through long conductive systems, including power transmission networks. High levels of GICs can overheat transformers, disrupt their normal function, and in severe cases cause damage that may lead to failures across parts of the power grid.

Currently, there are no GIC monitors in operation in England or Wales. The SEIEG report recommends establishing a network of monitors to assess how much current various transformer designs can tolerate before sustaining damage.

New Zealand as the Model

The report cites New Zealand as an example of effective monitoring. Since it is at a similar geomagnetic latitude, the country faces similar space weather risks, and its grid operators monitor around 93 transformers across 28 substations. Unlike in England and Wales, where monitoring is absent, these operators have verified their models using actual measurements and implemented operational mitigation procedures during the May 2024 storm.

Crowded Skies, Rising Risk

The storm also affected satellites in orbit. Almost 5,000 satellites adjusted their orbits during the storm. Satellites licensed in the UK saw their number of collision warnings rise by 35%. Since there are now so many objects in low-Earth orbit, a serious storm could raise the risk of collisions, possibly resulting in debris and causing additional incidents.

Preparing for Future Storms

SEIEG also recommends improving forecasts of coronal mass ejections and solar energetic particle events to provide two to three hours of warning before severe geomagnetic storms reach Earth. Improved forecasts could allow grid operators, satellite controllers, and airlines to take protective measures before severe geomagnetic storms arrive. 

“One of the biggest lessons from the May 2024 storm is that we still have important gaps in our monitoring and understanding of how severe space weather could affect UK infrastructure,” said Horne. “We were fortunate that this was not a one-in-100-year event. We now have an opportunity to strengthen our monitoring, improve our forecasts and make sure the UK is better prepared before a much larger storm occurs.”

The 14 recommendations are now under review by the UK government. Whether these steps will be taken before a Carrington-scale storm occurs remains uncertain. With this extreme class of storms remaining a realistic possibility, the researchers argue that improving monitoring and forecasting now could reduce the impact of a future extreme event.

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

When the brain tracks time, it must decide whether its regions should rely on a shared timing signal or tack time separately. A recent study in Nature Communications provides evidence that the brain uses both approaches, switching between them depending on the situation.

A group at the Institute of Science Tokyo simultaneously measured the activity of thousands of neurons in two mouse brain regions and found that the areas sometimes shared timing information but maintained more independent representations at other times. The researchers, led by Associate Professor Riichiro Hira, maintained that this flexibility enables the brain to remain stable as it adapts to changing requirements.

A Task Built to Catch the Brain Switching Modes

Hira’s team created a task to highlight this timing mystery. They trained mice to expect rewards at intervals that switched between 6 and 12 seconds, without any break to mark the end of one trial and the start of the next. Since there was no pause, the mice had to keep updating their internal sense of time throughout the experiment, instead of resetting their mental stopwatch for each new trial.

The mice eventually figured out the pattern. At first they expected a reward every six seconds even if the time they had to wait was longer than this, but by the end of the training session, their behavior indicated that they had learned to anticipate both reward intervals. This showed that the mice were capable of keeping track of both durations and of predicting which one would come next.

While the mice performed the task, the researchers recorded activity in their secondary motor cortex and the posterior parietal cortex using wide-field two-photon calcium imaging. Both regions play key roles in planning, prediction, and working memory.

Two Regions, Two Kinds of Mistakes

The neurons fired in sequence in each brain area, with different cells becoming active at different times. This sequence showed that each region was monitoring the passage of time.

The researchers also identified two kinds of errors in the neural activity. In some cases, both areas made the same mistake when assessing the passage of time. These coherent errors suggested that both regions sometimes shared the same timing drift. In other instances, only one region was inaccurate while the other remained correct. These independent errors suggested that one region could temporarily maintain a different timing representation from the other. Independent errors were more frequent than coherent ones, and this ratio remained the same in all the mice examined.

If the brain regions were just randomly out of sync, you’d expect the ratio to change. However, it didn’t, which suggests that the brain has a built-in way to balance working together and working independently.

Modeling the Switch Between Coherence and Independence

To identify this mechanism, the team built a computational model with two recurrent neural networks linked by sparse, long-range connections and exposed to the same background noise. The model produced the same 2-to-1 ratio of independent to coherent errors seen in the mice.

The model also discovered that the limited connections between the networks tended to cause them to become synchronized, while the common noise caused them to move in separate directions. Hira provided an explanation of the interaction saying, “We found sparse inter-regional connectivity promotes synchronization between the two regions, whereas widespread fluctuations prevent complete synchronization, allowing each region to preserve its own temporal representation.” Neither force takes precedence; instead, a compromise is reached which allows communication between the regions.

The findings challenge the idea that brain regions rely on a single synchronized timing system. It indicates that the brain can adjust how different parts are coordinated, rather than just turning that coordination on or off.

What a Flexible Clock Could Mean for the Brain

Hira’s team believes that there are implications beyond simple timing circuits. “In the future, our results may contribute to a better understanding of cognition, neurological disorders involving disrupted inter-regional coordination, and the development of brain-inspired artificial intelligence and robotic control systems that combine stability with flexibility,” said Hira.

This last idea may prove most important in the years ahead. Engineers building AI and robotic systems face a similar challenge: how to let separate parts work on their own when needed, yet still come back into sync. The mouse brain shows that sparse connections and shared background fluctuations can achieve this balance. This could point to a design principle that even applies to systems with no biological components.

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

Recent research from North Carolina State University, published in Parasites & Vectors and Royal Society Open Science, suggests that localized mosquito-control practices may create conditions that favor the evolution of insecticide resistance in mosquito populations.

Aedes albopictus, commonly known as the tiger mosquito, is an invasive species that has become widespread across much of the eastern United States. It breeds in a variety of artificial and natural containers that collect standing water, such as gutters and buckets.

In North Carolina, control of this mosquito is often managed at the household level, either through private mosquito-control services or by individuals applying pyrethroid insecticides. These chemicals are widely used because they are effective against adult mosquitoes and considered among the safer insecticides for use around people, pets, and homes, but they are typically applied without coordination among neighboring properties.

Modeling Mosquito Mutations

In one study, a team led by Jennifer Baltzegar tracked the emergence and spread of a resistance mutation known as F1534S in tiger mosquitoes in Wake County between 2016 and 2024. They looked at the F1534S mutation, which researchers have associated with knockdown resistance.

The mutation was absent from the Wake County samples collected in 2016 and 2017. In 2023, the researchers detected the resistance-associated mutation in 84% of the sampled residential areas, and they found it in 39% of the mosquitoes they sampled. The researchers’ models indicated that the resistance allele was under strong selection pressure, meaning mosquitoes carrying it had a significant evolutionary advantage in the local environment.

“Homeowners with money will pay to spray for mosquitoes, which selects for localized resistance,” said Martha Burford Reiskind, associate professor of biological sciences at NC State and corresponding author on both papers. “Over time, as more and more resistance builds up in the population, it will become harder to control populations. The insecticides will no longer be as effective.”

Wealth as a Selection Pressure

A second study, led by Cole Butler, looked at how resistance is distributed across neighborhoods with different property values. The team sampled mosquito populations across 31 residential blocks throughout Raleigh, covering a range of property values. They found that neighborhoods with higher total property values, which the researchers used as an indicator of likely spending on pest control, showed higher frequencies of resistance. While the study did not track individual spraying habits, the pattern suggests that greater private investment in mosquito control may be contributing to the spread of resistance.

That pattern breaks from how insecticide resistance usually spreads globally. “We see the rapid rise of pesticide resistance in places like South America and Asia where there is continuous spraying in some countries,” Burford Reiskind said. “But resistance driven by private mosquito control is novel in the contiguous U.S., to our knowledge.”

How the Mutation Actually Works

The F1534S mutation occurs in the mosquito’s gene for the voltage-gated sodium channel, which is the same site where pyrethroid insecticides act. This genetic alteration decreases the mosquito’s sensitivity to pyrethroids and thus enables some individuals to survive exposure to insecticides. The resistance allele is only partially recessive, so not all mosquitoes display the full effect. As a result, the mutation can spread through a population before resistance is noticeable.

“This mutation is often the first to show up when there’s insecticide resistance,” Burford Reiskind said.

Where the Research Goes Next

Beyond being a nuisance, tiger mosquitoes can transmit diseases such as dengue, Zika, chikungunya, and dog heartworm. While the current studies did not assess disease transmission directly, Michael Reiskind, a professor at NC State and co-author of both papers, notes that future research will expand to include a broader range of neighborhoods. “We want to make a better effort to get a diversity of neighborhoods, age, and wealth to extend our findings and see whether they work at different housing densities and wealth levels,” Reiskind said.

The researchers recommend using integrated pest management techniques since these methods decrease the need for chemical insecticides. They stressed that eliminating standing water where larvae develop is a key preventive measure. Effective pest control means addressing the entire life cycle and not depending just on chemical insecticides.

Putting these integrated approaches into practice may be challenging since many suburban homeowners already rely on seasonal mosquito-spraying services. The rapid development of resistance in Wake County suggests that managing this trend will likely require cooperation among homeowners, pest control companies, and public health agencies. Achieving that cooperation may require these groups to rethink how they manage private mosquito control.

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

At the site of Gradište, close to the village of Mlado Nagoričane, archaeologists from North Macedonia have uncovered what they believe was a ritual dining complex associated with a Hellenistic sanctuary, providing new evidence of elite religious practices and extensive trade connections more than 2,300 years ago.

The discovery was made this year as part of an excavation campaign carried out by the National Institution Museum of Kumanovo.

This campaign focused on the Lower Terrace of the settlement. Earlier excavations had already uncovered rock-cut structures dating from the fourth century BC, stone features similar to tumuli, and a series of ritual deposits. The current excavation builds on this previous work and supports the view that the area served as an important religious center rather than a typical residential district.

A Goddess on a Storage Jar

To the east of a previously identified burial mound, the team found the walls of a building full of broken pithoi and other storage jars. One of these jars contained a decorated surface featuring finger-ring impressions showing a female deity.

Archaeologists believe the deity is Demeter, the ancient Greek Olympian goddess of agriculture, the harvest, and fertility, shown holding a cornucopia and pouring a libation from a kantharos onto a tripod. The team sees the imagery as strong evidence that ritual ceremonies occurred at the site.

Feasting in the Shadow of the Sanctuary Wall

In more southern areas, the excavators discovered part of a peribolos wall, a boundary intended to separate the sacred area from the rest of the settlement. Nearby, they came across a small room that archaeologists believe served as a space for ritual dining and symposium-style feasting linked to ceremonies within the sanctuary.

Although the room itself was modest in size, its contents suggest it served an important ceremonial purpose. Archaeologists found large amounts of animal bones, including those of wild boar and goats, suggesting communal feasting formed part of the site’s religious activities. Along with the bones, archaeologists recovered a notably rich assortment of imported Hellenistic tableware, including West Slope gutti, decorated kantharoi, and black-glazed echinus bowls with palmette designs, as well as amphorae, hydriae, additional drinking vessels, lamps, and terracotta figurines.

“The room was most likely associated with rituals performed within the temenos and appears to have been used for ritual dining,” the excavation team said, drawing a direct comparison to the Sanctuary of Demeter and Persephone at ancient Corinth.

A Couch Fit for a Deity

Another significant discovery was the architectural remains of a dining table, together with ornate fragments from a ceremonial dining couch, or kline. The finds include a molded couch leg and an appliqué depicting a reclining deity holding a phiale, a shallow vessel used for libations.

Researchers suggest the figure was part of a wider scene depicting a sympotic procession or a gathering of the gods. Ornaments of this type are uncommon outside of elite Hellenistic burial settings. Archaeologists have previously uncovered similar kline ornaments at wealthy Hellenistic burial sites in Pella and the royal tombs at Aigai.

A Growing Picture of Gradište

For a long time now, Gradište has been yielding very significant discoveries. Previous excavations at Gradište uncovered a peristyle building decorated with painted plaster, along with imported amphorae and finely crafted ceramics. Together with the latest discoveries, the finds suggest the settlement was well connected to the broader cultural and commercial networks of the Hellenistic world.

Future excavations will focus on expanding the newly discovered buildings and determining whether a temple once stood within this part of the sanctuary.

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

Galaxies, stars, and living cells are all examples of local order emerging in the universe. At first glance, that seems to contradict one of physics’ oldest principles.

However, a recent study in Physical Review D offers a mathematical explanation for how these structures form while still obeying the second law of thermodynamics.

The second law of thermodynamics states that entropy, or disorder, in an isolated system always increases over time. Einstein famously said that “the second law of thermodynamics occupies a unique position among the laws of Nature,” reflecting how fundamental he believed the principle to be.

In its early days, the universe was smooth and uniform, with low entropy. As it expanded, gravity pulled gas into stars, stars into galaxies, and eventually made life possible. Each step seems to create order in one place, even though the universe as a whole became more disordered. Cosmologists have usually explained this by pointing to the universe’s growing volume.

Gravity as a Ledger, Not a Force

Mathematician Ginestra Bianconi at Queen Mary University of London addressed this problem with a framework called Gravity from Entropy. Rather than treating gravity as a fundamental force, the Gravity from Entropy framework proposes that it emerges from an information-based difference between two descriptions of spacetime geometry. One metric describes the actual shape of spacetime, while the other describes the geometry that matter and curvature would create. When these two match, gravity disappears. When they differ, gravity arises from the difference.

In the low-energy, weak-curvature limit, the framework reduces to general relativity. In the new study, Bianconi adds a thermodynamic perspective. She applies Gravity from Entropy to the standard model of an expanding universe and shows that the local geometric degrees of freedom follow the first law of thermodynamics, with their own temperature and pressure emerging from the equations.

Falling Density, Rising Total

One of the study’s central findings is the distinction between total entropy and entropy per unit volume. As the universe grows, the total entropy increases, just as the second law demands. However, the study found that entropy per unit volume decreases over time even as the universe’s total entropy continues to increase. Within the Gravity from Entropy framework, Bianconi proposes that this declining local entropy density may help explain how galaxies and other cosmic structures emerge.

The study also shows that these geometric temperatures change depending on what dominates the universe. In a universe dominated by matter or radiation, the temperature decreases over time. In a universe dominated by dark energy, like our own, they remain nearly constant. The framework even assigns a temperature and pressure to empty spacetime.

A Theory Still Waiting to Be Tested

“This work reveals how the Gravity from Entropy theory can tackle the challenging question of reconciling the second law of thermodynamics with the emergence of complexity in our universe,” stated Bianconi. “These results may open new avenues for investigating the long-standing problem of reconciling the foundations of cosmological irreversibility, the emergence of complex structures, and ultimately life with fundamental gravitational dynamics.”

So far, Gravity from Entropy has not been confirmed by observations. The theory makes predictions that future observations of large-scale cosmic structures and other gravitational phenomena could test. While it remains unproven, Bianconi believes it could offer a new way to link gravity, thermodynamics, quantum mechanics, and the rise of complexity in the universe.

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

For decades, scholars have debated whether the Qumran sect associated with the Dead Sea Scrolls actually used its unusual 364-day calendar, or viewed it as more of a theoretical ideal.

Now, a new study published in the Tarbiz Quarterly for Jewish Studies suggests that neither explanation is fully accurate. Instead, Prof. Eshbal Ratzon argues that the community used the calendar for a time before seasonal drift and changing Hasmonean politics prompted them to abandon the system.

A Calendar as a Religious Statement

Ratzon, a professor at Tel Aviv University, set out to answer a question that has puzzled scholars for decades. Unlike the approximately 365.25-day solar year, the Qumran calendar consisted of exactly 364 days. The calendar used 364 days because the number divides evenly into 52 seven-day weeks, so every festival would always fall on the same weekday each year.

To the Qumran sect, this order in the calendar demonstrated what they saw as God’s perfect design. They believed God set the calendar at Creation and that people could not change it. This belief clashed with Jerusalem’s religious leaders, whose priests used a lunisolar calendar that most Jewish people followed during the Second Temple period.

Reading the Evidence Differently

The mathematics that gave the calendar its perceived order also led to practical issues. A 364-day year lags behind the solar year by about a day and a quarter each year, causing festivals to drift by nearly a month over two decades. After several decades, a spring harvest festival could fall in winter. For a group that linked its holidays to agriculture, this gradual shift was a serious problem.

Two main theories have shaped the debate for years. One suggests that the sect occasionally added extra days to correct the drift, while the other argues that the 364-day calendar was only a theoretical model and not used in daily life. Ratzon argues that the Dead Sea Scrolls do not clearly support either view. Nearly twenty of the recovered scrolls concern calendars or astronomy, highlighting the importance of the subject within the community. The Book of Jubilees, a key text for the sect, goes further by criticizing the lunar calendar and presenting the 364-day system as the original calendar given to Moses at Sinai.

“The Qumran calendar has long been regarded as one of the Qumran sect’s defining features, but also as one of the most baffling mysteries of the Dead Sea Scrolls,” Ratzon said.

Why the Sect Moved On

Ratzon’s reconstruction sees the abandonment of the calendar as a two-stage process, rather than a single failure. The growing seasonal drift made the calendar increasingly impractical. At the same time, the sect’s relationship with the Hasmonean rulers improved under Alexander Jannaeus, who supported religious decisions closer to the sect’s views and disagreed with the Pharisees who led the Temple in Jerusalem.

According to Ratzon, improving relations with the Hasmonean rulers made it possible for the sect to adopt the Temple calendar for daily use, while still holding the 364-day system as an ideal. They believed it was valid at Creation and would be restored in the future.

The debate over the Qumran community has continued for decades. While Ratzon’s proposal does not settle that debate, it offers a new explanation for how a calendar once central to the sect’s identity could eventually become more of a religious ideal than a practical system.

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

A predatory sea worm known as Perinereis cultrifera possesses jaws that do not fit neatly into either biological or metallic categories. These jaws consist of structural proteins reinforced with metal ions, giving them mechanical properties unlike those of either conventional metals or ordinary biological tissue.

This unique combination of composition and mechanical behavior led researchers from TU Wien and the University of Vienna to propose an entirely new material classification. In a recent paper published in Biophysics Reviews, the team suggests that the creature’s jaws represent a distinct class of material, which they term bio-metal.

The jaws of bristle worms such as P. cultrifera are formed by linking structural proteins with metal ions, producing a material tough enough to crush and bite prey. Previous studies called these tissues metallike biomaterials, meaning they share some properties with metals, like strength or conductivity. The new study argues that this term is too broad. According to the researchers, a true bio-metal must meet three criteria: it must be hard, display specific strain mechanics, and have a well-defined ion-protein structure.

Hardness With a Metal Signature

To test if the jaw met these criteria, the researchers used nanoindentation, which means pressing a tiny probe into the tissue to measure its properties. They also conducted chemical tests and imaging at the same time. The results confirmed earlier findings that the jaw tips contain higher concentrations of metal ions than the center, likely making the tips harder.

When the probe pressed into the jaw at different depths, the researchers observed something called the Nix-Gao size effect. This effect, seen before in metals like copper and silver, means that smaller areas resist deformation more than larger ones. The reason is that strain gradients become larger in smaller regions, increasing resistance to deformation. Finding this metal-like behavior in worm jaws is one reason scientists have compared the material to metals.

Where the Metal Comparison Breaks Down

However, the jaw does not behave exactly like metals such as copper. Its elasticity changes depending on the size of the area tested, which is not seen in crystalline metals.

“Bristle worm jaws also showed size-dependent elasticity — this is a distinguishing feature of bio-metals when compared to standard crystalline metals like copper or silver,” said Christian Hellmich, one of the paper’s authors. Copper and silver can show a hardness size effect, but neither exhibits the size-dependent elasticity that the team measured in the worm jaw. That distinction is one reason the researchers argue that these materials deserve their own category.

To explain this property, the researchers built a mathematical model showing how the jaw’s atomic structure leads to the elastic size effect. This model helps explain the effect and gives a basis for future research.

“We plan to extend the experimental database by investigating additional species to refine the theoretical concept and perform dedicated computations, and — perhaps most interestingly — to explore the link between genetic interventions and the corresponding material design space,” Hellmich said. “All this comes with true excitement about the beauty, elegance, and refinement found in and produced by nature.”

Next, the researchers plan to explore how genetic changes influence the development of these materials. If successful, the work could eventually help engineers develop new biomimetic materials inspired by the ion-protein architecture found in these worms.

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

Some of the most promising locations to search for possible alien megastructures, known as Dyson spheres, may not be stars like the Sun, but rather the galaxy’s smallest and dimmest stars.

Physicist Freeman Dyson introduced the idea of a Dyson sphere in 1960, describing it as a shell or, more realistically, a swarm of orbiting collectors that could capture most of a star’s energy. This concept has interested scientists searching for signs of advanced technology, but the question of how such a structure would appear in astronomical observations remained unknown.

Now, a new study, available on the arXiv preprint server, suggests that one of the coldest objects in a stellar system could, in principle, be an artificial megastructure rather than a natural astronomical object.

Amirnezam Amiri, a physicist at the University of Arkansas, explored the question of Dyson spheres by modeling these hypothetical megastructures around two often-overlooked types of stars: red M-dwarfs and white dwarfs. Amiri credits discussions with Harvard astronomer and founder of the Galileo Project, Avi Loeb, with helping shape the study.

Small, Dim, and Built to Last

Red dwarfs make up about 70% of the stars in the Milky Way. These stars burn slowly and can remain stable for trillions of years, much longer than the universe has even existed so far. White dwarfs offer a different benefit. As the dense remnants of stars like the Sun, they shrink to about 1% of their original size. This means a Dyson swarm could orbit much closer, requiring less material and a smaller structure than one built around a star like the Sun.

Amiri’s study explores how astronomers could detect such structures. Both red dwarfs and white dwarfs are dim enough that the infrared heat emitted by a Dyson swarm would stand out more clearly against the star’s own light.

Reading the Wreckage on a Star Chart

Astronomers use the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram to classify stars by temperature and brightness, and this tool is central to Amiri’s analysis. A Dyson swarm would not destroy a star’s energy, but would capture its light and re-emit it as heat at much longer wavelengths. 

In the new model, a star with a Dyson swarm would appear on the H-R diagram at the same luminosity but shifted dramatically toward the cool end. For instance, a red dwarf at about 3,000 K could appear surrounded by a shell as cold as 50 K, a difference of about two orders of magnitude. No known stars naturally occupy this region of the H-R diagram.

Identifying Factors

Dust and distant galaxies can also produce strong infrared emissions, so astronomers cannot identify a Dyson swarm using temperature alone. Amiri’s model points to a more complex set of clues. A true Dyson swarm would not show the silicate dust features seen in normal dusty disks, so its spectrum would be unusually smooth for an object with strong infrared emission.

Additionally, if the swarm consists of many separate collectors rather than a solid shell, there would be gaps that cause irregular, non-stellar flickering as the pieces move. Each of these signs can have natural causes, but finding them together is rare and hard to explain without considering artificial structures.

Future Observations

Astronomers can carry out this search using existing telescopes. The James Webb Space Telescope’s infrared instruments are already designed to detect faint, cold signals like these. The Vera C. Rubin Observatory’s new sky survey and the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, which is expected to launch later this year, will add to these efforts. Together, they will generate the kinds of observations needed to search for the signatures described in the study.

Possible candidates for these future observations have already been identified. In 2024, Project Hephaistos identified seven potential Dyson sphere candidates among about 5 million cataloged stars, all linked to red dwarfs. One was ruled out after it was shown that a background black hole caused the observed signal. Several candidate Dyson sphere systems still remain under investigation. Amiri does not claim that any of these are actual Dyson spheres, and the paper makes this clear. Instead, the study offers a better way to tell true anomalies apart from dusty disks before using valuable telescope time. If a Dyson swarm surrounds a star and reradiates its energy at temperatures unlike those of natural stars, upcoming infrared surveys may finally be able to detect one.

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

Paternal care is uncommon among several wild animal species, even among arthropods—the invertebrates that include insects, arachnids, and crustaceans.

Now, in a recent study in the Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society, harvestmen—also known as daddy longlegs—account for more than half of all independently evolved cases of paternal care currently documented among arthropods.

The news insights were made possible by a recent citizen science effort that significantly increased the available data about these paternal behaviors in arthropods, all within days.

Built for Fatherhood

Harvestmen are one of the most diverse arachnid groups, with more than 6,900 described species. Despite making up just 0.6% of arthropod diversity, they show more independent origins of paternal care or egg guarding than any other arthropod lineage. This concentration of paternal care makes harvestmen a key group for studying the evolution of this behavior.

Led by Glauco Machado at the University of São Paulo, the research team combined almost thirty years of fieldwork with a review of iNaturalist, a public website for sharing nature sightings. From 1936 to 2025, published studies had found parental guarding in only 80 harvestman species. However, the iNaturalist search added 85 new records: 78 showing parental care and seven showing no care, more than doubling the number of harvestman species with available behavioral data.

Machado was surprised by how quickly the platform produced results. “It’s a tremendous source of information that can improve the velocity with which we accumulate biological information,” he said. “I would never be able to do this by visiting museums around the world. It would be very expensive, very time-consuming, but here we conducted the search in only one week.”

The Evolution of Fatherhood

With the expanded dataset, the researchers were able to map parental behaviors onto a newly constructed evolutionary tree encompassing 165 species across nine families. This represented the first reconstruction of how both maternal and paternal care evolved within the superfamily Gonyleptoidea. The findings challenge the assumption that caregiving behaviors follow a single evolutionary pathway.

The analysis found that maternal care evolved only from ancestors that did not provide care, a pattern also seen in insects. Paternal care, however, appeared in two ways: once from ancestors with no care, and once from species where females already guarded eggs. This difference suggests that separate evolutionary pressures shaped the development of parental care in harvestmen.

Machado suggests that sexual selection may have driven the evolution of paternal care from maternal care. In this scenario, which the researchers describe as enhanced fecundity, females favor males that are already tending eggs.

“It’s very rare in nature, paternal care, and this behavior evolved many times independently,” Machado said. “In many species where males care for the offspring alone, the caring activity is a sexually selected behavior, which means that females prefer males that are caring for the eggs.”

The evolutionary tree also showed that parental care does not always persist across lineages. Several groups appear to have lost caregiving behavior over evolutionary time. Some harvestmen now use easier methods, like hiding their eggs or burying them under debris, to protect them without having to stay and guard them.

Limitations of Citizen Science

Machado emphasizes that experts remain essential to this process. It takes specialized knowledge to correctly identify species, tell the sex of the guarding animal, and tell real parental care apart from similar behaviors such as mate-guarding. “I think taxonomists’ role in modern science is more important than ever,” he said. “We cannot preserve a species that doesn’t have a name. And names are provided by taxonomists.”

Additionally, animals that are actively guarding eggs are more likely to be photographed than those not showing any behavior, which could make active parental care seem more common than it really is.

What Comes Next

Machado views this approach as a model for future research. More than half of the new records came from individuals without formal training in arachnology, and he anticipates similar results as researchers apply iNaturalist to other animal groups for which parental care remains poorly documented.

“I think it’s a very broad contribution for people that are working with insects, frogs, and all kinds of groups, animal groups, in which we have both maternal care and paternal care,” he said. The next mystery solved through citizen science may not involve arachnids at all.

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

The mass extinction event known as the Great Dying, which occurred 252 million years ago, resulted in the loss of 96% of marine species, and for many years, scientists could not fully explain why certain animals disappeared while others survived.

That longstanding mystery may be closer to a resolution, thanks to a recent study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, which suggests that differences in physiology, metabolism, and oxygen use helped determine which marine animals survived the catastrophe.

Stanford University researchers found that physiological differences largely determined which marine animals survived the end-Permian mass extinction after warming oceans lost much of their oxygen. Animals whose bodies could not meet rising oxygen demands, including brachiopods and crinoids that had long ruled the seafloor, had a hard time surviving as ocean temperatures rose and oxygen in the water dropped.

By contrast, mollusks and fish possessed body plans better suited to supplying oxygen as temperatures climbed, allowing them to survive in greater numbers.

“With this study, we essentially wanted to solve the mystery of why, when you go to the beach, you collect the shells of clams and snails rather than those of brachiopods,” said lead author Jose Andres Marquez, a former PhD student in the lab of Stanford’s Erik Anders Sperling.

Marquez and his team developed a model based on species’ metabolic oxygen balance and tested it using direct measurements of oxygen use in living relatives of both ancient groups. This included brachiopods collected from the San Juan Islands in Washington. Their results revealed that the risk of extinction closely aligned with how much oxygen a species required and how effectively it could transport oxygen within its body.

A Body Built for Survival

Modern sea animals, such as bivalves, gastropods, and fish, have become more active and muscular over time. Their hunting habits demand more oxygen, even under normal conditions. Although this could seem like a disadvantage during harsh times, it actually worked in their favor. When ocean temperatures rose and oxygen levels dropped during the Permian-Triassic period, these animals already relied on features such as gills, strong blood flow, and larger muscles to get more oxygen when needed.

On the other hand, Paleozoic animals like brachiopods and crinoids were slow-moving filter feeders that thrived in low-oxygen environments when things were stable. However, as temperatures rose, they required more oxygen, and their bodies could not keep up with the demand in the now-oxygen-poor waters.

“Our findings show that, across different organism groups, extinctions happened at much higher rates for those more vulnerable to increases in water temperature and decreases in oxygen availability,” Marquez said.

The findings support decades of evidence from the fossil record. Brachiopods, which once accounted for thousands of species, now number about 400. In contrast, bivalves have diversified and now account for between 10,000 and 15,000 species.

Settling the Debate

Sperling previously co-authored a 2018 study that identified oxygen loss and warming as the main causes of the Great Dying. However, that earlier research used only physiological data from modern species, so the results were influenced by data from commercially important fish and crustaceans rather than from the ancient groups that have largely disappeared. The new study addresses this limitation by directly measuring the physiology of living representatives of ancient animal groups, including brachiopods.

“This study is really the final nail in the coffin for what caused the Permian-Triassic mass extinction,” Sperling said.

A Familiar Climate

The environmental changes that led to the Great Dying began in oceans that were relatively cool and well-oxygenated, similar to present-day conditions. A massive release of volcanic carbon dioxide altered the atmosphere, driving global temperatures up by 8 to 12 degrees Celsius over several thousand years. By comparison, current climate projections estimate a rise of 1.5 to 4 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels by 2100, but over a much shorter timescale. “The bad news is, we are on track for Permian-Triassic levels of warming in worst-case scenario projections,” Sperling said.

By comparing more groups of marine animals, the researchers hope to determine whether the physiological patterns that shaped Earth’s greatest mass extinction could help predict which species are most vulnerable as today’s oceans continue to warm. “We’re still at the point where we can change things and do something about it,” Sperling emphasized.

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

A key component of the Orion Nebula had escaped detection by astronomers until now, according to a new study in Astronomy & Astrophysics.

An international team led by Juan Diego Soler at the University of Vienna used two of the world’s most advanced radio telescopes to map neutral atomic hydrogen gas across the nebula’s outer shell at unprecedented resolution. The new maps provide a clearer view of the celestial feature, and reveal a previously uncatalogued second bubble—a shell with much less mass than earlier estimates—and a four-light-year filament of gas extending from the structure.

The Orion Nebula’s Miscalculated Bubble

Neutral hydrogen emits a faint radio signal at a wavelength of 21 centimeters, making it possible to trace otherwise invisible gas between the stars. Soler’s team solved this by combining data from the Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array in New Mexico and the FAST telescope in China. The VLA provided high resolution, while FAST picked up faint, widespread signals. Together, they produced the first detailed hydrogen map of the extended Orion Nebula, at the same scale as earlier ionized carbon maps.

Earlier calculations based on ionized carbon estimated that the front half of the shell was about 1,100 times the mass of our Sun. The hydrogen observations paint a different picture, suggesting the shell actually weighs in at closer to 100 solar masses. “Measuring mass is fundamental,” Soler said, “because it tells us about the efficiency of these newly formed stars shaping their environment with wind and radiation.”

A shell with only a tenth of the previously assumed mass significantly alters calculations of how efficiently newly formed stars shape their environment. The researchers note that molecular hydrogen, which is not detected in either the hydrogen or carbon data, may account for some of the missing mass.

A Second Bubble

The hydrogen maps also revealed an uneven distribution of gas, indicating a second, smaller cavity within the main shell. The team searched catalogs of known stars and young stellar objects in the region but found no candidate at the bubble’s center. The source responsible for creating the cavity may not be the type of object included in current catalogs.

Daniel Seifried at the University of Cologne, a co-author on the study, pointed to what that means for the models astronomers build to explain regions like this one. “These stunning observations serve as a reference for many modern astrophysical simulations investigating the evolution of gas and stars in the Milky Way. These are the kind of images that challenge the theoretical models and numerical simulations that we use to understand how massive stars affect their immediate surroundings.”

Previous models generally treated Orion’s shell as the product of a single expanding bubble. The discovery of a second cavity, with no obvious source at its center, instead suggests the nebula was shaped by multiple episodes of stellar feedback.

An Unexpected Filament

The new maps also uncovered a filament of hydrogen extending about four light-years from the shell’s western edge. Previous carbon-based observations saw only the base of this structure. The filament contains about 80 solar masses of hydrogen and does not appear to be associated with any known group of young stars. Its origin is unclear; it could be gas leaking through a weak spot in the shell or a leftover from the original cloud that existed before the bubble formed.

Claire Murray of the Space Telescope Science Institute, another co-author, framed the discovery within the broader push behind the observations. “This study is an exciting demonstration of the power of the latest-generation radio telescopes to uncover new pieces to the star formation puzzle.” Despite being one of the galaxy’s most extensively studied star-forming regions, the Orion Nebula continues to reveal discoveries.

This survey is the first scientific result from the NeAtHood project, which aims to map atomic hydrogen across nearby star-forming regions accessible to the VLA and FAST telescopes. Soler and his colleagues now plan to apply the same approach to additional targets. “Orion is only the beginning. Our newly developed methods show how future interferometers will reveal the hidden structure and dynamics of the interstellar medium—even in regions that astronomers already believed they understood well,” Soler explained.

If one of the sky’s best-studied star-forming regions still contains hidden structures, other nearby nebulae may prove equally surprising as the NeAtHood survey expands.

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

Scientists at the Weizmann Institute of Science have engineered Nicotiana benthamiana, a fast-growing relative of tobacco, to produce five different psychedelic compounds. 

The achievement, detailed in a study published in Science Advances, brings together biosynthetic pathways that nature distributes across three different kingdoms of life.

The five compounds (DMT, psilocybin, psilocin, bufotenin, and 5-MeO-DMT) are typically sourced from an Amazonian shrub, mushrooms, and the defensive skin glands of a desert toad. Extracting even one of these molecules from its natural source is a slow process. Producing all five in a single, easily cultivated plant had not been achieved before.

A Shared Chemical Ancestor

Despite coming from such different sources, all five of these molecules share a common origin: tryptophan, an amino acid found in every living thing. In humans, tryptophan is the building block for serotonin, which helps explain why these psychedelics interact with serotonin receptors in the brain. This shared chemistry gave the Weizmann team, led by Dr. Paula Berman and Prof. Asaph Aharoni, a logical starting point for their experiments.

The team began by focusing on DMT to address a previously unresolved question. Researchers knew the general biochemical pathway plants use to synthesize DMT, but they had not yet identified all the genes and enzymes responsible for each step. “At the heart of the study was the challenge of making DMT,” Aharoni says.

To identify the necessary genes, the team analyzed genetic material from the Amazonian chacruna shrub and an Australian acacia species. Introducing these genes into Nicotiana benthamiana allowed the plant to produce DMT within days.

Fixing a Bottleneck With One Amino Acid

The researchers applied the same gene transfer approach to the other four psychedelics, but the engineered plants initially produced only trace amounts of 5-MeO-DMT. Protein-design specialists Prof. Sarel Fleishman and Dr. Olga Khersonsky determined that the limitation was due to a poor molecular fit in one enzyme’s active site. Replacing a single amino acid resolved the issue.

“We mutated one amino acid in the sequence and got a 40-fold increase in the production of 5-MeO-DMT,” Berman says.

One Organism, Three Kingdoms

Once all five biosynthetic pathways were functioning separately, the researchers combined them within a single plant. The result was a tobacco relative capable of producing DMT from plants, psilocin and psilocybin from fungi, and bufotenin and 5-MeO-DMT from toads, all at the same time. “In effect, we created a kind of biological ‘cocktail’ — not by mixing substances externally, but by combining the underlying pathways inside one organism,” Aharoni says.

Combining all five pathways reduced the yield of each compound, as they competed for the same pool of tryptophan. The researchers also introduced bacterial enzymes to attach chlorine and bromine atoms to the psychedelic molecules, creating modified psychedelic molecules that do not naturally occur in the engineered plant. Some similar modified molecules have shown antidepressant-like effects in previous studies.

Why the Compounds Exist in the First Place

The bottleneck also highlighted a broader research question about the natural role of these compounds. These molecules likely function as defenses or as tools for interacting with microbes and insects in the organisms that produce them, rather than evolving to affect human consciousness.

“If we can move these pathways into a model plant that grows quickly and is easy to manipulate, we can start asking what these compounds actually do for the plant,” Berman explains.

A Sustainable Supply Line

There is a clear practical benefit to this approach. Plants used for ayahuasca are increasingly threatened by habitat loss and rising demand, and the Sonoran Desert toad is declining due to overcollection and habitat destruction. A fast-growing laboratory plant capable of producing these compounds within a week provides an alternative that does not rely on harvesting wild species.

The Weizmann researchers are now working on a plant that can produce the complete ayahuasca mixture, which includes both DMT and the compound required for it to be active when taken orally. They are also exploring whether these psychedelics could be produced in edible plants capable of delivering carefully regulated doses.

Whether this platform becomes a practical manufacturing system will depend on overcoming the metabolic bottleneck that currently limits production when multiple pathways operate simultaneously.

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

The properties of water are unusual among liquids—it expands when it freezes, reaches its highest density just above freezing, and does not behave like the simple liquids chemists often use to understand matter.

Now, a new study in Communications Chemistry uses artificial intelligence to compare competing methods for measuring water’s hidden molecular order and determine which are truly effective.

Researchers at the University of Osaka developed a neural network to test 16 different ‘structural descriptors,’ which are mathematical tools for measuring how ordered or disordered water molecules are at the microscopic scale. Over the past 30 years, scientists have independently developed these descriptors, each with its own approach and scale, all aimed at explaining the same underlying puzzle.

Until now, researchers lacked a standard method for comparing them directly—a gap this study fills.

Water’s Split Personality

Distinguishing Hot From Cold

To establish a common standard, the Osaka team trained a neural network using molecular dynamics simulations of water at temperatures from 200 to 300 Kelvin. Using only the values from a single structural descriptor, it had to predict the temperature at which each molecular configuration was generated. If a descriptor captured meaningful structural information, the network could easily distinguish hot from cold.

“Past studies have shown that using machine learning to classify and understand structural data is effective,” says corresponding author Kang Kim. “We specifically wanted to incorporate a neural network model into this study to evaluate how accurate the descriptors were at capturing key structural information, in a way that is like human cognition.”

The network assessed each descriptor using a standard classification measure. To deepen their analysis, the team used an explainable AI technique called LIME. This method looks at how the model makes its decisions and checks whether its reasoning matches established physical principles, instead of relying only on statistical patterns.

Two Descriptors Pull Ahead

Out of the 16 descriptors tested, two stood out. The Local Structure Index (LSI) and another, referred to as zeta (ζ), both of which measure the distance between the first and second layers of neighboring molecules, achieved nearly perfect accuracy across the tested temperatures. Another group, based on how hydrogen bonds connect, also scored well but was not as accurate as the others. Older descriptors that rely on tetrahedral angles or interaction energies became less accurate at higher temperatures, where molecules move more, and the differences blur.

“The network used what it had learned to compare how 16 descriptors differentiated between LDL and HDL structures at different temperatures,” says senior author Nobuyuki Matubayasi. “In this way, we determined the most efficient descriptors.”

The LIME analysis backed up the network’s results with evidence consistent with scientists’ expectations. Molecules with high Local Structure Index and zeta values led the model to predict lower temperatures, which is consistent with the idea that more ordered, LDL-like structures appear as water cools. This suggests that the network captured more than just statistical correlations.

With a common framework for comparing descriptors in place, researchers could attempt to develop descriptors that directly identify HDL and LDL environments rather than infer them indirectly. Whether these new tools will finally solve one of water’s biggest mysteries, the point where its two proposed liquid forms fully separate, is something scientists are just starting to investigate.

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

Engineers at Queen Mary University of London have created a tactile sensor, described in a study published in Science Advances, that allows robots to detect touch using a simple camera.  

The sensor converts mechanical forces into visible color patterns, reducing the need for dense arrays of embedded sensors. Giacomo Sasso, a postdoctoral researcher at Queen Mary’s School of Engineering and Materials Science, led the team that developed this new sensor. Rather than relying on embedded electronic sensors, they created a soft material that changes color when pressed or bent.

This effect, known as structural color, is the same reason butterfly wings look iridescent without pigment. Pressure causes microscopic structures within the material to shift, altering how light reflects and creating a real-time visual indicator of force.

Touch Without the Computation

Most vision-based tactile sensors can map contact and force in detail, but only at the cost of heavy computation that slows them down. Simpler systems are faster, but sacrifice detail. The new material developed by Sasso’s team sidesteps this problem by building the sensing function into the material itself. With just a standard USB camera, researchers can track color changes on the surface and immediately infer pressure, strain, and contact shape without complex data reconstruction.

“You won’t guess how much information is generated when your finger presses a light switch. A human hand contains more than 10,000 mechanoreceptors to do the job, yet touch sensing remains one of the major challenges in robotics,” Sasso said. “We were happy to capture the finger ridges, as no existing technology can reproduce such sensor density at [a] comparable scale and simplicity. The key idea behind this project was to think outside the box: instead of embedding dense and overengineered sensor arrays, sensing is moved into the material itself, where mechanical cues are directly transformed into colour fields and captured using a simple low-cost USB camera.”

Professor James Busfield, one of the paper’s co-authors, described the advantage more simply: “What is particularly powerful is that the information is already in the light signal. You are no longer reconstructing touch – you are observing it directly.”

From Precision Manufacturing to the Operating Room

Reducing the computational demands of touch sensing opens up new possibilities. A robotic gripper made with this material could handle tiny parts more gently, since changes in force are immediately detectable. Prosthetic limbs equipped with similar sensors could also provide users with more detailed tactile feedback.

The researchers also see potential applications in surgery, where detecting subtle pressure differences could help clinicians interpret tissue properties.

A Decade of Groundwork Behind One Material

Professor Federico Carpi from the University of Florence and Professor James Busfield from Queen Mary worked together on this project, merging years of separate work on stretchable sensors and polymer behavior into one material system. This allowed the team to use a mechanochromic material as the sensor itself, not just as a base for electronics.

Many approaches to robotic touch have relied on increasingly complex sensor arrays, wiring, and computing systems. Rather than adding more electronics, Sasso’s team’s approach allows the material itself to encode touch into visible color. It remains unclear whether this color-based method can be scaled for use in commercial robotic hands, but this work suggests that the future of robotic touch might rely as much on smart materials as on advanced electronics.

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

A recent study documented a participant using an AI model to simulate a conversation with her late grandmother. According to her report, the experience offered a sense of closure that she had not experienced before.

This interaction was one of sixteen documented in a study published in the Proceedings of the 2026 ACM Designing Interactive Systems Conference. The research provides some of the first empirical data on how individuals respond to the opportunity to communicate with AI representations of deceased loved ones.

Researchers at the University of Colorado Boulder call these AI agents ‘generative ghosts.’ These systems use data such as writing, voice recordings, or photographs from the deceased to create simulated conversations. Some platforms, such as Project December and Séance AI, generate text-based versions of journal entries and messages. Others, such as HereAfterAI, include voice and images. A few companies have also developed virtual reality experiences that let users interact with holographic representations of loved ones.

Jack Manning, the PhD candidate in Information Science who led the study, expected the sessions to feel unsettling. “We originally thought it might feel very Black Mirror creepy to people and make them uncomfortable,” he said. “I ended up being completely wrong. People thought it was amazing.”

How To Build a Ghost

The study included 16 participants, aged 22 to 50, each of whom joined a Zoom interview about a deceased relative or friend. During the session, a facilitator led the conversation while another researcher entered details into a large language model, generating an AI representation of the deceased in real time.

Each participant interacted with two versions of the AI model for about twenty minutes each. One version spoke as the deceased, using the first person, while the other described the person in the third person. A facilitator stayed present to offer support if the conversation became emotionally difficult.

The results indicated a clear preference for the version that spoke as the deceased individual, rather than about them. Researchers described this as a preference for ‘reincarnation’ over ‘representation.’

What People Will and Won’t Forgive

Participants tended to overlook factual mistakes or made-up details from the AI. What mattered more was whether the AI captured the right tone and language. If the model used words or phrases that felt out of character, people were more likely to disconnect from the experience. The study found that getting the voice and manner right was more important than perfect factual accuracy.

How the AI communicated also shaped the experience. Participants preferred short, to-the-point sentences and even the use of emojis, rather than the longer, more formal responses that AI models often produce. This suggests that future versions of these systems should pay close attention to conversational style.

A Technology Both Wanted, and Feared

All sixteen participants indicated that they would be willing to use the technology again. However, most also expressed concerns about the potential risks of individuals in grief accessing these AI systems without supervision.

Lead researcher Jack Manning said his own experiences with loss have shaped his view of the risks and benefits of AI grief tools. He acknowledged that negative outcomes are possible but also noted that the technology could help some users find a sense of closure and peace.

Jed Brubaker, the study’s senior author and an associate professor of Information Science, said the lab took on the work precisely because the field had outpaced the research. “To our knowledge, we are conducting the first user experience studies of simulated AI ghosts,” he said.

The research team intends to involve mental health professionals in future studies. The next phase will evaluate the psychological risks and benefits of prolonged use of AI grief tools to ensure that empirical research guides product development.

Generative ghost technology is already available through commercial platforms, and people are actively using these systems. The study highlights that voice, tone, and pacing are often more important to users than factual accuracy. As the technology develops, researchers are working to address the challenges of providing appropriate safeguards and responsible design.

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

A jellyfish can close a wound in real time, without stitches, scabs, or scars, a fascinating—and borderline miraculous—healing ability that has long perplexed scientists. 

Now, a new study in Molecular Biology of the Cell has finally revealed the secrets behind this process, identifying two cellular structures that act in a specific sequence.

Jocelyn Malamy, an associate professor at the University of Chicago, first observed this process a decade ago at the Marine Biological Laboratory. Using transparent, dime-sized jellyfish called Clytia hemisphaerica, she watched individual cells move toward each other to close a gap in the tissue.

Now, with colleagues Maxwell Sassaman and Manjula P. Mony, she has mapped the steps of this process and explored its broader significance.

A Flower That Never Stops Blooming

The free-swimming medusa most people picture when they hear “jellyfish” is only one phase of Clytia‘s life. It spends most of its life as a polyp colony attached to rocks, docks, or leaves, and it periodically produces medusae, much like a shrub produces flowers. While medusae live for only a few months, the polyp colonies can persist for much longer.

Clytia medusae are known for their ability to heal quickly. Small wounds close in minutes, and even larger injuries seal in under an hour, all without forming scar tissue. Malamy notes that this type of healing is similar to the scar-free repair seen in embryos.

Since Clytia are transparent, heal rapidly, and lack the immune-mediated inflammation that complicates wound healing in mammals, they serve as an excellent model organism. Scientists can watch epithelial cells close wounds in real time, without interference from scarring or immune reactions. The mechanisms uncovered in Clytia are likely relevant across many animals.

“A lot of the processes that we see in Clytia‘s wound healing are really similar to what you see in all other systems, including mammalian systems,” Malamy explains. “When you’re staring at these epithelial cells, you wouldn’t know this was a jellyfish.”

Two Structures, One Decision Tree

Epithelial cells form the surfaces of the body, including skin, the gut, and internal membranes, and must repair themselves after injury. Malamy previously described Clytia’s wound repair in 2017 and 2018. The new study addresses a longstanding question in epithelial wound healing: do wounds close by cells moving over the gap, or by an actin cable contracting to seal it? The findings show that both mechanisms operate in a specific sequence, with the basement membrane beneath the cells coordinating the transition between them.

The initial response involves lamellipodia, actin-rich extensions that move across the basement membrane, the protein layer beneath all epithelial tissues. These structures pull their parent cells forward to close the wound. Malamy’s team observed lamellipodia forming even in very small wounds within a single cell, a previously undocumented detail.

After the lamellipodia advance, an actomyosin cable forms and contracts after it covers the basement membrane. If damage or debris blocks the membrane, the cable closes the wound and removes debris that lamellipodia cannot cross.

For larger wounds, a third response occurs. When the gap is too wide for lamellipodia to bridge, regardless of how far the cells extend, the entire epithelial sheet lifts and migrates as a unit. Once lamellipodia from opposing edges meet, the same closing sequence resumes.

“This is a truly elegant mechanism where the system can rapidly adapt to heal all the kinds of wounds that might occur in nature,” Malamy says.

What’s Still Unrepaired

If epithelial repair mechanisms are conserved across animal evolution, as current evidence suggests, studies of jellyfish could reveal wound-healing processes that inflammation and scar formation obscure in mammals, making those processes difficult to observe directly.

Researchers have not yet fully understood the basement membrane, which coordinates these processes, and it remains the least understood aspect of wound repair. Scientists still do not know how organisms repair the basement membrane itself.

“It’s great that you can heal a wound by dragging the cells over it,” Malamy says, “but at some point, a damaged basement membrane has to get fixed.” That’s her next target.

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

A single machine learning model just turned one of condensed matter physics’ most persistent problems into a navigable map.

In a study published in National Science Review, researchers led by Nanjing University used AI to sort millions of magnetoresistance curves into 13 clean categories, then charted exactly how tuning a material’s electronic properties pushes it from one behavior to another.

The work targets the anomalous Hall effect, a decades-old phenomenon that governs how electrons move through certain magnetic materials, and it could hand physicists a shortcut to some of the most sought-after states in modern electronics.

A Problem Too Complex to Map by Hand

The anomalous Hall effect occurs when electrons moving through a magnetic material exhibit behavior beyond the predictions of the conventional Hall effect. Standard Drude theory predicts that resistance should shift as electrons move through a magnetic field. Anomalous Hall systems break that rule, producing resistance curves with double peaks, plateaus, and non-saturating shapes that shift with the material’s band structure and the way its electrons scatter.

The challenge becomes even greater when multiple electron energy bands are active near the Fermi level. Each additional parameter increases the difficulty of interpreting the resulting resistance curves, and until now, constructing a comprehensive map linking electronic properties to resistance behaviors has not been possible.

The Nanjing team set out to create that map. They generated more than 2.27 million magnetoresistance curves from a two-band model spanning five electronic parameters, then set an unsupervised algorithm loose on the dataset with no instructions beyond finding the pattern.

Millions of Curves

Every curve in the dataset collapsed into just 13 distinct types, a verdict so blunt that even the researchers seemed surprised. A trained neural network took over from there, sorting new curves into those same 13 categories with 99% accuracy and turning what had looked like an unruly set of data into something closer to a field guide.

Next, the team created phase diagrams and topological networks to visualize how changing just one parameter could shift a material from one type of resistance curve to another. Instead of a fixed chart, the result is more like an interactive roadmap; adjust a setting, and you can see the transition happen in real time.

To check whether any of this held up outside a computer model, the researchers tested their framework against real measurements from gated Fe5GeTe2 nanoflakes, a magnetic material whose properties can be tuned electrically. The experimental data closely matched the AI-generated phase diagrams, providing the model with a real-world anchor rather than a purely theoretical one.

“This is just the beginning. We believe this framework can be extended to a wide range of intricate models and will help uncover many more complex problems in condensed matter physics,” said Hongtao Yuan, professor at Nanjing University and an author of the study.

A Map That Points to New Physics

The significance of this work extends beyond classification. The phase diagrams indicate which parameter combinations are likely to produce large magnetoresistance, including giant magnetoresistance, a phenomenon already used in hard drive technology. These maps also identify regions where the quantum anomalous Hall effect may occur, a state in which an electric current flows along the edges of a material without energy loss due to resistance.

That kind of lossless conduction has long been seen as a target for low-power electronics, but identifying the narrow parameter windows that produce it has historically relied on trial-and-error. A phase diagram that predicts those windows in advance changes the search from guesswork into targeting.

“Our model provides a framework for comprehensively addressing the complex magnetoresistance behavior in anomalous Hall systems, and serves as a platform for predicting parameter regions that may host intriguing quantum phenomena such as giant magnetoresistance,” said author of the study Ganyu Chen.

The team frames the two-band model as a starting point rather than a finished tool. The same machine-learning approach, they note, should extend to more complex systems beyond ferromagnets, including topological insulators and superconducting junctions, areas of physics that have their own tangled, high-dimensional parameter spaces still waiting for a map. Whether AI-built phase models can keep pace with that added complexity, or whether some of these systems will require entirely new modeling strategies, remains an open question the field is only beginning to test.

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

While a patient is fully anesthetized and unresponsive, neurons in the hippocampus continue to process language, distinguish different types of words, and generate neural activity consistent with predicting upcoming words.

Researchers at Baylor College of Medicine directly recorded this neural activity, offering new insight into how unconsciousness works at the cellular level. Their findings, published in Nature, show that hippocampal neurons continue to process aspects of language even when the brain is unconscious.

“Our findings show that the brain is far more active and capable during unconsciousness than previously thought,” said Dr. Sameer Sheth, professor and Cullen Foundation Endowed Chair of neurosurgery and a McNair Scholar at Baylor. “Even when patients are fully anesthetized, their brains continue to analyze the world around them.”

a Rare Look Inside the Anesthetized Hippocampus

Sheth’s team recorded from hundreds of individual neurons in the hippocampus, a region of the brain essential for memory formation. Researchers collected data during epilepsy surgeries, specifically anterior temporal lobectomies, when patients were under general anesthesia and the hippocampus was temporarily accessible. This rare opportunity allowed researchers to directly record hippocampal activity, something scalp EEG cannot.

The researchers used Neuropixels probes, high-density recording devices that can monitor hundreds of neurons simultaneously. This study represents the first use of this technology in the human hippocampus during anesthesia. Seven patients participated, all under propofol anesthesia with consistent sedation levels maintained throughout the recordings.

The Unconscious Brain Still Learns

In the initial test, researchers played patients a repeating tone with occasional unexpected pitches. Hippocampal neurons consistently detected these outlier tones, and their sensitivity increased over approximately ten minutes. Researchers usually observe this kind of adaptive neural response during wakefulness.

To dig deeper, the researchers built a computer model of a recurrent neural network, trained to perform the same tone discrimination task. The model showed the same pattern as the human brain recordings, suggesting that this increased sensitivity to outlier tones can arise from local brain circuits alone, without the need for higher-level conscious processing.

Predicting Words Before They’re Spoken

The researchers also played short stories to anesthetized patients while recording from the same neurons. Hippocampal activity tracked language in real time, distinguishing between nouns, verbs, and adjectives. Neural activity reflected both the current word and prediction of the upcoming word in the sequence. “The brain appears to anticipate what comes next in a story, even without conscious awareness,” Sheth said.

“This kind of predictive coding is something we associate with being awake and attentive, yet it’s happening here in an unconscious state,” added Baylor neurosurgery professor Benjamin Hayden.

What This Means for the Science of Consciousness

The results show that the hippocampus can support neural computations associated with complex cognition even during unconsciousness. This suggests that at least some components of language processing and prediction may not require conscious awareness. Sheth’s team proposes that consciousness does not arise from a single brain region but rather emerges from interactions among multiple brain regions. The hippocampus may process information that later becomes part of awareness.

The researchers noted a parallel with artificial intelligence. Large language models generate text by predicting the next word in a sequence; the anesthetized hippocampus showed a similar pattern of prediction. This similarity may provide neuroscientists and AI researchers with a shared framework for studying language prediction based on biological circuitry.

“Can we use these signals to deploy and run a speech prosthetic for some of the parts of the brain that are damaged by stroke or injury? These are questions that we can now consider in relation to this part of the brain,” said study author and Baylor neurosurgery resident Kalman Katlowitz.

While these results are promising, the team acknowledged the study’s limitations. The research focused only on propofol-based general anesthesia, so the results may not apply to other unconscious states such as natural sleep or coma. Additionally, the researchers examined only the hippocampus, so they cannot yet determine how broadly this type of unconscious processing occurs in other brain regions.

“This work pushes us to rethink what it means to be conscious,” Sheth concluded. “The brain is doing much more behind the scenes than we fully understand.”

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

A new model suggests that asteroid impacts on Earth may have occasionally launched microscopic material into space that could have reached Venus’s atmosphere over billions of years. Some of this material may even have temporarily remained suspended in the planet’s cloud layers under certain conditions.

The idea is based on the theory of panspermia, which suggests that life, or the building blocks of life, can move between planets on debris created by asteroid impacts. Scientists have often discussed the possibility of microbes traveling between Earth and Mars, and even the possibility of Earthly organisms reaching locations as far away as Jupiter’s moons.

Now, interest in the possibility of microscopic life in Venus’s dense, sulfur-rich clouds has made Venus a focus for similar studies of interplanetary transfer.

A team from Arizona State University, the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, and Sandia National Laboratories recently explored this idea in a study presented at the 2026 Lunar and Planetary Science Conference. They used the Venus Life Equation, a framework made in 2021 by planetary scientist Noam Izenberg and his team. This equation considers three main factors: origination, robustness, and continuity. These factors help estimate the likelihood that life exists on Venus today. If panspermia occurred, it would mean that any life on Venus, if it exists at all, would not necessarily have originated there.

A Rock Becomes a Delivery Vehicle

Before considering the possibility of life originating on Venus, the researchers first addressed a fundamental question: could any material from Earth realistically survive the journey to Venus?

When an asteroid hits Earth hard enough to send material into space, that material faces intense shock, high heat, radiation, and the vacuum of space. Studies of meteorites found on Earth show that organic compounds can survive both ejection and travel between planets. However, an important question remains: what happens when this debris enters Venus’s atmosphere at high speed?

To study this process, the researchers used the pancake model. This model helps researchers analyze how meteors break apart when they enter an atmosphere. In this model, a meteor entering Venus’s atmosphere experiences intense heating and breaks into fragments. These fragments spread out into a flattened cloud of debris called ‘cells.’ Some of these cells are small enough to stay suspended in Venus’s clouds, instead of falling to the surface, where survival would be much less likely.

The Math of Interplanetary Hitchhikers

Their calculations indicate that, depending on the assumptions used, between 2 and 4 billion cell-sized fragments may have reached the clouds of Venus. Even accounting for a 99% loss during transit, billions of cell-sized fragments could be delivered. The model further estimates that approximately 100 cells could arrive in Venus’s clouds each year, amounting to roughly 20 billion over the past billion years, which corresponds to the estimated age of Venus’s current surface.

Life on Venus?

Venus is considered a relatively low-risk target for spacecraft contamination under planetary protection guidelines. The results of this study imply that natural processes may have been transferring material from Earth to Venus for a billion years, independent of human activity.

So far, no mission has found life in Venus’s clouds. However, future astrobiology missions are expected to directly search for it. If life is discovered, these models show that scientists will then need to determine whether it originated on Venus or arrived from Earth.

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