Researchers are replacing rigid silicon-based AI hardware with stretchable, neuromorphic electronics that mimic how the brain processes information, opening new possibilities for long-term human-machine integration. Modern artificial intelligence can outperform humans in tasks ranging from image recognition to medical data analysis, but there is one environment where today’s hardware still struggles: the human body. The [...]

Silphium was an extinct Libyan plant renowned for contraception, medicine, and trade. Its disappearance remains a historical mystery, and scientists continue searching for surviving descendants. Roman leader Julius Caesar is said to have kept a stock of it in the treasury. Ancient writer Pliny the Elder says Rome’s Emperor Nero owned the last stalk of [...]

Discovered in December 2024, the roughly 60-meter-wide asteroid 2024 YR4 was initially thought to have a slim chance of striking Earth in 2032. Further observations ruled out an Earth impact but left open the possibility of a Moon impact. New JWST observations show that 2024 YR4 will speed past both Earth and the Moon without a collision.

Another Update on 2024 YR4

In April 2025, we featured a Research Note that described March 2025 JWST observations of 2024 YR4 and characterized the asteroid’s size and albedo. At the close of that article, the authors suggested that further JWST observations in early 2026 could help to refine our understanding of the asteroid’s trajectory and determine whether it would strike the Moon.

On 18 and 26 February 2026, JWST carried out those critical observations. In this dataset, the asteroid is bright enough to be detected confidently, and the background is peppered with a sufficient number of reference stars — two factors necessary to determine the precise track of the asteroid as it zipped through space.

Trajectory Refinement

Julien de Wit (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) and collaborators analyzed the new JWST data and determined the asteroid’s position. The team used multiple methods to reduce the data and showed that their results were consistent regardless of the reduction method, ultimately yielding a measurement with an uncertainty of just 50 milliarcseconds. This is a huge improvement over the previous trajectory estimate, which had an uncertainty of 700 milliarcseconds.

Combining the latest JWST observations with existing data stretching back to the asteroid’s discovery, de Wit and coauthors determined a new, highly precise orbit for the object — one that definitively shows that the asteroid will safely pass by the Moon at a distance of 22,900 ± 800 km in 2032. In addition to ruling out the upcoming lunar impact, the team also ruled out any collisions with Earth in the next 100 years. Phew!

High-Impact Science

This work highlights JWST’s potential as a tool for planetary defense. The February 2026 observations detailed here represent the faintest-ever detection of a near-Earth object, and JWST can detect objects far fainter than ground-based telescopes can. This ability allows JWST to observe potentially hazardous asteroids over a larger swath of their orbits, which translates to earlier trajectory estimation — JWST pinned down 2024 YR4’s orbit two years before the asteroid would have become bright enough for ground-based telescopes to do so.

JWST’s role may be even more important for smaller objects that rapidly become undetectable after discovery. De Wit’s team demonstrated this for a 10-meter-diameter 2024 YR4 clone on the same trajectory; for an object of this size, JWST would be able to rule out an Earth impact before the asteroid became undetectable, but ground-based telescopes could not. With surveys from facilities like Vera C. Rubin Observatory and Near-Earth Object Surveyor set to discover hundreds of thousands of new near-Earth objects, JWST’s role as a hazard assessor will likely be in high demand.

Citation

“JWST Observations of Asteroid 2024 YR4 Rule Out a 2032 Lunar Impact and Demonstrate a New Regime for Planetary Defense Follow-Up,” Julien de Wit et al 2026 ApJL 1003 L21. doi:10.3847/2041-8213/ae6a95

The post Asteroid 2024 YR4 Won’t Hit the Moon, New JWST Observations Show appeared first on AAS Nova.

The outer solar system is inhabited by swarms of small objects that are challenging to observe and characterize. When one of these objects travels in front of a star, from our perspective, the passage provides a brief chance to study these distant, icy denizens of our solar system. In a recent article, Estela Fernández-Valenzuela (University of Central Florida) and coauthors described how they predicted and observed stellar crossings by Weywot, the largest moon of the dwarf planet Quaoar, which lies roughly 44 au from the Sun. In the image above, the black dashed lines indicate the areas where Weywot was predicted to briefly blot out the light from a star, and the blue lines show the updated regions based on Hubble Space Telescope observations. In each panel, the green squares and red circles show where the occultation was and was not detected, respectively. There were five successful detections of Weywot’s passage across a star, allowing the team to constrain Weywot’s diameter to 116–172 km. The team also found that Weywot is much darker than the body it orbits, which has important implications for how the system formed. To learn more about the planning process for and results of these observations, be sure to check out the full research article linked below.

Citation

“Weywot, an Unusually Low-Albedo Satellite in the Trans-Neptunian Region,” Estela Fernández-Valenzuela et al 2026 ApJL 1002 L37. doi:10.3847/2041-8213/ae6076

The post Featured Image: Chasing Weywot’s Shadow appeared first on AAS Nova.

Motivated by a desire to support community members financially during the coronavirus pandemic, researchers employed 30 local citizen scientists in the Hubble Image Similarity Project. This project quantified the similarities between astronomical images, providing a way to test the results of image-search algorithms.

Seeking Similarities

Say you have an image of a star-forming region, featuring eye-catching gas clouds, dense and dusty knots, and newborn stars. How would you go about finding other images that resemble yours?

You might start your search with an astronomical image database, using filters for object type or instrument to sift through thousands and thousands of options. But even filtering out everything but star-forming regions might yield vastly different results, given the widely varying shapes, colors, and sizes of these regions.

Or maybe you’ll feed your image into a neural network that has been trained to spot similar images. The results may seem promising, but how can you tell whether the algorithm has found the images that are the most similar? Would another algorithm do better?

The Hubble Image Similarity Project

Astronomical image collections rarely contain information about similarities between images in their metadata, and while neural networks appear to excel at gathering similar images, the results of these models are generally unverified. The Hubble Image Similarity Project, led by Richard White (Space Telescope Science Institute) and Josh Peek (Space Telescope Science Institute and Johns Hopkins University), addressed these issues with a team of citizen scientists who generated similarity information for astronomical images, providing a quantitative means to test the results of neural networks.

White and Peek began by amassing a sample of images from the Hubble Legacy Archive. This sample included many different object types, such as galaxies, planetary nebulae, star-forming regions, and star clusters. After trimming and binning the images, converting them to 8-bit grayscale, filtering out low-contrast images, and eliminating satellite trails, image artifacts, and repeated observations of the same patch of sky, 2,098 images of 666 objects remained.

Citizen Scientists, Assemble

White and Peek recruited 30 members of the community within walking distance of the Space Telescope Science Institute to identify similar astronomical images, and the reviewers were paid for their work. In the three phases of the project, reviewers considered test images one at a time and 1) selected all similar images from a set of 15 comparison images, 2) selected the most similar image from a narrowed-down set of 6 comparison images, and finally 3) selected the most similar image from a set of 3 comparison images.

The citizen science team ultimately compared 5.4 million pairs of images, and White and Peek used these comparisons to produce an image similarity matrix. The matrix describes the metaphorical “distance” between the images, with the most similar images being the smallest distance apart.

Similar images resemble one another in terms of structure, texture, and other factors that White and Peek say are “difficult even to describe in words” — for example, the diffuse glow of a galaxy interrupted by a bright star with diffraction spikes, or a nebula speckled with stars and dense dusty clumps. The similarity data from this study are available online and can be used to test the performance of image-search algorithms. In future work, the authors plan to carry out a similar project using images of the Martian landscape.

Citation

“The Hubble Image Similarity Project,” Richard L. White and J. E. G. Peek 2025 AJ 169 306. doi:10.3847/1538-3881/adcb43

The post Citizen Science Born in the Pandemic: The Hubble Image Similarity Project appeared first on AAS Nova.

Teams working on NASA’s INCUS (Investigation of Convective Updrafts) mission, the first space-based survey of the dynamics of tropical convective storms, have completed assembly and tested two of the mission’s small satellites, or SmallSats. Testing continues on the third SmallSat and is scheduled for completion no earlier than September in advance of a 2027 launch.

The three satellites will fly in tight coordination in low Earth orbit, with the first and second satellites separated by 30 seconds and the second and third satellite by 90 seconds.

Characterized by the sudden and intense lifting of large amounts of air and water, tropical convective storms provide more than half of the world’s precipitation, a crucial source of life-supporting fresh water. But they also produce severe weather, which can increase risks to life and property. The INCUS mission will help improve understanding of where, when, and why convective storms form.

Led by principal investigator Sue van den Heever of Colorado State University in Fort Collins, INCUS will use spaceborne radar instruments developed at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California to observe the vertical motion of air and water, known as convective mass flux, as storms develop and evolve. The mission will also explore how environmental factors such as air temperature, humidity, pressure, wind speed, and wind direction correlate with that movement.

These insights will improve storm forecasting, potentially mitigating loss of life and property damage in affected communities, by helping decision-makers plan for and respond to severe weather events and manage freshwater supplies. 

Teams at NASA JPL built each INCUS satellite’s radar, which were combined with a deployable mesh radar reflector made by Tendeg in Louisville, Colorado. The middle satellite also carries a microwave radiometer, also made at NASA JPL, that provides spatial context to the vertical precipitation profiles provided by the radars.

The three assemblies shipped in late 2025 and early 2026 to Blue Canyon Technologies in Lafayette, Colorado, where they were integrated with Blue Canyon’s spacecraft buses. The first two satellites, also called observatories, have successfully undergone vibration and thermal vacuum testing to ensure they will be able to withstand the jostling of launch and the extreme temperatures of space.

These two observatories also shipped to Tendeg, where teams successfully performed test deployments of the reflectors. Then they returned to Blue Canyon for additional testing. They’ll remain in storage before heading out next year to the launch site at NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia.

Funded through the Earth Venture Mission-3 acquisition under NASA’s Earth System Science Pathfinder Program, INCUS is one of several missions fulfilling the clouds, convection, and precipitation requirements of NASA’s Earth System Observatory, a series of interconnected missions set to study our home planet’s dynamic natural systems and how they interact. The mission is also part of FALCON (Fleet for the Atmosphere Linking Commercial Observations with NASA), a fleet of atmosphere-observing satellites that will combine hardware contributions from NASA centers, universities, and commercial partners.

The post NASA’s INCUS Mission on Road to Launch, Study Storms From Space appeared first on NASA Science.

For more than a century, musicians have maintained that the way a pianist touches a key influences the sound that emerges. Many scientists, however, have argued that after the hammer strikes the string, the instrument itself determines the outcome, making the pianist’s touch irrelevant.

Now, a recent study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences provides some of the strongest evidence yet in support of the musicians’ perspective.

A research team led by Dr. Shinichi Furuya of the NeuroPiano Institute and Sony Computer Science Laboratories developed a custom sensor system called HackKey. This system can record the movement of all 88 piano keys at 1,000 frames per second, with a spatial precision of 0.01 millimeters. The team invited 20 internationally recognized pianists to play notes while intentionally aiming for contrasting timbres, such as bright versus dark and light versus heavy. Listeners were able to distinguish among the different timbres, even individuals with no experience playing the piano.

The Movements Behind the Sound

The researchers identified a series of micro-movements beneath each keystroke. These movements are so subtle that they are almost impossible to see, but precise enough for listeners to perceive differences in sound.

Small changes in how quickly a key accelerates, slight overlaps between notes, and variations in the speed of initial contact with the key all influenced how listeners described the resulting sound. When each of these factors was adjusted individually, the perceived timbre changed. Adjusting a single movement feature was enough to reliably change how listeners perceived timbre. The results show that touch has a direct effect on sound, independent of factors such as volume or tempo.

The study describes these micro-movements as a motor skill developed through years of advanced training. The researchers call the emerging science of mapping movement to musical experience “dynaformics.”

A Debate as Old as the Modern Piano

The debate over whether touch can alter piano timbre dates back to at least the early 1900s, when music educators began discussing what distinguishes one performer’s sound from another. The piano’s mechanical action appeared to support the skeptics, since the hammer, once released, moves independently before striking the string and is not directly contacted by the pianist’s finger.

As a result of this mechanical process, many acousticians concluded that any reported differences in tone were psychological, influenced by context, volume, or timing rather than by touch. Musicians maintained their position but did not have the scientific tools to prove it.

To settle this debate, Furuya’s team developed a custom biometric contact-sensing system called HackKey, capable of recording the movement of all 88 piano keys at 1,000 frames per second with sub-millimeter precision. The system captured in-depth piano movement data that previous technology could not. For the first time, researchers could observe the specific actions of elite pianists and relate those movements to listeners’ descriptions of sound.

What It Means Beyond the Concert Hall

Piano teachers have often used general phrases like “play warmer” or “use a softer touch” because the specific movements that create certain sound qualities were not well understood. This study now offers a guide to those movements.

Future training tools may allow students to see precisely what their fingers are doing when a note is played successfully or not. Instead of relying on a teacher’s metaphor, students could compare their own keystrokes to a standard and work to improve their technique. The researchers suggest that this approach could make expressive technique easier to teach and visualize, especially for students who find it difficult to translate verbal instructions into physical actions.

The research may also apply to rehabilitation, robotics, and human-computer interaction. Discovering that small differences in movement can shape auditory perception offers new insight into how the brain links movement and sensory experience. Some researchers are exploring whether systems based on expressive musical movement could help patients recover dexterity and coordination after injury.

Most scientific research on music has focused on elements that are easier to measure, like pitch, loudness, and rhythm. Timbre, or the quality or “color” of a sound that makes one instrument or voice different from another, has been harder to measure. This study offers a new way to understand the mechanics behind this concept. The findings suggest that some of the most expressive parts of music come from movements too small to see, developed through years of practice.

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.

Ötzi the Iceman, Europe’s most famous mummy, is crawling with microbes, some long dead, some still eking out a living after thousands of years, and some very modern.

After he died in the Ötztal Alps, the Copper Age man now known as Ötzi lay alone and forgotten for 5,300 years, until a group of hikers stumbled on his freeze-dried remains in 1991. Since then, he’s received a lot of attention from scientists, who have sequenced his DNA, pored over his last meal and the remains of his gut microbes, and examined his clothes and his broken tools. Today, Ötzi lies in a high-tech resting place at the South Tyrol Museum of Archaeology in Italy, where, it turns out, his body is still home to a handful of cold-adapted yeast species that have probably been with him since just after he died.

Slightly morbid souvenirs from the Alps

Microbiologist Mohamed S. Sarhan (of the Institute of Mummy Studies at the private Eurac Research center) and his colleagues recently sampled material from Ötzi’s stomach and meltwater from inside his body, swabbed his skin, and even sampled airborne microbes from his frozen storage room and the lab outside it. They also took samples from a block of frozen alpine soil taken from next to Ötzi’s body back in 1991.

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Scientists discovered a hidden gut-brain network that can change cravings when the body needs more protein. The body has a remarkable ability to recognize when it is missing important nutrients and adjust behavior accordingly. New research shows that the gut plays a much larger role in this process than previously understood, actively detecting protein shortages [...]