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

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

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

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

The Venus Flytrap’s Secret is Finally Revealed

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

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

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

The Challenge of Measurement

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

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

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

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

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

Solving the Flytrap’s Mystery

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mapping Fungal Networks

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

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

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

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

Earth’s Circulatory System

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

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

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

Continuing Fungal Network Research

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

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

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

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

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

Scientists from Goethe University, Frankfurt, studying alternatives to black holes have suggested a mathematically viable formation mechanism for one proposed alternative called a ‘Gravastar.’

Although the team behind the newly proposed gravastar formation mechanism conceded that black holes still represent the simplest and most natural solution to gravitational collapse, they also suggest that the physics behind the alternative, which doesn’t require a single point where spacetime curves infinitely, called a “singularity,” can make them “easier to accept” than black holes.

If correct, and some or all black holes are, in fact, gravastars that mimic their expected properties, the work would establish a valid formation mechanism that could rewrite decades of accepted science and open a new field of research dedicated to understanding this previously misunderstood phenomenon.

Meet Gravastar: The Black Hole Mimicker without a Singularity

According to standard cosmology theories, black holes form when extremely massive stars stop generating energy, allowing the force of gravity to take over and collapse the remaining matter into a single point, or singularity. Unfortunately, the research team behind the new study notes that “the laws of physics break down” within the singularity, making the formation of the resulting black hole a difficult phenomenon to predict.

“How can spacetime be curved infinitely at that point, the singularity?” asks the team’s statement announcing the new approach. They also note that no information escapes a black hole, including light, making studying its inner workings effectively impossible, and opening up the possibility that “black holes are in fact entirely different objects.”

Some options have been proposed, including ‘horizonless’ black hole mimickers. The team notes that these proposed options are “mathematically consistent alternatives” that also address the physics challenges posed by traditional black holes. 

Still, how these alternative objects form has remained largely unclear. The research team said this lack of a formation mechanism constitutes “a significant open problem” since understanding how they form is the “first step” to determining if they truly exist.

New Model Creates a ‘Big Bang’ Inside a ‘Mini-Universe’

In the new formation model, theoretical physicists Daniel Jampolski and Theoretical Astrophysics Professor Luciano Rezzolla from Goethe University showed that the collapse of a dying star may not go far enough that it reaches the point of no return, where “the collapse to a black hole is inevitable.”

Instead, the collapse slows down near a point scientists call the Schwarzschild radius, then stops. The result is what the team termed a “miniature universe” within the collapsing matter, which they compared to the dynamics of the Big Bang, which most theorists agree formed the entire universe.

Since the universe’s expansion was driven by dark energy, the new model proposes that the dark energy within the mini-universe establishes an “equilibrium” with the counteracting force of gravity, therefore halting the collapse of the star “before a black hole can form.”

“The Big Bang of the emerging universe can unfold once the star has already collapsed almost to the point of becoming a black hole,” explained Jampolski, who discovered the black hole alternative gravastar solution in his master’s thesis while under the supervision of Professor Rezzolla.

Maintaining an Unbiased Approach Toward “What We Do Not Know”

When discussing the impact of their proposed black hole alternative formation model, Jampolski said that from a mathematical and physics standpoint, it is “easier to imagine that the Big Bang occurs only at a very late stage, when matter has already been compressed to an extreme degree, thereby giving rise to new effects.” The team also notes that the unresolved behavior of matter in this environment “leaves room for new physics.”

Although the team’s model offers a mathematically sound formation for an alternative to black holes, Rezzolla notes that the search for gravastars or other alternatives “should not suggest a skepticism towards black holes,” which, he adds, “still represent the most natural and simplest solution to the fate of gravitational collapse.”

Instead, the Goethe professor explained, his general role as a scientist and his specific discipline as a theoretical physicist make it essential that he and his colleagues “maintain an unbiased approach towards what we do not know and hence explore both the accepted wisdom and the more exotic interpretations.”

“History teaches us that it is not unusual for the latter to become the former,” the professor added.

The paper “Formation of gravastars” was published in the journal Physical Review D.

Christopher Plain is a Science Fiction and Fantasy novelist and Head Science Writer at The Debrief. Follow and connect with him on X, learn about his books at plainfiction.com, or email him directly at christopher@thedebrief.org.

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

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

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

A Particle of Unknown Origins

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

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

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

The Heavy Nucleus Hypothesis

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

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

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

New Theoretical Limits

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

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

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

Testing the Idea

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

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

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