American startup PsiQuantum has begun construction on a facility in Moreton Bay, Australia, where it plans to build and deploy what it calls the world’s first utility-scale, fault-tolerant quantum computer.

The California-based quantum computing company broke ground on the site alongside representatives from the Australian government, the Queensland government, and local officials. The project is expected to become a key part of Australia’s push to establish itself as a hub for advanced computing technologies.

The facility will be developed in multiple phases and will house the infrastructure needed to support PsiQuantum’s photonic quantum computing architecture. One of the first major components arriving at the site will be a large cryogenic plant designed to cool the quantum system.

PsiQuantum said the cryoplant, being built by Linde Engineering, is expected to be delivered in the second half of 2027. The company ordered the system in late 2024 and described it as one of the largest cryogenic cooling plants ever built for a quantum computing application.

Race toward utility

The cooling system will be followed by cryogenic cabinets that will contain photonic quantum chips. These cabinets will be connected using conventional optical fiber, forming the foundation of the company’s planned utility-scale machine.

Unlike many quantum computing efforts that remain focused on laboratory-scale systems, PsiQuantum is pursuing a photonics-based approach designed to scale using existing semiconductor manufacturing processes and optical networking technologies.

“Building a quantum computer that solves real world problems is one of the great engineering challenges of our time. For decades, quantum computing has held the promise of transforming what humanity can achieve through computation, and today in Australia we are beginning to turn that promise into reality,” said Victor Peng, Chief Executive Officer of PsiQuantum.

The company believes fault-tolerant quantum computers could eventually tackle problems beyond the reach of conventional computing systems. Potential applications include drug discovery, materials development, energy research, logistics, manufacturing, agriculture, and financial modeling.

PsiQuantum also sees quantum computing as a complement to emerging computational technologies rather than a replacement. The company said future industrial computing systems are likely to combine quantum and classical technologies to accelerate scientific discovery and solve increasingly complex problems.

Building local capability

The Moreton Bay facility is also expected to support workforce development in Australia’s growing quantum technology sector. The site sits within the Moreton Bay Central Innovation Precinct, close to a TAFE Centre of Excellence and the University of the Sunshine Coast’s Moreton Bay campus.

According to the company, the project will create jobs in engineering, technical operations, advanced manufacturing, research, and professional services. The location is intended to help students, technicians, apprentices, and engineers move directly into careers linked to quantum technologies.

“Australia has been part of this journey from the very beginning,” said Prof. Jeremy O’Brien, Co-Founder and Executive Chair of PsiQuantum.

The groundbreaking follows the opening of PsiQuantum’s Test and Validation Lab at Griffith University in Brisbane in May 2026. The laboratory houses cryogenic equipment used to test photonic quantum chips and supporting systems that will eventually be deployed at the Moreton Bay site.

If completed as planned, the facility will become one of the world’s most ambitious efforts to build a fault-tolerant quantum computer at industrial scale.

Some stars have planets. Others are orbited by brown dwarfs, balls of gas too massive to be planets, but too low-mass to be stars. Astronomers love these brown dwarf-star pairs because being paired with a star helps reveal a brown dwarf’s age. Ages of astronomical objects are often hard to measure, but essential for understanding how they form. 

Now, you can join NASA’s new Backyard Worlds: Binaries project and help astronomers discover these rare and interesting pairs. As a volunteer, you’ll inspect images from NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) space telescope. Brown dwarfs may appear as small dots moving across a field of otherwise static stars. 

“We need your help to gain critical insights into these enigmatic cosmic objects,” said project lead Aaron Meisner.

Brown dwarfs are common but mysterious because they are so faint. There’s one for every three or four stars in our corner of the Milky Way galaxy. They are important laboratories for understanding giant planets like Jupiter.

Join the Backyard Worlds: Binaries project today and help astronomers understand where and when brown dwarfs form! You can also try one of our other brown dwarf-related projects: Backyard Worlds: Cool Neighbors! Anyone with a laptop or cell phone can participate. Participation does not require citizenship in any particular country.

The post Search for Hidden Cosmic Companions in Sun’s Backyard appeared first on NASA Science.

Some stars have planets. Others are orbited by brown dwarfs, balls of gas too massive to be planets, but too low-mass to be stars. Astronomers love these brown dwarf-star pairs because being paired with a star helps reveal a brown dwarf’s age. Ages of astronomical objects are often hard to measure, but essential for understanding how they form. 

Now, you can join NASA’s new Backyard Worlds: Binaries project and help astronomers discover these rare and interesting pairs. As a volunteer, you’ll inspect images from NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) space telescope. Brown dwarfs may appear as small dots moving across a field of otherwise static stars. 

“We need your help to gain critical insights into these enigmatic cosmic objects,” said project lead Aaron Meisner.

Brown dwarfs are common but mysterious because they are so faint. There’s one for every three or four stars in our corner of the Milky Way galaxy. They are important laboratories for understanding giant planets like Jupiter.

Join the Backyard Worlds: Binaries project today and help astronomers understand where and when brown dwarfs form! You can also try one of our other brown dwarf-related projects: Backyard Worlds: Cool Neighbors! Anyone with a laptop or cell phone can participate. Participation does not require citizenship in any particular country.

US scientists have connected a novel 20-qubit quantum computer to Frontier, the world’s most powerful supercomputer for open science, in a major step aimed at advancing hybrid computing.

The research team at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) launched Pathfinder on June 16. The new 20-qubit IQM Radiance system will operate alongside the lab’s high-performance computing infrastructure.

Finland’s IQM, which built and deployed the Pathfinder, said the system is the first commercially procured quantum computer at ORNL. It is furthermore IQM’s first installation in the US.

“Our first US system now sits on Oak Ridge campus, connected to their HPC environment, owned and operated by their teams,” Jan Goetz, IQM co-founder and CEO, noted. “Quantum becomes useful when it works inside real computing infrastructure, and there is no better place to prove that.”

Pathfinder goes live

The Pathfinder is owned and run by ORNL. The researchers will have direct access to the hardware. They will moreover have the ability to build their own intellectual property and applications.

Travis Humble, ORNL Quantum Science Center Director, stated that the presence of the quantum computer has already sped up their efforts to integrate quantum technologies with the lab’s world-class supercomputing capabilities.

“On-premises systems enable us to demonstrate quantum computing concepts that realize our goal of building a scalable, hybrid HPC ecosystem,” Humble said. “Our research teams are now developing new methods and tools to demonstrate applications in materials simulations, chemistry, and artificial intelligence.”

The director said these fields are widely regarded as among the most promising areas in which quantum computing could provide advantages over conventional systems. The installation also serves as a test case for how future research sites may deploy quantum computers within their existing computing infrastructure.

A new era of computing

IQM pointed out that it has sold 23 full-stack quantum systems worldwide, with installations spanning Europe, Asia, and North America. The ORNL deployment represents a major expansion of its footprint in the US.

Beyond the Tennessee installation, the company recently established a quantum technology center in Maryland to support research, education, and collaboration with high-performance computing providers.

Senator Marsha Blackburn highlighted that the debut of ORNL’s IQM Pathfinder is set to strengthen Tennessee’s position in advancing US quantum innovation. She added that the partnership between the two institutions could support advances in national security and economic growth.

At the same time, Senator Bill Hagerty described the deployment as an important technological investment. “We find ourselves in a time when quantum science, energy systems, and economic growth are converging in ways never before seen,” Hagerty said in a press release.

The senator praised the system, saying it could lead to new future breakthroughs. “This is yet another example of how Tennessee is establishing itself as a global leader in quantum innovation, advanced energy, and nuclear ingenuity,” Hagerty concluded.

IQM develops superconducting quantum computers for research institutions, universities, and national laboratories. Founded in 2018, it employs more than 350 people and operates across Europe, Asia, and North America.

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The World Health Statistics 2026 report, published by the World Health Organization on 13 May, carries a paradox on almost every page. The gains it documents are genuine. A 40 percent reduction in new HIV infections between 2010 and 2024. A 36 percent drop in the number of people requiring interventions for neglected tropical diseases over the same period. The WHO’s African Region achieved faster reductions in new HIV infections than the global average — down 70 percent since 2010 compared with 40 percent globally — and also outpaced the global rate on tuberculosis. These are not small movements. They represent millions of lives in different conditions than they would otherwise have been.

The report also states that the world is “off track to achieve any of the health-related Sustainable Development Goals by 2030,” that progress in many areas has slowed, and that in some it has reversed. The HIV and NTD figures are cited as among the bright points. But the infrastructure that produced them, the funding systems, the programmes, and the health systems they flow through, is now under significant and specific pressure.

What the HIV figure represents

A 40 percent reduction in new infections across fourteen years is a result of sustained investment in prevention, testing, antiretroviral treatment access, and targeted behavioural programmes. No single intervention produced it. The figure reflects the cumulative effect of programmes that operated at scale, consistently, over a long period.

The United States has historically been the largest single contributor to international HIV funding, providing around 73 percent of all donor funding for HIV programmes in low- and middle-income countries in 2023, primarily through the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, known as PEPFAR. Early in 2025, USAID grant holders were instructed to stop work. Testing counsellors and clinic staff were laid off in the same period. Studies from Mozambique and South Africa documented immediate drops in HIV testing and new treatment initiations in the first quarter of 2025. Modelling work published by UNAIDS in 2025 projected that if US-supported programmes were halted without equivalent replacement, there could be more than 6 million additional new HIV infections by 2030 — potentially returning infection levels to those not seen since the early 2000s.

Neglected tropical diseases and what the 36% figure includes

Neglected tropical diseases, or NTDs, are a group of conditions, including lymphatic filariasis, trachoma, schistosomiasis, and several others, that predominantly affect people living in poverty in tropical and subtropical regions. The 36 percent reduction in the number of people requiring interventions between 2010 and 2024 reflects a combination of mass drug administration programmes, improved sanitation, and sustained public health campaigns that, like the HIV work, required consistent funding and logistical infrastructure over many years.

The gains in this area are concentrated in specific regions and specific diseases. They are not uniformly distributed. And because NTD programmes depend on donated medicines, coordinated delivery, and community health infrastructure that is itself dependent on external funding, they are vulnerable to the same financing pressures that now affect HIV programmes.

Where the broader picture is worse

The HIV and NTD improvements are among the few areas where the World Health Statistics 2026 report can present an unambiguously positive trajectory. Much of the rest of the data is more difficult.

Progress toward universal health coverage has slowed sharply. The WHO’s service coverage index rose only from 68 to 71 between 2015 and 2023. One quarter of the global population faced financial hardship from health costs. Around 1.6 billion people were living in or pushed into poverty from out-of-pocket health spending in 2022. Malaria incidence increased by 8.5 percent since 2015. Anaemia affects 30.7 percent of women of reproductive age, with no improvement over the past decade. Childhood vaccination coverage remains below target.

The COVID-19 pandemic’s shadow runs through the report. Between 2020 and 2023, it is linked to an estimated 22.1 million excess deaths, including indirect deaths. That figure is more than three times the number of officially reported COVID-19 deaths. The WHO states that this reversed a decade of gains in life expectancy, and that recovery remains incomplete and uneven.

The data gap underneath all of this

There is a further problem the report names directly. As of the end of 2025, only 18 percent of countries were reporting mortality data to WHO within one year. Nearly one third have never reported cause-of-death data. Of the estimated 61 million deaths globally in 2023, only around one third were reported with cause-of-death information, and roughly one fifth had usable coded data.

This matters for how to read all the figures above, including the gains. The 40 percent reduction in HIV infections and the 36 percent drop in NTD burden are derived from the best available data. Where data collection is poor, those estimates carry more uncertainty. The WHO notes this not to undercut its own figures but because the data gap affects the ability to monitor whether progress is holding, slipping, or reversing in real time. Progress built on incomplete reporting is harder to protect.

What the WHO is asking for

Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the WHO Director-General, said in the report’s accompanying statement that “investing in stronger, more equitable health systems, including resilient health data systems is essential to target action, close gaps and ensure accountability.” Dr Yukiko Nakatani, the WHO Assistant Director-General for Health Systems, named “a worsening health financing crisis” as one of the conditions requiring urgent response, alongside rising environmental risks and ongoing health emergencies.

The language is institutional and measured. The situation it describes is not. A decade of measurable progress in two of the most intractable areas of global health is now contingent on decisions about funding that are being made in contexts entirely external to the public health systems that produced the gains. The WHO’s report is, among other things, a record of what was built and a description of how fragile the conditions for maintaining it have become.

The post New HIV infections fell by 40 percent between 2010 and 2024 and the number of people requiring treatment for neglected tropical diseases dropped by 36 percent in the same period, according to the World Health Statistics 2026 report — gains now at risk as the funding that built them comes under pressure appeared first on Space Daily.

Using NASA’s Goldstone Solar System Radar and NSF’s Green Bank Telescope, astronomers from the University of California, Los Angeles, confirmed that the icy surface of Jupiter’s moon Europa scatters radio energy in an unusually strong and complex way not seen on rocky worlds.

The post Radar Observations Reveal New Clues about Europa’s Hidden Interior appeared first on Sci.News: Breaking Science News.

Rivers serve as the lifeblood of our planet, weaving through landscapes and ecosystems while sustaining human civilizations. Despite their critical importance, many rivers remain under-studied, often due to the difficulties presented by their accessibility and variability. Small streams can be intermittent and unpredictable, sometimes disappearing for months or even years. This presents a formidable challenge for hydrologists and environmental scientists tasked with understanding these dynamic systems and their impact on water resources. Now, cutting-edge satellite remote sensing technology is revolutionizing how researchers monitor and analyze river health and water quality on a global scale.

Professor Dongmei Feng of the University of Cincinnati is at the forefront of this emerging discipline. Specializing in hydrological modeling and remote sensing, Feng recognizes that satellite data offers an unprecedented opportunity to observe rivers wherever they flow, even those in remote or inaccessible regions. Through spectral analysis of satellite imagery, scientists can detect changes in water quality and identify key pollutants, nutrients, and biological stressors that are difficult to measure through traditional fieldwork alone. This technology enables continuous and comprehensive monitoring, which is essential in managing freshwater resources sustainably.

The article recently published in Nature Water by Feng and her international collaborators underscores the importance of a holistic yet detailed approach to river science. By combining systematic review techniques with satellite-based observations, the researchers advocate studying rivers both individually and collectively. Each river exhibits a unique combination of climatic conditions, geographical features, and human impacts, which influence its health and quality. Understanding these nuances at multiple scales is crucial for predicting the rivers’ response to environmental pressures and human activities.

Rivers are not isolated entities; they are integral to planetary processes, acting as conduits connecting terrestrial landscapes with oceans and the atmosphere. The sediment and nutrients transported from rivers to estuaries serve as essential nourishment for diverse marine ecosystems. Estuaries themselves act as critical breeding grounds and nurseries for countless marine species, making the health of upstream river systems vital to ocean biodiversity. Satellite remote sensing provides a powerful lens through which to monitor these interactions in near real-time with astonishing spatial coverage.

One of the most pressing global environmental concerns linked to river systems is nutrient pollution, which frequently leads to harmful algal blooms. These blooms, fueled by excess nitrogen and phosphorus from fertilizer runoff and sewage discharge, pose severe risks to public health and aquatic ecosystems. Professor Feng’s ongoing research, supported by a substantial grant from the National Science Foundation, aims to unravel nutrient dynamics over the past five decades across multiple rivers worldwide. This extensive historical analysis is anticipated to improve early warning systems, allowing water managers to preemptively respond to developing algal blooms before they reach toxic levels.

The biogeochemical cycles underlying these nutrient movements involve complex feedback mechanisms. Algal blooms block sunlight from penetrating the water column, suffocating submerged vegetation that supports aquatic life. Upon decomposition of the dead algae, oxygen levels in the water plummet, creating ‘dead zones’ where fish and other organisms cannot survive. This process, known as eutrophication, exemplifies how human-induced nutrient loading can trigger cascading ecological failures. Understanding and modeling this cycle is critical for devising targeted mitigation strategies.

Satellite technology, combined with sophisticated computer modeling, is revolutionizing the ability to track water quality parameters such as turbidity, chlorophyll concentration, and dissolved organic matter with unprecedented precision. Dr. Xiao Yang from Southern Methodist University highlights how spectral signatures obtained from satellites can differentiate among various pollutants and ecological indicators. This technological advancement enables continuous global surveillance and geographically detailed water quality assessments that were not feasible before.

The applications of these remote sensing tools extend beyond academic research; they have real-world implications for managing urban infrastructure and protecting public health. Cities that rely heavily on river water for drinking need accurate and timely data to prevent toxic algal contaminants from entering treatment plants. Given that around 90% of the world’s population lives within six miles of a river, technological breakthroughs in monitoring river systems have direct societal benefits, including safeguarding drinking water, supporting recreational activities, and preserving biodiversity.

Moreover, this satellite-enabled river science promises to illuminate previously hidden aspects of hydrological variability and change. By tracking fluctuations in river flow and quality across diverse climatic zones, researchers hope to better understand how climate change will impact freshwater availability and ecosystem services. The integration of historical datasets with contemporary remote sensing observations offers a pathway to predictive models that inform adaptation and conservation efforts worldwide.

The multidisciplinary collaboration evident in Feng’s study incorporates expertise from hydrology, environmental engineering, satellite physics, and data science. Such integrative research approaches are becoming increasingly necessary to tackle complex environmental challenges that span geographic and disciplinary boundaries. The comprehensive global perspective championed in this research paves the way for a new era of river science, where policy decisions and resource management are underpinned by data-driven insights and continuous observation.

As research progresses, the challenge will be to translate these tremendous amounts of data into actionable knowledge. This entails developing user-friendly platforms for water managers and policymakers to interpret satellite-derived information effectively. Ensuring accessibility while maintaining scientific rigor requires ongoing innovation in data analytics and communication. Nonetheless, the promise of these technological tools to safeguard freshwater resources against pollution and ecological degradation has galvanized the scientific community and stakeholders alike.

In conclusion, the integration of satellite remote sensing into river science marks a transformative advancement in understanding and managing one of Earth’s most essential natural resources. Pioneered by experts such as Professor Dongmei Feng, this approach enables scientists to overcome traditional barriers to studying rivers, track nutrient pollution trends, and predict ecological threats such as toxic algal blooms. As the global population continues to grow and climate change accelerates, technologies that provide real-time, global-scale insights into river ecosystems are indispensable for sustainable water management and environmental protection.

Subject of Research: Hydrology, water quality control, and nutrient dynamics in rivers using satellite remote sensing technology.

Article Title: Remote sensing and the new global river science

News Publication Date: 17-Jun-2026

Web References: DOI: 10.1038/s44221-026-00665-2

Image Credits: Andrew Higley

Keywords: Hydrology, Water quality control, Sewage treatment, Water delivery, Environmental engineering, Natural resources management, Pollution control

A groundbreaking study published in the open access journal PLOS One on June 17, 2026, reveals a compelling link between varying degrees of contact with the U.S. criminal legal system and the mental health outcomes of adolescents and young adults. Conducted by Raquel V. Oliveira and Elizabeth Culatta at Augusta University, this research dissects the complex and often overlooked mental health ramifications for youth entangled within the legal framework, a subject of critical importance given the high prevalence of mental health conditions in this demographic.

The study draws on data from the Pathways to Desistance project, an extensive longitudinal observational study following 1,354 youths from Phoenix, Arizona, and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. These participants were initially assessed between 2000 and 2003 during late adolescence, spanning ages 14 to 18, and then tracked with follow-up interviews over seven years. Such an extended study period provides a rare and valuable opportunity to analyze mental health trajectories in relation to different interactions with the criminal justice system, including arrests, court appearances, and institutionalization.

Previous research has consistently demonstrated a disproportionate representation of mental health conditions among incarcerated youth, estimating that while only 15 to 22 percent of all youths in the U.S. have diagnosable mental health disorders, an alarming 40 to 80 percent of incarcerated youths fall into this category. However, Oliveira and Culatta’s work delves deeper, examining the nuanced effects of various legal system encounters on mental health symptoms such as anxiety, depression, hostility, and psychoticism, moving beyond prevalence to explore causative complexities.

The findings illustrate that the experience of arrest acts as a significant short-term stressor, exacerbating symptoms related to anxiety, depression, and psychoticism in adolescents and young adults. These acute psychological impacts can be attributed to the trauma, stigma, and uncertainty commonly associated with arrest, which can introduce substantial emotional upheaval during a developmental stage already sensitive to stress.

Institutionalization—a potential consequence of judicial decisions—was similarly linked to increased short-term symptoms of depression, hostility, and psychoticism. The constrained and often isolating environment of juvenile detention facilities can compound existing mental health issues or catalyze new psychological distress, highlighting the critical need for targeted mental health support within these settings.

Interestingly, court appearances painted a more complex picture. While the act of appearing in court was initially associated with a short-term decrease in anxiety—perhaps reflecting relief after the end of anticipatory stress—this was counterbalanced by significant long-term increases in anxiety, depression, and psychoticism symptoms. Such findings suggest that while resolutions of legal events momentarily alleviate some distress, the enduring implications and future uncertainty following these events continue to burden affected youths.

Equally noteworthy is the discovery that youth experiencing two or more concurrent legal system contacts endure more consistent and lasting mental health symptoms over time. This cumulative effect underpins the critical intersectionality of criminal justice interactions and mental health, indicating an urgent need to re-evaluate how multiple touchpoints with the system may perpetuate or intensify psychological harm.

The study also acknowledges the influence of other adverse factors commonly entangled with justice-involved youth such as substance use, engagement in criminal behavior, and the use of prescribed psychiatric medication. These intersecting variables complicate the mental health landscape, emphasizing the multifactorial nature of psychological distress in this vulnerable group.

It is important to contextualize these findings within the limitations outlined by the authors. The Pathways to Desistance study deliberately limited the inclusion of male drug offenses, potentially skewing the representativeness of offense types nationwide. Moreover, the observational nature of the research restricts conclusions to associations rather than direct causative relationships, leaving gaps for future explorations into the causal mechanisms linking legal system contact and mental health outcomes.

Despite these constraints, the authors robustly argue that contact with the criminal legal system serves as a significant psychosocial stressor for youth, triggering mental health symptoms that not only emerge in the short term but may persist years beyond initial contact. This highlights a considerable gap in both the criminal justice system’s and public health domain’s capacity to adequately address the mental wellbeing of adjudicated youth.

Oliveira and Culatta’s work resonates powerfully with existing literature emphasizing the necessity for diversion programs and comprehensive mental health services tailored to youths in contact with the justice system. Their findings reinforce the call for systemic reforms focused on ameliorating the psychological burdens imposed by mechanisms of legal adjudication.

From a policy and intervention perspective, this study sends a clear message: psychiatric assessment and therapeutic interventions must become foundational components of juvenile justice procedures. Without these, the cycle of mental health deterioration intertwined with legal entanglements is likely to continue unabated, hindered by insufficient support structures and reactive rather than proactive care models.

Ultimately, this investigation fosters a crucial dialogue around the broader societal implications of youth incarceration and court involvement, advocating for multidisciplinary approaches that incorporate mental health expertise in legal contexts. Such integration promises not only to mitigate harmful mental health outcomes but also to facilitate more humane and effective justice practices for adolescents on the cusp of adulthood.

By shedding light on the intrinsic link between criminal legal system encounters and mental health trajectories, Oliveira and Culatta’s research paves the way for future inquiries and innovations aimed at reducing psychological distress and promoting resilience among justice-involved youth cohorts, a population too often marginalized in both research and policy.

Subject of Research: People

Article Title: Effects of differential contacts with the criminal legal system on mental health outcomes of adolescents and young adults: A fixed-effects model

News Publication Date: 17-Jun-2026

Web References:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0344895

References:
Oliveira RV, Culatta E (2026) Effects of differential contacts with the criminal legal system on mental health outcomes of adolescents and young adults: A fixed-effects model. PLoS One 21(6): e0344895.

Keywords: mental health, criminal legal system, adolescents, young adults, anxiety, depression, psychoticism, institutionalization, arrest, juvenile justice, Pathways to Desistance, longitudinal study, observational study

The question of why the sky is blue is one of the older questions in the history of human curiosity. Aristotle attempted an answer in the fourth century BCE. Newton, in the seventeenth century, suggested it had something to do with the reflection of light from the ocean. Ancient civilisations across multiple cultures proposed mystical, religious, and aesthetic explanations of varying poetic merit and zero physical accuracy. The actual answer turned out to be substantially weirder than any of these traditional accounts, and was not fully worked out until the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries — when the British physicist John William Strutt, the third Baron Rayleigh, derived the mathematical formula that bears his name, and Albert Einstein, in 1911, supplied the final theoretical underpinning. The blue of the sky, it turns out, is not the colour of air. Air, in any small quantity, has no colour. The blue is the colour of light being bent by the molecules of air, in a particular pattern that depends on wavelength, and that produces the specific shade of blue that humans see overhead on any clear day.

According to a reference summary of the physics maintained by the mathematician John Baez at UC Riverside, the first crucial step toward the modern understanding was taken by John Tyndall in 1859. Tyndall demonstrated, experimentally, that when light passes through a clear liquid containing small particles in suspension — a tank of water with a little milk mixed in, for example — the shorter blue wavelengths are scattered more strongly than the longer red ones. From the side of the tank, the beam appears bluish. Looking through the long axis of the tank, the transmitted light appears reddish. The geometry, Tyndall recognised, was identical to the geometry of the daytime sky versus the sunset. Lord Rayleigh derived the precise mathematical relationship governing the scattering in 1871, showing that the intensity of scattered light is inversely proportional to the fourth power of the wavelength. Both Tyndall and Rayleigh, however, initially attributed the sky’s blue to small particles of dust and droplets of water vapour suspended in the atmosphere, rather than to the gas molecules themselves. Subsequent scientists realised that this dust-and-water-vapour framework predicted more variation of sky colour with humidity and haze conditions than was actually observed, and that the molecules of nitrogen and oxygen in the air must be sufficient scatterers on their own. The case was definitively settled by Albert Einstein in 1911, who calculated the detailed formula for the scattering of light by individual molecules and showed that it agreed precisely with observation.

What Rayleigh scattering actually does

The Rayleigh scattering formula, which has been a fixture of undergraduate physics curricula for more than a century, states that the intensity of scattered light is inversely proportional to the fourth power of the wavelength. The practical implication is straightforward but striking. Blue light, with a wavelength of approximately 450 nanometres, is scattered roughly 5.5 times more strongly than red light, with a wavelength of approximately 700 nanometres. As sunlight enters the upper atmosphere and travels downward toward an observer on the ground, every gas molecule it encounters scatters a small fraction of the incoming light in random directions — but the fraction is heavily weighted toward the blue end of the spectrum. By the time the light reaches the observer, the direct beam from the Sun has been depleted of some of its blue content, and the indirect light arriving from all other directions in the sky is dominated by the scattered blue.

Per the UK Met Office’s reference explanation of the phenomenon, the human eye perceives this combination as a uniformly blue sky overhead, even though the underlying sunlight is white and the underlying air is colourless. The blue is, in a literal sense, a property of the geometry — of the angle between the observer, the Sun, and the column of atmosphere through which the light has travelled. Looking straight up on a clear day, the observer sees blue because they are looking through a column of atmosphere whose molecules have been preferentially scattering blue light toward them all day. Looking directly at the Sun (which one should not do), the observer sees the residual yellowish-white of sunlight that has been partially depleted of its blue. Looking at the Sun near the horizon at sunset, the observer sees red — because at that geometry, the sunlight has had to travel through approximately 38 times more atmosphere than it would at noon, and almost all of the blue has been scattered out before the light reaches the eye.

Why the sky is not violet

A logical question, given the wavelength dependence, is why the sky is not violet rather than blue — since violet light, with an even shorter wavelength than blue, should be scattered even more strongly. As reported by a physics-questions page maintained by Christopher Baird at West Texas A&M University, three factors combine to produce the observed blue rather than violet. First, the Sun emits less violet light than blue light to begin with — solar emission peaks closer to the green-yellow part of the spectrum and tapers off toward both red and violet. Second, the human eye is substantially less sensitive to violet than to blue; the retina’s cone cells are tuned to a colour space in which blue is more salient than violet. Third, some violet light is absorbed by molecules in the upper atmosphere before it can be scattered downward. The combined effect is that the sky appears blue rather than violet, even though violet is being scattered slightly more strongly than blue.

The same physics also explains a related puzzle: the actual colour of the Sun itself. From space, the Sun is essentially white — its emission spectrum, integrated across all visible wavelengths, produces a colour that the human visual system reads as white with a very slight bluish tint. From the surface of Earth, the Sun appears yellowish-white because some of the blue light has been scattered out of the direct beam during its passage through the atmosphere. The yellow colour of the Sun, in other words, is not a property of the Sun. It is a property of looking at the Sun through a Rayleigh-scattering medium. From space, astronauts see a white Sun.

The clouds and the other planets

As discussed in a 2024 explainer at When Notes Fly on the history and physics of sky colour, the absence of Rayleigh-style colour selectivity also explains why clouds appear white. Clouds are made of water droplets and ice crystals that are substantially larger than the wavelength of visible light — typically tens to hundreds of micrometres across, compared to the ~0.3-nanometre size of an air molecule and the ~500-nanometre wavelength of visible light. At those sizes, the scattering is governed by a different formula, called Mie scattering, which does not strongly favour any particular wavelength. The result is that clouds scatter all wavelengths of light roughly equally, which the eye perceives as white.

The Rayleigh-scattering explanation also predicts that the sky on other planets will have different colours, depending on what their atmospheres are made of and how thick they are. Mars, with its thin carbon-dioxide atmosphere and substantial dust load, has a brownish-red sky during the day and a blue tint near the Sun at sunset — essentially the reverse of Earth, where the everyday sky is blue and the sunset is red. Titan, Saturn’s largest moon, has a thick orange haze of hydrocarbons that produces an orange-yellow sky. Venus, with its dense and chemically complex atmosphere, has a yellowish-orange sky. The blue overhead on Earth is, in cosmic terms, a specific property of a specific combination of atmospheric chemistry, atmospheric depth, and human visual physiology — produced by the interaction of light with molecules so small that, taken individually, they are invisible, and that collectively produce the colour everyone above the cloud line has been looking at for the entire history of the species.

The post The blue color of the sky is not a property of the air itself — air is colorless, and a glass of it would look exactly like a glass of nothing — and the blue you see overhead is sunlight being scattered by molecules of nitrogen and oxygen, which deflect short blue wavelengths much more strongly than long red ones, in the same physics that makes the Sun appear yellow and a sunset appear red appeared first on Space Daily.

A groundbreaking study at The University of Texas at Arlington is poised to transform how families address adolescent alcohol use through innovative, technology-enhanced communication strategies. With a new five-year, $3.33 million federal grant, researchers are expanding their efforts to develop a family-based intervention program targeting early discussions between parents and teens about alcohol consumption and its social media influences.

Underage alcohol use remains a pressing public health issue in the United States, with nationwide surveys indicating that over 12 million individuals aged 12 to 20 have consumed alcohol at least once. Despite decades of research and intervention programs, the persistence of early alcohol experimentation underscores the need for novel approaches that account for the evolving digital landscape. Social media platforms profoundly shape adolescents’ perceptions and attitudes toward alcohol, often normalizing its consumption through peer influences and targeted advertising.

The UT Arlington project, led by the Studying Alcohol and Related Risks (STARR) Lab, harnesses multidisciplinary expertise spanning adolescent behavioral health, web-based intervention design, social work, and digital media studies. Principal investigator Dana Litt highlights that the initiative integrates years of collaborative research to craft a robust community resource that tackles the complex interplay between adolescent substance use and online social environments. By engaging families in effective communication, the program aims to instill critical thinking and awareness about alcohol-related risks before youths initiate use.

Previous intervention models often focused on older adolescents already experimenting with alcohol, but this study innovatively targets younger teens aged 12 to 17. This demographic shift is grounded in recent findings that pre-exposure attitudes toward substances significantly predict future use patterns. Early intervention that fosters open dialogue about alcohol and its portrayal on social media can disrupt these trajectories by equipping families with tools for informed conversations well before exposure escalates.

Co-principal investigator Melissa Lewis elaborates on the urgency of addressing alcohol use factors earlier in adolescent development due to the omnipresence of alcohol content on platforms such as Instagram, TikTok, and Snapchat. Studies reveal that repeated exposure to alcohol-related visuals and narratives subtly shapes normative beliefs, leading teens to underestimate the risks and overestimate peer approval. By facilitating early parent-teen discussions, the program leverages critical windows of neurocognitive development to build resilience against these influences.

An integral feature of the intervention is its bilingual accessibility, offering both English and Spanish versions tailored to the diverse communities in the Dallas-Fort Worth area. This linguistic inclusivity acknowledges the demographic realities and aims to bridge cultural gaps that often hinder engagement with prevention programs. By customizing content to resonate with multiple communities, the project enhances its potential for implementation and scalability.

The research team emphasizes the program’s flexibility as a dynamic communication tool that parents can adapt to address not only alcohol use but also emerging concerns such as vaping and other substance-related behaviors. This adaptability responds to the multifaceted nature of adolescent risk factors and the rapidly evolving social media landscape, promising long-term relevance and utility across different contexts and substances.

In developing this intervention, the STARR Lab collaborates with several local organizations, including Challenge of Tarrant County, SMART Arlington, Lena Pope, Recovery Resource Council, and JPS Health Network. These partnerships ensure that the tool is grounded in community needs and practical realities, facilitating its adoption as a trusted, no-cost resource for families. This community-engaged research model exemplifies a bidirectional flow between academic inquiry and real-world application.

The effort aligns with UTA’s broader mission to produce high-impact research that transcends academia and delivers tangible societal benefits. By positioning the university as a central hub for reliable information and support around adolescent health issues and social media influences, the project fosters a sustained infrastructure for preventive interventions that can evolve with technological trends and public health priorities.

Beyond its immediate aims, the research holds promise for significantly reducing underage drinking rates by addressing the root mechanisms through family dialogue and critical media literacy. This preventive focus contrasts with traditional approaches that often intervene post-initiation, offering a proactive paradigm shift. If effective, these models could also be adapted to mitigate other behavioral health challenges driven by digital media exposure.

The scientists behind the study bring methodological rigor by integrating behavioral theories, communication science, and digital evaluation metrics to assess intervention efficacy. The multidisciplinary team, including colleagues from UTHealth Houston School of Public Health, the University of Washington, and the University of North Texas Health Science Center, exemplifies comprehensive expertise essential to tackling a complex public health issue at multiple ecological levels.

Ultimately, this study represents a strategic nexus of research innovation, community partnership, and public health advocacy aimed at empowering families to navigate the often opaque and pernicious world of adolescent substance use amplified by digital media. Its success could redefine prevention frameworks nationwide, offering scalable, culturally sensitive tools for healthier youth development amid an increasingly interconnected social landscape.

Subject of Research: Adolescent alcohol use prevention through family-based communication interventions addressing social media influences

Article Title:
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News Publication Date:
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Web References:
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Keywords:
Social work, adolescent substance use, underage drinking, alcohol prevention, social media influence, family-based intervention, digital health, public health, bilingual program, adolescent behavior, substance use research, community partnership

In an unprecedented exploration of how entertainment media shapes public awareness of critical yet overlooked health care history, researchers from the University of Pittsburgh School of Public Health have unveiled compelling evidence that a single episode of the hit medical drama “The Pitt” catalyzed a surge in public knowledge about the Freedom House Ambulance Service. This pioneering emergency medical service, established in 1967 in Pittsburgh’s Hill District, holds the distinction of being the first EMS system in the United States staffed entirely by African Americans. Despite its foundational contributions to prehospital care, Freedom House’s legacy has languished in obscurity—until now.

The study, published in the American Journal of Health Promotion, marks a first-of-its-kind effort to quantitatively and qualitatively assess the impact of a scripted health-related storyline on public consciousness. Utilizing a multifaceted methodology that combined Google Trends analytics with comprehensive content analysis of Reddit discussions, the research team documented a remarkable 170% spike in online searches for “Freedom House” immediately following the episode’s original broadcast on February 20, 2025. This elevated search interest persisted for approximately one week, highlighting sustained public intrigue ignited by the storyline.

The TV episode in question, “2:00 P.M.” from the inaugural season, centers on Willie Alexander, an octogenarian patient navigating a glitching pacemaker while intermittently regaling the emergency department staff with medically accurate commentary about his case. As the narrative unfolds, viewers discover Willie’s own history as a former member of Freedom House Ambulance Service, affording a rare window into the challenges and triumphs of this groundbreaking group. Founded during a turbulent era marked by systemic racial inequities, Freedom House provided not only emergency medical transport but also vital paramedic training and community employment opportunities to African Americans excluded from many healthcare roles.

Despite its transformative community impact and innovative operational model, Freedom House was ultimately shuttered eight years after its inception when Pittsburgh transitioned EMS management to city authorities, who replaced the predominantly Black cadre with a mostly white workforce. The storyline poignantly underscores how Freedom House’s pioneering efforts were largely erased from mainstream recognition—a fact that elicited profound emotional responses from both the study participants and the viewing audience.

This resurgence of interest was catalyzed in part by the University of Pittsburgh’s public health researchers hosting a special screening event that included a panel discussion featuring six surviving members of Freedom House Ambulance Service. Their firsthand testimonies and reflections resonated deeply with attendees, many of whom expressed astonishment at learning about Freedom House only through the television narrative. According to Dr. Beth L. Hoffman, assistant professor of behavioral and community health sciences at Pitt Public Health and lead author on the study, the audience’s reactions illuminated a significant gap in public knowledge and a hunger for stories that reveal hidden chapters of health equity and systemic racism.

Coauthor Dr. Sylvia Owusu-Ansah, who also acted as medical consultant for “The Pitt,” articulated the personal significance of bringing Freedom House’s story to a broader audience. As an African American physician and emergency medical services director, Dr. Owusu-Ansah highlighted the importance of representation and the pride associated with recognizing historical pioneers who paved the way for greater diversity in healthcare professions. Her expertise ensured that the storyline accurately portrayed medical details while authentically conveying the sociohistorical context of Freedom House.

The research methodology deployed by the University of Pittsburgh team leveraged the power of social media as a digital ethnographic resource. Reddit, a platform where users engage in real-time discourse, served as a vital space to observe public reactions and information dissemination catalyzed by the episode. Analyzing nearly 200 posts, the researchers found a proliferation of content explicating Freedom House’s history, alongside emotional reactions ranging from surprise and admiration to frustration over the service’s historical obscurity. Many Reddit users proactively contributed context, fielded questions, and debated the implications of Freedom House’s narrative within broader conversations about racial equity in American medical history.

This study not only exemplifies the dynamic relationship between entertainment media and public health education but also reinforces the potential of thoughtfully crafted storylines to function as catalysts for social change. Dr. Hoffman emphasized that when narratives are developed collaboratively with subject matter experts ensuring accuracy and cultural sensitivity, even brief on-screen depictions can ignite expansive public engagement with complex health topics.

From a technical standpoint, the analysis underscores the utility of integrating traditional media impact studies with digital data analytics to capture both quantitative spikes in interest and the qualitative nuances of audience interpretation. The 170% increase in Google search volume represents a statistically significant indicator of episodic influence on information-seeking behavior, while the thematic coding of Reddit discourse provides insight into the multidimensional ways stories resonate across diverse audiences.

The resurgence of Freedom House’s legacy via “The Pitt” exemplifies how the intersection of media, medicine, and social justice can advance collective memory and awareness. It invites further exploration into harnessing entertainment platforms to shed light on marginalized histories and catalyze dialogue around systemic disparities in healthcare. Going forward, this case study sets a benchmark for future research on how fictional narratives enriched by authentic lived experiences can elevate public understanding and inspire advocacy.

In conclusion, the University of Pittsburgh’s investigation into the ripple effects of a medical drama’s nod to a historically crucial EMS pioneer reveals the transformative capacity of storytelling as a public health intervention. By rekindling interest in the Freedom House Ambulance Service, the research not only honors the unsung heroes of emergency medicine but also energizes ongoing discussions about health equity, systemic racism, and the power of media to inform and engage society at large.

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Subject of Research: Not applicable

Article Title: Public Awareness of Freedom House Ambulance Service After Viewing the Pitt

News Publication Date: 10-Jun-2026

Web References:

• University of Pittsburgh School of Public Health: https://www.publichealth.pitt.edu/
• American Journal of Health Promotion: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/08901171261460703
• Medical consultant information on Sylvia Owusu-Ansah: https://www.pediatrics.pitt.edu/people/sylvia-owusu-ansah-md-mph-faap
• Panel discussion video from Pitt Public Health screening: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T7sA264QkCc

References:
Hoffman, B. L., Owusu-Ansah, S., Fawole, O., Leshniowsky, K. (2026). Public Awareness of Freedom House Ambulance Service After Viewing the Pitt. American Journal of Health Promotion. DOI: 10.1177/08901171261460703

Keywords: Social media, Medical specialties, Emergency medicine, Mass media, Television, History of medicine, Health equity, Systemic racism, Prehospital care, Public health education

The wait is almost over. The Vera C. Rubin Observatory is just weeks, maybe even just days, away from officially beginning its landmark 10-year sky survey, according to officials at the 248th American Astronomical Society (AAS) meeting in Pasadena this week. “A lot of people in the community are waiting for that moment for theContinue reading "Vera C. Rubin Observatory days away from launching decade-long sky survey"

The post Vera C. Rubin Observatory days away from launching decade-long sky survey appeared first on Astronomy Magazine.

A groundbreaking study from UCLA Health introduces a pioneering approach to understanding anorexia nervosa, a complex psychiatric disorder notorious for its high relapse rates and elevated mortality. Researchers employed an ingestible, vibrating capsule to probe the nuanced ways in which the nervous system of individuals with anorexia nervosa processes bodily sensations originating from the gastrointestinal tract. This innovative technology not only illuminates the enigmatic interplay between gut sensations and brain function but also offers promising predictive capabilities regarding relapse risk, potentially transforming clinical management of the disorder.

Anorexia nervosa is marked by a persistent restriction of energy intake, an intense fear of weight gain, and a distorted body image, resulting in dangerously low body weight. Despite state-of-the-art treatments aimed at restoring healthy body weight, relapse rates remain alarmingly high—up to 50% within a year post-treatment. Suicidal behavior is also a significant concern, often cited as the leading cause of death among afflicted individuals. This desperate clinical landscape underscores the urgent need for objective biomarkers and more profound mechanistic insights to improve therapeutic outcomes.

The inadequacy of current understanding centers around a crucial chasm: while physicians focus on weight normalization, many patients continue to suffer from entrenched symptoms that drive relapse, suggesting that the disorder’s etiology extends beyond mere weight regulation. The nervous system’s interpretation and integration of visceral signals, especially from the gut, could hold the key to these persistent challenges. Yet, before this study, precise tools to quantify and manipulate these signals in vivo remained elusive.

The UCLA research team harnessed a clinical trial design involving an ingestible vibrating capsule capable of delivering controlled, gentle mechanical stimuli to the stomach. This non-invasive method allowed for real-time interrogation of gastrointestinal interoception—the brain’s perception and processing of internal bodily sensations. By remotely activating the capsule, the researchers could produce varying intensities of stomach vibrations, simulating subtle gut sensations that are typically difficult to access or measure reliably.

In the study, 62 female patients who had been hospitalized for anorexia nervosa and whose body weight had been restored to clinical norms, were compared against 57 healthy controls. Participants swallowed the vibrating capsule and were instructed to indicate, via button press, whenever they perceived a vibration. Concurrent physiological monitoring tracked brain activity through neuroimaging techniques, cardiac rhythms, and stomach motility, providing a multidimensional understanding of the gut-brain axis in real time. Self-reported metrics on hunger and bodily awareness further enriched the dataset.

Employing sophisticated computational modeling, the researchers analyzed participants’ ability to detect and interpret the gastric signals. These models were designed to estimate participants’ expectation of gut sensations, their reliance on incoming sensory signals, and their adaptability in updating these expectations when signals fluctuated. This approach transcended simple sensory detection, probing fundamental cognitive processes involved in interoceptive learning and prediction error correction.

The results revealed a striking divergence between anorexia nervosa patients and healthy controls. Those with the disorder exhibited diminished accuracy in sensing subtle stomach vibrations, often unaware that a stimulus was occurring even when the capsule was active. They demonstrated a cognitive bias towards expecting an absence of gut sensations and were significantly slower to revise these expectations in the presence of confirmed visceral signals. This implies an altered central processing mechanism rather than a peripheral sensory deficit, reflecting a disconnection or miscommunication within the gut-brain axis.

Crucially, these interoceptive abnormalities persisted despite the restoration of healthy body weight, challenging the conventional clinical assumption that weight normalization is tantamount to recovery. The findings suggest that long-lasting neurobiological alterations in interoceptive processing may underlie the stubborn persistence of anorexic behaviors and cognitions, thus offering a plausible explanation for the high relapse propensity witnessed in clinical practice.

Linking these mechanistic insights to clinical outcomes, the study reported a robust association between impaired gastric signal detection and relapse risk during a six-month post-discharge follow-up period. Patients whose nervous systems exhibited the greatest bias towards ignoring bodily signals were significantly more likely to experience a relapse. This highlights the potential clinical utility of the vibrating capsule as a predictive tool, enabling healthcare providers to stratify relapse risk and tailor interventions accordingly.

From a translational perspective, the use of this ingestible technology marks a seminal advance in biomarker discovery for anorexia nervosa. It opens new avenues for personalized medicine where objective physiological metrics, rather than solely subjective symptom reports, guide therapeutic decisions. Moreover, it positions gastrointestinal interoception as a critical target for future treatment strategies, including neuromodulation, pharmacotherapy, and cognitive retraining designed to recalibrate gut-brain communication pathways.

Nevertheless, the authors caution that these findings currently pertain to a relatively homogeneous sample, primarily young female patients, and must be validated across larger and more diverse populations to confirm generalizability. Future research should also explore how different treatment modalities influence interoceptive processing and whether modulation of this axis can directly mitigate relapse risks.

In conclusion, this UCLA-led study redefines our understanding of anorexia nervosa by exposing the subtle but profound alterations in gastrointestinal interoception that endure beyond weight restoration and presage relapse. It suggests that true recovery necessitates healing not only the body but the fundamental neural processes that govern the perception and integration of internal bodily states. This insight sets the stage for an era where interoceptive biomarkers and bioelectronic medicine intersect to revolutionize the management of this devastating disorder.

Subject of Research: Gastrointestinal interoception and relapse prediction in anorexia nervosa
Article Title: Altered Gastrointestinal Interoception in Anorexia Nervosa Predicts Relapse
News Publication Date: 17-Jun-2026
Web References: http://dx.doi.org/10.1001/jamapsychiatry.2026.1301
References: Published in JAMA Psychiatry, 2026
Keywords: Anorexia nervosa, gastrointestinal interoception, relapse prediction, gut-brain axis, ingestible vibrating capsule, psychiatric biomarkers, neurobiology of eating disorders

A naturally occurring anti-inflammatory protein fragment is showing promise in early Parkinson’s disease research. Parkinson’s disease affects millions of people worldwide, yet current treatments mainly address symptoms rather than the underlying damage occurring in the brain. Now, researchers in Brazil have identified a promising new approach that targets a different aspect of the disease: inflammation. [...]

On 22 December 1938, Marjorie Courtenay-Latimer took a taxi to the docks at East London, a port on South Africa’s east coast, to look through a trawler’s discarded catch. In the pile she found a heavy, steel-blue fish about 1.5 metres long, with thick fins that moved more like limbs than fins. She did not know what it was. She was certain it mattered, and she was right: the fish belonged to a group science had known only from fossils and had assumed died out around the time of the dinosaurs.

The fish was a coelacanth. Its discovery is one of the most quoted moments in twentieth-century natural history, and like most quoted moments, the popular version has picked up some embellishments worth stripping back.

The fish in the taxi

Courtenay-Latimer was the curator of the East London Museum, a job she had taken in 1931 with no formal training in zoology. She had asked local fishermen to tell her when something unusual turned up in their nets. On that December morning a trawler operator phoned to say he had a deck full of rubbish fish, and she went down to look.

The blue specimen stood out at once. By the standard account it was about five feet long, with four limb-like fins and a strange, stubby extra lobe on its tail. She had it taken back to the museum and tried to reach the one person she thought could identify it, the ichthyologist J.L.B. Smith, in Grahamstown.

She could not get hold of him. Smith was away over the holidays, and as the days passed the fish began to spoil. With no cold storage able to take something that size, she was forced to have it mounted by a taxidermist, and its internal organs were thrown out. That detail matters, because it meant the first coelacanth known to science was reduced to a skin and a skeleton before anyone could study its anatomy.

What Smith recognised

When Smith finally saw Courtenay-Latimer’s drawing in early January, he suspected what it was almost immediately, and the suspicion alarmed him. Coelacanths were supposed to be extinct. They appear in the fossil record going back hundreds of millions of years and then vanish from it around 66 million years ago, at the end of the Cretaceous, in the same broad window that closed the age of the non-bird dinosaurs.

Smith confirmed the identification and published it in the journal Nature in 1939, under the plain title “A living fish of Mesozoic type”. He named the animal Latimeria chalumnae, the genus after Courtenay-Latimer and the species after the Chalumna River, near where the trawler had been working.

A lineage assumed gone for tens of millions of years had turned up in a fishing net.

That is the part of the story that survives intact.

The “living fossil” that keeps being oversold

The phrase that attached itself to the coelacanth, “living fossil”, is where the retellings tend to overreach.

The animal Courtenay-Latimer found is not the fish in the Cretaceous rocks. Coelacanths are an old group, with a fossil history stretching back roughly 400 million years, but the living genus is its own thing, and fossil coelacanths were far more varied in shape and habitat than the two surviving species. The body plan has been conservative, which is not the same as frozen.

More recent work makes the point sharper. When researchers sequenced the coelacanth genome, reported in Nature in 2013, they found a genome that has kept changing rather than one stalled since the Mesozoic. The fish looks ancient. It has not stopped evolving.

And not the fish that walked onto land

A second common claim is that the coelacanth is the creature that crawled out of the water, a snapshot of our own first step onto land.

It is not.

Coelacanths are lobe-finned fish, and that group is related to the ancestors of four-limbed land animals, which is interesting in itself. But the living coelacanth is a cousin on that family tree, not a direct ancestor, and divers who have watched them in deep water have never seen them walk on those leg-like fins. The fins are used for fine, controlled movement through the water, not for clambering.

What the discovery actually showed

Strip away the embellishments and the 1938 find still carries a real lesson, and it is a lesson about evidence rather than about wonder.

“Extinct” had been read straight off the fossil record. The coelacanth’s absence from rocks younger than the Cretaceous was taken to mean the group was gone, when it meant only that none had been found and preserved. A deep-water animal living off remote coastlines can leave almost no trace and still be there. Absence of evidence had been mistaken for evidence of absence.

It took until 1952, and a second specimen from the Comoro Islands, before anyone could examine a coelacanth’s soft anatomy, the organs that had been thrown out in East London fourteen years earlier. Courtenay-Latimer never made another discovery on that scale, and did not need to. She had looked at a pile of rubbish fish and recognised that one of them did not belong, which is the part of the work no amount of expertise can do for you.

The post In December 1938 a museum curator sifting through a fisherman’s catch in a South African port lifted out a heavy blue fish that science had known only from fossils and presumed extinct since the age of the dinosaurs appeared first on Space Daily.

A copper-based drug helped the brain flush out Alzheimer’s toxins, cutting plaque buildup and improving memory in a promising new study. Scientists at Monash University have identified a promising new approach to tackling Alzheimer’s disease. In laboratory studies, a copper-delivering drug significantly lowered levels of toxic proteins linked to the disease while also improving long-term [...]

Artificial intelligence is transforming the world, but it also comes with a growing energy problem. Modern AI systems require enormous computing power, and the powerful chips that perform these calculations generate huge amounts of heat. Keeping these chips cool has become one of the biggest challenges facing the technology industry. Researchers at the Korea Advanced […]

The post New water-cooling technology could make AI chips 10 times more energy efficient appeared first on Knowridge Science Report.

Une nouvelle étude révèle comment le terrible bombardement d'astéroïdes subi par la Terre il y a quatre milliards d'années a, contre toute attente, créé les incubateurs parfaits pour faire naître la vie.Bienvenue dans ce nouvel épisode de Futura Planète ! Aujourd'hui, on plonge quatre milliards...

The claim holds. Challenger Deep, the lowest known point in the Mariana Trench and the deepest spot in any ocean, sits close to 11 kilometres below the surface. Drop Mount Everest into it, base on the seafloor, and the summit would still finish more than two kilometres underwater.

What makes this comparison unusual is that it survives a careful look. Many vivid scale facts fall apart once you check which numbers were used. This one does not.

The actual numbers

The most precise survey to date, published in 2020, puts the deepest point at 10,935 metres, give or take six metres. An earlier sonar mapping by the University of New Hampshire, reported by the United States National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in 2010, measured 10,994 metres, with a wider margin of about 40 metres.

Mount Everest stands 8,848.86 metres above sea level, the figure China and Nepal jointly settled on in 2020.

Put the mountain at the bottom of the trench and the arithmetic is not close. Using the 2020 depth, the peak ends up about 2,086 metres beneath the surface. Using the 2010 figure, about 2,145 metres. Either way, the tallest mountain on Earth disappears with more than two kilometres of water to spare. Everest accounts for only about four-fifths of the drop.

Why the depth is hard to pin down

The reason there is more than one number is that measuring the bottom of the sea is difficult. Depth at Challenger Deep is worked out from sound, timing how long a pulse takes to travel down through nearly 11 kilometres of seawater and back, then correcting for how temperature, salinity, and pressure bend the speed of sound along the way. Small errors in those corrections become metres at the bottom.

That is why each expedition tends to report a slightly different figure, and why the honest way to state the depth is with its error bar attached. The useful point is that the disagreement is small. Every credible measurement lands near 11 kilometres, and every one of them is deeper than Everest is tall.

What the comparison leaves out

The Everest image is a good way to grasp the vertical distance. It is a poor way to grasp what actually makes the place extreme.

Depth is not the danger. Pressure is. At the bottom of Challenger Deep the weight of all that water presses down at over a thousand times the pressure at the surface, the equivalent of several tonnes bearing on every square inch. A mountain sitting in the trench would feel that crush long before its peak neared the surface. The vertical-distance picture, dramatic as it is, quietly skips the part that has made the trench so hard to reach.

How rarely it has been reached

For all that the depth is now well surveyed by sonar, very few people have gone to the bottom in person.

The first descent was in 1960, when Jacques Piccard and Don Walsh rode the bathyscaphe Trieste down and back. It was more than half a century before anyone repeated it, when the filmmaker James Cameron made a solo dive in 2012. Fifty-two years separated the first descent from the second. Only with Victor Vescovo’s expeditions from 2019 onward did visits to the bottom start to become something other than a singular event.

The deepest point on the planet is barely 11 kilometres straight down, no farther than a short drive across a city. It remains one of the least visited places humans have ever managed to reach, and the reason is not the distance. It is the water pressing back.

The post The deepest point in the ocean, Challenger Deep in the Mariana Trench, sits nearly 11 kilometres below the surface — a depth so extreme that if Everest were dropped into it, the peak would still be covered by more than two kilometres of water appeared first on Space Daily.

On August 25, 1835, the New York Sun began telling its readers that life had been discovered on the Moon. Over the next six days the paper described lunar forests, inland seas, herds of bison, and beaches of white sand. Strangest of all were the creatures it called man-bats: people roughly four feet tall, covered in copper-colored hair, with thin membrane wings folded across their backs. The discoveries were credited to Sir John Herschel, one of the most respected astronomers alive, observing from an observatory at the Cape of Good Hope.

Herschel had said none of it. He was indeed at the Cape, mapping the southern sky with a real telescope, but he had not seen forests or man-bats or anything like them. The entire account was invented in a newspaper office in lower Manhattan. What makes the episode worth revisiting is not only how strange the claims were, but how plausibly they were staged, and how slowly the public could check them.

How the story was built

The Sun did not simply announce that there were people on the Moon. It claimed to be reprinting a scientific report from a supplement to the Edinburgh Journal of Science, lending the series the weight of a real research publication. The reporting was attributed to a Dr. Andrew Grant, described as a colleague of Herschel’s. Grant did not exist.

The narrative gave Herschel a telescope of fantastic power, built on what it called an entirely new principle, supposedly able to resolve objects on the lunar surface in fine detail. From that invented instrument the paper unspooled its discoveries one installment at a time: first geology and plants, then animals, then, at the climax, the man-bats, which the account named Vespertilio-homo in mock-Latin. There were bison-like quadrupeds, a bluish single-horned animal about the size of a goat, and beavers said to walk upright, carry their young, and live in huts warmed by fire.

The detail is what sold it. The Sun did not gush. It wrote in the flat, measured register of a scientific dispatch, piling up plausible-sounding specifics, which is exactly the texture readers expected from an account carrying Herschel’s name.

Why readers could not easily check

In 1835 there was no transatlantic telegraph cable. A New Yorker who wanted to know whether the Edinburgh Journal of Science had really published such a supplement faced a problem. Confirming it, or checking whether Herschel had said any of this, meant waiting weeks for ships to carry letters across the Atlantic and back. The hoax lived comfortably inside that gap.

It also helped that the named journal could not easily contradict the story, because it had stopped publishing two years earlier, in 1833. A rival editor, James Gordon Bennett of the New York Herald, seized on exactly this point, noting there was no such publication still in print. The defunct journal is one of the cleaner tells that the whole edifice was fiction.

The author is generally identified as Richard Adams Locke, a British-born editor working at the Sun. Years later, in an 1840 letter to another paper, Locke discussed the affair and framed it as satire, a send-up of the era’s overheated speculation about life on other worlds rather than a straight swindle. Whatever his intent, readers took it at face value first and learned the truth later.

What actually happened to belief

The popular memory of the hoax is that all of New York was fooled. Edgar Allan Poe had published his own lunar fantasy, “The Unparalleled Adventure of One Hans Pfaall,” in June of that year, and believed the Sun had borrowed his idea. He later wrote that not one person in ten discredited the story. That line is quoted constantly.

It is also probably too tidy. Historians who have gone back through the New York press of the period find that a good share of the city’s other papers met the Sun’s series with open skepticism. Some reprinted it as entertainment, others picked at its claims, rather than swallowing it whole. The honest version is that the hoax reached an enormous audience and genuinely took many readers in, while a meaningful part of the press was unconvinced from early on.

What is not in dispute is how far the story traveled. Within weeks the series was being reprinted in papers across Europe, and at least one Italian publisher issued a set of lithographs illustrating the supposed lunar discoveries, the man-bats, the temples and the horned beasts among them. By the time the account was widely understood to be fiction, it had already been read, copied and admired on two continents. The hoax outran its own correction, which is part of why it lodged so firmly in popular memory.

How sure are we about the famous circulation numbers

The story usually comes with a triumphant statistic: the hoax supposedly drove the Sun’s circulation to about 19,000 copies, making it, by the paper’s own claim, the most widely circulated daily in the world, ahead of the London Times. The Sun did print a boast to that effect at the height of the series, putting its daily figure at 19,360 and the Times at 17,000.

That number deserves a raised eyebrow. It came from the Sun itself, in the middle of promoting its own sensation, which is not a neutral source. Closer study of the paper’s circulation suggests it was already selling close to twenty thousand copies before the Moon series ran. The popular image of a paper that tripled its readership overnight, on the strength of the hoax, does not hold up well. The Sun’s reach helped the hoax travel; the hoax did not obviously transform the Sun’s reach.

There is a similar wrinkle in how the affair ended. The Sun never published a clean retraction. Around September 16, 1835, it acknowledged, in hedged language, that the account might not be genuine, while still declining to call its own series a fabrication outright. The myth of a bold confession is neater than the record.

Why it still matters

Strip away the man-bats and the Great Moon Hoax looks oddly modern. It worked by borrowing the voice and credentials of real science, attaching a trusted name, citing a source that was hard to check, and releasing the payload gradually so that each installment made the next easier to believe. The barrier to verification then was the width of an ocean and the speed of a sailing ship. The structure of the deception is not so different from things that circulate now.

It is tempting to read the episode as a story about gullible ancestors. It reads better as a story about the machinery of trust: how a claim borrows authority, how long it takes to test, and how a public slowly assembles the habit of asking where, exactly, a remarkable report came from. Herschel, for his part, was reportedly more annoyed than amused at being made the unwitting discoverer of a Moon full of creatures he never saw.

The post In 1835 the New York Sun told readers the Moon was full of life, from winged man-bats to bison — and pinned the discovery on a real astronomer who never said any of it appeared first on Space Daily.