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

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

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

Solar Storms Reconsidered

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

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

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

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

Correcting For Distance

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

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

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

Solar Storm Impacts

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

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

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

The paper, “Regression to the Mean Can Explain Saturation of Geomagnetic Storms,” appeared in Nature on July 15, 2026.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Searching Near The Lost City

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

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

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

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

Beneath The Ocean Floor

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

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

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

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

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

Feeding The Lost City

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Stealth Drones

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

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

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

Nature Drones

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

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

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

Creating the Phantom Twist

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

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

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

A Revised Drone

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Discovering Egypt’s Mummies

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

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

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

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

Weapons of the Egyptian Dead

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

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

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

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

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

A Hard Life, Even for Royalty

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

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

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

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

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

The paper, “Bioarcheological Reassessment of Dahshur Royal Skeletal Remains from the Late Middle Kingdom (c. 1850 to 1700 BCE),” appeared in Frontiers in Environmental Archaeology on July 17, 2026.

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