This discovery marks a major milestone in the search for life on worlds beyond our solar system. A faint stream of helium escaping from a distant rocky world has revealed something astronomers had never clearly detected before: an atmosphere around an Earth-like planet in another star’s habitable zone. The result is the strongest evidence so [...]

Quirky backyard sprinklers helped scientists solve a decades-old mystery about how flowing water makes objects spin. Every summer, lawns across the country come alive with “silly sprinklers,” colorful devices with looping and spiraling tubes that send water spraying in unexpected patterns. Although they may look like simple backyard toys, mathematicians have now used their unusual [...]

Researchers have developed a magnetic method for influencing deep-brain circuits without permanently implanted electrodes. A magnetic field may offer a new way to reach circuits buried deep within the brain without permanently implanting electrodes. An international research team injected magnetic nanoplatelets into a targeted brain region and used them to improve movement problems in mice [...]

Brain immune cells appear to drive reversible sleep loss in mice with Alzheimer’s-like disease. A fire starts in one room, but instead of containing the danger, the sprinkler system floods the entire house. The response causes far more damage than the original threat. Something similar may happen in Alzheimer’s disease. Amyloid plaques, the sticky protein [...]

Even modest sleep loss may quietly lead to weight gain and raise the risk of chronic disease over time. People who reduced their nightly sleep by about 80 minutes for six weeks gained an average of one pound and spent more time being sedentary, according to researchers at Columbia University Vagelos College of Physicians and [...]

Quantum materials could transform technologies ranging from powerful computers and highly secure communications to advanced energy systems, but one major obstacle has long stood in the way. Most quantum materials reveal their unusual properties only when chilled to temperatures near absolute zero. At room temperature, continual atomic vibrations caused by heat can overpower the fragile [...]

New research examines how gravity can be reconciled with thermodynamics through the Gravity from Entropy theory. Galaxies, stars, planets, and life emerged as the Universe expanded and became more complex. Yet the second law of thermodynamics says that the total entropy of an isolated system should rise over time, creating a fundamental question: how can [...]

The advance could provide a scalable route to clean energy while making plastic recycling more effective. A discarded bottle, shopping bag or car part can remain in the waste stream long after its useful life ends. Although plastic is everywhere in modern society, recycling it remains difficult because most systems require different types to be [...]

A new study strengthens the case for exercise as a critical way to protect the brain from age-related decline, including dementia and Alzheimer’s disease. During sleep, the brain activates a cleanup network that helps remove accumulated waste. A review led by Victoria University (VU) researcher Dr. James Broatch examined whether exercise could strengthen this glymphatic [...]

New PET imaging findings suggest that some of long COVID’s most disabling symptoms may stem from disruption of the brain’s dopamine system. For many people with long COVID, the infection ends but the exhaustion, slowed thinking, memory problems, and loss of motivation do not. Researchers have struggled to explain why these symptoms persist because the [...]

In a six-month study, people with obesity who ate an avocado each day lowered their blood levels of “bad” cholesterol particles. Adding one avocado to a person’s daily diet may modestly improve a blood marker linked to heart disease. In a study of adults with obesity, researchers at the Penn State Department of Nutritional Sciences [...]

Thousands of native milkweeds are transforming North Florida roadsides into experimental pollinator corridors. Along rural two-lane highways in North Florida, newly installed signs now identify grassy roadside slopes as wildflower areas. At this time of year, the labels may seem unnecessary. Thousands of milkweed plants are already producing dense clusters of five-sided buds and open [...]

Rising mantle temperatures and two heat surges may explain why some Hawaiian volcanoes grew exceptionally large. A 3500 km (2200 mile) trail of volcanoes records the Pacific plate’s slow passage over the Hawaiian hotspot. Instead of cooling through time as geologists have generally expected, the mantle plume beneath this chain appears to have warmed by [...]

New research calls for aquatic deoxygenation to be recognized as a critical planetary process under threat. Oxygen is declining across oceans, coastal waters, rivers, lakes and streams, threatening the organisms and chemical processes that depend on it. A review led by researchers at UC San Diego’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography warns that this widespread deoxygenation [...]

Scientists discovered a rare planet larger than Jupiter orbiting a distant star once every 180 days. A planet nearly five times as massive as Jupiter circles a distant star once every 180 days. Known as NGTS-38 b, it is an exoplanet, meaning a world that orbits a star outside our solar system. NGTS-38 b is [...]

Researchers have detected a sugar in the interstellar medium for the first time. Sugars are central to life. They help form the structural backbone of DNA and RNA and participate in essential metabolic reactions. They are also thought to have been necessary for the formation of the earliest nucleic acids. Yet researchers studying life’s origins [...]

Webb found a hidden giant planet by detecting its atmospheric chemistry through a bright debris disk. For years, a third giant planet remained concealed within the bright dust surrounding Beta Pictoris, one of the most closely observed planetary systems in the Milky Way. NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has now exposed the hidden world by [...]

Study suggests a new method for tracking electronic and vibrational dynamics in real time. Within a few trillionths of a second after absorbing light, a molecule bends out of shape, shifts its electrons, and converts electronic energy into vibrations. These changes happen too quickly for ordinary instruments to follow, but flashes from the European XFEL [...]

ISTA physicists have confirmed a theory proposed 20 years ago that could advance quantum technology. A future quantum computer may need separate modules to behave as one machine, even when they are physically apart. That requires distributed entanglement, a quantum connection between distant components that has typically depended on active control and repeated measurements. Physicists [...]

A new 3D material can guide heat around complex objects while shielding them from extreme temperatures and infrared detection. On an infrared camera, a warm object normally stands out clearly against cooler surroundings. Researchers have now built a three-dimensional cloak that bends heat around an object, erasing its thermal outline while protecting the space inside [...]