A new brain-computer interface (BCI) is the first to translate both speech and movement with a single device that reads data from implanted electrodes.

In a recent paper published in Nature Neuroscience, researchers revealed how their new BCI simultaneously communicates verbal and non-verbal information in seconds.

This is a major step forward in BCI research, as human communication relies on body language as much as spoken words to convey meaning. For the first time, one implant marries these two separate elements of communication, offering a breakthrough for individuals with severe paralysis.

A New BCI

The team’s new BCI translates electrical signals from the brain into text using artificial intelligence. The decoded information can then be used to control a digital avatar, guiding both its speech and movements.

The BCI field has made significant strides in recent years, allowing humans to control cursors and robotic arms or even communicate through synthesized speech. However, those projects have generally focused on a single mode of communication, whereas this new system is multifunctional, allowing it to capture more of the rich nuance of human communication.

“This gives us hope for neural prosthesis that will enter day-to-day usage,” said Christian Herff, a computational neuroscientist at Maastricht University in the Netherlands.

Since both are related to communication, it should be no surprise that the neural signals responsible for speech can overlap. That can make the business of separating them for two different functions at the same time extremely challenging. Additionally, when the brain commands the body to speak and move at the same time, the neural activity coordinating those activities can vary from what it would be if only one were occurring at a time.

Collecting Human Neural Data

Two volunteers worked with the researchers to test the new BCI, which involved surgically implanted arrays comprising 253 electrodes on the surface of the cortex. By covering portions of the sensorimotor cortex with so many electrodes, the team captured a large number of signals associated with attempted speech and movement.

Following a brainstem stroke, one volunteer experienced impaired speech and movement capabilities. The team instructed him to wave, shake his hands, clap, and nod. Additionally, they gave him five phrases to attempt to speak silently.

The other volunteer had amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), a motor neuron disease that causes progressive motor impairment and can lead to loss of speech. Although he could only move his facial muscles, he was capable of typing messages. Researchers gave him ten phrases to imagine vocalizing and ten gestures to imagine performing.

BCI Testing Results

Using the electrode implants, the BCI recorded neural activity generated by each attempt, including when participants attempted movement and speech separately or simultaneously. The team then trained AI models to translate those signals, finding that including data from simultaneous activities improved decoding performance.

With this neural activity mapped, the team then had the volunteers attempt to control a digital avatar using the BCI. Again, testing involved isolated and combined verbal and gestural communication. However, this time, instead of relying exclusively on preselected responses, the participants were asked questions in real time.

Accuracy varied between the volunteers, with the first achieving perfect BCI decoding of the tested movements and speech, while the second recorded 75% speech accuracy and 85% gesture accuracy.

While achieving such promising results for combined speech and gesture signals represents a major step forward in BCI research, more work is needed to continue refining the technology. Higher levels of speech accuracy have been achieved with speech-only devices, and this test was limited to individual sentences rather than continuous speech. Additionally, the device captured gestures rather than steady hand positions.

These limitations were partly intentional, as the team initially simplified its decoding tasks while making the jump to simultaneous actions. Further research could expand the system to recognize movements involving additional parts of the body and enable finer control of the many joints in the hands.

The paper, “Simultaneous Speech and Gesture Decoding for Multimodal Communication in Paralysis,” appeared in Nature Neuroscience on September 14, 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.

The Americas experienced their own Vesuvius-style volcanic eruption 21.9 million years ago, devastating a portion of Chile worse than Pompeii.

A new study in Science Advances highlights the work of University College London Earth Sciences researchers analyzing a mountain of ancient volcanic rock covering an area six times the size of the Chilean capital, Santiago. 

The Lauca Caldera erupted to cover the area in molten ignimbrite rock up to a kilometer deep. That ancient volcanic hellscape buried the region’s terrain but, ironically, preserved it from typical erosion, providing important clues for modern climate researchers.

Modeling Volcanic Activity

“This landscape was buried by a giant volcanic eruption – a little like Pompeii, but on a vastly larger scale,” said lead author Dr Byron Adams, based at UCL Earth Sciences. “Instead of covering a town, hot mixtures of volcanic ash, rock fragments, and gas swept across an entire landscape, engulfing the terrain beneath them.”

Using detailed computer models, the UCL Earth Sciences team produced hundreds of possible landscapes to explore what the region may have once looked like. Detailed data on how rivers cut through landscapes to form mountain ranges informed predictions of what lies beneath the massive ignimbrite deposits. The researchers concluded that a low-relief landscape, such as foothills, most likely existed there at the time.

“Pompeii shows how volcanic eruptions can freeze a moment in human history. This study shows that much larger eruptions can also freeze moments in Earth history, burying whole landscapes beneath volcanic deposits and preserving clues to how mountains were being built before the eruption,” Adams said.

“We cannot dig down to see the buried landscape, but we can use the shape of the volcanic blanket and what we know about how rivers shape mountains to infer what is hidden beneath it.”

The Volcanic Andes

The findings indicate that this portion of the Andes, the world’s longest continental mountain range, rose very slowly, by only about an inch per century. At a faster rate, the landscape beneath the volcanic deposits would not fit the researchers’ models, and the slopes would have been much steeper.

The work provides new evidence in a longstanding debate among geologists over whether the Andes rose rapidly in the last few million years or developed more gradually over a much longer period. Earlier mineral analyses of the Andean range produced similar estimates based on records of temperature changes preserved in the rocks as they cooled while moving toward the planet’s surface.

“This approach gives us a new way to look back at Earth’s history. Current methods to estimate the speed at which mountains build look at chemical ‘clocks’ in the rock, but these are limited to specific moments in time. Our method can estimate rock uplift over a much longer period,” Dr. Adams said. “In this case, we estimate it would have taken millions of years to produce the subdued landscape we infer prior to the eruption.”

Other mountain ranges around the world, such as the Himalayas, can move even faster, rising several millimeters or even centimeters each year.

Climate Implications

While the team’s work covers only the middle of the Andes’ history, it still provides interesting support for the slow-movement hypothesis. For years, researchers have worked to understand how the Andes developed, as they strongly influence global and regional climate. 

By better understanding the Andes, climatologists have a more complete data set to piece together the complex problem of global climate change.

“What’s particularly exciting about this study is that it gives us a new way of piecing together that history, concluded co-author Dr Frances Cooper, also based at UCL Earth Sciences. “The same approach could be applied to volcanic deposits elsewhere in the world, helping us reconstruct landscapes buried for millions of years.”

The paper, “Landscapes Buried Beneath Large-Volume Ignimbrites Reveal Preeruptive Uplift Rates,” appeared in Science Advances on September 11, 2026.

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

A new legal waiver allows current and former U.S. government personnel to disclose information related to unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP) to representatives of the government’s  Presidential Unsealing and Reporting System for UAP Encounters (PURSUE) initiative. 

The waiver “establishes an authorized, legally protected disclosure mechanism for current and former personnel to provide UAP-related National Defense Information (NDI) to designated representatives of the PURSUE effort,” the U.S. Department of War announced on Monday. 

The PURSUE initiative, initiated earlier this year by the Trump administration, is not a UAP investigative office like the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO), but rather an effort to identify, review, declassify, and publicly release UAP-related records held by U.S. federal agencies.

According to the Department of War, the waiver supports President Donald Trump’s mandate for greater transparency surrounding UAP by creating a protected channel for military and government personnel to provide UAP-related National Defense Information (NDI) to designated PURSUE representatives. The directive applies to current and former Department of War service members, veterans, civilian employees, and contractors who currently have or previously had access to UAP-related NDI.

For covered disclosures made to designated PURSUE representatives, the waiver provides targeted relief from certain civil and administrative enforcement provisions contained in Non-Disclosure Agreements (NDAs) and Special Access Program Indoctrination Agreements (SAPIAs). The waiver applies specifically to authorized communications with PURSUE representatives.

Michael Gold, President of Civil and International Space Business Development at Redwire and a former NASA official who supported the efforts of AARO’s predecessor office, the UAP Task Force, and NASA’s UAP Independent Study Team, told The Debrief the move was “unprecedented.”

“To the best of my knowledge, this action by the Department of War is nearly, if not entirely, unprecedented,” Gold said. “I have never seen anything like this before on any topic, and it demonstrates the seriousness with which the Department of War and the Trump administration are treating UAP transparency.”

“This administration’s handling of UAP transparency has been extraordinary and should be applauded by all of those who care about the issue and good government generally,” Gold added.

Why does this matter for past whistleblowers? 

The new PURSUE order comes after several UAP whistleblowers have come forward with allegations that the government possesses more information about UAP than has been publicly disclosed. Individuals who have claimed knowledge of UAP-related programs have also cited legal and professional risks as barriers to publicly discussing what they say they know. Those concerns have included potential violations of nondisclosure agreements, loss of security clearances, and administrative or legal consequences for revealing protected information.

The Department of War says the new waiver is designed to address some of those barriers. Importantly, however, the waiver does not mean that previously classified UAP information has been declassified or cleared for public release. Instead, it creates an authorized pathway for individuals with relevant information to provide it to PURSUE for review.

The Department of War says information submitted through PURSUE will undergo security review and, where appropriate, potential declassification before it can be publicly released.

“Disclosures of any kind made to PURSUE would need to be reviewed and classified information redacted before such information could be released publicly,” Gold told The Debrief. “The administration, through the National Archives and other executive branch agencies and departments, has already gone through this process to release information in the various tranches, and the same could be done for information disclosed via this waiver,” Gold said.

Gold said he was “optimistic that some very significant information could be publicly released through this process,” says Gold. 

Gold also argued that members of Congress involved in UAP oversight should eventually be given access to information provided under the waiver.

“In addition to select representatives of PURSUE, I think it would be very beneficial if Members of the House UAP caucus and other select Representatives and Senators would be granted access to whatever information is provided under the waiver.  For example, Representatives Burlison, Luna, Burchett, and others have been fearless champions for UAP transparency, and including them in this process would substantially bolster the credibility and efficacy of the overall effort.”

The change could provide former government personnel with an authorized route to disclose UAP-related information to PURSUE without triggering certain civil or administrative enforcement provisions that might otherwise apply under NDAs or Special Access Program agreements.

However, the waiver is specifically directed at authorized disclosures to PURSUE representatives. It does not provide blanket authorization for individuals to publicly reveal protected or classified information.

The potential implications for the commercial and private sectors also remain unclear. Gold, however, believes greater UAP transparency could have consequences for aerospace and aviation.

“UAP transparency could have tremendous beneficial impacts on the aerospace sector,” Gold said in an email to The Debrief.

“Understanding what the phenomenon is could lead to new scientific discoveries and technologies,” he said, adding that a better understanding of UAP “will benefit the safety of air traffic and space operations.”

Fundamentally, Gold says that any new information whistleblowers may now be willing to provide could also help reduce stigmas surrounding the topic that have impeded U.S. progress in the past, and which may even have aided foreign adversaries.

“By diluting the stigma surrounding UAP, it will close a loophole that I suspect is being used by adversary nations to hide advanced drone activity around critical American national security and civil infrastructure and facilities.”

Whether this new pathway produces substantive new information and opens the door for legitimate whistleblowers remains to be seen. As with previous UAP disclosure efforts, distinguishing well-supported testimony and documentation from misinformation, disinformation, or unsubstantiated claims will remain an important part of that process.

If the waiver results in significant new information reaching the public, it will depend on what is submitted to PURSUE, how that information is evaluated, and what can ultimately be cleared for public release following the security review process.

Chrissy Newton is a PR professional and the founder of VOCAB Communications. She currently appears on The Discovery Channel and Max and hosts the Rebelliously Curious podcast, which can be found on YouTube and on all audio podcast streaming platforms. Follow her on X: @ChrissyNewton, Instagram: @BeingChrissyNewton, and chrissynewton.com. To contact Chrissy with a story, please email chrissy @ thedebrief.org.

Since February 2026, the United States Department of War (DOW), under the direction of President Donald Trump, has released an unprecedented number of documents, videos, and firsthand witness accounts detailing the United States’ extensive history of encounters with unidentified anomalous phenomena, or “UAP.”

Despite the questions that remain, this initiative under the Presidential Unsealing and Reporting System for UAP Encounters (PURSUE) has been nothing short of historic. For more than 75 years, Americans pleading for the truth on the issue have been routinely ridiculed and even misled by their own government. It’s difficult to imagine the nation’s posture being anything other than one of obfuscation, secrecy, and resistance to transparency.

Documents, particularly those detailing reports from senior intelligence officials encountering “orbs”, are a stark departure from the U.S. government’s nearly century-long position of secrecy.

Lawmakers, however, have been left with more questions than answers. Who or what flies with such impunity over our sensitive military installations? Who owns this technology? Are they a threat to national security?

Across the Pacific, members of Japan’s National Diet are confronting the same questions. The May 2026 file releases from the U.S. DOW disclosed two unresolved UAP incidents from the U.S. Indo-Pacific Command. Japanese legislators only learned the details of these cases near their own territory after the American file release—not through any internal channels.

Democratic allies, it seems, face a shared challenge. For too long, elected officials in our respective nations have been denied adequate information about the phenomena operating in our common security environment. And in the U.S., whenever we are informed, it’s only through the preferred methods and timing of unelected bureaucrats deeply entrenched in our national security apparatus. In Japan, by contrast, the Ministry of Defense has stated that information may be made public when something arises that it determines should be explained.

But this raises a fundamental question: should the government alone decide what should be explained to the public?

If a grave national security threat truly exists, then elected representatives have been left with little choice but to entrust the security of their nations to the very institutions that have obscured the truth from us and even each other.

It is therefore incumbent upon us—Representatives solely accountable to the citizens of our respective nations—to work together and to seek the truth wherever we may find it; both for the good of our people and to defend against whatever threats we face from strategic competitors.

As mentioned above, among the files released by the U.S. DOW were highly significant firsthand reports from high-ranking officials in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. The documents detail a search operation at a classified missile testing site in the Western United States, explicitly for aerial phenomena:

En route, ground teams reported spotting a UAP on FLIR [Forward Looking Infrared], describing it as “super-hot,” low to the ground, and moving east then south at high speed. The object then split into two and changed direction. Upon arrival, we scanned the area using NVG [Night Vision Goggles], FLIR, and the naked eye. The ground team suddenly radioed that the object had risen from the ground, approached within ten feet of the helicopter, dropped below us, and then sped away.

The documents were accompanied by what the DOW labeled as “related photos.”

Accounts such as these are hardly “proof” of anything, but for elected officials, they do cement the reality of our national security concerns. Missing from this account—or any account we have been allowed to access—is an answer to a fundamental question: What do the various U.S. government agencies believe these objects are? Are they merely civilian drones? Do they represent technology belonging to a foreign actor? And if someone within the government does know, who decides that elected officials shouldn’t?

Members of Japan’s UAP Parliamentary League, led by former Japanese Defense Minister Yasukazu Hamada, share similar concerns.

DOW data, released through the Pentagon’s All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) in August of 2023, identified specific regions of Japan, particularly in the western and southern parts of the country, as being among the world’s notable hotspots for UAP reports.

One such instance occurred as recently as July of last year. Security guards at the Genkai Nuclear Power Station in Saga Prefecture observed three luminous objects in the sky above the facility. The lights remained visible for nearly two hours; long enough for local police to arrive and observe them. The police stated that what they themselves observed was an airplane, leaving a discrepancy between the two accounts. The incident was also recorded by Kyushu Electric Power’s security cameras, but the footage has not been made available even to members of the National Diet. Police have likewise declined to disclose related information on the grounds that the matter remains under investigation. As a result, elected lawmakers still lack access to the information necessary to independently assess the incident, and to this day, members of Japan’s National Diet have no answers.

Like their American counterparts, Japanese lawmakers have been left without the tools or information for proper oversight despite reports of UAP operating near critical infrastructure within restricted airspace.

It is no longer acceptable for elected representatives to be agnostic on this issue. Events such as these, along with countless videos now made publicly available, are more than mere optical illusions and cannot be dismissed on account of prosaic explanations like parallax effect. For many members of Congress and members of Japan’s UAP Parliamentary League, the evidence presented before us indicates an unknown technology.

Our understanding of what is technologically feasible in propulsion, the manipulation of physical matter, and even space-time itself is being challenged. From what we know, our current defense capabilities appear insufficient. Furthermore, the origin of these phenomena remains unknown—not only to the U.S. and Japan, but seemingly to other nations as well. China, for instance, recently established its own military body dedicated to investigating UAP, even supplementing human resources with artificial intelligence dedicated to tracking what the People’s Liberation Army refers to as “Unidentified Air Conditions.”

We are, by all indications, in a global arms race for technological supremacy, one that is rapidly rendering today’s weapons obsolete through advances in quantum technology, artificial intelligence, and drone warfare. UAP and whatever technology allows them to operate with apparent impunity over sensitive military and nuclear installations could redefine the competition.

If harnessed by democratic allies, breakthroughs could bolster deterrence and stability in the South China Sea. Conversely, failure to establish a coordinated effort among democratic allies could give China an unforeseen technological advantage over a future invasion of Taiwan, making an already difficult fight impossible.

U.S. global leadership, along with the territorial integrity of the Pacific are at stake. For members of Japan’s National Diet, UAP investigations are of great national importance—an issue that demands cross-party attention.

As for their American counterparts, it’s clear representatives can’t reach the truth through traditional pathways that amount to asking the Central Intelligence Agency ‘nicely.’ It stands to reason that close alliances with democratic allies like Japan may be the most viable pathway for disclosure.

Indeed, if our tools are limited in scope, perhaps new revelations made by democratic allies provide a unique leverage point. After all, it was the Trump administration’s disclosure under the PURSUE program that significantly increased pressure on Japan’s Defense Ministry to acknowledge its own previously undisclosed UAP-related activities.

This is why we, as elected representatives of our nations, have engaged the Emerging Technologies Interparliamentary Caucus (ETIC) as a platform for international dialogue regarding emerging technologies and the security threats presented by UAP. Comprised of representatives from across the globe, the ETIC presents a rare opportunity to ensure elected representatives are equipped to assess potential threats, safeguard our nations, and prepare for the realities of emerging technologies in the 21st century.

Whether the phenomena we are encountering originate from an adversary or something else entirely, democratic nations cannot afford to be complacent.

The people of our nations deserve answers, and we intend to find them.

Rep. Eric Burlison (R-MO-07) is the Chairman of the Subcommittee on Economic Growth, Energy Policy, and Regulatory Affairs. 

Yasukazu Hamada is a Member of the House of Representatives, Japan, Former Minister of Defense, and Chairman of the UAP Parliamentary League.  

Yoshiharu Asakawa is a Former Member of the House of Representatives, Japan, and Assistant to the Chairman of the UAP Parliamentary League.

A new stretchable quantum-dot light-emitting diode (QLED) delivers incredibly high resolution while producing record brightness that can be clearly viewed even outside in direct sunlight.

In a recent paper published in Nature Nanotechnology, Korean researchers unveiled a new QLED material with applications far beyond televisions, stretching into many future daily-use technologies.

This new QLED can stretch in every direction, just like organic skin, making it extremely useful in future wearable applications and as a covering for soft robots. Unlike earlier attempts to make a stretchable QLED, this one doesn’t lose picture quality when it stretches, delivering high resolution and extreme brightness under tension.

QLED Explained

For most of us, QLEDs are familiar as one of the technologies available in modern televisions. Conventional QLED TVs use quantum dots—nanoscale semiconductor crystals—to help produce exceptionally bright and vivid colors. OLED displays, by comparison, use self-emissive pixels that can switch off individually, allowing them to produce deeper blacks. While OLEDs perform particularly well in dark viewing environments, the high brightness achievable with quantum-dot displays can make them especially well-suited for brightly lit environments.

Despite the technology’s suitability for the bright world around us rather than just darkened environments, major challenges remained in producing a stretchable version. Early attempts addressed the problem by allowing the wiring to stretch while the light-emitting pixels remained unchanged in size. This meant that as the material expanded, its effective resolution dropped because the same number of pixels became spread across a wider area, much like enlarging a low-resolution digital image.

Building on these efforts, some researchers attempted to replace conventional materials with more stretchable alternatives, but these tended to make achieving high resolutions and efficiently moving electrical charge through the material difficult. As a result, these systems produced dimmer, lower-resolution images, limiting their utility.

A New Process

The researchers developed a new fabrication approach to address some of the major problems facing stretchable QLED technology. Central to their innovation is the use of an elastic polymer incorporating MPA as a ligand, or bonding molecule. This approach improves charge injection efficiency while helping eliminate the image stretching and smearing that have affected previous stretchable displays.

Using this new process, the researchers produced a display with a resolution of about 16,000 pixels per inch, with features spaced at roughly 700 nanometers. Red, green, and blue emissive layers can also be precisely arranged, allowing the stretchable material to produce full-color images.

Testing a New QLED

In tests, the team’s new QLED proved to be a major advance. They successfully stretched the material to 1.65 times its original size with no damage to its light-emitting performance. Additionally, their stretchable QLEDs were the brightest ever tested at 53,300 nits, more than triple the brilliance of prior attempts.

Based on these tests, the researchers see numerous future applications for their material in extended reality devices, soft robots, electronic skin, wearable technologies, health care, and automotive displays. 

“We resolved both the drop in resolution and the limits on light-emitting performance, which had been the biggest challenges for stretchable displays, and secured core technology for commercialization,” concluded co-author Professor Moon Kee Choi of Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology in Korea. “It will be used widely as a manufacturing platform for various next-generation soft devices, including wearables and electronic skin.”

The paper, “High-Resolution Intrinsically Stretchable Quantum-Dot Displays Through Thermally Assisted Intaglio Transfer Printing,” appeared in Nature Nanotechnology on September 14, 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.

The most powerful volcanic eruption of the last century occurred in 2022 with the Hunga volcano, and new research reveals it caused massive changes to the Pacific Ocean floor, according to an international team of researchers.

In a recent paper published in Nature Geoscience, researchers revealed the extent of the underwater caldera collapse, in which material equal to 1,500 Great Pyramids was displaced, and a massive tsunami was created.

According to the team, studying this volcanic event yields important new information for monitoring such calamities and highlights what is to be gained by increased mapping efforts. Close monitoring is an essential element of tsunami early warning systems, where time is of the essence in saving lives.

2022 Hunga Volcano Eruption

Beginning December 20, 2021, and reaching its climax on January 15, 2022, the Hunga volcano eruption was a devastating underwater event. It occurred north of Tonga, an archipelago in the Pacific, and its effects spread as far as Chile, Peru, and Russia. The volcano is part of the Tonga–Kermadec Arc, a major submarine feature with 74 underwater volcanoes and 20 caldera complexes.

A caldera is a large depression that can form when magma is expelled from beneath a volcano and the overlying ground collapses. As a result of the eruption, the caldera deepened from roughly 150 meters below sea level to as much as 850 meters. The event displaced an enormous amount of volcanic material—8.9 cubic kilometers—and generated waves and underwater flows that destroyed crucial telecommunications cables and contributed to massive tsunamis. Fortunately, the eruption was far less deadly than an event like the 2011 Japanese tsunami. While millions of dollars in damage occurred, the global death toll remained at seven, despite fatalities occurring as far away as Peru.

Volcanic Caldera

While some of the displaced material resulted from erosion produced by the event, most of it was newly erupted magma. Still, only about 30% of the total magma involved was displaced, leaving a significant amount behind.

Historically, undersea volcanic calderas have been linked to some of Earth’s most catastrophic eruptions. Some 30,000 people died in 1883 when Indonesia’s Krakatau erupted, generating tsunamis and incredibly powerful ocean currents.

The Hunga caldera is extremely steep and formed during a rapid collapse, the speed and scale of which helped produce a tsunami even larger near the volcano than the one generated by Krakatau in the nineteenth century. Even about 100 kilometers from the volcano, waves reached heights of 40 meters.

Exploring the Sea

Scientists often discuss how mysterious the seafloor remains, representing a largely unexplored frontier here on our own planet. Yet with Hunga, this was not the case, as the seafloor in the region had already been extensively mapped. Having such detailed maps from before an underwater volcanic eruption is extremely rare, making this a unique opportunity for scientists to study the impact of such an event.

By comparing these before-and-after datasets, the team can identify changes to the seafloor and better understand the threats such events pose to coastal communities and critical undersea infrastructure, including communications and energy links. By collecting repeated observations, scientists may eventually be able to develop better predictive models.

The researchers say this event illustrates the need for more extensive and repeated high-resolution seafloor mapping to better study these changes. They note that the southwest Pacific is particularly in need of improved mapping. By developing better mapping datasets, the team hopes to help mitigate the impacts of future—and potentially deadlier—events.

The paper, “Rapid Submarine Caldera Collapse During the 2022 Climactic Eruption of Hunga Volcano (Tonga),” appeared in Nature Geoscience on September 11, 2026.

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

A new class of cosmic object observed by NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory could hold the key to unraveling two long-standing mysteries, astronomers say.

In a recent paper published in Nature Astronomy, researchers described these new cosmic objects as having high levels of ultraviolet radiation but low-intensity X-rays. 

In the NASA Chandra data, the team identified 84 of these strange objects, which they dubbed “hypersoft X-ray sources,” across six galaxies. The unexpected discovery could finally help answer puzzling questions related to star formation and the expansion of the universe.

Chandra Sees Something New

“We’ve never encountered a group of objects that act like this,” said lead author Mustafa Muhibullah of the University of Alabama. “Of course, the next step was to try to figure out what these things are.”

The new research used data from a publicly accessible Chandra archive provided by NASA, including the spiral Andromeda and Pinwheel galaxies and an additional four elliptical galaxies. Intriguingly, both older regions and active star-forming regions contained the new objects.

The team discovered the objects by comparing Chandra’s high- and low-energy X-ray images to identify sources that were disappearing. Their departure from high-energy X-ray images indicated the objects were producing only low-energy X-rays, which border ultraviolet light on the spectrum. This led the researchers to then identify the high-energy ultraviolet radiation coming from the objects.

Mystery Objects

Currently, the team cannot effectively determine what these objects are, but they do have some suspects, including black holes, neutron stars, or white dwarves pulling material from a companion. Such material would heat as it fell into one of the three suggested objects, theoretically producing the observed X-rays. While these types of binary systems have all been observed previously, this combination of ultraviolet radiation and low-energy X-rays hasn’t been associated with them.

Because the researchers found so many of these objects in just six galaxies, they suggest many more of these likely binary systems remain undiscovered across the universe. 

These objects were not previously identified for two reasons. The more obvious is how faint their X-ray signature is, which requires extremely sensitive equipment to detect. The other is that helium and hydrogen gas between stars absorbs the stronger ultraviolet radiation, obscuring these otherwise brilliant signals.

“By combing through the Chandra archive, we were able to eliminate what used to be a blind spot for telescopes,” said co-author Rosanne Di Stefano, Senior Astrophysicist with the Center for Astrophysics, Harvard & Smithsonian. “That’s how we found what appears to be a new class of cosmic objects with remarkable qualities.”

What Did Chandra See?

“These clandestine X-ray sources are actually among the most energetic objects in galaxies, and they could be solving two cosmic mysteries at once,” said Muhibullah.

One of the mysteries this may solve ties to the rate of universal expansion itself. Type Ia supernova observations have provided astrophysicists with essential data indicating that the universal expansion is accelerating. Although they suggest these supernovae likely come from white dwarf binary systems, astronomers have never observed a star turning into one to confirm the hypothesis.

“If we could find a way to spot these Type Ia supernova explosions before they go off, that would be really important,” said co-author Jimmy Irwin, also of the University of Alabama. “Right now, we study them after they’ve exploded, and astronomers have struggled to understand what is actually ignited.”

The other mystery is what removes electrons from the free-floating gas between some stars, which could have major ramifications for star formation and galactic life cycles. Hot, massive stars were previously identified as likely partially responsible, but they couldn’t account for the full extent by themselves. The research team says hyper-soft X-rays and intense ultraviolet radiation could be the missing culprit. 

Only continued observation and research can provide a definitive answer on the mystery objects that Chandra observed.

The paper, “Hypersoft X-Ray Sources as a Low-Energy Class of Luminous Cosmic Emitters,” appeared in Nature Astronomy on September 9, 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.

Stanford University scientists say experiments on ancient Chinese stone tools, including 15,000-year-old hand axes, have solved a longstanding mystery about the critical technological transition from rudimentary hand tools to more versatile ground-edged tools, suggesting these new technologies enabled uses beyond food harvesting.

The research team behind the new analysis said the discovery of ground-edged sickles and knives in Neolithic North China, likely used for fiber production and harvesting, combined with their replica-based experiments, highlights the growing technological capabilities of the transition between Paleolithic and Neolithic peoples.

“The combined experimental and archaeological evidence from the site of Peiligang indicates that the emergence of ground-edged tools marked a significant step in technological specialization from the Late Pleistocene to the Early Holocene,” the researchers write in a paper detailing the work.

Mysterious Technological Transition Hidden in 15,000-Year-Old Stone Tools

According to lead author Ran Chen and colleagues, archaeologists widely regard ground-edged cutting tools like the modern sickle as “technological hallmarks of early agriculture in North China.” However, they note, the functional foundations of this advanced toolmaking capability “remain insuf­ficiently tested.”

The research team also noted that most analyses of the transition from the Upper Paleolithic to the Early Neolithic (ca. 15,000–8,000 BP) in ancient China have viewed tools through “the lens of food production.”

“Within this framework, cutting tools, including early flakes and blades and later ground-edged sickles and knives, are often interpreted primarily as implements for harvesting cereals through cutting stems and leaves,” they explained.

The researchers said these earlier findings made them wonder whether this “food-focused perspective” could have led researchers to miss the broader range of plant resource exploitation possibilities in some of the 15,000-year-old stone tools previously discovered, prompting their replica-based experiments.

“The development of stone tool technology in North China provides a framework for reassessing this long-term relationship between plant use and technological change,” they explained.

Experiments Reveal Ground-Edged Tools Were Multifunctional Implements

To test their hypothesis, Chen and colleagues analyzed 140 stone artifacts previously collected from the Peiligang site in Henan Province, China. This included some 15,000-year-old Upper Paleolithic flaked stone tools and several more advanced Early Neolithic flaked and ground-edged stone tools.

Rather than test irreplaceable artifacts, the study authors created realistic experimental replicas.

Testing the effectiveness of the oldest, most rudimentary stone flake designs and the more technologically advanced ground-edged tools for harvesting seed-bearing grasses, the researchers found little measurable advantage between the two designs.

However, when the researchers compared the 15,000-year-old stone flake tools against ground-edged tools made thousands of years later, they found the more technologically advanced tools were “significantly more efficient at cutting thick-stemmed weeds and fiber-yielding plants.”

“Upper Paleolithic flaked tools were multifunctional implements used for processing diverse plant and animal materials, and Early Neolithic flakes continued to serve similarly flexible roles,” the study authors explain. “In contrast, Early Neolithic ground- edged tools show marked specialization in plant- related tasks.”

More Advanced Tools Emerged Through Broader Functional Demands

When discussing the experimental results, the team noted that their findings were supported by microfiber and starch residues found on some of the ancient tools, suggesting that “ground- edged sickles and knives were used not only for plant foods but also for harvesting and processing fibrous plants.”

“These findings indicate that ground- edged cutting tools emerged through broader functional demands, including fiber production, and potentially vegetation clearance, rather than cereal harvesting alone,” they explained.

Beyond the food-harvesting uses of ground-edged tools, Chen and colleagues said their identification of non-food plant labor like fiber production as an important driver of technological evolution and specialization “reframes the emergence of ground- edged tools as part of a broader technological and economic reorganization in early Holocene East Asia.”

“These findings identify nonfood plant work as an important contributor to the adoption of ground-edged cutting tools and show that tools conventionally linked to early agriculture were shaped by broader demands than food production alone,” they explained.

Finally, the study authors suggested that their analysis of 15,000-year-old Chinese stone tools could “invite renewed attention” to ancient fiber-based economies and nonfood plant use during forager–farmer transitions and in early farming societies beyond China.

The study “Plant fiber exploitation contributed to the emergence of ground-edged cutting tools in North China” was published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 

Christopher Plain has spent the last six years as Associate News Editor and Head Science Reporter at The Debrief. Follow and connect with him on X, learn about his novels at plainfiction.com, or email him at christopher@thedebrief.org.

Long before pottery became a common art form, the southern Levant underwent major environmental changes that stripped vegetation from hillsides and caused large amounts of clay-rich soil to accumulate in the valleys.

Now, a new study led by Amos Frumkin at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem suggests this process may have exposed Neolithic communities to the effects of intense fire on clay. Frumkin refers to this as the natural kiln hypothesis.

The study, published in Geomorphology, examined evidence from ancient sediments, cave deposits, and charcoal remains and identified two separate periods when wildfire and erosion impacted the area.

The Hills That Burned Twice

The two periods are separated by more than 100,000 years; the first of them was the last interglacial, lasting from about 129,000 to 116,000 years ago. The second was the early Holocene, which lasted from about 11,000 to 7,000 years ago, a period that corresponds with the establishment of farming communities in the region. The most intense burning occurred between 9,500 and 8,200 years ago.

Both periods left similar evidence. Small charcoal particles in ancient lake sediments indicate periods of increased burning. Chemical signatures in cave formations show the loss of vegetation and soil that followed. Frumkin notes that the scale and timing of the fires point toward climatic causes rather than increased human use of fire, although people in the region already used fire on a limited scale.

A Natural Kiln

Once the vegetation disappeared, the hillsides could no longer retain soil when it rained. The terra rossa clay, therefore, washed down the slopes and collected in low-lying areas like the Jordan and Dead Sea valleys, building up in thick layers. Since this redeposited clay was very fertile, Neolithic settlements tended to cluster in these areas.

Pottery appeared in the region during the same time period. Earlier petrographic studies show that local redeposited terra rossa clay provided the material for Yarmukian pottery from the Jordan Valley, the same material that erosion deposited in Frumkin’s study.

“A wildfire is normally seen only as a catastrophe, but environmental disruption can also expose people to new materials and new possibilities,” said Frumkin. “Neolithic communities in the Jordan Valley may have watched fire transform the clay beneath and around their settlements and realized that this process could be reproduced deliberately. If so, one of humanity’s most important technologies may have emerged partly from people learning to imitate what they had already seen nature do.”

The 120,000-Year Comparison

This earlier period can serve as a comparison for this hypothesis. Vegetation also declined, and clay deposited heavily during the last interglacial period; however, pottery did not appear after that event. Frumkin sees this as an example of a natural limitation because the required materials were available 120,000 years earlier, but there were no settled, agricultural societies to identify and replicate the process.

The comparison suggests that environmental conditions alone were not enough to produce pottery. The innovation may have emerged when these conditions intersected with a society capable of recognizing the opportunity and reproducing what it observed.

Frumkin stresses that the hypothesis is still speculative. Although the fires, the clay deposits, and the earliest pottery all come from roughly the same period, current dating techniques cannot establish the exact order of events. Further excavations might search for fire-baked clay beneath the oldest pottery layers and test whether wildfires in the Jordan Valley reached the temperatures needed to harden clay. Finding any pottery that clearly predates the major fire episode would challenge this hypothesis.

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

Equations once used to predict whether populations of rabbits would boom, stabilize, or collapse are now being applied to something potentially even more complicated: romantic relationships.

According to mathematician Laurent Pujo-Menjouet of Claude Bernard University Lyon 1, the forces that determine whether a couple survives life’s inevitable stresses can be studied much like other complex systems. Attraction can strengthen or fade, outside pressures can push a relationship away from stability, and perhaps most importantly, there may be a critical mathematical threshold beyond which recovery becomes increasingly difficult.

In his new book, Love! Valour! Equations! The Mathematics of the Couple, published by CRC Press, Pujo-Menjouet draws on mathematical ecology, psychology, literature, and even film to explore why some couples weather years of conflict, stress, children, illness, and financial hardship while others gradually drift apart.

The goal isn’t to produce an equation that predicts who will fall in love with whom. Instead, Pujo-Menjouet treats relationships as dynamical systems—systems that change over time, respond to disturbances, and can move toward either stability or decline.

“There is no mysterious enchantment or magic potion. By now, that would be known,” Pujo-Menjouet writes in the book, which draws on mathematics, psychology, literature, and film. “Is all hope lost then? Certainly not. That is precisely where everything becomes interesting.”

From Rabbits to Relationships

The mathematical models Pujo-Menjouet uses originated in ecology. His work uses Malthusian growth models and the Lotka-Volterra equations, originally developed to describe population dynamics in animals such as rabbits. He also studies the Allee effect, a phenomenon that explains how populations struggle to recover if they drop below a particular size.

Pujo-Menjouet adapts these concepts to relationships, using the idea of a critical threshold to examine when a couple may become increasingly vulnerable to separation. He also draws on the research of psychologist John Gottman, who showed that relationship behaviors can be quantified as data.

“Just as we can predict population growth or endangered species, we can model the evolution of feelings within a couple,” Pujo-Menjouet explains. “We’re not trying to predict who you’ll fall in love with, we’re trying to understand why some couples remain stable despite life’s inevitable shocks while others slowly drift apart.”

A Threshold for Falling Apart

The basic idea is simple: a relationship may have a critical threshold, or minimum level of stability needed to keep the bond intact. Pujo-Menjouet’s model considers three main forces: mutual attraction, the gradual weakening of feelings over time, and each partner’s emotional response to the other.

“If your feelings fall below this threshold and stay there, the mathematics predicts an inevitable decline toward separation,” Pujo-Menjouet says. “However, understanding this threshold gives couples a powerful tool: they can recognize danger zones and take corrective action.”

These models emphasize how couples recover from drifting apart. The key question is not whether couples experience conflict, but whether they have the resilience to restore balance afterward.

“Life will always send its wolves: stress, illness, work, children, financial difficulties,” Pujo-Menjouet says, “mathematics helps us understand how to build the brick house rather than the straw one.”

Could AI Become Love’s Early-Warning System?

Researchers such as Pujo-Menjouet are considering whether they could combine these mathematical models with artificial intelligence to create an early-warning system for relationships. Such a system could detect the signs of instability before they become apparent to the people involved.

Pujo-Menjouet compares this method to a GPS for relationships, showing where a couple currently is, where its dynamics may be heading, and the various ways they could arrive at a healthier place. Although the models don’t decide who somebody will love, they can help explain how relationships evolve and what actions might help couples maintain their connection. Early detection of problems would allow partners to make changes before reaching a stage where recovery becomes unlikely.

Why Love Resists a Formula

Pujo-Menjouet admits that present-day mathematical models have limitations. Most of these models are based on data from Western relationships. In contrast, the factors that impact whether a relationship succeeds or fails can differ from one culture, religion, or generation to another. He points out that the model must account for additional factors to be applicable everywhere.

Human behavior also introduces unpredictability that mathematical models cannot fully account for. People can change their habits, strengthen their commitment, seek therapy, or otherwise alter the dynamics of a relationship in ways the equations cannot anticipate. The equations identify tendencies rather than determine an unavoidable outcome.

“Mathematics can illuminate patterns and provide guidance,” Pujo-Menjouet says, “but ultimately, the success of a relationship depends on two people choosing, every day, to nurture their connection. The equations can show you the path, but you still have to walk it together.”

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

Mercury has been slowly shrinking for billions of years. But scientists studying the smallest planet in the solar system may have overlooked just how dramatic that transformation has been because some of the evidence has literally been buried.

A new study suggests Mercury’s battered, crater-covered surface has concealed a significant fraction of the faults created as the planet cooled and contracted. After accounting for those hidden geological structures, researchers estimate Mercury may have shrunk by as much as 7.2 miles (11.6 kilometers) in radius—up to 30% more than previous estimates based on the same tectonic record.

The findings could alter models of how Mercury’s interior evolved and raise an interesting possibility beyond the planet itself. For instance, scientists may also be underestimating how much other rocky worlds, particularly the Moon, have contracted.

“Combined with the contractional strain map from Broquet and Andrews-Hanna (2026a), we show that radial contraction may have been underestimated by 10%–30%,” researchers write. “Our radial contraction correction should be considered as a lower bound.”

In the study published in Geophysical Research Letters, researchers led by Dr. Gaku Nishiyama of the German Aerospace Center (DLR) examined a longstanding mystery in Mercury’s geology.

As a rocky planet loses heat, its interior contracts. Much like the skin of a drying fruit, the planet’s rigid exterior must accommodate a shrinking interior, producing faults and enormous cliff-like features known as lobate scarps, along with wrinkle ridges and other shortening structures.

Scientists therefore use the crustal shortening recorded by these structures as a geological ruler to determine how much Mercury has contracted.

The problem is that those structures aren’t distributed across Mercury the way scientists might expect.

If cooling caused the entire planet to contract, the resulting deformation should be comparatively widespread. Instead, previous mapping has revealed regions filled with large scarps alongside enormous areas where surprisingly few contractional structures have been identified.

Dr. Nishiyama and his colleagues investigated whether at least part of that discrepancy could be an illusion created by Mercury’s extraordinarily battered surface.

Mercury’s Craters May Be Hiding Its Wrinkles

The researchers constructed a global map of Mercury’s surface roughness using topographic measurements acquired from NASA’s MESSENGER mission and a global digital terrain model produced from spacecraft imagery.

They then compared that roughness with previously cataloged tectonic structures.

Findings showed that fault scarps and other shortening structures were preferentially identified in smoother terrain, while rougher regions contained substantially fewer detectable structures. The relationship remained apparent across geographic scales extending to roughly 93 miles or about 150 kilometers.

That is counterintuitive because tectonic ridges themselves create topographic roughness. If roughness and plate movements were unrelated, areas with scarps might be expected to be slightly rougher than the surrounding terrain.

Instead, the researchers found the opposite.

One explanation is evident around relatively young impact craters such as Rachmaninoff. Large impacts blasted enormous quantities of debris across the surrounding landscape, producing thick blankets of material and secondary craters. In some locations, long tectonic structures appear to lose relief as they approach these deposits—consistent with the older structures being progressively hidden under impact material.

Other faults may still exist but become difficult to recognize against heavily cratered terrain. Once the surrounding topography becomes rough enough, a weathered ridge only a little higher than the background landscape can effectively disappear into the geological noise.

There is also a third possibility.

Heavily cratered regions may contain thick, porous layers of broken rock called regolith. During planetary contraction, some deformation could be absorbed as pores collapse rather than producing large faults visible from orbit. Alternatively, deformation could create faults too small for current observations to resolve. The researchers say available evidence cannot yet rule out that possibility.

Mercury Could Have Shrunk by More Than 7 Miles

Whatever mechanism is responsible, Dr. Nishiyama and his colleagues argue the relationship creates a systematic bias, where scientists see more evidence of contraction where Mercury’s surface makes that evidence easier to preserve and identify.

The team developed a correction using comparatively smooth regions, where tectonic structures appear less affected by this bias.

Applied to an earlier global estimate of 5.2 miles (8.3 kilometers) of radial contraction, the correction increased Mercury’s estimated shrinkage to roughly 7.2 miles or about 11.6 kilometers.

Depending on which tectonic structures are included, the researchers estimate surface roughness could have caused previous calculations to underestimate Mercury’s contraction by roughly 10% to 30%. They also caution that their corrected figure may itself represent a lower limit.

Ultimately, Mercury’s shrinking surface effectively records what has happened deep inside the planet.

The amount of contraction constrains how quickly Mercury lost heat, the thickness of its insulating regolith, the abundance of heat-producing elements, and even the composition and freezing history of its enormous metallic core. The revised estimate, for example, favors models involving a thinner regolith and lower sulfur content in Mercury’s core than some previous estimates.

Scientists may soon get a much sharper look.

The ESA-JAXA BepiColombo mission’s laser altimeter will eventually measure Mercury’s topography at scales as small as about 330 feet or 100 meters, possibly revealing geological relationships that MESSENGER could not resolve.

And Mercury may not be the only world whose geological record has been hiding in plain sight.

The Moon’s highlands are even rougher than Mercury’s cratered plains—by roughly 40% at the little-over 6-mile (10-kilometer) scale examined by the researchers. Yet evidence suggests the Moon contracted less than some thermal models estimate. If rough terrain similarly hides lunar faults, part of that difference might reflect structures scientists haven’t been able to see.

In other words, Mercury’s missing wrinkles may expose a wider problem in planetary geoscience. The more battered an ancient world becomes, the more effectively its later surface can erase the visible record of what happened before it.

“Investigating roughness alongside tectonic landforms may therefore refine our understanding of the lunar thermal evolution as well,” researchers conclude. “Mars could also be subject to this roughness effect, while topographic smoothing due to fluvial and aeolian processes may introduce more complex correlation between surface roughness and shortening structures.”

Study: Nishiyama, G., Broquet, A., Tosi, N., Preusker, F., Stark, A., Hussmann, H., & Hauber, E. “Underestimation of Planetary Contraction Due to Obscuration by Surface Roughness: The Case of Mercury.” Geophysical Research Letters 53, (2026). 

Tim McMillan is a retired law enforcement executive, investigative reporter and co-founder of The Debrief. His writing typically focuses on defense, national security, the Intelligence Community and topics related to psychology. You can follow Tim on Twitter: @LtTimMcMillan.  Tim can be reached by email: tim@thedebrief.org or through encrypted email: LtTimMcMillan@protonmail.com 

Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics scientists studying water ice believed to be stored in the Moon’s ‘pits of eternal darkness’ have concluded that there likely isn’t enough of this critical resource to support long-term future human colonies, meaning visions of large-scale cities on Earth’s largest natural satellite may be more science fiction than science fact.

Conversely, the researchers calculated that smaller settlements with fewer than 10,000 human colonists could have enough accessible water to survive for centuries. They also suggested that other technological advances in water harvesting or advances in scanning techniques that explore below the top few meters of surface regolith may reveal significant amounts of hidden lunar water.

Water Ice Stored in Moon’s Pits of Eternal Darkness

The Moon’s surface is covered with visible evidence of asteroid collisions. Along with its textured appearance, some of these massive impact craters contain areas that are permanently shaded from direct sunlight.

The Harvard-Smithsonian research team behind the new study said some of the earliest “pits of eternal darkness” could be over one million years old. More critically, they can maintain a temperature of 110K, or just above absolute zero. At this low temperature, frozen water ice trapped in the sunless craters won’t lose more than a millimeter of thickness to space every billion years.

When announcing the new study, the researchers noted that “a succession of Moon-orbiting missions” has mapped out possible locations of stored water ice since 2013. The results suggested that the Moon’s pits of eternal darkness may contain as much as a billion tons, with the largest concentrated around the Moon’s northern and southern poles.

Since those missions, scientists and industrialists have begun to speculate about the viability of long-term human lunar habitation. Unlike astronauts trapped in capsules or space stations, lunar colonists could theoretically possess enough on-site water to support farming, full-service bathroom facilities, and production of hydrogen-based fuels.

Still, researchers wondered if one billion tons of stored water ice is enough to support the types of cities that billionaire industrialists and science fiction authors have proposed.

On-Site Solar Power Could Support One-Million-Person Lunar City

To start, the team modeled how long large human settlements ranging from 100,000 to one million people could survive on the water stored in lunar pits of eternal darkness. This included water-recycling rates up to 98%, as achieved on the International Space Station (ISS).

After running the numbers, the team found mixed results.

First, even colonies up to one million humans wouldn’t run out of power. The team said that number is based on solar power generation and excludes nuclear reactors.

Instead, the Harvard-Smithsonian team proposed constructing one-kilometer-tall solar energy towers near the rims of the craters. Their models suggest that an array of towers covered in photovoltaic arrays could generate three gigawatts of usable electricity.

The team noted that the materials needed to build solar panels, including the primary ingredient, silicon, are plentiful on the Moon, meaning future lunar colonists could manufacture new solar power-generating towers on-site. Such lunar colonists could theoretically maintain enormous AI data centers near these towers capable of servicing paying customers back on Earth.

“That would be the start of a true lunar economy,” the research team explained.

Even Generous Water Ice Estimates Limit Large Lunar Colonies

When the researchers crunched the water numbers, long-term lunar habitability became significantly more dubious. In fact, most estimates had future lunar colonists exhausting the most generous one-billion-ton projected supply of water ice within “a few years.”

When researchers modeled an ISS-level water recycling efficiency level using those same water estimates, a colony of one million humans would run out of water “in just over a century.”

“And today’s best estimates of the amount of water on the Moon are about 30 times less than a billion tons, shortening the time to water exhaustion by the same factor,” they add.

For example, if more conservative ‘pits of eternal darkness’ water ice estimates are closer to reality, the researchers said that “even a small city” likely wouldn’t make it past a decade before they had tapped the Moon dry.

Untapped Sources Could Improve Long-Term Habitation Prospects

Fortunately, the news was not all bad. When the team assumed a smaller “Moon village” of over one thousand people, up to a larger settlement of 10,000, the researchers found that the water ice stored in the Moon’s pits of eternal darkness “would instead be sustainable for several centuries or more.”

The team also suggested alternate solutions for supporting a larger, long-term lunar settlement. These included potential improvements in water recycling, improved farming efficiency, or mining nearby asteroids for water.

The team also noted that additional pockets of stored lunar water ice may be awaiting discovery, suggesting that finding such lunar water may be easier than achieving sufficient farming and recycling efficiency improvements.

“Current water surveying techniques do not reach below the surface more than a few meters, while the rubble-like rocks of the surface regolith typically extend tens of meters down and may contain water in the cold traps,” they explained.

The study “No Cities on the Moon: a Billion Tons of Water is not enough for Sustainability” was published in Frontiers in Space Technology. 

Christopher Plain has spent the last six years as Associate News Editor and Head Science Reporter at The Debrief. Follow and connect with him on X, learn about his novels at plainfiction.com, or email him at christopher@thedebrief.org.

The first Denisovan radius ever discovered is offering scientists a rare new glimpse into one of humanity’s most mysterious ancient relatives, whose scarce fossil remains have left much of their story unknown.

In a recent paper published in Nature, the team described these unique remains, discovered in the Bianfu Cave in Southwest China, an important Paleolithic site.

While Denisovans have been discovered throughout Asia, this part of China has been a major gap in the record. Therefore, this site provides important information about what a complete Denisovan body would have been like, as well as intricate details about regional skull variations among these archaic hominins.

A New Technique

The researchers behind the new study developed a novel technique to make the most of the more than 60,000 bone fragments recovered from Bianfu Cave. While Zooarchaeology by Mass Spectrometry (ZooMS) has become an important tool in working with hominin fossils, using it on a find of this scale would be inefficient and expensive. 

Therefore, the team developed a morphological pre-screening and ZooMS identification technique, which greatly increased their efficiency in recovering hominin fragments from the site and could be applied to other Paleolithic sites in the future.

A total of 22 likely hominin bone fragments were identified in the pre-screening process, from which two parietal bone fragments and one proximal radial fragment were confirmed by ZooMS as belonging to hominins.

Denisovan Remains Uncovered

Two of these hominin remains were excavated from the same layer, dated between 148,000 and 143,000 years old, which also held four hominin teeth. The research team further examined two of those teeth, and a detailed analysis indicated they belonged to males. The third specimen was even older, from a layer dated between 167,000 and 150,00 years old.

By screening the fragments for amino acids, the team identified a variant of COL1A2 R996K unique to Denisovans as present, confirming the species identity of the remains. Other intriguing amino acids in the fragments included one shared by Denisovans, Neanderthals, and modern humans, as well as one that marks them as distinct from Homo erectus, which also occupied East Asia.

As the team closely examined the morphology of skulls excavated from Bianfu Cave, they identified a cranial thickness pattern remarkably similar to H. heidelbergensis and East Asian late Middle Pleistocene archaic Homo.

A New Understanding of Denisovans

After analyzing the morphology of the first Denisovan radius ever discovered, the researchers suggest it was likely oriented similarly to a Neanderthal’s, but with a shape and cross-sectional geometry closer to that found in modern humans.

The importance of the find lies not only in being the first example of its kind, but also in indicating biochemical demands and adaptations distinct from both Neanderthals and modern humans.

Besides Denisova Cave in Siberia, from which Denisovans draw their name, the team believes Bianfu Cave may hold the largest fossil record for the species. This could provide researchers with crucial new data, over a decade into the quest to understand the Denisovan species of Asia.

Based on the age of the layers in which the remains were found, the team says the Yunnan-Guizhou Plateau region, where the cave resides, may have been an ideal homing habitat at the time. The Earth would have been in a glacial period, during which the area’s relatively warm climate would have aided hominin survival.

The paper, “Ancient Proteins Identify Various Denisovan Remains from Southwest China,” appeared in Nature on September 9, 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 decades, the painted tombs of Tarquinia, Italy, have been viewed as artwork depicting scenes of music, feasting, processions, and the afterlife that date back to the first millennium BCE.

A recent study took a different approach to interpreting these paintings by examining how the physical characteristics of these tombs might have affected the senses of the ancient people who visited them. Archaeologists Maurizio Forte of Duke University and Jacqueline Ortoleva of the University of Oxford used AI-assisted visual analysis, 3D architectural modeling, and acoustic surveys to reconstruct the physical experience of entering two tombs over 2,400 years old.

The researchers propose that these tombs not only served as burial sites but also as spaces that could shape visitors’ sensory experiences. Their findings, published in the Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory, indicate that the two chambers could have produced contrasting sensory effects.

Modeling What Ancient Visitors Would Have Felt

Forte and Ortoleva prepared detailed three-dimensional models of both tombs and conducted acoustic surveys in order to gain an understanding of the sensory experience. To do this, they played recorded handclaps at different locations within each chamber and measured how the sound decayed and propagated through the space. The results indicated that low-frequency sounds under 1,000 Hz were particularly important in this environment. Forte and Ortoleva stated that people not only hear these sounds but also feel them in the body, where they can cause vibration, disorientation, and possibly alterations in cognitive state.

The team used AI models to identify features that may have attracted attention and to determine where rituals may have taken place. Lighting relied on candlelight, as torches would have produced unsafe amounts of smoke in these confined spaces.

A Calming Experience

Built between 450 and 400 BCE, the smaller Tomba del Gallo offers a striking contrast to the larger tomb. A steep stairway measuring 3.31 meters long and 2.5 meters wide descends to a burial chamber. The artists painted a banquet scene on one wall of the stairway corridor and musicians playing pipe instruments on the opposite wall.. This stairway leads directly into the main chamber.

In the main chamber, visitors naturally focus on the paintings and on points where the architecture changes. Areas of high curvature where the chamber walls meet function as visual focal points. Visitors may have used these areas for ritual offerings or performed ritual gestures there.

The acoustics in the Tomba del Gallo also suggest this function. The reverberation in the chamber is short and doesn’t allow sound to build up. Instead, it rises and moves away from the space. The researchers’ simulations link the combination of clear sightlines and short reverberation to alpha-band brain activity, often associated with relaxed alertness and focused visual attention. The researchers describe the result as a comparatively calm, focused experience that lets visitors concentrate on the paintings.

A Disorienting Descent Into the Afterlife

The second tomb, Tomba dei Demoni Azzurri, dates to the same period, between 450 and 420 BCE. The burial chamber is much larger, measuring 6.2 by 6.1 meters, almost four times as large as that of Tomba del Gallo.

One image in the tomb depicts a group of demons with a small boat carrying a woman and a smaller man. Etruscan iconography often associated demons with the afterlife.

Compared with the Tomba del Gallo, the acoustics in this chamber are considerably more intense. The reverberation is greater and lasts longer, particularly in the area near the banquet scene, and sound passes easily between the tomb and the outside area. Forte and Ortoleva state that the variety of reverberation times means both low-frequency sounds, such as drumbeats or handclaps, and high-frequency sounds such as voices would have echoed throughout the space, thus producing a far more powerful sonic environment than in the smaller tomb.

“Visual saliency analysis identifies the blue demon on the right wall as an extreme attentional attractor,” Forte and Ortoleva write. “The demon’s chromatic qualities, combined with its aggressive posture and spatial prominence in the center of the burial chamber’s right wall, produce an element of visual surprise. The visual gaze is arrested and attention seems to be forcibly captured. This is paralleled by the acoustics of the tomb.”

The combination of low-frequency vibration, loss of spatial orientation, and increasingly unintelligible speech may have left visitors feeling disembodied and disoriented. The team’s simulations link these effects to beta-band activity and transient gamma bursts, which are associated with heightened alertness and threat detection.

An Open Question

Together, the two tombs suggest that Etruscan mourners moved through carefully arranged environments of candlelight, painted figures, and resonant sound, with each tomb offering a distinct sensory experience. It remains unclear whether the tomb builders intentionally designed these effects or if they simply resulted from the available architecture and materials.

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

Scientists investigating a 66-million-year-old mystery have revealed that a bird feather embedded in fossilized dinosaur excrement suggests that the ancestors of modern birds who survived the dinosaur-killing asteroid that also wiped out all other ancient bird species benefited from the waterproofing properties of their feathers.

The newly analyzed bird feather fossil that provided the missing clues comes from an extinct bird group called Hesperornithiforms and not from the ancestor of modern birds, Neornithes.

However, the team said subtle differences between the species suggest previous theories crediting adaptation to water diving as the key to Neornithes’ survival were likely on the right track.

Survival of Modern Bird Ancestors Posed a 66-Million-Year-Old Mystery

When a huge piece of space rock slammed into Earth, killing off virtually all dinosaur species save the ancestors of modern birds, the event also left behind a 66-million-year-old mystery. How did these ancient avians survive this apocalyptic event, resulting in every bird species we see today?

Jingmai O’Connor, the associate curator of fossil reptiles at the Field Museum in Chicago, said her career has been spent analyzing fossils to try to answer this single, critical question. However, unlike the new poop-encased bird feathers, most were not so ‘naturally’ protected from the ravages of time.

“It’s such a beautiful, well-preserved feather, from such an unexpected source, and it’s exciting that it could help us answer this huge question in paleontology,” explained the lead author of a study detailing the new analysis. “As far as I know, no one has ever thought to look for feathers or to study feathers in coprolites, so this project was really exciting.”

Dinosaur Dropping Provided Effective Preservation Medium

Researchers discovered the ancient bird feather in 2016 in Montana. Although she initially suspected it could be a coprolite rock (fossilized feces), O’Connor said she couldn’t confirm the theory for a decade.

The situation changed when O’Connor and Nate Carroll, a co-author of the paper and paleontologist at the Carter County Museum in Ekalaka, Montana, gained access to the micro-CT scanner at USC’s medical campus in Los Angeles, California. According to O’Connor, that’s when “the full feathery fabric of this fossil feces” started to finally reveal itself.

“Every hour processing the data revealed another feather, another scale, another bone—in stunning 3D,” Carrol also recalled.

Along with multiple feathers and tiny fish scales, the ancient dinosaur poop, which may have come from a Tyrannosaurus Rex, also contained legs from a hesperonithiform bird.

O’Connor said hesperonithiforms were ancient aquatic birds with similarities to modern loons. Critically, these cousins of the modern bird ancestor group had evolved specialized feet to hunt for fish by diving deep into the water.

“The feathers showed adaptations for being underwater that we see in living aquatic birds,” O’Connor explained.

Notably, the team said this evolution likely cost ancient hesperonithiforms like the one that was consumed by a dinosaur the ability to fly.

Connection to Modern Birds Offers a Solution 

Although the bird group represented by the fossilized feather did not survive the dinosaur-killing asteroid, its connection to the ancestor of modern birds appears to support a previously proposed theory that adaptation to water may have helped Neornithes survive. O’Connor said she thinks that small differences in the feathers of the two ancient bird species hold the answer to a 66-million-year-old mystery.

“We think the types of feathers that these birds had, and/or the way they molted those feathers, may have been one of the underlying causes of the selectivity of the end-Cretaceous mass extinction,” the researcher explained, adding that this is “essentially why some birds died out and why others survived.”

Specifically, O’Connor pointed to the “smaller, fuzzy, primitive body feathers” found on the extinct bird “that we associate with dinosaurs and enantiornithines” alongside more modern-looking waterproof adaptations.

The team said that these evolutionary relics suggest that hesperornithiforms like the one that left behind its feathers were an evolutionary bridge between older bird groups and the Neornithes that survived the cosmic collision. Even more critically, the team said these earlier feather structures may not have retained heat as effectively as Neornithes feathers, allowing one species to survive the asteroid and another to die in the extreme cold that followed.

“The hesperornithiforms retain primitive feather types that may not have been as efficient for insulation as modern plumaceous feathers, and that could explain why they went extinct along with the enantiornithines,” O’Connor explained.

The study “Bird feathers from a Late Cretaceous coprolite” was published in Current Biology. 

Christopher Plain has spent the last six years as Associate News Editor and Head Science Reporter at The Debrief. Follow and connect with him on X, learn about his novels at plainfiction.com, or email him at christopher@thedebrief.org.

What may be the earliest known evidence of human drug use suggests that it occurred 25,000 years ago, according to findings by archaeologists that push back on earlier estimates by over 10,000 years.

In a recent paper published in Science Advances, an international team of researchers led by Professor Adam Brumm from Griffith University’s Australian Research Center for Human Evolution (ARCHE) discovered betel nut residue on ancient teeth in Indonesia. 

Betel nuts are an addictive stimulant popular throughout the Asia-Pacific region, which researchers previously believed only came into use about 3,500 years ago. Globally, archaeologists had believed psychoactive drugs had been tied to the rise of agriculture.

Betel Nuts: the First Drugs

Archaeologists typically point to Israel’s brewing of fermented alcoholic drinks, such as those made of barley, as the earliest use of psychoactive drugs, roughly 13,000 years ago.

“However, this theory fails to account for the possibility that very ancient drug-taking lies at the roots of our most commonly used psychoactive substances,” Professor Brumm said.

Betel nuts are only regionally popular in India and the South Pacific, but their use is almost ubiquitous among the 10% of the world’s population that lives there. The psychoactive effects of the stimulant include enhanced alertness and mild euphoria.

The betel nut is the seed of the Areca catechu palm. Locals burn its shell, then grind it into a fine powder and mix it with slaked lime, another powder made from quicklime and water. They mix these powders with other minor ingredients, wrap them in a betel leaf, and chew them to produce a mild altered state.

Research on the drug suggests that this processing releases Arecoline, the neuroactive alkaloid present in the betel nut, in a more bioavailable form. Modern usage is linked to cancer, gum disease, and tooth decay, making it a significant public health problem in regions where it is used.

A Prehistory of Betel Nut Usage Uncovered

The seeds were rarely preserved in archeological sites, creating a great deal of uncertainty about the drug’s early history.

Human remains used in the study came from Sulawesi, one of the islands that make up Indonesia. There, archeologists uncovered two hunter-gatherer skeletons: one dating to 7,600 to 6,300 years old and the other 25,000 to 16,000 years old.

These skeletons carried an unusual signal, which the team interpreted as related to ancient drug use. Their teeth had deep, rounded grooves that the researchers believe developed from the habit of sucking on whole betel nuts. Biochemical analysis further supported this interpretation by identifying Arecoline in the remains’ dental tissues.

“But our team conducted experiments in which we soaked betel nuts in artificial saliva and tested the resultant broths against a panel of cloned human receptors expressed in frog egg cells, including specialized proteins that act as molecular switches, regulating neural activity,” said lead author Professor Adam Brumm. “This showed that just sucking on intact betel nuts will release Arecoline in sufficient amounts to have a physiological effect, altering brain function.”

Rethinking Prehistory

This crude attempt to use the betel nuts as a drug likely produced a milder high, while also promoting periodontal disease. Given the poor state of the teeth in human remains previously found on the island, the team believes the betel nuts may have initially been used as a toothache remedy, though it was a poor choice for that purpose.

“Over time, however, sucking these hard, abrasive seeds wore down the foragers’ teeth so badly that in some cases the inner pulp chamber became completely exposed – this would have been extremely painful, caused difficulty eating, and greatly increased the rate of chronic tooth infection,” Professor Brumm said. “So while this habit may have been a remedy for toothache, years of prolonged nut-sucking eventually caused much worse dental health problems, creating a cycle of continued habitual use.”

Pushing back the use of these psychoactive substances so far significantly rewrites our understanding of human drug history.

“Emerging by up to 25,000 years ago in Sulawesi, thus long preceding the onset of agriculture, betel nut-sucking may be the earliest evidence for drug use anywhere in the world,” Professor Brumm concluded. “By identifying the ancient practice underlying betel-nut chewing as we know it, the study implies that some modern drug-taking behaviors are deeply rooted in forager traditions.”

The paper, “Betel Nut Sucking is the Earliest Recorded Evidence for the Habitual Use of a Neuroactive Plant Drug,” appeared in Science Advances on September 9, 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.

Defense aviation company Hermeus has announced the development of Ramjet-X, its next-generation ramjet propulsion test vehicle capable of carrying test payloads to high Mach speeds.

The company said Ramjet-X, designed to launch mid-flight from a carrier aircraft, offers the key advantages of competitive high-Mach test platforms while keeping costs low enough for a wider range of mission profiles.

Pre-flight testing of Ramjet-X is already underway, with its first official prototype test flights expected in 2027.

Ramjet-X Will Launch Mid-Flight from Quarterhorse

Most conventional jet engines can’t achieve supersonic speeds without dumping raw fuel into an afterburner and literally rocketing past the sound barrier. To travel at high Mach speeds without relying on rocket-style propulsion, engineers have turned to ramjet engines.

While ramjets are effective, they rely on the high-speed influx of air to operate. This limitation means aircraft equipped with this type of propulsion must be propelled to higher speeds by another craft or booster rocket before they can engage.

In an email to The Debrief, a Hermeus spokesperson explained that current options often rely on “large and expensive” boosters that are discarded after each test. Conversely, Ramjet-X relies on the company’s reusable aircraft to reach launch velocity.

“Ramjet-X is designed to be carried by Quarterhorse, which provides the speed and altitude required for deployment,” the company told The Debrief.

The company could not disclose what speed Quarterhorse must achieve before it can launch Ramjet-X. However, the spokesperson did note that the launch craft is designed to return to home base for future missions.

When asked about Ramjet-X’s specific operating velocity once it disengages from Quarterhorse and engages its ramjet propulsion system, the company could only say the vehicle will operate at “High-Mach speeds.”

Conventional ramjets use a combination of high-velocity air and fuel to achieve extreme velocities. Hermeus said they cannot disclose specifics about Rocket-X’s fuel requirements.

Mission Profiles and Repeatable Architecture

Because of the sensitive nature of potential future missions, Hermeus was cautious about sharing specifics of any planned missions. The company also couldn’t provide technical details on what a typical mission profile might look like.

However, a Hermeus spokesperson told The Debrief, the vehicle’s architecture “allows customers and partners to integrate payloads, sensors, communications and computer systems, autonomy, material samples, propulsion technologies, and other experimental hardware and software onto Ramjet-X for testing in representative sustained high-Mach conditions.”

Hermeus also highlighted the potential cost savings of a “repeatable platform, launch architecture, and flight-test infrastructure,” designed to dramatically lower costs without sacrificing versatility or reliability.

“Instead of relying on a large dedicated expendable booster to accelerate the test vehicle into its ramjet operating regime, the launch aircraft provides much of that energy and then returns to fly again,” the company told The Debrief. “This architecture allows Hermeus to fly more by reducing the cost of expendable launch hardware.”

“High-speed flight testing is extremely expensive, and you don’t get many shots at it,” Hermeus CEO Zach Shore explained.

“Another Order of Magnitude Reduction”

Hermeus said specific unit costs are not currently available. However, they said a projected cost per minute of high-Mach test time “is in the low $100k’s per minute.” For comparison, the company highlighted the historic and current costs of high-Mach flight testing.

“Most of the below comparisons are rocket-based but will give you an idea how costly high-Mach tests are and why Ramjet-X will fundamentally change the equation,” Hermeus told The Debrief.

Older examples include NASA’s X-43, which achieved around 21 seconds of high-Mach flight, and the Air Force’s X-51, which achieved around 350 seconds. Hermeus said both multi-year efforts cost around $450 million each in today’s dollars.

Current options include rocket-powered test flights aboard Rocket Lab’s HASTE, which Hermeus said run $10-20 million each, “not including the expendable cruise or glide vehicles.” The company also pointed to Stratolaunch Talon-A missions.

“Even though fully reusable, (they) are $10-12m per flight for a few min of on-condition time,” the company told The Debrief.

Conversely, Hermeus said its current projections of less than a million per minute offer potential customers “another order of magnitude reduction in the problem that matters most.”

“Ramjet-X is being designed around simplified manufacturing, rapid production, and expendability in meaningful quantities rather than the traditional model of building a small number of highly bespoke high-speed test articles as was done in other high-speed airbreathing flight test programs like X-43 and X-51,” the company told The Debrief. 

Development of Ramjet-X is already well underway

When detailing the newly announced Ramjet-X’s benefits, Shore noted that their system gives them a way to place new systems into sustained high-Mach environments “without building an expensive one-off test program every time.”

“Bringing speed, sustained flight, and scalability all into one system lowers the barriers to gathering extremely valuable data from these conditions and accelerates programs for both us and our customers,” the Hermeus CEO explained.

When announcing Ramjet-X, Hermeus said the vehicle’s ramjet engine is already undergoing extensive testing at its Florida-based HEAT facility. Future tests will occur at the company’s California headquarters, with the first flight tests planned for 2027. 

Christopher Plain has spent the last six years as Associate News Editor and Head Science Reporter at The Debrief. Follow and connect with him on X, learn about his novels at plainfiction.com, or email him at christopher@thedebrief.org.

A University of Cambridge-led research team has announced the discovery of a 560-million-year-old animal fossil preserved in three dimensions (3D) in a sheep field in the Norwegian Arctic.

The exceptionally rare Ediacaran Period fossil is the first of its kind in Europe in decades and gives scientists a unique window into a period of Earth’s history when the first complex life forms began to appear.

The discovery suggests the site could hide an entire lost ancient ecosystem that has remained hidden for hundreds of millions of years.

3D Fossil of 560-Million-Year-Old Lifeform ‘Unlike Animal Life Today’

When announcing the historic discovery, the Cambridge-led team noted that the fossil, called a Charnia, resembles a fern more than any animal life we would likely recognize today.

For example, Charnia has none of the organs we typically associate with animals. The archaic life form also lacks a mouth or visible means of locomotion. The closest modern comparison would be a sedentary jellyfish.

While previous efforts have identified ancient animal-life fossils from this period, the team noted that most are found as “flat impressions.” As a result, Professor Neil Davies from Cambridge’s Department of Earth Sciences said that many fossils from this period “occur as impressions where they’ve been squashed down under layers of rock,” like a flower pressed into a book.

“As a fossil record, the Ediacaran has several things working against it, primarily that most organisms were soft-bodied and skeletons hadn’t evolved yet, so that they are harder to preserve,” the team member and co-author of the study detailing the research explained.

Dr Veema agreed, while noting the difficulty in finding such rare specimens.

“Fossils need to be embedded within sedimentary rocks to be found, so if the rocks themselves are less common, then that makes the fossils harder to find,” the researcher explained. “Most Ediacaran fossils come from just a handful of locations, which makes it exciting to find them somewhere new.”

Fortunately, the newly identified 560-million-year-old life form was preserved in all three dimensions. The team said that discovering an ancient life form preserved in 3D is incredibly rare, particularly for soft-bodied organisms like Charnia. Finding one from this extremely ancient time, when animal life first began to appear, is even more unlikely, making the discovery unusually rare.

Well-Preserved Charnia Reveals Previously Unknown Details

560 million years ago, when this Charnia was still alive, evidence suggests that it was buried during an ancient underwater avalanche. This sudden submergence also filled the animal’s body with sediment. The researchers said these events caused the fossil to become preserved in 3D

For example, the research team identified small ridges along the animal’s branches. Called keels, these extremely subtle features had never been detected in other, flatter Charnia fossils.

Dr Yorick Veenma, from Cambridge’s Department of Earth Sciences and the lead author of the study detailing the team’s discovery, said finding a 3D fossil from this archaic time has provided them with an entirely new perspective.

“When you see the same species preserved in a different way, you start noticing properties you hadn’t seen before,” Dr. Veenma explained.

“There May Be a Whole Undiscovered Community of These Very Early Organisms”

Although scientists have found a few fossils from this period, they are often from the same handful of sites. However, this is the first time one has been found in Norway. Dr. Veema said this shows that discoveries can be made “in less familiar places.”

The researchers also successfully identified other components of the ancient ecosystem that this Charnia fossil called home. Future efforts may reveal that it was one small part of a larger, ‘lost’ ancient ecosystem supporting a variety of complex life forms.

“There may be a whole undiscovered community of these very early organisms preserved up there,” Davies explained. “Weird little umbrella-shaped blobs, things that don’t fit with what people know from elsewhere.”

“There are a whole host of different things that were not known before,” the researcher added.

The study “Charnia and other late Ediacaran macrofossils preserved in turbiditic deposits of the Indreelva Member (Finnmark, Norway)” was published in Paleontology.

Christopher Plain has spent the last six years as Associate News Editor and Head Science Reporter at The Debrief. Follow and connect with him on X, learn about his novels at plainfiction.com, or email him at christopher@thedebrief.org.

Welcome to this edition of The Intelligence Brief… This week, SpaceX launched USSF-153, a classified U.S. Space Force mission carrying a mysterious payload into orbit aboard a Falcon 9 rocket, highlighting the growing intersection between commercial spaceflight and U.S. national security operations. In our analysis, we’ll be looking at 1) what we currently know about the highly secretive USSF-153 mission, 2) how details surrounding its flight path may offer clues that classified satellites potentially based on SpaceX’s Starshield platform were aboard, 3) how the mission comes amid growing concerns about an emerging era of military competition and potential conflict in Earth’s orbit, and 4) why the launch represents another milestone for SpaceX as reusable commercial rockets play an increasingly important role in national security space missions.

Quote of the Week

“SpaceX’s ongoing work with the Department of Defense and other partners demonstrates our ability to provide in-space and on-ground capability at scale.”

– SpaceX Statement

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RECENT NEWS from The Debrief

• Scientists challenge the lizard brain myth, revealing two distinct neural systems that may explain how mammalian brains evolved.
• Analysis of the 4,000-year-old Devil’s Arrows stone pillar monument has finally revealed the site’s mysterious origins.
• A recent discovery is revealing fascinating new insights about Tyrannosaurus Rex.
• Get all the latest stories from The Debrief, with more breaking stories at the end of this week’s newsletter.

A Classified Mission is Carried to Orbit

Earlier today, SpaceX launched a classified mission for the U.S. Space Force, which carried a mysterious payload to orbit on one of the company’s Falcon 9 rockets.

The mission, officially known as USSF-153, lifted off from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California at around 11:37 a.m. EDT on Thursday. Beyond that, little else is known about what, exactly, the classified payload carried aboard the Falcon 9 might have been.

Here’s a look at what we currently know about this morning’s secretive launch, and how it may be related to other recent developments involving the growing use of Earth’s orbit in the advancement of U.S. national security objectives.

USSF-153 Mission

According to the company’s website, SpaceX says the USSF-153 mission marks the 27th flight for the first stage SpaceX rocket booster supporting this mission.

The same booster was previously used for the launches of missions that included the Crew-7, CRS-29, PACE, Transporter-10, EarthCARE, NROL-186, Transporter-13, TRACERS, NROL-48, COSMO-SkyMED Second Generation FM3, and 16 Starlink missions, according to an update on the USSF-153 mission page.

“Following stage separation, the first stage will land on the Of Course I Still Love You droneship, which will be stationed in the Pacific Ocean,” the SpaceX update read, noting that it may be possible for sonic booms to be heard in the region around Santa Barbara and surrounding communities, adding that “what residents experience will depend on weather and other conditions.”

Clues About a Classified Payload

The launch was live-streamed by SpaceX, and the moment of takeoff of the classified mission was subsequently added to the company’s official X account. However, few additional details about the exact nature of the mission were revealed, although experts have noted that at least a few details about the rocket’s mission could be discernible from its planned flight path, offering some clues about what USSF-153 might be carrying.

Some outlets have noted the similarity between the current mission’s rocket-stage drop zones and those from past SpaceX Starlink Group 15 missions, which could mean that a group of classified satellites, possibly built using SpaceX’s Starshield satellite platform, may be part of what’s on board.

Serving as the national-security counterpart to the technologies driving SpaceX’s massive Starlink broadband constellation, the program reportedly uses the company’s existing satellite and launch technology to support national security missions. If this is indeed a part of USSF-153’s mission, it would add to the increasingly important role commercial space technologies are playing in U.S. military and intelligence operations.

A New Cold War in Space

Last week’s Intelligence Brief newsletter covered recent concerns about potential future conflict in space, which include the use of sophisticated military capabilities in space by the U.S. and foreign adversary nations.

Experts warn that Earth’s orbit might become a critical battlefield in future conflicts, with recent examples of technologies currently being tested for this that include China’s secretive Shenlong spaceplane, as well as the U.S. and its allies demonstrating similar “dogfighting,” rendezvous, and other potentially military operations in orbit.

Additionally, Russia’s longstanding pursuit of anti-satellite weapons adds to the emerging threats that may soon occupy Earth’s orbit. Although it remains unknown whether Thursday’s mission could be related to such capabilities and other technologies aimed at leveraging Earth’s orbit for military purposes, its classified nature does leave this possibility open.

A New Milestone for SpaceX

Finally, Thursday’s mission also represents a milestone in SpaceX’s busy 2026 launch schedule, with USSF-153 expected to become the company’s 104th Falcon 9 mission of the year.

Eighty of those launches have been dedicated to expanding the company’s ever-growing Starlink constellation, which now consists of more than 11,000 active satellites in low Earth orbit.

Despite the unusual secrecy surrounding its cargo, the USSF-153 launch showcases the new reusable commercial rocket industry SpaceX has developed, which is now frequently relied on by the U.S. military for carrying national-security hardware into orbit.

That concludes this week’s installment of The Intelligence Brief. You can read past editions of our newsletter at our website, or if you found this installment online, don’t forget to subscribe and get future email editions from us here. Also, if you have a tip or other information you’d like to send along directly to me, you can email me at micah [@] thedebrief [dot] org, or reach me on X: @MicahHanks.

Here are the top stories we’re covering right now…

Tyrannosaurus Rex was likely one of the Cretaceous period’s most fearsome predators, and a new discovery is revealing how the long-extinct dinosaur may have moved.

In a recent paper published in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology, an international team of researchers reveals the first-ever adult T. rex trackway, discovered in North Dakota.

While fiction media shows dinosaurs in motion, paleontologists still have many questions about how species actually moved. The new discovery goes a long way toward answering these questions with the first-ever record of a real T. rex gait.

Finding a T. Rex Track

The work was a collaboration between the Denver Museum of Nature & Science and England’s Liverpool John Moores University, centered on a literally groundbreaking set of footprints.

The discovery was made in the Hell Creek Formation, one of the world’s most intensely studied Cretaceous and Paleocene rock formations, which continues to reveal new secrets about Earth’s remote past. Although the formation covers thousands of square miles, this particular discovery was made on U.S. Forest Service land outside Marmarth, North Dakota.

Intriguingly, a local teacher at Northglenn High School made the discovery in a fortuitous example of citizen science. His discovery earned him an author position on the resulting paper.

“As a teacher, I’m always telling my students that science starts with curiosity, passion, and careful observation. I never imagined that could lead me to a discovery like this,” said co-author Kent M. Hups.

High Tech Analysis

“The technology we’re able to apply in the digital age means my colleagues could scan the tracks in the field and then send the 3D information over to me to visualize on my computer and in VR, enabling me to take as close a look as they did in person,” said lead author Peter Falkingham, a professor of palaeobiology at Liverpool John Moores University and a dinosaur track expert.

Using high-resolution 3D surface scanning, the team measured each footprint along the 66.5-million-year-old trackway. Using these data, they constructed digital and physical 3D models of the T. rex tracks. The footprints are about three feet long, and the trackway extends for roughly 23 feet. Their size and distinctive narrow toe shape led to the Tyrannosaurus identification, further supported by the known recovery of T. rex fossils in the area.

Tyrannosaurus Movement

This isn’t the first time paleontologists have seen a track believed to have been made by a T. rex, but it is the first time such tracks have been found in a sequence. Locating a series like this provides scientists with crucial new evidence about how the dinosaur moved while it was alive.

“Bones tell us an enormous amount about these animals, but footprints capture a moment of behavior. With a trackway, we can actually follow an animal as it moved across the landscape. That is incredibly rare for T. rex,” said co-author Tyler Lyson, senior curator of vertebrate paleontology at the Denver Museum of Nature & Science.

The stride between the footprints was about 13 feet, with a symmetrical sequence of two left and two right tracks. Due to weathering, it is challenging to be certain, but the team estimates that the dinosaur was moving at 3.5 to 4.5 miles per hour—roughly what would be a brisk walking pace for a human.

The work will continue this fall, when three of the prints will be physically removed from the location and transported by helicopter to the Denver Museum of Nature & Science. The institution plans to make the most of the opportunity, providing updates over the winter as researchers conduct an in-person analysis of the tracks.

The paper, “A Large Tridactyl Trackway from the Upper Cretaceous Hell Creek Formation of North Dakota, Likely Attributable to an Adult Tyrannosaurus Rex,” appeared in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology on September 8, 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.