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 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.

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.

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.

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.

An important Egyptian tomb from the Fifth Dynasty of the Old Kingdom has been discovered in the Saqqara necropolis by a Spanish-Egyptian archaeological mission.

Josep Cervelló, an Egyptology professor at the Autonomous University of Barcelona, led the work, which was coordinated with the Egyptian Supreme Council of Antiquities to investigate the unique tomb in the Saqqara region southwest of Cairo.

The tomb did not belong to a Pharaoh, but was commissioned by a high-ranking official named Yunmen, who served during the reign of Djedkare Isesi. Strangely, the structure features two funerary chapels: one of which is dedicated to the Iti, Yunmen’s father, who held a lower rank than his son.

The discovery may offer a new context for the intersection of spirituality and social mobility in ancient Egypt.

Egyptian Tombs

We now see the Saqqara necropolis primarily as the remains of a dead culture, filled with long-forgotten tombs. While often portrayed as settings for horror stories, the Spanish-Egyptian archeological team viewed them differently, seeing them as places used by a vibrant community, where the living constantly came to leave offerings and work on funerary monuments.

The recent work is part of the continuing exploration of Egyptian sites discovered by archaeologists in the 19th century. To this day, archaeologists continue to seize on hints in the works of their forebears over a century ago to explore ancient Egypt’s impressive remains. Auguste Mariette, a French archaeologist, first discovered the site, identified as containing a large tomb complex, but no detailed exploration or documentation had been done.

Life In the Necropolis 

Egyptian mastabas were a unique style of tomb, and in some ways were like modern cemeteries: they were frequently visited places where the lost were mourned and remembered. For this reason, the team was also very interested in the tomb complex’s topography, rather than just its beautiful decoration. They studied the tomb as an urban location, investigating how ancient people moved through it and whether they worshipped outdoors or inside.

Exploring the bustle of urban life in the necropolis netted the team their first indication of Yunmen’s tomb, alongside hints at two more located nearby. In follow-up excavations, the archaeologists are planning to explore the remaining pair.

Moving in Ancient Egyptian Society

The tomb’s physical structure intrigues archaeologists, as it is a rare example of a building with two funerary chapels. Fortunately, the 4,400-year-old tomb is remarkably well preserved, with vibrant color and fine details observable in the wall reliefs. Archaeologists can still clearly make out tiny donkeys and other animals in the wall art. Elsewhere, some elements of the texts adorning the walls follow common formulas—yet even these are customized to the official role and personality of the owners.

Archaeologists interpreting the mastaba believe it reflects social advancement. Yunmen achieved a higher social status than his father, Iti. Yet on the journey to the afterlife, Iti was not forgotten; Yunmen ensured his father received a tomb of similar opulence, so the son’s prestige would apply retroactively to the father in death.

“We still need to fully examine it, but one possibility is that the official originally came from that outlying province, arrived at the court, and settled in Memphis—Egypt’s capital at the time—while his son became an official in the central state administration and was the one who built the tomb,” Cervelló said in a press release.

It remains to be seen what the other two mastabas identified by the team will reveal, whether they will provide more evidence for our traditional understanding of Egyptian culture or add more nuance to our view of these ancient people.

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 extinct American cheetah wasn’t a true cheetah at all, say biologists in new research overturning our previous understanding of the legendary predator, revealing a cautionary tale about superficial scientific interpretations.

In a recent paper published in Current Biology, a research team led by scientists at the University of California, Santa Cruz, revealed that the so-called “American cheetah” is actually a relative of the Puma, adapted to Arctic conditions.

Scientifically known as Miracinonyx trumani, the American cheetah has turned out to be a fish-eating Puma relative and quite a distinct creature from the one envisioned by earlier researchers, as their suggestions were based primarily on the animal’s physical form. Using fossils discovered as far north as the Arctic Yukon, the team analyzed the species’ nuclear paleogenomes and stable isotopes, reconsidering the big cat at the genetic level.

Convergent Evolution

M. trumani had long front legs and a slender body, weighing roughly 150 pounds and measuring about eight feet long and three feet tall. This sleek form allowed it to cross vast swathes of Pleistocene North America and achieve cheetah-like speeds.

While it may have developed a form similar to the cheetah, this is simply a case of convergent evolution, after the “American cheetah” split from the puma lineage some 2.6 million years ago. Fossils used in the research date from 23,000 to 31,000 years old, considerably more recent than that initial split.

Although the American cheetah is extinct today, its influence is still felt. One evolutionary theory is that the fastest North American land animal, the pronghorn, which can run up to 60 miles per hour, owes its tremendous speed to evolving to escape the swift predator.

Where The “American Cheetah” Roamed

One of the most intriguing elements of the new research is that it extends the cat’s habitat north by 20° latitude, into the Arctic Yukon. The team says that, depending on latitude, the species could occupy distinctly different ecological niches, demonstrating a high degree of adaptability to prevailing conditions.

To the south, the American cheetah had long been recognized as residing in Florida and Wyoming. In these areas, rich in temperate grasslands, the cat would have behaved as a generalist predator. However, in the harsher Arctic Yukon, it acted as a tertiary predator, living off fish like salmon.

“These cats were remarkably flexible, much like pumas are across their range today,” said lead author Molly Cassatt-Johnstone, a Ph.D. candidate in the Paleogenomics Lab at UC Santa Cruz. “We found loss-of-function mutations in certain genes that regulate circadian rhythms, suggesting they may have adapted to the extreme light cycles of summers and winters in northern latitudes.”

American Cheetah Extinction

The genes revealed further peculiarities of M. Trumani. Generally, cats are known for a lack of interest in sweet foods, but this particular cat also lacked a sour taste receptor, a trait associated with specialized diets. Animals normally use this receptor to identify food that is safe to eat.

The fossils tell the story of a slow, steady decline in the species over the course of the Pleistocene. One notable factor could be their distinct lack of genetic diversity, which the researchers do not attribute to inbreeding.

“Miracinonyx persisted for a very long time without the signs of inbreeding we’d expect before a collapse,” senior author Beth Shapiro, professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at UC Santa Cruz and co-director of the Paleogenomics Lab, concluded. “The decline was slow, not sudden, and that may be what left it unable to adapt when the climate shifted.”

The paper, “Range and Diet Diversity in the Pleistocene American ‘Cheetah,’ Miracinonyx Trumani,” appeared in Current Biology on September 4, 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 story of a Medieval European plague is coming into focus through historic manuscripts, but not in the way you might think. Instead of providing mere historical accounts, the animal skins from which these Medieval volumes are constructed provide genetic evidence for reconstructing the 3,500-year story of the sheepox virus (SPPV), which decimated European livestock.

In a recent paper published in Science Advances, an international team of interdisciplinary researchers ranging from geneticists and virologists to historians and conservators explored the history of this pre-modern plague.

The new work combs through Medieval history to reveal the lineages of diseases plaguing modern herds, providing new insight into the viruses threatening modern animal agriculture.

Medieval Texts

Chosen for the work were some of the most important Medieval manuscripts that Europe has to offer, including the millennium-old York Gospels, one of the best surviving examples of an early Anglo-Saxon illuminated manuscript. Another work used in the study was one of the earliest known English dictionaries, the Corpus Glossary of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. Beyond these notable examples, the team exploited a variety of English and continental European works.

Medieval volumes did not contain paper pages like modern books, but instead, vellum pages made of calfskin, as well as the skins of goats and sheep. Therefore, these works are preserved as hundreds-of-years-old biological specimens for modern geneticists.

SPPV tends to target younger animals, such as the calves from whom vellum is made, and is highly contagious, rapidly spreading through large portions of a herd. While these factors made the disease easier for modern researchers to study via vellum samples, it also made it devastating to wool, meat, and milk production.

Extracting DNA

“The recording of ancient DNA of pathogens has completely changed our understanding of infectious disease in the past, and here we show that parchment can also preserve animal pathogen DNA. It is possible that archives and libraries around the world also contain the genetic traces of disease outbreaks in animals in the past,” said lead author Louis L’Hôte, PhD candidate at the University of Cambridge, Dublin.

“These genomes help us understand how these pathogens evolved and how they impacted past societies – such as sheeppox virus, which we show has been affecting Eurasian sheep herds for at least three and a half millennia,” L’Hôte added.

With the rapid spread of SPPV across herds, many manuscripts contained SPPV DNA on multiple pages within the same manuscript. Additionally, finding SPPV DNA on pages made from both calf and goat skin marks it as a rare example of cross-species infection.

“Parchment making has been considered a vanishing craft, but we are beginning to understand just how much of the past it has retained. This project shows that parchments not only preserve our cultural history for hundreds of years, but also the landscape of disease in our livestock in the medieval period,” said supervising author Dr Kevin G. Daly, Associate Professor at UCD School of Agriculture and Food Science.

“This kind of exciting, surprising discovery is only possible when researchers from a range of disciplines come together to share their expertise and data,” Day said, calling this “a generosity and trust that collaborative science depends on.”

Exploring Medieval DNA

The Medieval manuscripts combine with even older surviving biological records, such as teeth, to show the virus reaching back 3,700 years. Between the manuscripts and archaeological finds, the team identified 41 samples containing related viruses.

Along with the goatpox virus and the lumpy skin disease virus, SPPV belongs to a category called capripoxviruses. The new research allowed the team to compare the ancient and modern sequences to determine that the division between the various viruses in the group occurred between 3,700 and 11,500 years ago, around the time animal domestication took hold in Europe as sheep came off the steppe.

“Ancient genomes can help us understand how these pathogens affecting us today evolved. We find that, unlike the smallpox virus, the sheeppox virus genome was very stable over the last few millennia,” L’Hôte concluded. “This might mean that genetic changes before this point were very important to how the sheeppox virus evolved to infect its host, which may help us fight the pathogen in the future.”

The paper, “3,500 years of Sheeppox Virus Evolution Inferred from Archaeological and Codicological Genomes,” appeared in Science Advances on September 2, 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 US Army has authorized its first production contract for a directed energy weapons system designed to take down uncrewed threats with high-energy lasers.

Designed under the Enduring High Energy Laser program (E-HEL), the LOCUST X3 laser counter-drone system weapon dramatically reduces the cost of taking out threats like adversarial drones compared with expensive kinetic missile systems. AeroVironment, Inc., of Albuquerque, New Mexico, will produce the new laser weapons for the U.S. Army.

The move marks a major step toward turning what was once a science-fiction trope into a battlefield reality alongside AI, drones, and other advanced technologies.

America’s Laser Weapon

“This first-of-its-kind directed energy program will enable our formations to defeat unmanned systems and dominate from the outset. Pairing human ingenuity with advanced technology is what ensures our Army will continue to outpace America’s adversaries,” stated General Christopher LaNeve, Vice Chief of Staff of the Army.

LOCUST X3 draws electrical energy from a magazine to produce the system’s high-energy beam. The system’s power supply then regenerates that magazine, preparing it for further action. This means that, on a per-shot basis, the system is far cheaper to operate than kinetic weapons like missiles, which are expended when fired.

As a result, countering the growing threat posed by uncrewed aerial vehicles could become considerably less economically burdensome. The technology could also help mitigate logistics and supply challenges, which have become a major concern amid the U.S.-Iran war as reports of dangerously low missile stockpiles continue to emerge.

Across Varying Battlefields

“The key to successfully countering all levels of drones is a layered defense of sensors and effectors. AV and the Army have worked for years to develop directed energy solutions, and we are proud to give our soldiers a decisive edge against drone threats,” said the Honorable Mike Obadal, Under Secretary of the Army.

The E-HEL system is designed to be modular, with 11 major interfaces allowing it to be integrated with a variety of platforms and vehicles. With this flexibility, the system can be deployed at permanent installations, temporary bases, and aboard mobile vehicles. Its design also allows for ongoing upgrades as the technology improves. According to U.S. Army Public Affairs, this modular approach will allow LOCUST X3 to be quickly integrated and used across a wide variety of operations.

Making the Laser Weapon a Reality

The contract to develop the systems is valued at $465 million.

“The E-HEL program is an example of how the Army has successfully utilized MOSA, a key element of acquisition reform, as part of our efforts to field technology quickly with an interface to upgrade in the future,” said the Honorable Brent Ingraham, Assistant Secretary of the Army for Acquisition, Logistics and Technology and Army Acquisition Executive. “Directed energy weapons have been considered S&T projects, and I’m proud that the Army is moving at speed and scale to deliver this first time capability,” he concluded.

Moving beyond its origins as an expensive laboratory technology, the E-HEL program is bringing laser weapons closer to widespread practical use. According to the Army, the system is scalable and affordable enough for broad integration, with dozens expected to be delivered annually. No longer relegated to testing, the Army is now working to integrate the system across the force, ensuring units will be prepared to deploy it against uncrewed aerial threats once it arrives.

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.

NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has glimpsed a strange ten-sided atmospheric wave at Saturn’s south pole, the first regular-sided jet pattern ever observed there.

In a recent paper published in Science Advances, researchers examined Saturn’s peculiar decahedron, detecting signs of an entirely new atmospheric phenomenon for the gas giant. A similar hexagon-shaped wave resides at Saturn’s north pole but differs in noticeable ways.

Years of Hubble observations from 2023 to 2025 allowed the team to trace subtle hints that they eventually resolved into the decagonal wave at Saturn’s south pole.

Observing the Solar System

“We’ve never seen anything quite like this in Saturn’s southern hemisphere,” said co-author Amy Simon, OPAL principal investigator, at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. “The northern hexagon has been there every time we’ve looked for more than 40 years. This feature is different — it appears to be strengthening, giving us the rare opportunity to watch a giant atmospheric pattern develop.”

Since its 1990 launch into low Earth orbit, the Hubble Space Telescope has been observing our solar system, uncovering new details about our planetary neighbors. One such project is the Outer Planet Atmospheres Legacy (OPAL) program, which began collecting data with observations of Uranus in 2014 and now provides the crucial evidence for this discovery, with high-resolution images that resolve murky hints from ground-based observations.

As Saturn’s seasons changed, its south pole came into alignment with ground-based observatories. In images from those telescopes submitted to the Planetary Virtual Observatory Laboratory, amateur astronomers Trevor Barry and Jean-Paul Oger, along with Agustín Sánchez-Lavega of the University of the Basque Country in Spain, noticed something interesting happening on the gas giant.

A Strange Band on Saturn

The researchers spotted an undulating band along Saturn’s south pole, which, in further 2025 ground-based telescope images, began to suggest a decagonal (ten-sided) structure. With its incredible image clarity and spatial resolution, Hubble’s imagery finally allowed researchers to resolve the decagonal shape with certainty.

“Given Saturn’s symmetry in its north-south jet stream system, we have been searching for a counterpart to Saturn’s northern hexagon on the south pole in Hubble images since 1990,” said lead author Agustín Sánchez-Lavega of the University of the Basque Country in Spain. “Images from NASA’s Cassini spacecraft, which orbited Saturn between 2004 and 2017, showed no inkling of a long-lived formation, either. The Hubble data confirmed the feature’s presence back to 2023.”

The wave is an interesting three-dimensional feature that extends through multiple layers of the atmosphere within one of the planet’s jet streams. Because Hubble can image the planet in multiple wavelengths, the decagon’s location appears to shift between observations, as each wavelength penetrates the atmosphere to a different degree.

Questions About Saturn

“The most intriguing part to me is that this seems to have just formed recently,” said Simon. “The question is, why did it suddenly form now when we haven’t seen one before?”

Recognizing Saturn’s decagonal wave is only a first step. Follow-up observations to collect more data and computer models to piece together what is occurring on the planet will be required to firmly grasp the phenomenon. Questions remain about how it formed, how long it may last, and how similar it is compared to the northern hexagonal wave.

One thing the team will be sure to watch for in their continued observations is whether the shape evolves or maintains its decagonal structure. Their continued work could provide important new insights into how atmospheric dynamics operate on gas giants and what they can reveal about our own planet’s atmospheric phenomena.

The paper, “A Decagon Wave Around Saturn’s South Pole,” appeared in Science Advances on September 2, 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.

Dark matter may finally be coming into focus thanks to a recent LUX-ZEPLIN (LZ) experiment, which detected a particle interaction that is difficult to explain as arising from ordinary matter.

Physicists believe that 85% of the matter in the universe is dark matter rather than ordinary matter, but because it neither emits nor reflects light, the mysterious substance effectively remains invisible.

The new findings, described in a recent paper submitted to Physical Review Letters and in a talk at Japan’s 2026 TeV Particle Astrophysics conference, detail the work of dozens of researchers that may constitute an intriguing hint in advance of a confirmed dark matter detection.

LUX-ZEPLIN

A massive international team of 250 scientists and engineers across 39 institutions makes up the LZ project, which conducts its experiment at a facility in South Dakota, almost a mile below ground. This facility, the Sanford Underground Research Facility (SURF), houses the detector, which is optimized to search for weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPS), one of the primary candidates for dark matter.

It does so using ten metric tons of ultrapure liquid xenon in a cylindrical detector. Layers surrounding the chamber block or detect background particles during the dark matter search. If WIMPs collide with xenon atoms, they should produce tiny flashes of light and electrons that can be detected within the chamber.

The nearly mile of rock above the facility helps prevent cosmic rays and other surface radiation from interfering with the experiments. A water tank and outer detectors help shield the central detector from background neutrons, while computational tools separate particle interactions to identify events that may mimic a dark matter observation.

Dark Matter Data

“This was a detailed study in a region we hadn’t explored within this dataset, and we spent months of additional effort to understand all the possible causes of background events,” said lead author Sam Eriksen, a senior research associate at the University of Bristol in the UK.

“We understand our detector and the backgrounds so well that even a single outstanding event, like the one we found, is important. We expect dark-matter events to be extremely rare, so only a handful could mark the first detection of WIMP dark matter,” Eriksen added.

Measurements used in the study were collected between March 2023 and April 2024, totaling 220 live days. The new work wasn’t the first pass on this dataset, as researchers had previously searched it for faint signals from the simplest kinds of WIMP interactions. This time, the team expanded its search to a broader range of possible interactions that could deposit more energy in the detector.

A Possible Dark Matter Detection

“We’re very intrigued to see this event in the data, in the region where we expect dark matter to show up and the competing backgrounds are very low,” said LZ spokesperson Rick Gaitskell, a professor at Brown University. “With only one event, we don’t want to get ahead of ourselves. We are not claiming to have seen dark matter. But we have seen something interesting that we want to share with the scientific community for their input.”

According to researchers, the event was an outlier from other LZ measurements and is consistent with one of the dark matter models the team explored. However, increasingly sensitive technology can ironically reveal previously unseen background processes alongside potentially interesting new signals. The sensitivity of the detectors used at LZ may therefore be measuring a background that earlier instruments missed rather than dark matter.

This detection is rated at 2.6 sigma, about half of the 5-sigma threshold needed to ensure the signal is not background noise. Further observations will be needed to push certainty toward that 5-sigma goal, but this could be a major step in that direction.

The paper, “Search for Dark Matter Particle Interactions in an Extended Nuclear Recoil Energy Window with the LUX-ZEPLIN (LZ) Experiment,” is currently available on the LUX-ZEPLIN website.

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.

Australia’s extinct thylacine, also known as the Tasmanian tiger, was not the powerful predator European settlers had assumed based on experiences with the dogs and wolves of their homeland, scientists say.

In a recent study of the skull of this creature, famously hunted to extinction, researchers from Flinders University and the University of Melbourne found something unexpected: the thylacine likely hunted only small prey. The team presented these findings in a paper published in Nature Communications, challenging the assumption that the Tasmanian tiger targeted large animals like sheep.

According to the new research, false European assumptions brought to a new land led to the overhunting and extinction of the thylacine species.

Reconsidering the Thylacine

The primary discovery in the work was that the thylacine’s long, deep jaw shape would be poorly suited to holding down large animals. Instead, it would be more effective at delivering a powerful snap to a much smaller animal.

“Our latest findings on their feeding adaptations counter the myths that drove the thylacine to extinction,” said lead author Professor Vera Weisbecker, from the College of Science and Engineering at Flinders University. “Thylacines were often compared to Northern Hemisphere predators such as wolves, jackals and foxes from the dog family Canidae. This resemblance gave them their species name ‘cynocephalus’, meaning ‘dog-head.’”

While the animal may have had some superficial resemblance to a wolf or dog, they followed a quite different evolutionary trajectory. Instead of being closely related to canines, they were more similar to kangaroos. Thylacines were marsupials, pouch-bearing mammals that separated from the broader mammalian lineage in the time of the dinosaurs.

The Strange Thylacine Skull

The researchers say the thylacine skull combines a set of features seen in no other living carnivorous mammal, making it a true outlier. At a glance, the team noted the extinct animal’s large skull, with its long, tall upper jaw that protrudes and ends in a wide snout—an unusual feature that is worthy of more detailed study.

“Even though the average thylacine may have weighed only half as much as the average wolf, its vastly oversized skull is about as large as a grey wolf’s skull,” said co-author Dr Douglass Rovinsky. “But while it was big, it wasn’t really shaped like the skull of a big predator. Instead, the thylacine’s snout was long and slender, almost delicate – not robust like the snout of a grey wolf. It very much looks like the snout of a fox or jackal, which can be much smaller than thylacines.”

Instead of holding down large animals, the researchers say these jaws would be better suited to capturing bandicoots, an animal similar in size to a rabbit, with a powerful snap.

“The longer a jaw is, the faster its tip moves when an animal bites. This increases the impact of the strike. We think that the thylacine’s huge skull size allowed it to withstand these bite forces,” says Professor Weisbecker.

Similar Carnivore Skulls

Intriguingly, while this skull configuration is not seen in carnivorous mammals, large-headed hunters with powerful snapping jaws are common outside of the mammal group.  This shape is particularly useful in aquatic environments, where fast, slippery fish are a primary target for predators.

Long, tall jaws with a wide tip are frequently found in crocodiles and some predatory fish. While the shape is conducive to hunting, it is typically used to capture smaller, highly agile prey. 

“Thylacines were hunted because of myths that they were ferocious predators of livestock, when there was little evidence for this. Their extinction is a story of ignorance and lack of respect for Australia’s unique wildlife and its Indigenous custodians,” Professor Weisbecker concluded. “As a country at the global forefront of mammal extinctions, we need to do all we can to safeguard equally irreplaceable surviving species.”

The paper, “Skull Morphology of the Extinct Tasmanian Tiger Suggests Unique Biting Style,” appeared in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on August 31, 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 theoretical kind of extraterrestrial life could survive the harsh acid clouds of Venus, according to MIT researchers.

Despite longstanding conceptions that Venus would be too deadly for even the hardiest of extremophiles, new evidence suggests a rethinking of life from the ground up may be in order. The work was revealed in a recent paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, which describes how extraterrestrial life could form from peptides to thrive only in such a hostile environment.

Based on recent evidence, it may be time to cast a wider net in the search for extraterrestrial life and look at planets that bear little resemblance to Earth.

The Brutal Venusian Environment

“We really don’t know the full extent of what planet archetypes are out there,” said senior co-author Sara Seager, the Class of 1941 Professor of Planetary Sciences in the Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences and a professor at MIT’s departments of Physics and of Aeronautics and Astronautics. “We’re seeking exoplanets that might be a true Earth twin, but what if they’re all Venuses? Our findings definitely open up a whole range of possibilities.”

About 30 to 40 miles above Venus’s scorching surface, which reaches temperatures close to 900° F, lies a pocket of milder temperatures that some scientists think may be conducive to life. However, this region’s heavy cloud cover poses its own challenges. Instead of being composed primarily of water, the clouds on Venus are 98% sulfuric acid, which is strong enough to dissolve metals and would kill any known life on Earth.

While traditional astrobiological thinking held that this would be far too extreme for complex biological molecules to hold together, new evidence is overturning that idea. Recent work at MIT suggests that peptides can endure such challenging conditions, maintaining their stability and adopting shapes useful to biological processes.

“If peptides find their way to that cloud layer of concentrated sulfuric acid, they will stay and be stably preserved in that cloud of droplets,” said senior co-author Mei Hong, an MIT professor of chemistry and one of the senior authors of the new study. “And once these macromolecules have a defined three-dimensional structure, they can potentially have a function.”

Seeding Extraterrestrial Life

Following the concept of panspermia, which holds that the building blocks of life are transmitted throughout the universe on meteoroids, asteroids, and comets, the researchers investigated whether any building blocks could survive the Venusian conditions to give rise to extraterrestrial life.

Work began in Seager’s lab in 2020, studying how biological molecules could endure the stress of such an acidic environment. With nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy, they analyzed the structures of molecules in sulfuric acid solution. Surprisingly, nucleic acids, lipids, and amino acids all maintained their integrity under acidic conditions. 

The next step was to investigate whether peptides could likewise hold their integrity and also assume useful biological shapes. They were surprised to find how resilient the peptides were, holding on for weeks at a time. Ironically, the lack of water in the environment could be a blessing, as without it, the hydrolysis reaction that breaks down peptides cannot occur.

“Without water, an acid that you would consider a harsh solvent suddenly is not as menacing as one might think,” Hong said.

New Concepts in Extraterrestrial Life

Additionally, the sulfuric acid molecules acted as scaffolds, allowing biologically useful shapes to form that otherwise wouldn’t, such as omega loops, which are found in some naturally occurring proteins on Earth but not typically in peptides.

“What hadn’t been known is that peptides can survive so well and have specific three-dimensional shapes in an acidic environment,” Hong explained.

Follow-up work will take these ideas even further, synthesizing a DNA alternative called PNA, made from peptides. Their existing work shows that a single PNA strand is stable in sulfuric acid, but the new research will attempt to recreate DNA’s double-strand structure with peptides. They also plan to investigate whether long peptides can hold omega loops under these acidic conditions. 

Based on their results, extraterrestrial life could easily be hiding in environments highly divergent from anything seen on Earth. Continued investigation may reveal that rather than being poisonous, environments like Venus may be the only places certain lifeforms could exist.

The paper, “Peptides Adopt Stable Omega-loop Structures in Concentrated Sulfuric Acid,” appeared in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on September 4, 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.

While astronomers are providing new knowledge of the stars daily, ancestral star knowledge is fading. For humans around the world, the stars were not mere objects of esoteric curiosity but guides to time and place that dictated the rhythm of life, and new research indicates that indigenous people in South Africa may be losing certain elements of that cosmic lore.

In a recent paper published in the Journal of Science Communication, South African researchers demonstrate that many of these old stories have disappeared from indigenous consciousness over the last century because of colonization and modernization in Africa.

Intriguingly, the investigation of ancient indigenous beliefs takes place against the backdrop of some of humanity’s most advanced scientific work exploring space today.

Indigenous Star Knowledge

As humans moved from a roving hunter-gatherer lifestyle to a stationary way of life reliant on agriculture, they gained a new level of appreciation for the stars. Those glittering celestial objects always provided direction, but with a new focus on growing food, they now dictated when to begin planting.

When considered in this light, our present astronomy is just a continuation of the stargazing that predates the modern conception of science. The new work looks back on ten years of conversations between San indigenous knowledge holders and South African researcher Anton Binneman.

While Binneman was investigating traditional indigenous ways of knowing about the stars, South Africa was building the highly advanced MeerKAT and SKA-Mid telescopes, highlighting the dichotomy between the old and the new. His work was directly related to the telescope construction, as part of an environmental and social impact assessment required for such large-scale projects. Binneman found those beliefs were changing with time, as the modern world seeped into traditional lives.

Investigating Indigenous Knowledge

“Stories are not frozen in time. Language evolves, the way people relate to the sky changes, and our knowledge of the universe changes too. Indigenous narratives also evolve together with the communities that tell them,” explained Binneman, a specialist in engagement, communication, and stakeholder management.

Rather than trying to uncover the original versions of the local lore, Binneman works in a Dialogical Knowledge Renewal Model, combining archives, community memory, and modern science into something with local meaning. The result informs local astronomy guides and astrotourism, connecting modern initiatives like SKA with the indigenous culture.

“It restores dignity to people,” Binneman concludes. “The first astronomers were not those who built MeerKAT or the SKA.”

At seven sites, Binneman interviewed 52 elders and knowledge holders from local Indigenous communities in a series of workshops. He focused on ethnoastronomical knowledge and how it changed over time.

In the workshops, Binneman showed participants images of celestial objects and asked what they saw and what knowledge they had of them. The researchers then compared these responses to stories recorded in the late nineteenth century, which now reside in the Bleek and Lloyd archive.

Star Stories

Over the course of a century, the indigenous understanding of the cosmos had changed considerably. Some stories loosely survived, while others appeared to have been completely erased from cultural memory.

“We could not simply use the archive as it was, partly because it is strongly shaped by the beliefs of the white researchers who created it at the time. Instead, it served as a starting point for dialogue with the communities,” Binneman explains.

The researchers discovered that the elements most relevant to modern life had the greatest staying power, such as Venus being known as The Farmer’s Clock because it marked the beginning and end of the workday.

The local people had once told a story of a girl who wanted to make light, so she threw a handful of ashes into the sky and commanded them to become the Milky Way. While the story of a girl throwing a cloud of dust is largely forgotten, the Milky Way is still called the Hemelstraat, meaning “road in the sky.”

“Older generations still remember these stories, whereas among younger people they are no longer part of living, practised knowledge,” Binneman said. “They continue to exist, but their form has adapted in response to colonialism, industrialisation and Westernisation.”

Preserving these stories in the public consciousness will now fall to local astronomy guides and the astrotourism industry, as they celebrate indigenous ways of knowing. 

The paper, “San Ethnoastronomy and Cultural Memory: Reclaiming Indigenous Cosmologies in the Square Kilometre Array Construction Area,” appeared in the Journal of Science Communication on August 31, 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.

Computers based on slime molds may be the next step for solving some of the most advanced and resource-heavy problems that tax the limits of conventional computing.

By studying the survival strategies of slime molds, researchers were inspired to create a new type of computer modeled on living organisms, as findings revealed by a team at Waseda University in a recent paper published in Physical Review Research describe how amoeba-like slime molds can be modeled in a new, simpler way to produce an ultra-efficient, low-energy computer.

These new computers are particularly suited to combinatorial optimization problems, which are of wide use in various industries but burn massive amounts of compute and energy.

Pushing Computers to Their Limit

The researchers’ new, simplified model can potentially be implemented using a wide selection of physical materials and phenomena to tackle combinatorial optimization problems. These types of problems involve finding the best possible combination of choices from a defined set of options. They are common in many industries where the challenge involves finding an optimal solution among numerous possibilities. This could involve discovering the ideal combination of ingredients for a new drug or, in materials science, designing a substance with highly specific properties.

Calculating every possible combination can become extremely expensive and taxing for traditional computers as the number of possibilities increases, leading computer scientists to explore new paradigms for solving these important optimization problems.

Slime Mold Computers

We often hear the human brain likened to a computer, but in this instance, researchers are casting a wider net. Instead of modeling human decision-making processes in ones and zeroes, slime mold computers look to the amoeba-like behavior of these organisms, particularly their survival strategies.

Surprisingly, these simple lifeforms regularly solve problems analogous to combinatorial optimization. This occurs through deformation dynamics, in which they alter their shapes to maximize nutrient intake while minimizing exposure to light. Such a balance of competing objectives closely resembles the kinds of optimization problems computers are tasked with solving.

However, implementing existing slime-mold-based models has been challenging, as they are often incompatible with the constraints of physical computing devices. In their new work, the Waseda researchers simplified an existing slime mold model to streamline how it handles information and make it easier to implement using physical systems.

“Our approach eliminates a major constraint, the volume-conservation law, making it possible to implement slime-mold computers using a much wider variety of materials and physical phenomena,” explained co-author assistant professor Yusuke Miyajima, of the Department of Applied Physics at Waseda University.

Amoebas and Combinatorial Optimization Problems

The traveling salesman problem (TSP) is one of the most classic and well-known combinatorial optimization problems. In it, a traveling salesman must identify the shortest route that visits every city on a list once before returning to the starting point.

The team started with the existing Amoeba TSP model, which uses slime mold dynamics to arrive at a solution. In physical implementations of this approach, researchers place an amoeba on a circular device with channels extending outward, representing cities in the TSP problem. As the amoeba extends branches along those channels in response to environmental stimuli, its behavior can be used to derive a solution.

With just five modifications to the Amoeba TSP model, the team enabled a much wider variety of physical materials and phenomena to be represented while also allowing the model’s parameters to be tuned. Tests showed that the new model produced feasible solutions in far fewer iterations than the original model, while increasing the number of cities it could handle from 100 to 180 and demonstrating mathematical equivalence to a recurrent neural network.

The researchers also identified alternative candidates for physical implementation, including spintronic devices and photonic circuits.

“The increased flexibility of our model can accelerate the development of energy-efficient slime-mold computers,” concluded co-author Dr. Masahito Mochizuki, a Waseda professor. “This decentralized mode of information processing could prove valuable for AI and large-scale combinatorial optimization, where conventional computers require significant power consumption.”

The paper, “Mathematical Model of the Amoeba-Inspired Combinatorial Optimization Machine for Physical Implementation and Its Equivalence to Recurrent Neural Networks,” appeared in Physical Review Research on June 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.

On January 23, 1961, a pair of thermonuclear bombs fell from the sky near Goldsboro, North Carolina. Neither of the weapons was dropped by a foreign adversary—they belonged to the United States, and in a remarkable series of events, they were dropped over American soil after the B-52 carrying them broke apart in midair.

The sobering circumstances that unfolded on that date were just one of several “Broken Arrow” incidents—accidents involving nuclear weapons that, in several cases, demonstrated how catastrophe could arise not from an enemy attack, but from mechanical failure, human error, and chance.

Goldsboro was neither the first nor the last nuclear weapons accident on American soil. More than six decades later, the incident remains a sobering artifact of the Cold War and a reminder of the extraordinary risks that accompanied keeping nuclear-armed aircraft continuously ready for war.

Nuclear Incident Over North Carolina

Early 1961 was a hard time for the B-52 bomber, with several crashes occurring across the United States. Most of these, and even the brief grounding of all B-52s, were minor news stories at the time. Outside the local area, sources like the New York Times gave only brief coverage of what happened in Goldsboro on January 23, 1961. However, the Goldsboro News-Argus placed a dark image of the twisted, flaming wreckage on its front page the next morning, and its ongoing coverage provided some of the only detailed records of how the public viewed the crash. What they didn’t know nearly killed them.

Part of the 4241st Strategic Wing under Strategic Air Command, the B-52G Stratofortress was armed with two Mark 39 hydrogen bombs and flying out of Goldsboro’s Seymour Johnson Air Force Base. Its nighttime flight was part of Strategic Air Command’s round-the-clock alert operations. Following an aerial refueling over the Atlantic, the plane began leaking fuel. This led to a dramatic midair breakup 11 hours into the flight, so spectacular that a night watchman eight miles away reported seeing sparks coming off the stricken plane.

During the crash, centrifugal forces became so great that they pulled a lanyard connected to the release mechanism of one of the bombs. This accidental twist of physics armed the bomb as it fell toward Earth.

Nuclear Response in Goldsboro

The plane crashed only a few hundred feet from the home of the Tyndall family, who described the event as looking “like the whole world was on fire.” Homes for miles around shook from the force of the impact. In the mad dash to reach the crash site, one military police officer was involved in a car accident, adding one more bit of destruction.

The Stratofortress, with its 185-foot wingspan, was an enormous plane, and it left behind a massive debris field. The burning wreckage quickly drew not only about one hundred Air Force personnel but also the state highway patrol, local sheriffs, and the fire department. Onlookers attempted to gain access to the site but were held back by military police warning of a potential radioactivity threat. This would be the only time for decades that the military would concede that the crash posed a nuclear danger.

It took seven hours to find the last survivor, one of only three from the eight-man crew aboard the Stratofortress.

After most of the wreckage was hauled away, the Air Force continued excavating the area to recover every piece of the plane and even turned to the public for help locating a lost ejector seat. These continued searches fueled a wave of rumors that the Air Force was looking for missing nuclear weapons and that the town might be evacuated. What the military called “routine” water tests did little to assuage some residents’ fears that they were in danger from whatever had come down. By late February, the Air Force was issuing official denials that anything was amiss in Goldsboro.

Soviet Propaganda

At a time of rising Cold War tensions, the USSR did not let the American crisis go to waste. Soviet propagandists employed “Moscow Molly,” a mysterious figure of the Soviet propaganda machine. Speaking in unaccented English between broadcasts of popular American music, Moscow Molly delivered messages designed to demoralize American, British, and Canadian soldiers. She would sometimes disconcert soldiers on lonely and remote bases by directing messages specifically at them, using personal information reportedly obtained by the Soviet intelligence apparatus. Several women likely played the role of Moscow Molly, but their identities have never come to light.

By January 24, just a day after the event, Moscow Molly was broadcasting over Radio Moscow that the United States hadn’t just inadvertently dropped a bomb on Goldsboro, but that it had gone off, claiming that locals were “incensed.” Soviet propagandists did not stop there, reportedly using ham radio operators to beam the broadcasts into the United States as well.

Their efforts attracted little notice in the United States. The Goldsboro Kiwanis Club drafted an official rebuttal statement to be read over the U.S.-backed broadcaster Radio Free Europe, stating that “The people of Goldsboro are stronger than ever in their belief that the Air Force is a good friend and neighbor.” This statement may have been more than mere propaganda, as hundreds of people attended the funerals of the deceased airmen, demonstrating how the community rallied in the aftermath of the event.

Nuclear Secrets Revealed

The story of rumors, propaganda, and community spirit stood still for decades as the United States continually denied that there had ever been a nuclear close call on US soil. Journalist Eric Schlosser overturned that story while researching his 2013 book Command and Control. One of his Freedom of Information Act requests turned up a document with the rather lengthy title Goldsboro Revisited or How I Learned to Mistrust the H-Bomb or To Set the Record Straight. The title’s parody reference to the film Dr. Strangelove perhaps makes its content even more eerie and surreal.

Sandia Laboratories nuclear weapons safety supervisor Parker F. Jones wrote the report in 1969. In it, he revealed that one of the bombs—the weapon that separated from the aircraft and descended by parachute before becoming entangled in a tree—had come disturbingly close to detonating. The weapon incorporated multiple safety mechanisms intended to prevent an unintended nuclear detonation. When investigators examined it, they found that several steps in its arming sequence had occurred, leaving one crucial low-voltage switch preventing the sequence from proceeding further.

Each Mark 39 carried a yield of several megatons, making the weapons vastly more powerful than the atomic bombs dropped on Japan at the end of World War II. Had one successfully detonated, the immediate destruction would have been catastrophic, while radioactive fallout could potentially have affected areas far beyond Goldsboro.

History often balances on the head of a pin, and this remarkable close call is just one of many such occurrences in the history of nuclear weapons.

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.

Bat DNA may hold clues to a long and healthy life, according to an international team of researchers.

These small creatures grace the night skies with extremely long lifespans and low cancer rates—traits that may ultimately benefit humanity if scientists can figure out how bats achieve them. Now, in a recent paper published in Nature, scientists from the University of Vermont and Penn State University led an international team investigating bats’ immune systems.

The paper’s crucial discovery was that bat DNA reveals the creatures encode genomic changes to handle exposure to environmental pathogens.

The Miraculous Bat

“Pathogen adaptation, longevity, and cancer resistance—they are fundamentally linked,” explained co-lead author Elise Lauterbur, an assistant professor of evolutionary biology at the University of Vermont. “Many of the genes that have adapted to viruses in bats are genes that are also involved in longevity and cancer resistance.”

Bats make an ideal study subject as they are only second to rodents in diversity, allowing scientists to study a wide variety of features in a single order.

“If you look at two bats, the same size, one lives 3 years the other lives 30 years and they are very closely related, like humans and Neanderthals, you can essentially find a very small number of genetic changes that leads to a very big change in their lifespan,” said co-lead author Juan Manuel “Manny” Vazquez, an assistant professor at Penn State University. “And that is kind of the Holy Grail for evolutionary medicine.”

The work focused on Myotis, one of the largest bat genera, whose members are found across much of the globe outside Antarctica. Eight Myotis species came under the microscope, with the team experimenting on cultured cells and analyzing their genomes. Among the species sampled were little brown bats (Myotis lucifugus), known both for their long lifespans, even among bats, and their susceptibility to the deadly white-nose syndrome, a fungal disease.

Even the researchers’ sample-collection methods were novel. They developed a technique akin to ear-piercing to collect small tissue samples from bat wings, which were then used to establish cell cultures. The team says this both spared the animals’ lives and produced more scientifically useful samples.

Bat Evolution

In their detailed examination, the researchers identified evidence of past events in which Myotis bats encountered pathogens and how adaptations to those viruses were selected for during their evolution.

Their work identified specific genomic changes, including the duplication or deletion of genes, associated with adaptation to environmental pathogens. This illuminated important differences in bats’ responses to DNA and RNA viruses compared with humans and other primates, potentially contributing to bats’ long, healthy lifespans.

Comparatively, human evolution shows stronger selection involving proteins that interact with RNA viruses like influenza, while bats show stronger selection involving proteins that interact with DNA viruses such as herpesviruses. These differences may help explain the distinct ways bats and primates have adapted to viral threats.

Cancer Resistance

The team also identified genetic mechanisms that could help explain bats’ resistance to cancer and other age-related diseases. In some cases, duplicated genes can diversify their functions, allowing different copies to perform distinct roles. According to the researchers, this may provide immune advantages that help bats combat multiple viruses while also contributing to pathways associated with longevity.

Another important finding was that while most mammals contain one copy of the immune-related gene PRKN, some bat species contain two or even three copies, suggesting that additional copies may offer evolutionary advantages. The team says this could provide important insights for future cancer research, given bats’ unusual ability to repair or eliminate damaged cells.

The research doesn’t point to immediate treatments for humans, but it does provide starting points for reconsidering human illness in the context of bat immunology and evolution.

“Everything is connected,” Vazquez concluded. “Everything uses the same shared set of biology. … We don’t have to treat all of these different problems as silos. We can now start focusing on systems like bats to understand how we can solve multiple human age-related diseases.”

The paper, “Insights into Longevity and Virus-Driven Adaptation from Myotis Bat Genomes,” appeared in Nature on August 26, 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.