One of nature’s most mysterious predators isn’t a mammal stalking remote forests or jungles, nor any large, finned creature lurking in the ocean depths: it is a bizarre little plant that grows only in certain wetland areas along the East Coast of the United States.

With the distinctive hinged leaves that it uses to capture insects, the Venus flytrap is one of nature’s most curious offerings. The small bog-dwelling plant owes its success to the way it can generate an inviting aroma with the nectar it produces, which lures insects. Then, with the help of tiny follicles that act as triggers, the insects become trapped within the flytrap’s leaves as they close like jaws around its prey.

Scientists have long been perplexed by exactly how these plants can react quickly enough to capture even some of the fastest flying insects. Even Charles Darwin seemed baffled by these curious examples of carnivorous flora, describing them as “a plant [that] should secrete, when properly excited, a fluid containing an acid and ferment, closely analogous to the digestive fluid of an animal.”

While the exact mechanism that allows the mysterious Venus flytrap to carry out its distinctive method of feeding has long remained unknown, new research is finally shedding light on the mystery.

The Venus Flytrap’s Secret is Finally Revealed

According to recent experiments detailed in a new study, when the hair-trigger mechanism is activated on these plants, cells on the jaw-like leaves soften, which initiates the closing movement within fractions of a second, trapping any insects unlucky enough to have landed searching for nectar.

Dr Yoël Forterre, a physicist at the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) and Aix-Marseille University, says that this movement had been so mysterious to Darwin that “he was convinced that the plant had a muscle inside, but plants do not have muscles and they do not have nerves.”

“For more than a century there have been many hypotheses,” Forterre, senior author of the recent study, said. “It’s very surprising that plant cell walls can tune their mechanical properties so fast.”

The Challenge of Measurement

One of the primary issues with resolving the plant’s curious mechanism involved overcoming challenges associated with measuring such a remarkably fast system of movement, let alone one in a plant, which possesses none of the usual mechanisms nature relies on for such activities.

Equally perplexing is that the Venus flytrap seemingly recognizes when an accidental trigger has been initiated, rather than a successful capture of an insect.

“If you close it accidentally with a drop of water, it will close and then reopen the next day,” Forterre says. “If it catches an insect, it has to digest it and dissolve the skeleton, which will take several weeks.”

In experiments Forterre and his colleagues performed, dental glue was used to secure the plant’s leaves, which allowed for the normal trigger mechanisms to be engaged, but left the plant’s leaves open throughout the process.

Past research had already shown that electrical signals had been detected coinciding with the manipulation of the trigger hairs present on the plant’s leaves, in which this sudden surge of electricity “activates” the plant’s closing mechanism within a fraction of a second.

Solving the Flytrap’s Mystery

Applying a new approach, Forterre and colleagues used the metallic tip of a nanoindenter, devices used to make very small mechanical measurements. Applying the device to the outer leaves revealed that its normal stiffness appeared to soften significantly once the hair mechanisms were triggered.

The reason this occurs, according to Forterre, is that the cells themselves temporarily become more flexible. Past theories suggested that the movement was initiated by the movement of water contained within the leaf.

The newly-identified mechanism reveals a process very similar to the function of a plunger, which, if inverted, will flip back to its normal position when pressure is applied.

Forterre says he is unaware of any similar plant in nature that displays such unusual mechanical properties, which he says allows the Venus flytrap to initiate a “very rapid change of mechanical properties of the cells.”

“I’ve been obsessed by this for 20 years,” Forterre recently told The Guardian, noting that “as a physicist, I thought we should understand the motor, the forces.”

Now, thanks to his team’s findings, one of the plant kingdom’s strangest inhabitants has finally revealed its secrets.

The team’s new study, “Fast cell wall softening causes Venus flytrap closure,” appeared in Science on June 11, 2026.

Micah Hanks is the Editor-in-Chief and Co-Founder of The Debrief. A longtime reporter on science, defense, and technology with a focus on space and astronomy, he can be reached at micah@thedebrief.org. Follow him on X @MicahHanks, and at micahhanks.com.

Ancient mycorrhizal fungal networks, consisting of a billion astronomical units’ worth of roots, have finally been mapped by scientists, providing insight into their connections, which are essential to climate regulation and plant sustenance.

Mycorrhizal fungi grow in an arbuscular formation, meaning they take on a branching tree-like structure of tubular cells called hyphae, which pull carbon from the atmosphere to aid in climate regulation.

The international team presented their work in a recent paper published in Science, which estimates the distribution and mass of these enormous fungal networks and provides an interactive visualization tool that offers crucial insight into threats to these systems, which are essential to Earth’s health.

Mapping Fungal Networks

The new research brings both encouraging and concerning findings, highlighting regions where fungal networks remain robust while also identifying areas under increasing threat.

Although previous studies have attempted to map the diversity of these fungi across the globe, this is the first effort to predict and visualize their density and biomass on a planetary scale. According to the team’s estimates, the network extends for approximately 110 quadrillion kilometers, with roughly 40% located beneath grasslands.

Using more than 16,000 soil cores collected worldwide, researchers assembled a massive fungal dataset. They then employed machine-learning models that combined data from multiple biomes to predict the density of arbuscular mycorrhizal fungal networks in unsampled regions. Robotic imaging of more than 300,000 living, laboratory-grown hyphae allowed the team to calibrate and validate their models.

“It is hard to overstate the importance and enormity of these fungi,” said lead author Dr. Justin Stewart, with the Society for the Protection of Underground Networks (SPUN). “There could be up to 10 meters (32 feet) of mycorrhizal network in just a teaspoon of soil.”

Earth’s Circulatory System

Because it transports carbon, water, and nutrients underground, scientists have likened the network to our planet’s circulatory system, with a flow rate of up to 120 micrometers per second. About 70% of Earth’s plant species thrive on a symbiotic relationship with the arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi network.  The network can provide over 80% of a plant’s phosphorus and increase the root foraging area 100-fold. 

The network subsists on carbon waste produced by plants, while providing them with water and nutrients in return. By pulling in roughly 4 billion tons of CO2 into the ground every year, mycorrhizal fungi mitigate an amount corresponding to roughly 11% of human emissions.

Unfortunately, grasslands, where the network thrives most, are among the least protected environments on Earth and are being rapidly converted to farmland. According to the study team, cropland has only about half the lower network density of regular land, which the researchers worry may negatively affect how soil stores carbon, cycles nutrients, and resists stress.

Continuing Fungal Network Research

“It is important to remember that these maps are living documents. This is a first attempt at building a foundational model of Earth’s fungal networks infrastructure, but it is not complete,” Stewart recently told The Debrief. “There are other types of mycorrhizal fungi that still need to be mapped in more detail, and other fungal structures, such as spores, that are also critical to understanding how these organisms persist, move, and respond to environmental change. Likewise, we need more data in regions that have been poorly sampled.”

The team says the study represents a major advance for climate science, a field in which fungi have often been overlooked in discussions about conservation and resilience. Researchers hope the findings will encourage a more comprehensive understanding of the role fungi play in maintaining healthy ecosystems.

“A major goal now is to make these kinds of data useful for decision makers. Fungi are still rarely included explicitly in climate, biodiversity, and land-use agendas, even though they are central to how ecosystems move carbon and nutrients,” Stewart adds. “We want to help ‘course-correct’ by building a clearer picture of the underground systems that support life aboveground.”

The paper, “Global Density and Biomass of Arbuscular Mycorrhizal Fungal Networks,” appeared in Science on June 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.

Scientists from Goethe University, Frankfurt, studying alternatives to black holes have suggested a mathematically viable formation mechanism for one proposed alternative called a ‘Gravastar.’

Although the team behind the newly proposed gravastar formation mechanism conceded that black holes still represent the simplest and most natural solution to gravitational collapse, they also suggest that the physics behind the alternative, which doesn’t require a single point where spacetime curves infinitely, called a “singularity,” can make them “easier to accept” than black holes.

If correct, and some or all black holes are, in fact, gravastars that mimic their expected properties, the work would establish a valid formation mechanism that could rewrite decades of accepted science and open a new field of research dedicated to understanding this previously misunderstood phenomenon.

Meet Gravastar: The Black Hole Mimicker without a Singularity

According to standard cosmology theories, black holes form when extremely massive stars stop generating energy, allowing the force of gravity to take over and collapse the remaining matter into a single point, or singularity. Unfortunately, the research team behind the new study notes that “the laws of physics break down” within the singularity, making the formation of the resulting black hole a difficult phenomenon to predict.

“How can spacetime be curved infinitely at that point, the singularity?” asks the team’s statement announcing the new approach. They also note that no information escapes a black hole, including light, making studying its inner workings effectively impossible, and opening up the possibility that “black holes are in fact entirely different objects.”

Some options have been proposed, including ‘horizonless’ black hole mimickers. The team notes that these proposed options are “mathematically consistent alternatives” that also address the physics challenges posed by traditional black holes. 

Still, how these alternative objects form has remained largely unclear. The research team said this lack of a formation mechanism constitutes “a significant open problem” since understanding how they form is the “first step” to determining if they truly exist.

New Model Creates a ‘Big Bang’ Inside a ‘Mini-Universe’

In the new formation model, theoretical physicists Daniel Jampolski and Theoretical Astrophysics Professor Luciano Rezzolla from Goethe University showed that the collapse of a dying star may not go far enough that it reaches the point of no return, where “the collapse to a black hole is inevitable.”

Instead, the collapse slows down near a point scientists call the Schwarzschild radius, then stops. The result is what the team termed a “miniature universe” within the collapsing matter, which they compared to the dynamics of the Big Bang, which most theorists agree formed the entire universe.

Since the universe’s expansion was driven by dark energy, the new model proposes that the dark energy within the mini-universe establishes an “equilibrium” with the counteracting force of gravity, therefore halting the collapse of the star “before a black hole can form.”

“The Big Bang of the emerging universe can unfold once the star has already collapsed almost to the point of becoming a black hole,” explained Jampolski, who discovered the black hole alternative gravastar solution in his master’s thesis while under the supervision of Professor Rezzolla.

Maintaining an Unbiased Approach Toward “What We Do Not Know”

When discussing the impact of their proposed black hole alternative formation model, Jampolski said that from a mathematical and physics standpoint, it is “easier to imagine that the Big Bang occurs only at a very late stage, when matter has already been compressed to an extreme degree, thereby giving rise to new effects.” The team also notes that the unresolved behavior of matter in this environment “leaves room for new physics.”

Although the team’s model offers a mathematically sound formation for an alternative to black holes, Rezzolla notes that the search for gravastars or other alternatives “should not suggest a skepticism towards black holes,” which, he adds, “still represent the most natural and simplest solution to the fate of gravitational collapse.”

Instead, the Goethe professor explained, his general role as a scientist and his specific discipline as a theoretical physicist make it essential that he and his colleagues “maintain an unbiased approach towards what we do not know and hence explore both the accepted wisdom and the more exotic interpretations.”

“History teaches us that it is not unusual for the latter to become the former,” the professor added.

The paper “Formation of gravastars” was published in the journal Physical Review D.

Christopher Plain is a Science Fiction and Fantasy novelist and Head Science Writer at The Debrief. Follow and connect with him on X, learn about his books at plainfiction.com, or email him directly at christopher@thedebrief.org.

In 2021, scientists detected a cosmic ray entering Earth’s atmosphere with as much kinetic energy as a fast-moving tennis ball, all contained in a single subatomic particle. Named the “Amaterasu particle” after the Japanese sun goddess, the event left researchers questioning its origin because its arrival direction pointed to a region of space with no known source capable of producing such energy.

Researchers at Penn State now suggest that the puzzle may stem more from assumptions about the particle’s composition rather than its missing source.

A recent study in Physical Review Letters suggests that the Amaterasu particle, along with other extremely energetic cosmic rays, may actually be atomic nuclei heavier than iron. If correct, the idea could change how researchers search for the sources of cosmic rays.

A Particle of Unknown Origins

Ultrahigh-energy cosmic rays are some of the rarest and most violent phenomena in nature. These particles slam into Earth’s atmosphere with more than 100 exa-electron volts of energy, which is about 10 million times more than what the Large Hadron Collider can produce. The Amaterasu particle, found by the Telescope Array in Utah in May 2021 and reported in Science in 2023, had about 244 exa-electron volts of energy. This makes it one of the most energetic natural events ever recorded.

The mystery extended not only to the particle’s energy, but also to its origin. It came from the direction of the Local Void, which is an almost empty area of space next to the Milky Way, where there is no known source that could create such a powerful particle.

“The origins and acceleration mechanisms of ultrahigh-energy cosmic rays have been among the biggest mysteries in the field for more than 60 years, since the first example was reported,” said Kohta Murase, professor of physics and astronomy at Penn State’s Eberly College of Science and the study’s lead researcher.

The Heavy Nucleus Hypothesis

The Penn State team ran computational simulations to study how particles of different masses travel through intergalactic space. They found that atomic nuclei heavier than iron, known as ultraheavy nuclei, lose energy much more slowly than protons or lighter nuclei as they move through the radiation fields of deep space.

Most research on cosmic rays has assumed that the most extreme events involve protons, which are the simplest and lightest atomic nuclei. Ultraheavy nuclei lose energy much more slowly during their journey, allowing them to reach Earth carrying far more energy than lighter particles traveling similar distances. That makes them strong candidates for the most powerful cosmic ray events we’ve seen, including the Amaterasu particle.

“When we detect individual cosmic-ray particles such as the Amaterasu particle here on Earth, we can often use their energies, arrival directions and expected magnetic deflections to infer their possible cosmic sources,” Murase said.

New Theoretical Limits

The hypothesis that these particles are ultraheavy nuclei also changes the range of possible sources. If the particles are indeed heavier nuclei rather than protons, their production would require some of the most extreme environments in the universe. The researchers identify collapsars, which are massive stars collapsing directly into black holes, and binary neutron-star mergers as likely candidates. Both phenomena are also associated with gamma-ray bursts, which are among the most energetic explosions known to science.

The team’s calculations set new theoretical limits on how much ultraheavy nuclei may contribute to the overall population of ultrahigh-energy cosmic rays. Murase also noted that these sources could help explain a possible asymmetry in the ultrahigh-energy cosmic-ray spectrum between the northern and southern hemispheres.

“The most promising sites for producing and accelerating such ultraheavy nuclei are massive star deaths involving explosive collapse into black holes or strongly magnetized neutron stars, as well as binary neutron-star mergers known to be powerful gravitational-wave emitters,” Murase said.

Testing the Idea

The researchers stress that they are not saying all ultrahigh-energy cosmic rays are ultraheavy nuclei, but some of the most extreme ones might be. This could change what scientists look for in future studies. New observatories and upgrades, like AugerPrime in Argentina and the planned Global Cosmic Ray Observatory, could test these ideas. If ultraheavy nuclei are important, future observations should find evidence that protons alone cannot explain.

More than six decades after scientists first detected ultrahigh-energy cosmic rays, researchers may finally have a new clue about what the most extreme particles in the universe are made of.

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

Einstein’s equations have withstood every experimental test for more than a century. However, according to one philosopher, they have not withstood careful scrutiny of the language used to describe them.

Daryl Janzen, an astronomer and instructor at the University of Saskatchewan, recently published a philosophical challenge in The Conversation. Janzen’s critique does not question the mathematics but instead focuses on how physicists and philosophers describe the nature of space-time itself. He argues that over the past century, the language used to describe space-time has gradually merged two separate concepts into one.

Existence vs. Occurrence

The main focus of this argument is the idea of the “block universe.” In this view, also known as eternalism, space-time is a fixed, four-dimensional structure. All past, present, and future events are equally real within this block, according to this interpretation. Time does not flow, and there is no single present moment. The block contains everything that has ever occurred.

Janzen does not object to the geometry itself. His concern lies with the way the word “exists” is used in this context.

Janzen distinguishes between existence and occurrence. Objects exist because they endure through time. Events occur at a specific place and moment, and then they are over. For example, an elephant standing in a room exists. A cross-sectional snapshot of that elephant, representing a single instant removed from its timeline and frozen in place, does not exist in the same way; it only occurs.

In the block universe model, space-time holds every moment of the elephant’s existence as a four-dimensional world line. This world line shows the animal’s full path through space and time. A single cross-section, or one slice of that path, is not the elephant itself; it is only a record of what the elephant was doing at a certain moment. Janzen says the block is better understood as a representational framework rather than a physical object in the usual sense.

A Problem of When

This confusion leads to a fundamental problem. The entire block universe is said to exist, but it is unclear when it exists. A timeless structure that never unfolds cannot endure as the elephant endures from moment to moment. Meanwhile, if the whole block occurs at once, like a single flash, there is no internal experience of time that could be considered an illusion. 

To keep the sense of time passing in a block universe, the four-dimensional structure would need to endure in some sense. This would mean adding a fifth dimension, a second time axis outside the block, for the block itself to exist within; however, this extra axis is not part of Einstein’s original theory.

Janzen uses a simpler analogy. He compares the situation to describing a song that exists all at once, complete but unperformed. A song only becomes a song when it unfolds over time.

Austrian-British philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein warned that philosophical problems arise when “language goes on holiday.” Janzen argues that physics has been in this situation for decades, reusing words such as “timeless,” “exist,” and “become” in technical senses without considering their everyday connotations.

Implications for Physics and Philosophy

One of the biggest unsolved problems in physics is how to bring together general relativity, which explains gravity and the large-scale universe, with quantum mechanics, which describes matter at the smallest scales. These two frameworks do not fit together, and every real attempt to unify them demands a clear definition of what space-time actually is.

If the language physicists use to describe space-time has been internally inconsistent for more than a century, Janzen suggests the resulting confusion may extend beyond philosophy. Clarifying what physicists mean when they talk about space-time could influence how researchers think about attempts to reconcile general relativity and quantum mechanics.

Janzen does not propose a replacement for the current framework but instead suggests that the fundamental question is not how space-time curves, but how to properly define them in the first place.

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

A disc-like object observed producing “beams” while it hovered above an airport in Zimbabwe in 2008, an object resembling a flying “potato” over the Cheyenne Mountains in 2022, and alleged “orbs” observed by U.S. personnel are all among the sightings included in the Pentagon’s latest release of files related to UAP encounters.

The documents, which appeared on the Department of War’s website on Friday, are just the latest in a series of rolling releases by the Pentagon under the Trump Administration.

“As the unprecedented levels of interest in both this topic and the Trump administration’s historic transparency effort continue, WAR.GOV/UFO has received over 1.7 billion hits worldwide since the site’s launch on May 8, 2026,” read a statement provided by Assistant to the Secretary of War for Public Affairs and Chief Pentagon Spokesman Sean Parnell that accompanied Friday’s release.

“The Department of War and our agency partners are actively working on the next release of UAP files,” Parnell added.

However, as more videos and documents continue to surface, a fundamental question arises: what, if anything, do they reveal about UAP, and how the United States intelligence community collects and processes information about these objects, whatever their origins may be?

What the Latest PURSUE Release Reveals

Within the latest batch of files from what the Pentagon characterizes as the Presidential Unsealing and Reporting System for UAP Encounters (PURSUE), a previously unreleased file from the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) describes an unusual observation of an object that reportedly hovered above the Harare International Airport in Zimbabwe in 2008.

“Individuals debated if the sighting was an advanced reconnaissance device of a foreign government or of extraterrestrial origins,” a short description provided with the document states. Although no video or other supplemental data is provided, the written account that the document contains, which features partial redactions, states that observers described a “disc-like” object possessing a hollow center and “a series of rotating lights on the underside of the airframe.” As the lighting shifted colors, the object reportedly ascended quickly and was soon out of sight.

“Regardless of the origins,” the document states, the incident reportedly “resulted in the decision to place the Zimbabwe [redacted] on high alert.”

Another series of documents describes an observation of an object shaped like a “potato” that was seen near Colorado Springs in 2024.

Witnesses at the time described seeing “distinct edges” on the object, which “appeared to look painted in a creamy/whitish opalescent color.”

“It was somewhat translucent with a slight shimmer,” the report states. “The object was made up of what can best be described as articulating fish scales or panels that were non-symmetrical, non-overlapping, and irregular shaped. The object itself was perfectly still but each panel on the object shifted in slow waves starting at different points of origin but at the same time.”

According to an assessment of the sighting by the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office, which currently leads the Pentagon’s investigations into UAP, “Analysis possibly indicates that the positioning on the sun in relation to Cheyenne Mountain would allow for backscattering of sunlight reflecting off snow-covered ground.”

“This reflection could illuminate low-level clouds in the vicinity,” according to the assessment, which was produced by one of AARO’s intelligence community (IC) partners, adding that such conditions “might account for the visibility of the object followed by its sudden disappearance.”

The report concedes that the analyst had “low confidence in this assessment” based on limited information made available about witnesses at the time, such as their individual field of view, as well as the level of cloud cover over the area at the time.

Another pair of documents describes what sounds like a very intriguing observation of an “intense bright light” seen hovering below the tree line near the observer’s backyard. Emerging from their vehicle, the witness observed a “strange light” that they estimated to be approximately one meter in diameter. The object was described as a “brilliant and beautiful” reddish color the observer had never seen before, adding that “inside the red sphere, at the center, there appeared to be what [redacted] described as a ‘white plasma sun’ about the size of a basketball.”

In this instance, the written accounts were not alone: a supplemental video indeed shows a pair of objects matching the description provided, which look suspiciously like candle balloons, also known as “sky lanterns,” drifting along with the breeze. Additionally, the footage bears a resemblance to a video released by an aviation safety advocacy group last year (and in fact, it may be the same video), which was also quickly assessed to have been sky lanterns, rather than anomalous UAP “orbs.”

In short, the latest Pentagon releases—as with most other recent releases of government data related to UAP—feature some interesting stories, though the majority of the “new” data remains underwhelming, at least at first glance.

Hopeful—but Skeptical—Ufologists

In a posting on his X account, prominent skeptic Mick West noted that in advance of the Pentagon’s second PURSUE release, “ufologists (myself included) were hopeful we’d get some amazing evidence.”

“All 46 videos have been released,” West wrote. “None of them are amazing. Maybe it’s time to consider that this might be the best they have.”

Whether or not the videos we’ve now seen are indeed among the best examples of UAP in the Pentagon’s holdings, West isn’t wrong to point out the obvious: the current examples the Pentagon has provided fail to establish that there is anything truly extraordinary about the objects these videos convey.

West places himself in the commendable position of being among the hopeful “ufologists” that he says are eager to see better data on these phenomena. I can affirm that this author is among those ranks as well, having followed the subject for decades; beyond that, and reporting on the subject for The Debrief, I have also managed an independent UAP sightings reporting website for the last two years, as a self-funded citizen science effort to collect data on possible UAP observations and make it freely available to the public. Unlike a few similar sites and apps that crowd-source data on possible UAP sightings, I also work to assess the data and resolve cases whenever enough information has been provided to make that feasible.

Like West would probably also tell you, I can confirm that the majority of UAP sightings have prosaic explanations, which can often be determined using resources that include weather data, aviation tracking sites, astronomical software, rocket launch data, and other online resources that are generally free to the public. After attempting to resolve UAP sighting reports, there is, however, a residuum of unresolved cases that remain intriguing.

Assessing UAP videos in this way, in order to determine whether they document real anomalous phenomena or simply misidentifications of known objects, often carries a very negative stigma, partially because it has an equally negative term attached to it: “debunking.” The negative association here is unfortunate, since the careful study and interpretation of purported UAP imagery and, when warranted by evidence, its classification as either misidentified known phenomena or genuine unresolved cases, is one of the most beneficial ways we can work toward advancing our understanding of the UAP issue.

Equally unfortunate is the fact that, all too often, what we get instead when it comes to UAP releases is just the opposite: imagery and other data (sometimes including official U.S. government materials released through unauthorized channels) that have undergone virtually no assessment, and which feature scant accompanying details required to help contextualize the sightings.

What we are left with are usually blurry videos and images of objects that end up seeing wide circulation, often with the help of the most ardent promoters of UAP (many of whom also happen to be equally skilled at self-promotion). Beyond making a poor case for the legitimate study of UAP, such instances invite criticism—although not so much from the hopeful, skeptically-minded “ufologists” genuinely interested in viewing quality UAP data. Rather, the most frequent attacks originate from ideological, self-branded “skeptics” whose real focus appears to be aimed at superficially undermining the topic and its proponents using rhetoric heavily dipped in ad hominem, all as a means of driving engagement through their social media accounts.

Who can really blame them? Such high-traffic social media engagement can reportedly be quite profitable these days, and let’s face it: few among the most active voices in the online UAP fracas these days appear to be above engaging in a bit of good old-fashioned grifting—including the ones who often complain the loudest when they see others doing it.

Fundamentally, though, none of this helps to advance our knowledge about UAP. Answers to questions about what these objects are, as well as what they aren’t, and whether any good evidence exists for truly “anomalous” behaviors often associated with these objects by those who witness them, remain void from such contentious prattling—just as it apparently remains absent from the vast majority of the new records released by the Pentagon.

However, that isn’t to say there aren’t at least a few intriguing data points that have emerged from the recent releases.

An Intriguing UAP Case from the Second PURSUE Release

In the second batch of videos released by the Department of War, one potentially intriguing example of an unidentified flying object seems to have gone mostly overlooked.

The case involves imagery from the holdings of the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office that was originally captured on April 12, 2021. Labeled “Spherical UAP [CALLSIGN] 2021/04/12 vid 0,” the footage, according to details provided at the time of its release, “is likely derived from a full-motion video camera and an infrared sensor aboard a U.S. military platform operating within the United States Central Command area of responsibility in 2021. A user uploaded this video to a classified network in June 2024.”

According to a short description provided by the Department of War, “An area of contrast enters the sensor field-of-view from the upper right corner of the frame, exiting in the bottom right corner of the screen. The sensor pans to track the area of contrast, centering it within the sensor field-of-view.”

“The sensor changes modes as the area of contrast becomes indistinct against the background,” the summary concludes.

However, viewing the footage reveals something slightly more intriguing than this description alone conveys. The footage appears to show a small, light-colored object moving above a rugged desert terrain, presumably somewhere in the Middle East. As the object is being filmed using the electro-optical system on board a United States military drone, at one point, the object can be seen as it begins to descend in altitude, an elevation change made apparent by the shadow the object casts against the terrain below it (as can be seen in the still frame from the footage featured below). At this point, the object engages in a sudden change in direction and appears to enter a shadowed area of the landscape, at which time its brightness (seemingly due to reflectivity of its surface) is significantly diminished by the surrounding shadow, and the object becomes indiscernible.

The most intriguing aspect of this behavior is the object’s apparent movement into what we might interpret as a position of concealment. In doing so, the object not only appears to “hide,” but it also demonstrates an obvious change in direction that is suggestive of controlled motion. This is significant for a few reasons: one is that in many purported UAP videos, a phenomenon known as the parallax effect can (and often does) lead to an optical illusion where a slow-moving or even stationary object can have the appearance of moving. This illusion is caused by differences in relative speed between objects closer to the camera and those further distant, causing any closer objects to appear to be moving faster than those in the background (a good explainer on parallax effect and its relationship to UAP sightings can be read here, made available at the website of the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office).

In the case of the “Spherical UAP” featured in the video from the second PURSUE release, perhaps some degree of motion parallax cannot be ruled out. However, the object’s descent just before changing direction and entering the rugged portion of terrain cast in shadow appears to clearly demonstrate in this case that the object is engaged in movement, which equally appears to convey intelligent control. Finally, an interpretation that the object may be taking a position of concealment, if correct, may indicate that the object and/or its operators had been aware that it was being observed.

Does anything conveyed in this video offer proof of extraterrestrial technology? Absolutely not. Are there any obvious signs of extraordinary capabilities being demonstrated by this object? No, there aren’t. What this video does demonstrate, however, is footage of an object that appears to be engaged in behaviors that clearly show movement beyond the capabilities of most simple balloons, and one that may fit the general description of objects the Pentagon’s All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office has characterized as its general “target” description for UAP it investigates (more on that in a moment).

In the case of the DOW-UAP-PR061, “Spherical UAP [CALLSIGN] 2021/04/12 vid 0” footage, the object not only demonstrates changes in its direction of motion, but also appears to conceal itself. Obviously, a better interpretation than “balloon” in this instance might be some kind of unmanned aerial system, although what limited information the footage conveys is simply too indistinct to be able to tell. Altogether, it simply remains “unidentified” in the purest sense: some kind of object engaging in what appears to be controlled flight, while not exhibiting any otherwise extraordinary capabilities.

However, all of this raises another important question about UAP reports: why do we always have to assume that an object must display “otherworldly” or otherwise extraordinary capabilities for it to qualify as a “genuine” UAP?

The Problem of Conditioning

Another intriguing phenomenon related to the recent release of UAP information by the Pentagon involves the similarity in responses to these releases from both UAP advocates and UAP skeptics.

Some proponents of genuine anomalous UAP have expressed frustration over the Department of War’s release of several dozens of videos, all of which fail to reveal any “classic” UFO shapes like flying saucers or giant black triangles, nor any confirmation of extraterrestrial technologies detailed in the troves of formerly classified documents included with the releases.

Meanwhile, skeptics essentially argue the same thing: so far, these videos show nothing particularly remarkable, and clearly fail to prove that extraterrestrials have visited Earth.

In short, the fundamental premise of most “believers” and “skeptics” appears to be the same: “UAPs either must represent evidence of extraterrestrials, or else they are unimportant.”

This premise fails to acknowledge several important issues, such as 1) that many ideas about how UAP are supposed to look and behave are based on presumptions about how we expect any technologies produced by extraterrestrials advanced enough to traverse interstellar distances would appear to us, 2) that UAP could still represent a genuine mystery, even if they aren’t evidence of extraterrestrial technologies, and 3) that even if most UAP turned out to be technologies of earthly origin, they could still represent a security concern, and hence warrant U.S. government investigation.

Clearly, it should be acknowledged that there is also witness testimony—some of it quite compelling—that describes unusual characteristics associated with UAP, such as extreme acceleration, erratic movement, exceptional agility/maneuverability, environmental effects, and other capabilities which could only be characterized as “anomalous.” Such descriptions are also part of what informs many of our expectations about how UAPs are supposed to behave. However, it is important to recognize that just because such eyewitness descriptions exist, it does not necessarily mean that we can—or should—attribute such capabilities to all UAP observations, and thereby use such presumptions as a gauge for their credibility on a case-by-case basis.

How the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office Characterizes UAP

A careful review of resources made available by the Pentagon’s All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) helps to shed further light on the attributes of what it characterizes as UAP.

A page dedicated to education and resources at AARO’s website lists a small collection of studies detailing current state-of-the-art technologies related to spherical drones, novel propulsion systems, and other technologies, which it says represent “advanced propulsion systems that are consistent with UAP observations.” The obvious implication of providing such resources involves the consideration that at least some UAP appear to operate in ways consistent with known earthly technologies, albeit ones that are still in their emergent stages.

AARO also gives us the following definition of UAP, according to an AARO Mission Brief featured at its website: “Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP) are sources of anomalous detections in one or more domains (i.e., airborne, seaborne, spaceborne, and/or transmedium) that are not yet attributable to known actors and that demonstrate behaviors that are not readily understood by sensors or observers.”

The brief goes on to define “anomalous detections” as “phenomena appearing to demonstrate capabilities or material properties exceeding the known state-of-the-art,” adding that UAP “may consist of one or more objects and may persist over an extended period,” are mainly “attributable to domain-awareness gaps, and in at least some cases “may represent advanced capabilities operating in domain awareness gaps.”

The AARO Mission Brief also separates the misidentification of known objects such as balloons and drones, as well as developmental or experimental platforms, from “genuine” UAP, which it clearly defines as AARO’s designated mission area.

According to past information produced by AARO under the tenure of its inaugural director, Dr. Sean Kirkpatrick, typically reported UAP characteristics include appearances of generally round objects roughly 1-4 meters in size, possessing white, silver, or translucent coloration. Performance altitudes, on average, fall within 10,000 to 30,000 feet, and velocities of the objects range from hovering in a stationary position to movement at speeds of up to Mach 2 (1534.54 miles per hour).

Despite such capabilities, no kind of thermal exhaust has been associated with these objects, and their propulsion systems remain unknown. Additional signatures associated with such genuinely anomalous UAP, according to AARO, include “intermittent, X-Band (8-12 GHz)” radar, as well as radio frequency emissions in the 1-3 GHz and 8-12 GHZ ranges. While no thermal exhaust evidencing propulsion is evident, intermittent shortwave infrared and medium-wave infrared thermal signatures are occasionally detectable.

“That’s what we’re looking for and trying to understand what that is,” Kirkpatrick told U.S. Senators during an April 2023 hearing that first revealed the AARO technical data described above.

Given the specificity of such technical information (all of which, as cited above, relates to AARO materials produced in 2023 during its early period in operation), one must wonder how such details could be derived from any of the videos or other materials the Department of War has released under the recent PURSUE initiative.

The obvious implication is that the data described above must have other, better-quality sources, which have not yet been released by AARO or the Department of War.

What This All Means, for Now

Of course, AARO also maintains that it has found no evidence of extraterrestrial technologies in its UAP investigations. All this taken together, a few things can be concluded based on the totality of AARO’s findings since its investigations began: 1) some objects appear to be genuinely anomalous, which AARO calls UAP, 2) AARO takes its investigations of these objects seriously, 3) studies involving breakthrough or disruptive technologies available at its website imply that AARO may suspect some UAP of being related to such developments, and are therefore not currently misidentifications of well-known objects or technologies, but possible “breakthrough” technologies whose origins remain unattributed, and 4) specific details about appearance and operational characteristics of AARO’s UAP “target package” strongly suggest the existence of higher quality UAP data that likely remains classified.

If it ends up being true that additional, higher-quality UAP data exists in U.S. government holdings—data from which AARO’s own technical attributes for genuinely “anomalous” UAP are derived—it therefore stands to reason that the recent batches of imagery fall significantly short of being the “best data” that has been obtained about these objects. Still, some of the videos, such as DOW-UAP-PR061 (described earlier in this article), nonetheless appear to match the so-called “target package” for genuine UAP first characterized by Kirkpatrick in 2023, even if they aren’t the most astonishing UAP videos in existence. Again, we should consider the conditioning outlined earlier, which has helped to encourage the public’s never-ending expectation for “extraordinary” revelations, most of which end up falling flat once they do finally come to light.

The bigger questions, for now, are whether such examples of higher-quality UAP data do indeed exist, and if so, whether they will be made public in any future releases.

“We are collecting as much data as possible, following the data where it leads, and sharing our findings whenever possible,” AARO states on its website. “We will not rush to conclusions in our analysis. In many cases, observed phenomena are classified as ‘unidentified’ simply because sensors were not able to collect enough information to make a positive attribution.”

Arguably, if there are better quality UAP materials in AARO’s holdings, there are probably very reasonable considerations for why that information has not yet been released, which may include uncertainty about whether some data could involve potentially sensitive information about experimental U.S. technologies or those of foreign adversaries, the release of which could have implications that, for now, may warrant secrecy.

In conclusion, although most of the videos in the recent Pentagon UAP releases provide too little data to draw any firm conclusions, arguably, some of the most important considerations are made evident by what the recent releases don’t contain—especially when compared to the information AARO uses as the basis for what it calls “genuine” UAP.

To borrow that overused X-Files quip once again, “the truth is out there.” Whether we’ll be seeing the best data that supports that truth any time soon is another question entirely.

Micah Hanks is the Editor-in-Chief and Co-Founder of The Debrief. A longtime reporter on science, defense, and technology with a focus on space and astronomy, he can be reached at micah@thedebrief.org. Follow him on X @MicahHanks, and at micahhanks.com.

A new ultra-efficient DNA splicing method developed by a Japanese research team using silver nanoparticles offers a dramatic improvement to how scientists stitch genetic blueprints together, with implications for future developments in genetics.

In animal models for drug research, crop breeding, and disease treatment, scientists cut and recombine DNA segments, traditionally relying on “sticky ends,” the overhanging bits left at the ends of the sequences to create a stable join.

Now, researchers at Japan’s Nagoya University and Gifu University have announced a much more precise silver nanoparticle-based solution for DNA cutting and joining in a recent paper published in Nucleic Acids Research, enabling incredible precision.

DNA Splicing Challenges

The sticky ends required in traditional splicing techniques come with significant drawbacks. In these methods, restriction enzymes cut DNA, which is then reattached using T4 DNA ligase. Unfortunately, restriction enzymes lack precision, often producing sticky ends that are not long enough to create an optimal join.

Professor Hiroshi Abe and Assistant Professor Masahito Inagaki at Nagoya University, in collaboration with Professor Natsuhisa Oka at Gifu University, led the effort to improve the efficiency of DNA splicing. The team focused on cutting DNA segments using chemical reactions rather than the restriction enzymes typically employed, drawing inspiration from decades-old research.

Between 1990 and 1992, researchers reported successfully cutting 3′-thiol-modified DNA at specific locations using silver ions.

“Although it had been known for a long time, it was never put to practical use, and we recognized that it could be the key to our goal of creating sticky ends of any length and sequence at any position we choose,” Hiroshi told The Debrief.

Rethinking Old Work

However, this method was impractical because nonspecific binding of silver ions resulted in only a 14% recovery rate.’ The researchers’ breakthrough came from substituting silver nanoparticles for silver ions, aiming to improve DNA recovery by removing them via centrifugation after the reaction was over.

“The turning point was to turn this problem of ‘how to remove the silver’ to our advantage,” Hiroshi explained. “We reasoned that if the silver were in the form of nanoparticles, it could be removed easily by centrifugation after the reaction, greatly improving recovery.”

Another problem quickly arose, as cleaving efficiency required temperatures and durations that were hazardous to the DNA itself. At 70°C, the DNA achieved only 50% efficiency, whereas it took 2 hours at 95°C to reach something approaching 100% efficiency.

Polyethylene glycol (PEG), a water-soluble polymer, provided the solution the researchers required. Coating the silver nanoparticles with PEG increased efficiency at a mere 37°C for two hours, from 36% to 92%. 

“In the end, we optimized the conditions to a practical level and, under ambient temperatures, achieved PEG-modified cleaving efficiency above 91% at 50°C within just one to two hours,” Inagaki said.

A Powerful DNA Editing Breakthrough

The new silver nanoparticle technique improves DNA assembly efficiency by two to five times. Crucially, their work is not theoretical: the team successfully introduced a DNA fragment into live cells, confirming expression of a green fluorescent protein gene.

“We have shown that two DNA fragments can be joined. Now, we need to confirm whether multiple fragments can be joined at the same time—a key step for building genome-scale DNA,” Ingaki said.

The researchers will continue to pursue this new splicing method, both to explore its potential for advanced applications and to consider bringing the technique into routine use.

“To make it a routine, everyday tool, the remaining tasks are to verify reproducibility across a wide range of sequences, to scale up to longer DNA, and to develop standardized, kit-format protocols that anyone can follow,” Hiroshi said. “We see these as engineering and optimization challenges rather than fundamental barriers, and we believe they can be overcome.”

“Our next goal is to extend this technique to longer DNA and, ultimately, to genome-scale DNA assembly,” Hiroshi concluded. “Specifically, we plan to apply it to the construction of mRNA libraries and the synthesis of long-chain DNA encoding therapeutic proteins, while also working on automation and standardization, so that it can grow into a foundational technology actually used in the fields of synthetic biology and nucleic acid medicine.”

The paper, “Silver Nanoparticle Induced Site-Specific Strand Cleavage of Chemically Modified Oligonucleotides for Long-Chain DNA Assembly,” appeared in Nucleic Acids Research on June 10, 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.

As NASA prepares for humanity’s return to the Moon, researchers at Texas A&M University are exploring how the same material could become a key building block for the first permanent settlements beyond Earth.

The Moon’s surface is surprisingly unlike anything we would consider soil on Earth. Instead, it is covered by a fine powder of pulverized rock and jagged glass that slips into every gap, grinds through seals and gaskets, and exists in a vacuum exposed to intense radiation and extreme temperature swings capable of bending steel. Yet researchers at Texas A&M University see opportunity rather than obstacles in this harsh environment.

Scientists refer to this material as lunar regolith, and it is considered one of the greatest challenges to long-term human habitation beyond Earth.

As NASA advances plans for a permanent human presence on the Moon through its Lunar Innovation Park initiative, Texas A&M researchers are developing technologies designed to transform the lunar surface into a foundation for future settlements.

“We are moving past the era of ‘flags and footprints,’” said Dr. Patrick Suermann, professor of construction science and retired U.S. Air Force lieutenant colonel in a statement. “We have to stop thinking like explorers and start thinking like settlers.”

Money as a Hurdle 

Arguably, the greatest challenge facing lunar construction may not be engineering, but cost. Transporting materials from Earth remains extraordinarily expensive, with estimates ranging from roughly $1 million to $1.3 million per kilogram delivered to the Moon. As a result, researchers are increasingly focused on utilizing resources already available on the lunar surface rather than transporting materials from Earth.

“The future depends on building infrastructure from resources already on the moon,” explained Suermann.

“The high cost of shipping to the moon is the million-dollar problem,” Suermann said. “Every time you can cut the mass of a payload, you save a fortune. That’s why the future depends on building infrastructure from resources already on the moon.”

Helping advance that vision is Dr. Robert Ambrose of the Texas A&M Space Institute, located near NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston. The institute has received $200 million in support from the Texas Legislature.

“One of the most exciting features of the 240-acre facility is it’s two-and-a-half acre testing areas: one replicating the surface of the moon, the other Mars,” says Suermann.

These facilities allow researchers to evaluate robotic systems, autonomous vehicles, and construction technologies under conditions similar to those expected during future lunar and Martian missions.

Meanwhile, the university’s Construction Automation, Safety and Education (CASE) Lab is exploring how humans and machines can collaborate in extreme environments. Led by Dr. Gilles Albeaino, the lab focuses on mixed-reality technologies and semi-autonomous robotic systems capable of performing construction tasks on the Moon.

“On the moon, construction operations will depend on semi-autonomous robotic systems,” Suermann said. “The CASE lab is leading research into how humans and machines can work together in environments where humans can’t safely do everything themselves.”

“Every tool matters. Every ounce of material you ship matters,” added Suermann. “So, the question becomes: how do you use the environment itself as your supply chain, and how can you augment machines to become your partner in austere environments?”

Arctic to Afghanistan

Suermann’s experience combines two worlds: military service and construction science. Before joining Texas A&M in 2017, he served in the U.S. Air Force, deploying to remote locations that included Afghanistan, Guam, and Greenland.

Those experiences operating in challenging and isolated environments continue to inform his thinking about future lunar settlements.

“My experiences in serving the U.S. Air Force were formative and transformative,” Suermann said. “It taught me a great deal about construction, and that what can go wrong will go wrong.”

It shows, to me, that lunar regolith isn’t too dissimilar from the terrain we have here on Earth,” Suermann adds. “At the end of the day, construction is construction.”

Should We Develop on the Moon?

The broader question remains whether humanity should be expanding its footprint beyond Earth at all. While plans for lunar settlements continue to advance, critics point out that many environmental, political, and social challenges remain unresolved here at home.

As governments and private companies invest billions into space infrastructure, some argue that humanity must carefully consider how development beyond Earth aligns with priorities on our own planet. Others contend that technologies developed for lunar habitation could ultimately provide benefits back on Earth, helping address challenges ranging from resource management to sustainability.

Chrissy Newton is a PR professional and founder of VOCAB Communications. She hosts the Rebelliously Curious podcast, which can be found on The Debrief’s YouTube Channel. Follow her on X: @ChrissyNewton and at chrissynewton.com.

Archaeologists have discovered an unusual artifact they say could represent the earliest known use of written numbers ever discovered in Mesoamerica.

The curious clay figurine features eleven small dots carved into its surface, appearing in three columns. Although its exact purpose remains unclear, researchers who report the discovery in Latin American Antiquity believe it could be one of the oldest examples of graphic notation that may have been used for rudimentary calculation or some similar purpose, dating to as far back as around 750 B.C.

Significantly, the researchers behind the recent study argue that this earliest known evidence of numerical writing could offer clues to “the relationship between numeration, bodies, and identity in ancient Mesoamerican worldviews.”

The Enigma of the Tab Figurines

The figurine, roughly the size and shape of a small television remote, was unearthed at an ancient Mesoamerican site located along Guatemala’s Pacific coast, known as La Blanca. It is among a group of similar artifacts archaeologists call tab figurines, and hundreds of these mysterious relics are known from past discoveries at the site.

Named for their unusual slab-like appearance, these figurines also bear anthropomorphic qualities, which include depictions of jewelry and other ornamentation, although the tab figurines do not directly resemble human heads beyond the presence of such ornaments.

A Remarkable Discovery at Ancient La Blanca

While similar past discoveries recognized as tab figurines have been made at La Blanca, the presence of dots appearing in columns makes this one very unique and presents a novel possibility: that the impressions on the statuette may not have been purely decorative.

“The ordered dots on the La Blanca tab figurine’s headdress, of course, raise more questions than they answer,” write authors Julia Guernsey, Stephanie M. Strauss, and Michael Love in their recent study. “This is often the case with unique examples such as this, which cannot be better contextualized within a larger grouping of like objects from La Blanca or elsewhere.”

“Although one might be inclined to dismiss the La Blanca figurine as a curiosity or an isolated addendum to the complicated history of first writing in Mesoamerica,” the authors go on to note, “we believe that it merits this thorough discussion.”

Clues to Unraveling a Mesoamerican Mystery

A clue to the artifact’s purpose may arise from the association between tab figurines and the human head, a region of the body that is traditionally associated with individual identity. This is significant, since archaeologists recognize a potential link between numbers and individual identity in the world of ancient Mesoamerica.

Based on existing archaeological knowledge from the region, it is known that experimentation with numbers had already begun around the time the artifact is believed to have been made. One well-characterized numerical system is known as the dot-and-bar system, which, as the name implies, relies on dots and bars to convey figures of one and five units, respectively.

“In the Mixtec and Aztec codices, one easily becomes accustomed to reading even long strings of single dots and quickly approximating their quantity, a visuo-summation process known as subitizing,” the authors write.

“And no matter what form Mesoamerican numerals took, the vigesimal system was rooted in metaphors/mnemonics of the body: specifically, 10 fingers and 10 toes and concepts of personhood anchored to the number 20,” they add.

Also of significance is the K’iche’ word for person, winik, which is the same word used for the number 20, and for a simple reason: it refers to the ten fingers and ten toes of the human body.

Connections to Mesoamerican Personhood Concepts

Although the connections between the unique figurine unearthed at La Blanca and existing knowledge of Mesoamerican number systems are compelling, the researchers caution against interpreting the artifact solely through the lens of later Mesoamerican writing systems. One main reason why is that scholars think there probably wasn’t ever any single method for recording numbers across the region.

Still, the artifact nonetheless joins a growing body of evidence that could point to the fact that the inhabitants of La Blanca were experimenting with symbolic communication, and at a time centuries before fully developed writing systems emerged in the region.

While the exact meaning of the dots on the statuette remains unknown, the researchers behind the study make a compelling case for why the markings may have represented a name, a date, or another personal identifier. If correct, the placement of the dots may hint at an early connection between numeration, identity, and social expression during a period when some of Mesoamerica’s first urban communities were taking shape.

“Yet a question remains as to whether the identity expressed by the La Blanca tab figurine with its 11 dots was human, supernatural, or a combination thereof,” the authors concede, although concluding that their assessment of the artifact strongly points to the known associations between time, numbers, and the concept of personhood as envisioned in the minds of ancient Mesoamericans.

“Early Mesoamerican conceptualizations of time and the nature of being, perhaps, were not so very different from those of Aristotle for whom Paul Ricoeur noted, ‘Being in time [meant] more than existing when time exists. It [meant] ‘being in number.’”

The study, “Numbers and Bodies: Potential Early Numeration on a Middle Preclassic Figurine from La Blanca, Guatemala,” was published in Latin American Antiquity.

Micah Hanks is the Editor-in-Chief and Co-Founder of The Debrief. A longtime reporter on science, defense, and technology with a focus on space and astronomy, he can be reached at micah@thedebrief.org. Follow him on X @MicahHanks, and at micahhanks.com.

The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has revealed a cosmic catastrophe, as winds extinguished a star-forming galaxy in the early universe, offering new insight into earlier strange observations.

Cosmic winds may destroy entire galaxies, according to new JWST research exploring the lingering mystery of why certain parts of the universe are unexpectedly devoid of growth.

The findings were published in a recent paper in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, revealing galactic-scale death in a universe just one billion years old, and potentially answering questions about previous troubling JWST observations.

James Webb Space Telescope Observation

Observations made by the JWST revealed cold gas, an essential star-forming material, blowing out of the CRISTAL-2 galaxy in a massive plume, severely degrading its ability to produce new stars. According to the researchers, it would take less than 50 million years for the galaxy to be completely dead if this activity keeps up, a mere blink in the scheme of a 13.8 billion-year-old universe.

Astronomers consider galaxies to be “dead” if they are no longer capable of producing fresh stars. Traditionally, astronomers expected that it would take billions of years for an old galaxy to slowly run out of fuel and burn out. However, JWST observations have continually captured events in the early universe that were not expected to occur until much later.

One of these was finding a host of dead galaxies in the early universe shortly after it first became operational in 2022. How galaxies could die so close to the beginning of the universe, without sufficient time to burn through their cold gas supplies, has long perplexed scientists.

Explaining Galaxy Death

As researchers began considering various explanations for the phenomenon, they initially settled on dark energy, essentially explaining one unknown with another. Dark energy is a theoretical substance that scientists believe drives the expansion of the universe and was once a stronger force than it is now. While the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument survey revealed last year that dark energy appears to be weakening over time, an exotic galaxy-killer is not required, according to this latest research.

Instead, researchers offer a much simpler explanation of powerful cosmic winds in the remote past. Conventional thinking has it that such powerful winds could only be generated by a supermassive black hole, yet these new observations challenge that assumption.

JWST Reveals the Culprit

CRISTAL-02 is a galaxy still in the making, composed of several smaller galaxies in the final stages of merging into a single system. Because the early universe was far denser than it is today, such collisions were much more common. During these mergers, gravitational forces funnel vast amounts of gas toward the galactic centers, triggering intense bursts of star formation.

Observations of CRISTAL-02 by the James Webb Space Telescope and the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) revealed a star formation rate roughly twice that of similar galaxies. Ironically, this extraordinary burst of stellar activity is also generating a powerful cosmic wind that is stripping away the very gas needed to form new stars.

Compounding the effect, many of the newly formed stars rapidly exhaust their fuel and end their lives as supernovae, producing additional outflows that further deplete the galaxy’s star-forming material.

Together, these processes appear capable of shutting down star formation far more quickly than astronomers previously believed possible. Going forward, ongoing JWST observations are likely to continue challenging astronomers’ assumptions, as more evidence indicates that nearly half of the early universe’s massive galaxies were interacting—a finding which also suggests early “galactic deaths” like these may not be all that rare, after all.

The paper, “Multiphase Images of a Powerful Supernova-Driven Wind in the Early Universe,” appeared in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society on June 10, 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.

Over two years after Japan’s Smart Lander for Investigating Moon (SLIM) mission deployed a tiny, shape-shifting rover on the Moon, the country’s space agency JAXA has finally revealed previously unreleased details about the first-of-its-kind autonomous robotic lunar exploration.

According to a statement announcing the recently published mission account, the SLIM team deployed the rover on the Moon’s surface, “after which the rover transformed from a tiny sphere into a wheeled robot that took images of the lander and its environment.” A second rover transmitted the data back to Earth, with all steps occurring autonomously.

The team behind the historic mission said their success could pave the way for swarms of small, transformable robots capable of exploring high-scientific value areas that larger spacecraft and robots cannot reach, including caves, tunnels, lava tubes, vents, and deep extraterrestrial craters.

The Benefits of Tiny Robots and Autonomous Shape-Shifting Rovers

In the published study, the JAXA team explains that robotic technologies like SLIM “are expected to drive substantial advancements in planetary exploration and resource prospecting” by performing tasks in extraterrestrial environments that are inaccessible to other platforms, including human astronauts. For example, the team noted that miniature robots offer tremendous weight savings over bulkier platforms, especially when added to missions with “strict payload limitations.”

“Miniature robots have the potential to reduce payloads and to reach cramped spaces such as small vents and craters that are inaccessible to larger, conventional robots,” they explain.

Still, the SLIM team notes that building tiny, shape-shifting rovers capable of exploring a variety of complex environments presents its own set of challenges. The most limiting constraints involve computational power and battery capacity. The team also observed that smaller robotics platforms inherently suffer from “reduced locomotion performance” due to their small size.

Now, when revealing the details of the SLIM mission, the researchers note that advancements in miniaturization and computational performance spurred by the Internet of Things “have catalyzed the emergence of smaller, lighter, and more intelligent rovers at lower costs.”

Introducing the ‘Hopping’ Lev-1 and the ‘Transforming’ Lev-2

To build a tiny, shapeshifting robot capable of exploring the lunar surface autonomously, team leader Daichi Hirano and colleagues designed the Lunar Excursion Vehicle (LEV) system, which comprises LEV-1 and LEV-2. According to the team’s statement, LEV-1 can communicate directly with mission planners back on Earth. For locomotion, the robot moves via what the team termed “a controlled hopping mechanism.”

The second robot, LEV-2, starts out as a compact sphere 8 inches in diameter. However, once on the Moon, the mission controllers said that the tiny robot can transform into a “two-wheeled rover with cameras and a tail stabilizer.”

“Here, we introduce a two-wheeled centimeter-scale rover, designated Lunar Excursion Vehicle 2 (LEV-2), also known as SORA-Q (named after the Japanese words for space and sphere), which transforms into a wheeled configuration from a compact spherical form, enabling efficient traversal of soft lunar terrains,” they write.

Transformers Make Autonomous Robotic Exploration History

According to the new mission details, the SLIM lander deployed LEV-2 “immediately before its landing on the lunar surface.” In the mission details, the team explained that upon deployment, the rover autonomously extended its wheels, tail stabilizer, and cameras, “thereby enhancing its mobility and stability on soft lunar terrain.”

After deployment, LEV-2 navigated the lunar surface in the immediate area around the lander. According to the published study, “the palm-sized rover accomplished autonomous lunar exploration by navigating around the SLIM lander, capturing images of both the SLIM lander and its environment.” Critically, the rover’s exploration was autonomous and “without reliance on ground-based teleoperation,” marking a historic first in lunar exploration.

After finishing its exploration, the tiny robot transmitted images of its adventures to LEV-1. The hopping rover then transmitted the data to Earth. The team notes that all these steps were also accomplished autonomously.

The team notes that the LEV-2 shape-shifting rover operated for “more than 100 minutes: before losing communication with LEV-1. Although determining the exact cause may require direct examination of the two robots, Hirano’s team suspects that issues caused by LEV-1’s hopping motions or battery depletion “may have contributed to connectivity issues.”

Exploring High-Risk, Scientifically Valuable Environments

When discussing the implication of an autonomous, shape-shifting rover successfully navigating the lunar surface and completing its mission directives, the team concedes that the capabilities of a single, small rover like LEV-2 “are inherently limited.” However, they also note that their mission success highlights the potential of this category of robotic platform “as independent explorers, capable of accessing environments beyond the reach of a primary large spacecraft.” 

“Swarm-controlled small robots are poised to be deployed in high-risk yet scientifically valuable environments, such as vents, caves, and steep slope craters, that are inaccessible to larger, conventional rovers,” the researchers conclude. “This approach promises to enhance both the efficiency and safety of future planetary surface exploration.”

The study “From ball to rover: Transformable palm-sized rover SORA-Q for autonomous lunar exploration” was published in Science Robotics.

Christopher Plain is a Science Fiction and Fantasy novelist and Head Science Writer at The Debrief. Follow and connect with him on X, learn about his books at plainfiction.com, or email him directly at christopher@thedebrief.org.

Astronauts selected for NASA’s Artemis missions are traveling to outer space in style, the American space agency has revealed.

On June 7, Axiom Space and fashion empire Prada showcased their Liquid Cooling and Ventilation Garment (LCVG), designed to be worn by astronauts inside the Axiom Extravehicular Mobility Unit (AxEMU) spacesuit. 

The unveiling of the new garment by Prada and Axiom Space took place at Prada’s SoHo location in Manhattan just days before the announcement of the Artemis III crew, according to the New York Times fashion desk. With black-clad waiters circulating champagne and healthy juices through the Rem Koolhaas-designed venue, the intersection of fashion and space exploration was once again on full display.

 

“The future of space exploration will not be built by any one entity alone, and our partnership with Prada is proof of that,” said Dr. Jonathan Cirtain, Axiom Space CEO and President, in a statement.

“By bringing together the best in both aerospace engineering as well as luxury craftmanship and advanced product development, we have developed a garment that neither company could have created independently, and that is exactly the kind of cross-industry thinking that will define the next era of human spaceflight,” Cirtain added. 

Some might be surprised to learn this is not the first time NASA has collaborated with a fashion house. The first modern spacesuit was designed and crafted by a group of international designers at the Latex Corporation (ILC). In the 1960s, this company was best known for manufacturing bras and girdles.

Notably, a version of its A7L spacesuit was worn by Neil Armstrong during the Apollo 11 mission. Designers developed the A7L to protect astronauts from the harsh conditions of space and the lunar surface.

The suit was constructed using materials such as neoprene, Beta cloth—which helped protect astronauts from extreme temperatures—and aluminized Mylar. Overall, it was a highly complex, multilayered design.

The new LCVG collaboration draws on Prada’s expertise in knitting, craftsmanship, and advanced design. The resulting garment is a next-generation system developed using sophisticated 3D modeling techniques.

The suit is designed to maintain cooling and ventilation while remaining comfortable during spacewalks lasting up to eight hours. Thanks to its high-performance materials, it can also be worn repeatedly during long-duration missions.

“When we unveiled the AxEMU, we announced that the collaboration between Prada and Axiom Space would continue beyond that first milestone,” said Lorenzo Bertelli, Prada Group Chief Marketing Officer and Head of Sustainability, in a statement. 

“Today, we are proud to present a new achievement born from the unique combination of Axiom Space’s pioneering expertise and Prada’s know-how in design, patternmaking, and advanced materials, ahead of humanity’s return to the lunar surface,” Bertelli added.

In 2024, Axiom Space and Prada unveiled the AxEMU’s outer layer, designed to withstand the harsh conditions of the lunar South Pole. Their latest collaboration on the Liquid Cooling and Ventilation Garment builds on that partnership, focusing on astronaut comfort, thermal regulation, and reliability inside the spacesuit.

“We look forward to continuing this collaboration with Axiom Space, pushing boundaries and exploring new frontiers together,” adds Bertelli.

The LCVG keeps astronauts cool during spacewalks by circulating chilled water through tubes woven into the garment, removing body heat and venting it through the spacesuit. It also delivers fresh oxygen and removes carbon dioxide, helping astronauts remain safe and comfortable in the harsh environment of space.

“Every minute astronauts spend outside their vehicle, the LCVG is working to keep them safe,” said Russell Ralston, Axiom Space Senior Vice President of Spacecraft Development.

“It manages their thermal environment, supports their breathing, and does it all while they’re pushing their bodies to the limit,” Ralson added. “The work we have done with Prada has taken that capability to a level we could not have achieved alone.”

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

Archaeologists say bones unearthed from an Iron Age burial in Scotland are revealing new insights into how human remains were interred in ancient Europe, in a region with scant evidence for mortuary practices in the archeological record.

Among the new findings, cuts within the skull of a woman’s 2,000-year-old Iron Age remains suggest the removal of her brain prior to burial, along with other evidence of mortuary processing. 

“Manipulation of one skeleton, including the possible removal of the brain, fashioning of long bones into ‘tools’ and reassembly for burial, suggests complex mortuary processing,” write the authors of a new study published in the journal Antiquity. 

Iron Age Remains

The study’s authors report that the woman’s remains, and those believed to have belonged to a teenage boy buried nearby, both had distant origins, adding to the intrigue. Archaeologists discovered the pair buried in a cairn in Sutherland’s Loch Borralie in northwest Scotland, a rare find in such well-preserved condition. 

Due to Britain’s acidic peat soil, few Iron Age human remains have been recovered, leaving many questions about the inhabitants’ funerary practices. This particular corner of Scotland is an exception, with an environment better suited to preserving bone, offering a rare window into this mysterious period.

“To find bodies of this age so well preserved is rare, but to discover evidence of a funeral ritual we previously knew nothing about was such a surprise and very exciting,” said lead author Dr. Laura Castells Navarro.

Unusual Mortuary Practices

“The adult female displayed incisions on the inside of her cranium, suggesting her brain had been intentionally removed after death,” Castells Navarro continued. “We have no other comparison of this type of practice, but we know that the dead were curated and treated carefully in Iron Age Britain, so our understanding is that this bone modification is within that same tradition of care.”

The sharpened bones, which the archeologists suspected were used as tools, included humeri, ulna, and femur. Why Iron Age Britons would have engaged in such elaborate and unusual manipulation of skeletal remains eludes archaeologists, although they note that the care evident in reassembling her skeleton for burial suggests she commanded the respect and reverence of those who laid her to rest.

Analysis techniques used on the bones include isotope testing and DNA mapping, revealing a close kinship suspected to be that of maternal second cousins.

Iron Age Connections

More intriguing than their relationship is the evidence of the distance they had traveled, as isotopic analysis revealed that the pair had grown up 50 miles to the southeast. Genetics pushed this even further, revealing family connections beyond the mainland, spreading out in opposite directions. To the northeast, they had relatives 108 miles away on the Orkney Islands, while to the southwest, they had kin 140 miles away at Applecross.

Archaeologists interpret this to mean that Iron Age Britons were extremely mobile, traversing water in family groups.

“Our research shows that prehistoric maritime communities periodically moved around the north coast and Northern Isles of Scotland, possibly in small groups,” Dr. Castells Navarro said. “This movement allowed for the spread and maintenance of cultural practices and traditions.”

With individuals of shared kinship spread so far, researchers suggest these complex mortuary practices were likely shared across Iron Age Britain, adding an intriguing new wrinkle to our assessment of these ancient people.

“I think we can assume that the Iron Age dead were not forgotten,” Dr. Castells Navarro concluded, “and still had meaning to the living, with a continued interaction between the living and the dead across time and distance.”

The paper, “Reconnecting the Dead in Iron Age Britain: Funerary Processing and Long-Distance Connectivity at Loch Borralie, Scotland,” appeared in Antiquity on June 10, 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 nature of time has long puzzled scientists, and now one researcher at the University of Birmingham has constructed a mini-universe in a laboratory to get to the bottom of this and other fundamental questions about gravity and quantum mechanics.

Revealed in a recent paper published in Physical Review Research, Professor Giovanni Barontini created a universe in a sealed quantum system to answer the lingering questions of “what is time?” with a laboratory model. His work creates an intriguing new testbed for exploring the nature of our universe from beginning to end, and all the phenomena in between.

Creating a Universe

Physicists have long puzzled over how a sequence of events could be understood in a universe without an external clock. The new work demonstrates how to move purely theoretical work into a practical laboratory environment, allowing exploration of deep questions about time and quantum physics.

In the new paper, Professor Barontini describes creating a miniature universe from 24,000 atoms held at just several degrees above absolute zero. Such temperatures are essential to many quantum explorations, including quantum computing technologies.

In this quantum system, the hermetically sealed cloud of ultracold atoms acts like a miniature universe. A thin barrier divides this tiny universe in half, while two lasers set to different frequencies bombarded it to create an observed bright region and an unobserved dark region.

Internal Time

Crucial to the experiment, Barontini did not measure time externally but instead waited for the internal relationship between the particles to generate time within this new universe. This idea comes from theoretical physics concepts such as the Wheeler-DeWitt equation, which posits that the universe exists in an ever-steady quantum state exhibiting both wave- and particle-like behavior, without an external time.

Barontini observed the bright side behaving similarly to our universe, albeit on “fast-forward,” repeating a cycle of Big Bangs and Big Crunches, continually expanding and collapsing back in on itself. Since the sequence of events could be reconstructed entirely within the quantum system without reference to a laboratory clock, this shows that time emerges from the system itself, created by the disorder of spreading atoms, rather than being an external function.

Investigating Quantum Time

Time moved forward in a single direction, with the increase or decrease in particles in the bright sector as they moved into the dark sector and back again, indicating an arrow of time. Yet, when the atomic distribution remained steady, Barontini observed a halt in time, leading him to describe what he witnessed as “entropic time.”

While this version of time corrects the order of events, it is not steady; it varies with the system’s entropy level. Notably, Schrödinger’s equation, the linchpin of quantum theory, still works in entropic time.

“In some theories of the universe, especially quantum gravity, time doesn’t appear as a built‑in feature,” Barontini said. “Yet in everyday life, time flows from past to future – why is this so, when most basic laws of physics work the same way forwards and backwards?”

“This study provides the first controlled experimental evidence that ‘time’ can be defined by changes within a system rather than as the external ‘ticking clock’ we think of as time,” Barontini concluded. “It offers new insight into the nature of time in quantum gravity that could be used to describe dynamics just as effectively as conventional time.”

Moving forward, such artificial universes could be used to probe the mysteries of our own universe, including its earliest moments, the emergence of time, and even black holes.

The paper, “Testing the Problem of Time with Cold Atoms,” appeared in Physical Review Research on June 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.

Archaeologists believe a site in present-day northern Iraq may preserve the remains of an ancient city whose fall was recorded in texts from ancient Mesopotamia.

While ancient texts described the event, the physical traces were not discovered until recently. Excavations at Kurd Qaburstan in the Kurdistan region have now revealed the clearest archaeological record of Middle Bronze Age siege warfare found in the area.

During the 2024 and 2025 excavation seasons, a team led by Tiffany Earley-Spadoni, associate professor of history at the University of Central Florida and director of the Kurd Qaburstan Project, recovered 20 cuneiform tablets and more than 100 administrative sealings from destruction layers inside the Lower Town East Palace.

A Lost Archive

This collection represents the first substantial group of cuneiform texts found on the Erbil Plain, and their dating is unusually precise. Scribes wrote several tablets within days of one another, clustering around the period recorded as the city’s fall, which allows researchers to closely align the archaeological and historical records.

Epigraphers Paul Delnero and Parker Zane, from Johns Hopkins University and Yale University, are leading the translation effort with art historian Marian Feldman. The texts include palace administrative records and at least one letter that may mention a senior official from the ancient city of Qabra.

Some inscriptions may also correspond to destructions recorded on the Victory Stele of Dadusha, a monument that documents military campaigns in the region from the same period.

Burned Layers

The physical signs of the attack are clear. Collapsed buildings, burned layers, and numerous broken pottery pieces all show signs of a coordinated and sustained assault. The team found two layers of destruction, one above the other, which match the recorded events of Qabra’s conquest.

Within these layers of destruction, bioarchaeologist Andrea Zurek-Ost of Michigan State University identified the remains of 17 people. Several seem to have died where they fell, possibly including palace workers. Archaeologists found one individual face down over a stone basin. Researchers are now using isotopic and ancient DNA analyses to learn more about who these people were, where they came from, and how they might have been related.

Mapping The City Before It Fell

The destruction layers tell the story of the city’s final chapter. A magnetometer survey covering over 80 hectares provides a picture of what the city looked like before its fall.

Led by Andrew Creekmore III at the University of Northern Colorado, the survey detects buried structures by measuring changes in the Earth’s magnetic field. It revealed a monumental wall with bastions surrounding the site, fortifications that match those shown on the Victory Stele of Dadusha and support the identification of Kurd Qaburstan as ancient Qabra.

Researchers also found a preserved street with a drainage system, along with areas used for food processing and textile production. These features indicate that the city was more complex than researchers usually expect in northern Mesopotamia.

Mesopotamian history has often focused on southern cities such as Uruk, viewing the south as the birthplace of urban civilization. The evidence from Kurd Qaburstan challenges that view.

“The evidence from Kurd Qaburstan shows that northern cities could be large, complex, and politically significant, with administrative systems, fortifications, and infrastructure comparable to those of the best-known southern sites,” Earley-Spadoni says.

Findings from the Kurd Qaburstan Project were announced as part of a reports and proceedings release supported by the University of Central Florida and the U.S. National Science Foundation.

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

Thousands of years ago, Scotland’s early inhabitants were building mysterious artificial islands in lakes throughout the region—and now archaeologists have uncovered evidence that reveals these curious aquatic features to be far older than once thought.

Scattered throughout Scotland’s ancient lochs, these curious structures—known as crannogs—have long intrigued archaeologists and historians, partially due to the questions about their age.

Now, artifacts recovered from these human-built islands are pushing back the timescales on their construction, causing researchers to have to reconsider the origins of one of the most enigmatic lacustrine features in the British Isles.

The Crannog Enigma

Crannogs have been known to archaeologists for some time, with some of the earliest extensive explorations of these features undertaken beginning more than a century ago by Odo Blundell, a monk at Fort Augustus Abbey.

Constructed mostly from stone and timber, speculations about their creation extend to as early as the Bronze Age, although most scholars believe these curious features were likely to have been an invention of the Iron Age.

However, a surprising recent discovery is now challenging that presumption, revealing that some of these artificial islands date back to more than 5,000 years ago, having been built during Scotland’s Neolithic era.

Older Than Previously Thought

The story began to unfold in 2012 when local diver Chris Murray was exploring a crannog near the Isle of Lewis in Scotland’s Outer Hebrides. There, he discovered fragments of ancient pottery that experts at the National Museum of Scotland later examined, revealing an astonishing discovery: the remains of artifacts unequivocally associated with the Neolithic period.

The implication was obvious: for Neolithic pottery to have been found on this crannog would indicate it must have been constructed thousands of years earlier than the past dating of these artificial islands.

The discovery prompted a deeper look at the region’s ancient artificial islands, which soon revealed additional evidence of their Neolithic provenance. During the research, Stephanie Blankshein, a maritime archaeologist at the University of Southampton, and colleagues discovered that organic materials and artifacts from several sites across Scotland’s Outer Hebrides indicated these crannogs were likely built sometime between 4,000 and 2,500 BCE.

At least 11 crannogs in the region, Blankshein and her colleagues say, were created during the Neolithic period, pushing back the date of their construction to as far back as six thousand years ago.

Rethinking the Lives of the Ancient Scots

One of the most intriguing aspects of the team’s findings involves what it reveals about the ingenuity of the early farming communities in the British Isles, since the new dating of these prehistoric artificial islands indicates that they must have been constructed within just a few centuries of when their ancient builders arrived in the region.

Such findings align well with past genetic studies, which indicate that the region’s Neolithic populations likely descended from farmers who made their way from the Near East through Europe, and eventually settled in the British Isles, where they made their new homes by the sea.

It remains unclear, however, whether the construction of crannogs had been an innovation that occurred after they arrived in Britain, or if this had been a much earlier practice these people brought with them.

Discoveries at the Loch Bhorgastail Crannog

Among the most remarkable crannog sites is one found at Loch Bhorgastail on the Isle of Lewis. This artificial island was initially believed to have been primarily built from stone, with some evidence of timber used as reinforcement.

However, underwater excavations by Blankshein and her colleagues soon uncovered something very surprising hidden below the crannog: a massive timber platform supporting the entire structure.

“As excavation advanced, it quickly became apparent that the terrestrial and underwater components formed a single continuous structure spanning both environments and could not be treated separately,” Blankshein and her colleagues write in a recent study detailing their research at the site.

During their underwater surveys, the team discovered that the wooden foundation extended beneath the entire island and dated to between 3500 and 3300 BCE. Measuring approximately 75 feet (23 meters) across, the platform may have originally sat in shallow water or even remained dry during parts of the year.

“Loch Bhorgastail provided a rare opportunity to develop, test, and refine a workflow capable of achieving terrestrial-grade accuracy underwater,” the research team writes. “The site demonstrates the potential of shallow-water archaeology to bridge the land–water interface while elevating the precision and reliability of underwater recording.”

Lingering Questions

A fundamental question that remains about these curious Neolithic constructions has to do with what their purpose was.

One clue may arrive in the form of residues found on the recent pottery discoveries at several of these sites, which indicate they were used to transport food. This may suggest the crannogs were locations where ancient people prepared and consumed meals, possibly during ceremonial gatherings.

However, it is also possible that these ancient structures served multiple purposes, ranging from sites for communal feasting to possible locations for meetings.

Despite the lingering questions about their use by Scotland’s ancient inhabitants, Blankshein and her colleagues saw these marvelous Neolithic structures as an ideal target for high-resolution shallow-water photogrammetry, which became the focus of her team’s recent research.

“Coastal, riverine, and lacustrine environments have played a central role in the development of human societies, yet locating and documenting this record of activity in littoral environments has proven difficult,” the team writes.

As a result of their research, the team’s findings, combined with recent archaeological discoveries from over the last decade or more, help to shed new light on Britain’s ancient past, while advancing the development of new archaeological approaches. This includes groundbreaking methods for creating 3D models of shallow underwater sites, which the team achieved by using paired action cameras.

As investigations continue, Blankshein and her colleagues suspect many more Neolithic crannogs remain hidden beneath the waters of Scotland and Ireland, and with their discovery and investigation, the potential for further advancements in understanding Europe’s earliest farming societies.

The team’s recent paper, “At the Water’s Edge: Photogrammetry in Extreme Shallow-Water Environments,” appeared in Advances in Archaeological Science.

Micah Hanks is the Editor-in-Chief and Co-Founder of The Debrief. A longtime reporter on science, defense, and technology with a focus on space and astronomy, he can be reached at micah@thedebrief.org. Follow him on X @MicahHanks, and at micahhanks.com.

James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) observations of what astronomers call “little red dots” have intrigued researchers since their discovery in 2022.

Now, new data on the spectra of one of these dots, made possible with imagery obtained by Webb, may hold the answers researchers have long sought.

In a recent paper published in The Astrophysical Journal, a team of astronomers led by the University of Texas at Austin’s Vasily Kokorev revealed their intriguing observations of the little red dot GLIMPSE-17775 using the JWST.

Data collected by the JWST support the BH* scenario, the hypothesis that little red dots are supermassive black holes surrounded by a cloud of partially ionized gas.

JWST and the Little Red Dot

The recent JWST observation of GLIMPSE-17775 is the deepest spectral view of a little red dot ever captured, spanning 40 spectral lines and offering a powerful opportunity to compare the data with various theories about the object’s origins. Born only about 1.8 billion years after the Big Bang, or about 12 billion years ago, the object hails from the universe’s early days.

As with many of science’s most interesting discoveries, this observation was a fortunate accident, captured as the JWST was observing the Abell S1063 galaxy cluster, located in front of GLIMPSE-17775 from our point of view.

Gravitational lensing magnifies GIMPSE-17775, allowing JWST a better look at the object despite its extreme distance, and making the 30-spectrum JWST captured equivalent to hours of observations. 

“When we saw the spectrum for the first time, it was like having all the pieces of a puzzle scattered on the floor,” said Kokorev. “We picked up each piece of the puzzle, measured the lines, and started combining the different pieces into a mosaic. Maybe a few pieces looked like nothing at first, but then a couple of them came together, and we realized that there was something there.”

Explaining Little Red Dots

First appearing at around 600 million years after the Big Bang, the mysterious little red dots have puzzled scientists since they first came to light. The black hole scenario is just one of several that researchers have proposed as a possible explanation, although it is currently gaining the most support as more data comes in.

“I think part of the scientific community is converging on a singular picture — that little red dots can be explained by black hole star models. But none of the previous little red dots have all of the pieces of evidence in the same place,” Kokorev said. “With GLIMPSE-17775, we can test these models because of how deep and amazing this source’s spectrum is.”

The researchers interpret the data as showing a rapidly accreting black hole covered by a dense gas cocoon that reprocesses the black hole’s light into the spectrum observed by JWST.

Comparing the spectra to various models revealed some intriguing evidence for the BH* scenario. The helium, oxygen, and hydrogen lines don’t fit a simple rotating gas cloud model, but do correspond to an electron scattering, a broadening effect associated with a dense, layered gas cocoon.

Other lines, such as the 16 iron lines, suggest a powerful energy source, which could indicate a rapidly accreting black hole. Additionally, helium absorption and fluorescence are seen in the spectrum, signs that a powerful energy source is enveloped in a dense medium.

What JWST Didn’t See

Beyond this incredibly deep spectrum, other little red dot observations have been faint in X-rays, a form of emission that the gas cocoon, in the BH* scenario, is likely to absorb.

One strange quirk of GLIMPSE-17775 is that the spectrum was missing the portion that would indicate the little red dots’ signature dip in light emission, known as a Balmer break. However, supplementary data collected by the Hubble Space Telescope resolved this issue, identifying that interference from a giant host galaxy is the root cause.

“Everything fits, nothing is broken, and I think that makes the puzzle that is our universe even better,” Kokorev concluded. “Looking ahead, I’m eager to dive deeper and learn about what is powering the central engines of little red dots. While we think it’s a black hole, there are some other interesting theories being proposed, which is exciting. Maybe in a year or two, we’ll have the final answer to what powers these sources.”

The paper, “The Deepest GLIMPSE of a Dense Gas Cocoon Enshrouding a Little Red Dot,” appeared in The Astrophysical Journal on June 10, 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.

Nearly three out of every four images obtained by NASA’s new SPHEREx space telescope revealed something many astronomers were afraid of: contamination by artificial objects humans are launching into space.

The findings were reported in a new preprint paper by researchers at NASA’s Ames Research Center, who say that 73.3% of all the images the telescope captured over four months last summer revealed evidence of at least one trail left by SpaceX satellites or other orbital spacecraft.

What may be worst of all is that astronomers aren’t surprised.

With its mission to map the night sky in near-infrared light, NSA’s Spectro-Photometer for the History of the Universe, Epoch of Reionization, and Ices Explorer (SPHEREx) relies on long-exposure imagery that enables it to map large regions of the sky with every viewing.

Unfortunately, long-exposure photography is also ideal for capturing the movement of satellites, an increasing number of which have been placed in orbit in recent years.

Equally troubling is the fact that SPHEREx, from its own position in Earth orbit, had been positioned at an altitude where it was hoped that the number of satellite streaks could be limited. Yet despite such efforts, the new paper featured at the arXiv preprint server reports that, on average, at least two satellite trails were detected in every exposure.

Satellites Mistaken for Cosmic Rays

Astronomers have been raising concerns about this problem already for some time, and presently, there doesn’t appear to be any near-term solution.

Even beyond image contamination, the preprint study also found that several satellites that enter SPHEREx’s field of view are bright enough that they are also triggering the space telescope’s automated system that protects its delicate components from stray cosmic rays.

Designed to shut down the telescope’s data collection when it detects what it suspects are cosmic rays, the new research reveals that some satellites reflect enough light to engage algorithms that control this defense system.

Even in instances where imagery is successfully obtained, albeit with contamination from satellites, the brightness of these orbital objects can effectively obscure objects behind the portions of the telescope’s images where the satellites appeared.

A Growing Concern

The new SphereX findings are only the latest indication that astronomers were right to be concerned about potential light pollution from satellites. In a past study by Sando Kruk and colleagues, Hubble Telescope images had shown an increase in the number of satellites crossing its field of view, rising from contamination shown in just 2.8% of its images, to 5.9% over a period of two decades.

Ideas about how to prevent the issue have focused on using anti-reflective coatings on satellites and other means of reducing their brightness once they reach orbit. However, many modern satellites are large enough that having darker exteriors doesn’t help to significantly mitigate the amount of light they can reflect.

Additionally, the study’s authors note that “Optical reflections are just a fraction of the problem, since satellites also emit and reflect [infrared],” meaning that optical darkening efforts “might even increase their temperature, making them brighter in the IR.”

Worse Before It Gets Better

According to the study’s authors, the problem is likely to worsen before astronomers see any improvements.

“Remarkably, some private operators have announced the intent of deploying 4000 purposely high reflective satellites,” the researchers write, which aim to provide “sunlight on demand.” Such artificial orbital systems, if successfully deployed, would reflect light as much as five times the brightness of the full Moon onto areas of the Earth roughly five kilometers in diameter.

This, the team argues, would potentially have “a catastrophic impact to the quality of the dark sky and the Earth’s inhabitants.”

Fundamentally, the authors hope that bringing additional attention to such issues with their recent study may help to mitigate future concerns about our ever-brightening night sky.

“The widespread contamination addressed in this paper affects multiple areas of astronomical research,” the team says, which they say includes “the study of transient phenomena, deep imaging surveys, spectroscopic studies, and the search for Near-Earth Objects (NEOs), thereby hindering our ability to understand the Universe and protect the Earth.”

The new paper by Alejandro S. Borlaff and colleagues, “SPHEREx confirms predictions for artificial satellite trail pollution in Low Earth Orbit,” appeared at the preprint arXiv server.

Micah Hanks is the Editor-in-Chief and Co-Founder of The Debrief. A longtime reporter on science, defense, and technology with a focus on space and astronomy, he can be reached at micah@thedebrief.org. Follow him on X @MicahHanks, and at micahhanks.com.

Researchers from the Université Polytechnique Hauts-de-France have revealed a technique that successfully analyzed several Vincent van Gogh artworks at a microscopic level to correctly identify well-known, previously identified forgeries from recently authenticated ones

The research team behind the pioneering, non-invasive art authentication process said their approach could provide museums, collectors, and art auction houses with a previously unavailable tool with a proven, scientifically based track record for identifying fake or counterfeit art.

Using Microscopic-Level Surface Scans to Foil Art Forgery

According to a press release announcing the successful counterfeit identification tests, art forgery is an increasingly complex problem. However, the traditional approach of expert opinion combined with historical research and invasive pigment analysis has not always proven successful, with the study authors noting that such methods are “often inconclusive,” leaving museums and collectors to shoulder most of the risk for difficult-to-authenticate works.

More recently, collectors and auctioneers have turned to science for answers, including a report showing that AI may have identified as many as 40 counterfeit artworks sold on online marketplaces. Although no counterfeit versions of Van Gogh’s works were found, that same effort identified potentially fake versions of paintings by Monet and Renoir that were indistinguishable from authentic ones.

In 2023, researchers at the University of Sydney announced the development of a cutting-edge microscope capable of surpassing the diffraction limit. In that story, study co-author Professor Boris Kuhlmey noted that the method, which is ideal for identifying microchip irregularities, “could even be used to reveal hidden layers in artwork, perhaps proving useful in uncovering art forgery or hidden works.”

Last month, The Debrief reported the discovery of a mathematical pattern in many famous expressionist artworks, noting that many abstract artists may naturally arrange shapes and patterns in similar ways, even without knowing the mathematics behind them. If correct, this concept could use science and mathematics to separate fake Impressionist works.

Now, the Université Polytechnique Hauts-de-France team says their new approach takes modern technology a step further, resulting in an unprecedented level of accuracy.

“Fractal Analysis Gives Us a Measurable Fingerprint of an Artist’s Brushwork” 

Unlike the above techniques, the new approach analyzes the texture of a painting’s surface at the microscopic level by converting high-resolution images into three-dimensional surface ‘maps’ of the painting’s upper layers. According to the study authors, the extracted “texture” of a painting allows them to measure an image’s roughness and detail using fractal math. For example, the team said that the subtle patterns of an artist’s brush stroke are so consistent “that they act like a morphological signature unique to that artist.” 

“Fractal analysis gives us a measurable fingerprint of an artist’s brushwork without needing to sample or disturb the painting,” explained Francois Berkmans, the study’s lead researcher.

To test their approach, the researchers scanned several artworks attributed to Renaissance artist Vincent van Gogh. The researchers also used their technique to study the mathematical texture of an artwork called The Plowmen, which the team noted is a “well-documented fake.” Last, they used their method to analyze another Vincent van Gogh work, Sunset at Montmajur, which was authenticated in 2013.

After running their microscopic surface analysis, the team’s new system identified The Plowmen as a “strong outlier” compared to the artist’s other works. Conversely, the new method determined that the two newly authenticated paintings “aligned closely with Van Gogh’s known works.”

New Method “Strengthens” Traditional Analysis as a Complimentary Tool

When discussing the study’s results, Berkmans said their technique “can clearly point out genuine artists and reliably detect known forgeries.” Along with identifying fakes and authentic works, the team said that the new approach successfully separated Van Gogh’s stylistic signatures from those of 17th‑century painter David Klöcker Ehrenstrahl, an achievement they heralded as demonstrating the technology’s “wider potential.” 

Although the new approach had successes, the team said it is not designed to replace current approaches, including complementary analyses such as the chemical examination of materials. Instead, they said their surface-texture approach should be used as a complementary tool to strengthen authentication, resulting in a multifaceted approach that can reduce risk for collectors, museums, and auction houses alike.

“This approach won’t replace traditional expertise, but it significantly strengthens it.”

The study “Preserving Van Gogh’s Painterly Heritage: Topographical and Fractal Insights in Authentication” was published in Surface Topography Metrology and Properties.

Christopher Plain is a Science Fiction and Fantasy novelist and Head Science Writer at The Debrief. Follow and connect with him on X, learn about his books at plainfiction.com, or email him directly at christopher@thedebrief.org.

Scientists have often wondered how the brain can take in new experiences without erasing stored memories. However, a new study in Nature now identifies a circuit-level mechanism that may help answer this question—and it may also offer clues for improving artificial intelligence.

Researchers at NYU Langone Health recorded the activity of hundreds of neurons simultaneously across several brain regions in mice. By tracking how signals move from the hippocampus to the neocortex, where long-term memories are kept, they found that a subset of hippocampal neurons appears to participate in routing information between regions in distinct patterns. These cells participate in both incoming and outgoing signaling, but do so using distinct patterns of activity.

Separate Channels Through the Same Cells

The study focused on a series of interconnected brain regions: CA3, which processes rapidly changing information; CA1, which serves as a central hub; and the retrosplenial cortex, which is important for navigation and spatial memory. About one in four CA1 neurons receives most of the signals from CA3. When these same neurons send signals to the retrosplenial cortex, they fire in a different pattern, creating a separate outgoing channel using the same cells.

Rather than using new neurons, the brain separates these channels by changing how the same neurons fire together. The researchers suggest this arrangement may help reduce interference between new learning and more stable cortical memories.

“Our findings help explain how memory can be both moldable and enduring,” said co-lead author Joaquín Gonzalez, PhD, a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Psychiatry at NYU Grossman School of Medicine. “By changing how the same cells fire together instead of turning on new cells, the brain can keep information organized and protect older memories.”

What Happens During Sleep

The CA1 neurons involved in learning during the day also stay active at night. The researchers found that these cells remain busy during sleep events called sharp-wave ripples, which are bursts of activity the hippocampus uses to replay and strengthen memories from the day.

Since overlapping neurons are recruited during both waking activity and sleep replay, the same circuit elements appear to participate in both learning and consolidation. This theoretically allows the brain to use a single system for both learning and storing memories, without the two processes interfering with each other.

“Our study shows how learning and memory consolidation can coexist in the same network,” said co-lead author Mihály Vöröslakos, MD, PhD. “Our discovery was made possible because for the first time, we were able to record hundreds of individual neurons across all the key regions simultaneously in animals that were moving around naturally.”

Implications for Disease and AI

The system identified in this research may help explain how memory disorders begin. In Alzheimer’s disease, for example, the hippocampal circuits examined here are some of the earliest to deteriorate. These networks are essential for sorting and organizing new experiences.

“Our discovery of a ‘memory switchboard’ deep in the hippocampus may provide clues as to how memory circuits fail in Alzheimer’s disease,” said co-senior author Zhe S. Chen, PhD, a professor in the Departments of Psychiatry and Neuroscience at NYU Grossman School of Medicine.

Artificial intelligence systems have a hard time holding onto what they’ve already learned when faced with new tasks, a problem researchers call catastrophic forgetting. The human brain appears able to update memories without catastrophic forgetting by altering the use of existing neural circuits. By studying how our brains pull this off, scientists hope to design AI that can keep learning new things without forgetting the old.

“By showing how the mammalian brain can safeguard memories during learning, our research may offer a biological blueprint for designing next-generation AI technology that can update itself continuously without overwriting what it has already acquired,” said co-senior author György Buzsáki, MD, PhD, the Biggs Professor of Neuroscience at NYU Grossman School of Medicine.

The researchers plan to investigate whether similar switchboard-like channels exist in other memory circuits. The authors caution that their findings in mice under controlled conditions do not yet allow conclusions about the human brain.

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