The small exoplanets of our Sun’s second-nearest neighbor, Barnard’s Star, are inhospitable wastelands, British astronomers say.

Located six light-years from Earth, Barnard’s Star is separated from our closest neighbor, Alpha Centauri, by about 66° in our sky. Now, University of Cambridge researchers have revealed their findings on this exosolar system in a recent paper published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

After careful analysis, the astronomers announced that the exoplanets are unlike any in our solar system, presenting a brutal and barren environment.

Barnard’s Star Exoplanets

Scientists only discovered these four small planets orbiting Barnard’s Star in 2025. Unlike anything in our solar system, these orbital bodies fit into a size range larger than Mars, but smaller than Earth or Venus.

Like a peeled onion, these smaller planets are rich in a mineral only found deep below the Earth’s surface. Chemical analysis revealed large amounts of the mineral periclase on the surface of these planets, something typically only found hundreds of kilometers deep on our planet.

“Barnard’s Star has an enormous amount of the element magnesium compared to other stars, so its planets are likely to be rich in magnesium too,” said lead author Xander Byrne from Cambridge’s Institute of Astronomy. “On Earth, that magnesium goes into making minerals called olivines, which are really important for storing water within the planet.”

A Lack of Water and Atmosphere

Unfortunately for those looking for extraterrestrial life, magnesium serves a different purpose on these exoplanets. Instead of water-storing olivine, it produces the abundant periclase, which is a poor store of water.

Even worse, these inhospitable exoplanets likely no longer have an atmosphere. According to the University of Cambridge team, these ten-billion-year-old planets probably only managed to hold an atmosphere for two billion years at most.

“These planets were always going to be hostile, because they’re really close to their star,” said Byrne. “Even the outermost planet orbits ten times closer than Mercury orbits the Sun. When you’re that close to your star, and have such little gravity, your atmosphere just gets blown off.”

In addition to the lack of atmosphere, the planets’ proximity to Barnard’s Star leaves them tidally locked, like our Moon, with one side always facing toward the star.

Exoplanet Stability

However, there is one positive element to these small planets. Typically, such close-orbiting systems are highly unstable, with the planets shooting out from the system, falling into their host star, or catastrophically colliding. Yet in this case, the system is as ordered as a piece of music. 

The three inner planets of the exosolar system have years in a 9:12:16 ratio, producing two of what is known as a “perfect fourth” in music. This musical harmony is known as an orbital resonance, with the same type of effect stabilizing Jupiter’s moons in their orbits around that planet. 

While our ability to view Barnard’s Star from Earth may be limited, the European Space Agency’s upcoming Plato mission may allow astronomers to discover ever smaller worlds orbiting in the nearby exosolar system.

“Larger planets are much easier to detect than small ones, so we know about very few sub-Earth planets like the ones in this system,” said Byrne. “But the sensitivity of these new missions will help to reduce this bias, allowing us to discover more and more planets that are small and rocky, like Earth.”

The true significance of the research may lie in the value of a null result. While these planets are bleakly hostile to life, observing this exosolar system’s composition can aid future astronomers in narrowing down the search for extraterrestrial life.

The paper, “The Barnard’s Star Planetary System: Stability, Composition, and Evolution of Four Sub-Earth Exoplanets,” appeared in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society on June 24, 2026.

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

A remarkable discovery has been made in East Africa’s Lake Malawi, one of the deepest bodies of water on the African continent.

Africa’s impressive lakes have long remained a focus of speculation for naturalists, involving folklore about strange creatures—including supposed holdovers from prehistoric times—alleged to inhabit some of their waters.

However, a much smaller discovery made by a team of researchers with the Department of Zoology at the University of British Columbia (UBC) at Vancouver, Canada, is nonetheless challenging our past thinking on what kinds of life forms can be found lurking in the depths of some of Africa’s storied lakes.

In a remarkable discovery, a variety of lake fly larvae have been found descending into the very oxygen-deprived depths of Lake Malawi, where they hide more than 650 feet below the surface to avoid predators.

After spending their days in this deep-water “dead zone,” the larvae reemerge at night and feed—or at least some of them do, if they are lucky enough to escape the fish searching for a dinner of their own, while these tiny insects are commuting back to the surface.

A Surprising Discovery Deep in Lake Malawi

To chart the unusual daily cycle of these larvae, UBC researchers Dr. Philip Matthews and Dr. Evan McKenzie used sonar technologies, which were positioned deep within the lake.

While this provided an idea about where these tiny insects were going, it was dissecting the larvae that revealed how these remarkable little creatures have somehow evolved a respiratory system that contains two pairs of small air sacs, which function like ballast tanks, allowing the larvae to control their buoyancy.

Within these sacs, they discovered the presence of resilin, a material that can either expand or contract in proportion to changes in the pH of the sac’s walls. As a result, the larvae can change the volume of these unique air sacs, thereby controlling their buoyancy.

It is an unusual capability these creatures display, to say the least. Curious about how deep they might be able to go, the researchers placed several of the larvae within small pressure chambers to simulate the depths they might travel to before the sacs imploded.

Much to the team’s surprise, these natural buoyancy systems held out under conditions that would match depths of 400 meters (1,312 feet), which is much deeper than what the sonar data reveals about the larvae’s daily descents into Lake Malawi.

While it has long been assumed that insects, which often thrive in freshwater environments, do not live in open oceans due to such pressures associated with the depths of the world’s largest bodies of water, these African insect larvae reveal that such creatures can survive under such conditions.

Based on their findings, the UBC researchers hope to work on finding ways of simulating such capabilities, perhaps by creating pH-powered resilin smart materials, or even artificial systems that emulate the way muscles operate.

The team’s findings appeared in the new study, “Crush-resistant air sacs allow insect larvae to exploit aquatic habitats at extreme depth,” published in the journal 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.

As AI reshapes the way we communicate, researchers at Texas A&M University are developing an artificial intelligence-powered platform that could transform care for children with autism and older adults living with dementia. The technology learns each person’s unique communication style, behaviors, and preferences, enabling increasingly personalized support for caregivers, therapists, and families over time.

Called VoiceLove, it is one of three projects being developed with support from the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H).

At the core of the system is an AI engine that analyzes both speech and nonverbal behaviors documented through short videos recorded by caregivers or therapists during daily communications and interactions. Rather than comparing participants against a general model, the platform focuses on understanding each person’s individual patterns and communication style.

“Every child with autism is unique, and effective support should reflect that,” he said. “Our project leverages artificial intelligence to understand each child’s individual behaviors, communication styles, and preferences. The goal is to deliver personalized recommendations that help families, educators, and clinicians work together more effectively, enabling more responsive, data-driven care and improving the health and well-being of children with autism,” says Dr. Junhyoung Kim, associate professor in the School of Public Health, one of the principal investigators on the project, in a statement. 

The AI system was created to identify behavioral patterns in communication, interests, and responses across different situations. Based on its observations, the program provides personalized recommendations that could help therapists or caregivers create individualized intervention plans.

“The key innovation behind this platform is its ability to understand each child individually and learn their unique preferences, needs, communication styles, and strengths to deliver personalized recommendations,” Kim said. “For people living with dementia, the platform is designed to enhance person-centered care by helping residents communicate their needs, preferences, and daily experiences more effectively.”

Researchers say the technology could support a wide range of developmental goals, including improving communication skills, encouraging self-care, strengthening social engagement, and enhancing a person’s quality of life.

The same personalized approach could also benefit people living with dementia, where communication challenges often make it difficult for individuals to express their needs and wants. 

“Our vision is to create an AI platform that continuously learns from each child’s daily experiences,” Kim said. “As the system identifies patterns in behaviors, preferences, and responses to different activities, it can provide therapists and caregivers with personalized recommendations that evolve over time.”

“This adaptive approach helps explain why certain behaviors occur and supports more individualized, proactive care,” Kim added. 

VoiceLove is designed to keep learning. As caregivers continue using the app, the AI analyzes new interactions while also incorporating caregiver observations, experiences, and responses to daily prompts. 

The research team plans to begin with a small pilot study involving children with autism and older adults living with dementia after receiving Institutional Review Board approval.

Participants will use the platform for approximately one month while researchers evaluate its usability, feasibility, and overall user experience, and from there, insights derived from the pilot will help to inform a larger-scale study at some point in the future. 

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.

When NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft delivered pristine samples from the asteroid Bennu back to Earth in 2023, scientists knew they were receiving one of the most chemically untouched collections of material ever recovered from the Solar System.

Since then, the returned grains have steadily transformed researchers’ understanding of how asteroids formed, how water altered primitive worlds, and even how the ingredients for life may have spread through the early Solar System.

Now, a new study, published in Nature Communications, has uncovered another surprise hidden inside those microscopic particles. Embedded within Bennu are tiny mineral fragments that formed during the Solar System’s earliest moments—less than 100,000 years after its birth—and they may reveal that the asteroid’s ancient parent body formed much farther from the Sun than scientists once suspected.

The research suggests that Bennu inherited some of the oldest surviving solids ever created, while simultaneously preserving evidence that Jupiter’s formation may have acted as an enormous cosmic filter, separating different populations of dust before planets had even fully formed.

“Our observations of phyllosilicates replacing olivine and interstitial phyllosilicates between olivine grains within AOAs… collectively indicate that these refractory inclusions experienced aqueous alteration on Bennu’s parent planetesimal,” researchers write. “Therefore, they were incorporated into the parent planetesimal before the onset of aqueous alteration, during which phyllosilicates and magnetite formed.”

“These mineralogical, isotopic, and chronological similarities among refractory inclusions in Bennu samples, Ryugu samples, and CI chondrites provide evidence that their parent planetesimal(s) accreted a common suite, and likely similar relative abundances, of high-temperature refractory inclusions and their fragments,” researchers write.

The research concentrates on “refractory inclusions”—tiny mineral-rich objects known as calcium-aluminum-rich inclusions (CAIs) and amoeboid olivine aggregates (AOAs). These objects are widely considered the oldest solid materials to condense from the hot gas surrounding the newborn Sun.

Long before planets existed, the infant Solar System consisted of a rotating disk of gas coupled with dust known as the protoplanetary disk. Temperatures near the young Sun exceeded 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit (roughly 1,100 degrees Celsius), allowing only the most heat-resistant minerals to crystallize.

These refractory inclusions were among the very first solids to emerge from that environment before eventually being transported throughout the growing Solar System.

Although scientists have found such inclusions in meteorites for decades, Bennu offered an unprecedented opportunity to examine them in material collected directly from an asteroid rather than from meteorites that survived passage through Earth’s atmosphere.

To investigate, researchers analyzed polished sections prepared from 12 Bennu particles using scanning electron microscopy, transmission electron microscopy, oxygen isotope measurements, and radioactive aluminum-magnesium dating techniques.

The team identified six amoeboid olivine aggregates and three calcium-aluminum-rich inclusions, all remarkably small—none exceeding roughly 100 micrometers across, or about the thickness of a human hair. This turned out to be one of the study’s most important discoveries.

The mineral chemistry and oxygen isotopes showed these inclusions formed in an extremely hot, oxygen-16-rich environment during the Solar System’s earliest stages. Radioactive dating using aluminum-26 indicated at least one inclusion formed essentially at the very beginning of Solar System history, within roughly the first 100,000 years after the earliest known solids condensed.

In other words, Bennu contains fragments that have survived for approximately 4.567 billion years with surprisingly little alteration. Yet, those ancient relics also preserve evidence that they later encountered liquid water.

Several inclusions show minerals partially replaced by phyllosilicates—water-bearing clay minerals—while magnetite and other alteration products reveal that water once circulated through Bennu’s ancient parent body after these primordial objects had already become incorporated into it.

For scientists, that sequence helps establish a timeline. First, the earliest high-temperature solids formed close to the newborn Sun. Later, they were transported outward through the protoplanetary disk. Only after they became part of Bennu’s larger parent asteroid did liquid water alter portions of the rock.

Researchers found distinct similarities between Bennu’s inclusions and those previously identified in samples returned from Japan’s Hayabusa2 mission to asteroid Ryugu, as well as in rare CI carbonaceous chondrite meteorites found on Earth.

The oxygen isotopes, crystal chemistry, and formation ages all closely match, suggesting these seemingly distant objects inherited material from the same population of ancient Solar System building blocks.

That mutual heritage points toward a surprisingly interconnected early Solar System, where material formed close to the Sun was efficiently transported across enormous distances before eventually becoming incorporated into multiple asteroid populations.

However,  the absence of something proved just as revealing as what scientists found.

Unlike many carbonaceous meteorites, Bennu contains no large refractory inclusions larger than about one-tenth of a millimeter. Other meteorites frequently preserve inclusions ranging from submillimeter sizes up to several centimeters across.

According to the researchers, the missing population may reflect the increasing influence of the Solar System’s first giant planet.

As proto-Jupiter accumulated mass, its gravity likely created a pressure bump within the gas disk encircling the young Sun. Such pressure bumps act as natural traffic jams for dust, trapping larger particles while allowing much smaller grains to continue drifting through the disk.

Under this scenario, larger refractory inclusions became concentrated closer to Jupiter’s orbit. At the same time, only the smallest particles were able to migrate farther outward into the distant regions where Bennu’s parent body eventually formed.

If correct, Bennu’s microscopic inclusions effectively record the influence of Jupiter before the giant planet had even fully matured.

The hypothesis also helps explain why Bennu, Ryugu, and CI meteorites all possess nearly identical populations of tiny refractory inclusions while lacking the larger varieties commonly found elsewhere.

Rather than showing different source materials, the distinction may instead reflect where—and perhaps when—their parent bodies assembled within the developing protoplanetary disk.

The findings similarly reinforce earlier studies suggesting Bennu is among the Solar System’s most chemically primitive objects. Because large refractory inclusions contain unusually high concentrations of certain elements, their absence helps preserve Bennu’s overall composition close to that of the earliest solar nebula from which the planets formed.

That makes the asteroid an unusually valuable time capsule. Every new microscopic grain examined inside the OSIRIS-REx collection provides another insight into processes that occurred billions of years before Earth existed as a habitable world.

Rather than simply representing rubble from a small asteroid, Bennu appears to preserve a remarkably faithful record of how the Solar System sorted, mixed, transported, and assembled its earliest building materials.

The study also demonstrates why sample-return missions have grown increasingly important to planetary science. Laboratory instruments on Earth can perform measurements impossible for spacecraft operating millions of miles away, letting researchers reconstruct events that occurred within the Solar System’s first fractions of a million years.

“We conclude that Bennu’s parent planetesimal, like those of Ryugu and CI chondrites, accreted small refractory inclusions that persisted in the outer Solar System beyond the influence of the proto-Jupiter-induced pressure bump,” researchers write. “Taken together, these findings highlight the need to integrate Bennu samples into comparative studies of early Solar System solids to better constrain the diversity and possible genetic links among planetesimal formation pathways,” researchers write.

The study, “Refractory inclusions in Bennu samples indicative of outer Solar System accretion,” appeared in Nature Communications.

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

The first proper brain scan involving the effects of mescaline found the drug ignoring the regions where psychedelic research has spent a decade studying, settling instead on the one structure no one really expected.

Sometime around 3,700 BC, someone in what is now southwest Texas cut two tops off a peyote cactus and dried them. They spent most of the twentieth century in a drawer at the Witte Museum in San Antonio, and when chemists finally analyzed them in the early 2000s, the mescaline was still detectable — roughly 2% alkaloids by weight, 5,700 years on.

Those dried-out cactus tops, where the drug compound is concentrated, remain the oldest plant drug ever to give up a major bioactive compound to chemical analysis. And with thousands of years of use, mescaline remains a bit of a scientific mystery.

Mescaline became a Schedule 1 substance under the Controlled Substances Act in 1970, and the classification effectively ended research on it. LSD and psilocybin eventually clawed their way back into laboratories for scientific research, but mescaline, the older compound by several thousand years, doesn’t have the same level of lab testing.

Now, a new study in Neuroscience Bulletin has become the first to properly look, and the answer is not what most expected.

Researchers at Northeastern University’s Center for Translational Neuroimaging scanned 24 rats, evenly split by sex. After a single dose of mescaline, while the animals were awake (anesthesia flattens the very signals a drug study is trying to read), the drug largely ignored the forebrain. It went almost entirely for the cerebellum, which is a strange location for a psychedelic. 

The cerebellum is the lump at the back and bottom of the brain where balance and motor coordination live. It also holds more than half of all the neurons in the brain, and everything it computes leaves through just three narrow output channels.

An interpretation, proposed by neuroscientist Anna Devor in 2002, is that the cerebellum is the “Great Gate.” As the brain receives sensory information, it acts as a filter that suppresses the sensory information that the brain already predicted and passes along only what it did not expect. A working brain spends most of its time discarding what it saw coming.

Under mescaline, the gate appeared to come off its hinges.

Activity inside the cerebellum dropped sharply, while its connections outward multiplied to the hippocampus, the thalamus, the sensory cortex, and the midbrain. Quieter on the inside, wired to far more on the outside. The researchers read this as a filter that has stopped filtering and started broadcasting, pushing raw sensory information into regions that normally receive it neatly packaged.

“Wouldn’t it be devastating if you didn’t ‘gate’ all of that sensory information out?” senior author Craig Ferris explained in a university press statement.

The clearest evidence for that reading came from a smell test. Rats were given almond odor, a reliably rewarding stimulus, and in the control group, it lit up 48 of the 169 brain regions the team tracked. Under mescaline, the response was essentially abolished, flattened close to nothing across the board.

Broken down by modality, smell, touch, and hearing were all measurably blunted, while the visual system showed no significant change at all — a peculiar result for a compound whose entire cultural reputation rests on what it does to sight. 

The authors put the discrepancy down to species differences, reasonably enough given that rats navigate by nose and whisker, but it remains one of the odder findings in the paper. What makes this significant is the comparison. 

Mescaline, LSD, and psilocybin all act on the same target, the 5-HT2A serotonin receptor, and all three produce broadly similar experiences in people, which has encouraged researchers to treat findings from one as transferable to the others. However, brains don’t seem to cooperate.

Earlier work from this same lab found LSD acting on the prefrontal cortex, thalamus, and hippocampus, and psilocybin engaging cortico-striato-thalamic circuits. Mescaline’s acute signature sat in neither place.

“The power of mescaline to me is that it is doing something different than other psychedelics,” said lead author Noah Cavallaro. “Essentially, the cerebellum is being shut down internally, but it’s talking more to other parts of the brain.”

The distinctiveness is narrower than it first appears, though. The lab’s own psilocybin work also produced pronounced cerebellar hyperconnectivity, so the sprawling network changes are not unique to mescaline; what looks specific to it is the acute suppression, the cerebellum falling quiet while the rest of the brain carried on largely unaffected.

“If two compounds produce similar hallucinogenic symptoms through different neural pathways, comparing them could help us pinpoint what’s actually causing those specific experiences,” Cavallaro said.

That being said, there are some cautions offered in the paper. First, these were rats, and rat and human brains differ most in the cerebellar-cortical wiring. Second, only one dose was tested. Third, the team did not monitor heart rate or breathing during scanning, so ordinary cardiovascular effects cannot be cleanly separated from neural ones.

Lastly, the researchers also flagged recent work showing that the scanner signal itself can run opposite to a brain region’s actual oxygen use, which complicates reading any of these images as direct neural activity. The one previous attempt to image mescaline in humans, a small study decades ago, found a different pattern entirely.

With all that being said, the paper presents a key social issue. Mescaline’s status as a drug has left it largely untested, and only now are we learning about what it can do to the brain, outside of the anecdotes of its users.

After fifty years of regulatory silence, scientists are just starting to answer a question people have arguably been asking since the Neolithic.

Scientists working at the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (ESO’s VLT) in Chile have detected evidence for an unusual, ‘moon-like object’ in the CD-35 2722 system that doesn’t appear to orbit a planet.

The research team behind the discovery said the unusual object, which orbits a brown dwarf that orbits a large, Sun-like star, doesn’t fit normal astronomical categories, leaving them unsure what to name it.

If confirmed, the unusual space object would be the first moon without a host planet ever discovered. Such a confirmation would also make the newly termed “exosatellite” the first exomoon of any type discovered outside our Solar System.

Moon-Like Object Part of ‘Super Weird’ System

According to a statement announcing the moon-like object, ESO student Kevin Hoy had been monitoring the CD-35 2722 star system for months. The measurements that spotted the new, moon-like object were taken with the observatory’s CRIRES+ instrument using the radial velocity method that spotted the first planet around a Sun-like star.

During that time, the researcher and lead author of a study detailing the find said he noticed the system was “super weird” compared to our local Solar System. While the star at the center of the system, with a mass of about half of our Sun, was not unusual, they also determined that it is orbited by a brown dwarf. Brown dwarfs are astronomical objects too small to be a star, but too massive to be a planet, making the pairing unusual. Still, it was not unheard of.

However, according to Hoy, when the team spotted a third, smaller object in the system, they were left confused. Measurements indicated it is at least as massive as Jupiter, suggesting it may be a moon orbiting the Brown Dwarf, only without a host planet.

“The satellite we report is a giant gaseous body orbiting a highly massive companion, itself several times the mass of Jupiter,” explained Alice Zurlo, Director of the Millennium Nucleus of Young Exoplanets and their Moons (YEMS) in Chile project and collaborator on the study.

Mysterious ‘Exosatellite’ Defies Traditional Classification

The team has temporarily named the moon-like object an “exosatellite.” However, Hoy said the object’s status as a ‘third wheel’ in the system makes them want to classify it as a moon, “even if it is nothing like the small, rocky moons we have in our system.”

“This system is somewhat hard to define using Solar-System-based words like ‘planet’ and ‘moon’,” the researcher explained. “The exosatellite is clearly massive enough to be a planet, but it does not orbit a star, though it orbits an object that orbits a star.”

Director Zurlo said the differences between the observed system and our own Solar System have added to the difficulty in labeling the moon-like object.

“We have a clear delineation between the planets and the Sun in the Solar System, so defining things like moons is simple,” Zurlo explained. “In the CD-35 2722 system, where we are blurring the lines between stars, planets, and moons, the whole thing becomes more complicated to describe.”

“This System is Truly Unique and Represents a Breakthrough”

When discussing the significance of the moon-like object, Director Zurlo said detecting satellites in other systems will help researchers better understand the diversity in formation and evolution of planets, moons, and other moon-like objects. The director also noted the historical nature of the detection.

“As exotic as it is, this system is truly unique and represents a breakthrough: the first plausible detection of an exosatellite,” the researcher explained.

Moving forward, the team said the increased sensitivity of the 39-meter mirror on the ESO’s in-development Extremely Large Telescope (ELT) will allow for the detection of even smaller moons, including potentially spotting moons the size of Earth’s largest satellite. The researchers said such detections will likely force the astronomical community to reconsider how planetary objects are labeled, especially those in systems so radically different from our own.

The study “Planetary-mass exosatellite detected around the substellar companion of a star” was published in the journal Nature.

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

The United States Space Development Agency (SDA), in support of the U.S. Space Force, has awarded contracts to L3Harris Technologies and Sierra Space Corporation to build and deliver 36 Accelerated Missile Defense Tranche 3 (AMDT3) space vehicles (SVs) designed to operate in four distinct orbital planes.

Part of the Tracking Layer for Tranche 3 of the Proliferated Warfighter Space Architecture (PWSA), the space vehicles will support the White House’s space-based segment ‘Golden Dome for America’ antimissile defense system to expand the country’s missile tracking and defense network, with a projected delivery date of 2028.

36 Space Vehicles Orbiting in Four Separate Planes Will Aid Missile Defense

According to a statement announcing the awards, the 36 space vehicles will operate across four separate orbital planes. Half of the vehicles covering two of the four orbital planes will be made by Sierra Space Corporation. The statement from the SDA describes the vehicles as “missile warning/missile tracking” SVs loaded with specialized sensor packages. An official at the SDA speaking on background told The Debrief that the details of the sensor technologies and capabilities are not available at this time.

The second half of the vehicle order covering the other two orbital planes will be made by defense technology company L3Harris Technologies. Their award calls for 18 Hypersonic and Ballistic Tracking Space Sensor (HBTSS)-like missile defense variant SVs.

When The Debrief asked the SDA for clarification on the term “variant” space vehicles, the official explained that this designation represents the different types of sensor packages that each company will provide. For the L3Harris award, the SDA explained that their sensor is an advancement on earlier work performed with the Missile Defense Agency under the Hypersonic and Ballistic Tracking Space Sensor (HBTSS) program.

Infrared Sensors Will Integrate with a Low-Latency Communication Network

When discussing the significance of the twin awards, the SDA said their deployment will expand the company’s missile defense sensing established in previous phases “in support of homeland defense and theater defense.”

“Each AMDT3 SV will be interoperable with all SDA Tranche 1, Tranche 2, and Tranche 3 SVs and will operate in an integrated fashion through a common ground system,” the statement explained.

They also note that the tracking layer is equipped with infrared sensors “that will integrate with a low-latency communication network.”

“With these awards, SDA is accelerating the deployment of the Tracking Layer to provide the homeland, our deployed forces, and allies with global, persistent indications, detection, identification, warning, tracking, and defense against advanced and evolving missile threats,” explained G.P. Sandhoo, Space Force Portfolio acquisition executive for Missile Warning and Tracking and SDA director. “AMDT3 expands upon SDA’s previous and current Tracking Layer generations — Tranches 1, 2 and 3 — marking another milestone in delivering a resilient, global missile warning, missile tracking, and missile defense capability.”

Future Satellites Will Offer Even Greater Capability to the Warfighter

Although a specific delivery date for each of the company’s separate awards was not made public, the announcement did say they are expected to be available for launch “by the end of 2028.” Once aloft and in their respective orbital planes, the missile tracking and defense space vehicles will be operated and maintained by the U.S. Space Force.

When asked by The Debrief if there are any plans to add capabilities beyond detection and tracking to the multi-layer system in the future, the SDA said future improvements are one of the main pillars of the organization’s business model.

“We use spiral development to deliver new generations of satellites (we call them “tranches”) every few years,” the SDA explained. “Each new tranche represents an enhancement over the previous and offers greater capability to the warfighter, either through additional sensing coverage, or through technology advances (or potentially both).” 

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

NASA’s Juno mission scientists have reported the first successful temperature measurements below the surface of Jupiter’s moon Io, including indications of significant heating within the moon’s shallow subsurface.

Collected during a pair of close flybys of the Solar System’s most volcanically active world, the Juno mission measurements were described as a complete “surprise” since the instrument was designed for a different purpose.

“[The readings] break new observational ground for both fiery and icy worlds beyond our planet,” the team said.

MWR Instrument Designed to Probe Jupiter’s Atmosphere Provides Double Duty

Due to the extreme gravitational pull of its host planet, Jupiter, Io is repeatedly stretched and pulled as its slightly elliptical orbit carries it around the massive gas giant. This repeated motion generates a tremendous amount of heat, which the scientists note is “many times greater” than the same type of heat generated on Earth.

However, a detailed understanding of this process has remained elusive, as the only data on the moon’s inner heat came from infrared telescope observations. The team notes this data is limited to the temperature of Io’s upper rocky surface layer.

Conversely, Juno is equipped with an instrument called the Microwave Radiometer (MWR). According to the team’s statement announcing the successful subsurface temperature detection, Juno’s Microwave Radiometer was custom designed by Scott Bolton, the mission’s principal investigator at Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio and a co-author of the study detailing the team’s findings, to “peer beneath Jupiter’s top clouds” for a closer look at the gas giant’s complex atmosphere.

“The MWR’s six microwave antennas serve as a single instrument, simultaneously detecting microwaves at a wide range of wavelengths, from about half an inch to 20 inches (1.3 to 51 centimeters),” the team explains.

“Everywhere We Looked, We Found the Temperature Rising”

Bolton said the team’s novel approach allowed the instrument to observe wavelengths from different depths, “providing a new way to characterize the deep atmosphere of giant planets and the subsurface crusts of icy and rocky moons.” This included observations of Jupiter’s other ‘Galilean’ moons, Ganymede and Europa.

“At Ganymede and Europa, we explored tens of miles below the surface, assuming their ice shells were mostly pure water,” the mission scientists explained.

However, Bolton added, using the instrument to successfully probe into Io’s volcanic rock “was an unexpected discovery.”

The feat was accomplished during a pair of flybys on December 30, 2023, and February 3, 2024, where Juno came within roughly 930 miles (1,500 km) of Io’s surface. Shannon Brown, the paper’s lead author at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, said that during these flybys the MWR instrument measured the moon’s thermal emission “at depths ranging from a few inches down to tens of feet.”

“Everywhere we looked, we found the temperature rising by more than 40 degrees Fahrenheit just several feet into the surface — a gradient far steeper than solar heating alone can explain,” Brown said.

Although more information is likely needed to make a conclusive determination, the team said that the data suggests two possible explanations for the readings. The first option is heat rising steadily through what the team termed a “conductive crust.”

“While this background heat flow — measured at 1 to 3 watts per square meter — is relatively gentle on a local scale (roughly equivalent to a small nightlight glowing under every square yard), across the entire moon it represents a release of energy up to 30 times Earth’s average,” they explained.

Another possibility proposed by the joint research team suggested that the heat signal detected by Juno’s MWR could be coming from cooling lava flows covered by 30 to 35 feet (9 to 11 meters) of solidified crust that cover approximately 10% of Io’s surface “at any given time.”

A Similar Instrument Could be Used to Scan Earth

When discussing the implications of the team’s findings, Bolton said the “surprising” ability to see below Io’s surface “has important implications for studying Earth’s volcanoes.” He also noted that if scientists used a similar instrument to measure areas on Earth near volcanoes, they might see a similar heat signature in the planet’s subsurface temperature gradient, “providing new information on how terrestrial volcanoes work.”

“Io provides a unique window into learning how tidal heating works throughout the cosmos, a fundamental process that provides energy and heat to worlds that are far from their parent star,” Bolton explained. “This process can not only create the most volcanic body in the solar system, in the case of Io, but also fuels the subsurface oceans on the moons of giant planets, such as Europa and Ganymede.”

“Up until this point, we could only observe the heat escaping at the surface or through eruptions,” the mission scientists added. “Now we can characterize how the heat is moving from the interior toward the surface.”

NASA has additional information about Juno available at the mission’s official webpage.

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

For more than a century, two enormous structures cutting across the desert southwest of Egypt’s famous Red Pyramid have been assumed to be ancient transport features—perhaps roads or ramps used to haul limestone blocks during pyramid construction. However,  a new study argues that archaeologists may have been looking at the wrong answer all along.

Instead of transportation infrastructure, researchers now suggest the mysterious earthworks could represent a nearly 4,600-year-old sophisticated hydraulic engineering system, with two giant dams built to capture, regulate, and redirect water through the desert landscape.

If confirmed, the discovery would dramatically revise our understanding of how the builders of Egypt’s pyramids engineered not only stone, but water itself.

The new research, published in Nature Heritage Science, combines satellite imagery, historical maps, digital elevation modeling, watershed analysis, and paleoclimate data to reexamine the little-studied features at Dahshur, the royal necropolis where Pharaoh Snefru built both the Bent Pyramid and the Red Pyramid.

While no excavation has yet confirmed the interpretation, researchers argue that the structures display multiple characteristics far more consistent with dams than with construction ramps.

“This study presents, for the first time, evidence of two ancient, giant dams built across Wadi Dahshur, Egypt, along with a water diversion channel west of the Red Pyramid,” researchers write. “Satellite imagery and watershed mapping show that the two long structures, previously interpreted as stone transport ramps, exhibit the technical signature of dams, each extending 600–700 m and anchored to the valley flanks.”

The findings add a fascinating new chapter to one of archaeology’s enduring mysteries. How did ancient Egyptians organize the enormous logistical operation required to construct the pyramids during the Fourth Dynasty?

The Red Pyramid, completed around 2600 BCE during Snefru’s reign, is widely recognized as Egypt’s first successful “true” pyramid. Scientists have spent decades studying the monument itself. However, much less attention has been devoted to the surrounding landscape and the engineering systems that may have supported its construction.

According to researchers, the wider landscape may have been far more technologically sophisticated than previously appreciated.

The two massive structures stretch approximately 2,000 to 2,300 feet (600 to 700 meters) across Wadi Dahshur. Earlier researchers interpreted one as a transport route leading from nearby quarries while considering the other a natural rise in the terrain. However, the new analysis points to several features that appear difficult to reconcile with those interpretations.

Rather than following the valley, both structures run directly across it, anchoring into the surrounding hillsides much like embankment dams. One also contains a distinctive zigzag geometry that the researchers argue resembles a duckbill spillway—a specialized overflow design still used in modern hydraulic engineering because it can safely release significantly larger volumes of water than a straight spillway of the same width.

No securely identified duckbill-style spillway has previously been documented from ancient Egypt. So if that interpretation is correct, it would mean that the Dahshur structure is one of the earliest known examples of this type of hydraulic design anywhere in the world.

Researchers believe the two structures may have functioned together as a multi-stage flood-control system.

In their proposed scenario, one dam traps sediment carried by flash floods while allowing cleaner water to pass into a second reservoir. From there, water could have been diverted through an artificial channel running remarkably close to the western side of the Red Pyramid before reconnecting with the surrounding drainage network.

That canal is especially intriguing because it raises the possibility that water may have played a more direct role in pyramid construction than traditionally assumed.

Researchers have long known that the ancient Egyptians exploited waterways for transporting heavy stone. Previous discoveries at Giza revealed harbor basins and canals associated with pyramid construction, while papyrus records from Wadi el-Jarf describe crews transporting limestone by boat during Khufu’s reign.

The newly proposed Dahshur canal could represent another piece of that larger hydraulic network.

If maintained at a stable water level, it could have assisted in transporting heavy materials on barges or water-assisted sleds over relatively flat ground. Even beyond transportation, the water could have supported workers, supplied construction areas, mixed mortar, reduced dust, and later been adapted for irrigation or ceremonial uses.

The hypothesis also depends on a very different view of Egypt’s climate nearly 4,600 years ago.

Today, the Dahshur plateau lies within an extremely arid landscape, making the idea of dams initially seem ridiculous. However, paleoclimate evidence reviewed by the researchers suggests northern Egypt during the Old Kingdom was considerably wetter than it is today.

Although the Sahara was already drying following the end of the African Humid Period, seasonal rainfall appears to have remained substantially higher than modern levels. Even infrequent storms could have produced powerful flash floods racing through normally dry wadis.

The study estimates that while average annual rainfall may have ranged between roughly 2 to 6 inches (50 to 150 millimeters), individual storm events could generate enough runoff to create destructive floodwaters requiring engineered control systems. Rather than depending solely on the annual Nile inundation, Egyptian engineers may also have exploited seasonal runoff flowing through desert valleys.

That broader perspective fits with growing evidence that water management extended well beyond the Nile floodplain itself.

Other nearby examples showing evidence of water management well beyond the Nile floodplain include the famous Sadd el-Kafara dam, located less than 12 miles (20 kilometers) east of Dahshur, which is generally regarded as one of the world’s oldest large dams.

Additional archaeological sites around Saqqara and Giza likewise show increasing evidence of canals, flood-control structures, and carefully engineered landscapes associated with pyramid construction.

Even so, the researchers stress that their interpretation is still a hypothesis awaiting archaeological confirmation.

The structures themselves have never been excavated. Much of the area lies within a military zone, limiting direct access, while centuries of windblown sand have buried much of the earliest construction. Modern roads, pipelines, and other infrastructure have also altered parts of the site, making efforts to reconstruct its original appearance more difficult.

Future excavations will therefore be critical. Researchers hope sediment studies could determine whether deposits behind the structures resulted from flowing water rather than drifting desert sand.

Excavations may also reveal construction techniques, protective stonework, spillway features, and datable material capable of establishing whether the structures truly belong to Snefru’s era.

If those investigations support the new interpretation, they would suggest that Old Kingdom engineers possessed a much wider understanding of landscape-scale hydraulic engineering than previously identified.

More intriguing, the study hints that similar forgotten infrastructure could still lie covered beneath Egypt’s deserts, disguised as ordinary landscape features or misidentified for generations.

“Nevertheless, the convergence of geomorphological evidence, watershed connectivity, hydraulic plausibility, and regional cultural context supports the interpretation of the Dahshur structures as intentional large-scale hydraulic installations rather than incidental landscape features,” researchers write. “Other hydraulic structures are most probably lost in the desert, waiting to be identified as such.”

The recent study, “Two possible ancient dams near the Red Pyramid on the Dashur Plateau, Egypt,” by Xavier Landreau, Guillaume Piton, and Sayed Hemeda, appeared in npj Heritage Science. 

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

Galaxies, stars, and living cells are all examples of local order emerging in the universe. At first glance, that seems to contradict one of physics’ oldest principles.

However, a recent study in Physical Review D offers a mathematical explanation for how these structures form while still obeying the second law of thermodynamics.

The second law of thermodynamics states that entropy, or disorder, in an isolated system always increases over time. Einstein famously said that “the second law of thermodynamics occupies a unique position among the laws of Nature,” reflecting how fundamental he believed the principle to be.

In its early days, the universe was smooth and uniform, with low entropy. As it expanded, gravity pulled gas into stars, stars into galaxies, and eventually made life possible. Each step seems to create order in one place, even though the universe as a whole became more disordered. Cosmologists have usually explained this by pointing to the universe’s growing volume.

Gravity as a Ledger, Not a Force

Mathematician Ginestra Bianconi at Queen Mary University of London addressed this problem with a framework called Gravity from Entropy. Rather than treating gravity as a fundamental force, the Gravity from Entropy framework proposes that it emerges from an information-based difference between two descriptions of spacetime geometry. One metric describes the actual shape of spacetime, while the other describes the geometry that matter and curvature would create. When these two match, gravity disappears. When they differ, gravity arises from the difference.

In the low-energy, weak-curvature limit, the framework reduces to general relativity. In the new study, Bianconi adds a thermodynamic perspective. She applies Gravity from Entropy to the standard model of an expanding universe and shows that the local geometric degrees of freedom follow the first law of thermodynamics, with their own temperature and pressure emerging from the equations.

Falling Density, Rising Total

One of the study’s central findings is the distinction between total entropy and entropy per unit volume. As the universe grows, the total entropy increases, just as the second law demands. However, the study found that entropy per unit volume decreases over time even as the universe’s total entropy continues to increase. Within the Gravity from Entropy framework, Bianconi proposes that this declining local entropy density may help explain how galaxies and other cosmic structures emerge.

The study also shows that these geometric temperatures change depending on what dominates the universe. In a universe dominated by matter or radiation, the temperature decreases over time. In a universe dominated by dark energy, like our own, they remain nearly constant. The framework even assigns a temperature and pressure to empty spacetime.

A Theory Still Waiting to Be Tested

“This work reveals how the Gravity from Entropy theory can tackle the challenging question of reconciling the second law of thermodynamics with the emergence of complexity in our universe,” stated Bianconi. “These results may open new avenues for investigating the long-standing problem of reconciling the foundations of cosmological irreversibility, the emergence of complex structures, and ultimately life with fundamental gravitational dynamics.”

So far, Gravity from Entropy has not been confirmed by observations. The theory makes predictions that future observations of large-scale cosmic structures and other gravitational phenomena could test. While it remains unproven, Bianconi believes it could offer a new way to link gravity, thermodynamics, quantum mechanics, and the rise of complexity in the universe.

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.

In the millennia that followed the last Ice Age, early humans began making their way into the inland mountains of southern Norway as ancient glaciers receded, revealing new portions of the landscape.

However, the landscape in this region made it impossible for fish to make their way upstream into high mountain lakes, impeded by waterfalls and other barriers. Somehow, fish appeared in these upland bodies of water anyway—so how did they get there?

The natural answer to this ancient question is that humans must have carried fish from regions further downstream, populating these ancient and once-lifeless lakes with an abundant food source. The question archaeologists have been unable to answer is when, precisely, these ancient transplants of wildlife took place.

Now, archaeologists with the University of Oslo believe they have finally solved this longstanding riddle, with the discovery of the remains of 7,000-year-old fish traps that reveal the likely period during which early Mesolithic inhabitants of the region engaged in some of its earliest fish farming.

The discovery not only offers archaeological evidence for when fish were likely first introduced into the region, but also reveals that agriculture was not the only means of nature management that these early Norwegians engaged in.

“For more than 100 years, it has been known that the fish inhabiting watercourses in the Norwegian mountains are descended from specimens translocated by humans,” says Axel Mjærum, a researcher at the University of Oslo and the lead author of a new study detailing the findings.

“However, until now, it has remained unclear when people first began transporting fish upstream into lakes and rivers that originally lacked natural fish,” he adds.

A 7000-Year-Old Discovery Leads to a Breakthrough

Offering a rare opportunity to unravel some of this mystery, the discovery of ancient fish traps constructed from wood, the remnants of which were discovered in southern Norway’s Lake Tesse, provided a unique look at the period during which fish transport and harvesting likely began.

Radiocarbon dating of the wood from the traps reveals that Salmo trutta, the region’s brown trout species, were relocated to the lake during the Mesolithic period.

Growing to considerable sizes, this species of trout was an ideal, high-protein food source that could readily be harvested from the lake once a thriving population had been established.

Although agriculture would later become a major source of food for these ancient Scandinavians, the period during which the fish traps are dated to predates farming in the region, which supports the idea that these people were hunter-gatherers, and also fishermen.

Environmental Management in Ancient Scandinavia

More broadly, the findings by Mjærum and his colleagues reveal the degree to which these Mesolithic Scandinavians were managing their food supply through direct control of the natural environment, setting the pace for several more millennia of food production.

Even today, brown trout are among the many fish species sportsmen harvest—the descendants of the very same fish originally carried to southern mountain Norwegian lakes thousands of years ago.

Mjærum says that the ancient Mesolithic Norwegian’s “release of brown trout into previously fishless lakes in the Norwegian mountains around 5000 B.C. is a very clear example of humans’ general capacity to reshape entire ecosystems, even before the introduction of farming.”

The study, “The introduction of fish to the Scandinavian mountains by hunter-fisher-gatherers 5000 BC,” appeared in the journal 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.

Archaeologists from the Israeli Antiquities Authority and Tel Aviv University, conducting excavations in the City of David, have unearthed massive wooden beams burned during the destruction of the First Temple in 586 BCE.

The research team behind the discovery notes that the huge wooden support beams, which were surprisingly well preserved for ancient wood structures, allow for much more precise dating of the site. The researchers also highlight the apparently deliberate efforts by the city’s rebuilders to leave the ruins in place for future generations to witness.

2,600-Year-Old Wooden Beams Preserved by Melting Plaster

According to a statement emailed to The Debrief, the ancient, charred wooden beams discovered within the Jerusalem Walls National Park were relics from a collapsed building destroyed by “the intense fire of the First Temple’s destruction” over 2,600 years ago.

“The beams appear to have served as the roof of an inner courtyard in a building from the First Temple period,” explained Excavation Director Efrat Bocher.

Although not unprecedented, the team said that finding intact wood relics of this advanced age is rare, since organic materials like wood typically break down over such extended time periods. In this case, they suggest that the surprisingly intact beams were likely preserved by melting plaster, “sealing the burnt wood beneath.”

“During the destruction, they collapsed onto the floor,” Director Bocher explained. “We believe that the plaster cladding of the building’s walls, melted by the fire, covered the charred wooden beams, and ultimately enabled their exceptional preservation.”

Growth Rings Help Archaeologists Narrow the Site’s Dating Range

When discussing the historic and scientific value of the discovery, Dr. Johanna Regev of the Israel Antiquities Authority, who studied the wooden beams up close, noted the exceptional rarity of finding ancient wood with “such a large number” of visible growth rings.

“Here, in the City of David, we found thick beams with many rings, offering significant research potential,” Dr. Regev said.

For example, the researcher explains, more growth rings help scientists date sites and materials with increased precision and “higher dating resolution.”

“Until now, we could date finds within a range of hundreds of years,” Dr. Regev explained. “Now we can attain much greater precision, narrowing the dating range down to as little as ten years.”

City’s Rebuilders Left Ruins in Place as a “Testament to the Destruction”

While the historic site was witness to a tragic destruction, the research team said returning residents beginning to rebuild the city appear to have intentionally left the remains untouched for future generations to see.

“[They] probably made a deliberate decision to preserve the memory of the destruction by leaving behind remains that tell the story of the catastrophe,” the team explained.

Dr. Yiftah Shalev, who directs the excavation on behalf of the Israel Antiquities Authority alongside Prof. Yuval Gadot of Tel Aviv University, said the idea of a landscape of memory is “familiar from many cultures around the world.”

“Preserving memory is a human need, seeking to preserve what once existed,” Dr. Shalev explained. “Here we see it in its clearest form: a deliberate choice to leave ruins in place as a testament to the destruction and build the new layer over them.”

On a more personal note, Director Bocher noted the serendipitous timing of the discovery “just before Tisha B’Av.” According to Hillel.org, the holiday, which is recognized as the saddest day on the Jewish calendar, “is a day of mourning for tragedies across Jewish history, most particularly the destruction and loss of the first and second Temple and Jerusalem.”

“This discovery makes you feel that you are witnessing the very moment of destruction, the moment when it all happened,” the researcher concluded, adding that “it’s deeply moving.”

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

For decades, scholars have debated whether the Qumran sect associated with the Dead Sea Scrolls actually used its unusual 364-day calendar, or viewed it as more of a theoretical ideal.

Now, a new study published in the Tarbiz Quarterly for Jewish Studies suggests that neither explanation is fully accurate. Instead, Prof. Eshbal Ratzon argues that the community used the calendar for a time before seasonal drift and changing Hasmonean politics prompted them to abandon the system.

A Calendar as a Religious Statement

Ratzon, a professor at Tel Aviv University, set out to answer a question that has puzzled scholars for decades. Unlike the approximately 365.25-day solar year, the Qumran calendar consisted of exactly 364 days. The calendar used 364 days because the number divides evenly into 52 seven-day weeks, so every festival would always fall on the same weekday each year.

To the Qumran sect, this order in the calendar demonstrated what they saw as God’s perfect design. They believed God set the calendar at Creation and that people could not change it. This belief clashed with Jerusalem’s religious leaders, whose priests used a lunisolar calendar that most Jewish people followed during the Second Temple period.

Reading the Evidence Differently

The mathematics that gave the calendar its perceived order also led to practical issues. A 364-day year lags behind the solar year by about a day and a quarter each year, causing festivals to drift by nearly a month over two decades. After several decades, a spring harvest festival could fall in winter. For a group that linked its holidays to agriculture, this gradual shift was a serious problem.

Two main theories have shaped the debate for years. One suggests that the sect occasionally added extra days to correct the drift, while the other argues that the 364-day calendar was only a theoretical model and not used in daily life. Ratzon argues that the Dead Sea Scrolls do not clearly support either view. Nearly twenty of the recovered scrolls concern calendars or astronomy, highlighting the importance of the subject within the community. The Book of Jubilees, a key text for the sect, goes further by criticizing the lunar calendar and presenting the 364-day system as the original calendar given to Moses at Sinai.

“The Qumran calendar has long been regarded as one of the Qumran sect’s defining features, but also as one of the most baffling mysteries of the Dead Sea Scrolls,” Ratzon said.

Why the Sect Moved On

Ratzon’s reconstruction sees the abandonment of the calendar as a two-stage process, rather than a single failure. The growing seasonal drift made the calendar increasingly impractical. At the same time, the sect’s relationship with the Hasmonean rulers improved under Alexander Jannaeus, who supported religious decisions closer to the sect’s views and disagreed with the Pharisees who led the Temple in Jerusalem.

According to Ratzon, improving relations with the Hasmonean rulers made it possible for the sect to adopt the Temple calendar for daily use, while still holding the 364-day system as an ideal. They believed it was valid at Creation and would be restored in the future.

The debate over the Qumran community has continued for decades. While Ratzon’s proposal does not settle that debate, it offers a new explanation for how a calendar once central to the sect’s identity could eventually become more of a religious ideal than a practical system.

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.

New analysis of microscopic plant remains collected from ashy pits within Cloggs Cave on Australian Aboriginal nation land confirms that local ancient inhabitants burned chosen grasses for magic and spiritual rituals dating back 25,000 years before present.

The research team behind the new analysis said the evidence also suggests that the ancient cave has been in continuous use throughout the entire timespan, offering scientists a rare glimpse into the magic and spiritual beliefs of Australia’s ancient inhabitants.

Oral Traditions Said Coggs Cave was Used for Magic and Spiritual Rituals

According to a statement announcing the ‘magical’ discovery, 19th-century ethnographic reports recorded a network of caves in Gippsland and the Southern Victorian Alps. Those same reports also noted that local oral traditions suggested that the caves were used by powerful women and men called “mulla-mullung” and other spiritual practitioners for magic, healing, and “cursing” rituals.

Previous archaeological expeditions determined that these caves, including the study site at Cloggs Cave, were occupied throughout the past 25,000 years. However, little direct evidence has been provided to support the oral traditions of magic and healing taking place within the caves.

Instead of cave art or other magical relics that may not have survived the passage of time, the research team, led by Dr Elle Grono, School of Culture, History and Language, ANU College of Asia and the Pacific, Australian National University, Canberra, Australia, focused on phytoliths, which are microscopic silica bodies from plants recovered from Cloggs Cave. To gain insight into the potential uses of Cloggs Cave, the studied phytoliths were recovered from its buried deposits.

When detailing the process, Dr. Grono said that phytoliths have the advantage of mostly accumulating where a plant decays. Conversely, plant pollen can be dispersed by winds or insects, diminishing some of their historic site value. This difference is critical, Grono said, because phytoliths found inside Cloggs Cave must have come from humans or other animals bringing them inside.

“No plants grow inside the cave due to a lack of light, so the phytoliths must have been carried in by people or by animals such as possums on their fur or through their scats,” the team leader explained.

Excavation of Ashy Deposits Includes Unexpected “Standing Stone”

To determine the taxonomic groups of the thousands of recovered phytoliths, the team examined the samples under a microscope. To ensure the samples were from plants brought into the cave by humans and not animals, the team used specimens collected from one pit that was 1.5 meters deep and a second that was 2.3 meters deep.

Grono said the team also exclusively studied half-burnt phytoliths from “ashy” layers within the pits. The researcher noted that this extra selection criterion also helps ensure the samples came from samples brought into the caves by humans, “as unburnt ones might have arrived through either means.”

The top layer of the two pits consisted of 73 thin, ashy layers of burnt plant material. When the research team performed optically stimulated luminescence and carbon dating tests to establish when the material was laid down, the latter via accelerator mass spectrometry,  the results placed the deposition of the material between 4,400 and 1,600 years ago.

When searching through the ashy pits, the team found a 28-cm-high “standing” stone. They note that subsequent analysis showed that the stone was likely erected in Cobbs Cave “by Old Ancestors for ritual purposes around 2,000 years ago.”

The “Old Ancestors” Were Selective About Which Grasses Were Brought Inside

When the analysis was complete, the team had identified 29 different phytolith types representing a wide range of plants. This included woody plants, herbs, and grasses.

The team determined that as much as 97% of the burnt matter came from grass. This included disparate species, such as grasses that prefer temperate or cooler climates and grasses that prefer warm and humid conditions to thrive, deposited in the same ash layer.

“Here we show that the Old Ancestors selected whole grasses from the wider landscape and carried them into Cloggs Cave to spread out in thin layers and burn,”  Dr. Grono said. “Over time, sediments covered these burnt layers, preserving each layer on top of another over thousands of years.”

The researchers said the taxonomic analysis revealed that the “Old Ancestors” were selective of which grass types they brought into the cave and which ones they omitted. For example, they avoided what the team noted were “diverse species” of grasses still plentiful in nearby riparian forest and open woodland before European settlement.

“The phytoliths found at Cloggs Cave were from different parts of grass plants such as stems, leaves, flowers, and roots, indicating that whole grasses were brought in, including the inedible parts,” Grono explained.

Selection and Burning Consistent With “Magic and Rituals”

Although there is no direct record of the reason the ancient people selected and burned grass inside of Cobbs Cave, dating back thousands of years, Professor Bruno David from Monash University, who co-led the excavations with GunaiKurnai Land and Waters Corporation, said the behavior is “consistent with GunaiKurnai traditional practices of using ash to perform magic and rituals.” Professor David also noted the practice could allow the participants to track the footsteps of anyone entering the cave, “including spirit beings.”

The team also found macro-botanical evidence, including fat-smeared trimmed wooden sticks from Casuarina trees, in deeper and older pit deposits. Professor David said this discovery suggests that “other kinds of rituals using woody plants” were also performed in Cobbs Cave.

When discussing the historical significance of the discovery, the researchers said that finding partially or completely burned phytoliths “throughout the dated deposits” suggests that humans intentionally brought selected plants and grasses into the cave and burned them “over the entire timespan of the past 25,000 years.”

The study “Phytoliths from Cloggs Cave, GunaiKurnai Country (southeastern Australia) reveal the gathering of whole grasses for burning practices inside the cave” was published in Frontiers in Environmental Archaeology.

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

Scientists from the Salk Institute have determined that brain waves in the visual cortex serve as a computational engine, allowing the brain to construct internal representations of the external world that enhance prediction, reconstruction, and perception capabilities.

While the scientists behind the new study focused their work on the visual cortex, they suspect that similar brain waves washing over other areas of the brain’s surface likely serve a similar role for other sensory systems.

Unraveling the Role of Traveling Brain Waves in the Visual Cortex

The human brain uses electricity to communicate between synapses. Research has shown that this electrical activity can travel in waves across the brain’s surface. Called neural traveling waves, the phenomenon’s role in brain function and consciousness is not completely understood.

Previous studies have established that traveling brain waves play a significant role in behavior and attention. In 2020, Salk neuroscientist John Reynolds, PhD, successfully identified traveling brain waves in the visual systems of animals during a wakeful state.

According to a statement from Reynolds, the senior and co-corresponding author on the new paper, and colleagues, the 2020 research effort also found a direct correlation between traveling brain waves in the visual cortex and an animal’s ability to perceive objects directly in front of them. The authors suggest this discovery explained the “classic conundrum” of searching for something like a pair of keys or a phone that was right in front of you the whole time.

Although the connection between traveling brain waves and an awake animal’s ability to perceive objects seemed solid, Reynolds said he was left wondering why. 

Process is Analogous to LLM’s Like ChatGPT

In their newly proposed theory, Reynolds and colleagues suggest that traveling brain waves are not simply “electrical noise” resulting from the brain’s normal relaying of signals. Instead, the Salk Institute team proposes that the neural connections responsible for the generation of traveling brain waves change their physiological structure, or “synaptic weights,” to more accurately reflect the outside world.

“Each sight, smell, sound, and action of an animal alters the connections that generate these waves, building the neural circuitry that the brain uses to construct an internal representation of the external world,” the team’s statement explains.

In the visual cortex, the part of the brain responsible for receiving and processing visual information, the team proposed that traveling brain waves perform four distinct functions. These include modulating visual perception from moment to moment and turning recent visual sensory inputs into “internal representations” of objects, people, and surroundings.

The team proposes that traveling brain waves also help humans generate short-term predictions about their surroundings, and “store and replay patterns that represent memories of events unfolding in time.” Reynolds said the process laid out by his team is analogous to how ChatGPT and other LLMs translate and interpret data.

“They learn statistical structure from language and use that knowledge to generate meaningful and appropriately structured text that reflects the patterns of language,” the researcher explained. “The brain may be doing something functionally similar—a biological generative model built from the ground up by experience.”

“One Step Closer” to Understanding How Our Brains Compute the World

When detailing the potential impact of their proposed role for traveling brain waves in the visual cortex, the team highlights the contrast between a rich and complex world and its general predictability.

“Objects around you exist in 3D space, you see the world in retinal images that change with your eye and body movements, and the laws of physics and physiology overlay this all,” they explain.

Reynold’s team says that traveling brain waves are merely the brain’s way of internalizing these predictable “regularities” and encoding them in its synapse network. If correct, they said that this encoding would allow the brain to “infer the likely causes of sensory input and construct an internal model of the world.”

“This framing brings us one step closer to understanding how our brains compute the busy, messy world around us, turning a complicated sensory onslaught into behaviors and experiences,” they conclude.

The study “Neural traveling waves in cortex: network mechanisms and potential roles in neural computation” was published in Neuron.

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

Scientists are sounding the alarm over a worsening situation in Earth’s oceans and freshwater systems, according to a new study that warns of “irreversible” changes our planet could be facing.

New research led by the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego has revealed the rapid disappearance of oxygen from bodies of sea and fresh water, leading to environmental changes that could endure for centuries if left unmitigated.

The new study, which appeared in the journal Limnology and Oceanography, argues that widespread aquatic deoxygenation—reduced levels of dissolved oxygen in oceans and coastal waters, lakes, rivers, and streams—is increasingly becoming a problem, and one that influences nine other crucial environmental processes.

These processes are all included in what is known as the Planetary Boundaries framework, a science-based tool that outlines the requirements of a safe operating space for humanity. Introduced in 2009 by Earth system scientists led by Johan Rockström, this framework identifies nine critical environmental processes that regulate Earth’s stability.

Specifically, the nine planetary boundaries outlined in this framework are climate change, biosphere integrity, land use changes, biogeochemical flow of nutrients, ocean acidification, freshwater changes, atmospheric aerosol loading, stratospheric ozone depletion, and pollution.

Now, the Scripps researchers behind the recent study say they believe dissolved oxygen levels should also be formally included in this framework.

Aquatic Deoxygenation is a Growing Concern

Erica Ferrer, a Scripps Oceanography alumna and current postdoctoral scholar at UC Santa Barbara’s National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis and lead author of the new study, says that her team’s work “is designed to elevate the profile of aquatic deoxygenation as a global threat and show that it does not operate in isolation.”

“The health and stability of our planet depends on the health and stability of aquatic ecosystems, which need oxygen to function normally,” Ferrer said.

Driving this growing problem, the new research says, is the excessive influx of nutrient pollution into water bodies, as well as anthropogenic warming, and changes occurring in natural ventilation systems within deep ocean waters.

With depleting oxygen levels scientists are seeing, longer-term changes to chemical and biological processes that regulate our planet’s climate are expected to occur. The decline, Ferrer and her colleagues argue, is also likely to impact a diverse range of aquatic organisms and ecosystems.

Even ocean mammals that acquire air at the surface are likely to be impacted, since deoxygenation can either cause the relocation or outright depletion of the organisms that make up their diets. This, in addition to causing severe damage to habitats and alterations to the food webs they depend on.

Ferrer and her colleague, study co-author and Scripps biological oceanographer Lisa Levin, are hopeful that their findings will encourage a deeper level of engagement on the potential ramifications of aquatic oxygen loss, and how other environmental challenges outlined in the planetary boundaries framework can act as multipliers, rather than separate existential concerns.

“Adding aquatic deoxygenation to the Planetary Boundaries framework will help us understand its impacts on Earth system stability,” Ferrer said in a statement, adding that mitigation of ocean deoxygenation impacts “represents a critical component of maintaining biodiversity and climate.”

Levin, Ferrer, and their colleagues’ study, “Abundant interactions and feedbacks between aquatic deoxygenation and the other planetary boundaries suggest ‘unsafe’ levels of oxygen loss with far‐reaching impacts,” appeared in the journal Limnology and Oceanography on June 30, 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.

More than 2,200 years Hannibal launched one of recorded history’s most daring military campaigns, leading roughly 46,000 soldiers and 37 war elephants across the towering Alps between modern-day France and Italy to invade the Roman Republic. Now, researchers believe they may have uncovered a surprising clue to one of antiquity’s greatest military mysteries.

For generations, historians have debated exactly which Alpine pass Hannibal used during his legendary crossing in 218 BC before descending into Italy and launching a campaign that brought Rome to the brink of defeat during the Second Punic War.

Any equally enduring mystery has been why the legendary Carthaginian general would burden his army with 37 war elephants, each weighing roughly three tons (about 6,600 pounds), while attempting one of the most difficult mountain crossings in military history?

A new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences suggests those two mysteries may actually be connected.

Rather than relying entirely on ancient accounts, particularly those of the Greek historian Polybius, or on geology and topography, researchers analyzed the energy required for Hannibal’s soldiers, horses, and elephants to traverse four leading candidate routes through the Alps.

Their findings show that the notoriously difficult Col de la Traversette was actually the most energy-efficient crossing—and that the elephants, far from being a crippling liability, may have been better suited for the journey as opposed to either the soldiers or the horses accompanying them.

The discovery provides a new perspective on one of history’s greatest military feats, suggesting that the biological limits of both humans and animals may help explain not only where Hannibal crossed the Alps, but why he believed his extraordinary gamble could succeed.

“Our analysis of the energy landscape challenging the army suggests that the Col de la Traversette would have been the shortest and energetically most efficient route,” researchers write. “In which case, driven by the aim to minimize the energy costs of the crossing, he would have chosen the Traversette route.”

Hannibal’s campaign remains one of history’s most astonishing logistical achievements. After marching roughly 620 miles (1,000 kilometers) from Spain, his force reached the Alps with approximately 46,000 soldiers and 37 war elephants.

The crossing reportedly took just 15 days despite hostile tribes, steep mountain passes, early winter conditions, and severe supply challenges. Only about half of the army survived the journey, although enough elephants reached Italy to participate in the Battle of the Trebia shortly afterward.

Researchers examined four leading candidate routes through the Alps by estimating the total energy required for each member of Hannibal’s expedition, including the soldiers, horses, and elephants accompanying them.

Rather than asking which mountain pass best matches ancient historical accounts, the researchers examined four leading candidate routes through the Alps, calculating the energy required for every member of Hannibal’s expedition—including his soldiers, horses, and war elephants.

Using models that consider elevation changes and the metabolic costs of climbing and descending, they calculated the total energy expenditure for men, horses, and elephants across each candidate route. The results consistently favored the Col de la Traversette.

The researchers estimate the entire army would have expended approximately 5.42 terajoules of energy along that route. By comparison, taking the Col du Clapier—long considered by many historians to be the strongest candidate—would have required roughly 16% more energy.

Even the second-best alternative would have demanded 11% more. A chart in the paper compares the cumulative energy costs of each route, showing the Traversette path retaining the lowest overall expenditure despite its dramatic elevation profile.

Although Hannibal obviously lacked modern mathematical models, the researchers suggest he likely had an instinctive insight into terrain developed through years of campaigning.

“Although Hannibal would not have had such accurate estimates, he may have had a qualitative understanding of the ranking of the possible routes,” researchers note.  

Perhaps the study’s most fascinating insights concern the elephants themselves.

Modern elephants require enormous quantities of food simply to maintain their body weight. Wild African elephants typically spend around 14 hours each day feeding, while a three-ton adult may consume roughly 440 pounds (200 kilos) of forage daily. Those requirements become even more daunting in mountainous terrain, where every climb increases energy demands.

The researchers estimate that each elephant would have expended an additional 1.53 gigajoules of energy simply from traversing the Col de la Traversette beyond its normal metabolic requirements. Replacing that energy through feeding alone would have required roughly five to six extra hours of foraging every day during the crossing.

That simply was not realistic.

Instead, the team concludes that Hannibal’s elephants almost certainly survived by drawing heavily on stored body fat rather than replacing the calories they were burning. Even then, the elephants appear to have been surprisingly well-suited for the journey.

According to the analysis, each elephant would have lost only about 4% of its body fat reserves during the Traversee crossing. Horses, by contrast, were estimated to lose around 11%, while surviving soldiers may have lost approximately 19% of their stored fat. Even on less efficient routes, the additional burden fell disproportionately on the men and horses rather than the elephants.

That finding helps explain an apparent historical paradox.

For generations, historians have wondered why Hannibal would risk bringing massive elephants across one of Europe’s most formidable mountain ranges. This new study argues that, biologically, elephants may actually have handled the journey better than many of the humans accompanying them.

Modern biomechanical research has shown that elephants move like a four-wheel-drive vehicle, enabling them to navigate difficult terrain more effectively than many might expect. Their large fat reserves also provided an energy buffer unavailable to exhausted soldiers.

“We may assume that Hannibal knew, after having traveled with elephants and their handlers through Spain and Southern France, that his elephants would struggle less than his men to make the crossing,” researchers note.

Researchers argue that the greatest challenge facing Carthage’s war elephants came after they crossed the Alps, not during the journey itself.

Once in Italy, Hannibal found himself deep inside enemy territory with no secure supply lines, making it extraordinarily difficult to replenish the elephants’ depleted energy reserves. Historical evidence suggests his army was forced to raid the surrounding countryside extensively to feed both its soldiers and animals.

Although the elephants survived the Alpine crossing, researchers say the enormous logistical burden of keeping them fed may have ultimately sealed their fate.

“The fact that all but one elephant died in the following winter might be indicative of Hannibal’s decision to stop attending to the energy needs of such costly pieces of military equipment when already under severe energetic constraints,” the researchers write.

The researchers suggest the elephants’ greatest value may have reached beyond their battlefield role. Simply bringing dozens of war elephants across the Alps would have delivered a powerful psychological advantage, both by surprising Roman forces and by demonstrating the extraordinary reach of Hannibal’s army.

But that advantage may have been short-lived. Once the initial shock passed, the enormous cost of feeding and upkeep of the animals deep inside enemy territory may have exceeded their military usefulness.

Taken together, the evidence suggests that the same biological realities that influenced Hannibal’s choice of route may also have determined the fate of his most famous weapons.

“Perhaps he counted on the elephants to provide an important, tactical element of surprise in the first battles against the Romans,” the researchers write. “In addition, he may have expected that his war elephants would awe and help recruit to his side the Celts of Northern Italy, who were known to be hostile to Rome.”

“After these first encounters, the elephants might have lost their military value,” the team adds.  

The paper, “Energy costs of Hannibal’s alpine crossing,” by Emilio Bertia and Fritz Vollrath, appeared in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

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

A new type of synthetic motion developed at City University of New York (CUNY) gives physicists access to impossible, faster-than-light speeds in an experimental environment. Previously, for researchers to explore such extremes of physics, their only option was simulations, and such real-world effects could not be studied in any practical sense.

In a recent paper published in Nature, scientists from CUNY’s Advanced Science Research Center (ASRC) revealed their new wave amplification technique, which mimics motion without any physical movement.

The synthetic motion machine relies on radio frequencies modulated around a ring-shaped structure to create the illusion of motion.

Extreme Black Holes

The SUNY team traces its inspiration back to the work of Sir Roger Penrose more than fifty years ago, when the scientists proposed a scenario in which a particle could leech energy from a black hole.

Frame-dragging measurements, which involve the pull on spacetime around the edge of a black hole’s ultra-fast rotation, have become a major focus for astrophysics in recent years. Penrose was interested in the region where this pull occurs, known as the ergosphere. He suggested that a particle entering the ergosphere may be torn into two pieces, one of which would fall into the black hole, while the half that escaped would contain even greater energy than the original particle.

Another physicist, Yakov Zel’dovich, built on Penrose’s work to describe a more general version of this effect. He predicted that a sufficiently fast-rotating object could transfer energy to a wave, amplifying it.

A Synthetic Motion Machine

In their quest to study how a rotating body can amplify a wave, the researchers produced a radio-frequency device that mimics a spinning motion. Crucially, this mimicry is unbound by certain physical constraints on motion, allowing for incredible speeds beyond what can be mechanically produced, opening up new experimental possibilities.

“Our approach facilitates a new method of wave–matter interaction in which waves with selected rotational properties extract energy from synthetic time-engineered rotation, producing a form of broadband selective amplification,” said principal investigator Andrea Alù, Distinguished Professor and Einstein Professor of Physics at the CUNY Graduate Center and founding director of the CUNY ASRC’s Photonics Initiative.

“This successful experiment moves ideas about extreme rotational dynamics from theory to practice and creates a versatile experimental platform for exploring a broad range of phenomena at the intersection of astrophysics, wave physics, and quantum science,” said lead author Hadiseh Nasari, a postdoctoral researcher with the CUNY ASRC’s Photonics Initiative. “The work has implications for advances in fundamental science and in communications, optics, and photonics.”

Mimicking Motion

For the project, the CUNY team constructed a ring of networked electronic resonators, whose properties were rapidly modulated in a precisely timed sequence, producing a traveling pattern around the ring. The device itself is stationary, yet the modulated pattern led electromagnetic waves to react as though the device were spinning at the speed of the pattern.

“Waves with the appropriate rotational characteristics extracted energy from the system and became amplified, reproducing the essential physics of the Penrose–Zel’dovich process,” said co-lead author Hady Moussa, a former PhD student with the CUNY ASRC Photonics Initiative. “Our approach relies on engineered metamaterials that are designed to control how waves propagate.

This work in developing synthetic motion has implications far beyond just a single theory on wave amplification. Researchers can now access previously unattainable rotational speeds in experimental physics work thanks to the new device.

Beyond those experimental possibilities, this technique could be used in communication and optics applications, including quantum systems. Future work will involve adapting this revolutionary technique beyond the initial problem into practical technologies for information processing and exploring the universe’s most extreme physics.

The paper, “Observation of Floquet Rotational Super-Radiance,” appeared in Nature on July 8, 2026.

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

A predatory sea worm known as Perinereis cultrifera possesses jaws that do not fit neatly into either biological or metallic categories. These jaws consist of structural proteins reinforced with metal ions, giving them mechanical properties unlike those of either conventional metals or ordinary biological tissue.

This unique combination of composition and mechanical behavior led researchers from TU Wien and the University of Vienna to propose an entirely new material classification. In a recent paper published in Biophysics Reviews, the team suggests that the creature’s jaws represent a distinct class of material, which they term bio-metal.

The jaws of bristle worms such as P. cultrifera are formed by linking structural proteins with metal ions, producing a material tough enough to crush and bite prey. Previous studies called these tissues metallike biomaterials, meaning they share some properties with metals, like strength or conductivity. The new study argues that this term is too broad. According to the researchers, a true bio-metal must meet three criteria: it must be hard, display specific strain mechanics, and have a well-defined ion-protein structure.

Hardness With a Metal Signature

To test if the jaw met these criteria, the researchers used nanoindentation, which means pressing a tiny probe into the tissue to measure its properties. They also conducted chemical tests and imaging at the same time. The results confirmed earlier findings that the jaw tips contain higher concentrations of metal ions than the center, likely making the tips harder.

When the probe pressed into the jaw at different depths, the researchers observed something called the Nix-Gao size effect. This effect, seen before in metals like copper and silver, means that smaller areas resist deformation more than larger ones. The reason is that strain gradients become larger in smaller regions, increasing resistance to deformation. Finding this metal-like behavior in worm jaws is one reason scientists have compared the material to metals.

Where the Metal Comparison Breaks Down

However, the jaw does not behave exactly like metals such as copper. Its elasticity changes depending on the size of the area tested, which is not seen in crystalline metals.

“Bristle worm jaws also showed size-dependent elasticity — this is a distinguishing feature of bio-metals when compared to standard crystalline metals like copper or silver,” said Christian Hellmich, one of the paper’s authors. Copper and silver can show a hardness size effect, but neither exhibits the size-dependent elasticity that the team measured in the worm jaw. That distinction is one reason the researchers argue that these materials deserve their own category.

To explain this property, the researchers built a mathematical model showing how the jaw’s atomic structure leads to the elastic size effect. This model helps explain the effect and gives a basis for future research.

“We plan to extend the experimental database by investigating additional species to refine the theoretical concept and perform dedicated computations, and — perhaps most interestingly — to explore the link between genetic interventions and the corresponding material design space,” Hellmich said. “All this comes with true excitement about the beauty, elegance, and refinement found in and produced by nature.”

Next, the researchers plan to explore how genetic changes influence the development of these materials. If successful, the work could eventually help engineers develop new biomimetic materials inspired by the ion-protein architecture found in these worms.

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 three-dimensional thermal cloak that can conceal objects from heat, while also shielding them from extreme temperatures, has been developed by researchers in a breakthrough with significant potential for quantum electronics and military stealth technologies.

The breakthrough, led by University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign civil and environmental engineering professor Shelly Zhang in collaboration with colleagues at the Technical University of Denmark, differs from past thermal cloaks that only function in two dimensions, or in a single direction.

The team’s new device is capable of guiding heat around an object, regardless of the origin point of the heat source. When used with an infrared camera, the cloaked object effectively disappears, while the temperature inside the protected region remains stable.

The team’s achievement was detailed in a new study published in Nature Communications.

A Novel Approach to 3D Thermal Cloaking

Unlike previous thermal cloaks, which only worked in two dimensions or from a single direction, the new device guides heat around an object regardless of where the heat originates. To an infrared camera, the cloaked object effectively disappears, while the temperature inside the protected region remains stable.

“A real thermal cloak should work no matter where the heat comes from,” Zhang said in a recent statement. “Our device can hide a complex 3D object in an infinite number of directions while keeping the temperature inside stable and protected.”

As opposed to blocking heat, Zhang and her team’s new cloak redirects it around an object, preserving the temperature field in the surrounding area as though nothing were present.

Although the concept has existed theoretically for many years already, researchers have encountered challenges when it comes to practically leveraging such capabilities.

Redirecting Heat Around Hidden Objects

To overcome past hurdles engineers have faced, Zhang and her team designed a novel lattice-based material, which exhibits thermal properties that allow it to be “tuned” with a great degree of precision in three dimensions.

By combining a 3D-printed aluminum lattice, which serves as a good heat conductor, with a molded rubber-like material that functions as a thermal insulator, the team was able to control the flow of heat through different regions of the device. Additional lab testing helped to confirm its functionality as intended.

Placed between hot and cold environments, the cloak redirected heat around hidden objects, producing an external thermal pattern which they say appeared essentially undisturbed. Simultaneously, temperatures within the cloaked region remained largely uniform, despite the surrounding thermal gradient.

As a further demonstration of its capabilities, the researchers then successfully concealed objects with highly complex three-dimensional geometries, which included detailed head-shaped models that they say surpassed the performance of past versions of thermal cloaks.

Defense and Security Applications

Zhang says the technology could have a wide range of potential applications, especially where precise thermal control is a requirement.

“Any field that needs precise control of heat or needs to protect something from being detected thermally could benefit from this work,” Zhang said in a statement, “But we also see it more broadly: it’s about hiding and protecting information that is carried by heat.”

Additionally, the technology could have applications involving the use of similar cloaks to protect sensitive electronics and microchips from damaging heat, improve thermal management in advanced computing systems, and shield equipment from detection using infrared, which may be useful in security and defense technologies.

Going forward, the team plans on exploring more advanced designs capable of concealing objects that generate their own heat, which could pave the way toward more active thermal cloaks in the coming years that could dynamically manipulate heat and still remain effectively invisible to infrared sensors.

The team detailed their research in a recent paper, “Free-form thermal cloaks in three dimensions,” which appeared in Nature Communications.

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.