EverythingScience

Scientists have used a gravitational wave detector to "hear" two black holes getting bigger as they merged into a single, gigantic entity.

The detection, made by the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO) on Jan. 14, provides the best evidence yet for a theory put forth by famed physicist Stephen Hawking more than half a century ago, but which was never proven in his lifetime.

Now with a decade of experience under their belts, LIGO collaborators have made many improvements to the detectors — such that black hole mergers are now spotted about once every three days instead of once a month, according to a statement from Caltech, which jointly operates LIGO along with MIT.

During the event detected Jan. 14, LIGO witnessed two black holes merging, with the resulting black hole measuring significantly bigger than the two objects entering into the collision.

Before the merger, the combined surface area of the two black holes was about 93,700 square miles (243,000 square kilometers) — roughly the size of Oregon. After the merger, by contrast, the newly formed and single black hole had a surface area of roughly 154,500 square miles (400,000 square km) — about the size of California. In other words, the newly merged black hole was larger than the sum of its parts.

Ice formation on propeller blades or aircraft wings can cause major problems. It can limit flight time, increase costs and pose safety and environmental risks.
That is why researchers at SINTEF have developed a new coating material that makes ice removal both more efficient and cheaper—without harming the environment.

Today, ice is usually removed using electrical heating, either with permanent heating systems in the rotor blades, or by temporarily applying chemical de-icing agents. The challenge is that these methods do not provide sufficient protection against the formation of new ice. As a result, they have to be repeated several times, leading to high maintenance costs.

The industry is therefore eyeing the new anti-icing method that SINTEF is developing, according to researcher Christian Karl, who is part of the research team on the project called IceMan. "This is a more effective and long-lasting method for removing ice on technical surfaces. We're seeing that more and more industrial sectors, like wind energy, aerospace, automotive and marine technology, have turned their attention to our solution."

The coating is based on polyurethane, a type of polymer material, and can be sprayed or brushed directly onto the surfaces, giving them ice-repellent properties and slowing down ice formation. The study is published in the Journal of Nanoparticle Research.

"In practice, this will mean that supercooled water droplets that land on the rotor blades won't be able to freeze onto the surface. The water will bead up and roll off the surface before it has time to freeze. If, contrary to expectations, it remains there, it will adhere less well and be easier to remove," says the SINTEF researcher.

Research colleague Monika Pilz led the project. She says that the additives are environmentally friendly and are made in such a way that they can easily be scaled up and used in industry settings.

Neuroscientists from around the world have worked in parallel to map, for the first time, the entire brain activity of mice while they were making decisions. This achievement involved using electrodes inserted inside the brain to simultaneously record the activity of more than half a million neurons distributed across 95 percent of the rodents’ brain volume.

Thanks to the image obtained, the researchers were able to confirm an already theorized architecture of thought: that there is no single region exclusively in charge of decisionmaking and instead it is a coordinated process among multiple brain areas.

Your name goes here!

We’re collecting names to fly around the Moon. 3.4 million of you joined us for Artemis I. How many of you would like to come along with the Artemis II mission? https://nasa.gov/send-your-name-with-artemis/

Submitted names will be included on an SD card that will fly inside Orion when the Artemis II mission launches in 2026.

Repetition has a strange relationship with the mind. Take the experience of déjà vu, when we wrongly believe we have experienced a novel situation in the past – leaving us with an spooky sense of pastness.

But we have discovered that déjà vu is actually a window into the workings of our memory system.

Our research found that the phenomenon arises when the part of the brain which detects familiarity de-synchronises with reality. Déjà vu is the signal which alerts you to this weirdness: it is a type of "fact checking" for the memory system.

But repetition can do something even more uncanny and unusual.

The opposite of déjà vu is "jamais vu", when something you know to be familiar feels unreal or novel in some way. In our recent research, which has won an Ig Nobel award for literature, we investigated the mechanism behind the phenomenon.

Jamais vu may involve looking at a familiar face and finding it suddenly unusual or unknown. Musicians have it momentarily – losing their way in a very familiar passage of music. You may have had it going to a familiar place and becoming disorientated or seeing it with "new eyes".

It's an experience which is even rarer than déjà vu and perhaps even more unusual and unsettling. When you ask people to describe it in questionnaires about experiences in daily life they give accounts like: "While writing in my exams, I write a word correctly like 'appetite' but I keep looking at the word over and over again because I have second thoughts that it might be wrong."

Makemake, also known as 2005 FY9 and (136472), was discovered in 2005 by a team of astronomers from the California Institute of Technology led by Mike Brown.
This dwarf planet is located in a region beyond Neptune that is populated with small Solar System bodies.

It has a radius of approximately 715 km (444 miles) — just slightly smaller and dimmer than Pluto.

It takes about 305 Earth years for this dwarf planet to make one trip around the Sun.

Previously observed stellar occultations suggested that Makemake lacked a substantial global atmosphere, though a thin one could not be ruled out.

Meanwhile, infrared data of the dwarf planet hinted at puzzling thermal anomalies and unusual characteristics of its methane ice, which raised the possibility of localized hot spots across its surface and potential outgassing.

“Makemake is one of the largest and brightest icy worlds beyond Neptune, and its surface is dominated by frozen methane,” said Dr. Silvia Protopapa, an astronomer at the Southwest Research Institute.

“Webb revealed that methane is also present in the gas phase above the surface, a finding that makes Makemake even more fascinating.”
“It shows that Makemake is not an inactive remnant of the outer Solar System, but a dynamic body where methane ice is still evolving.”

The observed methane spectral emission is interpreted as solar-excited fluorescence, which is the re-emission of sunlight absorbed by methane molecules.
According to the team, this could indicate either a tenuous atmosphere in equilibrium with surface ices — similar to Pluto — or more transient activity, such as cometary-like sublimation or cryovolcanic plumes.

How well do we understand the Universe if we struggle to understand its most energetic events? This question can trigger a wide-ranging philosophical or even epistemological discussion. It's the kind of question that can bring the Universe's most mysterious incidents into the foreground of busy lives.

While the Big Bang is, without a doubt, the most energy-dense event in the Universe's history, there are other energetic events that lack clear causes. Scientists have a pretty clear theoretical framework for the Big Bang, but when it comes to Gamma-Ray Bursts (GRB), our understanding of them is lacking. Unlike the Big Bang, which happened more than 13 billion years ago, GRBs are happening right now, yet scientists don't have a clear understanding of their underlying physics.

Usually in science, discovering more examples of a class of objects leads to greater understanding. However, that may not be the case when it comes to the most recently detected GRB. It's unlike any previous GRB that scientists have encountered.

The new GRB is called GRB 250702B and it was discovered on July 2nd, when the Fermi Gamma-Ray Space Telescope detected it and sent out an alert. But this detection was different. Rather than a single burst, there were three separate bursts over a nearly day-long period.

GRBs are extremely energetic explosions, the most energetic in the Universe, and they usually last only milliseconds, or sometimes several minutes. They're likely caused by massive stellar explosions or by supermassive black holes tearing huge stars apart. But this GRB's multiple bursts, that span almost an entire day, set it apart from other GRBs. In a press release, Martin-Carrillo said that the GRB is "unlike any other seen in 50-years of GRB observations." Lead author Levan also pointed out how unusual this GRB is. "This is 100-1000 times longer than most GRBs,” he said.

Strange nodules of unusual minerals found on speckled rocks on Mars have offered more tantalizing clues that ancient life may have once thrived on the now-dead planet, NASA says.

NASA's Perseverance rover found one such arrow-shaped rock, nicknamed Cheyava Falls, in 2024 along the northern bank of Neretva Vallis, the dried-up remnants of an ancient river that once rushed into Mars' Jezero crater.

An initial analysis of the rock, which appeared in a lake bed formation known as Bright Angel, revealed it was crammed with organic compounds, had evidence that water once flowed through it, and contained flecks of leopard-like spots from chemical reactions that ancient microbes could have used for energy.

These features may result from non-biological processes occurring over millions of years. But now, in a new study published Sept. 10 in the journal Nature, NASA scientists have announced intriguing details about additional rock samples found at two nearby sites — and they say these clues bolster the case for past life on Mars.

"After a year of review, they have come back and they said, listen, we can't find another explanation," Acting NASA Administrator Sean Duffy, said during a news briefing following the announcement. "So this very well could be the clearest sign of life that we've ever found on Mars, which is incredibly exciting."

Space changes you. It strengthens some muscles, weakens others, shifts fluids within your body, and realigns your sense of balance. NASA's Human Research Program works to understand—and sometimes even counter—those changes so astronauts can thrive on future deep space missions.

Astronauts aboard the International Space Station work out roughly two hours a day to protect bone density, muscle strength and the cardiovascular system, but the longer they are in microgravity, the harder it can be for the brain and body to readapt to gravity's pull. After months in orbit, returning astronauts often describe Earth as heavy, loud, and strangely still. Some reacclimate within days, while other astronauts take longer to fully recover.

A large study of more than 5 million women over 30 years has suggested that CT scans before conception could increase the risk of pregnancy loss and congenital anomalies.

As concerning as the results seem, there are a lot of caveats to consider.

This observational study was conducted in Ontario, Canada, between 1992 and 2023, involving 5,142,339 pregnancies that resulted in 3,451,968 live births. Generally, rates of spontaneous pregnancy loss and congenital anomalies were found to increase in patients who had more CT scans prior to conception.

Compared to patients who had no CT scans, the risk of pregnancy loss increased by 8 percent for those who had 1 scan, 14 percent for 2 scans, and 19 percent for 3 or more scans. The risk of congenital anomalies increased by 6 percent for 1 scan, 11 percent for 2 scans, and 15 percent for 3 or more scans.

That sounds alarming, but extra context is important.

First, the increase itself is rather small: If, for example, your baseline risk is 10 percent, and it increases by 19 percent after 3 scans, the new risk is 11.9 percent.

Secondly, the study shows a correlation but not necessarily causation, and other factors are almost certainly at play. For instance, people don't tend to require CT scans for trivial reasons – the reason they're getting checked out could be a bigger driver of problems than the scan itself.

One of the first parts of the brain affected by Alzheimer’s disease is the entorhinal cortex — a region that plays a big role in memory, spatial navigation, and the brain’s internal mapping system.

With support from the Commonwealth of Virginia’s Alzheimer’s and Related Diseases Research Award Fund (ARDRAF), Fralin Biomedical Research Institute at VTC scientists Sharon Swanger and Shannon Farris are working to understand why this area is especially vulnerable.

A landmark federally funded clinical trial has provided the first real evidence that doctors can pinpoint breast cancer survivors at higher risk of relapse by detecting dormant cancer cells, and that these hidden cells can be successfully treated using already available drugs. The work, led by researchers at the Abramson Cancer Center of the University of Pennsylvania and Penn’s Perelman School of Medicine, appears in the journal Nature Medicine.

Although survival rates for breast cancer continue to improve thanks to better screening and therapies, the disease remains incurable once it comes back after initial treatment. About 30 percent of women and men experience a relapse, leaving them dependent on ongoing treatment that cannot completely remove the cancer. Some forms, such as triple negative and HER2+, often reappear within a few years, while ER+ cases can resurface even decades later. Until now, doctors had no way to identify which survivors carried dormant cells that fuel recurrence or to step in with a therapy that could prevent it.

🌙 A blood moon from the edge of the world 🇦🇶
🌒 A few nights ago, around 85% of Earth could see a total lunar eclipse - including the crew of Concordia station in Antarctica, a place more remote than the Space Station.
📸: esa /IPEV/PNRA/DC21-J. Lacrampe, sivrupanin

On Wednesday, Sept. 10 at 11am EDT, NASA will host a media teleconference with Acting NASA Administrator Sean Duffy and experts from the Mars Perseverance mission to discuss the analysis of a rock sampled by the rover.

Set a reminder:
https://www.youtube.com/live/-StZggK4hhA