EverythingScience

A recent paper has proposed a new idea for what is causing the observed accelerated expansion of the universe, and dark matter, suggesting both of them may be a "cosmic illusion" caused by the changing constants of the universe. 

By observing the universe from the cosmic microwave background to our nearest galaxies, we know that our universe is expanding. Weirder (and subject to further observations and analysis) the expansion appears to have sped up, beginning around 5-6 billion years ago. We call the mysterious influence driving the accelerated expansion dark energy. 

Dark matter, meanwhile, is invisible matter that doesn't emit its own light and only interacts with normal matter through gravity, which we can see evidence for in galaxies and galaxy clusters. As well as finding evidence for it in the rotation rate of galaxies, and in the bullet cluster, there is evidence for its existence in the gravitational lensing of galaxies.

While there are many dark matter candidates, and plenty of experiments looking into it, detection has not yet happened, and we are no closer to figuring out what dark energy is. There's even evidence to suggest it could be evolving.

There's a lot to explain, and any new big idea would have to explain a vast amount of observations with it. In a new idea from Rajendra Gupta, adjunct professor in the Department of Physics at the University of Ottawa, the observations can be explained by changes to the strength of the fundamental forces of the universe over time.

"The universe's forces actually get weaker on the average as it expands," Gupta said in a statement. "This weakening makes it look like there's a mysterious push making the universe expand faster (which is identified as dark energy). However, at galactic and galaxy-cluster scale, the variation of these forces over their gravitationally bound space results in extra gravity (which is considered due to dark matter). But those things might just be illusions, emergent from the evolving constants defining the strength of the forces."

The paper suggests that galaxy rotation curves, gravitational lensing, and dark energy could all be explained with covarying coupling constants (CCC), or the idea that the universe's "constants" like the strength of gravity and electromagnetism change over time, related to each other. In this model, the coupling constants (noted 𝛼) are fixed on cosmological scales, but are allowed to vary locally depending on the distribution of normal baryonic matter.

Many governments and tech companies are investing heavily in quantum technologies. In New Zealand, the recently announced Institute for Advanced Technology is also envisioned to focus on this area of research.

As quantum technologies develop, we argue quantum literacy becomes essential for informed discussions and policy on their potentially profound societal implications.

Quantum technologies build on quantum mechanics, a fundamental theory that explains the structure of matter and has enabled the design of many useful devices such as transistors, microchips and lasers.

The term "quantum" comes from German physicist Max Planck, who proposed that energy can only come in discrete packets, or quanta.

When atoms absorb or emit energy quanta, they transition between quantized energy levels. New technologies use the quantum nature of such levels to develop super-fast computers, precision sensors and improved encryption.

One of the key ingredients in almost any kind of quantum tech is the phenomenon known as "quantum entanglement." It has really bizarre implications which Albert Einstein once called "spooky action at a distance." Among non-physicists, it typically raises consternation or fascination.

Astronomers have identified an enormous "growth spurt" in a so-called rogue planet. Unlike the planets in our solar system, these objects do not orbit stars, free-floating on their own instead.

The new observations, made with the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope (ESO's VLT), reveal that this free-floating planet is eating up gas and dust from its surroundings at a rate of six billion tons a second. This is the strongest growth rate ever recorded for a rogue planet, or a planet of any kind, providing valuable insights into how they form and grow.

"People may think of planets as quiet and stable worlds, but with this discovery we see that planetary-mass objects freely floating in space can be exciting places," says Víctor Almendros-Abad, an astronomer at the Astronomical Observatory of Palermo, National Institute for Astrophysics (INAF), Italy and lead author of the new study.

The newly studied object, which has a mass five to 10 times the mass of Jupiter, is located about 620 light-years away in the constellation Chamaeleon.

Officially named Cha 1107-7626, this rogue planet is still forming and is fed by a surrounding disk of gas and dust. This material constantly falls onto the free-floating planet, a process known as accretion. However, the team led by Almendros-Abad has now found that the rate at which the young planet is accreting is not steady.

The first stars in the universe formed out of pristine hydrogen and helium clouds, in the first few hundred million years after the Big Bang. New James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) observations reveal that some of the first stars in the universe could have been very different from regular (nuclear fusion-powered) stars, which have been observed and cataloged by astronomers for millennia.

A recent study led by Cosmin Ilie, at Colgate University, in collaboration with Shafaat Mahmud, Jillian Paulin at UPenn, and Katherine Freese, at The University of Texas at Austin, identifies four extremely distant objects which are consistent, both from the point of view of their observed spectra and morphology, with being supermassive dark stars. The paper is published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

"Supermassive dark stars are extremely bright, giant, yet puffy clouds made primarily out of hydrogen and helium, which are supported against gravitational collapse by the minute amounts of self-annihilating dark matter inside them," Ilie said.

Supermassive dark stars and their black hole remnants could be key to solving two recent astronomical puzzles: the larger than expected extremely bright, yet compact, very distant galaxies observed with JWST, and the origin of the supermassive black holes powering the most distant quasars observed.

Freese developed the original theory behind dark stars with Doug Spolyar and Paolo Gondolo. They published their first paper on this theory in the journal Physical Review Letters in 2008. In that paper, they envisioned how such dark stars might have led to supermassive black holes in the early universe. In a 2010 Astrophysical Journal publication, Freese, Ilie, Spolyar, and collaborators identified two mechanisms via which dark stars can grow to become supermassive, and predicted that they could seed the supermassive black holes powering many of the most distant quasars in the universe.

Although dark matter makes up about 25% of the universe, its nature has eluded scientists. It is now widely believed that dark matter consists of a new type of elementary particle, yet to be observed or detected. While the hunt to detect such particles has been on for a few decades, no conclusive evidence has been found yet. Among the leading candidates for dark matter are Weakly Interacting Massive Particles. When they collide, these particles would theoretically annihilate themselves, depositing heat into collapsing clouds of hydrogen and converting them into brightly shining dark stars.

The conditions for the formation of dark stars were just right a few hundred million years after the Big Bang, and at the center of dark matter halos. This is when and where the first stars in the universe are expected to have formed.

Learn more about the art of processing martian samples on the blog #ToMarsandBack:
blogs.esa.int/to-mars-and-ba…

A few years ago, one of us (Myles Allen) asked a Chinese delegate at a climate conference why Beijing had gone for "carbon neutrality" for its 2060 target rather than "climate neutrality" "or net zero," both of which were more fashionable terms at the time.

Her response: "Because we know what it means."

It was a revealing answer: China, unlike many other countries, tends not to make climate commitments that it doesn't understand or intend to keep. And that's why its latest pledge—cutting greenhouse gas emissions by 7%–10% by 2035, as part of its commitments under the Paris agreement—matters more than the underwhelmed response might suggest.

To be fair on those other countries, lofty goals have played a role in driving the climate conversation about what is possible: there is always the argument that it is better to aim for the moon and miss than aim for the gutter and hit it.

But the climate crisis needs more than aspirations. It needs concrete, plausible plans.

That's what makes China's pledge so significant: Beijing has form in only promising what it plans to deliver. Having promised to peak emissions this decade, barely 50 years after it began to industrialize in earnest, it looks set to achieve that. And in the process, become a world leader in wind power, solar energy and electric vehicles.

A team of physicists say they have found a way to sidestep Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, one of the more troublesome and irritating rules of our universe.

Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, for the uninitiated, states that it is not possible to exactly measure or calculate both the position and momentum of an object at the same time. 

With macroscopic objects, for example a basketball or Danny DeVito, the principle doesn't matter too much. For example, you could measure Danny DeVito's position using light, and know that the light you used hasn't pushed him hard enough for you to be uncertain about his momentum. But in the quantum realm, it becomes a real problem.

Before we measure an electron's position, its wavefunction is spread out over an area, giving us probabilities about where the electron will be found. Hit an electron with light to measure its position, and its momentum increases, shrinking its wave function and localizing it around its position. But with that, you lose information about the electron's momentum as you impart energy into the electron, altering it. The more precise you want to be about one property, the less you know of the other. The more you know of the object's position, the less you know about its speed and mass, and vice versa. 

This principle is as tested as it is frustrating, and has held up nearly a century after its discovery by Werner Heisenberg in 1927. But a team of physicists from the UK and Australia say that with a few clever little tradeoffs, it is possible to sidestep the principle and gain precision about both properties at a level better than the "standard quantum limit".

In 1960, Dr. Jane Goodall’s early fieldwork observing chimpanzees at Gombe Stream Game Reserve, in Tanganyika (now Tanzania), unveiled groundbreaking research of shared behaviors between humans and apes.

The Jane Goodall Institute announced on October 1, 2025, that Jane Goodall died at 91. A primatologist, conservationist, animal advocate, educator, and National Geographic Explorer, her work revolutionized our understanding of the natural world.

More than four years after the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, scientists are still working to fully understand the lingering effects of infection with SARS-CoV-2. One of the most concerning outcomes is Long COVID, a chronic condition that can emerge after the initial illness and bring a wide range of lasting health problems.

Among its most common and disruptive symptoms is cognitive impairment, often described as “brain fog.” Studies suggest that over 80% of people living with Long COVID experience this issue, which can make it difficult to work or handle daily responsibilities. With hundreds of millions of cases worldwide, the condition has become both a major public health concern and a growing socioeconomic burden.

Despite how widespread Long COVID is, its root causes remain unclear. Some imaging studies have revealed changes in brain structure, but these findings have not explained the molecular processes that lead to cognitive symptoms. Because the molecules that regulate communication between neurons are extremely difficult to study directly, researchers currently lack objective biomarkers that could confirm a Long COVID diagnosis or guide the development of effective treatments.

A Breakthrough in Brain Imaging
To address this challenge, a research team led by Professor Takuya Takahashi from the Graduate School of Medicine at Yokohama City University, Japan, has made a significant breakthrough in understanding the cause of Long COVID brain fog

Scientists digging through data collected by the Cassini spacecraft have found new complex organic molecules spewing from Saturn's moon Enceladus. This is a clear sign that complex chemical reactions are taking place within its underground ocean. Some of these reactions could be part of chains that lead to even more complex, potentially biologically relevant molecules.

Published in Nature Astronomy, this discovery further strengthens the case for a dedicated European Space Agency (ESA) mission to orbit and land on Enceladus.

In 2005, Cassini found the first evidence that Enceladus has a hidden ocean beneath its icy surface. Jets of water burst from cracks close to the moon's south pole, shooting ice grains into space. Smaller than grains of sand, some of the tiny pieces of ice fall back onto the moon's surface, while others escape and form a ring around Saturn that traces Enceladus's orbit.

Manufacturers of infrared cameras are facing a growing challenge. Many of the materials used in today’s detectors, including toxic heavy metals, are now restricted under environmental regulations. As a result, companies often find themselves forced to choose between maintaining performance or meeting compliance standards.

These tightening rules have slowed the spread of infrared technology in civilian markets, even as interest rises in areas such as self-driving vehicles, medical imaging, and national security.

A team from NYU Tandon School of Engineering has introduced a promising alternative in a study published in ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces. Their approach replaces mercury, lead, and other restricted substances with environmentally friendly quantum dots that can detect infrared light without relying on hazardous materials.

A Quantum Dot Alternative
Instead of the traditional, slow, and costly fabrication methods that require atoms to be placed with extreme precision across detector pixels (similar to carefully assembling a puzzle under a microscope), the researchers turned to colloidal quantum dots.

These quantum dots are created entirely in liquid form, like mixing an ink, and then applied using scalable coating techniques already common in industries such as packaging and newspaper printing. Moving from atom-by-atom construction to this solution-based process could slash production costs and make large-scale commercial use of infrared detectors far more feasible.

Human skin cells have been used to produce fertilizable eggs in a proof-of-concept study that heralds a potential new approach to infertility treatment. While much more research is needed to know how truly safe and effective this could be, it opens up the possibility that we could one day create new egg cells for women containing their own DNA.  

Infertility impacts an estimated one in six adults globally, and lots of scientists are working to unpack the multitude of causes and develop new approaches to treatment. A recent world-first estimate found that over 13 million babies have been born through assisted reproduction. 

As well as improvements to existing technologies like in-vitro fertilization (IVF), recent years have seen advances like mitochondrial transfer. This allows parents to avoid passing on inherited mitochondrial diseases to their children by taking mitochondrial DNA from a third person. 

A common cause of infertility is insufficient or degraded egg cells. In such cases, conventional IVF may not be an option, but one exciting alternative that’s recently been explored is somatic cell nuclear transfer. This involves swapping the nucleus of a donor egg cell with the nucleus from another cell – such as a skin cell – producing a functional egg with genetic material from the parent-to-be. 

Our Milky Way galaxy never sits still: it rotates and wobbles. And now, data from the European Space Agency's Gaia space telescope reveal that our galaxy also has a giant wave rippling outwards from its center.

We've known for about a hundred years that the galaxy's stars rotate around its center, and Gaia has measured their speeds and motions. Since the 1950s, we've known that the Milky Way's disk is warped. Then, in 2020, Gaia discovered that this disk wobbles over time, similarly to the motion of a spinning top.

And now it has become clear that a great wave stirs the motion of stars in our galaxy over distances of tens of thousands of light-years from the sun. Like a rock thrown into a pond, making waves ripple outwards, this galactic wave of stars spans a large portion of the Milky Way's outer disk.

A recent study found that ground shaking caused by moonquakes, not meteorite impacts, was responsible for altering the terrain in the Taurus-Littrow valley, the site of the Apollo 17 landing in 1972. The research also identified a likely source of these surface changes and evaluated the potential hazards by applying new seismic models, with results that carry important implications for both future lunar exploration and the development of permanent bases on the Moon.

Geological evidence from Apollo 17 site
The research team examined data from the Apollo 17 site, where astronauts had gathered rock samples from boulder falls and landslides believed to have been triggered by moonquakes. By analyzing these geological traces, they were able to estimate the intensity of past moonquakes and determine their most likely origin.

“We don’t have the sort of strong motion instruments that can measure seismic activity on the moon like we do on Earth, so we had to look for other ways to evaluate how much ground motion there may have been, like boulder falls and landslides that get mobilized by these seismic events,” Schmerr said.

Researchers at the University of Bristol have uncovered unusual behavior in Titan’s atmosphere for the first time.

Using data from the Cassini-Huygens mission, a collaboration between NASA, the European Space Agency (ESA), and the Italian Space Agency, the team found that Saturn’s largest moon has a dense, hazy atmosphere that does not rotate in step with the surface. Instead, it oscillates like a gyroscope, shifting position with the change of seasons.

Titan stands out as the only moon in the Solar System with a substantial atmosphere, a feature that has fascinated planetary scientists for decades. After analyzing 13 years of thermal infrared measurements collected by Cassini, the researchers were able to chart how Titan’s atmosphere leans and drifts over time.

A gyroscopic wobble
“The behavior of Titan’s atmospheric tilt is very strange!” said Lucy Wright, lead author and postdoctoral researcher at Bristol’s School of Earth Sciences. “Titan’s atmosphere appears to be acting like a gyroscope, stabilizing itself in space.

“We think some event in the past may have knocked the atmosphere off its spin axis, causing it to wobble.

“Even more intriguingly, we’ve found that the size of this tilt changes with Titan’s seasons.”

Meeting the standard daily requirement for vitamin B12, which is essential for making DNA, red blood cells, and nerve tissue, may not provide enough protection for the brain, particularly in older adults. In fact, falling within the “normal” range could still increase the risk of cognitive problems.

Researchers at UC San Francisco studied healthy older adults and discovered that participants with lower B12 levels, even though still considered normal, showed neurological and cognitive weaknesses. These individuals had more damage in the brain’s white matter (the network of nerve fibers that allows different regions of the brain to communicate) and scored lower on tests measuring cognitive speed and visual processing compared with those who had higher B12 levels. The study was published in Annals of Neurology.

Rethinking Vitamin B12 Guidelines
According to senior author Ari J. Green, MD, of UCSF’s Departments of Neurology and Ophthalmology and the Weill Institute for Neurosciences, the results raise concerns about whether current B12 recommendations are sufficient and suggest that guidelines may need to be revised.

“Previous studies that defined healthy amounts of B12 may have missed subtle functional manifestations of high or low levels that can affect people without causing overt symptoms,” said Green, noting that clear deficiencies of the vitamin are commonly associated with a type of anemia. “Revisiting the definition of B12 deficiency to incorporate functional biomarkers could lead to earlier intervention and prevention of cognitive decline.”

Whenever you see the ISS from Earth, WE aboard the ISS cannot see you!

When ISS is exposed in sunlight, our window reflectivity blinds us! We can only see you when you cannot see us!

Same effect as how you cannot see through your kitchen window at night when the lights are on!

It may look like these comets are racing, but they are not. Comets C/2025 K1 ATLAS (left) and C/2025 R2 SWAN (right) appeared near each other by chance last week in the featured image taken from France's Reunion Island in the southern Indian Ocean.

Fainter Comet ATLAS is approaching our Sun and will reach its closest approach in early October when it is also expected to be its brightest -- although still only likely visible with long exposures on a camera. The brighter comet, nicknamed SWAN25B, is now headed away from our Sun, although its closest approach to Earth is expected in mid-October, when optimistic estimates have it becoming bright enough to see with the unaided eye. Each comet has a greenish coma of expelled gas and an ion tail pointing away from the Sun.

Image Credit & Copyright: Luc Perrot (TWAN)

A team of MIT geochemists has unearthed new evidence in very old rocks suggesting that some of the first animals on Earth were likely ancestors of the modern sea sponge.

In a study appearing in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the researchers report that they have identified "chemical fossils" that may have been left by ancient sponges in rocks that are more than 541 million years old. A chemical fossil is a remnant of a biomolecule that originated from a living organism that has since been buried, transformed, and preserved in sediment, sometimes for hundreds of millions of years.

The newly identified chemical fossils are special types of steranes, which are the geologically stable form of sterols, such as cholesterol, that are found in the cell membranes of complex organisms. The researchers traced these special steranes to a class of sea sponges known as demosponges. Today, demosponges come in a huge variety of sizes and colors, and live throughout the oceans as soft and squishy filter feeders. Their ancient counterparts may have shared similar characteristics.

"We don't know exactly what these organisms would have looked like back then, but they absolutely would have lived in the ocean, they would have been soft-bodied, and we presume they didn't have a silica skeleton," says Roger Summons, the Schlumberger Professor of Geobiology Emeritus in MIT's Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences (EAPS).

The group's discovery of sponge-specific chemical fossils offers strong evidence that the ancestors of demosponges were among the first animals to evolve, and that they likely did so much earlier than the rest of Earth's major animal groups.

Don't rule out the grasshopper mouse. These rodents are equipped with special venom-blocking proteins that are especially useful when battling a potentially paralyzing foe—like the giant hairy scorpion.