EverythingScience

Two spacecraft on Mars have captured new images of the interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS in the closest view that the European Space Agency (ESA) will get of the mysterious object, according to an ESA statement.

The comet, which came from an unknown star system far beyond our own, is currently taking a months-long tour of the inner solar system. It made its closest approach to Mars Friday (Oct. 3) ahead of a close encounter with the sun on Oct. 30. During its recent flyby of the Red Planet, the comet came within view of ESA and NASA's fleet of robotic explorers, including ESA's ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter (TGO) and Mars Express orbiter.

Soaring 18.6 million miles (30 million kilometers) overhead, the comet proved too dim for Mars Express to capture. However, the ExoMars TGO satellite succeeded in snapping a series of images, which ESA combined into an animated GIF. The animation shows the comet — visible as a fuzzy, bright dot — descending toward the center of the frame as it zooms away from Mars at an estimated 130,000 mph (210,000 km/h).

Africa's Great Green Wall project began as an ambitious plan to build a 15-kilometer-wide band of trees across the north of Africa. The African Union launched the project in 2007 with plans for the trees to extend for 6,000 kilometers through 11 countries in the Sahel, restoring 100 million hectares of land from Senegal to Djibouti and Ethiopia. Its main aim was to prevent the Sahara Desert from advancing. But the Great Green Wall's also been billed as a solution to climate change, poverty, and even extremism.

Senegal has been one of the most active countries implementing the Great Green Wall initiative, despite being among the smallest. It has targeted 817,500 hectares of land for restoration. Environmental researchers Annah Lake Zhu and Amadou Ndiaye were part of a team who looked at satellite images of some of Senegal's section of the wall and found that only one out of 36 planted areas analyzed was more green than it would have been naturally. The project is not an actual wall of trees but rather a mosaic of rehabilitated land. But increased greenery should still be visible from satellite imagery. They also found that financial pledges were often left unmet, money for the wall didn't make it to ground level and new trees had low survival rates.

For millions of years, a fragment of ice and dust drifted between the stars—like a sealed bottle cast into the cosmic ocean. This summer, that bottle finally washed ashore in our solar system and was designated 3I/ATLAS, only the third known interstellar comet. When Auburn University scientists pointed NASA's Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory toward it, they made a remarkable find: the first detection of hydroxyl (OH) gas from this object, a chemical fingerprint of water.

Swift's space-based telescope could spot the faint ultraviolet glow that ground observatories can't see—because, high above Earth's atmosphere, it captures light that never reaches Earth's surface.

Detecting water—through its ultraviolet by-product, hydroxyl—is a major breakthrough for understanding how interstellar comets evolve. In solar-system comets, water is the yardstick by which scientists measure their overall activity and track how sunlight drives the release of other gases. It's the chemical benchmark that anchors every comparison of volatile ices in a comet's nucleus.

Finding the same signal in an interstellar object means that, for the first time, astronomers can begin to place 3I/ATLAS on the same scale used to study native solar-system comets—a step toward comparing the chemistry of planetary systems across the galaxy.

What makes 3I/ATLAS remarkable is where this water activity occurs. The Swift observations detected OH when the comet was nearly three times farther from the sun than Earth—well beyond the region where water ice on a comet's surface can easily sublimate—and measured a water-loss rate of about 40 kilograms per second—roughly the output of a fire hose running at full blast.

At those distances, most solar-system comets remain quiet. The strong ultraviolet signal from ATLAS suggests that something else is at work: perhaps sunlight is heating small icy grains released from the nucleus, allowing them to vaporize and feed the surrounding cloud of gas. Such extended sources of water have been seen only in a handful of distant comets and point to complex, layered ices that preserve clues to how these objects formed.

It rains on the Sun, and scientists at the University of Hawaiʻi Institute for Astronomy (IfA) have finally uncovered the reason why.

Unlike the water droplets that fall on Earth, solar rain occurs within the Sun’s corona, a region of extremely hot plasma that extends above its surface. This phenomenon involves cooler, denser clumps of plasma that condense high in the corona and then descend back toward the Sun. For years, researchers struggled to understand how this process could happen so rapidly during solar flares.

New explanation
Now, that long-standing mystery has been solved by Luke Benavitz, a first-year graduate student at IfA, and astronomer Jeffrey Reep. Their findings, published in the Astrophysical Journal, provide an essential update to solar models that have puzzled scientists for decades.

“At present, models assume that the distribution of various elements in the corona is constant throughout space and time, which clearly isn’t the case,” said Benavitz. “It’s exciting to see that when we allow elements like iron to change with time, the models finally match what we actually observe on the Sun. It makes the physics come alive in a way that feels real.”

Why it matters
The new finding means solar scientists can better model how the Sun behaves during flares, insights that could one day help predict space weather that affects our daily lives.

Earlier models required heating over hours or days to explain coronal rain; however, solar flares can happen in just minutes. The IfA team’s work shows that shifting elemental abundances can explain how rain can quickly form.

“This discovery matters because it helps us understand how the Sun really works,” said Reep. “We can’t directly see the heating process, so we use cooling as a proxy. But if our models haven’t treated abundances properly, the cooling time has likely been overestimated. We might need to go back to the drawing board on coronal heating, so there’s a lot of new and exciting work to be done.”

For the first time, scientists have managed to directly observe and measure the protein clusters thought to spark the onset of Parkinson’s disease, representing a major leap forward in understanding this rapidly growing neurological disorder.

These microscopic structures, known as alpha-synuclein oligomers, have long been suspected of initiating the disease within the brain. However, until now, researchers had been unable to detect them directly in human brain tissue.

A team from the University of Cambridge, UCL, the Francis Crick Institute, and Polytechnique Montréal has now developed an advanced imaging method that enables them to visualize, count, and compare these elusive clusters. One of the researchers described the breakthrough as being “like being able to see stars in broad daylight.”

The findings, published in Nature Biomedical Engineering, could reveal new details about how Parkinson’s spreads through the brain and aid in the development of early diagnostic tools and future treatments.

Currently, around 166,000 people in the UK live with Parkinson’s disease, and that number continues to grow. Globally, the total is expected to reach 25 million by 2050. While existing medications can ease symptoms such as tremors and muscle stiffness, there are still no treatments capable of slowing or stopping the progression of the disease itself.

An amateur astronomer looking through data from NASA's Perseverance rover may have spotted interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS as it passed overhead.

On October 3, Comet 3I/ATLAS had its closest approach to Mars, passing by it at a distance of around 29 million kilometers (18 million miles). NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA) both planned to observe the sky during this timeframe using space robots such as Mars Express and the ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter, and we'll find out soon enough if they observed it from Mars' orbit. And possibly, as the case may be, by the Perseverance rover on the Red Planet's surface.

Here's where it gets a little murky. As the US space agency explains on its website, "NASA Operating Status: NASA is currently CLOSED due to a lapse in Government funding". While NASA is unable to post information on any data that may have been captured by its robots, Perseverance continues to send its raw images, which are available to the public to view. Looking through those images, some believe they have identified the interstellar object. While one has been picked up by the press and the Internet alike, this one is unlikely to be an image of 3I/ATLAS. However, another that has gone unnoticed by most media may be worthy of some further attention.

Japanese researchers have discovered a way to overcome long-standing thermodynamic limits, such as the Carnot efficiency, by using quantum states that do not undergo thermalization. Their innovative method employs a non-thermal Tomonaga-Luttinger liquid to transform waste heat into electrical energy with greater efficiency than conventional systems. This advancement could lead to more energy-efficient electronics and future progress in quantum computing.

Energy harvesters are devices that collect power from surrounding environmental sources, offering a means to improve the efficiency of modern electronics and industrial operations. Waste heat is produced continuously by everyday technologies, including computers, smartphones, and factory machinery, as well as by large-scale systems like power plants. Energy-harvesting techniques make it possible to reclaim this otherwise lost heat and convert it into usable electricity, reducing dependence on traditional energy supplies.

Traditional energy-harvesting technologies, however, remain limited by the fundamental principles of thermodynamics. Systems that operate under thermal equilibrium face strict boundaries on how much heat can be turned into electrical power. The ratio between generated electricity and the heat drawn from a waste source is defined by the Carnot efficiency. Additional constraints, such as the Curzon-Ahlborn efficiency (which represents the efficiency achievable at maximum power output), have further restricted how much practical energy can be recovered from waste heat.

Now, a research team led by Professor Toshimasa Fujisawa from the Department of Physics at Institute of Science Tokyo (Science Tokyo), Japan, in collaboration with Senior Distinguished Researcher Koji Muraki from NTT Basic Research Laboratories, Japan, has found a way to bypass this barrier. In their paper published in Communications Physics on September 30, 2025, the team introduced a novel energy-harvesting technique that uses unique quantum states to achieve efficiencies that go beyond the conventional thermodynamic limits.

NASA's spinning spacecraft studying the satellites of the solar system's largest celestial body (aside from the sun), may already be switched off, but the space agency won't say.

The Juno probe launched in 2011 and entered orbit around Jupiter in 2016, beginning what was originally planned as a 20-month mission. Nearly a decade later, the spacecraft has delivered unprecedented research of the Jovian system, observing the gas giant, its many moons and faint ring system long past its intended lifespan.

NASA has extended Juno's mission multiple times, most recently in 2021, guaranteeing operations through Sept. 30, 2025. That date has now passed, and with the U.S. government shut down, there is no word yet on whether Juno will come out alive on the other side.

Fragments of DNA left by viruses that infected our distant ancestors may be 'firestarters' for new human life, new research finds.

"Our results illustrate how recently emerged… genes can confer developmentally essential functions in humans," Stanford University biologist Raquel Fueyo and colleagues write in their paper.

Fueyo and her team used a ball of stem cells induced to mimic a blastocyst, the phase of embryonic development about five days after fertilization. This 3D model, or blastoid, replicates the developmental stage just before the embryo implants into the uterus's lining.

When the researchers disabled a group of remnant virus genes known as LTR5Hs, the embryonic model either turned into a disorganized clump of cells or died. Without the LTR5Hs, the middle layer (epiblast) of the three-tissue-layered blastoid did not form properly.

Up to 9 percent of our DNA is composed of genetic material from ancient viral invaders. These endogenous retrovirus remnants infiltrated the genetic material of our ancestors' reproductive cells millions of years ago and are now permanently integrated into our genetic blueprints.

A trio of researchers has won the 2025 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for discovering how the immune system is prevented from attacking our own bodies.

Mary E. Brunkow of the Institute for Systems Biology in Seattle, Fred Ramsdell of Sonoma Biotherapeutics in San Francisco, and Shimon Sakaguchi of Osaka University in Japan were awarded the prize "for their discoveries concerning peripheral immune tolerance." The Nobel Assembly at Karolinska Institutet announced the winners at a ceremony in Stockholm, Sweden, on Monday (Oct. 6).

The three scientists' research, honored with the 116th medicine prize, provides insights into keeping the immune system under control to fight microbes and avoid autoimmune diseases.

"Their discoveries have been decisive for our understanding of how the immune system functions and why we do not all develop serious autoimmune diseases," Olle Kämpe, chair of the Nobel Committee, said in a statement.

New research has uncovered a species of hook-toothed lizard that lived about 167 million years ago and has a confusing set of features seen in snakes and geckos—two very distant relatives. One of the oldest relatively complete fossil lizards yet discovered, the Jurassic specimen is described in a study, published on October 1 in the journal Nature, from a multinational collaboration between the American Museum of Natural History and scientists in the United Kingdom, including University College London and the National Museums Scotland, France, and South Africa.

The species was given the Gaelic name Breugnathair elgolensis meaning “false snake of Elgol,” referencing the area in Scotland’s Isle of Skye where it was discovered. Breugnathair had snake-like jaws and hook-like, curved teeth similar to those of modern-day pythons, paired with the short body and fully-formed limbs of a lizard.

Scientists have released new images showing, in incredible detail, antibiotics defeating disease-causing bacteria by piercing the microbes' membranes and infiltrating their innards.

The antibiotics, called polymyxins, were observed forcing the armored membranes around Escherichia coli bacterial cells to grow bumps and bulges. The bacteria then shed their outer membranes, leaving space for the antibiotic to enter the cells.

"It was incredible seeing the effect of the antibiotic at the bacterial surface in real-time," study co-author Carolina Borrelli, a doctoral student studying biophysics and microbiology at University College London (UCL), said in a statement.

Researchers at Penn Medicine have uncovered how psilocybin, the main psychoactive ingredient in certain “magic mushrooms,” influences key brain circuits, offering potential new approaches for treating chronic pain and related mental health conditions.

Chronic pain affects more than 1.5 billion people globally and often intertwines with anxiety and depression, creating a feedback loop that worsens both physical and emotional suffering. The new research from the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, published in Nature Neuroscience, sheds light on how this cycle might be broken.

“As an anesthesiologist, I frequently care for people undergoing surgery who suffer from both chronic pain and depression. In many cases, they’re not sure which condition came first, but often, one makes the other worse,” said Joseph Cichon, MD, PhD, an assistant professor of Anesthesiology and Critical Care at Penn and senior author of the study. “This new study offers hope. These findings open the door to developing new, non-opioid, non-addictive therapies as psilocybin and related psychedelics are not considered addictive.”

Targeting the Brain’s Pain and Mood Hub
In experiments using mice with chronic nerve injury and inflammatory pain, scientists discovered that a single psilocybin dose eased both pain and depression-like behaviors caused by that pain, with the effects lasting for nearly two weeks. Psilocybin achieves this by subtly stimulating serotonin receptors (5-HT2A and 5-HT1A) in the brain. “Unlike other drugs that fully turn these signals on or off, psilocybin acts more like a dimmer

Scientists from the University of Bath, working with colleagues at the Universities of Oxford and Bristol, have created a new molecule that stops a key protein from clumping together in the brain. This protein, called alpha-synuclein, is linked to Parkinson’s disease and certain forms of dementia. The research team has already shown that the molecule is effective in an animal model of Parkinson’s, and they believe it could eventually lead to a treatment that slows how the disease progresses.

Alpha-synuclein is a protein found mainly in brain cells (neurons), where it helps control the release of chemical messengers such as dopamine, which allow neurons to communicate with each other.

In people with Parkinson’s disease, alpha-synuclein begins to stick together, forming harmful clusters that damage and kill nerve cells. This process triggers the movement-related symptoms of the disease, including tremors, stiffness, and difficulty controlling motion. Although current medications can ease these symptoms, there is still no cure for Parkinson’s.

Stabilizing the Protein’s Natural State
Normally, alpha-synuclein’s natural or “native state” is like a flexible strand, but when active it shapes itself into a helix, which is critical for its function in binding and transporting parcels of dopamine.

The team engineered a peptide fragment that locks alpha-synuclein into its healthy shape, blocking its conversion into the toxic clumps that cause nerve cell death.

Laboratory tests showed the peptide is stable, penetrates brain-like cells, and restores movement while reducing protein deposits in a worm model of Parkinson’s.

This breakthrough, published in the journal JACS Au, demonstrates the potential of rational peptide design to transform large, unstable proteins into compact drug-like molecules.

The findings mark a significant step towards developing new peptide-based treatments for currently untreatable neurodegenerative conditions.

Professor Jody Mason, from the Department of Life Sciences at the University of Bath, said: “Our work shows that it is possible to rationally design small peptides that not only prevent harmful protein aggregation but also function inside living systems.

“This opens an exciting path towards new therapies for Parkinson’s and related diseases, where treatment options remain extremely limited.”

Incoming cuteness alert—did you know baby octopuses can change color and texture from the moment they’re born?

Human papillomavirus (HPV) is responsible for about 70% of head and neck cancers in the United States, making it the most common type of cancer linked to the virus. Rates of these cancers continue to rise each year. Unlike HPV-related cervical cancers, which have established screening options, there is currently no test to detect HPV-associated head and neck cancers.

As a result, most cases are diagnosed only after tumors have already expanded to billions of cells, causing symptoms and often spreading to nearby lymph nodes. Developing screening tools that can identify these cancers much earlier would allow patients to begin treatment sooner and improve outcomes.

Researchers have discovered a key molecular process that may contribute to chronic inflammation as we age. If this process can be accurately targeted, it could unlock ways to stay healthier in our later years.

The discovery centers on the unique strands of DNA contained within our mitochondria, the power stations of our cells. By banishing their 'mtDNA' into the surrounding cytoplasm, mitochondria can cause inflammation. Yet just how or why this happens has never been well understood.

In this study, researchers led by a team from the Max Planck Institute for Biology of Ageing in Germany analyzed tissue samples from humans and test animals, using mice genetically engineered to be models of aging and disease.

They found that when mtDNA can't find enough DNA building blocks (deoxyribonucleotides) for replication, it picks up RNA building blocks (ribonucleotides) instead. This mistake in construction causes instability in the mtDNA, which leads to it being ejected from the organelle.

"Our findings explain on a molecular level how metabolic disturbances can lead to inflammation in senescent cells and in aged tissue and open up new strategies for possible interventions," says molecular biologist Thomas Langer, from the Max Planck Institute for Biology of Ageing.

Engineers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst have developed an artificial neuron that behaves strikingly like its natural counterpart. The breakthrough builds on earlier research in which the team created protein nanowires from electricity-producing bacteria. Their new discovery suggests the possibility of designing computers that are far more energy-efficient and capable of directly interacting with living cells.

“Our brain processes an enormous amount of data,” says Shuai Fu, a graduate student in electrical and computer engineering at UMass Amherst and lead author of the study published in Nature Communications. “But its power usage is very, very low, especially compared to the amount of electricity it takes to run a Large Language Model, like ChatGPT.”

In terms of efficiency, the human body leaves current technology far behind. The brain contains billions of neurons, specialized cells responsible for sending and receiving electrical signals throughout the body. Despite this complexity, it requires only about 20 watts of power to perform tasks such as writing a story. By contrast, a large language model may draw well over a megawatt of electricity to accomplish the same activity.

The Efficiency Challenge
While electrical and computer engineers have long been interested in using artificial neurons as the circuitry for more efficient computers, the problem has always been how to keep their voltage low enough. “Previous versions of artificial neurons used 10 times more voltage—and 100 times more power—than the one we have created,” says Jun Yao, associate professor of electrical and computer engineering at UMass Amherst and the paper’s senior author. That means that previous attempts at creating artificial neurons weren’t all that efficient, nor could they plug directly into living neurons, which would be frightened by the increased amplitude.

“Ours register only 0.1 volts, which is about the same as the neurons in our bodies,” says Yao.

There are a wide range of applications for Fu and Yao’s new neuron, from redesigning computers along bio-inspired, and far more efficient principles, to electronic devices that could speak to our bodies directly.

Most of us have likely experienced artificial intelligence (AI) voices through personal assistants like Siri or Alexa, with their flat intonation and mechanical delivery giving us the impression that we could easily distinguish between an AI-generated voice and a real person. But scientists now say the average listener can no longer tell the difference between real people and "deepfake" voices.

In a new study published Sept. 24 in the journal PLoS One, researchers showed that when people listen to human voices — alongside AI-generated versions of the same voices — they cannot accurately identify which are real and which are fake.

"AI-generated voices are all around us now. We’ve all spoken to Alexa or Siri, or had our calls taken by automated customer service systems," said lead author of the study Nadine Lavan, senior lecturer in psychology at Queen Mary University of London, in a statement. "Those things don’t quite sound like real human voices, but it was only a matter of time until AI technology began to produce naturalistic, human-sounding speech."

The study suggested that, while generic voices created from scratch were not deemed to be realistic, voice clones trained on the voices of real people — deepfake audio — were found to be just as believable as their real-life counterparts.

The US has hit a regrettable new measles milestone, with over 1,500 cases reported in the country so far this year. This is the highest number since the disease was locally eliminated at the turn of the century.

Although weekly cases are well down compared to the peak of the outbreak in March of this year, it’s a concerning record that could have devastating consequences for children, the unvaccinated, or anyone with a weakened immune system.

According to new Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) data, as of September 30, there have been a total of 1,544 confirmed cases of measles in the United States in 2025. This is the highest since 1992, which saw 2,126 cases, and well above 2019’s modern record of 1,274 – the highest since the disease was declared eliminated in the US in 2000.

Almost all (92 percent) of these infections have involved people who are unvaccinated or have an unknown vaccination status. So far, 191 people have been hospitalized and three have died – the first measles deaths in the US in a decade – with the worst-affected states being Texas and New Mexico, the latter of which declared the end of its large-scale outbreak at the end of last week.

For comparison, last year, there were just 285 cases reported, and 59 in 2023.

Measles outbreaks are entirely preventable thanks to vaccines. It is because of a sustained vaccination effort that the US officially eliminated measles 25 years ago. However, this progress is now being undone as vaccination rates are falling amid a wave of anti-vax sentiment at the highest level.

The CDC states: “The measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine is very safe and effective. When more than 95 percent of people in a community are vaccinated [...], most people are protected through community immunity (herd immunity).”

“It’s worth emphasizing that there really shouldn’t be any cases at this point, because these diseases are preventable. Anything above zero is tragic. When you’re talking about potentially thousands or millions, that’s unfathomable.”