EverythingScience

For more than a century, scientists have observed rhythmic waves of synchronized neuronal activity in the brain. Now, for the first time, researchers at Yale University have pinpointed where a specific type of this activity—known as gamma waves—originates and have linked it directly to behavior.

Through the development of a highly precise new method for measuring brain activity, the team overcame long-standing technical barriers that had prevented a clear understanding of how these oscillations contribute to information processing and behavioral control.

For many of us, climate change feels like a distant threat—damage that will happen in the future somewhere far away to people we know little about. A new Stanford University-led study reveals how virtual reality can close that distance, enabling users to explore faraway places, develop a sense of attachment to those places, and care more about how a warming world is wreaking havoc on people's lives.

The findings, published this week in Scientific Reports, show that VR experiences significantly reduce people's indifference to climate change-driven damages in faraway places compared to viewing static images. The findings demonstrate promise for bridging partisan gaps on the issue, and inspiring people to take constructive action, such as supporting pro-environment organizations and policies.

"Virtual reality can make faraway climate impacts feel immediate and personally relevant," said study lead author Monique Santoso, a Ph.D. student in communication at the Stanford School of Humanities and Sciences. "By helping people form emotional attachments to distant places, VR fosters constructive emotions that motivate engagement rather than paralyzing fear."

From indifference to action
The new study involved 163 Stanford students who were randomly assigned to experience one of nine U.S. locations, such as New York City, Des Moines, Miami, and Massachusetts' North Shore, either through VR or static images. Participants listened to a news story about climate change-driven flooding in that location while virtually flying through a realistic 3D version of it.

This satellite imagery of Melissa approaching Jamaica is jaw-dropping and sobering.

satlib.cira.colostate.edu/event/hurrican…

The Sentinel-2 satellite captured this image of Melissa's eye at peak intensity. 10m pixel resolution - one of the best satellite images ever captured of a hurricane of this intensity.

They say we know more about the surface of the Moon than we do about the bottom of the ocean, which is what made it so incredibly exciting when scientists decided to do what the rest of us are too chicken to, dive down to the seabed to get a look at what’s lurking there. The Japan “Ring Of Fire” Expedition explored some of the deepest parts of the ocean and documented nearly 30,000 organisms.

Want to see some of them? Of course you do: Watch video

Diving deep
The crewed submersibles dove down to the hadal zone between 6,939 to 9,775 meters (22,700 to 32,000 feet) below the sea in three Japanese subduction trenches called the Japan, Ryukyu, and Izu-Ogasawara trenches. It marked an unprecedented exploration of the ocean’s deepest zone that enabled them to observe some seriously weird deep-sea creatures in their natural habitats.

“This work represents one of the most detailed in-situ surveys of biodiversity and habitats in the hadal zone to date,” said Research Fellow at the Minderoo-UWA Deep-Sea Research Centre and study lead author Dr Denise Swanborn to IFLScience. “Historically, most of our knowledge came from stationary landers or trawl samples, which make it difficult to understand how organisms live in their natural habitats and what local influences determine where we find certain organisms.”

For the first time ever, we’ve been able to prove that some dinosaurs had hooves, thanks to two remarkably well-preserved mummified dinosaurs retrieved from Wyoming’s Badlands. The specimens are the duck-billed dinosaurs Edmontosaurus annectens that, thanks to a "fluke preservation event" are near-perfect 66 million years later.

Known as “clay templating,” that process essentially encased the dinosaurs shortly after burial with a mask of clay no thicker than 1/100th of an inch, or about 0.3 millimeters. “This is a mask, a template, a clay layer so thin you could blow it away,” said senior author Paul Sereno, PhD, Professor of Organismal Biology and Anatomy at UChicago in a statement. “It was attracted to the outside of the carcass in a fluke event of preservation.”

Using hospital and micro-CT scans, thin sections, X-ray spectroscopy, clay analyses, and examination of the discovery site, a team of scientists were able to figure out how that “fluke event” played out. After death, the dinosaurs were briefly baked under the Sun before a flash flood submerged their carcasses.

A thin biofilm then covered their fleshy surface and electrostatically pulled clay out of the wet sediment, forming a wafer-thin layer that would preserve them in three dimensions. The result is two unprecedented specimens that have already provided a glut of dinosaur firsts.

Even as a brilliant, naked-eye comet slices through Earth's sky (cheers, Comet Lemmon!), the most famous object in the solar system right now is hidden on the far side of the sun: the interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS.

This alien visitor, which most astronomers believe to be a comet originating from an unknown star system far beyond our own, is only the third interstellar object ever detected in our solar system. It is the largest, fastest-moving, and quite likely the oldest interstellar object ever seen.

Though it was just confirmed by NASA in early July, the freewheeling ball of ice and dust is already nearing the halfway point on its tour of our solar system. This Wednesday (Oct. 29), 3I/ATLAS will reach perihelion — its closest point to the sun — before beginning its months-long departure from our cosmic neighborhood.

As 3I/ATLAS reaches perihelion this week — coming within 1.4 astronomical units, or 130 million miles (210 million kilometers) of the sun, according to NASA — it may start releasing gas in overdrive. When the comet becomes visible to telescopes again in early November, it may look both bigger and brighter than how it appeared two months ago. Instruments on the ground, in orbit and even on their way to Jupiter will snap to attention, making 3I/ATLAS an even bigger space celebrity as it zooms away from our solar system forever.

Announcing ISS in Real Time, a new multimedia project where you can play back every day of the past 25 years aboard the International Space Station.
issinrealtime.org

Biologists have long been fascinated by the ability of salamanders to regrow entire limbs. Now Harvard researchers have solved part of the mystery of how they accomplish this feat—by activating stem cells throughout the body, not just at the injury site.

In a paper published in the journal Cell, researchers documented how this body-wide response in axolotl salamanders is triggered by the sympathetic nervous system—the iconic "fight or flight" network. The study raises the possibility that these mechanisms might one day be manipulated to regenerate human limbs and organs.

"We've shown the importance of the adrenaline stress signaling hormone in getting cells ready for regeneration," said Duygu Payzin-Dogru, lead author of the new study and a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Stem Cell and Regenerative Biology (SCRB).

"Because adrenaline exists in humans, this tells us we can co-opt some of the things we found in the axolotl to perhaps improve regenerative outcomes in humans. We have some of the same components and just have to figure out the right way to implement them."

The new study culminates several years of research by the lab of Jessica Whited, associate professor in SCRB, who studies limb regeneration in axolotls, a species native to Mexico. Axolotls are often examined as model organisms of limb regeneration because they are among the fastest-breeding species of salamanders.

Some invertebrates such as planarian flatworms can regrow entire bodies from small bits of tissue. But salamanders are the only vertebrates that can regenerate full limbs.

The impact of physical activity continues long after the workout ends.

A new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences by researchers from Virginia Tech, the University of Aberdeen, and Shenzhen University found that being active increases the total amount of energy the body uses each day without prompting it to cut back elsewhere.

While the health advantages of regular exercise are well established, scientists know less about how physical activity influences the body’s overall “energy budget,” meaning how energy is distributed among different biological processes.

For years, researchers have debated whether this energy budget works like a fixed income, where energy for movement is taken from other functions, or like a flexible system that expands to support more activity. The study aimed to identify which of these models best reflects how the human body manages energy at varying levels of physical activity.

To do this, researchers evaluated the total energy expenditure, or the total calories burned in a day, in participants across a wide spectrum of physical activity.

Some think it's a no brainer: Scattering microscopic particles of sulfur into Earth's atmosphere would reduce the amount of sunlight that reaches the ground, thereby cooling the planet. Indeed, this cooling might temporarily offset the progressing climate change — but a new study claims this type of intervention is likely to have several more unwanted side effects than previously thought.

The concept of geoengineering, or human-induced alteration of the planet's climate, by stratospheric sulfur injections (SAI) is backed by nature's own phenomena. The 1991 eruption of the Philippine stratovolcano Mount Pinatubo injected nearly 20 million tons of sulfur dioxide in the stratosphere, the layer of Earth's atmosphere between altitudes of 7.6 and 31 miles (12 and 50 kilometers). The presence of the sulfur particles in the atmosphere led to a global mean temperature drop of about 1 degree Fahrenheit (0.5 degree Celsius), according to the U.S. Geological Survey.

But that cooling, measurable for two years after the eruption, also disrupted the Indian monsoon system, causing a drought across South Asia, according to the new research paper. Plus, although the sulfur aerosol cooled Earth's surface, it warmed the stratosphere, speeding up ozone destruction.

"There are a range of things that might happen if you try to do this — and we're arguing that the range of possible outcomes is a lot wider than anybody has appreciated until now," Faye McNeill, an atmospheric chemist and aerosol scientist at Columbia’s Climate School and Columbia Engineering and one of the authors of the paper said in a statement.

Researchers are using sophisticated computer models to understand the effects of geoengineering interventions. But McNeill and her colleagues warn that no simulation is perfect and that, in the real world, surprises would be inevitable.

People recalling a familiar image use different brain mechanisms to focus on a component than those who are viewing the situation live, a new study indicates. The reasons why the brain has evolved a different process for this task are not known, but might hold the key to understanding why some people have this capacity and others do not.

A few years ago, many frequent Internet users were astonished to discover that some people have no “mind’s eye”, the capacity to visualize things that they cannot see at the time, also known as aphantasia. A smaller group were at least as amazed to learn that other people can, and that references to such capacities were not merely metaphorical. 

Possibly influenced by these exchanges, research into the working of the mind’s eye, where it exists, has picked up, for example finding that psychedelics may switch it on. The most recent example investigated how the brain responds when challenged to focus on part of a remembered map, in contrast to a scene laid out before it, revealing crucial differences.

Last night I used a massive telescope and super short exposures to try and keep as much detail as possible near the comet's Nucleus, and it revealed a series of "jets", likely sublimated water and chunks of rock and dust, streaming off the core.

And check out this crazy timelapse of the Lemmon comet. You can see how the chunks in the tail stream off into space!

This July, astronomers were left reeling by an event unlike anything seen before: a gamma-ray burst (GRB) that repeated four times in a day, instead of lasting a few minutes as is usually the case. The JWST has examined the source of this event and a paper undergoing peer-review claims the total energy released probably exceeded anything previously witnessed, including events that were brighter but much briefer. The work only helps a little in trying to get to the bottom of what could cause such a prodigious event.

The universe keeps raising the bar on us in terms of how energetic events can be. We have only understood the power of GRBs since the 1990s, but recently we have discovered there are specific examples of this phenomenon that involve almost unimaginably more energy than the ordinary ones.

One such example, GRB 221009A, has been dubbed the BOAT (Brightest Of All Time) for being so far off the range predicted by other GRBs that we should only see something like it every thousand years. GRB 250702B proved there is more than one way for such events to be extraordinary, in the form of rapidly repeating explosions.

Some GRB-like events, known as soft gamma repeaters, come from within our galaxy and are suspected to be produced by magnetars. Others are extragalactic. The two can look similar at first, but the vastly greater distances to those in other galaxies mean the energy released must have been millions or billions of times greater, implying a different cause.

Consequently, when GRB 250702B was detected the most urgent question was its distance, which would indicate how much energy had been emitted. The Very Large Telescope and Hubble provided evidence it was from beyond the Milky Way, although the suspected source galaxy identification was tentative.

The JWST, however, has detected hydrogen emission lines in the afterglow, and these are red-shifted enough to confirm that the explosion took place billions of light-years away. Using that distance, a team of astronomers across 23 departments and institutions concluded the event released at least 2 x 1054 ergs in the course of the later three bursts. For comparison, the Sun emits about 1041 ergs a year, so at its current rate it would take about 20 trillion years to release that much energy. 

Supernovae are sometimes measured in “foes”, where a foe is 1051 ergs because that is the energy released by a run-of-the-mill supernova, if there is such a thing (the name "foe" comes from [ten to the power of] Fifty-One Ergs). This is 2,000 times greater, and in a day, rather than the months over which supernovae emit most of their energy.

In research published on October 23 in Science, the team precisely measured the energy of electrons orbiting a radium atom that was chemically bound to a fluoride atom, forming radium monofluoride. By using the molecular environment as a microscopic stand-in for a particle collider, they confined the radium atom's electrons and increased the likelihood that some would briefly pass through the nucleus.

Traditional experiments that investigate nuclear interiors depend on kilometer-scale accelerators that speed up electron beams to smash into and fragment nuclei. The new molecule-centered approach provides a compact, table-top way to directly probe the inside of a nucleus.

Table-Top Method Detects Nuclear "Messages"
Working with radium monofluoride, the researchers tracked the energies of the radium atom's electrons as they moved within the molecule. They observed a small shift in energy and concluded that some electrons must have briefly entered the nucleus and interacted with what lies inside. As those electrons left, they retained the energy change, effectively carrying a nuclear "message" that reveals features of the nucleus's interior.

The method opens a path to measuring the nuclear "magnetic distribution." Inside a nucleus, each proton and neutron behaves like a tiny magnet, and their orientations depend on how these particles are arranged. The team plans to use the technique to map this property in radium for the first time, a step that could inform one of cosmology's central puzzles: why the universe contains far more matter than antimatter.

"Our results lay the groundwork for subsequent studies aiming to measure violations of fundamental symmetries at the nuclear level," says study co-author Ronald Fernando Garcia Ruiz, who is the Thomas A. Franck Associate Professor of Physics at MIT. "This could provide answers to some of the most pressing questions in modern physics."

Using cutting-edge computational modeling, scientists from the University of Oxford, in collaboration with the Instituto Superior Técnico at the University of Lisbon, have successfully produced the first real-time, three-dimensional simulations showing how powerful laser beams can modify the “quantum vacuum.”

Once thought to be completely empty, this vacuum is now understood through quantum physics to be filled with fleeting pairs of virtual electrons and positrons.

The team’s simulations vividly capture a strange and long-theorized effect in quantum physics called vacuum four-wave mixing. According to this phenomenon, when three laser pulses are precisely focused, their combined electromagnetic fields can polarize the virtual particles within the vacuum.

This interaction causes photons to scatter off one another like billiard balls, resulting in the creation of a fourth beam of light in what researchers describe as a “light from darkness” process. These simulated events may provide a new way to explore untested areas of physics at extremely high energy levels.

“This is not just an academic curiosity—it is a major step toward experimental confirmation of quantum effects that until now have been mostly theoretical,” said study co-author Professor Peter Norreys, Department of Physics, University of Oxford.

A New Era of Ultra-Intense Lasers
The work arrives just in time as a new generation of ultra-powerful lasers starts to come online. Facilities such as the UK’s Vulcan 20-20, the European ‘Extreme Light Infrastructure (ELI)’ project, and China’s Station for Extreme Light (SEL) and SHINE facilities are set to deliver power levels high enough to potentially confirm photon-photon scattering in the lab for the first time. Photon-photon scattering has already been selected as one of three flagship experiments at the University of Rochester’s OPAL dual-beam 25 PW laser facility in the United States.

The simulations were carried out using an advanced version of OSIRIS, a simulation software package that models interactions between laser beams and matter or plasma.

Using supercomputers, researchers recreated the galaxy’s history and mapped where dark matter should gather and collide. The results matched real gamma-ray observations, suggesting the mysterious light could be produced by dark matter particles colliding rather than by dying stars.

Clues in the Cosmic Mystery of Dark Matter
Scientists may have uncovered one of the most promising hints yet in the search to confirm the existence of dark matter.

At the heart of the Milky Way, a faint and widespread glow of gamma rays has puzzled astronomers for decades. The light could be the result of dark matter particles colliding, or it might come from fast-spinning neutron stars known as millisecond pulsars.

According to a new study published October 16 in Physical Review Letters, both explanations currently appear equally possible. If the gamma-ray glow is not produced by dying stars, it could mark the first real evidence that dark matter exists.

Scientists on the Hunt for Hidden Matter
“Dark matter dominates the universe and holds galaxies together. It’s extremely consequential and we’re desperately thinking all the time of ideas as to how we could detect it,” said co-author Joseph Silk, a professor of physics and astronomy at Johns Hopkins and a researcher at the Institute of Astrophysics, Sorbonne University, and CNRS. “Gamma rays, and specifically the excess light we’re observing at the center of our galaxy, could be our first clue.”

Silk and an international team of researchers, led by Moorits Muru with the Leibniz Institute for Astrophysics Potsdam (AIP), used supercomputers to create maps of where dark matter should be located in the Milky Way, taking into account for the first time the history of how the galaxy formed.

Galactic Collisions and a Cosmic Match
Today, the Milky Way is a relatively closed system, without materials coming in or going out of it. But this hasn’t always been the case. During the first billion years, many smaller galaxy-like systems made of dark matter and other materials entered and became the building blocks of the young Milky Way. As dark matter particles gravitated toward the center of the galaxy and clustered, the number of dark matter collisions increased.

When the researchers factored in more realistic collisions, their simulated maps matched actual gamma-ray maps taken by the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope.

These matching maps round out a triad of evidence that suggests excess gamma rays in the center of the Milky Way could originate from dark matter. Gamma rays coming from dark matter particle collisions would produce the same signal and have the same properties as those observed in the real world, the researchers said—though it’s not definitive proof.