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An international team of quantum researchers has shown how machine learning can be used to filter a practically infinite number of possible material combinations to identify candidates for superconductivity. Thanks to the breakthrough, new superconductors can now be found much faster, says Aalto University Professor Päivi Törmä, who leads the SuperC consortium behind the research.

Superconductors carry electric current with zero resistance, thanks to a quantum effect appearing only at extremely low temperatures. They power not only quantum computers but many other things, from neuroimaging to fusion reactors and maglev trains.

However, these unicorn materials are prohibitively hard to identify. Any endlessly variable combination of elements could be a superconductor—yet few actually are. And the ones already discovered require expensive cooling equipment to bring them to the near-absolute-zero temperatures that give them their quantum properties.

For scientists the world over, the race is on to find a scalable superconductor that works at room temperature.

"Superconductive materials that can operate at room temperature would forever change the way we consume energy," explains Törmä. "If such a material could replace regular conductors in applications like computers and data centers, global energy consumption could be slashed and the heat footprint of the ICT sector vastly reduced."

Arriving at proof of concept
Driven by a shared desire to harness quantum physics in the fight against climate change, Professor Törmä and a team of renowned physicists formed the SuperC consortium in 2023. It is the first coordinated global collaboration to find new superconductors—and they aim to find a room-temperature superconductor by 2033.

According to Törmä, SuperC's combination of quantum geometry and machine learning gives them an excellent starting point. This latest discovery has its underpinning in traditional Japanese basket-making patterns; both of the newly discovered materials (YRu3B2 and LuRu3B2) gain their superconductivity from electrons forming flat bands in a traditional pattern known as a kagome lattice.

To identify the two new superconductors, the team used machine learning to narrow down promising elemental combinations. After prescreening these with a unique algorithm, the team carried out detailed calculations to determine which materials could be superconductive.

After theoretical confirmation, SuperC collaborators at Rice University set about synthesizing the samples. This complex process, which involves chemically combining raw elements into new compounds, was led by Professor Emilia Morosan. The team at Rice was then able to run tests on the materials to confirm their superconductivity.

The giant trees of tropical forests are important allies in the fight against climate change because of their ability to store carbon, yet they are still poorly understood by science. However, a study published in the journal Science reveals a crucial survival mechanism: These trees, which exceed 70 meters (230 feet) in height, have no difficulty transporting water to their tops and are no more vulnerable than smaller trees.

They have developed internal adaptations that compensate for the challenges of transporting water to the highest branches. Furthermore, tests conducted during severe droughts showed that they did not experience a more pronounced decline in growth than smaller trees. This contradicts the hypothesis that very tall trees would be more susceptible to water stress.

How giant trees move water
To date, the scientific literature suggests that as trees grow taller, their ability to move water upward is impaired by the greater distance between roots and leaves, as well as by the effects of gravity. This would reduce photosynthesis, limit growth and increase vulnerability to drought.

The research found that adjustments to the xylem conduits (microscopic "tubes" that the plant uses to transport water and nutrients to the leaves)—which increase in diameter as the tree grows taller—compensate for the increased resistance to water flow along the way. In practice, it's as if a larger hose were needed to carry water further. These complex adaptations reduce the likelihood of water transport failure when the plant is in drought conditions.

A light intro to LLMs, chatbots, pretraining, and transformers.

Dig deeper here:
Neural networks  
Technical details as a talk:
Visualizing transformers and attention

The hantavirus outbreak that struck a cruise ship in April, killing three people and sparking fears of further spread, is over, the World Health Organization (WHO) has announced.

"Today, the final contact of a person exposed to hantavirus on the cruise ship MV Hondius completed their quarantine period, tested negative and returned home. No further cases have been reported since the 25th of May," Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the WHO's director-general, said in his opening remarks at a news conference Thursday (July 2). "We are therefore very pleased to say that WHO considers the outbreak of hantavirus over."

The total number of cases linked to the outbreak was 13. All those affected were either passengers or crew on the ship.

The outbreak began aboard the Dutch-flagged cruise ship MV Hondius after it departed southern Argentina on April 1. It involved the Andes virus, the only known hantavirus that can spread between people.

Hantaviruses are rodent-borne viruses that are found in the Americas, Europe and Asia and spread to humans relatively rarely, usually via contact with the urine, droppings or saliva of infected rodents. The Andes virus, however, has sparked short chains of human-to-human transmission in the past.

A rush rescue mission to save a NASA space telescope remains grounded, this time because of a last-minute launch problem.

Northrop Grumman 's rocket-launching plane took off from the Marshall Islands in the Pacific on Thursday, following weather delays all week. While in flight, the team observed a warning in the stream of data and decided against releasing the Pegasus rocket strapped to the plane's belly, the company said. It was not immediately clear whether the warning came from the rocket or the plane.

The rocket holds a three-armed robotic spacecraft built by Katalyst Space Technologies to capture the Swift Observatory, which will come crashing down by October if no help arrives. No new launch date has been set.

NASA paused Swift's science operations earlier this year to preserve its orbit as long as possible. It has detected thousands of gamma ray bursts and exploding stars since its launch in 2004, tipping off other telescopes for more detailed observations.

Anxious to continue Swift's scanning of the universe, the space agency hired Katalyst Space last September for the $30 million salvage operation.

NASA on Tuesday announced new uncrewed missions to aid in the future creation of a lunar surface base, a project beginning to take shape despite recent setbacks.

Three U.S. companies were awarded contracts for missions to deliver cargo, including scientific instruments, to the moon, NASA said. The agency will pay nearly $600 million for the projects, which supplement others announced in May.

The efforts are part of plans to use robotic vehicles to build infrastructure that future human explorers to the moon could eventually use.

The announcement comes as the U.S. space agency's lunar ambitions have faced setbacks following the spectacular explosion this spring of the New Glenn rocket, which is built by tech billionaire Jeff Bezos' company Blue Origin.

Senior agency officials have acknowledged that the situation would likely cause lunar program delays but voiced optimism Tuesday, also indicating there were alternatives to launch a lander carrying equipment developed by Blue Origin.

"We're working with Blue Origin very closely to understand their timelines to recovery and also looking at other options in case it doesn't meet our timeline," said Carlos Garcia-Galan, NASA program manager for the moon base, during an event with journalists Tuesday.

After spending years creating a lunar orbital space station known as Gateway, NASA overhauled its plans in March, saying it would now focus on creating a base for surface operations.

The agency pledged $20 billion to the moon base efforts.

The base is planned for a site near the lunar south pole, a strategic area because of the presence of water ice in the soil. NASA had previously said construction could begin in 2029.

Conceived to compete with China—which also aims to send humans to the moon and establish a base there—NASA's ambitious plan remains vague in several aspects.

But the U.S. agency has started to roll out its vision, which includes lunar landers, lunar rovers and drones designed to survey the terrain and subsequently build up infrastructure, including a power grid and pressurized habitats.

The agency on Tuesday floated the possibility of repurposing a Mars rover as part of the efforts it is aiming to complete in a tight time frame.

Pesky mosquitoes on the hunt for blood may find the smell of a common repellent attractive, not repulsive. That’s the finding of new lab tests.

The chemical is known as DEET. It’s been one of the most effective insect repellents for decades. But in new lab tests, yellow-fever mosquitoes (Aedes aegypti) exposed to DEET learned to associate the chemical with food. This suggests these insects can link unpleasant odors with rewards. That turns a bad experience into an inviting one.

For now, it’s not clear if this might happen outside the lab, too.

How DEET works, exactly, is a bit unclear, says Clément Vinauger at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg. He studies animals’ brains and behaviors. Some studies have suggested mosquitoes don’t like DEET’s smell or taste. Others hinted that the repellent scrambles mosquito senses. That would keep the insects from detecting the otherwise enticing body odors that normally lure them in for a blood meal.

The new results suggest that mosquitoes do detect DEET, Vinauger says. They also can learn, changing their behaviors based on prior experiences.

Charting the vast Jovian realm: NASA's Juno mission provides new maps of the giant planet Jupiter. ‍This is a cylindrical composite map from Juno's 9th close pass by Jupiter 🗺️ missionjuno.swri.edu/junocam/think-…

A study is reframing a fundamental question in plant evolution: What made trees possible? Researchers from Cal Poly Humboldt, Yale University, the University of Hohenheim in Germany and the Czech Academy of Sciences set out to understand how trees evolved and what allowed them to become some of the largest and longest-living organisms on Earth.

The Current Biology study suggests that surviving drought may have been a powerful force shaping the evolution of trees. It challenges conventional ideas about what defines a tree.

Rather than viewing trees simply as plants with trunks and wood, the researchers argue that a defining feature may be their ability to add and replace water transport tissues throughout their lives. Becoming tree-like and growing taller to compete for sunlight, they argue, required solving a critical challenge—moving water through a massive organism.

Water became the central challenge
To grow tall, trees must move water upward from their roots to their trunks, branches and leaves. But as they grew larger, keeping more and more water moving became increasingly difficult, especially when water became scarce.

Xylem, the microscopic tubes that carry water through plants, can become blocked by air bubbles called embolisms. If those blockages spread, they can cut off water to the rest of the plant and kill it. As plants evolved larger and more extensive water-transport systems, they became more vulnerable to embolisms and hydraulic failure.

But tree-like plants, the researchers propose, started to compartmentalize these systems to limit the spread of damage.

The strategy is similar to a power grid with circuit breakers or a ship with watertight compartments: If one section fails, the entire system doesn't go down with it.

That led the researchers to a new conclusion: The evolution of trees may have been driven by the need to move more water through their increasingly taller bodies and survive hydraulic failure...

or the very first time, biologists packed nonliving components into a cell-like membrane, piece by piece, and witnessed the bag of molecules start to behave like life. The lab-made synthetic cell grew, replicated its DNA, and divided, demonstrating the basic functions of a cell cycle.

It’s “an impressive step,” said Jack Szostak, who studies the origins of life at the University of Chicago and was not involved in the research. “I don’t know of any other effort to put together an artificial cell from biological components that has progressed so far.”

The cell is not alive by any definition. It can’t survive without constant deliveries of food and ribosomes, the machinery needed to make proteins. It has no defenses or a good waste removal system. But it’s the strongest demonstration yet that it is possible to generate life from nonlife, a goal that synthetic biologists have been chasing for decades.

“It’s a big step forward to this holy grail of making a living thing out of dead components,” said Sijbren Otto, a systems chemist at the Stratingh Institute for Chemistry in the Netherlands who was not involved in the work. “It’s not completely there yet, but it’s definitely getting quite close.”

Since these cells were pieced together from scratch, and all the molecular parts were crafted in the lab, scientists can tinker with the system and switch components in and out. “I have a blueprint, I have a full chemical ingredient list of every component,” said Kate Adamala, a synthetic biologist at the University of Minnesota who led the new study, which is not yet peer-reviewed. With such flexibility, this kind of synthetic cell could eventually be coaxed to create new materials, such as biofuels and drugs, and help researchers study disease.

The liver is one of the body’s hardest-working organs, carrying out hundreds of vital jobs, from filtering toxins and metabolizing medications to producing proteins essential for blood clotting. Yet when it fails, the only definitive treatment is often a transplant, a solution limited by a chronic shortage of donor organs.

MIT engineers have now developed injectable “mini livers” that, in mice, survived for at least two months while performing many of the functions of healthy liver tissue.

“We think of these as satellite livers. If we could deliver these cells into the body, while leaving the sick organ in place, that would provide booster function,” says Sangeeta Bhatia, the John and Dorothy Wilson Professor of Health Sciences and Technology and of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT, and a member of MIT’s Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research and the Institute for Medical Engineering and Science (IMES).

The smallest centipedes have 30 legs, while the largest ever discovered had 382 👀
🐛 Despite the name, no centipede with exactly 100 legs has ever been found. Surprising science explains why!

Every time electricity flows through a wire, some of its energy is inevitably lost as heat because electrons collide with one another and with the material around them. But just how much can these collisions increase electrical resistance? A new study suggests there is a fundamental limit.

To investigate, researchers from the University of Toronto, L’École Normale Supérieure in Paris, and Lehigh University turned to an unusual stand-in for electrons: ultracold potassium atoms cooled to temperatures just above absolute zero.

By precisely controlling how often the atoms collided, they found that resistance increased only up to a certain point before leveling off. The discovery provides rare experimental evidence for a microscopic limit to resistivity and could improve scientists’ understanding of electron behavior in quantum materials.

“Electron-on-electron collisions are known to increase resistivity in some pure materials,” explains Professor Joseph Thywissen in the Department of Physics and the Center for Quantum Information and Quantum Control in the Faculty of Arts & Science at the University of Toronto, senior author of a study published in Physical Review Letters. “The energy produced by electrical resistance shows up as heat. Transmission lines, for instance, lose up to 8% of the generated electrical power. Resistivity is also interesting to study because it can be a signature of new physics in materials.”

Despite continual habitability headlines, the debate over whether Mars ever had or currently has life still rages. At every new planetary conference, someone presents data that often for a few weeks at least appears to change the calculus of Martian astrobiology. But for well over two decades now, one of the biggest mysteries remains --- the origin of the putative methane detections made by the Tunable Laser Spectrometer (TLS) on NASA's Curiosity rover which has repeatedly reported several detections of methane.

This methane flap actually began with the European Space Agency’s Mars Express spacecraft which started orbital science operations in 2004. During Mars Express’ first year of observations and analysis, a small spectrometer on the spacecraft detected a very low-resolution spectral bump which indicated the tenuous infrared absorption of methane in the red planet’s atmosphere.

Yet the detections were at the limits of the instrument’s (the Planetary Fourier Spectrometer) sensitivity, ESA notes.

It's not that convincing, but at the very same time, two different independent research groups using ground-based telescopes were also claiming that they could see Mars methane through Earth's atmosphere, Kevin Olsen, a planetary scientist at the University of Oxford and a co-investigator of the ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter's Atmospheric Chemistry suite instrument, told me in the U.K.

Habitability is the key.

The most important thing people care about is whether Mars has been or is habitable, and whether there's microbial life, and in the atmosphere the big thing is methane, which we don't see, says Olsen.

As for the ExoMars TGO?
The Trace Gas Orbiter primary objective is to definitively detect trace gasses such as compounds with sulfur, chlorine, and methane.

If methane is coming from a biosphere, then either living things are producing methane as they go about their daily life and use energy, says Olsen. Or maybe they're not living anymore, and there remains an ancient source of biologically created methane.

If methane is not coming from a biological source; then the most likely thing is active rock metamorphosis, he says.

This is where rock changes from one type into another, which would happen deep underground, at high pressure, with lots of heat, water and chemical energy. But after eight years of observations with TGO’s instruments working at nominal levels, the ESA team still has not found evidence for methane.

We have a thousand times better sensitivity than the Mars sample analysis suite on NASA’s Curiosity rover, but we do not see any sign of the absorption of methane in the Martian atmosphere, says Olsen.

Sound does not fossilize, making it difficult to trace the vocal origins of song, speech, and language,” said University of Warwick researcher Chiara De Gregorio and colleagues.

“Comparative studies of the behavior of (non-human) great apes — our closest living relatives — provide the only extant model of extinct vocal capacities and adaptive functions among human ancestors.”

“While all major branches of the hominid family have evolved distinct call repertoires shaped by their species-specific socio-ecologies, one vocalization has been conserved across species and age-sex classes: laughter.”

In the study, the researchers recorded laughter from 17 individuals across all five great ape species in both tickling and social play situations.

The study involved four orangutans, two gorillas, three bonobos, four chimpanzees, and four humans, including children between six months and seven years old.

Their analysis revealed that laughter across all species is isochronous — that is, the bursts occur at regular, evenly spaced intervals — a property also observed in music and speech rhythm.

According to the scientists, this basic rhythmic structure was already present in a shared common ancestor 15 million years ago and has remained remarkably conserved with all living great apes still show the same underlying pattern.

But they also found meaningful differences along the evolutionary tree: as species grow closer to humans on the family tree, their laughter becomes faster, more variable in timing, and more sensitive to social context.

Humans stood out as the only species to adjust their laughter tempo depending on whether they were being tickled or engaged in free play.

The authors also noted that in human laughter, variable timing is perceived as more emotionally warm and socially positive than rigid, robotic-sounding laughter, suggesting that rhythmic flexibility carries real social meaning.

Even a relatively small asteroid can have a surprisingly dramatic history. During a close flyby of the asteroid Donaldjohanson, NASA’s Lucy spacecraft discovered an oddly shaped world that wobbles through space, bears scars from an ancient collision, and even preserves evidence that liquid water briefly existed on its parent body long ago.

The asteroid formed about 155 million years ago when fragments from a violent impact slowly came back together. Since then, sunlight has steadily altered its rotation through a subtle but powerful process, leaving behind clues to its long and eventful evolution.

Lucy’s Close Encounter With Donaldjohanson
On April 20, 2025, Lucy flew within 650 miles of Donaldjohanson while traveling through the main asteroid belt on its way to the Jupiter Trojan asteroids. The spacecraft captured the first detailed images and scientific measurements of this previously unexplored object.

Rather than rotating around a single axis like most planets and asteroids, Donaldjohanson was found to have a much more complicated motion involving two separate rotational movements. The flyby also revealed its distinctive peanut-like shape along with numerous craters and ridges covering its surface.

The encounter served as a full-scale rehearsal before Lucy begins exploring the Trojan asteroids, starting with its flyby of Eurybates on Aug. 12, 2027. Everything aboard the spacecraft operated as planned, while scientists gained an unexpected opportunity to compare Donaldjohanson with two better-known asteroids, Bennu and Ryugu. Those two bodies have similar compositions but followed very different evolutionary paths after their formation.

The Lucy team’s initial findings were published June 18 in the journal Science.

Artificial intelligence is being adopted across policing and the wider criminal justice system of England and Wales faster than the rules designed to govern it, according to major new research published by Northumbria University.

The study—the most comprehensive mapping exercise of its kind to date—identifies 70 AI tools already deployed, trialed or under development across the criminal justice system, from contact-center triage and witness statement drafting to digital forensics and facial recognition.

Led by Northumbria University in partnership with the Universities of Glasgow, Northampton, Leicester, Newcastle and Cambridge, the four-year PROBabLE Futures project was funded by Responsible AI UK as a 4.2 million-pound Keystone Project. The team spent the past year building an interactive mapping tool and conducting interviews between May 2025 and January 2026 with police officers, government officials, legal professionals, oversight bodies, academics and technology vendors.

Of the 70 tools identified, 27 are already live, with around 34 at the trial or pilot stage. More than half, 52%, come from commercial vendors, with most activity concentrated at the community policing, intelligence and investigation stages of the criminal process.

The research delivers a clear central finding: AI is already generating real value in transcription, redaction, crime analysis, vulnerability identification and officer welfare—but only where it has been carefully designed, matched to clearly defined operational problems and robustly evaluated. Across the wider system, adoption is outpacing the institutional, evidential and governance frameworks needed to support it.

A particular focus of the report is the concept of the "human in the loop"—the principle that a person should review and remain accountable for AI outputs. The research finds this principle often exists in name only, providing a false sense of assurance rather than a genuine safeguard.

The report also highlights a counterintuitive risk: As a tool approaches near-perfect accuracy, people may stop checking its outputs, meaning rare errors are more likely to go undetected and carry serious consequences. This danger grows when AI systems are linked together in sequence, with each stage potentially inheriting and compounding errors introduced earlier.

Why does the Sun throw stuff at us?

The Sun’s surface is a churning soup of energetic electrons and ions called plasma.

The motion of those charged particles creates magnetic field loops that are larger than the Earth. These loops twist, turn, and trap plasma.

The featured time-lapse, taken over 2 hours on April 24th, 2026 by the Solar Dynamics Observatory, shows what happens when those magnetic fields become too stressed: they snap and expel billions of tons (trillions of kilograms) of plasma into space at millions of miles (or kilometers) per hour in what is called a coronal mass ejection (CME).

The Sun releases a few CMEs each day when it is at the peak of its activity cycle, which passed in 2025. Some of these eruptions hit Earth and can disrupt power grids, disable satellites, and endanger astronauts, which is why space weather monitoring is so important.

A University of Alberta research team has designed a promising alternative for treating antimicrobial-resistant infections, a pressing global health issue. In a paper recently published in Cell Biomaterials, the team describes preclinical testing results for its human-derived peptide treatment, D-GK17. The peptide is stable and nontoxic to humans and is synthesized to attack the surfaces of bacterial or fungal cells that create biofilms, a sticky matrix that is often impenetrable to antibiotic treatments.

"Antimicrobial resistance is the biggest pandemic threatening humanity, so we really need potent antibiotic alternatives to which bacteria are unable to develop resistance," says principal investigator Dr. Prasanna Neelakantan, associate professor in the Mike Petryk School of Dentistry and Alberta Dental Association & College Chair in Oral Health Research, who did the work with collaborators at the University of Hong Kong and the University of Pennsylvania.

"Our peptide shredded bacterial biofilms, which cause up to 75% of life-threatening infections," Neelakantan explains. "We used skin infection models to show how our antibiotic alternative not only rescues from devastating bacterial infections, but also reduces inflammation and promotes wound healing."

Antimicrobial resistance is estimated to have directly caused 1.27 million deaths and contributed to 4.95 million deaths in 2019, according to the World Health Organization.

The team's treatment is based on a human-produced host defense peptide that provides rapid, broad-spectrum protection against bacteria, viruses and fungi. Most such peptides are toxic in the high concentrations needed to eradicate biofilms, and more importantly, they are unstable in body fluids, so it has been hard to harness their power as drugs.

The team serendipitously discovered a small subunit of the human peptide LL-37 known as GK17 that is stable and nontoxic, first publishing its findings three years ago.

"It checked the box for killing bacteria and fungi. It checked the box for preventing the development of resistance. But one box that it did not check was whether it could eradicate biofilms, which would be critical. So, we made a mirror version of our peptide, hoping it would break down biofilms," Neelakantan says.

They tested it against the biofilms created by the so-called ESKAPE group of the world's most critical pathogens, and it worked.