Mosquito excrement could provide valuable insight on potential pathogens. Scientists have created a “toilet” to collect the insect waste, which can then be analyzed. The results showed a variety of viruses, including some never seen before.

Valuable waste

Mosquito excreta (or waste matter) has “recently emerged as a promising alternative substrate for pathogen detection,” said a study published in the journal Microbiology Spectrum. This detection in mosquito populations “can provide a critical warning before human cases begin, allowing health officials to act quickly.”

Analyzing mosquito waste showed the presence of viruses along with other parasites. To collect the mosquito excretions, scientists built a “mosquito toilet,” which is a “3D-printed funnel coated with a superhydrophobic (water-repelling) material that causes liquid to bead up and slide into a collection tube,” said a release about the study.

Researchers then sequenced the genetic material and “recovered a complete West Nile virus genome, found the first known evidence of a Hedwig-like virus in the Americas and detected several viruses that may be new to science,” said the release. (The Hedwig virus was first “identified in Europe in snowy owl tissue, prompting scientists to name it after Harry Potter’s famous white owl.”) Some of the infected birds also had West Nile virus. Scientists “don’t know whether Hedwig-like viruses make birds sick, facilitate West Nile infections or simply coexist with other viruses.”

Along with West Nile and the Hedwig-like virus, the mosquito waste also contained trypanosomatids, which are “single-celled parasites associated with insects and other hosts,” said Earth.com. One parasite “produced tens of thousands of genetic matches in the samples.”

Traditional mosquito surveillance “requires collecting large numbers of insects, sorting them by species, grinding them into pools and testing for specific pathogens,” said Lab Compare. This slow process can “delay information during an outbreak and only detects what researchers already know to look for.” If “you don’t look for it, you won’t find it,” Dana Price, an entomologist and associate professor at Rutgers University who led the research, said in the release. “But what if you don’t know what to look for?”

Time and place

While the presence of the viruses and microbes is alarming, experts say there is no need to panic. “A virus found for the first time in a region may have recently arrived or may have gone unnoticed for years,” said the release. Only a “few broad mosquito-virus studies have been conducted in North America,” so “organisms that seem geographically restricted may prove widespread.”

The “more data we generate, the more we start to wonder if everything is everywhere,” Price said in the release. “Although we don’t yet know how much of everything is everywhere, it may be a lot more than we realize.” Also, just because a pathogen is found in mosquitoes does not mean it will pass to humans.

This study only involved 100 mosquitoes collected from one location in New Jersey, so the “results cannot show how common these viruses are across New Jersey or elsewhere in North America,” said Earth.com. The mosquitoes were also “moved into the collection device in a laboratory” rather than tested at the collection point.

Researchers are now “working toward a field-ready trap that would collect mosquitoes and their waste,” said the release. Eventually there may be a “system that could prepare samples, sequence genetic material, analyze the results remotely and alert scientists to a possible threat in real time.”

To be loved is to be smelled, at least according to the manosphere. In the newest internet trend, young men are “pheromonemaxxing,” opting to forgo hygiene rituals to emphasize natural body odor and attract mates. The science behind human pheromones, however, is wishy-washy at best, and maximizing odor may also be putting your love life in a funk.

Pheromones are not all the same

Similar to the looksmaxxing trend, pheromonemaxxing is based on the idea that “natural body odor may contain chemicals that influence attraction” and that a person’s scent could make them “more appealing to a potential mate,” said NBC News. Partaking in the trend involves “ditching deodorant, skipping showers” and in a gross escalation for the most committed, “drinking their own urine to ‘sweat out toxins,’” said Vice. The goal is “amplifying a ‘natural musk’ that allegedly contains pheromones that make you biologically irresistible.”

A pheromone is a “chemical messenger made inside the body of one member of a species” that is “secreted or excreted and reliably produces a response in another member of that same species,” said Samuel Cornell, a research fellow in public health at the University of Queensland, and Rob Brooks, a professor of evolution at the University of New South Wales, at The Conversation. But while some pheromones are for the purpose of attracting mates, many are not sexual. For example, “alarm pheromones might warn others about danger, and food trail pheromones might inform colleagues about where food is located,” said Forbes.

Sex pheromones in some animals do attract mates, but pheromonemaxxing relies on the belief that humans are “like ants, moths, mice and other animals known to secrete pheromones,” said Forbes. Unfortunately, human mating is far more complex.

Some research has found that people are “unconsciously drawn to partners whose immune profile differs from their own,” but it is not a guarantee, as research has also found that hormonal birth control “appears to completely reverse” the preference, said Vice. The studies with these conclusions have not held up over time and may be victims of publication bias.

To have or not to have pheromones

Scientists have yet to find conclusive evidence about whether humans have or are able to detect pheromones. The chemicals require a biological method to be received. In many animals, “that job falls to the vomeronasal organ, a small structure in the nasal cavity wired to a dedicated processing station in the brain called the accessory olfactory bulb,” said Cornell and Brooks.

While “some humans have a vomeronasal pit,” from birth there are “no nerve cells in it connecting to the brain and no accessory olfactory bulb for a signal to report to,” said Cornell and Brooks. There has also never been a chemical in humans that “meets the criteria to be labeled a pheromone.”

However, just because we haven’t found any doesn’t mean we don’t have pheromones. Because other mammals can have pheromones, it is “highly likely that humans do too,” said Tristram Wyatt, a senior research fellow in biology at the University of Oxford, to IFL Science. One of the clues is the “smells we give off as we grow up and go through puberty.”

Even if humans do have pheromones, thumbing your nose at showering does not mean you can “select for what remains on your body and what doesn’t,” said Forbes. It is “hard to selectively remain dirty,” as “everything that your body has accumulated throughout the day and night” stays there, which could include “alarm pheromones and food trail pheromones if they do exist on humans.”

It is ultimately important not to “confuse sensing and liking different smells with detecting and being affected by pheromones,” said Forbes. Sweat is “just a mix of 99% water, electrolytes (salts) and then tiny amounts of urea, ammonia and other compounds.” The mixture, said Cornell and Brooks, can become a “cozy breeding ground for bacteria, and that will start to cause a stench.”

What happened

A team of biologists Thursday said they have identified the first new living feline species in more than 100 years: a small spotted tiger cat that lives in Bolivia’s cloud forests. Genetic testing confirmed that Leopardus tilcayo is a new member of the cat family, the researchers reported in the journal Current Biology.

Weighing about 5 pounds, the cat resembles a “leopard that shrank to the size of a house kitten,” The Washington Post said.

Who said what

“Little is yet known about the cat’s biology and lifestyle,” Reuters said, and it’s unclear how many there are. “Our information at this moment is limited to the two live individuals that we examined, and a small number of camera-trap records,” said study co-lead author Jonas Lescroart of Belgium’s University of Antwerp. The “discovery is monumental, and not just because it’s the first new cat discovered since the pampas cat in 1923,” said National Geographic. The genomic analysis “redraws the cat family tree to have a lot more branches than previously thought.

What next?

“Showing the general public” there are still new species of a “flagship group such as cats,” said study co-author Eduardo Eizirik, transmits the “important message” that unless we preserve endangered habitats, the “many undiscovered species” are “at risk of disappearing before we even discover them.”

What happened

Tyrannosaurus rex, the “king of the dinosaurs,” was warm-blooded, with an average body temperature of 97 degrees Fahrenheit, scientists reported Wednesday in the journal Science Advances. The researchers, from UCLA, calculated the dinosaur’s temperature by analyzing the chemical makeup of tiny samples of enamel drilled from three T. rex teeth.

That “clever geochemistry technique” revealed that “T. rex ran hot, but not too hot,” The New York Times said, “somewhere on the body-temperature spectrum near large mammals like Indian elephants (97 degrees) or humans (98 degrees).”

Who said what

The T. rex temperature is “unusually high for a reptile,” CNN said, but dinosaurs “share an evolutionary link with birds,” and 97 degrees “sits between” reptiles and “modern avians.” The findings “can help scientists piece together how the dinosaur might have lived,” said The Associated Press. The UCLA researchers calculated that T. rex “could have lived across most of prehistoric North America.” Being warm-blooded “really places new constraints on its behavior, its physiology, how it interacted with other species and how much food it needed,” study co-author Robert Eagle told CNN.

What next?

Scientists plan to “test these methods on other dinosaurs to see how warm or cold they ran,” the AP said. “There’s lots of interesting, charismatic species that could be explored using this,” said Eagle.

Who we are and who we become may be in our genes, at least partially. A new study links a variety of gene variants to various personality traits and lifestyles. These findings displayed patterns across large demographics, though experiences and surroundings still play a pivotal role in individual development.

In your DNA

Over 1,000 gene variants are associated with personality, including more than 800 not previously linked to it, according to a study published in the journal Nature. These genetic variants also “partially predict mental and physical health, longevity, education, career paths and outcomes and even how people are perceived by close others,” said a release about the study. While scientists have known that a variety of factors, including DNA, could affect personality, the “challenge has been deciphering the specific pathways through which a genetic blueprint nudges the direction of a person’s life,” said The New York Times.

In order to analyze how genes affect personality, researchers had participants from 46 different cohorts provide DNA samples and fill out a questionnaire measuring the “Big Five” personality traits, which are “openness to experience, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness and neuroticism,” said the release. These traits are “relatively stable and habitual differences in how people think, feel and act.” The data also included demographic and lifestyle information about the participants, allowing the researchers to “see links between personality traits, genetic variants and other parts of people’s lives as well,” said Time.

For example, the variants linked to conscientiousness “were associated with being more active during the day while variants linked to openness to experience and extraversion were linked to being more of a night owl,” said the release. Those with variants associated with neuroticism tended to spend more time at hospitals. Scientists also analyzed fraternal twins and siblings, who are raised in the same surroundings, finding that “genetic effects on personality within families were almost identical to those found between unrelated people,” said ScienceAlert.

Nature vs. nurture

Of course, experiences can also shape personality. Genetic variants linked to openness “predicted that a person would move to more cosmopolitan neighborhoods” but “living in those neighborhoods may reinforce and further shape that same trait,” said the release. Genes obviously “influence our personality predispositions,” Michel Nivard, a genetic epidemiologist at the University of Bristol and a senior author of the study, said to ScienceAlert. “But there are clearly also substantial environmental causes of personality, which collectively explain the majority of individual differences.”

Cultural differences and societal perception additionally affected the results of the study. Of the Big Five, “agreeableness proved the most difficult to analyze,” as researchers found “weaker genetic correlations across countries and evidence that the trait is less heritable than the others,” said El País. This could potentially be because “‘agreeable’ may not mean the same thing everywhere.” This study is the “first time genetics has made it possible to assess objectively whether two cultures are measuring the same thing when they use the same word.”

Ultimately, genetic differences only “account for only about 5 to 10% of personality variation among people,” said the Times. A “person’s DNA and context are constantly interacting,” and “experiences are the very tool that genetic predispositions use to mold who a person becomes.” If “we’d want to know someone’s personality at an individual level, genetics isn’t really a fruitful path,” Nivard said to ScienceAlert. Instead, “what genes do offer us is a way to link personality, in the aggregate across groups of people, to all other outcomes we have ever previously studied.”

Space travel is taking off, but landing on the moon will be no easy feat. The first-ever spaceport could join the moon’s orbit in the next 20 years, increasing space traffic. As a result, plans need to be made to deal with the logistics of several celestial vehicles taxiing and docking at the port and eventually at a permanent moon settlement.

Arrivals and departures

NASA during the next two decades is preparing to implement its Gateway, a small space station designed to be a “multipurpose outpost supporting lunar surface missions, science in lunar orbit and human exploration further into the cosmos,” said NASA. With increased cosmic traffic, there need to be systems in place to manage the flow, according to a study published in the journal Acta Astronautica. The station will become an airport for space travel but “won’t have concrete runways crowded with airplanes, flashing taxiway lights or a crackling voice over an intercom,” said a release about the study.

The Gateway “will not circle the moon the way a satellite circles Earth” and will instead “travel in a near-rectilinear halo orbit, or NRHO, an elongated path shaped by the combined gravity of Earth and the moon rather than by the moon alone,” said Earth.com. The NRHO “passes within 1,000 miles of the moon’s north pole” and then rounds its turn “about 40,000 miles past the lunar south pole,” said Popular Science. The Gateway NRHO “provides an uninterrupted line of sight for communications to Earth and requires little propellant to maintain,” Diane Davis, an associate professor of space engineering at the Texas A&M University College of Engineering and an author of the study, said in the release.

However, the catch is that any spacecraft that enters the NRHO “will be subject to a gravitational tug-of-war between Earth and the moon,” said the science publication Nautilus. Lunar and space missions are also “likely to involve multiple spacecraft arriving, orbiting and leaving at similar times.” With several crafts, traffic management in the form of loitering, or the “careful choreography of spacecraft positioning,” will be necessary, said the release.

Unlike parking at an earthly airport, vehicles in space require “continuous effort to counteract the forces of orbital physics over extended periods, such as days or weeks,” since each spacecraft is moving constantly, said Universe magazine. Scientists are “required to ascertain a distance that ensures sufficient separation for safety while remaining sufficiently proximate to their destination to optimize fuel efficiency.”

Control tower

To tackle what could be a logistical nightmare, scientists ran thousands of computer simulations to test “strategies for keeping vehicles carefully spaced around Gateway while accounting for realistic navigation errors, thruster imperfections and even small disturbances expected during future Artemis missions,” said the release. They found that “modest increases in station-keeping maneuvers allowed spacecraft to stay significantly closer to their intended positions, requiring only small changes in propellant use.”

The proposal is to “get everything moving together, rather than each spacecraft focusing exclusively on its own path around the moon,” said Nautilus. “By sharing data and continually calculating the position of the Gateway, spacecraft can follow a ‘string of pearls’ formation that keeps everybody at a safe distance.”

The concepts “remain incredibly complex to translate into multibillion-dollar missions with dozens of lives on the line,” said Popular Science. “Greater positional accuracy means mission planners can better predict where every spacecraft will be, preserving valuable fuel,” Davis said in the release. “The future of lunar exploration depends as much on the traffic management as it does on the rocket science.”

This year has been one of “unthinkable” progress for maths, said The Wall Street Journal. But OpenAI’s proof of the Navier-Stokes problem – one of the seven esteemed Millennium Prize Problems accepted as maths’ “deepest and most difficult unresolved questions” – “represents the most significant advance yet”.

The tech company took around three days to find a solution with an internal model that is “significantly more capable” than its most advanced commercial model, said New Scientist. It first used 1,000 AI agents to crack a similar problem, then around 10,000 to complete the task. If a customer wanted to run the same problem, it would cost them “around $15 million” (£11 million).

However, there has been a “dispute” about how the solution was reached. Two human researchers had announced they had “cracked three significant problems” linked to the Navier-Stokes problem, also using OpenAI and Anthropic large language models, which has raised questions over the privacy and integrity of the data integral to the breakthrough.

‘Potentially historic breakthrough’

The “Navier-Stokes existence and smoothness problem” essentially looks at equations which describe the movement of liquids and gases, said The New York Times. These equations are used to predict the weather and “model the behaviour of ocean currents or the climate as a whole”. The problem challenges whether, theoretically, the “laws of physics would break down under certain extreme conditions”, such that water, for instance, could “spontaneously explode”.

This “potentially historic breakthrough” has been “shadowed by questions over unpublished research by outside mathematicians”, said Axios. New York University mathematician Tristan Buckmaster and Anthropic researcher Levent Alpöge had been using large language models, including OpenAI’s Codex, where information was stored privately. Just hours before OpenAI’s announcement, the pair had published work which was claimed to make a breakthrough in the Navier-Stokes problem. OpenAI denies having seen this work, but admits it had launched the project “after hearing rumours that Anthropic’s models had solved a major maths problem”. The company has also said it would not collect the $1 million (£738,000) prize.

“The result is the latest in a string of shocking mathematical discoveries led by AI in recent months,” said New Scientist. In May, an OpenAI model also “cracked a decades-old conjecture by Paul Erdős”, while a Claude Fable 5 AI found a “counter-example to the Jacobian conjecture, which had stood for nearly a century”. And just last week, an AI model “formalised Fermat’s last theorem in just 11 days”.

‘Reshaping mathematics’

This controversy is important because it “strikes at a core trust question for AI-assisted science”, said Axios. It casts doubt over whether researchers can “safely use frontier labs’ tools to work on unpublished discoveries”. Although Buckmaster and Alpöge have not accused OpenAI of any direct wrongdoing, this episode “taps into a broader push” for companies to keep sensitive data away from the major AI labs.

This advancement also allows OpenAI to “cast its technology in a positive light after a period of alarm” over its safety practices, said The Guardian. In July, during a cybersecurity testing breach, OpenAI admitted its agents hacked into Hugging Face, another tech company. The company may have solved a major problem which has “stumped humans for nearly a century”, but would struggle to quiet “renewed calls for curbs on AI development” and AI “superintelligence”.

For human mathematicians, this result is “sobering”, said the MIT Technology Review. Buckmaster and Alpöge collaborated for almost a year and were unable to achieve only a simplified solution, while private OpenAI models achieved a full solution in a matter of days, at vast cost. If major tech companies keep “striving for more and more impressive mathematical accolades, there might not be any open problems left” for humans to “wrestle with”, which would “dramatically change the field of mathematics”.

Clearly, humans take longer to achieve proofs than AI but, in doing so, they “uncover new mathematical approaches and ideas that might inspire their peers and even birth their own subfields”. Those “benefits disappear” if breakthroughs are kept behind a paywall. OpenAI’s “brute-forced” approach is “indisputably impressive”, but if this is the “future we are headed for, it is unclear how human mathematicians will fit into it”.

While fog can create an eerie, lonely atmosphere, it’s teeming with life. Scientists have found vibrant microbial communities in low-hanging clouds, including bacteria that can detoxify air pollution. And these microbes could play a larger role in our air quality than previously expected.

Misty microbes

Fog water can have “bacterial concentrations similar to those in continental or marine bodies of water” and “contain microbiomes well-differentiated in composition from those in the dry aerosol microbiomes,” said a study published in the journal mBio. While scientists have known that bacteria and other microbes exist in the air, not much was known about “whether those airborne microbes are doing much,” be it “growing, feeding, dividing and changing the air around them” or “simply waiting to land somewhere better,” said ZME Science.

Fog is “basically just a cloud that’s low to the ground — water vapor that has condensed or frozen to form tiny droplets or crystals in the air,” said The Weather Channel. Researchers focused on radiation fog, which is the still kind that “occurs on clear nights as the ground cools the moist air immediately above it.”

They “collected and analyzed samples from 32 separate fog events along with aerosol particles gathered before, during and after fog formation,” said a release about the study by Susquehanna University. The findings showed that fog is “more than a vehicle for transporting microbes” and could be a “habitat where bacteria can thrive and positively influence atmospheric chemistry, air quality and even climate processes.”

While “fewer than 1% of fog droplets contain bacteria,” when “averaged together, they represent an astounding amount of life,” said a release by Arizona State University (ASU). “When you take all of the droplets together, the concentration of bacteria is the same as in the ocean,” said study co-author Ferran Garcia-Pichel, the director of the ASU Biodesign Center for Fundamental and Applied Microbiomics, in the release. Each fog event had an average of 188 unique bacterial signatures, and the “communities of microbes present were similar across all fog samples” but “differed quite a bit from those found in air without fog,” said Science News Explores.

Cloud cleaning

Scientists identified Methylobacterium as “one of the most abundant bacteria in the samples,” said the Susquehanna release. These microbes “consume single-carbon compounds such as formaldehyde,” which is a common air pollutant “resulting from the combustion of carbon fuels that contributes to ozone smog and poses health risks.”

The Methylobacteria “cleared such large amounts of formaldehyde so quickly that the researchers suspected they weren’t just eating it,” said the ASU release. At “high levels, the chemical is toxic to the bacteria, so they break it down into carbon dioxide to keep the levels low,” which is a “win-win for microbes and humans alike.”

“We observed them under the microscope to see that, yes, the bacteria are getting bigger and they are dividing, so there’s growth,” making fog a microbial habitat, said lead study author Thi Thuong Thuong Cao, a postdoctoral researcher at ASU, in the ASU release. The potential for “harvesting fog for drinking water has also been up for discussion,” said The Weather Channel. “Now, we need to consider and further study if these air-cleaning benefits are too good to pass up.”

People “think of fog as just water droplets,” said study co-author Derek Straub, an associate professor at Susquehanna University, in the Susquehanna release. But there’s a “tremendous amount happening inside those droplets that we are only beginning to understand.”

The newest search and rescue recruits are cockroaches. Scientists have outfitted the insects with capabilities to locate and administer medical care to people in remote or hard-to-reach locations. Different kinds of insects could be used for varied purposes and could be a valuable asset for disaster relief in the future.

Engineering and experimentation

Paramedic cyborg cockroaches called Paraborgs can be “field-deployable medical intervention,” said a study published in the journal Advanced Science. The robotic roaches “contain cameras and miniature medical injectors” that “could deliver supervised emergency care to people trapped in collapsed buildings, caves or other places too dangerous for rescuers to reach,” said a release about the study.

“A lot of people might not like the sight of a giant cockroach scurrying toward them,” said the study co-author and Ph.D. candidate Hai Nhan Le in the release. “But if you are trapped in rubble or stuck in a cave and need help, it could make a real difference between life and death.”

To create the cyborgs, scientists fitted North Queensland giant burrowing cockroaches (Macropanesthia rhinoceros), the “heaviest cockroach species in the world that ​measure up to 3.3 inches, with backpacks containing syringe cylinders and cameras,” said Reuters. They “start with anaesthetizing the insect, immobilizing them so that we make sure that they cannot feel anything during the implementation process,” said study co-author Thang Vo-Doan, a biorobotics ‌engineer, to the outlet. “Once we implant an electrode into the insect, we can apply a small electrical signal to activate or stimulate the nerve system so that they can respond to our command.”

While promising, “one of the biggest engineering challenges was getting the cockroaches into the correct position for an injection,” said Interesting Engineering. The insect has to “navigate to the target, position itself accurately and remain stable enough to perform the injection,” said Le in the release.

The good news is that the Paraborgs had a 95% success rate at performing close-range injections in proof-of-concept experiments. “The long-term goal is targeted human-supervised intervention in places conventional medical technologies cannot access,” said Thanh Nho Do, a medical robotics associate professor at the University of New South Wales who worked on the study, in the release.

Harnessing nature

If cyborg insects can “safely enter spaces we can’t, locate casualties and ultimately help deliver emergency care, they could become another valuable tool in the future of urban search and rescue,” said Tim Hassiotis, the superintendent of Fire and Rescue New South Wales, in the release. And other insects could offer promising methods of search and rescue in the future. “Rather than building one robot to do everything, we can harness the natural strengths of different insects and equip them for different missions,” said Vo-Doan in the release.

“Ethical guidelines for invertebrate research are not yet standardized,” said the study. Still, the cockroaches were “provided with a suitable living environment” and “decent nutrition.”

This is not the first time cockroaches have been fitted for other purposes. Scientists previously created tiny diving suits for Madagascar hissing cockroaches that could be used in perilous search operations, according to a study published in the journal Nature Communications. The suit contained electronic controllers to guide the cockroach and “allowed it to survive and operate in oxygen-deprived environments such as underwater” for up to three hours, “transforming it into an amphibious cyborg robot capable of operation across land and water.”

The sweet treat of the future could be plastic. Scientists have found a way to transform plastic waste, along with other food additives and ingredients, into edible cookies. The method could combat refuse accumulation and provide sustenance in remote or disaster locations — or in space someday. However, many are understandably unsure about eating plastic, and there’s a long road ahead before the cookies can hit shelves.

From bottle to bakery

According to research that was presented at the fall 2026 meeting of the American Chemical Society (ACS), scientists have “programmed yeasts to turn plastic and agricultural waste into edible proteins and flavoring molecules,” creating a treat deemed µBites (micro bites), said an ACS news release. The cookies could tackle food shortages and plastic pollution.

We were “trying to develop technologies for plastic upcycling to make more valuable products. We thought: Why not focus on making food? Because plastic is carbon, and food is carbon,” said Lahiru Jayakody, a microbiologist at Southern Illinois University Carbondale who worked on the study, in the release.

Polyethylene terephthalate, or PET, from plastic bottles and “discarded sweet corn plant stalks and leaves” were put through a process called “oxidative hydrothermal dissolution,” which “uses heat to break down the materials into components that microbes can digest,” said New Scientist. The components are “fed to yeast that has been genetically altered using CRISPR gene-editing technology,” allowing it to “convert the components into a variety of useful ingredients, including proteins, fats and acids, as well as vanilla flavoring and beta-carotene, which the body can convert into vitamin A.” Then “fiber, starch and sweetener are added, and the paste is extruded through a 3D printer into any desired shape.” Thus µBites are produced.

Bite-size solution

While the “futuristic treats received high ratings on overall aroma and the underlying science implies that µBites are safe to eat, researchers still must wait for institutional approval before beginning actual taste tests,” said Popular Science. “It has a pleasant, appealing aroma,” said graduate student Sandhya Jayasekara, who worked on the study, to New Scientist. “We have not tasted it, but it smells good, like a real cookie.”

Still, plastic cookies likely won’t be a sought-after delicacy. “We produce 400 million tons a year of plastic waste. You are not going to turn it all into cookies,” said Jason Hallett, a professor and researcher at Imperial College London, to New Scientist. It’s “not a solution to the plastic-waste crisis.”

Rather than becoming a mainstream treat, the “µBites system is a tunable and portable device that integrates all necessary components” that could be “deployed in submarines or disaster relief vehicles to produce on-demand, on-site food,” said Jayakody to ScienceAlert. The process is also “particularly suited for using carbon waste in extreme environments such as deserts, the Arctic or the Antarctic to make food” and potentially even “on Mars or the lunar surface.”

‘Mirror life is theoretical. The danger is anything but.’

Nidhi Kalra at The Washington Post

Mirror life “could theoretically be built out of biological molecules that are mirror images of the ones that exist naturally,” as it’s “possible to imagine — and maybe even create — a living organism made of mirror-image counterparts to natural biomolecules,” says Nidhi Kalra. Scientists “warn that mirror bacteria could devastate most life on Earth,” as it “might not be recognized by the things — immune systems, enzymes and other predator microorganisms — that keep normal bacteria in check.”

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‘Tanzania’s dam is a massive moment for African self-finance’

Mihir Sharma at Bloomberg

Tanzania’s new hydroelectric dam has “doubled domestic generation capacity,” and “that’s the sort of energy abundance even developed countries dream of,” says Mihir Sharma. The country “has achieved this almost entirely on its own dime.” Given the “many pitfalls associated with big dams, it’s remarkable that Tanzania has pulled this off.” Western investors have “turned away from big projects in the emerging world and from hydropower in particular,” but “countries are discovering they can do it for themselves.”

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‘Uzbekistan’s startups could give the US an edge in Central Asia’

Bruno S. Sergi at Newsweek

A “few years ago, the idea of a billion-dollar Uzbek tech company would have sounded far-fetched,” but “today, investors are searching for the next Uzum, Uzbekistan’s largest digital ecosystem,” says Bruno S. Sergi. This is “exactly why Uzbekistan matters.” If the U.S. “wants Central Asia in its orbit and not locked into Russian surveillance tech, Chinese AI models and processing of its critical minerals, it needs a success story that is not built on sanctions or pressure, but on commerce.”

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‘Why we love watching robots fail’

Kyle MacNeill at Time

Robotic “tumbling records will likely be, in the pop cultural consciousness, eclipsed by something far more entertaining: tumbling robots,” says Kyle MacNeill. Along with the “epic wins, there have been some seriously old-school, epic fails,” and “these slapstick scenes are deliciously satisfying.” This “robot schadenfreude is fueled by a fear of the future,” as “pointing out their flaws makes humanity’s finish line feel further away, even if that’s a highly unintelligent thing to think.”

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What happened

NASA on Sunday launched the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, a $4.3 billion repurposed spy satellite designed to capture panoramic views of the cosmos, cataloguing Earth-like exoplanets and helping solve some of the biggest mysteries of astrophysics: dark matter and dark energy. The bus-sized telescope, named after NASA’s first chief astronomer, blasted off from Florida’s Cape Canaveral aboard a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket en route to an observation point a million miles away.

Who said what

Roman is “NASA’s latest and greatest cosmic cartographer,” The New York Times said. Set to send back a “whopping one terabyte of data each day,” the telescope “promises a panorama so wide and so crisp that it would take more than half a million high-definition TVs to display in full.” While 2021’s James Webb Telescope, like a zoom lens, is designed to “probe very deeply and with exquisite sensitivity ​into the universe,” Roman’s “vast reach will allow us to find the weird, the rare and the unusual,” senior project scientist Julie McEnery said.

The new telescope’s real “superpower is speed,” The Associated Press said. The Hubble Space Telescope, “still churning out celestial glamour shots after 36 years,” could scan the entire Milky Way in a century; Roman can do it in a month.

What next?

Roman is scheduled to arrive at its L2 orbit point in about 100 days. “Its mission is planned for five years,” Reuters said, “though NASA said the telescope may have enough fuel for five additional years.”

We are barreling toward a nuclear problem. Decades-old radioactive waste from discarded containers may be slowly seeping into the Atlantic Ocean and affecting the marine ecosystem. Scientists have conducted dives to collect samples and test the region to determine the extent of the pollution and whether the radioactivity has made its way into the food web.

A barrel of trouble

Between 1950 and 1990, “more than 200,000 barrels filled with radioactive waste were dumped in the depths of the North-East Atlantic,” said a release by the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS). Scientists first mapped the area where the barrels were dumped on a mission in summer 2025. They recently completed a second mission where they “carried out 20 dives to depths of over 4,700 meters (15,419 feet), enabling direct observation of several barrels and their immediate surroundings” using a manned submersible called the Nautile.

The barrels “contain low- and intermediate-level radioactive material” including “process sludge, contaminated metal and laboratory equipment,” said Futura. They sit “between 10,000 and 16,000 feet down in international waters.” Using the “Nautile and other instruments deployed from the vessel, together with the samples collected,” CNRS researchers “were able to document the advanced state of deterioration of several barrels, observe that some of them had leaked their contents and identify the various materials used to encapsulate the waste,” said the release.

While the “photographs from the initial cruise revealed barrels in various stages of degradation and corrosion,” images “alone cannot determine if radionuclides have entered the marine food web,” said Futura. To fill in the gaps, the researchers collected “precise water, fauna and sediment samples directly adjacent to the corroded barrels, allowing scientists to measure exactly how far any escaping radioactive materials have migrated into the deep sea ecosystem.”

Nuclear family

Due to barrel deterioration, there were “significant signals of radionuclides specifically linked to this waste, cobalt 60 and niobium 94, in addition to cesium 137 and americium 241,” Javier Escartin and Patrick Chardon, who were both involved in the research, said at The Conversation. The difficulty now is in “separating any potential leakage from historical background radiation,” said Futura. The Atlantic Ocean in the region “already contains radiation from 20th-century atmospheric nuclear weapons testing, the 1986 Chernobyl disaster and authorized runoff from coastal nuclear power plants.”

Despite the depth and radioactive signatures at the site, it was “not devoid of life,” said The Cool Down. Researchers “saw crabs, sponges, anemones and other organisms on or near the barrels, which have effectively become hard surfaces in an otherwise soft seabed environment.” The question that remains is not simply “whether radioactive material is present” but “whether deep-sea life is absorbing it and whether it is moving through sediment and water in meaningful amounts.” Studying the collected samples will provide more information on the effect these underwater communities have on the transfer of radionuclides.

The barrels were never meant to permanently seal the radioactive waste. These containers were intended to “provide an initial period of confinement rather than act as permanent deep-sea vaults,” said Earth.com. Over time, the “radioactive contents were expected to be released gradually and dispersed in the ocean.”

“It’s too late to undo the damage inflicted on the environment by previous generations,” said Popular Mechanics. But “having a deeper understanding of how these systematic episodes of pollution impacted the world will help future generations avoid making the same mistakes.”

The cosmos may be speckled with black hole stars, celestial entities that have the properties of both black holes and stars. But only now have scientists discovered one for the first time, which could provide important insight about our universe.

Huge size and energy

NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) previously spotted unidentified little red dots in space in 2024 that scientists have now designated as a new astrophysical source, according to a study published in the journal Nature. Deemed a “black hole star,” the celestial object “resembles an enormous star, spanning the size of our solar system,” but also puts out “100 billion times more energy than any known star can physically produce,” similar to a black hole, said a release about the study.

The NASA telescope was used to “look into deep space, back when the universe was a few hundred million years old,” to “look for galaxies that actually formed at those early times,” said the release. While analyzing JWST’s images, astronomers found the red dots that at the time of their discovery had them convinced that “something broke in the James Webb Space Telescope,” said Gizmodo. “Much about the universe’s earliest days remains a mystery,” so “pinning down the true identity of little red dots,” which are “relics from the cosmic dawn,” would “represent a huge advance in our understanding of our universe’s history.”

Researchers analyzed one specific bright red dot called MoM-BH*-1 and found that its properties were “too intense to be explained as normal star behavior,” said Wired. Instead, they posited that the dot is a “black hole devouring matter and releasing enormous amounts of energy” and surrounded by a “massive gas envelope.”

The energy “would pass through that gas before escaping into space” and “acquire some of the characteristics we would normally expect to find in starlight,” said Wired. The black hole star likely has a “central black hole that is 100,000 times as massive as the sun,” said lead study author Rohan Naidu in the release.

New questions, more research

The black hole star is a “very special thing to find,” as it is an “object with no comparison given the vast stores of data on billions of stars, galaxies and black holes that we have in our archival databases,” said Naidu to Gizmodo. MoM-BH*-1 is perhaps the beginning of “what will likely be the first of more black hole stars to come,” said Popular Science. And “many other red dots lurking in JWST models may soon be explained by the new astrophysical model.” What is unique about MoM-BH*-1 is that the “black hole star is essentially completely outshining its surrounding host galaxy, such that we are seeing pure black hole star light,” said Naidu in the release.

The study’s findings “raise new questions and insights into little red dots and, by extension, the state of the early universe,” said Gizmodo. If the “distinct color of little red dots is caused by gas,” it “could explain why the earliest supermassive black holes are far larger than what’s predicted by conventional cosmological models.”

Scientists are planning further research on the “detailed physics of these remarkable objects,” said Naidu. Perhaps it will answer exactly how “massive” they are and what their “‘stellar’ features tell us about their ‘stellar’ atmospheres.”

A new generation of drugs could transform the lives of people with narcolepsy and offer hope of future treatments for ADHD and depression.

Orexins help regulate wakefulness, as well as attention, motivation and the brain’s reward system. This month, the US Food and Drug Administration approved the first orexin agonist treatment for narcolepsy. Oveporexton (sold as Orzeyful) is designed to target the cause of the chronic sleep disorder, rather than treat the symptoms with stimulants.

But “the excitement is not just about narcolepsy”, said The Economist. Inspired by the success of drugs that mimic glucagon-like peptide-1 (GLP-1), developed to treat diabetes and later used for weight-loss in medication such as Ozempic, drugmakers are “betting” that orexins could “follow a similar path”, potentially leading to treatments for conditions that “burden hundreds of millions” of people.

What are orexins?

They are two peptides (chains of amino acids that act as messengers in the brain) that are involved in the body’s sleep-wake system. Specifically, they are neuropeptides. They act as neurotransmitters, or chemicals, that carry messages between neurons. They are involved with reward and motivation.

Named after the Greek word orexis (appetite), orexins were discovered in 1998 by two teams working independently in the US. The discovery turned “the long march to develop a new kind of sleeping pill into a sprint”, said The Guardian.

But their “true role emerged” in 1999, said The Economist. People with narcolepsy were found to lack the specialised neurons that produce orexins, causing “abnormally low levels”. That means the brain “loses the ability to control when the body sleeps”, said Time.

How do they work?

In 2011, researchers at Takeda, a Japanese pharmaceutical company, found a chemical compound that could block the orexin receptor, and so promote sleep. Orexin antagonists were developed as a treatment for insomnia, differing from conventional sleeping pills that induce sedation.

But “the bigger prize may lie not in blocking orexin’s signal, but restoring it”, said The Economist. The results of Takeda’s trials of oveporexton, published last year in The New England Journal of Medicine, “created a stir”. Volunteers were able to stay awake 12.5 to 25 minutes longer with the drug (depending on the dose) than without it.

The drug “activates the orexin pathway” and “restores the brain’s ability to remain alert”, said Time. Volunteers also had fewer episodes of cataplexy, or loss of muscle control, as well as other symptoms such as hallucinations and irregular sleep. There were “no serious adverse events related to treatment”, said the Smithsonian magazine.

“It’s really a complete revolution,” Emmanuel Mignot, a sleep-medicine professor who led Takeda’s final studies, told The Wall Street Journal. “The first time patients take it, it’s like the light switch.” One 19-year-old trial participant said: “It was the first time I felt somewhat alive in the last 10 years.” “It’s the best thing that has ever happened to me,” he told Nature.

What might the future hold?

In the US and Western Europe, narcolepsy affects about one in 2,000 people, but there is no cure. Existing drugs – “decades-old stimulants and sedatives” – only manage symptoms, said The Wall Street Journal. Oveporexton and its competitors are “designed to treat the disease as a whole”. Morgan Stanley estimates that orexin-based medicines for narcolepsy and other sleep disorders could generate $16 billion a year by 2035, according to SF Globe.

Takeda is testing orexin-targeting drugs for sleep apnea and chronic daytime sleepiness. Alkermes, an Irish biotech company, is testing an orexin drug for ADHD in adults. And this year Eli Lilly (of Mounjaro fame) bought Centessa, a biotech firm with an orexin agonist in trials, in a deal potentially worth up to $7.8 billion. New research has also revealed “the essential role of orexin neurons” in motivation, said BioTechniques.

The twice-daily oral drug Orzeyful could be “a boon for the roughly 120,000 people in the United States with narcolepsy type 1”, said the Smithsonian. But its success also “opens the door to the use of orexin-mimicking drugs for other conditions associated with low levels of the chemical”, such as ADHD and depression. “Orzeyful is just the beginning,” said Andy Plump, Takeda’s president of research and development.

‘What’s the value of an hour?’

Joshua Rothman at The New Yorker

Government is “only one participant in a much larger conspiracy to waste our time,” says Joshua Rothman, as “many conveniences also have hidden time-wasting downsides.” All “around us, systems calculate, markets churn and clever people find ways to monetize seemingly everything,” but “hours are thrown away and used up randomly,” as “time, our scarcest resource, feels beyond our reckoning.” People “grapple with time, of course, finding ways to domesticate it,” and “we’re outrageously suggestible when it comes to our temporal attitudes.”

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‘We’re paying for climate disasters instead of preventing them’

Sienna Shankel at Newsweek

Home insurance “has become one of the defining economic issues of 2026, yet our response remains dangerously small,” says Sienna Shankel. Americans “argue over premiums, subsidies and regulations while ignoring the structural failure driving them.” Until “that changes, households will pay more.” A “mistake is believing that higher premiums are the crisis,” as “they are only symptoms.” The “real problem is that every climate disaster now triggers an economic chain reaction that extends far beyond damaged buildings.”

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‘Black liberation requires investment’

Reginald Thomas Brown at The Progressive

By “no coincidence, Black August and Black Philanthropy Month are observed at the same time,” as “both are rooted in a simple truth: Our liberation is never granted; it is built, protected and sustained,” says Reginald Thomas Brown. The “Black liberation movement commemorated by Black August gave us the blueprint for organizing,” while Black Philanthropy Month underscores what communities have always understood — that collective action, from mutual aid networks to civil rights campaigns, is our greatest strength.”

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‘How to squander a superpower’s credibility’

Fareed Zakaria at Foreign Policy

Saudi Arabia and Turkey “pledged to go to war in each other’s defense,” even as they’ve “been bitter regional rivals,” says Fareed Zakaria. What “brought them together? U.S. President Donald Trump — or rather the two countries’ diminishing faith in him and his word.” The “Iran war has been a master class in how to squander credibility.” Trump’s “word is as solid with his counterparts abroad as it was with his bankers in New York.”

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The total solar eclipse, occurring on Aug. 12, 2026, in Spain and other parts of Europe, is bringing all the scientists to the yard. During a total eclipse, the moon completely covers the face of the sun, darkening the sky and revealing just the sun’s outer atmosphere called the corona. That astronomical ring provides a unique opportunity to learn more about the sun as well as its effect on Earth.

Fellowship of the ring

Researchers around the world are investigating the eclipse in different ways. NASA is taking its research aircraft, the WB-57, to the skies with the mission of “chasing an eclipse, but in reality the eclipse is chasing them,” said The Guardian.

During the flight, the “pilot will aim to reach the point of greatest eclipse, when the largest fraction of the sun is obscured by the moon, at the moment the shadow catches up with them,” said The Guardian. The aircraft also contains four cameras to “take high-resolution images of the corona in several different wavelengths of visible and infrared light,” said NASA.

The cameras will “capture at least 20 images per second” to “learn more about the formation of prominences (solar material that gets suspended above the sun’s surface), better understand the corona and how it gets heated,” and “investigate how material in the corona and the solar wind are related,” said NASA. Scientists at the European Space Agency will be studying the eclipse to learn more about solar winds.

NASA scientists in Iceland are also launching a “total of 80 balloons starting 18 hours before the eclipse until eight hours afterward to study how the eclipse affects Earth’s ‘boundary layer,’ the part of the atmosphere that touches the ground,” said NASA. In Spain, “three balloon teams will launch a total of six balloons with 360-degree cameras to image the eclipse shadow from above” to “measure levels of ozone in the atmosphere, which requires sunlight to form.” At Spain’s Javalambre Astrophysical Observatory, researchers are testing a new linear spectrometer prototype that “has a circular slit and can capture the spectrum of the entire corona at a certain distance from the centre of the Sun in a single photograph,” Federico Landini of the Astrophysical Observatory of Turin said to Reuters.

Return of the ring

From “our unique perspective on Earth during a total solar eclipse, scientists can study the sun’s corona in a way we can’t from anywhere else in the solar system,” Kelly Korreck, the eclipse program manager at the NASA headquarters in Washington, D.C., said in the NASA article. The sun “impacts our daily life, satellites and astronauts in space, and we can take advantage of this moment to advance our understanding of that influence.”

The sun’s corona extends about 6.2 million miles and is approximately one million times less intense than the surface. In noneclipse times, “scientists study the sun’s atmosphere with satellites equipped with a coronagraph,” which blocks out the sun’s surface, said the Agence France-Presse. However, total eclipses “allow them a rare glimpse of the chromosphere, the layer of atmosphere between the corona and the surface.”

We are “incredibly lucky” that the “moon is 400 times smaller than the sun,” as well as “400 times closer to us,” Allan Sacha Brun, an astrophysicist at France’s Atomic Energy Commission, said to the AFP. “Our work aims to understand the physical mechanisms underlying the sun’s activity” and “to put the sun back into context within its evolutionary timeline, from its birth to its death.”

If one company has its way, animal allergies could soon be a thing of the past. A biotech laboratory has developed gene-edited dogs that do not contain the allergy-causing proteins found in most pups, which the lab says marks a breakthrough in the pet industry. But it could still be a long time before dogs like these become available on a wide scale.

How were these dogs created?

Bailey and Alfie are two beagles who were specifically bred with a “targeted genetic knockout” of Can f 1, the major allergy-causing protein in dogs, according to research published in The CRISPR Journal. The canines were born in September 2024 and “have shown healthy growth and development,” Kindred Companion Sciences, the company behind the research, said in a press release.

The idea of allergy-friendly dogs is not new, and breeds like poodles are often recommended for their hypoallergenic coats. But these dogs “still produce allergy-causing proteins that end up in their saliva, hair and dander, so they can still make people sniffly,” said The Associated Press. In the case of Bailey and Alfie, scientists at Kindred used the DNA-altering technology CRISPR to eliminate the Can f 1 protein entirely. Tests of the two dogs thus “showed no detectable protein compared to samples from nonedited dogs,” said Wired.

The use of genetic editing to create completely hypoallergenic dogs marks a significant shift in the field. Previously, efforts to “reduce dog allergen exposure have focused on downstream mitigation, including selection of so-called ‘hypoallergenic’ breeds and household hygiene measures,” said The CRISPR Journal. But scientists have started looking into new approaches, as tests measuring Can f 1 have “found that breeds marketed as hypoallergenic do not yield consistently lower environmental exposure.”

How will this affect the pet industry?

Experts believe it could open the door to a new wave of adoptable pets. Gene editing “can, and should, be applied to solving legitimate problems that humanity has,” Fyodor Urnov, a gene editing expert at the University of California, Berkeley, said to Wired. “Dogs are a human’s best friend, now potentially more so because of one tiny gene edit.”

Questions remain as to the viability of the genetic changes. For one, Can f 1 “isn’t the only protein in dogs that can trigger allergic reactions — there are also so-called minor allergens,” said New Scientist. There are also concerns about the long-term health of these dogs, although “so far, both dogs appear normal and healthy.” Researchers overall maintain that this option could be groundbreaking for people with pet allergies, which is about 10% to 20% of the world’s population, according to the Asthma and Allergy Foundation of America.

“The feeling right now is sort of a mix of relief and awe and gratitude that it worked,” geneticist Matt Walker, the founder of Kindred, said to the AP. “It feels just amazing to get to have a dog.” For others, the jury is still out. “It opens the door to a lot more people being able to own pets,” New York University bioethicist Arthur Caplan told the AP. But on the “negative side, it may discourage people from trying to use strays and unwanted animals that are not engineered to be allergy-free.”

Parts of Europe will receive a brief respite from searing summer heat this week with the first solar eclipse in nearly three decades.

According to Nasa, on Wednesday parts of Greenland, Iceland, northern Russia, Spain and a small corner of Portugal will be plunged into darkness as the Moon briefly passes directly between the Earth and the Sun, the first time this has happened on the continent since 1999.

What about the UK?

A total solar eclipse occurs at a specific location on Earth on average once every 366 years, and the British Isles are currently in “no-man’s land”, with the next one not visible from the UK until 2090, said Space.

This time around, most of the country will experience a partial eclipse where around 90% of the Sun’s rays will be blocked by the transit of the Moon. “First contact”, when the Moon first covers the disc of the Sun, will begin shortly after 6pm, reaching its “maximum”, when most of the Sun is covered, at 7.05pm in Scotland, 7.10 in Manchester and Liverpool, and 7.12pm in London, Bristol and Cardiff. Some parts of Cornwall will have a 95% blackout, rising to 97.7% in the south-west of Ireland.

For the rest of the country, enough of the Sun will be covered to make a “noticeable difference in the temperature and light levels” but “unlike with a total eclipse, the sky will not become dark – it will feel more like a cloudy day or close to dusk or dawn”, said Royal Museums Greenwich, home to the Royal Observatory.

“As always with astronomy, we’re at the mercy of the weather”, meaning “there’s always the possibility that clouds could obscure part or all of the eclipse”.

How should you view it?

Even with a partial eclipse, because the Sun is so bright it is still “extremely dangerous” to look at it without taking safety precautions, said the Royal Astronomical Society, otherwise it could cause permanent damage to your eyes or even blindness.

“Never look directly at the Sun without appropriate solar viewing equipment. Certified eclipse glasses, specially designed solar filters for telescopes and binoculars, or indirect methods such as pinhole projectors are all safe ways to observe the event”, said RAS President Professor Jim Wild.

If using eclipse glasses “make sure they work”, said Sky News, “as bogus retailers capitalise when an eclipse is due and you may be duped into buying a counterfeit pair”.

The American Astronomical Society advises trying them on indoors first. You should not be able to see anything through them, except very bright lights which should appear very faint. Even in regular sunlight outdoors you should only be able to see a slight reflection of the Sun off a shiny surface. Looking at the Sun for a second you should see a sharp-edged disk that is comfortably bright.

Wednesday is set to be an extra special evening for astronomy lovers, with the partial eclipse followed by the peak of the annual Perseid meteor shower a few hours later.

Anything else to know about it?

Octopus Energy is asking customers to delay using washing machines, dishwashers and other plug-in devices between 6pm and 8pm on Wednesday.

The eclipse “will send solar generation plunging just as electricity demand begins to rise as millions of people return home from work”, said The Telegraph.

While there is no suggesting that the eclipse could trigger outages, Octopus said it was encouraging people to use less energy to negate the need for carbon-emitting gas power.

What happened

Scientists at Stanford University on Thursday reported in the journal Science that they had successfully directed artificial intelligence to create 16 new viruses. This first-ever use of AI to design and build viruses not found in nature raised “hopes for medical advances” like eliminating drug-resistant bacteria, The New York Times said, while also “raising the disturbing possibility that the technology could someday be used to invent dangerous pathogens.”

Who said what

“Synthesizing viruses from scratch is hardly new,” the Times said, but the Stanford and Arc Institute researchers went “well beyond” previous efforts by teaching AI to “recognize patterns of DNA structure in nature, and then to use that data to write recipes for entirely new viruses.” Their AI tool, Evo, was fed genetic sequences “much like ChatGPT and other language models are trained on large sets of existing text material,” CNN said.

What next?

The new study “arrives at a moment of heightened anxiety regarding danger posed by increasingly powerful AI models,” The Wall Street Journal said. Evo was constrained to create “simple viruses” that can “only infect bacteria and pose no threat to humans.” But the breakthrough “raises urgent biosafety and biosecurity questions,” Johns Hopkins health security experts said in a corresponding Science article. “The ability to compose viral genomes using generative AI now exists; the governance to safely steer it does not.”

‘The godmother of the “conspiracy mom”’

Jessica Winter at The New Yorker

After JFK’s assassination, Oklahoma housewife Shirley Martin “flung herself into investigating the crime and getting to know some of those closest to it,” says Jessica Winter. It is “generally understood today, as it was not understood 60-plus years ago, that those who subscribe to conspiracy theories tend to do so in order to make sense of an unstable reality,” and “in some ways, Martin was a preview of today’s post-Covid, stay-at-home ‘conspiracy mom’ or of the MAHA moms.”

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‘The ethical perils of gene therapy’

Anjana Ahuja at the Financial Times

In China, a “risky experimental treatment was undertaken for a nonfatal condition; oversight by external authorities, regulators and ethical review boards in China was insufficient to avert tragedy,” says Anjana Ahuja. The “episode is another blow to a country vying to become a global leader in biotech,” as “truly advancing science means being open, honest and transparent about mistakes, as well as successes.” Parents “crave better lives for their children and ambitious researchers covet world firsts.”

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‘I used to mock gym bros. Here’s why I became one.’

Emily Hoeven at the San Francisco Chronicle

It “may seem absurd to say that deadlifts and squats and bench presses changed my life,” but “then again, it wasn’t long ago that I couldn’t lift a coffee cup without excruciating pain,” says Emily Hoeven. It is “almost impossible to name an area of life that weightlifting doesn’t improve.” Studies “show that it boosts confidence and mood, strengthens bones, reduces joint pain and chronic inflammation, and improves cognition,” and it “can be especially beneficial for older women.”

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‘How to fight a cloud’

Nitish Pahwa at Slate

It “feels like an inflection point” for the construction of AI data centers, as “more community leaders and elected officials are listening to their concerned constituents and hitting the pause button,” says Nitish Pahwa. But an “even bigger fight is at hand: whether these halts on buildouts will eventually lead to permanent bans, or whether elected officials are just kicking the clankers down the road.” It’s “one thing to impose a pause for a period of time” but “another to actually make use of that time.”

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Plastic products could soon have a built-in self-destruct feature. Scientists have found a way to incorporate bacteria into plastic products that can completely break down the plastic after activation. If this technique is applied widely, it could greatly reduce the amount of plastic pollution in the environment.

A plastic kill switch

Scientists have created a plastic capable of degrading quickly without producing microplastics, according to a study published in the journal ACS Applied Polymer Materials. The key is using microbes. Living plastics “contain dormant microbes capable of degrading the surrounding polymer,” said a release about the study. Earlier living plastic designs “often depended on a single enzyme, which limited how efficiently the material could be broken down.” However, in the new study, researchers engineered the bacteria “Bacillus subtilis to produce two polymer-degrading enzymes that work together.”

The two enzymes team up to break down the plastic polymers. The first enzyme “cuts the long polymer chains at random points, reducing them into shorter sections,” while the second enzyme “works from the ends of those fragments, breaking them down further into their individual monomer building blocks,” said the release. With the embedded microbes and the enzymes, “plastics could effectively ‘come alive’ and self-destruct on command, turning durability from a problem into a programmable feature,” Zhuojun Dai, a corresponding author on the paper, said in the release.

The researchers “incorporated dormant spores from the engineered bacteria into polycaprolactone (PCL), a biodegradable polyester used in products ranging from surgical sutures to 3D printing materials,” said Food & Wine. The living plastic material “retained the strength and structure of conventional plastic but could be triggered to degrade when no longer needed.” The scientists “activated the dormant spores by placing the material in a warm nutrient broth heated to about 122 Fahrenheit” where the “spores began producing both enzymes, which together had completely broken down the plastic within six days.”

Worldly applications

Most of the world’s plastic ends up in landfills or the ocean. Plastic can take anywhere from 20 to hundreds of years to break down because of its chemical structure. It can also degrade into microplastics, which have “turned up in water, food and even human bodies,” raising a number of health concerns, said The Cool Down. But creating plastic that can break down completely rather than releasing tiny fragments “could reduce one path for that contamination.” Still, the living plastic has not yet been “validated in real-world conditions in the ocean, a landfill or a roadside ditch,” said ZME Science.

Plastic that decomposes in a short time period makes “life easier for consumers by reducing the buildup of everyday products that turn into long-lasting trash,” said The Cool Down. In addition, if “disposable packaging, medical products or short-term electronics can degrade more cleanly, communities could face lower cleanup costs and less expensive waste management over time.”

While the researchers only incorporated the bacterial spores in one type of plastic, they eventually hope to “develop a method that activates the bacterial spores in water, where a significant share of plastic pollution accumulates,” said the release. The same strategy used for the PCL “could be adapted for other materials, including plastics widely used in disposable products.”

While the jury is still out on whether diet and zero-sugar drinks are really better for your health than sugary sodas, a recent study has found that the artificial sweeteners they use may have one very unintended side effect: memory loss, particularly among younger consumers. But even though the study found a significant link between artificial sweeteners and memory issues, experts say this is still only a correlation, not causation.

What did the study find?

Several widely used artificial sweeteners may be “associated with faster declines in memory and thinking skills over time,” according to the study published by the American Academy of Neurology. It followed 12,772 adults in Brazil for about eight years and examined their intake of seven sugar substitutes: aspartame, saccharin, acesulfame K, erythritol, xylitol, sorbitol and tagatose. These are “frequently added to ultra-processed products, including flavored water, soft drinks, energy drinks, yogurt and desserts marketed as low in calories.”

Researchers found that the people who consumed the highest amount of artificial sweeteners “experienced a 62% faster rate of cognitive decline than those with the lowest intake,” said USA Today, a rate “estimated to be comparable to about 1.6 additional years of brain aging.” People who were in the mid-range of consumption “experienced cognitive decline that was 35% faster than those in the lowest-intake group.” The memory loss itself was also most prevalent in study participants who were under 60; researchers “did not find the same association among participants older than 60,” said the study.

When it came to the amount of sweetener consumed, those in the “lowest consumption group averaged 20 milligrams per day, while those in the highest group averaged 191 milligrams per day,” said the study. Regarding aspartame, one of the most common artificial sweeteners, the “amount consumed by the highest group was roughly equal to the aspartame in one can of diet soda.”

What is the bigger picture?

This study suggests that sugar substitutes are not as good for you as their marketing makes them seem. “Low- and no-calorie sweeteners are often seen as a healthy alternative to sugar; however, our findings suggest certain sweeteners may have negative effects on brain health over time,” the lead study author, Dr. Claudia Kimie Suemoto of Brazil’s University of São Paulo, said in a press release.

This is not the only new study to suggest that artificial sweeteners have negative health effects; recent research published in the journal Current Atherosclerosis Reports showed that these chemicals are “linked to higher fasting insulin levels and a higher HbA1c — a measure of long-term blood sugar control,” said HealthDay. It also “found that people who consume more artificial sweeteners may have a higher risk of cardiometabolic conditions, including type 2 diabetes and heart disease.”

When it comes to memory issues, scientists are careful to point out that this research doesn’t necessarily mean artificial sweeteners cause lapses. The study “identified a relationship between sweetener intake and cognitive decline but could not determine whether the sweeteners caused the changes,” said USA Today. The data also “did not include every artificial sweetener currently used in foods and beverages,” and Suemoto emphasized that more research was needed.

Wally Funk — 1939-2026

Wally Funk waited over 60 years for a few fleeting moments of weightlessness. An accomplished pilot, she longed to go to space from the moment in 1960 when she heard of a private program that put female pilots through the same astronaut fitness tests that the men were taking. At 22, Funk was the youngest of the Mercury 13, the group of women who passed the grueling physical challenges, and she was one of just two to go through two more phases of testing, including spending over 10 hours in an isolation tank. NASA didn’t sanction the program, though, and it barred women from astronaut training. Funk wouldn’t reach space for another six decades. In 2021, at age 82, she joined Amazon founder Jeff Bezos on his rocket company Blue Origin’s first crewed flight. At the time, she was the oldest person to reach space; Funk remains the oldest woman to do it. The spacecraft took her up over 60 miles to the edge of space in a flight that lasted just 10 minutes. Back on land, she spread her arms and said, “I want to go again, fast!”

Mary Wallace Funk grew up in New Mexico with parents who encouraged her daring exploits. At 5, she leaped from her barn’s roof in a cape and crashed into a haystack. “Her fascination with flying was undiminished,” said The New York Times, and while attending Oklahoma State she earned licenses to fly planes, gliders, and seaplanes. At age 20, she became the first female flight instructor at a military base—commercial airlines wouldn’t hire her, using the pretext that their facilities lacked a women’s bathroom—and later became the first female safety inspector for the U.S. government, investigating some 450 crashes. Yet “hanging over these accomplishments was her unfulfilled dream of becoming an astronaut,” said The Guardian. She applied four times, but by the time Sally Ride flew on the space shuttle in 1983, Funk was 44 and considered too old.

Still, she continued astronaut training on her own, alongside her pilot career, “undergoing centrifuge tests, entering a high-altitude chamber, and visiting a Russian training site to experience zero-gravity conditions,” said The Washington Post. She ultimately logged 19,000 hours flying, taught over 3,000 pilots, and took part in numerous flying competitions. “They said, ‘Wally, you’re a girl, you can’t do that!’” she recalled. “I said, ‘Guess what: Doesn’t matter what you are, you can still do it if you want to do it.’”

A super-Earth 48 light-years away, approximately 1.7 times the diameter and 5.6 times the mass of our planet, may be capable of sustaining life. The exoplanet, LHS 1140 b, was leaking helium, which could be indicative of the presence of an atmosphere, a necessary factor for life to flourish.

A whole new world

LHS 1140 b likely has an “upper atmosphere dominated by helium and depleted in hydrogen, with other volatile species trapped at lower altitudes,” said a study published in the journal Science. The exoplanet was discovered in 2017 and was found to share many qualities with Earth. Though its temperatures are colder than our planet’s, it “orbits a red dwarf star within the star’s habitable zone,” which is the sweet spot “where temperatures and environmental conditions are within the range that could support liquid water on the planet’s surface,” said a news release about the study. This is the “first time anyone has found an atmosphere on a rocky planet in the habitable zone of another star,” Collin Cherubim, the lead author of the study, said in the release.

The researchers were able to identify the exoplanet’s atmosphere using a technique that is “typically reserved for observing giant planets” and using it “for a rocky planet, which nobody has done before,” Cherubim said to Space.com (a sister site of The Week). With the Warm Infrared Echelle (WINERED) Spectrograph on the Magellan Observatory in Chile, they were “able to see LHS 1140 b and another planet both transit, or pass in front of, their star in the same night,” where they could “identify the signatures of molecules in the atmospheres of these planets as they passed,” said Space.com. One planet “yielded no results,” but LHS 1140 b “showed a direct, undeniable helium signature.”

Helium is a “very light gas that easily escapes gravity,” so it “could serve as a readily detectable marker of a complex atmosphere underneath,” said Time. A potential atmosphere is a significant find as small red dwarf planets are the “most common type of star, and hence our best chance for studying nearby rocky exoplanets in their habitable zone,” said The Guardian. Red dwarfs aren’t as bright as our sun, so their planetary habitable zone tends to be in the range of solar flares, which often strip “away the atmospheres from the planets they host, leaving rocky planets with thin atmospheres or airless.”

Endless diamond sky

While the findings are promising, “at this point, we have absolutely no evidence for life on the planet,” Cherubim said to The New York Times. “But we think all of the really important, essential ingredients are there.” The question remains whether LHS 1140 b is “bare rock with no atmosphere that sometimes burps up some gas that then immediately escapes” or if there is a “steady-state atmosphere there that will leak out stuff like the Earth does from time to time,” Jason Dittmann, an assistant professor of astronomy at the University of Florida and the one who first found the planet, said to The Independent.

An atmosphere helps a planet hold water, regulate climate and protect from space radiation. To determine whether the helium leak is from an atmosphere, NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope will be used to “look for water, and if there’s water in the atmosphere, then it’s probably a stable atmosphere that will persist,” said Dittman to The Independent. Even if this exoplanet is not the next Earth, “if one potentially organic world is out there, countless others could be too,” said Time. The existence of potentially viable planets “dramatically” boosts the odds of alien life.

‘Structural shifts demand a new central banking mindset’

Vivekanand Jayakumar at The Hill

While the “primary objective of most central banks” is “unchanged, the post-pandemic economic landscape has evolved in ways that require policymakers to rethink how monetary policy is designed,” says Vivekanand Jayakumar. The “pandemic shock and its aftermath substantially altered underlying economic trends and gave rise to a new geopolitical reality.” Forces are “reshaping inflation dynamics, impacting economy’s growth potential, and altering monetary policy transmission mechanisms.” So “central bankers will need to exhibit greater flexibility, adaptability and forward-looking decision-making.”

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‘Where did all the computer science professors go?’

Lila Shroff and Rose Horowitch at The Atlantic

AI companies are “turning into something like mini-universities,” say Lila Shroff and Rose Horowitch. As AI has “taken center stage, Silicon Valley has intensified its efforts to recruit star researchers and looked beyond computer science departments.” While “plenty of research is still happening within universities,” the “result is a flywheel.” As “more academics get sucked up by industry, the center of AI research moves further from academia, thus increasing the incentive for remaining researchers to leave.”

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‘We are taking hobbies too far’

Meehika Barua at Time

Having hobbies shows that you “have the time, money and energy to spend on them,” says Meehika Barua. But we have “turned hobbies from optional leisure activities into a marker of identity.” Hobbies are “increasingly sold as a route to becoming a more interesting or successful person rather than simply a way to spend free time.” This can “leave people feeling guilty if they prefer quieter pursuits or if they discover they don’t enjoy the hobby that everyone else seems to love.”

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‘He may be Trump’s only real friend. He’s quietly transforming the world.’

Andrea Bernstein at Slate

Special Envoy to the Middle East Steve Witkoff “seems like Trump, a New York real estate developer turned world dealmaker,” says Andrea Bernstein. But in an administration that “privileges snarling visages, Witkoff is nearly universally described as kind or nice, a quality he has used to good diplomatic effect.” As Witkoff “presided over a tenuous ceasefire deal with Hamas and Israel, he surrounded those talks with meetings with big-name Gulf leaders.” He is “unabashed about performing diplomacy through a business lens.”

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Scientists have assembled a cell from scratch in the laboratory for the first time — one that feeds, grows, and replicates much as a natural cell does.

Synthetic biologist Kate Adamala and her team at the University of Minnesota built the prototype molecule by molecule from nonliving chemicals, reports New Scientist. It turned out looking rather like a potato, so they nicknamed it SpudCell. SpudCell is similar to a simple bacterium, but it’s made of just 150 to 200 molecules, while a biological cell holds millions or billions. It was assembled using 36 genes, including some from E. coli bacteria, some from phage viruses, and one from jellyfish: a fluorescent protein that helps make the cell visible. That it can replicate itself makes it lifelike, but its autonomy is limited.

Each generation must be hand-fed, and it can replicate only about once every 12 hours, compared with once every 20 minutes for E. coli. Plus, it gives out after roughly five rounds of division, when its protein-making machinery fails. That’s why it doesn’t qualify as life.

“I would be satisfied with calling it living [only] if it’s replicating indefinitely,” says Adamala, “and if it’s capable of Darwinian evolution.”

Still, the cell is a massive leap forward for bioengineering. The researchers have made the project open source so others can work on it. Eventually, the researchers hope to see made-to-order organisms designed to capture carbon or fight cancer. “We want to be able to make all petrochemicals with living biology,” Adamala says, “so we can basically move away from oil for all the climate and societal benefits."

A new underwater research facility is making waves. Deep, a U.K. ocean engineering company, has installed a subsea human habitat almost 60 feet underwater in the Tennessee Reef, part of the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary. Called Vanguard, the habitat allows for four aquanauts to live in a dry environment underwater for five days without needing to resurface. And Vanguard is just the first of a proposed network of underwater habitats by the company.

Aquanaut in the ocean

Deep’s Vanguard is “providing extended access to the ocean for research, conservation and training,” said Deep’s website. The habitat is the “first open-ocean human habitat built, tested and deployed in the United States in four decades,” said Vice.

To install Vanguard on the sea floor, engineers “first needed to install a base foundation and then lower the habitat onto the platform using a boat crane,” said Popular Science. The habitat is “tethered to a surface buoy,” which is a “bright-yellow structure” that “holds multiple vital support services, such as communications arrays, breathable air and power.” Aquanauts are expected to be able to safely use the facility, as it has received the “green light from Det Norske Veritas, an internationally recognized accreditation institution used by oceanographic organizations and companies.”

Vanguard is a precursor for another habitat the company is working on called Sentinel. This habitat would be an “underwater station with direct ocean access, individual suites with showers and toilets, and configurable workspaces, as well as social spaces and communal rooms for meetings and dining,” said Oceanographic magazine. Sentinel will be “complemented by a revolutionary range of submersibles” with “dive and scientific research equipment to cover the full range of ocean depths.” Deep hopes to enable permanent underwater living by as soon as 2027.

Previous dives

Living underwater exploits a “strange loophole in human biology,” said Vice. “It’s like you have been scuba diving for a really long time and your tissues and your blood get saturated with nitrogen, the inert gas that you are breathing,” said Dawn Kernagis, the director of scientific research at Deep, to Science Alert. “Essentially, once you are saturated, you could stay down there for weeks, months at a time.” Those in the facility can leave the habitat using a cord connected to Vanguard’s air supply, allowing for hourslong dives as opposed to the 60-minute limit of recreational scuba dives.

Underwater facilities are not new. They have been used for professions such as underwater welding and in energy and defense industries. The Florida Keys are home to another underwater research habitat, Florida International University’s Aquarius Reef Base.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has designated the Tennessee Reef as a “research-only zone.” The goal of Vanguard is to allow scientists to conduct marine science research, mainly related to “coral reef restoration, long-term monitoring, climate impact studies, human performance research, and training for extreme environments,” said Deep in a statement. And the deployment of the Vanguard habitat within the marine sanctuary “creates additional opportunities for marine science and builds on research infrastructure.”

The U.S. has long led the world in scientific research — a feat that has undergirded the country’s economic and political might. Now researchers are pushing back against a proposed Trump administration rule. Scientists say it would upend the federal funding that drives U.S. science by shifting grantmaking decisions away from independent experts and into the hands of the president’s political allies.

What did the commentators say?

The proposed rule would give President Donald Trump’s appointees “power over hundreds of billions of dollars” in federal grant funding while “diminishing the traditional role of scientific peer reviewers,” said The Washington Post. Projects would be evaluated to ensure they “advance the president’s priorities” while rejecting projects and institutions that promote DEI, affirm transgender identities or support “anti-American” ideas. The new grantmakers would thus have wider latitude to defund “anything Trump doesn’t like,” said Elizabeth Kolbert at The New Yorker. The White House argues the change would “bring much-needed accountability to the grantmaking process,” an administration spokesperson said to the Post.

Shifting responsibility for scientific funding to political operatives would amount to “cancel culture for cancer research,” said Rep. Rosa L. DeLauro (D-Conn.) at The Hill. The proposed rule would allow the White House to reject or cut funds mid-project if an institution “uses the word ‘diversity’ in their mission statement” or if a researcher publicly opposed the Trump administration’s vaccine policies. It would be a system of “arbitrary political control” that is “ripe for abuse.” The Trump administration could deny a grant for “any reason — or no reason at all.”

The change should be welcomed by Americans who “believe in democracy and democratic accountability,” said Michael S. Kochin at The American Mind. Political appointees who would oversee grantmaking going forward are “accountable to the president and to Congress,” and projects should not advance if their “political masters” do not “believe them to serve the national interest.” The current peer review system, meanwhile, ends up “enforcing consensus rather than discovering truth” by rewarding scientists who play it safe. Federal grants should be directed at research that will “actually make us healthier, richer and freer.”

Peer-reviewed grantmaking is not perfect, but the Trump administration’s proposed solution is “far worse than the disease,” MIT’s Carlo Ratti said at the Financial Times. Researchers are “not immune to herd behavior” and can struggle to challenge their own assumptions. But “ideological pressures” are the wrong way to correct those problems, incentivizing scientists to abandon proposals that “could be cancelled when the political weather turns.”

Opponents say the Trump administration rule will blunt U.S. science supremacy. American researchers are “not going to be able to cure disease, and you’re not going to be able to grow the economy,” Sudip Parikh, the CEO of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, said to STAT. U.S. science is already struggling. The administration “suspended and canceled nearly 8,000 scientific grants” in 2025, said The Atlantic.

What next?

Science and education groups are lobbying lawmakers on Capitol Hill to oppose the rule, staging protests and organizing letter-writing campaigns. Some 300 leading scientific organizations sent a letter to the administration requesting more time to review the proposed regulation, said the Post. Dozens of Democratic members of Congress, along with Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine), have condemned the proposal. But the public comment period closed last week, and the administration plans to finalize the sweeping rule by Oct. 1.

Astronomers have detected a type of sugar that’s found in raspberries and self-tan lotions near the centre of the Milky Way. A study published this week in the journal Nature Astronomy revealed evidence of erythrulose, a simple sugar, in interstellar gas and dust clouds between stars.

The discovery may conjure up images of a “civilisation of pale, safety-conscious frugivores” in outer space, said The Guardian science editor, Ian Sample, but for astronomers it is significant because “it shows that compounds important for life can form in the frigid expanse between the stars”.

Erythrulose is a monosaccharide (simple sugar) like glucose and fructose, but it is the “most complex sugar spotted beyond our Solar System”, said Nature. Two-carbon simple sugars have previously been detected on meteors and asteroids, but this is the first time a four-carbon “true sugar” has been spotted in interstellar space.

‘Exceptionally sensitive observations’

Using radio telescopes in Spain, researchers collected data from a dust cloud called G+0.693-0.027 near the centre of the Milky Way. After comparing these signals to samples in the lab, they detected traces of erythrulose. The discovery was enabled by “the combination of exceptionally sensitive observations, extensive frequency coverage, and highly accurate laboratory spectroscopic data”, study co-author Izaskun Jiménez-Serra told Live Science.

The findings indicate that erythrulose was probably produced by chemical reactions on tiny interstellar dust grains, which then “rained down” on nearby objects, including planets, or were incorporated into comets. It’s thought that “Earth underwent a period of heavy bombardment from asteroids and comets” around the time that the earliest signs of organic life began to emerge “about four billion years ago”, said Nature. This might have been how sugar molecules were brought to our planet’s surface.

Origin of life

“Sugar does more than sweeten tea and powder doughnuts”, said The Associated Press. “Different varieties fuel our cells and even make up DNA,” so scientists are “itching to know how sugars form because they’re a key ingredient for life as we know it”. Erythrulose itself “isn’t essential for life, but can easily convert to a form that’s thought to be crucial to kick-starting life on Earth”.

It is “especially tantalising” to think that erythrulose might have acted a “feedstock” for the more complex sugars that evolved into nucleic acids – the “building blocks of modern-day DNA and RNA”, said Nature.

“That’s why the detection of erythrulose is so relevant for the origins of life,” said Jiménez-Serra. And, if we could discover even more complex sugars in the Milky Way, more light could be shed, astrophysicist Anthony Remijan told Nature. “An actual building block of RNA and DNA: that would be the next big thing.”

People dealing with record summer heat waves across the United States and Europe aren’t getting much of a respite when the sun goes down. Climate change is causing temperatures to stay high at night, and climate scientists and health experts say hotter evenings may lead to social and medical consequences.

Why are hotter nights a problem?

Intense heat at night is “raising the risk of heat exhaustion and heat stroke even higher, especially for people without access to air conditioning,” said NPR. In cases where the temperature after sundown doesn’t drop below 75 to 80 degrees Fahrenheit, people are “not getting the opportunity for recovery overnight, as we’ve historically seen,” Ashley Ward, the director of the Heat Policy Innovation Hub at Duke University’s Nicholas Institute, told NPR.

It is largely the fault of climate change that no nighttime recovery is occurring, as “each summer we are seeing more heat waves similar to the current one and also more hot nights,” said NPR. The “number of nights where the temperature never falls below 70 degrees Fahrenheit is increasing everywhere in the U.S. except the Northern Great Plains,” according to 2023’s Fifth National Climate Assessment. In fact, the extent of the continental U.S. “experiencing hot summer nights is growing at a faster rate than the extent experiencing hot summer days.”

Many people also find sleeping in hot weather difficult, which could further contribute to negative health effects. A June heat wave in the United Kingdom resulted in nearly 65% of people saying they “struggled to sleep,” according to a YouGov survey, while about half said they lost at least three hours of sleep per night. When this happens, the “implications are significant: a drop in work performance, an increase in accidents, lower school test scores” and a “decline in mental health,” Dr. Laurence Wainwright from the U.K.’s University of Oxford told The Guardian.

The type of residence in which people sleep can also make a difference. In Philadelphia, hotter nights are becoming “more dangerous than the days, particularly for older people who live alone in brick rowhouses in the city,” said The Philadelphia Inquirer. Without cooler temperatures, these rowhouses “can become ‘brick ovens’” at night and lead to heat-related deaths. Philadelphia’s dense neighborhoods can also be “several degrees warmer than other areas even within the city,” further exacerbating the problem.

What can be done about this?

With the continually changing climate, nights will likely remain hot, especially during summer. A 2022 Lancet Planetary Health study “projected that heat-related deaths could rise sixfold by the end of the century, largely because of warmer nights, unless planet-warming pollution is significantly curbed,” said The Sacramento Bee. Heat currently “kills more Americans in an average year than any other weather hazard.” The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s 10-year range from 2014 to 2024 recorded an average of about 250 heat-related deaths annually.

Experts say there are warning signs you can look out for to prevent overheating, whether during the day or night. “In its early stages, heat-related injury can be subtle, so it can be fatigue, increased thirst, nausea, vomiting sometimes and oftentimes muscle cramps, which is a symptom of dehydration,” the Cleveland Clinic’s Dr. Bryan Baskin said to AccuWeather. People “often think that only those out working in the environment, athletes, people who are outside all the time are at risk, and it’s really not true.”

Nasa has launched a spacecraft to catch a falling telescope, an unprecedented mission that could pave the way for similar future rescues.

The Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory telescope, known simply as Swift and launched in 2004, detects some of the most powerful explosions in the Universe. Its name comes from its ability to point at a new target in the solar system in a matter of minutes, compared to other space telescopes such as Hubble, which can take up to two days to focus on a target.

Because of its success spotting distant gamma-ray bursts, Swift’s mission has been repeatedly extended. But now it is sinking faster than expected due to recent solar storms and is at risk of crashing back to Earth in a matter of months unless something is done to change its orbit.

‘Mind-bogglingly short’ turnaround

To carry out the mission Nasa has turned to Arizona-based Katalyst Space Technologies. Swift has no engines of its own and was not built with docking hardware, so Katalyst engineered a “custom capture mechanism” that will use three guided robotic arms “to latch onto a structural feature without disturbing Swift’s instruments”, said Astronomy.

Having successfully launched last week, Katalyst’s Link spacecraft is now carrying out a series of navigation and propulsion systems checks before approaching Swift. It will survey the telescope to determine the best point of contact, and eventually capture and lift the observatory, which is about the size of a small car, back into its correct altitude.

The capture itself will be “especially tricky because Swift was never meant to be touched again once it reached orbit”. Katalyst CEO Ghonhee Lee told Aerospace America that it has been made even more complicated because “nobody took a picture of the backside of Swift before it launched”.

Katalyst was awarded the contract only last September, a “mind-bogglingly short” turnaround time, said Space. If it succeeds in saving Swift, the company will have done something unprecedented: “reboosting an ailing space telescope using a spacecraft developed in less than a year to rescue a target that was meant to be left in space on its own forever”.

‘A spacecraft worth saving’

At a cost of $30 million, the mission to save “a nearly 22-year-old space telescope, well past its prime” seems, “on paper” at least, not great value for money, said Space. But “Swift, it turns out, is still worth it, according to Nasa”.

“We didn’t want to set the precedent that anything that comes out of orbit has to be boosted, because it is part of our space ecosystem to have things deorbit frequently,” said Shawn Domagal-Goldman, Nasa’s astrophysics division director, in June. But Swift is “not just any spacecraft” and has a unique ability to “quickly pivot across the night sky to find things that go boom in the night”.

“In short,” said BBC science correspondent Pallab Ghosh, “there is nothing like Swift, and Nasa deemed that it was a spacecraft worth saving.”

Such an “ambitious” mission “has never been carried out before” and “a lot will have to go right if it is to succeed”. If it does, however, “attention will turn to whether the next rescue mission could be to save the even more famous Hubble Space Telescope”.

Karl Marx famously described religion as the opium of the people. Now, a study has shown that going to church has a similar effect on the body to morphine. Researchers from Oxford Brookes University asked 265 people in the UK and Brazil how close they felt to other worshippers before and after 24 religious events – ranging from Catholic and Baptist services to Afro-Brazilian rituals. The participants were also given a standard pain-threshold test to help assess the activation of the brain’s “mu-opioid” system, the neural pathway responsible for the body’s response to pain, reward and addiction. Its receptors can be activated by external opioids such as morphine, but also natural ones – the endorphins produced by the brain to relieve pain and stress. The results showed that, after the ritual, the participants felt more connected to one another, and more able to tolerate pain. This doesn’t mean that sermons are sedating people, said the team. Instead, these events may have developed to nurture feelings of closeness in large groups in much the same way as social grooming does between pairs of apes.

The earliest-known plague victims

When four Stone Age cemeteries were excavated in Siberia in the 1980s and 1990s, archaeologists were puzzled by the number of children among the dead; at some of the sites, two-thirds of the bodies were under 15 years old. Now, thanks to new DNA sequencing techniques, the mystery has been solved: the children were victims of the world’s earliest-known plague outbreak. An international team of scientists analysed pulp from the teeth of the hunter-gatherers buried near Lake Baikal, the oldest and deepest lake in the world, and found DNA from a previously unknown strain of the plague bacterium, Yersinia pestis, in nearly 40% of the individuals – a higher proportion than found in some medieval plague pits. Radiocarbon dating shows that many of them died within a very short time span; in several cases parents and children were buried together. The evidence suggests the plague struck twice, the first time 5,500 years ago. This “flies in the face” of the long-standing assumption that the plague only took hold after the advent of agriculture and the formation of densely populated settlements, said lead author Dr Ruairidh Macleod, of the University of Oxford. The theory is that individuals became infected by a strain that was particularly lethal to the young through close contact with marmots (rodents that are known reservoirs of the plague), perhaps while butchering them. It would then have spread through the community.

The impact of the HPV jab

Girls vaccinated against HPV when they are 12 or 13 have a close to zero chance of dying from cervical cancer before the age of 30, a study has found. The researchers, from Queen Mary University of London, used official data to assess the impact of the HPV vaccine on cervical cancer survival. They found that deaths have fallen sharply since the jab became routine in 2008. No women aged 20-24 died from cervical cancer between 2020 and 2024; without the jabs, 23 deaths would have been expected, says the report in The Lancet. “It’s incredible to think that a single jab can almost eliminate a particular type of cancer,” said lead researcher Professor Peter Sasieni. He warned, however, that vaccination rates are falling and, without “concerted efforts” to increase uptake, deaths could start to rise.

Loss of smell can be devastating

People may not think of anosmia – the loss of the sense of smell – as a serious condition, but it can have a similar effect on a person’s sense of well-being as having a stroke. A team from the University of East Anglia looked at studies on the emotional and psychological impacts of stroke, diabetes, Parkinson’s, kidney failure and heart disease, and compared them with findings on people with anosmia and ageusia (the loss of the sense of taste). It turned out that those with taste and smell conditions had experienced a sharp reduction in well-being that often rivalled that of the patients in the other groups. Typically, they no longer found pleasure in food, had difficulty socialising, and were more anxious about their safety (as, for instance, they could no longer smell gas). They had high rates of social withdrawal and 20% were depressed.

A spider’s spring-loaded trap

A newly discovered species of spider has been observed weaving a spring-loaded snare, which it uses to catch an ant that is usually too aggressive for arachnids to prey on. The ballista spider spends its days lurking in webs on the undersides of leaves in the rainforests of north Queensland, Australia. When night falls, it lowers itself from its web and fixes a tight line of silk to a leaf below, to act as an anchor. Then it returns to its web, leaving a tension line behind it, repeating the process until it has built a cone-shaped scaffold. Finally, it wraps the cone in a thinner silk and returns to its web. Soon the ants arrive, in attack mode. One bites into the cone, which is sticky. Its jaws become glued to it, and as it wriggles, the cone detaches, catapulting the whole thing – ant and all – into the spider’s web at force, and the spider can then safely eat it.

As the trap only targets these ants, the researchers, from Macquarie University, suspect that the spiders lace the silk with a particular pheromone that both attracts and angers exclusively this species. They also suspect that the spiders pick off the green tree ants quietly, one by one, to avoid triggering an alarm that might cause thousands of aggressive ants to descend on the scene.

New drug for diabetes

The first drug that has been found to delay the onset of type 1 diabetes is to become available on the NHS in England and Wales. In patients with type 1 diabetes, the immune system starts attacking the insulin-producing cells in the pancreas. As a result, the patient has to take insulin, via injections or a pump. Teplizumab – a form of immunotherapy – binds to immune cells to slow their attack and so delays the need to take insulin by two to three years. However, to work it must be given to people when they are in stage 2 of the condition – when their immune cells are attacking, but they have no symptoms yet. That being the case, people will only know they need it if they are offered a blood test because they have a family history of diabetes, take part in a screening study, or have a blood test for some other reason that raises a red flag with their GP.

The ancient Moa Eggshell Cave in New Zealand contains the remains of several extinct animal species lost approximately a million years ago. This finding sheds light on an understudied period of ecological history and hints at more environmental factors that could have driven the extinction of species over time.

Birds of a feather

Scientists discovered the fossils of 12 ancient bird species and four frog species in the Moa Eggshell Cave, according to a study published in Alcheringa: An Australasian Journal of Palaeontology. Of the fossils found in the cave, “about 33-50% of species went extinct during the million years before humans arrived,” said a statement about the study. These extinctions were likely “driven by relatively rapid climate shifts and cataclysmic volcanic eruptions.” Some of the notable species found include a “now-extinct ancestor of the takahe (a flightless swamphen native to New Zealand) and an ancient pigeon species closely related to Australia’s bronzewing pigeons, which were not around in the million years before humans arrived,” said The Economic Times.

The most surprising discovery was a parrot species called the Strigops insulaborealis, which is an ancient relative of the kakapo, the “only flightless parrot in the world, the heaviest parrot alive and critically endangered,” said The Economic Times. As of 2026, there are “only 235 known kakapo in existence, and all of them are on islands free of predators.” This is a “newly recognized avifauna for New Zealand, one that was replaced by the one humans encountered a million years later,” Trevor Worthy, the lead author of the study, said in the statement. “This remarkable find suggests our ancient forests were once home to a diverse group of birds that did not survive the next million years.”

Between a rock and a hard place

The findings fill in a period of New Zealand’s evolutionary history that was largely unknown. Researchers “know a lot about its really ancient past (circa 18 million years ago) and its more recent past (around 10,00 years ago), but the bit in the middle is less well understood,” said the BBC.

The fossils were found “trapped between two layers of volcanic ash,” said Earth.com. The older ash layer “fell during the Ngaroma eruption about 1.55 million years ago,” while the younger layer “came from the Kidnappers eruption right around 1 million years ago.” Having the two layers clearly defined in time gave the team “something rare: a fossil deposit with a firm age, pinned between two natural clocks.”

These discoveries also change the way researchers consider extinction. “For decades, the extinction of New Zealand’s birds was viewed primarily through the lens of human arrival 750 years ago,” Worthy said in the statement. But this study “proves that natural forces like super-volcanoes and dramatic climate shifts were already sculpting the unique identity of our wildlife over a million years ago.” This “isn’t a missing chapter in New Zealand’s ancient history,” study coauthor Paul Scofield said in the statement. “It’s a missing volume.”

What happened

Scientists at the University of Minnesota Wednesday announced that they created synthetic cells from non-living chemicals that can perform many of the functions of living cells, like feeding, growing, dividing and replicating their genetic material. Lead researcher Kate Adamala said she named them SpudCells after Sputnik but also “because I’m mostly made of potatoes.” Her team said they are the “first synthetic cell with a complete cell cycle.”

Who said what

The SpudCell is a “major step” toward “discovering the alchemy by which chemicals can be turned into life,” The New York Times said. With just 36 genes, it’s a “limited and fragile prototype,” CNN said, “but it could help scientists better understand the origins of life” and potentially solve “human problems” like “new cancer treatments and novel ways to capture carbon or manufacture chemicals.” The SpudCell could also “challenge our preconceived notions of what’s considered ‘life,’” said Futurism.

“We’re going to remember this moment,” said computational cell biologist Roseanna Zia, who wasn’t involved in the research, per the Times. The “shake-the-ground accomplishment here” was the ability of SpudCells to compete with each other, leading to more sophisticated progeny.

What next?

While Adamala’s research undergoes peer review, she and three colleagues created a public-benefit institution to disseminate the SpudCell “recipe” and collaborate with scientists worldwide to improve and utilize the breakthrough.

Walkers tend to drift leftwards

Humans instinctively move anticlockwise, a study has found. “If you simply ask someone to start walking, whether they are wandering around a museum, a supermarket, or even an empty room, it is surprisingly likely that they will drift [in that direction],” said lead author Dr Iñaki Echeverría Huarte, of the University of Navarra in Spain.

The researchers first noticed the bias when investigating social distancing during Covid: in 32 of the 33 experiments, people ambling around enclosed spaces were more likely than not to do so in an anticlockwise direction. Suspecting that it might be a cultural phenomenon, they asked scientists in Japan to repeat the experiments. The results were the same. Further work revealed that humans veer left regardless of whether they are right- or left-handed, alone or with others, male or female, young or old.

The team can’t explain this but hypothesise that biomechanics play a role. “None of us is perfectly symmetrical and the way each person’s brain gathers sensory information and coordinates it with the muscles seems to tip them gently to one side,” Dr Echeverría Huarte told The Guardian.

A step closer to a cure for lupus

An experimental treatment that resets the immune system has offered hope of a cure for lupus – a condition that affects about 50,000 people in the UK. In patients with the autoimmune condition, faulty B cells attack healthy tissue and organs, leading to symptoms including painful joints, skin rashes, extreme fatigue, and organ damage. Anti-inflammatory drugs can help control these, but they do not work for everyone. Now, though, patients taking part in a small trial of a new therapy have gone into remission.

Doctors at University College London Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust and UCL removed T cells (white blood cells that destroy infected cells) from six people with severe lupus that wasn’t responding to treatment. The cells were then modified, to make them hunt down the rogue B cells, before being infused back into the patients.

Within three months, all six were in remission, and five were still in remission 12 months later, suggesting their immune system had been reset. One of them, Katie Tinkler, from Surrey, had previously been in such pain, she’d struggled even to pick up a tea cup. Since the trial, she has been skiing, and she now hopes to climb Mount Kilimanjaro. “If these results are confirmed in larger studies, the prospect of a cure for lupus may no longer be out of reach,” said lead researcher Professor Karl Peggs.

Rare sighting of the ugliest shark

With its soft flabby body, pointy head and retractable jaw that shoots out to snatch prey, the goblin shark is “arguably the ugliest shark on the planet”, one ecologist told The Guardian. It is also one of the most mysterious: the sharks, which live in the deep oceans, have rarely been seen alive, other than when accidentally hauled in by fishing vessels. Now, though, they have been observed for the first time in their natural habitat.

In 2019, a male thought to be more than 50 years old was spotted in the South Central Pacific at a depth of 1,200m. Five years later, and thousands of miles away, another goblin was filmed at a depth of 2,000 metres in the southwestern Pacific. More than 50 days of filming yielded only about 20 seconds of footage, “which is testament to how elusive this species is”, said co-author Professor Alan Jamieson. “It’s a classic case of a deep-sea animal that has very low abundance, but an absolutely massive geographical range.”

Making sperm magnetic

Scientists have developed magnetic sperm – a breakthrough that could lead to a less invasive, more natural alternative to IVF. When a man has a low sperm count, or sperm that swim poorly, couples often turn to IVF, in which the sperm and egg are combined in a dish in the lab; this involves various invasive procedures, and it is not always successful, partly because of the environment in which the sperm and egg meet, says The New Scientist.

To address this, researchers in Spain incubated sperm with nanoparticles made from iron oxide and polystyrene; about 30 stuck to each one, making the sperm magnetic. They also showed that they could steer these sperm with magnets. Their hope is that, in future, they’ll be able to use magnets to draw such sperm through a woman’s body to the fallopian tubes, where they’d fertilise the waiting egg under natural conditions.

Earlier this week, a bipartisan group of U.S. senators delivered a letter to the National Science Foundation urging Acting Director Brian Stone to “reverse course” on a Trump administration plan to dismantle the “vital” Ocean Observatories Initiative. Comprising “over 900 unique deep-sea buoys and other instruments,” the OOI “provides insights into changing ecosystem conditions and extreme weather events,” said the group. The administration’s plan threatens the “safety of our coastal communities” and undermines the U.S.’s “ability to monitor coastal environments, marine currents and extreme weather events.”

What did the commentators say?

The National Science Foundation’s order to remove Initiative equipment from coastal waters off Alaska, North Carolina and Washington came with “no warning and no scientific review” last month, said The Associated Press. The program had been “slated to run another 15 to 20 years.” Pulling back now “reflects the further lack of understanding that the current administration has of scientific value and scientific merit,” said Craig McLean, who was the acting chief scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration during the first Trump term, to The New York Times. Dismantling the OOI pushes the U.S. “back yet again into a rear seat in global scientific leadership.”

OOI data on “waves, currents, salinity, the soundscape for marine mammals, carbon dioxide levels, alkalinity and more” has been a “godsend to public researchers, hazard planners and private companies alike,” said The Bulwark. The loss, for example, “could well be existential” for North Carolina’s “tourism-dependent Outer Banks economy” and will be “pretty problematic for the rest of us, too.” The change is “pulling the plug on some of the most important science being done,” said retired coastal geologist and East Carolina University teacher Stanley R. Riggs to the outlet.

The plan to shutter the OOI was originally “laid out by conservative strategist the Heritage Foundation,” said Oceanographic Magazine. The group’s Project 2025 authors “explicitly targeted the network” for its contributions to climate change research. Dismantling the ocean monitoring system “marks another step” in Trump’s “rollback of science and climate initiatives,” said The Guardian. It also comes amid Trump’s “push to expand deep-sea mining and loosen fishing regulations.”

“Preserving and improving OOI” and oceanographic science overall is “critical to advancing U.S. ocean science,” said the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine in a statement. Doing so takes on additional significance as “other countries, including our competitors,” are “increasing their investments in ocean science and advancing their capacities.”

These cuts are “part of a broader retreat from environmental and climate-related science” by this White House, the AP said. Federal law requires congressional notification “at least 30 days in advance of any planned decommissioning of agency-owned facilities.” Instead, Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.) “learned of the dismantling through news reports.”

“The alarm bells just went off,” said Merkley to the AP. “None of us” were given advance notice.

What next?

The National Science Foundation should respect “congressional intent and legal direction,” which is “clearly to maintain the operation of this cost-effective research system,” said the bipartisan Senate group in their letter. Any subsequent efforts to alter oceanographic research should follow a “thorough evaluation of OOI, including engagement with the marine science community and other impacted stakeholders.” The foundation must “cease this expensive, destructive and, crucially, illegal action at once,” a separate group of Democrats said in a letter signed by members of the House Committees on Science, Space, and Technology and Natural Resources.

For scientists who work with the OOI’s shared data, the program’s closure is only part of the frustration. “If we want to put [the instruments] back out again, we need people who know how to do it,” said Hilary Palevsky, a marine biogeochemistry and oceanography professor at Boston College, to The Guardian. However, the team with that exclusive expertise is “being dismantled along with the infrastructure program itself.”

Data collection for the OOI is a “huge engineering challenge,” said Palevsky in a separate interview with the Times. Researchers can’t simply leave “notes for the next person who comes in. There’s a lot of expertise that has the potential to be lost.”

With many in the Trump administration pushing an anti-vaccine agenda, declining measles vaccination rates have forced scientists to reinvigorate the hunt for a drug that could fight the virus. While the FDA has not approved any measles drugs yet, researchers seem hopeful that a breakthrough is on the horizon.

Why are researchers revamping the measles drug search?

For a long time, the quest to create a measles drug was essentially dormant, as the virus “had been kept at bay in the United States for more than two decades thanks to a remarkably effective vaccine,” said The New York Times. But in 2025, amid anti-vaccine sentiment from the White House, a “series of outbreaks popped up in unvaccinated communities across the country,” marking the worst year for measles in the U.S. since 1991.

The outbreak led to a “‘very crowded’ hunt for new measles therapeutics that could prevent or treat infections,” said the Times. Currently, if an unvaccinated individual contracts the measles, doctors can “offer ways to manage symptoms, which often include fever, fatigue, cough and a hallmark blotchy rash,” said Science News. But they “can’t fight off the virus itself.”

How far away is an approved measles drug?

There have been several breakthroughs from various scientific groups, and many feel that FDA approval of a measles drug is imminent. At least one antiviral drug, GHP-88310, was recently shown to “help treat measles, croup and other related viral diseases that cause contagious and life-threatening respiratory infections,” said The Independent. The drug is the “most promising inhibitor” of this virus family that causes measles “we have encountered in years of research,” Carolin Lieber, a senior postdoctoral fellow at Georgia State University’s Center for Translational Antiviral Research, said in a statement.

GHP-88310, which is taken orally, could “offer a much-needed option to treat measles in the midst of increasing endemic transmission in the U.S. and throughout the world due to vaccine hesitancy,” said Drug Discovery News. The drug could provide an alternative to the typical measles defense mechanism, ring vaccination, in which “direct and social contacts around an infected person are vaccinated.” But with “increasing vaccine hesitancy in some population groups, ring vaccination is no longer a viable option in some communities.”

The success of the drug doesn’t necessarily mean it will become ubiquitous as a measles treatment, partially due to people’s feelings about the disease. “One of the biggest misunderstandings about measles is that it’s ‘not that bad,’” Kathryn Hastie, a structural virologist at San Diego’s La Jolla Institute for Immunology, said to Science News. The virus instead can “cause a range of complications that can severely impact people’s lives, including pneumonia and blindness.”

Another company, Saravir, is developing its own measles antibody treatment. The medication could be a “potential multi-billion dollar market opportunity,” Dr. Ronald Moss, Saravir’s CEO, told the Times. Moss estimates there are 44 million people in the U.S. and EU who are “uniquely vulnerable to measles,” and if even a small portion of that group is exposed, it’s a “pretty big population that we would want to protect.” Still, the antibody treatment and other measles drugs could be cost-prohibitive. If the “drug makes it through trials,” said the Times, Saravir “expects the infusions to cost roughly $2,500.”

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Wearable ultrasound tracks high-risk pregnancies

A new wearable ultrasound patch could one day help detect pregnancy complications early on and prevent stillbirths. The UPatch, now a proof-of-concept device, continuously monitors fetuses in the womb and tracks blood flow. In a trial of 52 pregnant women, the UPatch found that one woman with preeclampsia, a serious type of high blood pressure, had extreme intrauterine growth restriction. Her baby was then delivered via caesarean to prevent a stillbirth, researchers reported in the journal Nature Biotechnology.

Paralympian could be first astronaut with disability in orbit

British Paralympic sprinter John McFall is set to make history as the first disabled astronaut in space. The 45-year-old surgeon is a member of the European Space Agency astronaut reserve and has been cleared to participate in a two-week mission to the Haven-1 commercial space station, set to launch as soon as next year. Among other tasks, The Guardian said, McFall will assess how the space environment affects modern prosthetic limbs, “which often rely on sensors and microprocessors to function properly.”

New method transforms ocean water into drinking water

A new desalination method offers a waste-free way to turn ocean water into drinking water without any chemical additives. Self-cleaning solar panels distill the water and separate out the salts, which can be used as table salt or to extract minerals like lithium. The researchers who designed the system at the University of Rochester’s Institute of Optics say it is scalable for use worldwide and tackles both clean drinking water scarcity and damage caused by mining minerals.

Patients helped by therapy donkeys at French psychiatric hospital

Therapy donkeys are helping to improve the emotional regulation and communication skills of patients at a French psychiatric hospital. As part of their treatment, patients with conditions like anxiety, schizophrenia and depression take the donkeys on walks, clean their hooves and give them hugs. This is “animal medicine,” one patient, Nathalie, told France 24. “It brings relief. You stop thinking about everything else.” Participants are paired with one donkey so they can form a bond.

Spinal-cord injuries are “notoriously difficult to treat,” said Rhys Blakely, science editor of The Times. But Zurich-based researchers think a solution may be in sight: injectable microrobots.

When the spinal-cord is damaged, recovery is often limited: nerve-fibre regrowth can be hampered by scarring, and the nerve cells usually cannot regenerate on their own. But studies by a team at the Multi-Scale Robotics Lab at ETH Zurich suggest that microrobots, made from stem cells with magnetic nano-particles, could “coax” these nerve cells to repair and regenerate.

The studies were carried out in a lab on zebrafish and mice, so there is “still a long way to go” before the microrobots can be tested on humans. But the results are promising, and scientists the world over are intrigued by the idea of “microscopic repair crews, guided by magnets”.

‘Near-complete recovery’

The decision to build this “fleet of living machines” came after other experimental treatments had fallen short, said Blakely. Attempts to inject immature nerve cells into the injured area, then implant electrodes to stimulate them to develop, had failed.

So the Zurich robotics team engineered microscopic machines about six micrometers wide – smaller than a red blood cell. Each one combines a neural progenitor cell (a spinal stem cell) with a cluster of customised nanoparticles. These nanoparticles have two layers: one is sensitive to magnetic fields, so the microrobot can be guided by a magnet; the other turns magnetic signals into electrical pulses. This “lets scientists steer the cells and then coax them, electrically, into maturing into new nerve tissue”.

Millions of these microrobots were needed during the animal trials. First, they were injected into injured zebrafish larvae and, in three days, the larvae were exhibiting “near-complete recovery of swimming and exploratory behaviours”, according to the study published in Nature Materials. Then, when tested on mice with severed spinal cords, the microrobots “promoted neural differentiation, and resulted in substantial improvements in motor function within four weeks”.

‘Reproducible and scalable’

Further research is needed before these microrobots can be tested on humans but the Zurich team is already thinking about ways they can be used in other medical settings. “The reproducible and scalable production of microrobots using our lab-on-a-chip system demonstrates” that there is a great deal of “application potential”, said study leader Salvador Pané i Vidal. With adaptations, the microrobots could be used in wound healing, and to make cardiology and oncology treatments “safer, more controllable and more effective”.

Different microrobots have already been shown to be successful in other areas of medicine, said Healthcare in Europe. Formed in droplets, they are effective at “precision-targeted drug delivery”, outperforming IV-delivery on the amount of drug than reaches the target tissue.

What happened

New World screwworm, a deadly flesh-eating parasite, has been confirmed in a calf in south Texas, the U.S. Department of Agriculture said late Wednesday. It was the first case of the fly-borne parasite found in U.S. livestock since 1966.

Who said what

Screwworms are “parasitic flies whose females lay eggs in open wounds” on “any warm-blooded animal,” hatching hundreds of larvae that “use their sharp mouths to burrow through living flesh, eventually killing their host if left untreated,” Reuters said. Human cases are “rare,” and the fly “poses no food safety issues.”

The U.S. has been preparing for the parasite’s arrival, sealing the U.S. southern border to livestock since screwworms were found spreading north through Mexico in 2024. If “more screwworms are found” in the U.S. beyond this one case, it “could devastate the American cattle industry,” The New York Times said. The nation’s cattle herd is “already at its smallest since the 1950s,” The Wall Street Journal said.

What next?

The USDA is “taking immediate action” to “contain” and “eradicate this case,” said Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins, including forming a 12.4-mile “infested zone” quarantine around the calf, increasing monitoring and releasing millions of sterile New World screwworm flies to shrink the population.

What happened

A cancer drug decades in the making significantly extended and improved the life of patients whose metastatic pancreatic cancer had stopped responding to previous treatments, researchers reported Sunday in The New England Journal of Medicine and at an American Society for Clinical Oncology meeting in Chicago. In a study of 500 last-stage pancreatic patients, those assigned Revolution Medicine’s daraxonrasib pill lived an average of 13.2 months versus 6.7 months for those undergoing chemotherapy. They also experienced fewer side effects.

Who said what

The “hotly anticipated” findings suggest researchers have “cracked one of the most stubbornly lethal cancers” by blocking mutated KRAS genes responsible for most pancreatic tumors, The Washington Post said. Daraxonrasib “ticks all of the boxes,” Dr. Rachna Shroff of the University of Arizona Cancer Center, who wasn’t involved in the study, told The Associated Press. “Having treated pancreatic cancer for 16 years, I actually started crying” at the results.

What next?

“Dozens of experimental drugs” targeting cancer-causing gene mutations are in development, stoking “optimism that this may be a turning point in the quest” for new treatment options, the AP said. Revolution Medicine is now testing daraxonrasib in earlier-stage cancer and in combination with other treatments.

Colossal Biosciences, a Texas-based biotech company known for its de-extinction agenda and previous claims about genetically engineering dire wolves, has successfully hatched 26 chicks from artificial eggs. The company now hopes to use the technology to bring back extinct birds, including the dodo and the giant moa. But skeptics say de-extinction is not possible and the company may be overstating its claims.

A whole new bird

Eggs are a biological wonder. They are the “largest single cell of any species” and a “self-contained engine of incubation, doing away with the need for a living womb to keep a growing organism safe,” said Time. Because of eggs’ unique properties, artificially engineering them is a difficult task. However, Colossal Biosciences has managed to 3D-print artificial eggs with a “semi-permeable, silicone-based membrane housed inside a rigid hexagonal support cup,” said the company in a release. The membrane was “engineered to replicate the gas-exchange function of a natural eggshell — allowing oxygen to pass through while retaining moisture and blocking contaminants.”

The company released a video showing the hatching chicks. Researchers “took recently laid chicken eggs and carefully poured their contents into the artificial shells, where they continued growing,” said MIT Technology Review. A “window on top lets researchers peek inside.” To “see them all moving around in their artificial eggs was absolutely mind-blowing,” said Andrew Pask, Colossal Biosciences’ chief biology officer, to the outlet. “You really feel you can grow life outside of the womb.”

“Artificial egg” may be a misnomer, according to some. “You’ve poured in all the other parts that make it an egg. It’s an artificial eggshell,” said Vincent Lynch, an evolutionary biologist at the University at Buffalo, to CBS News. In addition, “producing a chick from an artificial vessel is not necessarily new,” said Nicola Hemmings, who studies bird reproductive biology at the UK’s University of Sheffield, to CBS News. In the past, scientists “used cruder technology to create transparent eggshells that hatched chicks from plastic films or sacks,” mainly to “study chicken development and glean insights that can also be applied to other mammals and even humans,” said CBS News.

A crack at de-extinction

The company’s artificial shell is just a first step in larger de-extinction plans. Colossal Biosciences’ ultimate goal is to bring back extinct birds like the giant moa or dodo. The egg’s design is “variable in size” and “scalable from hummingbird-egg dimensions down to the soccer-ball-sized eggs of the South Island giant moa, which once stood nearly 12 feet tall,” said the release.

Before the company can resurrect an extinct species, “scientists will need to genetically engineer bird DNA at a much earlier stage,” said National Geographic. “Once the fertilized egg is laid, the embryo already has around 50,000 cells — that’s way too many cells to bioengineer,” Hans Cheng, a retired molecular geneticist who teaches at Michigan State University, told the outlet.

Colossal Biosciences previously claimed it revived the extinct dire wolf and hopes to resurrect species like the woolly mammoth and the Tasmanian tiger. The company has also suggested its technology could support conservation efforts but included “no data or peer-reviewed scientific publications” in its release about the hatching chicks, “making it difficult to independently assess the claim,” said Nic Rawlence, an associate professor in ancient DNA at the University of Otago, at The Conversation. “If the technology lives up to the hype, it won’t be a silver bullet or panacea to stopping species declines, but it might just help.”

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Ballet dancer with ALS performs again through digital avatar

A ballerina with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) danced again through a digital avatar powered by her brainwaves. At a live performance in Amsterdam, Breanna Olson wore an electroencephalogram headset that captured and “translated” her brain activity and “specific motor signals associated with imagining certain dance movements,” allowing her avatar to dance in real time, said the BBC. The headset’s creator, Dentsu Lab, said it aims to make this “new brainwave interface” accessible to everyone with ALS and other motor neuron diseases.

San Diego has excess water to sell to drier states

San Diego County has built up its water infrastructure to the point it can now sell excess capacity to nearby states. Following a long drought in the 1990s, the San Diego County Water Authority (SDCWA) built the massive Carlsbad Desalination Plant, expanded its reservoir and acquired rights to a Colorado River allocation. Today, with desalinated water to spare, SDCWA is negotiating a swap of its Colorado River rights to Arizona and Nevada, providing the “parched” states with an “unconventional lifeline,” said The Wall Street Journal.

Zambian reserve rewilds captive lions 

Two lions born in captivity are preparing for life in the wild on the vast Lolelunga Private Reserve in Zambia. The reserve partnered with Zambia’s ministries of tourism and parks and wildlife to relocate the 7-year-old lions from a small enclosure at a Tanzanian tourist attraction. The animals, a male and female, will now spend several months in the reserve’s acclimatization habitat, developing scavenging and hunting skills. Once ready, they will have the run of the reserve’s 74,000 acres.

Once-overlooked San Francisco bridge gets beautified

A neglected bridge in San Francisco’s Glen Park neighborhood was turned into a beautiful piece of infrastructure after residents banded together to cover it with tiles. Before its makeover, the crossing at Bosworth Street and Lippard Avenue was dirty and overgrown. About 100 volunteers from Glen Park Beautiful and the Create Peace Project and kids from Glen Park School spent months cleaning and painting the bridge, pulling out weeds and finally designing and installing the colorful mosaics.

Bacteria may be able to help mass-produce a natural UV-protectant ingredient called gadusol that is found in many fish and marine organisms. The chemical could be used to make sunscreen safer and greener in the future. However, much more testing is required to determine its efficacy and safety compared to other currently available sunscreens.

Like a fish out of water

Gadusol could potentially be produced using E. coli, according to a study published in the journal Trends in Biotechnology. The compound helps protect against ultraviolet damage but it is “scarce in nature, and extracting it is inefficient and can carry environmental costs,” Ping Zhang, a biochemist at Jiangnan University in China and lead author of the study, said in a release. “We want to find a scalable and greener way to produce gadusol.”

Gadusol is “transparent, unlike melanin, and yet is perfectly tuned to block out harmful UV rays from the sun, which makes it ideal for organisms hiding from prey,” said New Scientist. Instead of harvesting the compound directly from fish, researchers opted to turn the bacteria E. coli into “mini chemical factories,” said Popular Science. They “rebuilt a zebrafish’s pathway for making gadusol inside of an E. coli bacterium” then “tweaked the E. coli’s genetics and growing conditions.”

The modifications of the E. coli “increased gadusol yield by nearly 93 times, from 45.2 milligrams per liter to 4.2 grams per liter,” said the release. The lab-made gadusol also “showed promise in preliminary UV-protection tests.” The results suggest that “we may be able to meet future demand for natural sunscreen ingredients through microbial production,” Zhang said. However, the study didn’t compare gadusol’s effectiveness to currently available sunscreens. The process also needs to be assessed for long-term safety and whether it can be scaled for manufacturing.

A bright future

Finding natural sunscreens has become a growing interest, as some people have grown opposed to conventional sunscreen ingredients, “which can irritate sensitive skin, harm marine organisms or rely on petrochemicals,” said the release. There has also been concern that two common sunscreen ingredients, homosalate and oxybenzone, may have endocrine-disrupting properties. “While effects have been seen at high concentrations in animal studies, it is not clear whether these translate to humans exposed to sunscreen levels,” Ian Musgrave, a senior lecturer in pharmacology at the University of Adelaide, said at The Conversation in 2025.

Gadusol is promising not only for its sun protection but also because of its “antioxidant activity comparable to that of vitamin C, suggesting it may help neutralize cell-damaging free radicals from UV exposure,” said the release. We “haven’t necessarily given it the praise that it deserves,” James Gagnon, a researcher at the University of Utah who helped discover gadusol’s role as a sunscreen in fish embryos, said to New Scientist. “This is a great molecule.”

However, gadusol “won’t join your next beach day just yet,” said Popular Science. There are a number of hurdles to making the ingredient available for commercial use. The biggest is “finding a mixture of chemicals that bind it into a solution that works as a long-lasting application,” said New Scientist. “The active ingredient could be gadusol, but I guarantee 99% of what’s in that bottle of sunscreen someday in the future is going to be just stuff to hold the gadusol to your skin so it doesn’t wash off,” says Gagnon. “There’s still a lot of work required on the material science side.” The product would also need regulatory approval.

What happened

A 59,000-year-old Neanderthal tooth discovered in a cave in Siberia shows clear signs of dental surgery with a small stone drill-shaped tool, researchers reported Wednesday in the journal PLOS One. The hollowed-out molar pushes back the “known history of human dentistry” by more than 40,000 years, The Washington Post said. Previously, the “oldest evidence of dental surgery was a Homo sapiens tooth found in Italy dating to about 14,000 years ago,” Reuters said.

Who said what

The operation to scrape out the molar’s pulp would have “required diagnosing the ​source of pain, understanding that removing decayed tissue could bring relief, deliberately selecting an appropriate stone tool and executing precise drilling with controlled finger movements,” study senior author Ksenia Kolobova, an archaeologist with Russia’s Institute of Archaeology and Ethnography, told Reuters.

What next?

The “painful prehistoric dentistry saga” is the “latest in a string of evidence that explodes the myth of our unique cognitive and social abilities,” the Post said, and it “deepens the mystery of why we are the only species of human left on the planet.” Neanderthals “disappeared roughly ​40,000 years ago,” Reuters said, though “most people today carry a ​small amount of their DNA due to ancient ⁠interbreeding.”

There’s been a fierce debate over the past two decades about the status of the distant icy world of Pluto after it was contentiously stripped of its planethood and reclassified as a dwarf planet.

Nasa chief Jared Isaacman has indicated that he might revisit the matter but it won’t be an easy decision because scientists are still “worlds apart” on the issue, said The Observer.

Rock and ice

Pluto was discovered on 18 February 1930 by an American astronomer called Clyde Tombaugh. He was using one of the most powerful telescopes of his day at the Lowell Observatory in Arizona.

For 76 years the “tiny ball of rock and ice” was recognised as the ninth, smallest and most distant planet of the solar system. But in 2006, nine years after Tombaugh died, members of the International Astronomical Union voted on the criteria for a planet.

To qualify, the group decided, an object must orbit the Sun, be nearly round in shape, and be the largest object in its path. Pluto meets the first two conditions but not the third, because it shares its orbit with other icy objects, in a region called the Kuiper Belt. So its status was downgraded to a dwarf planet.

This decision was “controversial” and “not just because it forced schoolchildren” to “learn a new mnemonic for our solar system's major denizens”, said Space. Earth and Jupiter share orbital space with lots of asteroids, “so why was Pluto singled out?” Pluto was “beloved and remains so”, especially in the US, because “it’s the only planet discovered by an American”.

The “most vocal” Pluto advocate has been the planetary scientist Alan Stern. “Science isn’t about voting,” he said in 2016 of the IAU’s decision. “We don’t vote on the theory of relativity. We don’t vote on evolution.”

There was a “significant escalation” in the pro-Pluto campaign in July 2015, when Nasa’s New Horizons spacecraft produced the “first-ever up-close imagery” of Pluto, revealing a “stunningly diverse world” with “towering mountains, vast nitrogen-ice glaciers and other jaw-dropping features”, said Space. But the “historic flyby” wasn’t enough to “get Pluto its planethood back”.

Maga echoes

But now, Nasa boss Isaacman has signalled that the US space agency might re-examine the case for Pluto to be given its planet status back. Last month, he told a US Senate committee that he was “very much” wanting to make Pluto a planet again. He added that “some papers” were under way at Nasa to “revisit this discussion”.

With an “echo of Maga”, “make Pluto a planet again” is a phrase that suggests a “nostalgic journey back to a past of certainties”, when “everything was in its right place in the heavens”, said The Observer. But “actually it’s the Plutonists who represent the argument for radical change” and Stern has calculated that there might be as many as 1,000 planets in the solar system.

But first, the best thing that Nasa and other “Pluto advocates” can do is “escalate the discussion”, said Space.

What happened

Engaging in the arts, whether directly or by going to museums or concerts, helps people age more slowly, British researchers reported Monday in the journal Innovation in Aging. The benefits were found to be comparable to physical exercise and quitting smoking. They were most pronounced for people over 40 and those who engage in a wider range of artistic endeavors.

Who said what

The University College London researchers looked at how often 3,556 adults in the U.K. engaged in some artistic pursuit — singing, painting, dancing, crafting, photography — or visited an exhibition or heritage site. Those who did so weekly aged 4% slower in blood tests of their “epigenetic clock,” or biological aging. “People were around a year younger biologically if they’re regularly engaged in the arts,” researcher Daisy Fancourt, the study’s lead author, told NPR. Monthly arts engagement slowed aging by 3%.

Slower biological aging “does not necessarily mean someone will live longer,” The Guardian said, but “previous studies have suggested a link between arts engagement and longer lifespan.”

What next?

The research “builds on a growing body of evidence” that arts activities “reduce stress, lower inflammation and improve cardiovascular disease risk,” study senior author Feifei Bu told The Guardian. Regular creative engagement should be treated not “as a luxury” but “an essential,” Fancourt told The Art Newspaper, “just like we promote 10,000 steps a day or five-a-day of fruits and vegetables.”

Scientists are pushing for “radical” measures against climate change, proposing the construction of a dam across the Bering Strait that would link Alaska and Russia, said Science.

A study by University of Utrecht academics Jelle Soons and Henk Dijkstra suggests that this would be a decisive way to protect the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), which is instrumental in regulating the planet’s sea temperature and climate.

Three separate dams would be needed across the strait, which is 51 miles (82km) wide at its narrowest, due to the two islands that lie in the middle, with the longest section spanning roughly 24 miles (38 km), said LiveScience. Similar structures already exist in the Netherlands and South Korea, although “not in remote locations with strong currents and sea ice, or with rival geopolitical powers on opposite sides”.

‘Grave’ dangers

Building a dam in the Bering Strait is just as “out there” an idea as “refreezing the Arctic” or “floating a giant parasol in outer space”, said The New York Times. The concern for the continuation of the AMOC is very real, however.

Acting as a “vast oceanic conveyor belt”, it carries tropical, salty currents from the Atlantic towards Europe. There, it releases the warmth into the air, which regulates the temperature across the continent. Once cooled, it circles back south, influencing rainfall patterns in Africa, South America, and beyond.

There is a “growing body of evidence” that human-caused global warming could cause it to “shut down or slow significantly”, which would have “grave effects” on weather patterns on multiple continents.

“At first glance”, the role of the Bering Strait “isn’t all that obvious” in this global cycle. However, it acts as the “gateway for large quantities of fresh water” to flow from the Pacific into the Arctic Ocean, then into the Atlantic. A dam in this region would alter the balance of fresh and salt water in all three oceans.

The University of Utrecht study was based on simulations indicating that the AMOC was “much stronger” in the Pliocene era – roughly 5.3 to 2.6 million years ago. During this era, sea levels in the strait were lower, exposing an intercontinental land bridge, leading Soons, the study’s lead researcher, to wonder “could we do this again?”, said New Scientist.

No ‘escape hatch’

It is an “audacious proposal”, and a project that would be on an unseen and “truly epic scale”. Researchers have been “mulling it over” at the European Geosciences Union general assembly in Vienna this month. But “because we don’t fully understand the AMOC, we can’t be sure of the consequences of such an intervention”. “These drastic things really do have big uncertainties attached”, Jonathan Rosser, a climate researcher at the London School of Economics, told the magazine.

“This is one of those climate ideas that sounds almost ridiculous when you first hear it”, said Earth.com. In fact, the “real takeaway” from the study, and its discussion at a conference level, is “how worried scientists have become about the AMOC”. “When researchers start seriously modelling something this extreme, it tells you that the level of concern is high.”

Even if this project were given the green light – following much more advanced and rigorous modelling – it would “raise huge environmental, political, legal and logistical questions”. The scale of the intervention, let alone the complex political relations between the US and Russia, would mean this project would not be anywhere as simple as “building a bridge or a seawall”. “It would be one of the boldest and strangest geoengineering projects ever seriously contemplated.”

Even then, it does not promise an “escape hatch”, or get-out-of-jail-free card. “Once you are debating mega-dams to prop up ocean currents”, it’s a clear sign that progress towards reducing emissions “has not gone nearly well enough”.

El Niños arrive every few years, inflicting drought, flooding and other climate destruction across the globe. Climate scientists are predicting “potentially the biggest El Niño event since the 1870s” in the coming months, said State University of New York at Albany’s Paul Roundy, per The Washington Post. Rising temperatures in the equatorial Pacific Ocean waters could “shift patterns of droughts, floods, heat, humidity and sea ice across the planet,” said the outlet, as well as create a “higher frequency of heat waves” across much of the United States. Such dramatic shifts could have a “profound impact on human society and human well-being,” said climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe to the Post.

El Niños are natural phenomena, but could prove combustible when combined with global warming. The coming El Niño might “lock Earth into a hotter climate” with “lasting changes in heat, rainfall and drought patterns” around the world, said Inside Climate News. Researchers believe the newest cycle “could permanently push” the planet past the 1.5 degrees Celsius warming milestone long seen as the threshold for “potentially irreversible climate impacts” likely to affect food production, human health and the global economy.

What did the commentators say?

The world is about to learn “how much climate disruption we can manage at the moment,” David Wallace-Wells said at The New York Times. The biggest recorded El Niño in 1877 produced famine that killed millions of people in Egypt, India and China and elsewhere, often followed by epidemics of “malaria, plague, dysentery, smallpox and cholera” that further harmed “famine-weakened populations.” The next El Niño may not “produce nearly as much human suffering as the one of 150 years ago.” But it is “almost certain” to make 2027 the “hottest year on record by some margin.”

“Prepare for bedlam,” Bill McKibben said on The Crucial Years Substack. “We get lots more” fires and floods “when the temperature tilts sharply up” as happens during an El Niño. The coming cycle may offer “final proof that global warming is actually accelerating sickeningly,” coming atop a “higher baseline temperature” produced by the “steady warming of the planet.” The likely weather disasters could set in motion the “next, pivotal chapter of the climate fight.” The ugly truth: “We are ever further into the great overheating.”

What next?

“A lot has changed” since the 1877 El Niño, said The Washington Post. Advances in climate monitoring make the world “much more prepared to deal with the consequences” of massive weather shifts.

It will still be a challenge. “Hotter, drier weather across Asia” could damage crops while farmers on the continent “grapple with fertilizer shortages” caused by the Iran war, said Reuters. El Niño could also “dump more rain ​on Europe and the United States,” affecting U.S. corn and soybean harvests. The uncertainty may prompt farmers to hedge their planting plans. “Why spread expensive fertilizer on a crop that is going to be poor anyway?” said Vitor Pistóia at Australia’s Rabobank to the outlet.