It’s a regrettable reality that there is never enough time to cover all the interesting scientific stories we come across. So every month, we highlight a handful of the best stories that nearly slipped through the cracks. May’s list includes the discovery of a possible prehistoric mining site in the Pyrenees; a new species of tiny blue octopus; why cats seem to prefer silver vine to catnip; and why political polarization might behave like a phase transition, among other noteworthy stories.

Prehistoric mining in the Pyrenees

Credit: IPHES-CERCA

High in the eastern Pyrenees is a prehistoric cave, excavated between 2021 and 2023. Based on analysis of artifacts uncovered at the site, a team of Spanish archaeologists believes this may have served as an ancient copper smelting spot, with far more frequent occupation by humans than previously thought. The researchers described these preliminary findings in a paper published in the journal Frontiers in Environmental Archaeology.

Of particular interest were 23 hearths found in the second and third layers of the excavation, filled with crushed green mineral fragments that had clearly been subject to burning; other materials found there showed no sign of thermal damage. The team is still conducting experiments to conclusively identify the green material, but the fragments strongly resemble malachite. That’s significant because malachite can be heated to produce copper.  Most of the hearths are between 4,000 and 5,500 years old. The team also recovered two prehistoric pendants, a human finger bone, and a baby tooth belonging to a child about 11 years old. It’s possible there may be burials in deeper layers as excavations continue at the site.

Frontiers in Environmental Archaeology, 2026. DOI: 10. 3389/fearc.2026.1811493 (About DOIs).

Singing mice

Credit: NYU School of Medicine

Singing mice live high in the cloud forests of Costa Rica, engaging in chirping call-and-response duets that can change slightly depending on responses received. In 2019, scientists pinpointed the precise brain circuit responsible for this behavior. Now, scientists at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) have discovered that this ability doesn’t require any major evolutionary leap in brain complexity, just a couple of targeted changes to existing wiring patterns, according to a paper published in Nature.

The key to the discovery was a molecular barcoding technique developed by CSHL’s Anthony Zador, which enabled the team to map out the wiring of thousands of individual neurons in the brains of singing mice and other closely related species. This revealed that there were roughly triple the number of neurons connecting the mouth-movement control region with the cortex that controls hearing, and a midbrain structure that controls vocalizations. The authors suggest it might one day be possible to make an ordinary lab mouse “sing” by making similar neural wiring changes.

Nature, 2026. DOI: 10.1038/s41586-026-10458-y.

Tiny blue octopus

Credit: Courtesy of the Charles Darwin Foundation

In 2015, scientists on a deep-sea expedition in the Galapagos Islands, aboard the E/V Nautilus, were looking at footage from the remotely operated vehicle (ROV). They spotted a tiny, distinctly blue octopus some 5,800 feet (1,773 meters) below the surface, and collected the creature for further analysis, along with other deep-sea specimens. Charles Darwin Foundation researchers have now concluded that the adorable creature, small enough to fit into the palm of one’s hand, is a new species, according to a paper published in the journal Zootaxis.

The little octopus has been preserved in storage since it was collected. Scientists were reluctant to cut the specimen open for a thorough analysis to determine the species, since it was one of a kind, and it was extremely unlikely that another would be collected. Instead, the team opted for mini-CT scans, enabling a 3D virtual dissection with clear imaging even of soft tissues. This revealed that the creature had short arms, few arm suckers, and no ink sac, as well as having very smooth skin and a large rachidian tooth. They’ve dubbed the new species Microeledone galapagensis.

Zootaxis, 2026. DOI: 10.11646/zootaxa.5814.4.

Not all “slapsticks” are created equal

Credit: YouTube/Normans Musical Instruments

Foley artists have used so-called “slapsticks” to mimic the sound of the crack of the whip since at least the mid-20th century; it’s used in Leroy Anderson’s holiday classic “Sleigh Ride,” for example. But not all commercial slapsticks are created equal, according to Daniel Ludwigsen of Kettering University, who presented the results of his preliminary experiments comparing five versions at a meeting of the Acoustical Society of America in Philadelphia. Ludwigsen played each of the five commercial slapsticks five times in an anechoic environment, minimizing any acoustic room effects with absorbing wedges.

All shared a high-frequency roll-off and a broad peak between 1,000 and 3,000 Hz, with varying degrees of low-frequency roll-off. The two smallest could be played with one hand thanks to a spring hinge and performed best in the high-frequency range. By contrast, longer models like the “Sleighride Special” performed best in low-frequency ranges. The resulting sound’s tone is influenced by how hard one smacks the sticks together. And preliminary testing of the Pearl slapstick showed roughly uniform sound directionality regardless of frequency, although Ludwigsen emphasized that a more complete study is needed.

The hidden math of abstract art

Credit: Emil Dmitruk/CC-BY 4.0

Taste in art is highly subjective, and understanding why some works resonate with the public more than others has long fascinated researchers. Mathematicians think they have identified a hidden “golden rule” of abstract art that might account for why we gravitate toward a Jackson Pollock while lesser works leave us cold, according to a paper published in the journal PLoS Computational Biology. The researchers developed a new analytical method for art, drawing on a computational topology technique that captures structure on multiple scales (“persistent homology”).

They applied this method to a set of abstract paintings by well-known artists and also to a second set of AI-generated “pseudo-art.” Their method could clearly distinguish between the two. Further analysis revealed that works by Pollock, Wassily Kandinsky, and Mark Rothko shared a similar balance of visual elements at the edges (specifically the Alexander duality).

They also conducted experiments that tracked people’s eye movements and recorded their brain activity as they viewed sets of images—both in the lab and in a gallery. There was more stable integrative brain processing when people looked at real art versus pseudo-art, and the eye movements mapped neatly onto the previously identified topological features, suggesting a link between topologically derived image features, eye movement, and aesthetic experience.

PLoS Computational Biology, 2026. DOI: 10.1371/journal.pcbi.1014156.

Political polarization is a phase transition

Credit: Complexity Science Hub (CSH)

It’s usually assumed that the candidate who spends the most has an electoral advantage, but physics suggests the reality is more complex. Scientists at the Complexity Science Hub (CSH) have found that political polarization behaves like a phase transition, according to a paper published in Physical Review Letters, marked by a critical campaign spending threshold. Below that threshold, social dynamics shape the outcome; exceeding that threshold deepens polarization without significantly increasing the margin of victory.

The CSH team used a statistical physics model to examine bipartisan elections, specifically 6,357 House races (with just two main candidates) spanning 435 congressional districts and 21 election cycles (1980 to 2020). They found that the tipping point is $1.8 million at the district level. (Senate and presidential campaigns have higher absolute spending.) When both parties spend less than that, community interactions shape the outcome. If just one party spends more than that, the campaign gains a decisive edge, drowning out the influence of community interactions. But if both campaigns exceed the threshold, both social influence and high spending become negligible.

Spending more and more doesn’t change the outcome, which usually falls into the 50:50 range. But it does significantly increase polarization. The authors found that the incumbency advantage is also very real, at least in the intermediate spending range. Any challenger must spend about $140,000 to unseat an incumbent, even if said incumbent spends nothing, given the baseline advantage. The scientists hope to extend their analysis to multi-party systems in European democracies to learn more about these dynamics.

Physical Review Letters, 2026. DOI: 10.1103/9gjj-1df6.

Do cats prefer silver vine or catnip?

Credit: Reiko Uenoyama

All domestic cats love catnip, right? Well, not necessarily. Japanese cat owners would likely say their cats prefer silver vine (matatabi), which is equally famous for triggering the usual strong kitty response: rubbing their faces and bodies all over it, rolling on the ground, or licking and chewing the leaves. Japanese researchers have conducted several studies and concluded that cats actually have a significant preference for silver vine even though catnip contains more active compounds, according to a paper published in the Journal of Chemical Ecology

First, the team placed fresh silver vine branches and leaves near living catnip plants in a garden and monitored six free-roaming cats over 10 nights. Five cats responded to the silver vine while none responded to the fresh catnip. Repeating the experiment with catnip and silver vine extracts produced similar results. The researchers then tested 22 captive purebred cats with the extracts and found that 15 chose the silver vine, three chose the catnip, one responded to both, and the remaining three cats weren’t interested in either.

There was a clear preference for silver vine even though the amount of bioactive compounds in the catnip extract was 170 times higher than in the silver vine, according to the authors. They suggest that the odors of living catnip might be too strong and intense, which might explain why commercial catnip is usually sold in a dry-leaf form. There is even some historical anecdotal evidence that this is the case: in 1768, botanist Philip Miller wrote in The Gardeners Dictionary that cats were fond of catnip “when it is withered,” but often ignored it when there was a lot of catnip growing in a cluster.

Journal of Chemical Ecology, 2026. DOI: 10.1007/s10886-026-01717-3.

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Posted Tuesday 2 June 2026 at 2:22 pm AEST (my time).

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The global health organization Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI) announced Monday that it will “urgently accelerate development” of three vaccine candidates against Bundibugyo ebolavirus (BDBV), pledging a little over $60 million in the effort to extinguish an outbreak currently raging out of control in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Under the plans, CEPI has committed up to $50 million to US-based Moderna for preclinical development and Phase 1 clinical testing of its mRNA-based BDBV vaccine candidate. The funding will simultaneously allow the company to ramp up manufacturing capabilities and ready large-scale Phase 2/3 trials in the event the vaccine makes it through early testing. The vaccine will use Moderna’s mRNA vaccine platform that allowed for rapid development of a COVID-19 vaccine during the pandemic.

“[W]e believe our mRNA platform can play an important role in responding rapidly to emerging infectious disease threats,” Moderna CEO Stéphane Bancel said in a statement Monday. ” We will move with urgency and scientific rigor to support the response and help bring a potential vaccine closer to the communities that need it most.”

Raging outbreak

CEPI will also provide $3.2 million to the International AIDS Vaccine Initiative, which is developing a vaccine that uses the same technology as Merck’s approved Ebola vaccine, Ervebo, which targets the more common Zaire ebolavirus strain.

Last, the CEPI is committing $8.6 million to the University of Oxford and Serum Institute of India, which is using its adenovirus-based vaccine platform, as it did for its COVID-19 vaccine during the pandemic.

There are two licensed vaccines against Ebola disease currently, including Ervebo and Zabdeno/Mvabea by Johnson & Johnson. Both vaccines target the Zaire strain, which has caused most of the large outbreaks to date, followed by the Sudan strain. The current outbreak is only the third driven by the Bundibugyo strain. As such, there are currently no licensed therapeutics or vaccines against it.

The lack of medical interventions is one of the challenges facing health officials responding to the outbreak. Detection of the outbreak was delayed, allowing the virus to spread out of control. Disease is also spreading in an area of DRC with armed conflict, large population mobility, and significant need for humanitarian assistance.

As of Friday, the World Health Organization reported 1,041 cases (135 confirmed, 906 suspected) and 241 deaths (18 confirmed, 223 suspected) in the outbreak.

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Posted Tuesday 2 June 2026 at 2:21 pm AEST (my time).

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On Saturday, at around 2:06 pm ET, a meteor streaked over the northeastern US and exploded north of Cape Cod Bay. The fireball was caught on camera by several people, shook houses, and can even be seen clearly in satellite imagery, lighting up the sky.

Some residents initially thought that the shaking and boom may have been an earthquake, but the United States Geological Survey (USGS) denied that, saying that it was a “widely felt sonic boom from a suspected bolide.” In a statement posted on X, NASA described the event as a “bright fireball… accompanied by a loud noise.”

The meteor was traveling at roughly 75,000 miles per hour when, according to NASA, it “appears to have fragmented at an altitude of 40 miles over northeast MA and southeast NH. The energy released at breakup is estimated to be equivalent to about 300 tons of TNT, which accounts for the loud noise.”

NASA’s deputy news chief Jennifer Dooren also told AFP in a statement that, “This fireball was not associated with any currently active meteor shower, but it was a natural object and not a re-entry of space debris or a satellite.”

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Posted Monday 1 June 2026 at 7:23 am AEST (my time).

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On a blazing hot day in South Africa, female southern pied babblers can’t think straight. The medium-sized black-and-white birds are trying to get at tasty mealworms behind a see-through barrier. On cooler days, the birds can quickly figure out that all they have to do is go around the small wall of plastic. But when the mercury goes up, the birds just keep stubbornly pecking at the barrier.

That experiment is part of a growing body of research showing that animals get their minds muddled during heat waves. When it’s hot outside, birds struggle to learn, dogs bite more often, goat-like chamois pick fights. This is bad news not just for those who get on Fido’s toasted nerves. If the animals can’t stay alert enough to find food or avoid predators, their chances of survival go downhill, says Amanda Ridley, a behavioral ecologist at the University of Western Australia who coauthored the pied babbler study.

With climate change making heat waves more common, such cognitive impairments across the animal kingdom could ripple through entire ecosystems, putting already fragile species at greater risk. If pollinators forget which flowers to visit, crops and wild plants may fail. If birds can’t find food as easily, their young may not survive. And on a warming planet, a sharp mind is particularly vital. “A changing climate means that your ability to behaviorally adapt is even more important,” Ridley says.

Hotheaded

There is plenty of evidence that animals are affected by heat. Birds, for example, spend less time looking for food and feeding their young; they even sing less. Instead, they’ll sit around for hours with wings spread to dissipate the heat, and pant with their beaks wide open. Some animals retreat to shade or hide in cool burrows—again, skipping meals. Bees, meanwhile, splash their faces with droplets of water midflight when the weather is sizzling. This way, “they get convective cooling for their brain,” says Emily Baird, a neuroscientist at Stockholm University.

Some of the first hints that hot temperatures can mess up minds, however, came from studies on humans. Back in the 1800s, Belgian astronomer Adolphe Quetelet noticed that violent crime in France peaked in the summer. Later studies linked high temperatures with gun violence, mental-health-related hospital admissions, suicide, and gambling. When it’s hot, people have trouble making decisions, and their memory suffers. For students at schools without air conditioning, a school year just one degree Fahrenheit hotter reduces test scores by 1 percent, a study found.

Increasingly, there’s evidence that other species may also be more aggressive when mercury shoots up. A 2023 study that combed through nearly 70,000 reports of dogs biting people across eight US cities, from Chicago to Baltimore, found that such incidents were more likely to happen on hot, sunny, and smoggy days. The risk was 10 percent higher on a 90° F day than on a 60° F day—and not only because people are more apt to venture out for walks when the sun is shining (the researchers controlled for seasonal effects in their data).

Still, the scientists were unable to determine whether dogs get more aggressive as it gets hot, or if cranky humans provoke more attacks. “It’s likely that both humans and dogs get stressed and more irate at higher temperatures,” said Clas Linnman, a neuroscientist at the University of Miami and a coauthor on the study.

And it’s not only dogs: A 2025 study out of China showed that many animals, including snakes and cats, are more inclined to bite people when it gets hot.

Animals also seem to lose their cool with each other, especially if there is food involved. Scientists used binoculars and spotting scopes to spy on wild goat-like chamois that feed on protein-rich plants on the slopes of the Italian Apennine Mountains. More than 1,600 hours of observations over two summers revealed that when temperatures rose from 54° to 64° F, vegetation grew scarcer, and chamois aggression in turn shot up. The animals became territorial over patches of food, they assumed threatening postures, chased each other—attacks that, at times, escalated. The study authors predict that chamois aggression will go up 50 percent by 2080 due to climate change.

When temps climb and greens become scarcer, chamois become more aggresive with each other, as shown in this video.
CREDIT: N. FATTORINI ET AL / SCIENCE OF THE TOTAL ENVIRONMENT 2023

The small tropical fish called a golden julie also gets confrontational in the heat. Ordinarily, when a golden julie is placed in front of a mirror, it sees its reflected image as a stranger and shows some hostility, raising its fin, for example. But if the normally 78° water is raised to a hot 84°, the fish is more likely to get aggressive, and may bite and slap its tail against the mirror, as it tries to scare or attack the reflected image.

Cognitive problems

Heat waves can also hamper the ability of animals to learn, as Ridley and her colleagues observed with the southern pied babblers. In one of their experiments, the birds were presented with a simple wooden block with two holes drilled in it, each covered with a lid. If the bird pecked at the lid, it would rotate, revealing either an empty hole or a tasty mealworm (the babblers, Ridley says, “are highly motivated by mealworms”). One lid was dark, and the other a lighter shade of the same color. During heat waves, the birds needed twice as many trials to learn that the mealworm was always hidden under the lid of the same shade.

Another group of scientists tested zebra finches, pretty Australian songbirds, and discovered that if temperatures are high, they too have cognitive problems. When figuring out how to get a mealworm out of a see-through tube with an opening at one end, they would just keep pecking on the tube, says study coauthor Elizabeth Derryberry, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. It’s the bird equivalent of “banging your head against a brick wall,” she says.

Adding to the tally, several years ago researchers showed that when the heat is on, mice have trouble finding their way around a maze and forget objects they’ve seen the day before. More recently, researchers found that male guppies, popular aquarium fish, also have trouble getting through a maze after spending several days in heat-wave-like 90° water, even if the prize for getting it right is a virgin female—which they tend to find particularly attractive.

For animals such as fish and insects that can’t control their body temperature, heat waves could be particularly detrimental. “Changes in air temperature will affect brain temperature,” says Baird. A hotter brain could hinder the functioning of nerves, and that, she says, “might affect sensing, memory, and learning.”

Cross section shows band of cells in the mouse hippocampus.

Credit: RAUNAK BASU / UNIVERSITY OF UTAH, SALT LAKE CITY

When Baird and colleagues tried to teach bumblebees to associate sweet sucrose with the color blue and bitter quinine with yellow, most of the bumblebees learned the trick at 77°, but fewer than half managed to do so at 90°. Such impaired cognition could spell trouble in the field: If the insects forget which flowers they should pollinate (in the case of bumblebees, these include tomatoes and blueberries) or how to get back home with nectar, not only will the pollinators suffer, but human agriculture too, Baird says.

Heat appears to dangerously diminish animal vigilance as well. In Ridley’s recent experiments, once mercury in the Kalahari Desert reached 96° F, pied babblers lost their ability to properly respond to predators. In their studies, researchers lured birds toward a mystery shape covered in a sandy-colored blanket, using worms as bait. Once a babbler approached, the scientists would reveal what was hidden underneath: either a taxidermied cat-like carnivore called a genet, or a similarly sized and colored wooden box. The birds got scared of the genet in cooler temperatures—they’d call out, scan their surroundings, or simply flee. But once it got hot, they behaved similarly whether they were facing the carnivore or the box. Ridley suggests that this could translate into higher chances of fatal predator attacks as heat rises, which could harm populations of babblers and other prey species.

These studies are not just abstractions. In the Kalahari, where southern pied babblers use their wits to search for worms, temperatures are rising twice as fast as the global average. In tropical rivers, where male guppies seek mates, heat waves are growing longer and more intense. It’s the same story across much of the planet—temperatures climb, and animal thinking becomes strained, potentially putting species at risk. The effects may be magnified in certain areas such as cities, which often exhibit even warmer temperatures than non-urban areas. If anything, Ridley says, “We are probably underestimating the impacts of increased heat on animal minds.”

This story originally appeared on Knowable Magazine. 

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Posted Monday 1 June 2026 at 7:21 am AEST (my time).

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A morning walk through East Lawn Cemetery in Ithaca, New York uncovered an immense colony of some 5.5 million subterranean bees. The discovery, which a Cornell University research team published in April in the journal Apidologie, documents one of the largest aggregations of these insects ever recorded in the world. The population, belonging to the species Andrena regularis, occupies an area of about 1.25 acres and is crucial for pollination of the region's orchards, demonstrating that historic cemeteries can prove unsuspected refuges for urban biodiversity.

The Genesis of the Discovery

It all began in the spring of 2022, when Rachel Fordyce, then a laboratory technician in Cornell University's entomology department, noticed an anomalous presence of insects during her usual walk to work. After collecting some specimens, she showed them to Bryan Danforth, an entomologist at the same university. Analysis revealed that they were Andrena regularis, commonly called the mining or miner bee. Unlike honey bees, this wild species has a solitary lifestyle and nests by digging tunnels in the ground. Historical records indicate that the insect has been present in the cemetery, established in 1878, since at least the early 1900s.

The Census

To calculate the size of the colony, scientists placed 10 traps placed in the cemetery between late March and mid-May 2023. These small net curtains cover less than one square meter of soil and channel insects coming out of the ground to a glass container. In total, more than 3,000 insects belonging to 16 different species were sampled, including bees, beetles, and flies, with an overwhelming prevalence of Andrena regularis. Extrapolating from the average density found in the traps, the researchers estimated a total population of between 3 and 8 million, with an average value of 5.5 million—the equivalent of more than 200 domestic bee hives.

The research yielded previously unpublished data on the biology of this little-studied insect. The traps revealed that males emerge from the ground a few days earlier than females during the first warm days of April, a strategy that maximizes mating opportunities. Subsequently, females dig nests and lay eggs in cells filled with pollen and nectar. The species has the distinction of wintering at the adult stage underground, which allows it to become active very early in the spring, in perfect synchrony with the flowering of apple trees in the nearby Cornell University orchards. Monitoring also revealed the presence of complex ecological dynamics, such as parasitism by bees of the Nomada imbricata species, which lay their eggs in the nests of the host species at the expense of the original larvae.

A Heritage to Conserve

The discovery highlights the need to protect the nesting sites of wild bees, 75 percent of which are solitary species living underground. Places such as old city cemeteries offer ideal conditions: sandy soils that are easy to dig, no pesticides, and an environment that is not subject to the profound alterations typical of intensive agriculture or housing development. To prevent populations of this magnitude from being accidentally destroyed by concrete pours or road work, the study's authors have launched a global citizen science initiative. The project invites citizens to report the presence of underground bee aggregations in order to survey and protect these vital pollinators before habitat fragmentation jeopardizes their survival.

This story originally appeared on WIRED Italia and has been translated from Italian.

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Posted Sunday 31 May 2026 at 7:15 am AEST (my time).

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Organs, arms, appendages, and other complex tissues usually decay rapidly when they’re separated from their host. Over the years, biologists have seen some success with keeping them alive outside of the body—organ transplants depend on it—but it has always required germ-free environments and nutrient-rich mediums filled with growth factors. Now, though, scientists have discovered bits of tissue removed from a species of sea cucumber called Psolus fabricii can keep on living indefinitely if they’re left in ordinary seawater.

“This is naturally occurring tissue immortality,” said Sara Jobson, a researcher at Memorial University of Newfoundland and lead author of the study. “Having tissues that survive that easily is unheard of. We’ve never seen anything like this.”

The beginning of LiPfe

Psolus fabricii is a species of sea cucumber that lives in the cold waters of the Atlantic and Arctic oceans. Its bottom side, known as a sole, is soft and ringed by a band of tube feet that it uses to grip rocks. Once on a rock, it extends soft, branching tentacles into the water to feed on suspended particles. Because these sea cucumbers inhabit harsh environments, their feet and tentacles experience high rates of injury and loss. Evolution has therefore endowed these sites with an incredibly high capacity for regeneration.

While sea cucumbers can easily regrow these parts, they don’t have whole-body regeneration like flatworms and some starfish do. Their severed bits don’t grow into new sea cucumbers. But it turns out they don’t die, either.

“We didn’t set out to find immortal tissues,” Jobson said. “Our lab focuses on sea cucumbers, and this sea cucumber has been used in other studies. One of my collaborators happened to notice that its amputated tissue just kept living, and it seemed to be healing and surviving and she didn’t do anything special to keep it. It was a fortuitous discovery.”

This fortuitous discovery quickly turned into an organized long-term experiment. The researchers took excised tube feet, groups of tube feet called ambulacra, and tentacles from P. fabricii and found all of them survived when placed in natural, non-sterile seawater.

“We examined all of them, but we primarily focused on tube feet,” Jobson said. When tube feet were severed, the wound margin was a mess of missing or fragmented epidermal and connective tissue. Within two days, the explants began shedding this damaged tissue. Internally, a large influx of coelomocytes, the sea cucumber’s immune cells, rushed from the inner connective tissues toward the damaged spot, apparently to facilitate organismal defense and regeneration.

By day six, the healthy tissue had curled inward, completely sealing the wound site; the severed organ was more or less restored to working order.

It turned out LiPfe explants weren’t just surviving; they were actively reorganizing their architecture to adapt to the new, severed state. First came the shrinking. During the first week, the tissue shrank by about 23 percent in diameter. Given more time, it stabilized and reversed this trend. Between 60 and 120 days post-excision, LiPfe grew back to their initial size, and after a year, they were 12 percent larger than when they were first cut from the host.

The researchers have introduced these tissues as a completely new class of living material they called LiPfe—living immortal P. fabricii explants. And as time went by, LiPfe put on quite a show.

The metamorphosis

The internals of a foot tube attached to a sea cucumber include a mix of epidermal tissue, connective tissue, a neural plexus, muscle tissue, and an inner lumen. The separated explants, though, got busy dismantling parts of themselves that were no longer useful. Muscle tissues, which initially made up 17 percent of the explant, were gradually invaded by coelomocytes that broke the muscle down into small pieces and destroyed its organization. After 180 days, the muscle tissue and the lumen had completely disappeared from the explant.

In their place, connective tissue expanded to become the dominant structure. The collagen fibrils within it began bundling together, creating strong bands or striations that looked similar to the vanished muscles. By the end of the first year, connective tissue accounted for 74 percent of the explant, while the epidermal tissue thinned out to occupy just 20 percent.

The outward appearance changed, too. The explants shifted in color from red or orange to a lighter white or pink. Red-pigmented cells clumped into small aggregates and migrated toward the center of the tissue, leaving the outer edges of the explants increasingly transparent.

In a year, LiPfe explants rebuilt themselves into alien-like translucent orbs with a large red cellular mass at their core.

They didn’t develop any orifices, though, or anything even remotely resembling a digestive system. “One of the first questions we had was how they were able to maintain cellular energy,” Jobson said.

Feeding the orbs

To test how LiPfe sustains itself, Jobson’s team exposed its explants to isotopically labeled amino acids and ammonium. By six days post-excision, the tissues saw a significant spike in the absorption of dissolved amino acids. LiPfe was directly sucking nutrients from the surrounding seawater to fuel its tissue repair and survival. And they could survive for a really long time.

The scientists noted that some of the tube foot explants survived for years just sitting free at the bottom of holding tanks, covered in a layer of particulate matter and surrounded by other living organisms. Some were completely buried under 10 millimeters of mud and still displayed the same morphology: round shape, transparent margin, and a red core. The only thing that could apparently harm them was proximity to decaying tissues of other species. “This made them struggle to survive,” Jobson said. “I think there were toxins or harmful materials their immune system could not cope with.”

The team also found that the immortality of severed tissues is, to the best of our knowledge, unique to P. fabricii. The researchers conducted comparative experiments on explanted tissues from related sea cucumber species, and none showed equivalent tissue survival.

Zombie cucumbers

Back in 1951, doctors at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore took a sample of a malignant cervical tumor from Henrietta Lacks, a 31-year-old mother of five. When they cultured these cells later, they noticed that they doubled every 24 hours in a seemingly never-ending cycle. The HeLa cells, named after the patient, were the first instance of cell immortality ever discovered in humans. “This revolutionized cell biology and a lot of medical research,” Jobson says.

HeLa, though, was just a single cell type. LiPfe offers a new experimental model that enables scientists to work with a structured piece of animal tissue that maintains its own immune activity, cell cycling, and nutrient intake, without ethical concerns that come with experimenting on live animals. “On the evolutionary tree, sea cucumbers are relatively close to mammals, and they have been previously noted as having potential for interdisciplinary research,” Jobson said.

The authors of the study also point out that finding naturally immortal complex tissues challenges our conventional perceptions of what being alive really means. “The question we get a lot is ‘are these tissues actually alive?’ and this is where it becomes kind of philosophical—we lovingly call them zombies,” Jobson said.

LiPfe explants are not dead because their tissue is not decaying or degrading, and it does absorb nutrients. On the other hand, LiPfe orbs don’t reproduce, and reproduction is one of the fundamental characteristics of life. “They’re not growing into a new sea cucumber but restructuring into a form that best suits them in their current state,” Jobson said. “So, they seem to be functioning as a whole new entity.”

Before resolving philosophical dilemmas about LiPfe, the team wants to understand the basics first. The first question is how tissue immortality in P. fabricii actually works. “Is there anything unique, rare, weird that we haven’t seen in other sea cucumbers that makes them able to do this?” Jobson wondered. The second question is why it’s there in the first place—whether there is an evolutionary role of this ability or if it’s just a byproduct of really high regenerative capacity.

Finally, we still don’t know how long P. fabricii with their immortal tissues actually live. “That’s a great question,” Jobson said. “Unfortunately, there are very few tools that work for aging sea cucumbers.”

Science Advances, 2026.  DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.aeb1394

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Posted Saturday 30 May 2026 at 7:47 am AEST (my time).

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Welcome to Edition 8.43 of the Rocket Report! A disclaimer: No one yet fully appreciates the ramifications of Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket explosion Thursday night on its launch pad at Cape Canaveral, Florida. What we know as of this writing is that much of Blue’s sole orbital-class launch pad has been destroyed, and the New Glenn rocket will be grounded for an extended period of time. It is too soon for any hot takes, at least until the Sun rises at the Cape on Friday morning. One thing I am sure of is that we will be writing about this event for weeks, months, and years to come.

As always, we welcome reader submissions. If you don’t want to miss an issue, please subscribe using the box below (the form will not appear on AMP-enabled versions of the site). Each report will include information on small-, medium-, and heavy-lift rockets, as well as a quick look ahead at the next three launches on the calendar.

Charting China’s contribution to space junk. There’s a problem with the drastic uptick in Chinese space launches over the last decade. China appears to be ignoring long-established norms about disposing of the upper stages of rockets, Ars reports. These are the parts of the vehicle that separate from the first stage of a rocket and push a satellite or spacecraft into orbit. In the early decades of spaceflight, launch operators routinely left upper stages in orbit after they released their payloads. But most launch companies today reserve enough propellant in their rockets to remove them from orbit to avoid the risk of spent upper stages becoming a source of space debris. But China is not following this trend. There has been striking growth in China’s rocket body mass. In the past five years, the mass of Chinese rocket bodies in long-lived orbits has risen from less than 100 metric tons to 252, according to a new analysis by Space Domain Awareness expert Jim Shell.

Worst practices… The recent growth of Chinese upper stages has been driven by the country’s increased launch rate as it begins to deploy satellite megaconstellations, Shell said. China’s space industry is just at the beginning of launching megaconstellations to compete with SpaceX’s Starlink satellite service, suggesting that if the country does not curb this practice, it will deteriorate an already congested space environment. Chinese constellations such as Guowang and Spacesail are typically at higher altitudes, above 800 km, and China may launch 1,000 or more rockets over the next decade to support these constellations. That’s a lot of new junk if the trend continues.

DARPA, Voyager team up on solid rocket motors. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has awarded Voyager Technologies a $16.5 million contract to continue development of a solid rocket motor thrust-control technology designed to make missile propulsion systems more adaptable across different missions and weapons programs, Space News reports. The contract is part of DARPA’s “Burn n’ Go” program. Solid rocket motors are used for a wide range of applications, from tactical missiles to space launch vehicles. The upside for solid rocket motors is their reliability and manufacturability. Solid rocket motors can vary their thrust, but these thrust profiles are predetermined by propellant grain patterns and the dimensions of the motor. In other words, the thrust profiles are locked in once the motor is manufactured. Unlike liquid-fueled rocket engines, solid-fueled rockets typically can’t be throttled up or down on the fly.

It’s in the propellant… Voyager is working with DARPA on a new “propellant-embedded” method of controlling the thrust of solid rocket motors after they are manufactured. The recent contract is for Phase 2 of the Burn n’ Go program. During Phase 1, Voyager worked on architecture concepts and preliminary designs. Voyager’s Phase 2 contract will culminate in “tailorable SRM hot-fire demonstrations,” the company said in a press release. “This award reflects confidence in our ability to translate advanced propulsion technologies into field-ready capabilities that support US national readiness and deterrence,” said Matt Magaña, president of space, defense, and national security programs at Voyager. “Our approach is designed not only to demonstrate performance gains at the system level, but to establish a credible path to industrialization that can reshape how solid rocket motors are produced, mission tailored and controlled.”

Virgin Galactic’s VSS Unity vehicle returns to flight, kinda. With its first Delta-class suborbital spaceship expected to debut this summer, Virgin Galactic has returned its first-generation SpaceShipTwo vehicle Unity to flight for pilot and ground team training, Aviation Week & Space Technology reports. Grounded since its seventh and final operational mission on June 8, 2024, VSS Unity and its quad-jet carrier aircraft took to the skies over New Mexico on Wednesday. The jet released the unpowered spaceplane, and its two pilots steered Unity to a runway landing at Spaceport America. This was the first of several anticipated glide flights with Unity to help prepare Virgin Galactic’s pilots for the first glide test flights of the Delta-class ship.

Managing energy... “Unity‘s glide characteristics and energy-management profile provide an outstanding real-world proxy for our new spaceship,” said Mike Moses, president of Virgin Galactic Spaceline. “Using a proven vehicle in this way prepares our pilots and operations teams to move through flight testing for our new spaceship more efficiently and with greater confidence than simulator training alone could provide.” The latest schedule provided by Virgin Galactic calls for glide flights of the first Delta-class ship to begin before the end of September, followed by the first rocket-powered test flights by the end of the year.

German launch startup tests upgraded engine. Rocket Factory Augsburg, based in Germany, has developed and tested its Helix engine for use on the company’s light-class RFA One satellite launcher. RFA is working on an upgrade to the power pack, a critical piece of the Helix engine responsible for delivering propellants from the rocket’s storage tanks to the engine combustion chamber. This new power pack design recently completed a series of tests in Sweden through a partnership between RFA and the European Space Agency, ESA announced this week. RFA says the power pack will allow the company’s souped-up kerosene-fueled Helix 2.0 engine to provide double the thrust for the RFA One rocket with the same mass and cost of the already-developed Helix 1.0. “The result for our customers: more payload for a lower budget!” said Stefan Brieschenk, RFA’s chief operating officer.

But what about that launch?... All of this work to upgrade the RFA One launcher is happening before the company has even flown the basic configuration of the rocket. Nine Helix 1.0 engines will power the first RFA One booster off its launch pad in Scotland. RFA has applied for a marine license to launch its first RFA One rocket no earlier than July 1. There is still much work to do to prepare for the rocket’s first launch. The original booster RFA planned to use for the first test flight was destroyed during a test firing in 2024. “This is a legally required step for planning, and a good sign of how far we’ve come—but it’s not a launch date just yet,” RFA said. (submitted by EllPeaTea)

Fresh crew launches to China’s Tiangong space station. China launched the Shenzhou 23 spacecraft Sunday with three astronauts heading to its space station, including one set to stay in space for a year, The Associated Press reports. The spacecraft blasted off on a Long March 2F rocket from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in northwestern China. The astronauts on the mission are Zhu Yangzhu, the commander, Zhang Zhiyuan, and Lai Ka-ying, also identified by Chinese authorities as Li Jiaying using the Mandarin transliteration of her name. Lai, who was born and raised in Hong Kong and has a doctoral degree in computer forensics, is the first astronaut from the city on a space mission.

Who will draw the straw?... The Shenzhou 23 spacecraft docked at the Tiangong space station less than four hours after launch. The new crew members joined three astronauts who have lived and worked on the Tiangong complex for more than 200 days, temporarily raising the station’s crew complement to six. The outgoing crew is set to return to Earth as soon as Friday. One of the three astronauts on the Shenzhou 23 mission is scheduled to stay at the orbiting space station for a year in what would be among the world’s longest single stays in space. Chinese officials said they have not determined which of the astronauts will be tasked with the one-year stay in orbit. The other two crew members will return to Earth in approximately six months. (submitted by EllPeaTea)

NASA to order more Crew Dragon flights from SpaceX. NASA plans to add more missions to SpaceX’s commercial crew contract, protecting the agency from the possibility that Boeing’s spacecraft is never certified for missions to the International Space Station, Space News reports. The space agency announced its intent on May 18 to add six more missions to SpaceX’s commercial crew contract. Each will carry four astronauts to and from the space station. NASA last placed an order for more SpaceX commercial crew missions in 2022, when it added five missions for $1.4 billion. That contract extension covers missions through Crew-14, expected to launch sometime next year. The Crew-12 mission is currently docked at the ISS.

Blame Starliner… If Boeing’s Starliner crew capsule had worked out as NASA hoped, the agency would have two independent crew transportation providers to service the International Space Station. But six years after NASA certified SpaceX to ferry crews to and from the ISS, Boeing’s Starliner still lacks approval for regular crew rotation flights after a 2024 test flight was marred by technical issues. The next Starliner mission will be a cargo-only flight, so the earliest time Boeing’s crew capsule will fly with astronauts again is next year. With the ISS nearing retirement in the early 2030s and Starliner still firmly in test phase, NASA has reduced its order for operational Starliner flights from six to four. (submitted by EllPeaTea)

Rideshare integrators book their own Falcon 9 launches. Two rideshare operators—SEOPS and Exolaunch—have purchased dedicated SpaceX Falcon 9 launches to run their own rideshare missions, Via Satellite reports. Both companies announced the deals on Tuesday during the Smallsat Europe industry conference, with Exolaunch buying two Falcon 9 launches, and SEOPS purchasing one. Both companies explained the dedicated missions as a way to increase options for a pressured smallsat launch market.

Transcending Transporter… SpaceX organizes its own rideshare launches. Its Transporter missions go to Sun-synchronous orbit, and Bandwagon flights launch into mid-inclination orbits. Companies like Exolaunch, SEOPS, and others buy up capacity on these missions to divide among their customers’ CubeSats and small satellites. SEOPS said its motivation for buying up an entire Falcon 9 launch, rather than reserving a portion of the capacity of a Transporter mission, was to create a mission tailored for “time-sensitive or non-standard payloads,” such as larger or unique satellites beyond typical rideshare limits. (submitted by EllPeaTea)

New Glenn explodes on the launch pad. On Thursday evening, Blue Origin attempted to test fire its massive New Glenn rocket at its Florida launch site, but something went very wrong after engine ignition. The super heavy lift rocket exploded in spectacular and disastrous fashion, Ars reports. The static fire test was being filmed by NASASpaceflight.com on its Space Coast Live feed, which captured video of the conflagration that followed the destruction of the booster. The first stage of New Glenn, fueled with methane, produced a massive fireball above the launch site along the Florida coast, LC-36A. It is possibly the most dramatic and powerful rocket explosion since the Soviet Union’s N1 rocket was destroyed during a launch attempt in 1969.

Far-reaching consequences… This is the worst disaster in the history of Blue Origin, founded in 2000. The space company owned by Jeff Bezos appeared to be on the verge of turning a corner with the New Glenn rocket after years of delays and growing pains. The New Glenn that blew up on the pad Thursday night was supposed to launch next week with a batch of Amazon Leo broadband satellites, which were safely tucked away in a hangar and not on top of the rocket when it exploded. It would have been the fourth New Glenn launch to date, coming less than two months after the rocket’s third flight. The failure of New Glenn also has major implications for NASA and its surging efforts to return humans to the Moon before the end of this decade and to establish a lunar base on the surface.

Starship mostly successful on 12th test flight. SpaceX launched the first test flight of its upgraded Starship rocket and Super Heavy booster May 22, with mostly positive results, Ars reports. The giant rocket took off from South Texas, and its upper stage, or ship, splashed down on target in the Indian Ocean a little more than an hour later. This was the first flight of the latest version of SpaceX’s stainless-steel mega-rocket, and the 12th full-scale test flight of Starship to date. Starship V3 fared better on its debut than the first flights of Starship V1 and V2 in 2023 and 2025. Both past versions of Starship broke apart during launch on their inaugural flights.

Some goals left unaccomplished… Something caused two Raptor engines—one of 33 on the Super Heavy booster and one of six on Starship itself—to fail during the May 22 launch sequence. This is notable because the test flight marked the first use of SpaceX’s newest version of Raptor on a launch. The booster was unable to complete a guided descent toward the Gulf of Mexico, and the ship skipped a planned restart of a Raptor engine in space. The latter unchecked box means the next Starship flight will likely launch on a suborbital trajectory, as all Starships have to date, rather than attempting the program’s first truly orbital test flight. The good news is that Starship’s heat shield appeared to function well during reentry, with fewer signs of damage or degradation as the vehicle splashed down northwest of Australia. (submitted by EllPeaTea)

Air Force chief calls for new heavy launch site. Traffic at US military launch sites is approaching max capacity. The nation needs another launch site capable of hosting heavy and super heavy launches to keep up with the growing demand, according to a study cited by Air Force Secretary Troy Meink during recent testimony in front of the House Armed Services Committee, Payload reports. Meink talked about the growing challenge to find space to launch amid the geographical limitations at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida and Vandenberg Space Force Base in California. The Pentagon is preparing for the rising number of US launches to climb ever higher in the coming years.

Support for diversity… Specifically, the Pentagon is talking about a new military-run spaceport. Defense officials are wary of the vulnerabilities of private or state-run launch sites to potential attack, and they argue that geographic diversity could help the military overcome bottlenecks at the Cape and Vandenberg.

Next three launches

May 29: Falcon 9 | Starlink 10-53 | Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida | 12:03 UTC

May 29: Atlas V | Amazon Leo LA-07 | Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida | 23:33 UTC

May 30: Falcon 9 | Starlink 17-41 | Vandenberg Space Force Base, California | 14:00 UTC

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Posted Saturday 30 May 2026 at 7:46 am AEST (my time).

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Thursday night’s detonation of Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket during a static-fire test produced a spectacular fireball over Florida, sending shards of the rocket flying far and wide, into the sea and across the coastal scrubland nearby.

With sunrise on Friday teams from Blue Origin, the US Space Force, and NASA will be able to begin more thoroughly assessing the damage to Blue Origin’s facilities and begin picking up pieces of the rocket.

Metaphorically, the effort to pick up pieces will extend far beyond Blue Origin. This launch failure will be devastating not just for Blue Origin but also NASA and broad segments of the US space industry. Here’s a look at some of the major issues that will stem from the explosion.

No launch pad

There’s a reason why, before the very first launch of the Falcon Heavy rocket in 2018, SpaceX founder Elon Musk defined success as the vehicle clearing the launch pad. “I hope that it makes it far enough away from the pad that it does not cause pad damage,” he said. “I would consider even that a win to be honest.” Musk had similar thoughts about the first Starship launch, saying he would consider anything that did not destroy the launch mount a “win.”

Big rockets produce big explosions. And ground infrastructure is a challenging and underrated component of a rocket launch.

Multiple sources have confirmed that there is significant damage to Blue Origin’s launch site in Florida, LC-36A. The company invested years and at least hundreds of millions of dollars in this facility. The scale of the massive lightning towers is difficult to comprehend unless one has climbed one of them.

The company does not have another launch site for New Glenn. It has begun preliminary work on a nearby pad, LC-36B, and has plans to develop another site at Vandenberg Space Force Base in California. But these projects are just getting started.

Rebuilding the company’s pad, or finishing a new one, will likely take at least a year, even with a major effort by Blue Origin, and drawing upon Jeff Bezos’ nearly infinite resources. One source familiar with pad rebuilds estimated that 15 months was a “best case” scenario.

A maturing design

You might wonder what the big deal is. SpaceX has been blowing up Starship rockets left and right, and the space nerds seem to be cheering them on.

The reality is that Blue Origin took a more traditional design route with New Glenn, as opposed to SpaceX’s iterative design, which seeks to test, fly, fail, and fix hardware. The New Glenn first stage had performed nearly flawlessly during its first three flights. It is a mature design.

Because of this, Blue Origin had reached the point where it was poised to begin near-monthly launches of the vehicle during the second half of the year, serving a variety of customers, from NASA to Amazon, AST SpaceMobile, and its own internal payloads.

With the Vulcan rocket also currently offline due to an anomaly, it once again places all of the US medium- and heavy-lift launch capacity in SpaceX’s basket, with its Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy rockets.

Speaking of Vulcan, if this is a problem with the BE-4 engine—and early indications are that the anomaly leading to Thursday night’s failure originated in the central engine of the booster—it would further compound United Launch Alliance’s difficulties in getting the large rocket back into service.

Blue Moon Mark 1

Blue Origin’s cargo lander has emerged as the supreme workhorse of the early stages of NASA’s Artemis program and Moon Base. It has a capacity to deliver up to 3 tons to the lunar surface and would serve as a pathfinder for a larger version of a lander to take humans to the Moon.

This week, NASA announced that its Moon Base I mission would fly on Blue Moon Mark 1, and it awarded Blue Origin $280.4 million to deliver two lunar rovers in 2028. Multiple other missions are planned on the lander, which was designed to be sent to the Moon on a single New Glenn vehicle.

Could Blue Moon Mark 1 launch on other rockets? SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy and United Launch Alliance’s Vulcan vehicles both likely have the lift capacity to push the vehicle to the Moon. But Vulcan is also sidelined at present and has a long line of Space Force payloads in the queue. So what of Falcon Heavy?

The Mark 1 lander is powered by the BE-7 engine, which runs on liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen. There may be compatibility issues related to the Falcon rocket’s kerosene-powered upper stage, although this has not been confirmed. Also, it is unlikely that Blue Origin would partner with a direct rival, SpaceX, in this manner.

Artemis program

Due to the Mark 1 issues outlined above, there will either be significant delays to, or the need to restructure the early phases of, the Moon Base program. The lunar rovers under development by Astrolab and Lunar Outpost, for example, have a mass of about 1 ton. Only Mark 1 and SpaceX’s Starship have that kind of delivery capacity.

There are also major implications for the main Artemis crewed missions.

NASA recently changed Artemis III to become a mission that will see the Orion spacecraft rendezvous with one or both of the Human Landing Systems under development by Blue Origin (Blue Moon) and SpaceX (Starship) in low-Earth orbit. NASA appears determined to launch this mission in 2027 and plans to announce its four crew members in a couple of weeks.

But it’s now all but certain that a Blue Moon lander will not be ready for such a mission within the next 18 months. NASA will need to decide whether to wait on Blue Origin or press ahead solely with a Starship mission.

As for Artemis IV, the lunar landing mission, this failure further complicates that plan. It is difficult to imagine a scenario in which a crew-rated Blue Moon lander is ready at any point in 2028 now. Even if the hardware is far along, Blue Origin still needs to fly test missions with Blue Moon Mark 1, which are on hold indefinitely.

A number of senior NASA officials had come to view Blue Origin’s plan to use a slimmed down version of the Mark 2 lander, which would not require in-space refueling, as the prime option for Artemis IV. Now, like much of the US space industry, NASA finds itself highly dependent on SpaceX’s ability to deliver with Starship.

Note: This article has been edited to clarify interoperability issues between the Blue Moon Mark 1 lander and the Falcon Heavy rocket.

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Posted Saturday 30 May 2026 at 7:44 am AEST (my time).

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(View the video at the source page.)

Mental health disorders are now the leading cause of disability worldwide, according to a major new study.

Researchers found nearly 1.2 billion people were living with a mental disorder in 2023 — almost double the number in 1990.

Their global analysis looked at data from 204 countries and found anxiety and depression have surged since the COVID-19 pandemic.

Rates of major depressive disorder have risen about 24% since 2019, while anxiety disorders skyrocketed more than 47%.

One author warns 15- to 19-year-olds are being hit especially hard during a critical stage of development that can shape education, employment, and relationships.

The results also show women are disproportionately affected, possibly due to caregiving pressures, gender inequality and higher rates of abuse.

The authors say addressing the growing crisis will require more investment in mental health care, expanded access to treatment and better support for at-risk populations.

Source: The Lancet

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The mission launched on October ‌31, ⁠when the spacecraft lifted off atop a Long March-2F ⁠rocket from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch ⁠Center in northwest ⁠China.

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One of the world’s last stable glacier regions may have finally begun to succumb to global warming, with researchers recording an unprecedented loss of ice across the Pamir mountains of Asia.

For decades, glaciers all over the world have been retreating due to rising temperatures, but in central Asia, a region dubbed “the roof of the world” has bucked this trend. From the 1970s to the early 21st century, glaciers in the western Kunlun mountains, the Karakoram mountains and the eastern Pamir mountains have remained stable or grown slightly.

Fan Yu at the Chinese Academy of Sciences and his colleagues have been monitoring the 3-kilometre-long Kangxiwa glacier in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, China. The glacier is within the eastern Pamir range and is 5350 metres above sea level at its highest point.

Before 2022, the ice mass of the glacier exhibited some fluctuations but remained in a stable pattern of moderate mass loss, with occasional years showing slight growth.

But since then, ice loss has accelerated. In 2025, the team recorded a record-high loss of ice, equivalent to the entire surface of the glacier losing 1.5 metres of water. This is more than four times greater than the glacier’s average for 2011–2024.

The record-breaking melt seen at Kangxiwa, mirrored at other glaciers across the Pamir mountains, was driven by exceptional heat. Unlike other years, when extreme temperatures were confined to a single month, high temperatures in 2025 persisted throughout the entire melt season.

The findings suggest the glaciers of the Pamir-Karakoram region are no longer an exception to the global trend, and extreme events are likely to further accelerate glacier melt there, say the researchers.

Shaun Eaves at the Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand, says the results are consistent with predictions that human-induced climate change will increase the probability of extreme warm temperatures that can drive glacier melt, but it is too early to conclude that such melting is locked in.

Glacial ice mass measurements have been undertaken at Kangxiwa glacier only since 2011, so it is hard to describe 2025 as extreme in a historical context, he says.

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The World Meteorological Organization also forecasts an overheating Arctic that warms nearly 3 degrees Fahrenheit (1.66 degrees Celsius) between now and 2030 and a dangerous drought with potential wildfires for the Amazon, a crucial part of Earth’s natural defenses to lessen human-caused climate change. A hotter globe from the burning of coal, oil and gas means more extreme weather including floods, droughts and heat waves, scientists said.

The projections by the U.N. climate agency and the United Kingdom’s Meteorological Office said there’s a 75% chance that the average global temperature between 2026 and 2030 will be more than 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) higher compared to pre-industrial times. That threshold is the agreed-upon limit of warming — averaged over 20 years — set in 2015 by the Paris climate agreement.

A U.N. science report a few years later detailed how exceeding that 1.5 mark means more likely death, danger and species loss. Even though it’s only a few tenths of a degree, some of the planet’s ecosystems, such as coral and glaciers, can’t handle the strain.

Passing warming limit has consequences, but no cliff

There’s a 91% chance that at least one of the next five years will shoot past the 1.5 degree threshold and an 86% chance that one of those years will smash the record for Earth’s hottest year set in 2024, the WMO report said. The WMO projects each year between now and 2030 to be between 1.3 degrees Celsius (2.3 degrees Fahrenheit) and 1.9 degrees Celsius (3.4 degrees Fahrenheit) since the late 1800s.

“It’s important to note that (1.5) is not kind of a cliff edge that we’re going to fall off,” said report co-author Melissa Seabrook, a climate scientist at the U.K. Meteorological Office. “Every kind of 0.1 of a degree has more and more severe impact.”

Emissions from a coal-fired power plant are silhouetted against the setting sun in Kansas City, Mo., in Feb. 2021.

She pointed to unprecedented May heat in Europe this week.

An entire year or more above the 1.5 degree mark “means a whole range of extreme weather events, probably many so hot/wet/dry that it exceeds anything we’ve experienced in the past and thus crucially, anything our city planning, agriculture etc. has anticipated,” Imperial College of London climate scientist Friederike Otto, who wasn’t part of the report, said in an email. “This will mean many people will lose their lives, we are in for a lot of food price shocks, and more intense wildfires.”

Nearly all the shorter-term forecasts call for a strong El Nino — a natural warming of parts of the central Pacific that alters weather worldwide and spikes global temperatures — to form soon. The WMO report said it could stretch all the way to 2028. Because of that, Seabrook said 2027 will likely break the 2024 heat record.

And if the next five years do average more than 1.5 degrees Celsius since pre-industrial times, that means Earth will have warmed a quarter of a degree Celsius (0.45 degrees Fahrenheit) in a decade, which is faster than the previous rates of warming. Those were closer to two-tenths of a degree Celsius per decade.

Climate scientists are debating whether global warming is accelerating, “which obviously is quite scary,” and if these projections come true it would give additional evidence to those who see a speeded up rate of change, Seabrook said.

Accelerating warmth forecast in the Arctic

The projections, based on the averaging of about 200 runs of computer simulations using 13 different climate models from various countries, show warming in the Arctic rising 3.5 times faster than the rest of the globe, because there’s less ice and snow that had been reflecting solar radiation to space, Seabrook said. It becomes a vicious cycle.

“As the temperature warms, more sea ice melts, the worse this makes it,” Seabrook said.

Winters in the Arctic from 2020 to 2025 on average were 2.1 degrees Fahrenheit (1.2 degrees Celsius) warmer than the 1991-2020 average. The WMO projects the next five winters will average 5.1 degrees Fahrenheit (2.8 degrees Celsius) warmer than that recent normal, Seabrook said.

The report also forecasts Arctic sea ice to continue to shrink in the summer.

The Kaktovik Lagoon and the Brooks Range mountains of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge are seen in Kaktovik, Alaska, in Oct. 2024.

Amazon may get drier, sparking fire worries

The report calls for even warmer and unusually dry conditions in the Amazon basin, and that could be devastating for both local residents and the planet as a whole, Seabrook said.

People rely on the Amazon for water and the hotter, drier conditions should increase wildfire risk, Seabrook said, threatening to turn the Amazon, which now sucks heat-trapping carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, into a region that worsens the problem.

Attribution: By permission of Mike Luckovich and Creators Syndicate

Africa’s Sahel area, which has been extra dry, is likely to get more than normal rain and that could lead to flooding, Seabrook said.

United Nations officials said efforts to curb climate change haven’t been enough.

“Despite the progress of recent years, it’s clear that global heating is still outpacing global efforts to contain it, and the baking temperatures in Europe, India and elsewhere show yet again the brutal human and economic impacts of humanity still burning colossal amounts of coal, oil and gas,” U.N. climate chief Simon Stiell said about the WMO report.

“Whether it’s extreme heat, mega-storms, floods, massive wildfires or droughts hitting food supply and prices,” he said, “every nation is already paying a huge price from this global climate crisis.”

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On Thursday evening Blue Origin attempted to test fire its massive New Glenn rocket at its Florida launch site, but something went very wrong after engine ignition. The super heavy lift rocket exploded in spectacular and disastrous fashion.

The static fire test was being filmed by NASASpaceflight.com on its Space Coast Live feed, which captured video of the conflagration that followed destruction of the booster. The first stage of New Glenn, fueled with methane, produced a massive fireball above the launch site along the Florida coast, LC-36A. It is possibly the most dramatic and powerful rocket explosion since the Soviet Union’s N1 rocket was destroyed during a launch attempt in 1969.

There was no immediate indication as to what caused the rocket to fail during the initial stages of the static fire test. The failure originated with the first stage of the rocket, which is powered by seven BE-4 engines. Sources said the problem appeared to start in the engine section of the vehicle.

“It’s too early to know the root cause but we’re already working to find it,” Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos said on X. “Very rough day, but we’ll rebuild whatever needs rebuilding and get back to flying. It’s worth it.”

No one was injured during the failure, which sources said caused extensive damage to the company’s large and complex launch site. During a pad failure in 2016, with the smaller Falcon 9 rocket, it took SpaceX more than a year to rebuild its seriously damaged Space Launch Complex-40 pad.

A true catastrophe

This is the worst disaster in the history of Blue Origin, founded in 2000.

The company has launched New Glenn three times, during each of which the first stage performed well. The company had already demonstrated the ability to land the New Glenn first stage, and impressively reused it in April for the first time.

During that third flight, carrying the Blue Bird 7 satellite, an upper stage issue caused the mission to fail. However the company responded rapidly to the in-flight failure and returned to the launch pad in less than two months this week. The first stage for this mission, nicknamed No, It’s Necessary, was making its debut launch.

Prior to this launch attempt Blue Origin had in its inventory two first stages and about six New Glenn upper stages completed, and it was poised to break into a monthly launch cadence. By all accounts, the rocket was viewed as a major success for a company which, for so long, had seemed to plod along. New Glenn’s success catapulted the company to the upper echelon of spaceflight enterprises in the world. That Blue Origin was on the precipice of accelerating further makes this setback all the more painful.

New Glenn an essential part of a Moon Base

The failure of New Glenn also has major implications for NASA and its surging efforts to return humans to the Moon before the end of this decade, and to establish a lunar base on the surface.

On Tuesday NASA announced that it had selected the New Glenn rocket to deliver the first two rovers, built by Lunar Outpost and Astrolab, to the lunar surface in 2028. Blue Origin has developed its own cargo lunar lander, Blue Moon Mark 1, designed to fly on top of New Glenn. It was due to launch this fall to the Moon for the first time, and again next year carrying the VIPER rover to the Moon for NASA.

Then there is the larger Blue Moon Mark 2 lander, which is due to fly on a larger and more powerful version of the New Glenn rocket with nine first stage engines, known as 9×4. NASA is counting on the Mark 2 lander, alongside SpaceX’s Starship vehicle, to carry humans to the Moon on a regular basis—and soon.

Pad infrastructure severely damaged

It is too early to determine the impacts from this failure, but they will be considerable. Early reports from sources suggest that the launch infrastructure at LC-36A is severely damaged. A source indicated that one of the lightning towers may not be salvageable, and that the transporter-erector may also be damaged beyond repair.

The company recently began construction on a second New Glenn launch site nearby, LC-36B. However work there is in its early stages. It is possible, however, that completing this new launch tower may be faster than rebuilding LC-36A. New Glenn almost certainly will not launch again in 2026, and frankly a launch during the first half of 2027 would be heroic given the launch site concerns.

Blue Origin has been doing a lot of developmental work on the larger 9×4 rocket, which is expected to become the workhorse of the fleet over the smaller 7×2 rocket variant that exploded on Thursday evening in Florida. It is possible that the company now throws all of its efforts into completing work on this larger rocket.

Bezos, who made his fortune from Amazon, has largely funded Blue Origin since its founding a quarter of a century ago. He has put tens of billions of dollars into the company. Fortunately for Blue Origin, he has the financial wherewithal to sustain the company through this failure, and to accelerate its recovery efforts. NASA, too, will be very keen to see Blue Origin get back on its feet as expeditiously as possible.

If there’s a small silver lining its that the rocket that exploded Thursday night did not carry its payload of Amazon Leo internet satellites. They were safe, in a nearby integration facility, awaiting launch.

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Posted Friday 29 May 2026 at 4:06 pm AEST (my time).

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An experimental gene-editing therapy that aims to lower bad cholesterol for the long-term after a single infusion is off to a positive start in an early clinical trial.

Researchers running a Phase I safety trial for the drug, dubbed VERVE-102, published interim results from just 35 patients this week in the New England Journal of Medicine. Though the numbers are small and the analysis is preliminary, VERVE-102 appeared safe, with no serious adverse events reported from the treatment, even at the largest doses. The most significant finding was a temporary, mild increase in a liver enzyme that suggested minor injury in the liver, where the drug works.

The small amount of data also hints that the drug is effective. The subgroup of participants who received the largest dose have seen their bad cholesterol—that is, their low-density lipoprotein or LDL—drop 62 percent, to a mean of 78 mg per deciliter. For people with high cholesterol—like the participants in the trial—a reduction of this magnitude could cut the risk of cardiovascular disease from plaque buildup in arteries by an estimated 50 percent if it’s sustained for over 20 years. The trial only has up to 18 months of follow-up data so far, but from that, the positive effects of VERVE-102 seem to be holding up. The LDL reductions have been sustained in all the subgroups.

Gene-editing delivery

VERVE-102 works by using an mRNA-based gene-editing design. The mRNA is packaged into nanoparticles that carry tags that allow them to be easily taken in by liver cells, which play a central role in cholesterol metabolism. The mRNA provides the cell with instructions to make molecular machinery that can change a single base in DNA, called an adenine base-editor protein. It carries a modified portion of the gene-editing machinery CRISPR-Cas9 that nicks a single strand of DNA. The nanoparticle package also provides a guide RNA that directs the base-editing protein to make a specific base change and nick in a specific gene.

That target gene is one that codes for proprotein convertase subtilisin/kexin type 9 (PCSK9). This enzyme plays a role in regulating LDL levels in the blood. Specifically, it promotes the destruction of LDL receptors on liver cells that would otherwise help clear LDL from circulation. Thus, people who have overactive versions of PCSK9 have fewer LDL receptors and higher LDL levels in their blood. Those who have defective versions of PCSK9 have lower LDL levels. This has been known for years, making PCSK9 a well-established target. Multiple drugs already in use for treating high cholesterol work by hobbling PCSK9.

With VERVE-102, though, the goal is to permanently break the gene that encodes PCSK9. Specifically, the guide RNA directs the adenine base-editing protein to change a single base in the PCSK9 gene such that it causes cellular machinery to prematurely read a stop signal, and the enzyme is not produced.

In the trial, the first 35 patients were given different doses so researchers could gradually test safety. The first four participants started with the lowest dose of 0.3 mg per kilogram of body weight. When that went well, a second subgroup of six got 0.45 mg/kg. Then others got 0.6 mg/kg, 0.7 mg/kg, 0.8 mg/kg, and the final high dose of 1 mg/kg, which was given to seven participants. The first subgroup that got the lowest dose was followed for 18 months, while the subgroup that got the highest dose was followed for just three months so far.

The researchers noted a dose response in both the amount of PCSK9 the treatment knocked out and the size of the LDL reduction; the larger the dose, the less PCSK9, and the lower the LDL. For the lowest dose, mean PCSK9 levels dropped 51 percent, while mean LDL dropped 9 percent. For the highest dose, mean PCSK9 levels dropped 88 percent with mean LDL dropping 62 percent.

Therapeutic potential

The participants were all people who had either developed cardiovascular disease early in life (at or below age 55 for men or 65 for women) or were people who had an inherited condition that caused high cholesterol.

The drug was developed by Verve Therapeutics, which was bought by Eli Lilly last year for $1.3 billion. While Verve has been testing the drug on people at some of the highest risks from high cholesterol, its co-founder and now Lilly Senior Vice President Sekar Kathiresan hopes to see its use expand, providing an option for patients with high cholesterol that doesn’t require lifetime management with medications, like statins.

Riyaz Patel, the co-author on the trial and a cardiologist at Barts Health NHS Trust and professor of cardiology at University College London, agreed. In a statement released by Lilly, Patel said the early data was “encouraging,” indicating that VERVE-102 could “offer a novel approach to achieving substantial and durable LDL-C reduction with a one-time treatment.”

“Many patients with elevated LDL-C struggle to achieve sustained control despite ongoing efforts with the medicines available today, putting them at significant risk for cardiovascular events. With coronary artery disease still one of the leading causes of death worldwide, the need for new approaches is real,” Patel said.

While the researchers and Lilly are optimistic, this is, again, a very small, very preliminary look at the drug in clinical action. It will require further trials, with more people and longer follow-ups, to convincingly demonstrate safety and efficacy. But, if all goes well, Lilly notes that the Food and Drug Administration has already granted VERVE-102 a Fast Track designation for review.

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Posted Friday 29 May 2026 at 7:44 am AEST (my time).

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While we make batteries based on many different chemistries, nothing has approached the massive scale at which we can produce lithium batteries. That scale makes the economics of lithium-ion batteries hard to compete with. Even if we develop a superior battery technology, it’s unclear whether we can get manufacturing costs down quickly enough to compete with the efficiency of the lithium supply chain and manufacturing.

The one thing that could change the dynamics is a supply crunch. While lithium is extremely widespread, lithium that can be extracted economically is a different matter. It’s cheapest to extract it from brines, and lithium-rich brines are largely limited to South America. We do obtain some lithium from other sources, but it’s considerably more expensive.

In today’s issue of Science, however, a research team has identified an energy-efficient means of extracting lithium from rocks. The process they’ve designed uses far less energy than existing ones, regenerates all its starting chemicals, and produces byproducts that could also be sold.

Reacting rocks

Like other metals, lithium shows up in various minerals. For example, the US Geological Survey recently took an inventory of all the lithium oxide deposits in the Northeast (they are extensive), which are found in a type of rock called pegmatite. Globally, however, the new paper indicates that the most abundant lithium ore is called spodumene, a lithium-aluminum silicate (LiAl(SiO₃)₂). And there is some processing of this material going on—it’s just energy-intensive and leaves behind a lot of waste.

That’s because the process starts by heating the mineral to roughly 1,000° C to disrupt its compact structure, after which sulfuric acid is used to leach out the lithium. The resulting lithium sulfate solution is then converted into something useful for battery manufacturing (typically lithium carbonate), leaving behind sulfur-containing waste.

The new work was done by a collaboration between MIT researchers and a couple of Boston-area companies. Their goal was a process that was far more energy-efficient and didn’t produce as much waste. What they came up with is a process where the key chemical used at the start of the process gets regenerated at a later step, and both the silicon and aluminum in the mineral end up in a form that we’re already using in commercial applications.

The key chemical in the process is ammonium fluoride (NH₄F). It’s possible to use the salt directly in a molten form, but heating it invariably leads to some production of hydrogen fluoride, which is extremely dangerous stuff (although they end up using some later). So instead, they used it dissolved in water, which apparently keeps these reactions from occurring. In this process, heating the solution to about 70° C results in the formation of NH₄F₂ ions, releasing ammonia gas that’s used later in the process.

This ion donates a fluorine to the lithium, leaving a water-based solution of lithium fluoride. The silicon also forms a soluble ion, (NH₄)₂SiF₆), while the aluminum forms a similar ion that remains behind as a solid, (NH₄)₃AlF₆). Each of these is processed separately.

Using everything

We’ll start with the aluminum chemistry, which is one of the simpler pathways. Initially, heating the (NH₄)₃AlF₆ to about 300° C produces aluminum trifluoride and releases ammonia and hydrogen fluoride. Then, raising the temperature to 700° C causes the aluminum trifluoride to react with water, leaving behind aluminum oxide and releasing yet more hydrogen fluoride.

Again, hydrogen fluoride is dangerous stuff and needs to be handled carefully. But it’s also easy to react it with the ammonia (which is produced during two different reactions here) and reform the ammonium fluoride that was used to start the whole process. So, aside from minor losses due to inefficiencies, the process regenerates one of the key ingredients. Meanwhile, aluminum oxide is one of the key starting materials for the production of aluminum metal, and so can be fed into that, given that the purity of the end product here was over 98 percent.

We’ll just note here that this is probably the worst aspect of the whole process, given the energy requirements for these temperatures and the highly dangerous chemicals involved.

By contrast, the silicon purification is a walk in the park. Simply adding more ammonia to the solution caused the starting chemical (NH₄)₂SiF₆) to react with water, releasing silicon dioxide and ammonium fluoride. Again, an ammonium fluoride solution is one of the starting materials; the silicon dioxide simply precipitates out of this solution. That has a variety of applications, but the team showed that it’s quite effective at strengthening concrete.

All that leaves us with is the solution of lithium fluoride. That’s actually one of the raw ingredients for production of a common battery electrolyte, LiPF₆. Alternatively, the researchers showed that you could react it with nitric acid and (once again) release hydrogen fluoride, leaving behind lithium nitrate. Heat that and it will decompose into lithium oxide, which is easy to convert into other battery raw materials.

Checking the economics

While the process gets rid of the high temperatures for the initial processing of lithium-containing ore, there are several steps with elevated temperatures needed further down the line, both for the lithium and for the useful aluminum and silicon products. So, the researchers did a full economic evaluation of how their process stacked up to what’s already on the market.

The existing process, which involves roasting ore/sulfuric acid, came in at just under $9,000 for each usable tonne of lithium. By contrast, they estimate that the new process should only cost a bit over $5,000 per tonne. That’s roughly comparable to the cost of isolation from high-quality brines. If the silicon and aluminum products can also be sold, then the cost of the whole process would drop by over $1,000, making it highly cost-effective.

With those numbers come a lot of caveats, of course: Prices shift with supply and demand; not every source of spodumene produces equivalent-quality ores; switching to this process might require investments in new industrial equipment, etc. So the real world will undoubtedly be more complex than these calculations might suggest. Still, in our increasingly lithium-dependent world, it’s nice to have alternatives in case a serious supply crunch ever does hit.

Plus, it’s pretty neat to see that there’s still room for chemists to rethink large industrial processes.

Science, 2026. DOI: 10.1126/science.aec4652 (About DOIs).

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Posted Friday 29 May 2026 at 7:44 am AEST (my time).

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Scientists have long known that migrating birds and homing pigeons navigate in part by sensing the Earth’s magnetic fields, especially at night or in overcast conditions when visual landmarks or sunshine are in short supply. But exactly where this magneto-sensing occurs in the body—and the mechanism that enables it—remains a matter of intense debate. A new paper published in the journal Science suggests that homing pigeons have iron-rich immune cells in their livers that help them detect magnetic fields and transmit that information to the brain.

There are three primary hypotheses for how birds might sense Earth’s geomagnetic field. One is a compass-like mechanism, whereby the Earth exerts a pull on magnetic particles in a bird’s upper beak that relays directional information via a large nerve in the cranium. A second is that it happens biologically via cellular ion channels sensitive to voltage, enabling birds to sense changes in the magnetic field. And a third suggests that physical effects on retinal pigments enable birds to detect photons and send signals to the brain, although this mechanism is really only viable in the light.

None fully explain how animals can sense magnetic fields. However, “We had some clues that the liver and spleen have magnetic properties, because they break down red blood cells and so store much iron in the body,” said co-author Clivia Lisowski of the University of Bonn and the University Hospital Bonn. This refers to a 2015 paper suggesting that red pulp macrophages in the spleens of mice and humans are intrinsically superparamagnetic and hence more sensitive to magnetic fields. But it wasn’t clear if those properties were involved in any kind of magnetoreception.

For their homing pigeon study, Lisowski et al. used vibrating sample magnetometry and magnetic cell separation to test liver and spleen tissue samples stained with Prussian blue—which is sensitive to ferritin, a red blood cell degradation product—along with the eyes, beak, and brain. They found the strongest concentration of iron and the strongest magnetic response in the liver tissue.

An internal compass

To further test their hypothesis, Lisowski et al. trained 34 pigeons to home over a west-to-east route covering 19 kilometers (just under 12 miles). Once trained, half the birds were injected with clodronate liposomes to deplete macrophages in the liver, while the other half served as a control group. This was done the day before weather predictions called for overcast conditions with the sun obscured. The next day, all the pigeons were released.

Electron microscopy image of pigeon liver tissue shows hepatic macrophage (blue) in contact to nerve fiber

(yellow), which enables them to transmit (“magnetic”) information to the pigeon brain.

Lisowski et al. (2026) Science

 

Histology of pigeon liver tissue, depicting iron-containing macrophages (blue).

Lisowski et al. (2026) Science

 

Electron microscopy image of pigeon liver tissue, with full colorization of cells.

Lisowski et al. (2026) Science

 

All the pigeons in the control group successfully navigated their way back to the aviary; those that received the injections lost their sense of direction and did not return home until the following day, when the sun was out. A follow-up experiment with the clodronate-treated pigeons under sunny conditions did not affect their homing ability because they were able to use solar cues. This suggests that pigeons use a combination of the sun’s orientation and magnetic sensing to navigate—and the latter is a previously unsuspected mechanism for magnetic perception in animals.

The authors think these results could also explain magnetoreception in bats and blind mole rats, which don’t have functioning cryptochromes or live in environments with little to no light. They might also apply to certain species of shark capable of swimming in straight lines over long distances—such as scalloped hammerhead sharks, which seem to orient themselves using seamounts found to have geomagnetic anomalies. “Beyond magneto reception, our findings contribute to a broader emerging concept: tissue-resident macrophages can function as peripheral sensory cells, providing direct, biologically meaningful feedback to the brain,” the authors concluded.

In an accompanying perspective, Simon Spiro of the Zoological Society of London and Hal Drakesmith of the University of Oxford noted some caveats. For instance, the iron-rich cells in the liver could have been due to the diet of captive pigeons, given that many zoo-housed animals have iron overloads. They also don’t think it’s yet clear that the liver is the best and most likely organ for sensing magnetic fields. It’s possible that doping the pigeons with clodronate also depleted macrophages located elsewhere in the body, skewing the histological results.

Spiro and Drakesmith cite a 2025 study, also published in Science, that used a different, more global methodology and suggested a different mechanism: Special cells within the pigeon forebrain encode magnetic information, thereby facilitating effective navigation. Both potential mechanisms do not require light stimulation, so it’s possible there could be two or more complementary processes at work to help pigeons navigate.

“Perhaps one process dominates for long-distance navigation, whereas another is used for more specific destination-finding, with both operating with different degrees of precision,” Spiro and Drakesmith concluded. “Indeed, it could be prudent to have more than one way of getting home in the dark.”

DOI: Science, 2026. 10.1126/science.ady2486  (About DOIs).

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Posted Friday 29 May 2026 at 7:42 am AEST (my time).

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Forecasters are calling for below-average activity this hurricane season, which begins Monday, June 1.

The National Weather Service is predicting eight to 14 named storms, including three to six hurricanes and one to three major hurricanes of category 3, 4, or 5 strength, packing winds of 111 mph or greater. By comparison, a typical season is characterized by 14 named storms, including seven hurricanes and three major hurricanes. The season ends November 30.

“It just takes one,” said Ken Graham, director of the National Weather Service. “Now is the time to start thinking about your hurricane preparedness.”

The forecasters based their predictions on an expected El Niño that is likely to develop during the season. An El Niño is a naturally occurring climate phenomenon that begins with unusually warm waters in the central and eastern equatorial Pacific Ocean and can affect weather patterns worldwide.

In the Pacific, an El Niño can trigger more hurricanes. But in the Atlantic Ocean, the phenomenon can suppress activity, as it tends to cause more wind shear that can break apart the storms. Nonetheless, warm water temperatures in the Atlantic were expected to help the storms that do develop rapidly intensify, something that is becoming more common as climate change heats the planet’s oceans.

“When your ocean temperatures are warmer you get more intense hurricanes to develop. So if there is an opportunity and a location for low wind shear and warm ocean temperatures,” said Marc Alessi, science fellow at the Union for Concerned Scientists, an advocacy group, “that is when you can get a very strong hurricane to form.”

Haiyan Jiang, a meteorologist at Florida International University, said there was a high chance of a strong El Niño that could boost water temperatures in the Gulf of Mexico.

“We probably won’t have as many number of storms as previous years. However, some storms get lucky,” she said. “We see outliers all the time, especially with hurricanes. So I believe Floridians, we need to get prepared.”

2026 Atlantic Tropical Cyclone Names

Forecasters at Colorado State University similarly predicted a below-average season, with 13 named storms, including six hurricanes and two major hurricanes. The forecasters said waters in the western tropical Atlantic were warmer than normal but the eastern tropical and subtropical Atlantic were slightly cooler than normal. They said a warmer Atlantic also tends to lead to lower atmospheric pressure and a more unstable atmosphere, which can boost hurricane activity.

The Colorado State forecasters said the probability of a hurricane making landfall was 32 percent for the entire US coastline, 15 percent for the US East Coast including the Florida peninsula, and 20 percent for the Gulf Coast from the Florida panhandle to Brownsville, Texas.

Alessi pointed out that although no hurricanes made landfall in the US last year, Hurricane Melissa devastated Jamaica as a category 5 storm. Melissa caused nearly $9 billion in damage and 95 fatalities across the Caribbean.

“Just because it’s a below-average season doesn’t mean a very powerful hurricane won’t make landfall in the United States,” he said.

This article originally appeared on Inside Climate News, a nonprofit, non-partisan news organization that covers climate, energy, and the environment. Sign up for their newsletter here.

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Posted Friday 29 May 2026 at 7:41 am AEST (my time).

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Scientists at Kyoto University took a fresh look at Strontium Ruthenate (Sr₂RuO₄), a material that has puzzled researchers since it was found to be superconducting in 1994. Superconductors are materials that can carry electricity with zero resistance, usually at very low temperatures. Most follow well-understood rules based on conventional BCS theory, but Sr₂RuO₄ has remained an exception. It belongs to a class known as unconventional superconductors, where electrons pair through mechanisms that are still not fully understood. Despite being one of the cleanest and best-studied unconventional superconductors, the exact way its electrons pair up to create superconductivity is still debated.

For years, experiments have given conflicting results. Ultrasound studies suggested that Sr₂RuO₄ might have a two-component superconducting state. The superconducting state is described using something called an order parameter — a mathematical framework that explains how electrons organize themselves inside the material. In a two-component state, multiple interacting quantum states can coexist, making the superconductivity more complex and capable of supporting unusual effects like internal magnetic fields or multiple superconducting domains. On the other hand, some uniaxial pressure experiments pointed toward a simpler one-component state. This disagreement has been at the center of the debate.

To help resolve it, the Kyoto team tried a new approach. They applied three different kinds of shear strain to very thin crystals of Sr₂RuO₄. Shear strain is a sideways distortion of the crystal, similar to sliding the top of a deck of cards relative to the bottom. It is applied to uncover the quantum mechanisms behind superconductivity.

The strain was carefully measured using optical imaging, and the superconducting transition temperature (Tc) — the temperature at which the material enters the superconducting state — was tracked using low-frequency magnetic susceptibility, which measures how a material responds to magnetic fields, down to 30 Kelvin (−243 °C).

The outcome was striking: Tc barely changed. Any variation was smaller than 10 millikelvin per percent strain, which is effectively undetectable. This shows that shear strain has little to no effect on superconductivity in Sr₂RuO₄.

These results line up with a one-component order parameter model, but the story is not that simple. A one-component model cannot explain other experimental findings, such as time-reversal symmetry breaking, superconducting domains, and horizontal line nodes. Time-reversal symmetry breaking refers to a situation where the superconducting state behaves differently if time is mathematically reversed, implying the existence of spontaneous internal magnetic fields. Horizontal line nodes are regions in momentum space where the superconducting energy gap drops to zero, offering clues about how electron pairing changes throughout the crystal. This means that while the new data rules out several theories, it also points to the need for alternative explanations that go beyond conventional models.

“Our study represents a major step toward solving one of the longest-standing mysteries in condensed-matter physics,” said Giordano Mattoni, first author and researcher at the Toyota Riken–Kyoto University Research Center (TRiKUC).

The findings also highlight a puzzle. Earlier ultrasound experiments showed a strong shear effect, while the new direct strain measurements do not. Understanding why these two methods disagree is now a major open question.

Beyond Sr₂RuO₄, the strain-control technique developed in this study could be useful for other superconductors that may have multi-component states, such as UPt₃, and for materials with complex phase transitions.

In short, the Kyoto team’s work narrows the possibilities for what kind of superconducting state Sr₂RuO₄ can host. It strengthens the case against a two-component state but leaves unexplained features that continue to fuel debate. The mystery of how superconductivity works in this compound is not solved yet, but the path forward is clearer.

Source: Kyoto University, Nature

This article was generated with some help from AI and reviewed by an editor. Under Section 107 of the Copyright Act 1976, this material is used for the purpose of news reporting. Fair use is a use permitted by copyright statute that might otherwise be infringing.

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Posted Thursday 28 May 2026 at 7:53 am AEST (my time).

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A tiny blue octopus that lives in the deep sea off the coast of the Galápagos Islands is so small that it can fit in the palm of a hand. And as a team of researchers coordinated by Chicago's Field Museum announced in a new study just published in the journal Zootaxa, it now has an official name—Microeledone galapagensis.

The octopus was first spotted in 2015 during a deep-sea expedition aboard the research vessel E/V Nautilus. From there, marine biologists used a remotely operated underwater vehicle (RoV) to explore the ocean floor near Darwin Island, at the northern end of the Galápagos archipelago. As the RoV's camera moved across the seafloor near an underwater slope at a depth of 1,773 meters (5,817 feet), they noticed the tiny octopus with its vibrant blue coloring.

By performing a close inspection, the researchers were able to recover the blue octopus and film two other specimens, and then, at the end of the mission, conduct a thorough analysis. It left them puzzled, however, as they were not certain which species it belonged to. So they contacted Field Museum expert Janet Voight, sending her a photo of the animal. “Right away, I knew it was something really special,” said Voight, lead author of the new study. “I’d never seen anything like it.” However, to determine whether an animal belongs to a new species requires a complete analysis of all its body parts, and since the blue octopus was the only one of its kind ever collected, the experts did not want to dissect and thus lose such a valuable specimen.

To overcome this problem, the authors used x-ray computed tomography to create and assemble thousands of CT micro-scans, which then allowed them to create a 3D model of the blue octopus, both internally and externally. The researchers were able to observe the most minute details, from the tentacles (squat, with few suckers) to the smooth skin (almost devoid of pigment on the back) to a specific funnel-shaped organ, thus obtaining the information needed to classify it as a new species and place it among other cephalopods. "Because CT imaging is nondestructive, it's especially important for type specimens like this one," said coauthor Stephanie Smith. “And that's great for me, because people are often bringing me these incredibly rare and stunningly beautiful specimens that I get the privilege of virtually opening up.”

In addition to describing the new species, the blue octopus reminds us how much we still don't know about the ocean depths, how crucial these expeditions and research are to better understand these still unexplored ecosystems, and why protecting them is so important.

“These are little octopuses that live in the deep sea, and hardly anybody on Earth has ever gotten to see them. I just feel lucky that I got to work with them,” said Voight. “If you took all the land on Earth and pieced it together, you would not cover the Pacific Ocean. The oceans are so big, and there’s so much left to explore.”

This story originally appeared on WIRED Italia and has been translated from Italian.

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Posted Thursday 28 May 2026 at 7:52 am AEST (my time).

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NASA officials announced contract awards for the initial elements of a lunar base on Tuesday, including two rovers that will provide mobility to astronauts.

With the series of announcements, NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman sought to maintain momentum around a Moon Base initiative revealed two months ago as part of the space agency’s return to the Moon. “For those waiting patiently, the grand return is close at hand, and we will not slow down,” he said.

The manager for the lunar base, Carlos Garcia-Galan, said the space agency had selected two companies, Astrolab and Lunar Outpost, to build approximately one-ton rovers that would be ready for delivery to the Moon in 2028. Astrolab will receive $219 million for its “CLV-1” rover, and Lunar Outpost $220 million for its “Pegasus” rover, building upon initial contracts awarded two years ago. Each rover is expected to have a range of 200 km and be capable of driving autonomously, with guidance from operators on Earth, in addition to being driven by astronauts.

Garcia-Galan also announced that Blue Origin, with its Blue Moon Mark 1 lander, would deliver each of the rovers separately to the lunar surface. These two delivery contract awards were worth $280.4 million.

The awards increase Blue Origin’s centrality to NASA’s Moon plans, both by flying large amounts of cargo, with a Mark 1 lander previously contracted to deliver the Viper vehicle to the lunar surface, and by supporting the company’s larger Mark 2 lander for eventual human missions.

Need to learn more about the lunar surface

One theme of Tuesday’s news conference was the reality that, decades after humanity’s first visits to the Moon, there remains much we do not know about conditions on the lunar surface.

“What we are embarking upon is extremely challenging,” Isaacman said. “We know so little from what is a combined 80 hours of lunar astronaut EVA time across the Apollo missions, and that was more than a half century ago.”

To that end, one of the central elements of the early Moon Base program is the development of the MoonFall program, which will entail three or four drones each about 1 meter tall, with a mass of 225 kg, including propellant. NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory is leading development of the MoonFall drones, and these will be delivered to the lunar surface by Firefly Aerospace, Garcia-Galan said.

The goal is to get these spacecraft to the Moon before the Artemis IV lunar landing mission, scheduled for no earlier than 2028, to provide high-resolution imagery of the lunar surface. For most of the Moon, the current imagery resolution is 1 meter, and NASA wants to improve it to 1 cm, Garcia-Galan said.

Establishing a perimeter

These drones will perform a number of functions, including scouting for water ice in permanently shadowed regions, identifying areas of scientific interest, and providing detailed information about landing sites, including soil mechanics, lighting conditions, and the terrain. At the end of their flying lifetime, the drones would then be used to set a boundary for the Moon Base.

“We’re hoping to … establish a Moon Base perimeter with four or three lunar drones,” Garcia-Galan said. “We’re going to be able to basically put them at the corners of the areas where we think we have either key scientific objectives, or we want to build up the Moon Base.” In these positions, he added, the retired drones could also provide a beacon with retro-reflectors, or even perhaps serve as the first lunar cell towers.

The idea of a perimeter raises interesting questions about territory on the Moon.

The 1967 Outer Space Treaty, agreed to by all spacefaring nations, essentially says no country can claim sovereignty over territory on the Moon. Even building a base on the lunar surface does not confer ownership of that area under the treaty.

“Mindful” of the Outer Space Treaty

NASA and 66 other nations have, to date, signed on to the Artemis Accords as a framework for exploring and developing the lunar surface this century. This NASA-led Artemis group is in direct competition with a China-led initiative that also intends to explore the Moon’s south pole and potentially extract resources there.

The Artemis Accords, while recognizing the Outer Space Treaty, allow for the possibility of creating “safety zones” that would establish areas in which “harmful interference” is not allowed. “A safety zone should be the area in which nominal operations of a relevant activity or an anomalous event could reasonably cause harmful interference,” the Artemis Accords state. NASA and China have not formally discussed or mutually approved the concept of safety zones, and some Chinese commentators have been critical of the idea.

Establishing a perimeter would seem to be the first manifestation of a safety zone on the lunar surface, although Isaacman would not confirm this when asked directly.

“There are areas of great interest on the lunar surface, and we do want to get there and explore them,” he said. “We also obviously want to be very mindful of the Outer Space Treaty, so that we are respectful of other nations that are putting assets on the lunar surface. We would expect that to be reciprocal, but I think that’s just one objective of many that the MoonFall drones intend to accomplish.”

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Posted Wednesday 27 May 2026 at 12:15 pm AEST (my time).

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MUNICH, GERMANY—Think about every fast Porsche you’ve ever seen on the road—the ones with big wings, bold colors, and wide wheels. Now get ready for an uncomfortable fact: None of them had more horsepower than the SUV you see pictured here. This is the new Cayenne Turbo Coupe, a fastback, dual-motor, upgraded version of Porsche’s electric SUV.

It makes a whopping 1,139 hp (850 kW) and 1,106 lb-ft of torque (1,500 Nm), enough to drive this 5,637 lb (2,557 kg) machine and its 113-kilowatt-hour battery pack from zero to 60 mph (97 km/h)  in 2.4 seconds. That makes it not only Porsche’s most powerful production car ever but also among its quickest, bested only by the Taycan Turbo GT.

But unlike that pared-down, performance-oriented take on Porsche’s sultry electric sedan, the Cayenne Coupe is meant to be an everyday hauler for friends, family, and whatever else you can fit underneath its hatch. Does it succeed? That’s what I went to Munich to find out.

It’s not really the most handsome car, but there are reasons to like the Cayenne Coupe other than its looks.

Credit: Tim Stevens

Formula E-inspired

Manufacturers love trumpeting any track-bred technology that finds its way to the street. With SUVs, such comparisons are generally strained at best, but in its fastest Turbo form, the Cayenne Electric has a legitimate link to Porsche’s efforts in Formula E.

Porsche has been a competitor on the world’s biggest stage for emissions-free motorsport since 2019, winning multiple championships. Much of Formula E has historically been spec-based, meaning manufacturers can’t modify things like chassis or bodywork. They can, however, develop their own motors.

For its Formula E racer, Porsche found a way to insert a cooling system between the stator and the rotor, enabling greater and more consistent power output without running temperatures into the red. That same design is now used on the rear motor of the electric Cayenne’s top-shelf Turbo model.

This is the rear drive unit.

Credit: Tim Stevens

Again, that model delivers 1,139 hp through all four wheels. If that’s a bit more than you need, Porsche will instead gladly sell you a 657 hp (490 kW) Cayenne S or 435 hp (325 kW) base electric model. Unlike on the electric Macan, there is no single-motor, rear-drive version here.

All versions are powered by the same 113-kWh gross battery pack, which charges at an impressive 400 kW. That’s not just a flashy peak. Porsche’s SUV can maintain that rate up until the pack is half-charged, and it doesn’t drop below 250 kW until you hit the 75 percent mark. Many major EVs, like Ford’s Mustang Mach-E, struggle to do half that at peak.

For slower, at-home charging, Porsche offers the best implementation of wireless charging I’ve yet seen on an EV. Buy a wireless charging pad from Porsche (which costs around $8,000), install it in your home, and your Cayenne will automatically identify it as you approach. You’ll then get a visual indicator on the touchscreen to guide you to the correct position. Once there, just walk away, and the car will charge at 11 kW, losing 10 percent efficiency over a wired connection.

Design decisions

In addition to your motor configuration, you can choose your body style: either the more traditional SUV shape or the swoopier Coupe you see here. The Coupe’s coefficient of drag is slightly lower, 0.23 vs. 0.25, which Porsche says results in about 3 percent more range.

Play “spot the difference” with a non-Coupe Cayenne electric to see where that 0.02 improvement in drag comes from.

Credit: Tim Stevens

EPA figures are not yet available, but on the European WLTP cycle, the base Cayenne Coupe is rated for 411 miles (661 km), while the S does 415 (668 km) and the Turbo 390 miles (628 km). They should rate somewhere just south of 350 miles in the US, but we’ll have to wait and see.

In exchange for the slight range and style boost of the Coupe, you get a roughly one-third reduction in cargo capacity behind the second row, down to 18.9 cubic feet (535 L) total. Otherwise, the performance of the two models is identical, so choose the one that best fits your aesthetic preferences and capacity needs. While the Coupe is doubtlessly shapelier, I wouldn’t call either particularly endearing. The rear bumper seems needlessly busy, and while the upper-half of the Cayenne Electric’s nose looks familiar and compelling, the rest is likewise a bit much.

Go with the Turbo, and you’ll get a few extra frills and gills. Up front, every model has active aerodynamics to regulate airflow, and the Coupe has a pop-up spoiler at the rear. Down low on the bumper, though, you’ll find a pair of extending, vertical planes exclusively on the Turbo. These subtly extend the car’s aerodynamic profile, helping it achieve that 0.23 drag coefficient.

The interior design is much more familiar than current Porsche designs, with one major exception: the radically curved center display. It’s vertically oriented and has a distinct kick up at the bottom; it’s angled to meet a padded wrist rest.

The curved screen works much better than you might expect.

Tim Stevens

 

The houndstooth pattern is called pepita.

Tim Stevens

 

It’s a curious look, and I was sure I’d hate using it when I first saw it, but I quickly came to love it. Porsche’s software designers put the most frequently used touch controls at the bottom of the display, so you can rest your hand and cycle through playback settings or toggle major options.

The 14.25-inch gauge cluster behind the steering wheel is also curved, but in a more traditional way, as seen on other Porsches. There’s an optional 14.9-inch passenger display, too, on which you can install a plethora of video games (mostly mediocre) and streaming services. Cue up any of those, and the screen appears to go black from the driver’s seat, helping to reduce distraction.

Everything inside the car feels high-quality. I was a big fan of the woven pepita insets in the leather trim, which added some much-needed contrast to the otherwise monotone interior. Headroom in the rear seats was just enough, even on the Coupe, and there’s no shortage of legroom in any chair.

Drive time

Over the course of a lovely day in southern Germany, I got to sample all three motor configurations available in the Cayenne Electric, driving both the SUV and Coupe shapes, and I was surprised by how different they felt.

The 435 hp (325 kW) Cayenne Coupe may have the least power of the three, but it certainly doesn’t feel slow. Cruising on rural roads, it zips up to any legal speed near-instantly. It’s only on the de-restricted sections of Germany’s fabled Autobahn that the throttle response started to get a bit tepid. That, though, was only when I was pushing 100 mph (160 km/h). At speeds legally traveled in the United States, it’s peppy enough to claim any gap in traffic.

It was surprisingly lacking in ride refinement, though. All Cayenne Electric models feature adaptive suspension, but even in Comfort mode, the Coupe felt harsh and nervous on bumpy roads. The optional 22-inch wheels wrapped in Pirelli P Zero R sports tires may be partly to blame, but even so, I expected better.

You have a commanding view of the road from the driver’s seat.

Tim Stevens

 

The back seats are more suitable for two than three.

Tim Stevens

 

It’s less practical than the non-Coupe, but only marginally.

Tim Stevens

 

As I stepped up to the S and Turbo models, it was the increased ride quality that impressed me the most. That’s because of Porsche’s Active Ride suspension. We’ve sampled it before on the Panamera, and it’s available on the Taycan, too. It’s basically an uprated, high-voltage adaptive suspension that can instantly react to road conditions and driver inputs.

It’s a real game-changer here. Even on the same 22-inch wheels and tires, the turbo felt miles more comfortable on the soft end and yet even sharper and more responsive when dialed up to Sport Plus.

And yes, you can definitely feel the extra power. Press the Sport Response button on the Turbo’s steering wheel for 10 seconds of maximum power. Then warn your passengers to put their heads against the headrest. This car will induce whiplash in the unprepared and expletives from those who have been forewarned.

Predictably, the S sits somewhere in the middle, noticeably quicker than the base car but not as terrifying as the Turbo. The base model is quick enough for me, and at a starting price of $113,800 (plus $2,350 destination), it’s $54,200 cheaper than the Turbo to start.

But that’s just to start. The Turbo I drove, the one you see pictured here, included nearly $50,000 in options for a final price of $220,330, including destination fee.

Go big or go home

The base Cayenne Coupe Electric has more than enough power and interior comfort to work as a stellar everyday machine, but it’s let down by a ride quality that feels a bit uncouth in an SUV with a six-figure starting price. The Active Ride suspension is infinitely better and well worth the $7,790 upgrade, but to get that, you’ll need to step up to at least the S, which starts at $131,200.

And the Turbo? If you have the financial means and the maniacal desire, by all means, go for it. It’s not only Porsche’s most powerful car yet; it’s also the company’s first SUV that feels truly as bonkers as some of its most storied sports cars.

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Posted Wednesday 27 May 2026 at 7:37 am AEST (my time).

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A new study from the University of Georgia suggests binge-watching — watching many episodes of a TV series in one sitting or over a short period — may not always be as bad as it seems. Researchers found that watching shows or reading books in long stretches can make stories easier to remember and more likely to stay in people’s minds through imagination and daydreams.

Joshua Baldwin, lead author of the study and postdoctoral researcher at the University of Georgia, said, “Humans are storytelling creatures. One of the functions of narratives is the ability to satisfy motivations for things like connecting with other people, feeling autonomous and confident, and even security and safety. Stories have characters that fulfill these roles, and we can satisfy those needs through them.”

The research looked at what is called retrospective-imaginative-involvement (RII), a psychology and communication term describing how people continue mentally revisiting stories long after they finish them. Researchers say this can include replaying scenes in the mind, imagining alternate endings, daydreaming about fictional worlds, or emotionally reconnecting with characters after a show or book has ended. The study found that binge-watching or marathon reading sessions were more likely to spark RII compared to slower consumption. People who binge-watch and use stories as a form of escape were especially likely to engage in RII. Leisure time made RII stronger, while stress reduced it.

Watching episodes back-to-back can also help viewers connect plot threads and see the bigger picture, especially in longer series with many characters and storylines. Researchers explain this through the idea of mental models — internal “maps” the brain creates to organize information, track relationships, and understand events. In storytelling, these mental models help viewers follow timelines, character motivations, and plot developments more clearly. Baldwin explained, “People who have that habit of binge-watching shows often aren’t doing it passively but are actually actively thinking about it afterwards. They’re very much wanting to engage with stories, even when they’re not around to watch shows.”

The study also connects with the concept of narrative engagement, which refers to the emotional and psychological involvement people experience while interacting with stories. Communication researchers describe this as a mix of attention, imagination, emotional connection, and identification with characters. Strong narrative engagement can make fictional experiences feel meaningful enough that they remain active in memory long after viewing ends.

Participants in the study said that memorable stories were more likely to spark imagination. They often fantasized about stories they found moving or meaningful. Television shows were described as more memorable than books, though Baldwin noted that avid readers may experience similar effects. “If you think about people who are avid book readers, like those who might read a whole book from cover to cover, they might have a better memory of that book and have a higher chance of engaging with the story mentally after finishing it,” he said.

Researchers also note that repeated engagement with stories can contribute to parasocial relationships — one-sided emotional bonds people form with fictional characters or media personalities. Although the characters are not real acquaintances, viewers may still feel friendship, familiarity, trust, or emotional comfort toward them, especially after long periods of exposure.

The findings suggest that forming strong mental models of stories through binge-watching may help people cope with daily stress by continuing to imagine and interact with narratives even after finishing them. This could explain why some people find comfort in revisiting favorite shows or books in their minds.

At the same time, Baldwin pointed out that the effects of binge-watching are not always positive or negative. “There’s a lot of debate over whether or not media is a good or bad thing, but it’s always nuanced argument,” he said. “It always depends on the content itself, why people are watching it, the psychological background of the individual and the context.”

Overall, the study highlights that binge-watching can strengthen memory, imagination, and long-term engagement with stories through RII, and in some cases may even help people recover from stress. But the impact depends on the person, the story, and the situation.

Source: University of Georgia, ScienceDirect

This article was generated with some help from AI and reviewed by an editor. Under Section 107 of the Copyright Act 1976, this material is used for the purpose of news reporting. Fair use is a use permitted by copyright statute that might otherwise be infringing.

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Posted Monday 25 May 2026 at 8:26 am AEST (my time).

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Garlic has been considered a natural mosquito repellent for centuries. In popular culture, it is believed that its pungent smell repels these insects, which, in addition to causing sleepless nights, transmit diseases such as dengue fever or malaria. Now, this belief has a scientific explanation.

A group of scientists from Yale University conducted a phytochemical analysis of 43 fruits and vegetables to identify natural compounds capable of interfering with the reproductive behavior of flying pest insects. To do so, the team used fruit flies, a species that often mates on food, as a model organism.

Based on this behavior, the researchers hypothesized that some fruits and vegetables might contain substances capable of altering the reproductive processes of these insects. After exposing different specimens to the mashed food included in the experiment, they observed that none of the products had a significant aphrodisiac effect. However, they found that garlic completely blocked mating and egg laying.

After this initial finding, the researchers sought to determine the source of the effect and focused their attention on the influence of garlic on the flies’ senses of taste and smell. To this end, they conducted two experiments. In the first, they placed the garlic puree in such a way that the insects could only smell it; in the second, they allowed them to taste it as well. The results showed that the taste was the factor that actually inhibited reproductive behaviors.

The team then conducted a chemical analysis of the garlic to identify the compound responsible for the effect. They determined that diallyl disulfide was the element that caused the inhibition. In practice, this substance acts on a sensory receptor present in the fly's taste organs, known as TrpA1.

The TrpA1 receptor functions as a sensor that triggers immediate rejection responses when it detects potentially noxious tastes. According to an article published in the journal Cell, garlic specifically activates a group of bitter taste-sensitive neurons containing this receptor. This activation not only provokes a physical avoidance reaction but also changes at the molecular level by modifying the expression of various genes.

Among the alterations identified, that of a gene closely related to the sensation of satiety stands out, suggesting that contact with garlic compounds directly interferes with the biological processes that regulate appetite and feeding in these insects. The authors posit that increased satiety appears to drive behaviors that limit mating and reproduction, primarily in females.

A Natural Repellent for Many Species

In addition to fruit flies, the experiments were replicated in other flying insects, including two species of mosquitoes that transmit diseases such as yellow fever, dengue, and Zika virus, as well as tsetse flies. In all cases, the tests showed that garlic can act as an effective remedy to discourage reproduction.

The researchers’ findings suggest that this plant, Allium sativum, could be used as a tool to control various insect pests harmful to both human health and agriculture.

“It’s inexpensive and grown all over the world,” said John Carlson, a Yale professor and coauthor of the study. “The idea of using it to ward off hematophagous creatures was proposed in 1897 by Bram Stoker in his novel Dracula, and perhaps he was right.”

This story originally appeared on WIRED en Español and has been translated from Spanish.

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Posted Monday 25 May 2026 at 7:58 am AEST (my time).

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Scientists working on the Micro Booster Neutrino Experiment (MicroBooNE) have published results in Nature that rule out the existence of the sterile neutrino (a hypothetical type of neutrino that would not interact via the weak nuclear force, only gravity), a particle that had been suggested for decades as a possible explanation for puzzling behavior in neutrinos. This closes the door on one of the most popular theories in the field, while leaving the mystery itself still unsolved.

Neutrinos (tiny, hard-to-detect fundamental particles that are among the most abundant in the universe) are everywhere in the universe. “Neutrinos are elusive fundamental particles that are difficult to detect experimentally, yet are among the most abundant particles in the universe,” said David Caratelli, assistant professor of physics at UC Santa Barbara. Past experiments had shown results that did not match expectations, sparking speculation about a fourth type of neutrino, called the sterile neutrino. MicroBooNE’s data, however, did not support this idea.

The Standard Model of particle physics (the theoretical framework describing known fundamental particles and forces, but not including gravity, dark matter, or dark energy) explains most known particles and forces, but it does not cover everything. “We know that the Standard Model does a great job describing a host of phenomena in the natural world,” said Fermilab senior scientist Matthew Toups. “And at the same time, we know it’s incomplete. It doesn’t account for dark matter, dark energy or gravity.” Neutrinos are one of the areas where the model falls short. They were once thought to have no mass, but experiments showed they change between three “flavors” (electron, muon, and tau types that neutrinos can transform between through a process called neutrino oscillation), which can only happen if they do have mass.

In the 1990s, experiments at Los Alamos and Fermilab found odd results suggesting muon neutrinos were turning into electron neutrinos in ways that could not be explained with just three flavors. “The most popular explanation to these anomalies for the past 30 years has been a hypothetical sterile neutrino,” said Justin Evans, professor at the University of Manchester.

MicroBooNE was built to study these anomalies more closely. Between 2015 and 2021, the team collected data using neutrino beams at Fermilab and a liquid-argon detector (a device using ultra-cold liquid argon to record charged particle tracks through ionization). The recent paper reports the first analysis using all five years of data, with an exposure of 1.11×10²¹ protons on target (a measure of how many particles in the accelerator beam hit the target material), a 70% increase over earlier results. The study looked at low-energy electron-neutrino interactions, focusing on two samples: one with visible protons and one without. The data matched predictions fairly well, with combined p-values (statistical measures of how likely observed results could occur by chance) of at least 26.7%, though predictions were slightly higher than the data in some regions.

The team also tested two models designed to explain the MiniBooNE excess of electron-neutrino-like events. One model unfolded results by neutrino energy, while the other matched shower energy and angle distributions. MicroBooNE excluded an electronlike interpretation of the MiniBooNE excess based on these models at greater than 99% confidence level (a statistical measure indicating extremely strong evidence against a hypothesis being true). “Basically, what we were looking for is the effect of the appearance of new electron neutrinos caused by this oscillation phenomenon,” Caratelli explained. The absence of such signals ruled out the sterile neutrino.

Although this closes off one explanation, the puzzle remains. “I think it’s a bit of a paradigm shift for us,” Caratelli said. Researchers are now exploring other possibilities, such as whether photons or other new physics could explain the anomalies. Larger experiments are on the horizon, including the Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment (DUNE) in South Dakota, which will be the biggest neutrino detector ever built. “MicroBooNE is big — it’s the size of a school bus. But DUNE is football field-scale,” Caratelli said. Its sensitivity could help answer not only questions about neutrinos but also why the universe has more matter than antimatter.

Caratelli added that the lessons learned from MicroBooNE will guide future work. “One of the key things that MicroBooNE did was give us all confidence and teach us how to use this technology to measure neutrinos with high precision,” he said. “What we learned with MicroBooNE on how to analyze the data that comes to the detector all directly applies to DUNE.”

Source: UC Santa Barbara, APS

This article was generated with some help from AI and reviewed by an editor. Under Section 107 of the Copyright Act 1976, this material is used for the purpose of news reporting. Fair use is a use permitted by copyright statute that might otherwise be infringing.

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Posted Monday 25 May 2026 at 7:58 am AEST (my time).

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An international team of astrophysicists has found evidence that the universe recycles black holes, merging them to form even larger ones. Gravitational waves recorded in recent years show that some of the heaviest black holes within star clusters exhibit clear signs of being “second-generation” black holes—products of past collisions—and therefore could not have originated from the collapse of a massive star.

Impossible Black Holes

The evolutionary theory of stars explains that, at the end of the lives of the most massive stars, their cores compress until they form a point so dense that it curves space-time to infinity. This is the classic black hole, with masses 10 to 40 times that of the sun. There are also supermassive black holes, in the center of galaxies, with millions or billions of solar masses, whose origin is related to processes that occurred in the earliest moments of the universe.

Between these two extremes lies a contested category: black holes with masses between 40 and 100 solar masses. They are too heavy to be born after the death of a star, but they do not reach the necessary dimensions to emerge from the collapse of a gigantic cloud of matter. Conventional stellar physics considers them “impossible,” yet they appear frequently in detections.

Astrophysicists propose that these massive black holes could form by the merging of two or more smaller, ultradense objects. The idea was plausible, but it needed evidence. Until relatively recently, there was no way to obtain it.

Then gravitational wave detectors came on the scene. These instruments use lasers to measure the micro-distortion of space-time generated by the collision of extremely dense objects. The first detection, in 2015, confirmed a merger between black holes. Since then, each new signal has allowed for a better characterization of these structures and revealed that these collisions occur much more frequently than previously imagined.

The Second-Generation Signature

The study, published this month in Nature Astronomy, analyzed a transient catalog of gravitational waves generated by the world's three leading observatories. The database included 153 reliable detections of black hole mergers. Among them, 34 corresponded to particularly heavy objects.

By comparing all the signals, the team identified two distinct populations. The lighter black holes, up to about 40 solar masses, showed small, aligned spins, as expected for objects born from the collapse of a star. But from a certain point, around 45 solar masses, a completely different population appeared: heavier black holes, spinning rapidly and in chaotic directions—a statistical signature that can arise only when the object has already participated in a previous merger.

“This is the exact signature you would expect if black holes repeatedly merged into dense stellar clusters,” said Isobel M. Romero-Shaw, coauthor of the research, in a statement from Cardiff University.

So far researchers have not directly observed any of these “impossible” black holes. They do not appear in x-rays or in the visible spectrum, unlike supermassive ones. However, their collisions vibrate space-time, and that vibration reveals masses that stellar physics cannot explain.

This study shows that the heaviest black holes are built rather than born. They arise from previous generations of collisions, assembled in the densest environments in the cosmos.

This story originally appeared in WIRED en Español and has been translated from Spanish.

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Posted Monday 25 May 2026 at 7:57 am AEST (my time).

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