Scientists from the University of Manchester have played a leading role in the discovery of a new subatomic particle at CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC). The particle, known as the Ξcc⁺ (Xi‑cc‑plus), is a new type of heavy proton-like particle containing two charm quarks and one down quark.

The result is the first particle discovery made using the upgraded LHCb detector, a major international project involving more than 1,000 scientists across 20 countries. The UK made the largest national contribution to the upgrade, with significant leadership from Manchester.

The newly observed Ξcc⁺ is a heavier relative of the proton, which was famously discovered in Manchester by Ernest Rutherford and colleagues in 1917–1919. The proton contains two up quarks and a down quark. Details of the Ξcc⁺ discovery were presented at the Rencontres de Moriond Electroweak conference.

The new discovery replaces the up quarks with their heavier relatives, the charm quarks. It also extends a legacy begun in the 1950s, when Manchester physicists were the first to identify a member of the Ξ (Xi) particle family.

Professor Chris Parkes, head of the University's Department of Physics and Astronomy, led the international collaboration during the installation and first operation of the LHCb Upgrade detector. He also led the UK contribution to the project for over a decade, from approval through to delivery.

It's no secret that prolonged periods spent in microgravity takes a toll on the human body. This includes muscle atrophy, bone density loss, and changes to the cardiovascular, endocrine, and nervous systems. But for female astronauts, there is also the greater risk of developing blood clots, according to recent findings. This highlights the fact that, to date, most studies of human health in space have involved male astronauts. But as the number of female astronauts continues to grow, more research is required to address potentially gender-related health risks.

This was the motivation behind a new study that examined how microgravity affects blood clotting, specifically in women. The study was conducted by Simon Fraser University (SFU) and the European Space Agency (ESA), with support provided through a grant from the Canadian Space Agency (CSA). It consisted of 18 women participating in a 5-day dry immersion test to assess the risk of developing potentially life-threatening blood clots. The results support existing evidence that women are at a greater risk of venous thromboembolism and identified hypercoagulability as a potential key mechanism.

For more than 100 years, scientists have pursued the idea of delivering insulin as a pill. This goal has remained difficult to achieve because insulin breaks down in the digestive system and the intestine lacks a natural transport pathway that allows the hormone to enter the bloodstream.

Because of these biological barriers, many people with diabetes still depend on daily insulin injections, which can place a significant burden on long-term treatment and quality of life.

Researchers at Kumamoto University, led by Associate Professor Shingo Ito, have now developed a promising drug delivery strategy designed to overcome these obstacles. Their approach uses a cyclic peptide that can pass through the small intestine. The molecule, called the DNP peptide, helps insulin move across the intestinal barrier and into the body after oral administration.

Astronomers say unusual readings from a star system 11,000 light-years away suggest that two of the planets circling the star crashed into each other, creating a huge, light-obscuring cloud of rocks and dust.

The analysis, laid out this week in a paper published by The Astrophysical Journal Letters, could provide new insights into the occasionally cataclysmic process that governs the evolution of planetary objects — including our own planet Earth and its moon.

“There are only a few other planetary collisions of any kind on record, and none that bear so many similarities to the impact that created the Earth and moon,” University of Washington graduate student Anastasios Tzanidakis, the study’s lead author, said in a news release. If we can observe more moments like this elsewhere in the galaxy, it will teach us lots about the formation of our world.”

Tzanidakis found the first clues while combing through archival data from the Gaia spacecraft and other sky surveys. He was particularly intrigued by Gaia20ehk, a sunlike star near the constellation Puppis.

“The star’s light output was nice and flat, but starting in 2016 it had these three dips in brightness. And then, right around 2021, it went completely bonkers,” Tzanidakis recalled. “I can’t emphasize enough that stars like our sun don’t do that. So when we saw this one, we were like ‘Hello, what’s going on here?’ ”

Tanzania's Mt Kilimanjaro, among the clouds over East Africa. Photographed in space from the ISS, and on Earth from Amboseli National Park with National Geographic's BabakTafreshi

It may sound fanciful, but a Los Angeles-based company says it has conceived of a plan to fly out to a smallish, near-Earth asteroid, throw a large bag around it, and bring the body back to a “safe” gathering point near our planet.

The company, TransAstra, said Wednesday that an unnamed customer has agreed to fund a study of its proposed “New Moon” mission to capture and relocate an asteroid approximately the size of a house, with a mass of about 100 metric tons.

“We envision it becoming a base for robotic research and development on materials processing and manufacturing,” said Joel Sercel, chief executive officer of TransAstra. “Long term, instead of building space hardware on the ground and launching propellant up from the Earth, we could harvest it from raw materials in space.”

Lots of targets
Sercel said there are as many as 250 potential target asteroids, with a diameter of up to about 20 meters, that could be reached with reusable, robotic spacecraft over the next decade. He envisions aggregating dozens, and then hundreds, of small asteroids at the “New Moon” processing facility, which could potentially be located at the Earth-Sun L2 point, about 1.5 million km from Earth.

Such asteroids could provide water for use as propellant and minerals for everything from solar panels to radiation shielding. Various asteroids could be targeted for their content, such as C-type asteroids as a source of water or M-types for metals.

All of this may seem a little bit out there, and to some extent it is. That’s the point of the feasibility study, which Sercel said will be completed by May, which will further refine a mission plan and its trajectory and the spacecraft needed to fly it. If fully funded, the mission could rendezvous with an asteroid by as early as 2028 or 2029. TransAstra is working with the University of Central Florida, Purdue, and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory/Caltech to complete its analysis.

Humans may not be the only primates with the power to imagine. A bonobo named Kanzi recently showed that he could keep track of make-believe juice and grapes during a pretend tea party.

This finding adds to a growing body of evidence that apes — primates without a tail, such as bonobos and gorillas — can picture things that aren’t really there. Scientists once thought only people did this.

By a year old, human children can start playing pretend. By age three, most kids can build whole imaginary words in their minds. This ability is necessary for many complex tasks.

In a happy twist of fate, NASA's Hubble Space Telescope witnessed a comet in the act of breaking apart. The chance of that happening while Hubble watched is extraordinarily minuscule. The findings are published in the journal Icarus.

The comet K1, whose full name is C/2025 K1 (ATLAS)—not to be confused with interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS—was not the original target of the Hubble study.

"Sometimes the best science happens by accident," said co-investigator John Noonan, a research professor in the Department of Physics at Auburn University in Alabama. "This comet got observed because our original comet was not viewable due to some new technical constraints after we won our proposal. We had to find a new target—and right when we observed it, it happened to break apart, which is the slimmest of slim chances."

Noonan didn't know K1 was fragmenting until he viewed the images the day after Hubble took them. "While I was taking an initial look at the data, I saw that there were four comets in those images when we only proposed to look at one," said Noonan. "So we knew this was something really, really special."

From cleanroom to ocean world – our Dragonfly mission has begun integration and testing at JHUAPL. Engineers are powering up key systems, including the spacecraft’s “brain” and power units, preparing the rotorcraft for the journey to Saturn’s moon Titan. go.nasa.gov/4ljsD9w

A new study by University of Vermont researchers finds that a majority of people across the globe favor protecting the environment over growing the economy when the two goals conflict. The paper, published recently in the journal Ecological Economics, analyzed data from two major international surveys, encompassing responses from residents in 92 countries.

Overall, the researchers found nearly 58% of people worldwide value environmental protection over economic growth when the two goals are at odds.

"The political discourse is often very much focused around the goal of economic growth, but our results show that this is actually not people's priority," said Jukka Kilgus, a master's student studying natural resources at the Rubenstein School of Environment and Natural Resources and the lead author of the paper. "Instead, they often favor ecological and social well-being. And these are not just left-leaning college graduates in rich countries, but a diverse group of people with many different backgrounds across countries."

A more complex global picture
Previous studies have largely focused on residents of the Global North and have identified characteristics common among individuals in those countries who favor environmental protection over economic growth. They tend to be well-educated, lean politically to the left, are younger, and female.

Kilgus, who is also a Gund Graduate Fellow, said this analysis showed a drop off in support for environmental protection over economic growth among some less wealthy or only recently industrialized nations.

But it also showed that in many non-Western countries, commonly assumed traits like education, gender, age, income, and political orientation do not behave as expected. In some cases, stronger environmental support is found among men, older individuals, lower-income groups, or those leaning politically to the right, underscoring how deeply cultural, political, and economic context shapes public opinion.

"This shows that there is no universal set of factors that influences people's prioritization of the environment over the economy," the authors write.

Why do widely supported solutions to major problems, such as climate change, so often struggle to gain real traction? A new study suggests that part of the answer lies in understanding why people resist change, and how the combination of their preferences and social networks can help overcome that resistance.

A study published in Nature Human Behaviour by researchers at the University of Zurich (UZH) shows that it is possible to measure people's individual thresholds for change. This threshold value describes how much social support a person needs before adopting a new behavior.

Personal thresholds vary widely
The research brings together two fields that have traditionally studied social change separately: behavioral science, which examines what drives individual decisions, and complexity science, which looks at how behaviors spread through complex social networks.

"People don't change in isolation," says Manuel S. Mariani from the Department of Business Administration. "They respond to what others around them are doing, but the amount of encouragement they need varies from person to person. Some people will try a new idea the moment they hear about it. Others wait until everyone else is doing it."

Every ounce counts when launching a rocket, which is why considerations for the Size, Weight, and Power (SWaP) of every component matters so much. For decades, one of the heaviest and most power-hungry components on a spacecraft has been its optical and communications hardware - specifically the bulky mechanical mirror used for LiDAR and free-space laser communications. But a new paper, published in Nature by researchers at MIT, MITRE, and Sandia National Laboratories, might have just fundamentally changed the SWaP considerations of LiDAR systems. Their technology, which they’re called a “photonic ski-jump” could one day revolutionize how spacecraft communicate.

At its core, the technology described in the paper is a photonics innovation. To get light off a computer chip and out into the world, engineers typically have to rely on a frustrating trade-off. They either use diffractive optics or micromechanical scanners - each has its own set of disadvantages. Diffractive optics are easy to scale, but they have poor beam quality. Micromechanical sensors, on the other hand, are physically huge and not easily scalable, especially on spacecraft.

The new “ski-jump” bypasses their weaknesses entirely. It is a nanoscale optical waveguide integrated directly onto a piezoelectrically controlled microcantilever - which makes it look like a series of miniaturized “ski jumps” taking off from the chip itself. It’s fabricated in a standard 200-mm CMOS foundry, and uses the thermal forces between the cooling of different layers of the chip, causing the cantilever to curve out at a 90 degree angle - straight up from the chip surface.

All the essential ingredients to make the DNA and RNA underpinning life on Earth have been discovered in samples collected from the asteroid Ryugu, scientists said Monday.

The discovery comes after these building blocks of life were detected on another asteroid called Bennu, suggesting they are abundant throughout the solar system.

One longstanding theory is that life first began on Earth when asteroids carrying fundamental elements crashed into our planet long ago. The asteroids that hurtle through our solar system give scientists a rare chance to study this possibility.

In 2014, the Japanese spacecraft Hayabusa-2 blasted off on a 300-million-kilometer (185-million-mile) mission to land on Ryugu, a 900-meter-wide (2,950-feet-wide) asteroid.

It successfully managed to collect two samples of rocks weighing 5.4 grams (under a fifth of an ounce) each and bring them back to Earth in 2020. Research in 2023 showed that these samples contained uracil, which is one of the four bases that make up RNA.

While DNA, the famed double helix, functions as a genetic blueprint, single-strand RNA is an all-important messenger, converting the instructions contained in DNA for implementation.

On Monday, a new study by a Japanese team of researchers in Nature Astronomy demonstrated that the samples contained all the "nucleobases" for both DNA and RNA.

These included uracil as well as adenine, guanine, cytosine and thymine. This "does not mean that life existed on Ryugu," the study's lead author, Toshiki Koga, told AFP.

"Instead, their presence indicates that primitive asteroids could produce and preserve molecules that are important for the chemistry related to the origin of life," added the biochemist from the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology.

The discovery also "demonstrates their widespread presence throughout the solar system and reinforces the hypothesis that carbonaceous asteroids contributed to the prebiotic chemical inventory of early Earth," according to the study.

Happy vernal equinox! 🍀

Today marks the first day of spring in the Northern Hemisphere and the first day of autumn in the Southern Hemisphere.

After today, the Sun will shine more directly on the Northern Hemisphere than on the Southern Hemisphere until the autumnal equinox.

America’s return to the Moon is underway 🇺🇸

🚀 Artemis II rolled to the pad overnight in preparation for launch as soon as April 1

Humans really do rule the world. We took over fast and far, more than any other wild vertebrates. We inhabit nearly every corner of the world, and can thrive in deserts, tropical rainforests and even extremely cold climates. But how? Scientists say we did it through not only biological evolution, but another system: cultural evolution. That is what makes us so special.

Culture as the engine of expansion
New research from Arizona State University evolutionary anthropologist Charles Perreault measures just how important culture was relative to biology. In a study appearing in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, he uses empirical data to show human global dominance was predominately achieved through cultural evolution.

"As humans moved into new environments, they didn't have to wait for genetic mutations to adapt to Arctic cold, tropical forests, deserts or high altitudes," said Perreault, a research scientist at the Institute of Human Origins and an associate professor at ASU's School of Human Evolution and Social Change.

"Instead, humans adapted through culturally transmitted technologies, ecological knowledge and cooperative social norms. Innovations in clothing, shelter, hunting strategies, food processing and social organization could spread rapidly through social learning."

The result, his research shows, is that humans encompass about 51 million square miles of land while the typical wild mammal species occupies about 64 square miles.

Putting human uniqueness in numbers
Perreault's work demonstrates that if humans were an average mammal that relied only on genetic evolution, achieving today's geographic range would have required tens of millions of years, thousands of separate species and enormous differences in body size.

"This research helps put human uniqueness into a measurable evolutionary perspective," Perreault said. "We often say that culture makes us different, but here we can estimate by how much. The results suggest that cultural evolution compressed what would normally require roughly 88 million years of biological diversification into about 300,000 years within a single species.

"It reframes recent human history as a kind of adaptive radiation—but one powered by cultural diversification rather than speciation—and shows that adding a cultural inheritance system changes how quickly and extensively a lineage can expand."

Psilocybin, the psychoactive ingredient in “magic mushrooms,” is attracting increasing interest from scientists studying treatments for neuropsychiatric conditions such as depression, anxiety, substance use disorders, and certain neurodegenerative diseases. While research suggests the compound may have therapeutic value, its strong hallucinogenic effects could limit how widely it is used in medicine.

In a study published in ACS’ Journal of Medicinal Chemistry, researchers developed modified forms of psilocin, the active compound produced from psilocybin in the body. In early experiments with mice, these altered molecules maintained biological activity but triggered fewer hallucinogenic-like effects than pharmaceutical-grade psilocybin.

“Our findings are consistent with a growing scientific perspective suggesting that psychedelic effects and serotonergic activity may be dissociated,” says Andrea Mattarei, a corresponding author of the study. “This opens the possibility of designing new therapeutics that retain beneficial biological activity while reducing hallucinogenic responses, potentially enabling safer and more practical treatment strategies.”

Washington State University professor Mesut Cicek and his team repeatedly evaluated ChatGPT by giving it hypotheses drawn from scientific studies. The AI was asked to decide whether each statement was supported by research — essentially judging if it was true or false.

In total, the researchers tested more than 700 hypotheses and submitted each one 10 times to examine how consistent the responses would be.

Accuracy Results and Performance Limits
In the initial 2024 experiment, ChatGPT answered correctly 76.5% of the time. When the study was repeated in 2025, accuracy rose slightly to 80%. However, once the results were adjusted for random guessing, the performance looked far less reliable. The AI was only about 60% better than chance, which the researchers described as closer to a low D than strong performance.

The system had particular difficulty identifying false statements, correctly labeling them only 16.4% of the time. It also showed inconsistency. When given the exact same prompt 10 times, ChatGPT produced consistent results for only about 73% of the cases.

Inconsistent Answers to Identical Questions
“We’re not just talking about accuracy, we’re talking about inconsistency, because if you ask the same question again and again, you come up with different answers,” said Cicek, an associate professor in the Department of Marketing and International Business in WSU’s Carson College of Business and lead author of the new publication.

“We used 10 prompts with the same exact question. Everything was identical. It would answer true. Next, it says it’s false. It’s true, it’s false, false, true. There were several cases where there were five true, five false.”

AI Fluency Versus Real Understanding
The study, published in the Rutgers Business Review, highlights the importance of caution when using AI for important decisions, especially those involving nuance or complex reasoning. While generative AI can produce fluent and convincing language, it does not necessarily demonstrate true understanding.

Cicek said the findings suggest that artificial general intelligence capable of genuine reasoning may still be further away than some expect.

“Current AI tools don’t understand the world the way we do — they don’t have a ‘brain,’” Cicek said. “They just memorize, and they can give you some insight, but they don’t understand what they’re talking about.”

Cigarette butts are the most common form of litter worldwide. Trillions are discarded every year in cities, parks, beaches, along railway tracks and roadside environments. Despite their small size, these remnants of smoked cigarettes represent a persistent form of pollution because their filters are made primarily of cellulose acetate—a plastic polymer derived from natural cellulose and highly resistant to environmental degradation and produced as tightly packed microscopic fibers.

A long-term study has now reconstructed what happens to cigarette filters once they enter the environment. By tracking their transformation over an entire decade, the research reveals that cigarette butts undergo a complex sequence of physical, chemical and biological changes—but they do not fully disappear. Instead, they slowly transform and persist in soils as microplastic-like residues.

The results, published in Environmental Pollution, offer one of the most comprehensive pictures so far of the environmental fate of cigarette filters and highlight the long-term nature of this type of pollution.

Gamma-ray bursts are the most violent explosions in the universe. In a fraction of a second, they can release more energy than the Sun will emit across its entire ten billion year lifetime. Most are over before you've had time to register them, gone in seconds, minutes at most. So when something arrived on 2 July 2025 that kept going for seven hours, fired three distinct bursts spread across an entire day, and then left behind an afterglow lasting months, astronomers knew immediately they were looking at something completely new.

GRB 250702B, detected by NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope, is the longest gamma-ray burst ever recorded and it dwarfs all others in duration. Of the roughly 15,000 bursts catalogued since the phenomenon was first recognised in 1973, only a handful even approach its duration. Normal gamma-ray bursts don't repeat. They arise from cataclysmic, one time events, maybe a pair of neutron stars colliding, or a massive star collapsing in on itself. GRB 250702B did neither. "This is certainly an outburst unlike any other we've seen in the past 50 years," said one member of the detection team. The hunt for an explanation has occupied astronomers ever since.

The new paper published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society focuses on one of the most intriguing possibilities, an intermediate mass black hole. Black holes come in dramatically different sizes. At one end you have stellar mass black holes, a few times heavier than the Sun, formed when massive stars die. At the other, you have the supermassive monsters lurking at the centres of galaxies, millions or billions of solar masses across. In between sits a largely missing population, intermediate mass black holes, ranging from a few hundred to a hundred thousand solar masses. Theory says they should be common. Finding them has proven stubbornly difficult.

The researchers propose that GRB 250702B was produced when an ordinary star like our Sun wandered too close to one of these intermediate mass black holes and was torn apart by its tidal forces. As the shredded stellar material spiralled inward and was consumed, it powered a relativistic jet of particles firing outward at close to the speed of light, generating the extraordinary gamma-ray emission Fermi detected.

Crucially, the repeating nature of the bursts fits this picture neatly. The star wasn't necessarily destroyed in one go. Models suggest it could have been partially stripped across multiple close passes before final disruption, each encounter generating a fresh burst of emission which would explain the near regular spacing of the three Fermi triggers.

A new study published in JNeurosci examined how brief bursts of sleep-like brain activity in awake adults affect their ability to stay focused during demanding tasks. Elaine Pinggal of Monash University and her colleagues investigated whether this unusual brain activity could help explain attention difficulties commonly seen in people with ADHD.

Comparing Brain Activity in ADHD and Neurotypical Adults
The research team monitored sleep-like brain activity in two groups while they completed a task that required sustained attention. The study included 32 adults with ADHD who were not taking medication and 31 neurotypical adults.

Participants with ADHD showed more episodes of sleep-like brain activity during the task. These moments were linked to increased attention lapses compared with the neurotypical group. Additional analysis suggested that this brain activity may help explain the connection between ADHD and attention-related difficulties such as making mistakes during tasks, responding more slowly, and feeling sleepy.

Why Sleep Like Brain Activity Happens
Pinggal explains that these brief brain events are actually a normal part of how the brain responds to demanding mental work.

“Sleep-like brain activity is a normal phenomenon that happens during demanding tasks. Think of going for a long run and getting tired after a while, which makes you pause to take a break. Everyone experiences these brief moments of sleep-like activity. In people with ADHD, however, this activity occurs more frequently, and our research suggests this increased sleep-like activity may be a key brain mechanism that helps explain why these individuals have more difficulty maintaining consistent attention and performance during tasks.”