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.”

On March 6, Japan’s Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare officially granted conditional and time-limited marketing authorization to two regenerative medical products derived from reprogrammed iPS cells, marking exactly 20 years since the creation of mouse iPS cells. These will be the world's first practical application of iPS cell-derived products.

What Are iPS cells?
The initialism stands for induced pluripotent stem cells. These are adult cells, such as skin or blood cells, that have been reprogrammed to function like embryonic stem cells. They can divide indefinitely and can take the form of any cell type. Thanks to this ability, they can be used to test new drugs and for research in regenerative medicine. This type of cell allows for scientific advancement without the ethical problems that arise from working with embryonic stem cells.

Sheets of Cells Attached to the Wall of the Heart
One of the regenerative medicine products that has been approved is ReHeart, from Qualipse, a startup based at Osaka University. It's a sheet of specialized heart cells called cardiomyocytes differentiated from iPS cells of healthy donors, and it generated considerable buzz when it was presented at the Osaka-Kansai Expo. It's intended for patients with severe heart failure due to ischemic cardiomyopathy who don't recover sufficiently despite standard treatment, including drug therapy and invasive procedures.

Neurons “Implanted” Directly Into the Brain
The second approved product is Amusepri (generic name: laguneprocell) from Sumitomo Pharma and Racthera. It consists of precursor cells destined to become dopamine-producing neurons made from donor iPS cells. It is indicated for improving motor symptoms in patients with Parkinson's disease who have had an inadequate response to existing drug therapies, including levodopa-containing preparations.

CERN's Large Hadron Collider’s high-luminosity upgrade will increase the number of collisions, opening the door to unprecedented precision — and Fermilab is helping level up the CMSExperiment right alongside it.

Cameras that photograph insects overnight and AI that identifies them are among a new generation of tools that could finally allow scientists to track whether the world's plan to save nature is working for its most overlooked creatures. A global team of scientists has found that 23 biodiversity targets agreed by world governments to protect and restore nature by 2030 are well-designed and could—if met—help reverse falling insect numbers.

However, the researchers highlight that dragonflies and damselflies are the only insect group to have been fully assessed for extinction risk globally, illustrating that very few measurements used to track progress are sensitive enough to detect changes in insect populations. The study, published in Conservation Letters, recommends the United Nations establish a dedicated working group to develop insect-focused measurements, and outlines several practical tools that could be used to create a worldwide picture of insect health.

Dr. Andrew Bladon, lead author from the University of Reading, said, "Insects are the foundations of life on Earth, and we are only just beginning to understand how fast we are losing them.

"Technology is opening up possibilities that simply did not exist a decade ago. We can now monitor insects at a scale and speed that was unimaginable to previous generations of scientists. The big question is whether governments are willing to use new technology to hold themselves to account. A plan to save nature that cannot measure whether nature is actually recovering is not good enough."

The European Space Agency announced Thursday it has re-established communication with a spacecraft that is part of its Proba-3 mission, after losing contact with the satellite a month ago. Proba-3, which launched on a two-year mission in 2024, uses two spacecraft flying in precise formation to simulate a solar eclipse more than 60,000 kilometers (37,000 miles) above Earth.

Scientists have used this delicate dance to get a rare glimpse of the sun's little-known outer atmosphere, which is called the corona. One satellite has a 1.4-meter (five-foot) shield that plays the role of the moon in blocking the sun's light, while the other observes the corona from the shadow.

However, something happened to the second spacecraft, which has the crucial coronagraph instrument, on February 14. A chain reaction led to the spacecraft losing its orientation, causing its solar panel to face away from the sun, draining the batteries. The spacecraft then entered survival mode—it has been silently floating through space since.

However, overnight "some miracle happened because we reconnected with the spacecraft," ESA director Josef Aschbacher said on Thursday. The other spacecraft—the one with the shield—had been "following and observing" its lost twin, he told a press conference held after an ESA Council meeting. The lost spacecraft had been "tumbling" when an ESA team in Spain "saw that some sunlight is actually hitting the solar panels," Aschbacher explained.

They seized the chance, using this small amount of power to re-establish a connection. The spacecraft's solar panel is now facing the sun, allowing it to charge its batteries. Next ESA experts will switch the instruments back on and carry out tests to find out how much damage has been done.

Mars is a very different world today than it once was. Scientists believe the planet used to have a thicker atmosphere, liquid water on its surface, and a warmer environment. Now it is cold, dry, and surrounded by only a thin layer of gas.

The main force behind this dramatic change is the solar wind, a constant stream of charged particles flowing from the Sun. Over billions of years, this flow has steadily stripped away much of Mars’ atmosphere. As the atmosphere thinned, temperatures dropped and surface water gradually disappeared.

NASA’s ESCAPADE Mission Investigates Mars
To better understand this transformation, NASA launched the ESCAPADE (Escape and Plasma Acceleration and Dynamics Explorers) mission on November 13, 2025. Its scientific instruments were activated and fully operational as of February 25. These tools will study how Mars lost its atmosphere and how solar activity continues to affect the planet today. The mission will also collect new data on space weather near Earth and during the journey to Mars.

Once at Mars, the mission’s results could help NASA prepare for future human exploration by improving understanding of the planet’s harsh environment.

“The pioneering ESCAPADE duo will not only investigate the Sun’s role in transforming Mars into an uninhabitable planet, but also will help inform the development of space weather protocols for solar events directed at Mars during future human missions to the Red Planet,” said Joe Westlake, heliophysics division director at NASA Headquarters in Washington. “By joining the heliophysics fleet of missions across the solar system, ESCAPADE will be another weather station making humans and technology in space safer and more successful.”

Ocean waves are among the most plentiful and reliable sources of renewable energy on Earth. However, turning that constant motion into usable electricity has proven difficult. Most existing wave energy systems work efficiently only under specific conditions, which limits their usefulness in the ever changing ocean environment. This has created a need for more flexible and effective technologies.

New Gyroscopic Wave Energy Converter Design
A researcher from the University of Osaka has investigated a new type of system designed to overcome these limitations. The device, known as a gyroscopic wave energy converter (GWEC), was evaluated for its ability to support large-scale power generation. The results of this work were published in the Journal of Fluid Mechanics.

The GWEC produces electricity using a spinning flywheel housed within a floating structure. As the platform moves with the waves, the flywheel converts that motion into energy. Because the system relies on gyroscopic behavior, it can be adjusted to capture energy efficiently across a wide range of wave frequencies instead of just a narrow band.

Alzheimer's disease, the most common form of dementia, has beaten back potential treatments for decades. Past research suggested it was a complicated, multifactorial disease in which a patchwork of biological and lifestyle factors combined to increase or decrease risk.

But a new study published in January in the journal Nature suggests the risk of developing the disease is determined largely by one key gene, called apolipoprotein E (APOE). Lifestyle and environmental factors can dial the risk up or down modestly in people with susceptible gene variants, but those who have protective versions of the APOE gene are extremely unlikely to develop Alzheimer's. And a staggering 99% of the population carries at least one disease-fueling version of the gene.

The findings raise the possibility that gene therapy targeting APOE could dramatically reduce the risk of Alzheimer's for a large swath of people who are at risk of developing the disease, thus paving the way for one of the first widely used gene therapies, experts told Live Science.