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.

PPOD: Titan and Dione 🪐

Saturn's fourth-largest moon, Dione, can be seen through the haze of the planet's largest moon, Titan, in this view of the two, taken by NASA's Cassini spacecraft on December 22, 2011, with the planet and its rings in the background. The north polar hood is visible on Titan here, appearing as a detached layer at the top of the moon.

This view looks toward the sides of Titan (5,150 kilometers across) and Dione (1,123 kilometers across), which are facing away from Saturn. North is up on the moons. This view looks toward the northern, sunlit side of the rings from just above the ring plane.

Credit: NASA NASAJPL Caltech spacescienceins

An international team of researchers, including Virginia Tech scientists Xiaofeng Wang and Boris A. Vinatzer, has identified fungal proteins that can trigger ice formation at relatively warm subzero temperatures. Their findings were published in Science Advances.

This discovery could open the door to new ways of influencing the weather.

Cloud seeding works by releasing particles known as ice nucleators into clouds. These particles cause water droplets to freeze into ice crystals. As more water attaches, the crystals grow larger and heavier. Eventually, they fall, melt as they pass through warmer air, and reach the ground as rain.

Silver iodide is the most commonly used ice-nucleating material, but it is highly toxic. The researchers suggest that fungal proteins could provide a safer alternative.

“If we learn how to cheaply produce enough of this fungal protein, then we could put that into clouds and make cloud seeding much safer,” said Vinatzer, professor in the School of Plant and Environmental Sciences.

Fifty-eight years after it first appeared, string theory remains the most popular candidate for the “theory of everything,” the unified mathematical framework for all matter and forces in the universe. This is much to the chagrin of its rather vocal critics. “String theory is not dead; it’s undead and now walks around like a zombie eating people’s brains,” the former physicist Sabine Hossenfelder said on her popular YouTube channel in 2024.

String theory is a “failure,” the mathematical physicist and blogger Peter Woit often says. His complaint is not that string theory is wrong — it’s that it’s “not even wrong,” as he titled a 2006 book. The theory says that, on scales of billionths of trillionths of trillionths of a centimeter, extra curled-up spatial dimensions reveal themselves and particles resolve into extended objects — strands and loops of energy — rather than points. But this alleged substructure is too small to detect, probably ever. The prediction is untestable.

A further problem is that uncountably many different configurations of dimensions and strings are permitted at those tiny scales; the theory can give rise to a limitless variety of universes. Amid this vast landscape of solutions, no one can hope to find a precise microscopic configuration that undergirds our particular macroscopic world.

These issues are profound indeed. Yet in my experience, the typical high-energy theorist in a prestigious university physics department still thinks string theory has a good chance of being correct, at least in part. The field has become siloed between those who deem it worth studying and those who don’t.

Recently, a new angle of attack has opened up. An approach called bootstrapping has allowed physicists to calculate that, under various starting assumptions about the universe, a key equation from string theory naturally follows. For some experts, these findings support the notion of “string uniqueness,” the idea that it is the only mathematically consistent quantum description of gravity and everything else.

Detergents may begin their journey by cleaning our clothes, but they end up contaminating the environment, flowing into rivers, ponds, and oceans, where they severely disrupt aquatic animal life. Even after wastewater treatment, some chemicals remain and pass through filtration systems, continuing to pollute natural water bodies. A team of researchers from China explored the question: What if our clothes could be washed without detergent?

In a study published in Communications Chemistry, researchers introduced a versatile self-cleaning fabric coating that could eliminate the need for detergents in everyday laundry. By alternately spraying the fabrics with two polymers—poly(diallyldimethylammonium chloride) (PDADMAC) and poly(vinylsulfonic acid) (PVS)—they created a dense hydration layer that allows dirt and microbes to be washed away using only water.

The coating remained effective for over 100 wash cycles. It made laundry quicker and reduced water and electricity consumption by ~82%.

Human-driven climate change is slowing Earth's rotation at a rate not seen in 3.6 million years, with sea level rise increasing the length of days by 1.33 milliseconds per century, according to a new study.

Earth spins faster when its mass is more concentrated, just as twirling figure skaters pull in their arms to speed up and spread out their arms to slow down. Rising sea levels have long been known to redistribute that mass and change the planet's spin, but the newly identified rate is unprecedented, scientists say.

Many factors influence Earth's spin speed. The moon's pull on the planet is the most significant over the long term. Its gravitational pull creates a bulge in the planet that slows Earth's rotation rate, Michael Mann, a climatologist at the University of Pennsylvania who was not involved with the new study, told Live Science. The moon's influence increases Earth's day length by about 2.4 milliseconds per century.

Although the impact would likely not be perceptible to humans, the findings have other real-world implications. For example, Mann said, instruments that require precise knowledge of Earth's rotation rate, such as those on spacecraft, may need to be recalibrated. Other precise timekeeping applications, such as in computing, could be affected, Shahvandi said.

The findings also underscore the rapidity of modern warming. "It tells us about the rapid climate change," Shahvandi said, "[the] melting of snow and ice in polar ice sheets and mountains glaciers, and increase in the sea levels."