The amount of heat trapped by Earth reached record levels in 2025, with the consequences of such warming feared to last for thousands of years, the UN warned Monday.

The 11 hottest years ever recorded were all between 2015 and 2025, the United Nations' WMO weather and climate agency confirmed in its flagship State of the Global Climate annual report.

Last year was the second or third hottest year on record, at about 1.43 Celsius above the 1850-1900 average, the World Meteorological Organization said.

"The global climate is in a state of emergency. Planet Earth is being pushed beyond its limits. Every key climate indicator is flashing red," said UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres.

"Humanity has just endured the 11 hottest years on record. When history repeats itself 11 times, it is no longer a coincidence. It is a call to act."

For the first time, the WMO climate report includes the planet's energy imbalance: the rate at which energy enters and leaves the Earth system.

They’re born on their mother’s back, after the eggs are pushed in and covered by her skin! 😮 Hear more about this weird and wonderful creature from Museum scientist Jeff, in this week’s surprising science.

The astronaut who prompted NASA's first medical evacuation earlier this year said Friday that doctors still don't know why he suddenly fell sick at the International Space Station.

Four-time space flier Mike Fincke said he was eating dinner on Jan. 7 after prepping for a spacewalk the next day when it happened. He couldn't talk and remembers no pain, but his anxious crewmates jumped into action after seeing him in distress and requested help from flight surgeons on the ground.

"It was completely out of the blue. It was just amazingly quick," he said in an interview with The Associated Press from Houston's Johnson Space Center.

Fincke, 59, a retired Air Force colonel, said the episode lasted roughly 20 minutes and he felt fine afterward. He said he still does. He never experienced anything like that before or since.

Doctors have ruled out a heart attack and Fincke said he wasn't choking, but everything else is still on the table and could be related to his 549 days of weightlessness. He was 5 ½ months into his latest space station stay when the problem struck like "a very, very fast lightning bolt."

A recent study published in Physical Review Letters reveals that many widely used signatures of criticality in brain data may be statistical artifacts. They propose a more robust framework that, when applied to whole-brain fMRI data, confirms the brain operates near, but not exactly at, a critical point.

Neuroscientists have long found the idea fascinating—that the brain operates near a "critical point," a phase transition between stable and chaotic dynamics. Theory suggests this sweet spot enhances computational flexibility, dynamic range, and sensitivity to inputs. Evidence has mounted over the years from neural recordings showing approximate scale invariance and power-law behavior across spatiotemporal scales.

The concept has even influenced AI, particularly reservoir computing, where networks near the "edge of chaos" tend to perform best. However, the field faces a persistent concern: are these criticality signatures intrinsic to the brain's recurrent dynamics, or do external inputs and data limitations shape them?

Two common features of neural recordings—temporally autocorrelated signals and limited data sampling—can mimic the statistical fingerprints of criticality, even in systems with no genuine collective dynamics whatsoever.

Phys.org spoke to Rubén Calvo Ibáñez, a Ph.D. student at Universidad de Granada and one of the co-authors of the study. "I've always been drawn to fundamental questions—how complicated behavior emerges from simple rules. What excited me about complex systems and non-equilibrium physics is that you can bring those tools to messy, real biological data, like brain activity, and still ask principled questions."

Artificial intelligence is not just changing software. It is also driving a sharp rise in electricity use. In the United States alone, AI systems and data centers consumed about 415 terawatt-hours of electricity in 2024, according to the International Energy Agency. That amounts to more than 10% of the nation’s total energy output, and the figure is expected to double by 2030.

That trend is raising a difficult question for the future of AI: Can these systems become more capable without becoming dramatically more expensive to power?

Researchers at the Tufts University School of Engineering believe the answer may be yes. They have built a proof of concept for an AI approach that could use up to 100 times less energy than today’s standard systems while also producing more accurate results on certain tasks. In a field that often rewards ever larger models and ever larger computing infrastructure, that kind of improvement could be significant.

The work was developed in the laboratory of Matthias Scheutz, Karol Family Applied Technology Professor. It centers on neuro-symbolic AI, which combines standard neural networks with symbolic reasoning, similar to how people break problems into steps and categories.

Researchers at the University of Houston have achieved a major milestone in the race toward practical superconductors, setting a new temperature record under everyday pressure conditions. The advance could eventually help reduce energy waste, lower costs, and improve technologies ranging from power grids to medical imaging.

The team, based at the Texas Center for Superconductivity (TcSUH), reported a transition temperature (Tc) of 151 Kelvin (about minus 122 degrees Celsius, or about minus 188 degrees Fahrenheit). That is now the highest temperature ever recorded for a superconductor operating at ambient pressure. Tc is the threshold below which a material can carry electricity with zero resistance, eliminating energy loss.

The study, led by University of Houston physicists Ching-Wu Chu and Liangzi Deng, was in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Funding came from Intellectual Ventures, the state of Texas through TcSUH, and other organizations.

“Transmitting electricity in the grid loses about 8% of the electricity,” said Chu, professor of physics, TcSUH founding director and the paper’s senior author. “If we conserve that energy, that’s billions of dollars of savings, and it also saves us lots of effort and reduces environmental impacts.”

A multi-institutional team of scientists, co-led by Northwestern University, has taken a crucial step toward implantable "living pharmacies"—tiny devices containing engineered cells that continuously produce medicines inside the body. In a new study published in Device, the team engineered cells to simultaneously produce three different biologics—an anti-HIV antibody, a GLP-1-like peptide used to treat type 2 diabetes, and leptin, a hormone that regulates appetite and metabolism. When implanted under the skin of a small animal model, the device kept drug-producing cells alive and stably delivered all three therapies at once.

Called HOBIT (hybrid oxygenation bioelectronics system for implanted therapy), the new system integrates the engineered cells with oxygen-producing bioelectronics. Roughly the size of a folded stick of gum, the design shields cells from the body's immune system while also providing cells with oxygen and nutrients to keep them alive and producing biologic drugs for several weeks.

With more work, living pharmacies hold the potential to treat chronic conditions with a single, long-lasting therapy—bypassing the need for patients to carry, inject or remember to take medications.

The idea of computers communicating with light instead of electricity is moving closer to reality, thanks to a breakthrough nanolaser developed at the Technical University of Denmark (DTU).

Described in Science Advances, the device is small enough to be embedded by the thousands onto a single microchip. Instead of relying on electrical currents, which generate heat and slow performance, these nanolasers could transmit information using photons. This shift could dramatically increase processing speeds while reducing energy demands across everything from smartphones to massive data centers.

“The nanolaser opens up the possibility of creating a new generation of components that combine high performance with minimal size. This could be in information technology, for example, where ultra-small and energy-efficient lasers can reduce energy consumption in computers, or in the development of sensors for the healthcare sector, where the nanolaser’s extreme light concentration can deliver high-resolution images and ultrasensitive biosensors,” says DTU professor Jesper Mørk.

It's humanity's first flight to the moon since 1972.

In a throwback to Apollo, NASA's Artemis II mission will send four astronauts on a lunar fly-around. They'll hurtle several thousand miles beyond the moon, hang a U-turn and then come straight back. No circling around the moon, no stopping for a moonwalk—just a quick out-and-back lasting less than 10 days.

NASA promises more boot prints in the gray lunar dust, but not before a couple practice missions. The upcoming test flight by Artemis astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch and Jeremy Hansen is the first step in settling the moon this time around.

Here's a snapshot of the Artemis II mission.

Artemis II will be launching from Florida on April 1st at 22:24 UTC. Watch on NASA's broadcast and follow for updates on launch day.

For many people, "protein" is the key element of a food order. However, beyond the preferred choice of meats or plant-based alternatives, proteins encompass a large class of complex biomolecules whose chemical structure is encoded in our genes. Proteins have critical functions in living cells; they help repair and build body tissues, drive metabolic reactions, maintain pH and fluid balance, and keep our immune systems strong.

The hidden rhythms of proteins
To perform their important functions, many proteins have a dynamic molecular structure capable of adopting multiple conformations. For a long time, scientists have suspected that proteins don't change shape at random. Instead, they seem to move according to deep, slow rhythms—like a building that sways gently in the wind rather than shaking violently.

Those slow rhythms guide how a protein bends, twists, and shifts between its different forms. If one could understand those rhythms, one might be able to predict—and even hurry along—the protein's movements.

The problem is that many tools scientists have to make predictions of molecular motion were built for simpler cases. They work well for fast, tiny vibrations, like the quick trembling of a guitar string. But the slow, sweeping motions of proteins are different. They're messy, uneven, and irregular.

A new way to read motion
Recently, the research group of Associate Professor Matthias Heyden in ASU's School of Molecular Sciences has found a new way forward. They developed a method that can tease out these slow, important motions from short computer simulations—snapshots lasting only billionths of a second.

Even better, the method is remarkably reliable: run it again and again, and it tells the same story each time. They have published this work in Science Advances.

Better understanding protein fluctuations, in turn, predicts which larger motions the protein is capable of, and that knowledge can greatly improve drug design, enable more effective cancer treatments, and help find a solution to antibiotic resistance.

Artemis II astronauts will soon set off to fly around the Moon—but their journey started here, on Earth. 🌎

Meet the crew and see how they prepared for this historic moment in Moonbound, free to watch on NASA+. go.nasa.gov/4v1GOVa

NASA's Artemis II mission remains on track for its planned April 1 launch, the space agency announced in a prelaunch news conference Tuesday (March 31).

At the news event, held at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, NASA managers emphasized that both the vehicle and team are ready to fly, with current conditions not pointing to any major last-minute technical concerns. The briefing also broke down the two biggest possible spoilers of tomorrow's launch the weather on the ground and in space.

Yesterday (March 30), the sun produced a X1.4-class solar flare tied to a coronal mass ejection, prompting NOAA's Space Weather Prediction Center to issue a G2 geomagnetic storm watch for March 31 and G1 watches for April 1 (the planned launch date) and April 2. Events like solar flares can interfere with radio communications, navigation systems and spacecraft operations, as well as expose astronauts to harmful radiation.

However, Mark Berger, NASA's Launch Weather Officer for the Artemis II mission, highlighted that the flare is not currently expected to affect the launch. Artemis launch criteria is designed to avoid liftoff during severe solar conditions, but based on the latest outlook, this flare appears to be something NASA is monitoring rather than something that is stalling the launch.

Artemis II will be launching from Florida on April 1st at 22:24 UTC. Watch on NASA's broadcast

A view no human has seen in over 50 years. 🚀

During Artemis II, astronauts will travel from Earth to around the Moon, conducting science from a unique vantage point, with our planet visible outside their windows.

Here’s what we’ll learn: go.nasa.gov/4sCE8vI

A view of Earth from Artemis II. If you can see your region, then you might be able to spot Artemis II with a telescope or binoculars.

Imagine trying to spot a firefly hovering next to a lighthouse from several kilometres away. That's essentially the challenge astronomers face when searching for Earth like planets around other stars. The planet is there, it’s just completely lost in the overwhelming blaze of its host star. Solving that problem is the whole point of a tiny but extraordinarily precise piece of glass called an optical vortex phase mask.

NASA's planned Habitable Worlds Observatory, a future space telescope designed specifically to hunt for signs of life beyond our Solar System, will need to image faint exoplanets directly. To do that, it must suppress incoming starlight by a factor of ten billion. Even a perfect mirror can't achieve that on its own. When light passes through a telescope's circular aperture, it spreads outward into a ringed pattern of light called an Airy pattern, a fundamental consequence of the physics of waves. Those rings can be millions of times brighter than a nearby exoplanet, and they have to go.

That's where the vortex phase mask comes in. Placed at the focal point of the telescope, it applies a carefully engineered delay to the starlight, one that increases continuously as you move around the centre of the mask, like the rising thread of a screw. The result is that the starlight cancels itself out through destructive interference, and what's left can be blocked by a simple aperture stop, leaving only the faint planet light to reach the detector. Light from the exoplanet, arriving at a slight angle, misses the mask's centre and passes through unaffected.

The most promising version of this technology uses a thin layer of liquid crystal polymer, whose long molecular chains can be precisely oriented to manipulate light differently depending on its polarisation direction. Because the delay is produced geometrically rather than by the material's chemical properties, it works across a wide range of wavelengths and that’s crucial for a telescope that needs to analyse the full colour spectrum of a planet's atmosphere.

Live from Kennedy: Artemis II launch coverage is underway. We are tracking every milestone of today's historic launch! Visit our blog for detailed updates:
go.nasa.gov/4v90Ux6

Artemis II will be launching from Florida on April 1st at 22:24 UTC. Watch on NASA's broadcast