Is your houseplant thirsty? Are crops getting enough water? Is a forest at high risk of wildfire? Leaf health can answer all these questions, and researchers at The University of Texas at Austin have developed new technology to measure hydration levels with greater accuracy and without hurting the plant. The researchers developed an electronic tattoo for leaves that uses the hyperflexible and sustainable material graphene to track hydration levels. It sticks on the leaves without harming them, a major improvement over current methods that work only with dead or dried-out leaves or provide indirect measurements.

"Being able to directly measure and monitor the live leaf over time, at the point of photosynthesis, gives us more information to understand the health of our plant ecosystems, whether that's an individual plant or an entire forest," said Jean Anne Incorvia, associate professor in the Cockrell School of Engineering's Chandra Family Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and one of the leaders on the new research published recently in Nano Letters.

Artemis II Moon mission complete!
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- Space Launch System rocket launched crew into space
- Orion spacecraft kept astronauts safe
- Flew around the Moon, observed its far side
- New human spaceflight distance record
- Crew safely returned to Earth
- Inspired the WORLD

In a demonstration that could help pave the way for gene therapies with fewer side effects, several human cell types have been genetically modified with protein nanoparticles designed at University of Michigan Engineering and Michigan Medicine. Gene therapy has been enormously successful for treating disorders of the blood, including sickle cell disease and leukemia. However, using a virus as a vector for treatment can create unwanted side effects, such as secondary cancers and immune system overreactions. With the nanoparticles, the research team aims to develop a safer method for delivering gene therapies.

In a proof-of-concept experiment, the researchers used nanoparticles to modify several types of human cells. They made human liver cancer cells, kidney cells and immune cells glow green by giving them genes for green fluorescent protein. The cells activated the new genes after they engulfed and digested the nanoparticles, releasing the DNA or messenger RNA packed inside. The work is published in the journal Advanced Materials.

"There are a lot of diseases where a protein is missing or dysfunctional due to a single mutation, and we can definitely correct for that by introducing a new gene," said Joerg Lahann, the Wolfgang Pauli Collegiate Professor of Chemical Engineering, director of the U-M Biointerfaces Institute and the corresponding author of the study.

"Typically, this is done with viruses, but the viruses can be toxic and activate the immune cells. So there has been a push in the field to replace virus-based gene editing strategies."

When lasers were invented in the 1960s, they opened new avenues for scientific discovery and everyday applications, from scanners at the grocery store to corrective eye surgery. Conventional lasers control photons—individual particles of light—but over the past 20 years, scientists have invented lasers that control other fundamental particles, including phonons—individual particles of vibration or sound. Controlling phonons could open even more possibilities with lasers, such as taking advantage of unique quantum properties like entanglement.

A new squeezed phonon laser developed by researchers at the University of Rochester and Rochester Institute of Technology provides precise control over phonons at the nanoscale level. This could give new insights into the nature of gravity, particle acceleration, and quantum physics.

In a paper in Nature Communications, the researchers describe how they coax these individual particles of mechanical motion to behave like a laser.

Nick Vamivakas, the Marie C. Wilson and Joseph C. Wilson Professor of Optical Physics with the URochester Institute of Optics, and his collaborators first demonstrated a phonon laser by trapping and levitating phonons with an optical tweezer in a vacuum in 2019. But to make this technology useful for extremely accurate measurements, they had to overcome a key obstacle fundamental to both photon and phonon lasers: noise, or unwanted disturbances that make a signal difficult to accurately read.

Researchers led by Botond Roska at the Institute of Molecular and Clinical Ophthalmology Basel (IOB), along with an international team, have uncovered genetic pathways and chemical compounds that can help protect cone photoreceptors. These cells are damaged in diseases such as age-related macular degeneration, a leading cause of vision loss.

Why Cone Cells Matter for Sight
Cone photoreceptors are located in the macula and play a crucial role in everyday vision tasks like reading, recognizing faces, and seeing color. When these cells die, as they do in many inherited retinal disorders and macular degeneration, central vision begins to fade. Despite years of research, there are still no approved treatments that can stop this process. This study, led by first authors Stefan Spirig, Alvaro Herrero Navarro, and colleagues, tackles that challenge using a human-based experimental model.

The burst of animal diversification spanning the transition from the Ediacaran to the Cambrian periods stands as one of the most consequential turning points in Earth’s history.

Yet the fossil record offers only a fragmented view of that transformation: Ediacaran communities bear little resemblance to those of the Cambrian, leaving the pivotal moment when major animal groups emerged frustratingly out of reach.

“Our discovery closes a major gap in the earliest phases of animal diversification,” said Dr. Gaorong Li, a researcher at Oxford University.

“For the first time, we demonstrate that many complex animals, normally only found in the Cambrian, were present in the Ediacaran period, meaning that they evolved much earlier than previously demonstrated by fossil evidence.”

For over half a century, people in Central Africa have told tales of the fish seen climbing waterfalls, but these claims have never been officially confirmed. Now, these fish have finally been caught on camera, studied more closely, and described in a study published in Scientific Reports.

An arduous vertical journey
The shellear fish (Parakneria thysi), found in the upper Congo Basin, are tiny 37–48 mm-long fish that can grow up to a size of around 96 mm. Researcher Pacifique Kiwele Mutambala from the University of Lubumbashi in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and his team documented the shellear fish climbing waterfalls from 2018–2020. In particular, the fish were recorded scaling the Luvilombo Falls on the Luvilombo River, which is a 50-foot (15 meter) waterfall. Thousands of shellear were seen migrating upstream, clinging to wet rock surfaces in the splash zone.

Humans may have been shaped in part by an unexpected force: repeated exposure to high-temperature burn injuries. New research suggests this long history has influenced how the body repairs damage, responds to infection, and reacts under severe trauma.

For over a million years, the ability to control fire has been central to human progress. It enabled cooking, warmth, and later technological development, helping drive both cultural and genetic change that distinguishes humans from other species. At the same time, this close relationship with fire introduced a unique and persistent risk of high-temperature injuries.

Humans experience burns, and survive them, far more often than other animals. While most species instinctively avoid fire, humans have integrated it into daily life. As a result, minor burns are a common experience for most people.

A study published in BioEssays, led by researchers at Imperial College London, proposes that this repeated exposure to burns may have shaped human evolution. The findings suggest that humans developed genetic traits that differ from other primates and mammals, influencing how the body handles both mild and severe burn injuries.

A Chinese satellite equipped with a robotic "octopus arm" has passed a key refueling test in low Earth orbit (LEO), according to state-run media. The achievement highlights China's continued leadership with this particular technology, which NASA has not yet caught up with.

The experimental spacecraft will eventually deploy a giant balloon in LEO, which could help solve another important issue surrounding satellite "megaconstellations" like SpaceX's Starlink network.

The satellite, dubbed Hukeda-2 (also known as Yuxing-3 06 within China), launched March 16 aboard the Kuaizhou-11 rocket from Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center, according to the website of Jonathan McDowell, a now-retired astronomer at the Harvard and Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics who has been tracking the movements of Earth-orbiting spacecraft for more than two decades. It was one of eight satellites deployed during this mission, and it is now orbiting Earth at an altitude of around 335 miles (540 kilometers).

Hukeda-2 is a demonstration satellite intended to test new technologies in LEO. Its most notable attachment is an octopus-like robotic arm that "can curl, twist and wrap around objects to work in tight, complex spaces, with a nozzle-like tip at one end designed to line up and connect with a target port," according to the South China Morning Post.

The arm is made of a series of spring-like tubes threaded with cables attached to a motor, allowing it to bend in almost any direction and make the small adjustments needed to dock with another satellite while both spacecraft are traveling at speeds of around 16,800 mph (27,000 km/h).

Using high-intensity lasers, researchers have taken an important step toward miniaturization of particle accelerators by demonstrating free-electron laser amplification at extreme ultraviolet wavelengths (27–50 nm), with an acceleration length of only a few millimeters. By generating high-quality, monoenergetic electron beams (i.e. beams where all the electrons have nearly the same energy), they have achieved a key milestone toward compact accelerator technologies.

The doctoral thesis of Sophia Hollick, Ph.D. '25, a recent graduate of Yale's Wright Lab in professor Reina Maruyama's group, has significantly contributed to answering a decades-long question in her field about whether or not a signal observed in an experiment that has taken data since 1997 was indicative of a direct detection of dark matter. The results of her analysis, which have excluded the dark matter explanation with greater confidence, were published in Physics Review Letters in the article "Combined Annual Modulation Dark Matter Search with COSINE-100 and ANAIS-112."

Testing DAMA
In 1997, the DAMA/NaI experiment at the Gran Sasso National Laboratory in Italy observed a signal whose annual variability was suggestive of dark matter. Despite the follow-up DAMA/LIBRA experiment producing similar results, claims of direct dark matter detection drew skepticism from the physics community.

To test the claims independently, sister experiments ANAIS-112 and COSINE-100 were constructed using the same basic design as DAMA/NaI and DAMA/LIBRA. COSINE-100, located at the Yangyang Underground Laboratory in South Korea, began taking data in 2016. ANAIS-112, located at the Canfranc Underground Laboratory (LSC) in Spain, began taking data in 2017. Maruyama is the Principal Investigator (PI) and scientific co-spokesperson of COSINE-100.

All of these experiments were designed to search for the signature of a dark matter candidate scattering off the sodium iodide detector. Such a signature should contain a distinct annual modulation because the detector's speed relative to the Milky Way's dark matter varies as Earth orbits the sun. Observations of such modulation by DAMA/NaI and DAMA/LIBRA are inconsistent with other direct-detection experiments and with model predictions. But the reproducibility of these observations had not been tested robustly using identical techniques.

ANAIS-112 and COSINE-100 enabled such a test by using the same sodium iodide detector material as the DAMA experiments, while including some extra analysis techniques designed to reduce background noise and increase event-detection rates.

The data sets from both ANAIS-112 and COSINE-100, each working independently, were found to contain no such variability, tentatively ruling out dark matter as the cause of the earlier observations. Hollick's 2025 thesis combined the data from both ANAIS-112 and COSINE-100, and statistical analysis of the combined dataset showed no significant evidence of annual modulation in the relevant energy regions. This result effectively rules out dark matter as the origin for the DAMA/LIBRA signal.

Hollick explained, "These results end a longstanding debate (almost 30 years) about the source of the DAMA/LIBRA annual modulation signal. They show that, due to the irreproducibility of the signal in COSINE-100 and ANAIS-112, the modulation cannot be attributed to dark matter."

Researchers at the Institute of Materials Science of Seville (ICMS), a joint center of the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC) and the University of Seville (US), have created a hybrid device that can generate energy from both sunlight and rainfall at the same time.

At the core of the system is a patented thin film that protects perovskite solar cells and improves their durability, even in harsh weather. The same film also enables nanogenerators to produce more than 100 volts from the impact of a single raindrop, which is enough to power small portable electronics.

Halide perovskite solar cells are made from synthetic crystalline materials that absorb sunlight very efficiently. While silicon remains the dominant material in solar technology, perovskites are considered a promising alternative because they combine high performance with lower production costs.

DNA carries the genetic instructions for all living things, but it is also an extraordinarily dense way to store information. Just one gram can hold roughly 215 million gigabytes of data.

If that level of storage could be harnessed in electronics, it could lead to far more efficient data centers, faster processing, and the ability to handle much more complex information. The challenge has been making a biological molecule like DNA work within electronic systems. Researchers at Penn State say they have now found a way to connect the two.

The team’s approach, reported in Advanced Functional Materials with a patent application underway, relies on two main components. One is synthetic DNA, made from chemically engineered short sequences designed for specific electronic functions. The other is crystalline perovskite, a semiconductor widely used in solar cells, lasers, and data storage devices.

“Biology and electronics are different domains,” said Kavya S. Keremane, co-corresponding author and postdoctoral researcher in materials science and engineering at Penn State. “Bridging these two fields required developing an entirely new materials platform that allows them to function seamlessly together. By combining the information storage capabilities of DNA with the exceptional electronic properties of perovskite semiconductors, we created a bio-hybrid system that fundamentally changes how low-power memory devices can be designed.”

The Atlantic current system, or more formally the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), is more likely to weaken than previously thought. That's the conclusion of a new study published in the journal Science Advances, which used more refined modeling techniques to get a clearer picture of the future. If these new projections are correct, the consequences could be severe, particularly for Europe and Africa.

The AMOC is a major system of Atlantic Ocean currents that helps regulate climate by transporting heat from the tropics toward the North Atlantic. It is often likened to a conveyor belt because it carries warm water north, where it cools and sinks before flowing back south deep underwater.

While it was already known to be weakening, most climate models disagree on the exact magnitude of the decline, but generally point to a one-third reduction by 2100. However, this new study puts the figure at a much more substantial 51%.

NASA has given approval to begin implementing its project to support ESA's Rosalind Franklin mission. Scheduled to launch in 2028, this Mars rover will be the first to search for signs of past or present life under the Red Planet’s surface. go.nasa.gov/4vAIeX1

Why do some people struggle to adapt to new information and stay locked into outdated beliefs?

Scientists at MIT may have found a key reason. A newly identified gene mutation appears to disrupt a brain circuit that helps us update our understanding of the world. When this system fails, the brain may cling to old ideas even when reality changes.

In experiments with mice, researchers showed that this mutation interferes with the brain’s ability to adjust decisions based on new input, a problem that closely mirrors cognitive symptoms seen in schizophrenia.

The mutation occurs in a gene called grin2a, previously linked to schizophrenia in large genetic studies. The findings suggest that targeting this circuit could eventually help improve cognitive function in some patients.

“If this circuit doesn’t work well, you cannot quickly integrate information,” says Guoping Feng, the James W. and Patricia T. Poitras Professor in Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT, a member of the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT, and the associate director of the McGovern Institute for Brain Research at MIT. “We are quite confident this circuit is one of the mechanisms that contributes to the cognitive impairment that is a major part of the pathology of schizophrenia.”