Astronomers have detected an atmosphere that shouldn't exist on an icy object beyond the orbit of Pluto — sparking calls for follow-up observations.

Japanese astronomers found evidence for a thin atmosphere surrounding the body, which is located within the Kuiper Belt in the cold outer reaches of the solar system, according to a new study published May 4 in the journal Nature Astronomy.

The object, known as (612533) 2002 XV93, is supposed to be too small and too cold to sustain an atmosphere. At about 311 miles (500 kilometers) across — a little wider than the Grand Canyon is long — the object is more than four times smaller than Pluto, which was thought to be the only body beyond Neptune with an atmosphere in our solar system.

The new observations challenge assumptions about which objects can sustain atmospheres in our solar system. However, these initial findings must be verified by outside researchers, with some experts keen to make follow-up observations with the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) to confirm the atmosphere exists.

"This is an amazing development, but it sorely needs independent verification," Alan Stern, a planetary scientist and principal investigator for NASA's New Horizons mission to explore Pluto and the Kuiper Belt, who was not involved in the new study, told the Associated Press. "The implications are profound if verified."

Lidar systems use pulses of infrared light to measure distance and map a 3D scene with high resolution, allowing autonomous vehicles to rapidly react to obstacles that appear in their path. But traditional lidar sensors are expensive, bulky systems with many moving parts that degrade over time, limiting how the sensors can be deployed.

A new study from MIT researchers could help to enable next-generation lidar sensors that are compact, durable, and have no moving parts. The key advance is a novel design for a silicon-photonics chip, which is a semiconductor device that manipulates light rather than electricity.

Typically, such silicon-photonics chip-based systems have a restricted field of view, so a silicon-photonics-based lidar would not be able to scan angles in the periphery. Existing workarounds to this problem increase noise and hamper precision.

To avoid these drawbacks, the MIT researchers designed and demonstrated an array of integrated antennas that minimizes unwanted crosstalk between the antennas. Their innovation allows a lidar chip to scan a wider field of view while maintaining low-noise operation compared to other silicon-photonics-based approaches.

This novel demonstration could fuel the development of advanced lidar sensors for demanding applications like autonomous vehicle navigation, aerial surveying, and construction site monitoring.

Earthset 🌏🌑🛰️ (Apr 6)

Camera setup by Artemis II Christina H Koch

Raw photos courtesy of the ESRS NASA Earth NASA Johnson
ID ART002-E-21062 to 21302
(only 400mm ƒ/8 frames - stabilized - linear interpolation - rotoscoping)

Edit by Riccardo Rossi (ISAA)

Scientists have found that the brain is more physically linked to the body than once believed. Reporting in Nature Neuroscience, a research team used mice and computer models to uncover a possible explanation for why physical activity benefits brain health.

Their findings suggest that when abdominal muscles tighten, they squeeze blood vessels connected to the spinal cord and brain. This pressure causes the brain to shift slightly inside the skull. That small motion appears to help cerebrospinal fluid move across the brain, which may carry away waste that can interfere with normal brain function.

How Abdominal Contractions Influence Brain Motion
Patrick Drew, professor of engineering science and mechanics, of neurosurgery, of biology and of biomedical engineering at Penn State, said the study builds on earlier research showing that sleep and neuron loss can affect how cerebrospinal fluid moves through the brain.

“Our research explains how just moving around might serve as an important physiological mechanism promoting brain health,” said Drew, corresponding author on the paper. “In this study, we found that when the abdominal muscles contract, they push blood from the abdomen into the spinal cord, just like in a hydraulic system, applying pressure to the brain and making it move. Simulations show that this gentle brain movement will drive fluid flow in and around the brain. It is thought the movement of fluid in the brain is important for removing waste and preventing neurodegenerative disorders. Our research shows that a little bit of motion is good, and it could be another reason why exercise is good for our brain health.”

Drew, who also serves as associate director of the Huck Institutes of the Life Sciences, compared the process to a hydraulic system in which pressure drives fluid movement. In this case, the “pump” is the abdominal contraction. Even mild tightening, such as bracing before standing up or taking a step, can create this effect. The pressure is transmitted through the vertebral venous plexus, a network of veins connecting the abdominal and spinal cavities, which results in subtle brain movement.

Smell plays a vital role in daily life. It helps us detect danger, enriches the way food tastes, and is closely tied to memory and emotion. Even so, scientists have long struggled to fully explain how this sense works at a basic biological level.

“Olfaction is super-mysterious,” said Sandeep (Robert) Datta, professor of neurobiology in the Blavatnik Institute at Harvard Medical School. Compared with sight, hearing, and touch, the science behind smell has remained less developed.

First Detailed Map of Smell Receptors in the Nose
Using mice, Datta and his team have now produced the first detailed map showing how more than a thousand different smell receptors are arranged inside the nose.

Their findings overturn a long-standing assumption. Instead of being randomly distributed, the neurons that carry these receptors are arranged in a highly organized way. They form horizontal stripes that extend from the top of the nose to the bottom, grouped by receptor type.

“Our results bring order to a system that was previously thought to lack order, which changes conceptually how we think this works,” said Datta, senior author of the study.

The team also found that this layout in the nose aligns with corresponding maps in the olfactory bulb of the brain. This connection offers new clues about how scent signals travel from the nose into the brain.

100 years of Sir David Attenborough: A century of storytelling

"I've been lucky enough to live through the golden age of natural history filmmaking. I've enjoyed every minute of it."

A lifetime dedicated to bringing the natural world closer to us all.

Happy birthday, Sir David Attenborough – from Planet Earth 💚🌍

Cruises are so closely associated with illness that the highly contagious norovirus is commonly called the “cruise ship virus.” But a ship headed for Spain’s Canary Islands has attracted global attention due to a rare outbreak of hantavirus that’s left three dead. While alarming, health officials and infectious disease experts say the risk to the general public right now is low because hantavirus is less contagious than other respiratory diseases like the coronavirus responsible for the Covid-19 pandemic.

“This is not Covid, this is not influenza. It spreads very, very differently,” Maria Van Kerkhove, director of epidemic and pandemic preparedness and prevention at the World Health Organization, said at a press conference on Thursday.

During the briefing, WHO director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus confirmed eight hantavirus cases among passengers of the MV Hondius luxury cruise ship, including the three who died. Typically transmitted by rodents, hantavirus can cause severe disease in humans. People usually get sick by inhaling air that’s contaminated with droppings, urine, or saliva from infected rodents. But the particular strain identified in the cruise ship cases, called the Andes virus, can spread between people.

Health officials in several countries are working to trace the contacts of 29 people who disembarked the ship on the remote South Atlantic island of St. Helena on April 24, about two weeks after the first hantavirus death occurred. A Swiss man who left the ship early has tested positive for the virus and is being treated, and two people in the UK are reportedly self-isolating after returning home. Six people from the US were among those who got off the ship.

“The Administration is closely monitoring the situation with U.S. travelers onboard the M/V Hondius cruise ship with confirmed hantavirus,” the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said in a statement on Wednesday.

Yet experts say there’s no need to panic at this point.

“It doesn’t spread terribly well, so I don't have any concerns of this being the next Covid,” says Steven Bradfute, an immunologist and associate director of the Center for Global Health at the University of New Mexico. “Most of the spread in the past with this virus has been with close contacts—people sharing a bed, people sharing food, that sort of thing.”

The virus doesn’t spread easily with casual contact, and asymptomatic spread—a major driver of Covid cases during the pandemic—is also less likely. The available data on the Andes virus suggests it’s most likely to be transmitted when somebody is visibly sick, Bradfute says. Symptoms include fever, muscle aches, fatigue, and dizziness, which can progress to coughing, shortness of breath, and difficulty breathing.

“That is actually really helpful, because it makes it a lot easier to do contact tracing and to identify high-risk individuals,” he says, though he cautions that outbreaks of Andes virus are uncommon, and just because the virus has behaved one way in the past does not mean it always will. “The infections have been rare enough that we can’t say that with certainty.”

Cytotoxic T lymphocytes serve as the immune system’s specialized “killer” cells, targeting and eliminating infected or cancerous cells with remarkable accuracy. Their effectiveness depends on a tightly controlled contact point known as the “immune synapse,” where they release toxic molecules that destroy the target while leaving nearby healthy cells unharmed. Until recently, scientists could not clearly observe how these structures are organized.

Researchers at the University of Geneva (UNIGE) and the Lausanne University Hospital (CHUV) have now visualized these processes in three dimensions while preserving conditions close to their natural state. Their findings, published in Cell Reports, show how the internal organization of cytotoxic T cells supports their function and point to new possibilities in immuno-oncology.

How Killer T Cells Precisely Eliminate Threats
When the body encounters infection or cancer, cytotoxic T lymphocytes attach to the affected cell and form the immune synapse. Through this interface, they release toxic compounds that trigger the death of the target cell. This highly controlled process allows the immune system to remove harmful cells without damaging surrounding tissue.

Although the overall mechanism is well known, studying its fine structure at the nanometer scale inside intact human cells has been difficult. One major challenge comes from sample preparation, which can distort delicate cellular features. Traditional imaging methods often require compromises between resolution, the size of the area observed, and the preservation of natural structures.

Cornell University scientists have made significant progress toward what many consider the holy grail of male birth control: a safe, long-acting, fully effective, and nonhormonal contraceptive that can be reversed.

Stopping Sperm Production by Targeting Meiosis
In a proof-of-principle study conducted in mice over six years, researchers showed that interrupting a natural checkpoint in meiosis, the process responsible for producing sex cells, can temporarily halt sperm production. Importantly, this approach worked without causing permanent damage.

To achieve this, the team used JQ1, a small molecule inhibitor originally developed as a research tool for studying cancer and inflammatory diseases. Although JQ1 is not suitable as a treatment due to neurological side effects, it is known to interfere with a specific stage of meiosis called prophase 1. This allowed the researchers to demonstrate for the first time that sperm production can be safely and reversibly stopped by targeting meiosis and sperm production at this stage.

“We’re practically the only group that’s pushing the idea that contraception targets in the testis are a feasible way to stop sperm production,” said Paula Cohen, professor of genetics and director of the Cornell Reproductive Sciences Center.

“Our study shows that mostly we recover normal meiosis and complete sperm function, and more importantly, that the offspring are completely normal,” Cohen said.

Seasonal models are predicting an El Niño climate pattern that could be the strongest on record, bringing with it more extreme weather.

"I think we're going to see weather events that we've never seen in modern history before," WFLA-TV Chief Meteorologist and Climate Specialist Jeff Berardelli, in Tampa, Florida, said Friday.

An El Niño event is expected to develop from the middle of this year, impacting global temperature and rainfall patterns, according to the World Meteorological Organization. While the models indicate that this may be a strong event, the WMO cautioned that the models also have a harder time making accurate forecasts in the spring.

What El Niño is
El Niño is a cyclical and natural warming of patches of the equatorial Pacific that then alters the world's weather patterns. Its counterpart, La Niña, is marked by waters that are cooler than average.

Berardelli said an El Niño event essentially redistributes heat on Earth. Currently, the subsurface heat in the Pacific is moving east across the ocean and ascending to the surface from the deep waters, the initial stages of El Niño.

The WMO's Global Seasonal Climate Update showed that sea-surface temperatures are rising rapidly. There is high confidence in the onset of El Niño, followed by further intensification in the months to follow, according to Wilfran Moufouma Okia, chief of climate prediction at WMO.

El Niño typically occurs every two to seven years and lasts around nine to 12 months, WMO said.

🕷️ Scientists are rethinking what venomous really means and the results are surprising. 🤔

Find out how expanding the scientific definition of venom is dramatically increasing the number of species we consider as venomous.

For the first time, scientists have measured the instantaneous mind-blowing power of jets blasting from a black hole.

The jet power from this relatively close black hole-star system is equivalent to 10,000 suns, an international research team reported Thursday. They also tracked the jet speed: roughly 355 million mph (540 million kph)—half the speed of light.

Located 7,200 light-years away, Cygnus X-1 features not only a black hole—the first one ever identified more than a half-century ago—but a blue supergiant star, its constant companion. A light-year is nearly 6 trillion miles (9.7 trillion kilometers).

The University of Oxford's Steve Prabu and his team based their findings on 18 years of high-resolution radio imaging obtained by a global telescope network. He conducted the research while still at Australia's Curtin University, which led the study published in Nature Astronomy.

Prabu and his colleagues were able to measure the swift power of these "dancing jets" as he calls them, as they were pushed in opposite directions by the star's wind. The group based its calculations on how much the jets were bent by the stellar wind as well as computer modeling.

The human brain is constantly managing streams of information that move at very different speeds. Some signals require immediate responses to sudden changes in the environment, while others involve slower forms of thinking, such as interpreting meaning, context, or complex situations.

A new study from Rutgers Health, published in Nature Communications, examined how the brain combines these fast and slow forms of processing through its network of white matter connections. Researchers say this coordination is essential for cognition, behavior, and the ability to respond effectively to the world around us.

Different parts of the brain are tuned to process information over specific time ranges. Scientists refer to these patterns as intrinsic neural timescales, or INTs.

“To affect our environment through action, our brains must combine information processed over different timescales,” said Linden Parkes, assistant professor of Psychiatry at Rutgers Health and the senior author of the study. “The brain achieves this by leveraging its white matter connectivity to share information across regions, and this integration is crucial for human behavior.”

Mapping the Brain’s Communication Networks
To explore how this system works, Parkes and his colleagues analyzed multimodal brain imaging data from 960 people. The team created detailed maps of each participant’s brain connections, known as connectomes, and used mathematical models designed to track how complex systems evolve over time. This allowed the researchers to study how information travels through the brain’s communication pathways.

“Our work probes the mechanisms underlying this process in humans by directly modeling regions’ INTs from their connectivity,” said Parkes, a core member of the Rutgers Brain Health Institute and the Center for Advanced Human Brain Imaging Research. “This draws a direct link between how brain regions process information locally and how that processing is shared across the brain to produce behavior.”

Back when dinosaurs stomped the Earth, dinky mammals scurried about in their shadows. The little furballs, hiding out in underground burrows, provided a fresh niche for a novel reptile: the snake. Skinny snakes could squeeze into the homes of mammals and gobble them up.

At least, that's how the dawn of snakes is imagined by Marc Tollis, an evolutionary biologist at Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff. No one knows for sure. Like the creatures themselves, the snake fossil record is long and thin, leaving gaps in snaky history. Major questions, such as where they got their start and who their closest relatives are, remain unanswered.

Today, new fossils and modern techniques are updating the story of snakes. Starting about 125 million years ago, snakes used their flexible body plans to diversify like crazy, conquering regions that now make up six continents, plus the Indian and Pacific Oceans — and Tollis would not be surprised to find snake fossils in once-balmy Antarctica, either.

Microplastics are absorbing heat in the atmosphere and contributing to global warming, a new study reveals.

Microplastics are infamous for being everywhere, contaminating ecosystems and accumulating inside our bodies. Scientists have known for a while that plastics are also blown high into the atmosphere, where they are now pervasive, but it was unclear what impact they might be having up there.

Now, the new study, published Monday (May 4) in the journal Nature Climate Change, has found that overall, plastic particles create a warming effect. This is because, while very-light-colored plastics scatter sunlight back into space, darker-colored plastics absorb sunlight and radiation.

Study co-author Drew Shindell, a distinguished professor of Earth science at Duke University, told Live Science that the climate change impact of plastic particles is fairly small  —  comparable to the emissions of a small country. In numbers, this is the equivalent of around a couple of percent of the contribution from carbon dioxide (CO2) — the main driver of climate change — or a couple hundredths of a degree of warming. However, the researchers' modeling was based on a limited understanding of the amount of plastic in the atmosphere, so the extent of the warming effect is uncertain.

"The key finding is really that the warming strongly outweighs the cooling," Shindell said. "I think we have a lot of confidence in that because we did all of these measurements in the laboratory of how [microplastics and nanoplastics] interact with sunlight. What we don't have so much confidence in and what's still a big uncertainty is exactly how many of these are in the atmosphere."

The growing popularity of electronic devices—from fitness trackers and laptops to smartphones—is driving demand for more energy-efficient computing chips. Now, researchers have found a way to change the electronic properties of a common semiconductor material, potentially laying the foundation for faster, lower-power data storage and processing.

Transforming a common chip material
In a study published in Science, a UC Berkeley-led team of researchers discovered they can transform titanium dioxide (TiO₂) into a ferroelectric material by reducing its thickness to less than 3 nanometers (nm), roughly the diameter of a single strand of human DNA. These findings, according to the researchers, could open a pathway toward ultra-scaled, energy-efficient electronic devices.

Ferroelectric materials, with their ability to switch electric polarizations, have a long history in the semiconductor industry. Today, many researchers believe that they may hold the key to enabling next-generation, energy-efficient nanoelectronics, including non-volatile memory, logic devices and emerging computing technologies.

Antimicrobial resistance is creating growing challenges for both healthcare and food production, increasing the need for affordable new materials that can fight dangerous pathogens.

A multidisciplinary team led by Flinders University, working with researchers from the UK, has developed a new material designed for safe and effective antimicrobial and antifungal use.

The World Health Organization has identified antimicrobial resistance as one of the century’s most serious global health threats. The problem involves dangerous pathogens, including Staphylococcus aureus, Klebsiella pneumoniae, non-typhoidal Salmonella, and Mycobacterium tuberculosis.

Novel Sulfur-Based Polymer Shows Promise
“Importantly, the antimicrobial does not harm human or plant cells, so it has potential in medicine and agriculture,” says Professor Justin Chalker, whose research group recently created an innovative photochemical reaction used in the new study published in Chemical Science.

“The new antimicrobial is a sulfur-rich polymer material which overcome previous limitations in sulfur-based preparations and shows impressive potency against a variety of fungal and bacterial pathogens.”

Sulfur and sulfur-based compounds have been used as antimicrobials for many years, but they are often malodorous (strong smelling) and difficult to formulate because of their limited solubility.

Inside a fusion reactor, matter is heated to temperatures hotter than the Sun and confined by powerful magnetic fields. But keeping this superheated plasma stable long enough to produce usable energy remains one of the field’s toughest challenges.

One major problem is that the plasma edge can unleash violent bursts of energy capable of damaging reactor walls, while the exhaust system must also withstand enormous heat loads comparable to those on a spacecraft during reentry.

Now, researchers in China may have found a way to tackle both issues at once.

A team led by Professor Guosheng Xu at the Institute of Plasma Physics, part of the Hefei Institutes of Physical Science under the Chinese Academy of Sciences, has demonstrated a new plasma operating regime on the EAST fusion device that simultaneously reduces heat striking reactor components, suppresses damaging instabilities, and maintains strong energy confinement. The achievement, sustained for roughly a minute in a metal-wall environment, was recently published in Physical Review Letters.

Fusion Challenges: Heat Loads, ELMs, and Stability
Fusion reactors work by confining plasma — an extremely hot, electrically charged gas — inside magnetic fields. For fusion power plants to operate continuously, they must maintain high temperatures and strong confinement while safely removing excess heat and particles from the plasma edge.

One of the most vulnerable regions is the divertor, a specialized exhaust system that handles escaping heat and particles. Under normal conditions, the divertor can experience immense heat fluxes that threaten to erode reactor materials. Scientists often inject small amounts of impurity gases to cool this region through a process called detachment, where the plasma partially separates from the divertor surface. However, excessive cooling can also reduce the plasma’s performance.

Another major issue involves edge-localized modes, or ELMs, sudden eruptions of heat and particles from the plasma edge that behave somewhat like solar flares. These bursts are common in high-confinement, or H-mode, plasmas, which are otherwise desirable because they trap energy efficiently. Eliminating ELMs without sacrificing confinement has long been considered a key hurdle for future fusion reactors.

In the new study, the researchers precisely controlled the injection of light impurity gases inside the EAST tokamak to create what they call the Detached divertor and Turbulence-dominated Pedestal (DTP) regime.