Isotope analysis of gas from geothermal springs in Zambia could show that a new continental rift is forming, scientists say. Unexpectedly high helium isotope ratios indicate that a weakness in Earth's crust has broken through to reach the mantle beneath. This rift could eventually become a new tectonic plate boundary. In the meantime, opportunities for geothermal energy could boost local economies.

"The hot springs along the Kafue rift of Zambia have helium isotope signatures which indicate that the springs have a direct connection with Earth's mantle, which lies between 40 and 160km below Earth's surface," said Prof Mike Daly of the University of Oxford, an author of the article in Frontiers in Earth Science.

"This fluid connection is evidence that the fault boundary of the Kafue Rift is active and therefore the Southwest African Rift Zone is too—and may be an early indication of the break-up of sub-Saharan Africa."

What if the next generation of high-performance materials did not come from a factory filled with petroleum-based plastics, but from living bacteria?

Scientists at Rice University and the University of Houston have developed a new way to turn bacterial cellulose into an ultra-strong, multifunctional material that could eventually replace plastics in products ranging from packaging to electronics. Their findings, published in Nature Communications, describe a scalable manufacturing process that guides bacteria to build highly organized cellulose structures with remarkable strength and thermal performance.

Plastic waste remains a major environmental problem because synthetic plastics gradually break down into microplastics that can release harmful substances such as bisphenol A (BPA), phthalates, and carcinogens. To explore a more sustainable alternative, the team led by Muhammad Maksud Rahman, assistant professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at the University of Houston and adjunct assistant professor of materials science and nanoengineering at Rice University, focused on bacterial cellulose, one of the purest and most abundant natural biopolymers on Earth.

“Our approach involved developing a rotational bioreactor that directs the movement of cellulose-producing bacteria, aligning their motion during growth,” said M.A.S.R. Saadi, the study’s first author and a doctoral student in material science and nanoengineering at Rice. “This alignment significantly enhances the mechanical properties of microbial cellulose, creating a material as strong as some metals and glasses yet flexible, foldable, transparent, and environment friendly.”

A protein tied to the brain’s immune system may be helping Parkinson’s disease spread from cell to cell, and scientists believe stopping it could open a new path toward slowing the disease itself.

In a new study published in Neuron, researchers at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania reported that monoclonal antibodies were able to block the activity of a protein called glycoprotein nonmetastatic melanoma B (GPNMB), preventing the spread of harmful Parkinson’s-related protein clumps in laboratory experiments.

“Many patients with Parkinson’s disease are diagnosed in the early stages, when symptoms are relatively mild, but there is currently no treatment that slows the progression,” said lead author, Alice Chen‑Plotkin, MD, Parker Family Professor of Neurology. “These early results are a promising step towards developing this type of treatment.”

NASA says its Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope could launch as early as September 2026, moving the mission ahead of the agency’s previous commitment to fly no later than May 2027.

“Roman’s accelerated development is a true success story of what we can achieve when public investment, institutional expertise, and private enterprise come together to take on the near-impossible missions that change the world,” NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman said during a news conference at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.

Roman Space Telescope Mission Goals
The Roman Space Telescope is built to capture enormous sections of the sky with high-resolution infrared imaging. Its combination of a wide field of view and sensitive instruments will allow astronomers to study the universe on a scale that was previously difficult to achieve.

While the mission’s primary objectives include investigating dark energy, dark matter, and planets orbiting distant stars, scientists expect Roman to support research across many areas of astronomy. Its advanced capabilities could help researchers uncover unusual objects and cosmic events that have never been observed before.

Massive Cosmic Survey and Data Archive
During its planned five-year primary mission, Roman is expected to gather roughly 20,000 terabytes of scientific data. Researchers will use that information to study approximately 100,000 exoplanets, hundreds of millions of galaxies, and billions of stars.

Scientists also hope the telescope’s sweeping surveys of deep space will reveal rare and unexpected phenomena that could reshape understanding of the cosmos.

Launch Plans With SpaceX
NASA plans to send Roman into orbit aboard a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket from Launch Complex 39A at Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The agency and SpaceX will announce more details about the official launch date as preparations continue.

The evolution of tiny arms in several groups of meat-eating dinosaurs was likely driven by the development of strong, powerful heads, which were used to attack prey, according to a new study led by researchers at UCL (University College London) and Cambridge University.

The study, published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B, looked at data for 82 species of theropod (two-legged, mainly meat-eating dinosaurs), finding that shortening of forelimbs occurred across five groups, including tyrannosaurids, the family that included Tyrannosaurus rex.

The team, including Dr. Elizabeth Steell at Cambridge and Professor Paul Upchurch at UCL, found that smaller arms were closely linked to the development of large, powerful skulls and jaws, more so than to larger overall body size, indicating that tiny arms were not just a by-product of bodies getting bigger.

The researchers suggested that the increasing size of prey, in the form of gigantic sauropods (long-necked, long-tailed plant-eaters) and other large herbivores, may have resulted in a shift to hunting using jaws and head instead of claws.

How tiny arms and big heads evolved
Lead author Charlie Roger Scherer, a Ph.D. student at UCL Earth Sciences, said, "Everyone knows the T. rex had tiny arms but other giant theropod dinosaurs also evolved relatively small forelimbs. The Carnotaurus had ridiculously tiny arms, smaller than the T. rex.

"We sought to understand what was driving this change and found a strong relationship between short arms and large, powerfully built heads. The head took over from the arms as the method of attack. It's a case of "use it or lose it"—the arms are no longer useful and reduce in size over time.

"These adaptations often occurred in areas with gigantic prey. Trying to pull and grab at a 100ft-long sauropod with your claws is not ideal. Attacking and holding on with the jaws might have been more effective.

"While our study identifies correlations and so cannot establish cause and effect, it is highly likely that strongly built skulls came before shorter forelimbs. It would not make evolutionary sense for it to occur the other way round, and for these predators to give up their attack mechanism without having a back-up."

Misleading information online is often treated as a technical glitch, something that better algorithms or stricter moderation can fix. But research points to a more complex reality. That is, the rise of "misfluencers," individuals who shape how information is interpreted, shared and trusted across digital platforms.

Whether acting deliberately or not, they tap into emotion, identity and community to amplify misleading claims in ways that feel credible and relatable. This human layer makes misinformation harder to detect and regulate. It's a danger when it comes to everyday decisions about important topics like health, finance and technology. Understanding how misfluencers operate is key to navigating an information environment where trust is increasingly contested.

Herkulaas MvE Combrink is a co-director at the Interdisciplinary Centre for Digital Futures, senior lecturer in Economics and Management Sciences at the UFS, and the head of the Knowledge Mapping Lab, a research group to manage infodemics and human language technology innovation.

Phelokazi Mkungeka is an interdisciplinary researcher with a background in sociology, specializing in artificial intelligence and health misinformation in digital environments.

They've explored the interplay between AI, misfluencers and health communication.

What exactly is a 'misfluencer,' and how do they differ from traditional influencers?
A misfluencer is an individual who shapes how information is interpreted, trusted, and acted upon within a network. Misfluencers fuel the spread of misinformation by being perceived as a trustworthy source of information that people within their social network latch onto.

Traditional influencers typically aim to promote products, lifestyles, or ideas with clear intent. Often, these are within commercial or branding frameworks marketing a specific product, for example.

Sources of misinformation, on the other hand, are usually defined by the content itself. They are people who share false or misleading information.

A planet that is about the size of Saturn, but with a temperature more like Earth's, has an atmosphere rich in methane, according to a new study using NASA's James Webb Space Telescope (JWST).

Unlike the gas giant planets—Jupiter and Saturn—in Earth's solar system, which are distant from the sun and therefore extremely cold, and so-called "hot Jupiters"—giant planets beyond the solar system that are scorching hot due to their proximity to the stars they orbit—the planet is one of only a handful of known temperate, giant planets and the first to have its atmosphere analyzed.

The new details about the composition of the planet's atmosphere will inform models of planetary formation and evolution and could improve astronomers' understanding of how Earth's atmosphere works, according to the research team.

Exoplanet background and discovery context
"One of the main advantages of studies of planets beyond our solar system, known as exoplanets, is the ability to study many different types of planets—especially ones that we don't see in the solar system—to learn about how planetary systems form and evolve," said Renyu Hu, associate professor of astronomy and astrophysics in the Penn State Eberly College of Science and leader of the research team.

"Since the first exoplanet was discovered in 1992 by a team that included Aleksander Wolszczan at Penn State, astronomers have found thousands of exoplanets. But only a few giant, temperate exoplanets are known and this is the first time that we have been able to study the atmosphere of one of them in detail."

A temperate giant with Saturn-like size
The planet, called TOI-199b, orbits a star that is more than 330 light-years from Earth about every hundred days. Its temperature is about 175 degrees Fahrenheit [79°C], which is still hot from a human perspective, but not too much hotter than the highest record temperatures on Earth at around 134 degrees [57°C]. It is easily reached, for example, on the dashboards of cars parked in direct sunlight. It's significantly more temperate than the hot Jupiters that can reach thousands of degrees and the cold solar-system gas giants that are hundreds of degrees below zero.

“Once dismissed as too small-brained or simple to support experience, insects are now known as capable of remarkably complex tasks, including associative learning, context-sensitive decision-making and cross-modal sensory integration,” said Dr. Thomas White, an evolutionary ecologist and entomologist at the University of Sydney, and his colleagues.

“Recent studies have also identified brain regions such as the mushroom bodies and central complex that appear to support evaluative processing functionally analogous to that seen in vertebrates.”

“Yet the question of pain in insects cannot be settled by neural architecture alone.”

“Given the diversity of nervous systems across phyla, and the sheer creative power of adaptive evolution showcased via multiple realizability, behavior remains our most direct and inclusive route to inferring experience.”

“That is, rather than asking whether an animal has the same hardware, the more relevant question is whether it shows a comparable behavioral profile under similar conditions.”

In their research, the authors tested 80 adult house crickets in a carefully controlled experiment designed to rule out simple reflexes.

Imagine slicing an apple into smaller and smaller pieces. First you would reach molecules, then atoms, and eventually the subatomic particles inside them, including protons, quarks, and gluons. According to string theory, however, nature may continue even deeper. At scales far smaller than a proton, the universe could be built from tiny vibrating strings.

Originally developed in the 1960s, string theory attempts to solve one of the biggest unsolved problems in physics: combining quantum mechanics with general relativity. Quantum mechanics explains the behavior of matter and energy at extremely small scales, while general relativity describes gravity and the structure of the cosmos on the largest scales. Physicists have struggled for decades to merge the two frameworks because the mathematics tends to break down when gravity is treated quantum mechanically.

String theory offers a possible solution by replacing pointlike particles with microscopic strings. Different vibrations of these strings would produce all known particles, including the graviton, a hypothetical particle believed to carry gravity. The theory also predicts the existence of at least 10 dimensions, rather than the four dimensions humans experience in everyday life.

One of the biggest challenges is testing the theory directly. The energies needed to probe strings experimentally are so enormous that researchers would need a particle accelerator roughly the size of a galaxy.

A New Bootstrap Approach to String Theory
Unable to test string theory directly, physicists are turning to alternative methods. One increasingly popular strategy is known as the “bootstrap” approach. Instead of beginning with a complete theory, scientists start with a few broad assumptions about how nature should behave and see what mathematical structures emerge.

In a new paper called “Strings from Almost Nothing,” accepted for publication in Physical Review Letters, researchers from Caltech, New York University, and Institut de Fisica d’Altes Energies in Barcelona used this method to explore particle interactions at extremely high energies. Starting from only a small number of assumptions about scattering behavior, they unexpectedly recovered the defining features of string theory.

“The strings just fell out,” says Clifford Cheung, professor of theoretical physics and director of the Leinweber Forum for Theoretical Physics at Caltech. “We didn’t start with any assumptions about strings at all, but then the solution contained the cornerstone signatures of strings.”

Cheung explains that the work does not count as experimental proof of string theory, but the result is still significant because the assumptions could have produced many possible mathematical outcomes. Instead, the equations led to a unique structure matching string theory.

Researchers have found that obesity may leave a lasting biological “memory” in the immune system, potentially increasing the risk of obesity-related diseases years after a person loses weight. The findings come from a decade-long study published in EMBO Reports.

The European study was led by Professor Claudio Mauro from the University of Birmingham and supported by the National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR) Biomedical Research Centre: Birmingham. The team discovered that helper T cells, also known as CD4+ lymphocytes, can retain long-term changes linked to obesity.

Scientists found that a process called DNA methylation adds molecular markers to the DNA of these immune cells. These changes may remain for 5 to 10 years after successful weight loss. Researchers say this lingering “memory” could disrupt important immune system functions, including waste removal and regulation of immune aging.

The research team believes this may help explain why some people remain vulnerable to obesity-related conditions even after reaching a healthy weight.