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.

Chinese engineers have built a mecha-style robot that can quickly transition from two legs to four while carrying people, resembling the power-loader exoskeletons from Aliens or the utility-style mobile suits from Japanese anime series Gundam SEED.

The robot's developer, Unitree, says the large, humanoid robot is intended for civilian transport. In a promotional video, the robot — called GD01 — walks upright, smashes down a high wall of cinder blocks, and reconfigures itself to stand on four limbs to traverse more difficult terrain.

Unitree representatives say the machine weighs around 1,100 pounds (500 kilograms) with an operator on board and stands nearly 10 feet (3 meters) tall. People can even buy the robot, with prices starting at 3.9 million yuan ($572,000).

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As an Ebola outbreak rages in central and East Africa, public health workers say that the response has been stymied by the Trump administration’s cuts to foreign aid and global health organizations.

“We are no longer able to get some supplies,” Amadou Bocoum, Democratic Republic of Congo country director for the anti-poverty nonprofit CARE, tells WIRED. “Because of that, we are not able to react immediately.”

Bocoum says that basic medical equipment like masks and hand sanitizers, as well as components necessary for testing, are in short supply due to funding cuts.

WIRED spoke to more than half a dozen global health experts who described how the Trump administration’s move to shutter the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), amid other funding cuts, has created a strained, increasingly fragmented disease prevention and response system in the lead up to this Ebola outbreak, one in which a severely reduced workforce already struggles with burnout.

“We are so far behind in this outbreak,” says a current Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) employee with outbreak experience. “This is a perfect storm.”

The World Health Organization (WHO) declared the Ebola outbreak an emergency “of international concern” on May 16. There is no vaccine or treatment for this strain of Ebola, known as Bundibugyo. There were over 530 confirmed cases and 134 deaths as of May 19, and both numbers are rising quickly. According to the CDC, 25 to 50 percent of people who contract the strain will die from it.

“People really need to understand that if this is not handled carefully, it will get wild very easily,” says Bocoum. “It’s really key that we need to react fast to contain it.”

SpaceX's next-generation Starship V3 rocket got off to a glorious start for its first test flight, and although not all of its engines fired fully according to plan, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk said the mission "scored a goal for humanity."

This was the 12th Starship launch, but the first one since SpaceX completed a thorough redesign of the rocket's Super Heavy first-stage booster, the second stage (known as Ship), the Raptor rocket engines and the launch facilities at SpaceX's Starbase in south Texas.

Super Heavy lit all 33 of its Raptor V3 engines at liftoff, and successfully sent Ship on its way over the Gulf of Mexico. But after stage separation, Super Heavy shut down its engines prematurely. As a result, the booster tumbled through the atmosphere to an uncontrolled but safe splashdown in the gulf. SpaceX had planned for a controlled splashdown but hadn't planned to recover the booster, so it was no great loss.

About an hour after launch, Ship made a fiery atmospheric re-entry over the Indian Ocean. Onboard cameras showed the glow of superheated plasma surrounding the rocket stage, followed by occasional flashes of flame. In the moments just before splashdown, Ship fired up two of its Raptor engines — as opposed to the three that would typically be used for a landing — and flipped itself upright just in time for the end.

SpaceX's team members emphasized that they didn't expect everything to go right the first time. "This is a flight test," Huot said. "We're trying to intentionally find where our limits are."

Fusion is always “x years away,” or so goes the old joke. I tried (unsuccessfully) to find where this saying even came from.

For what it’s worth, one researcher’s testimonial dates back to the 1960s, whereas another 1986 conference panel mentioned something similar. Both accounts say fusion power is 50 and between 25 and 30 years away, respectively, so that adds up to around the 2010s.

Clearly, we’re well past this so-called deadline and still getting headlines about how fusion energy is 30 years away or 50 years away or, for the mathematically minded, maybe 17.8 years away. So the joke quips at the apparently sluggish pace at which fusion energy is arriving to commercial grids. But this comes with important caveats. In the past couple of decades, there have been huge strides in fusion research, leading to increased energy outputs, improved hardware, and a wide range of experimental and theoretical developments—coming from big and small stakeholders from around the world, too. And scientists have achieved fusion ignition in labs.

The question isn’t so much whether humans can recreate how stars fuel themselves on Earth, but more the question of how we can do that consistently, continuously, and efficiently.

We posed the latter question to experts for this Giz Asks. No need to take a shot at guessing when fusion energy will arrive. No need to justify the value of fusion research. But if fusion energy isn’t here yet, there has to be a reason (or two or three). And we should probably get on top of that, right? So, what are these reasons? If one had to pick the greatest obstacles for fusion power, what would that be? And, most importantly, are there any easy solutions?

At first blush, it sounds like science fiction: supersonic jets able to traverse the vastness of the Pacific Ocean in under two hours. But recent tests by Japan's Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) in conjunction with several Japanese universities have brought that once seemingly impossible vision closer to reality (alongside similar Mach-5 testing in the U.S.).

A team of engineers from JAXA, Waseda University, the University of Tokyo, and Keio University has completed a successful ground combustion trial of a ramjet engine designed for a Mach‑5 hypersonic aircraft, a key step toward a future where flights from Tokyo to Los Angeles could take roughly the same time as a short domestic hop. The test was conducted at JAXA's Kakuda Space Center, simulating flight at five times the speed of sound and focused on validating the aircraft's heat‑shielding, control surfaces, and engine performance under extreme conditions. The results, and aircraft like NASA's "quiet" supersonic X-59, may help redefine how engineers think about high‑altitude, high‑speed passenger and even suborbital travel.
...

To be clear, this initial test is still a far cry from an actual test flight. What it represents is a ground‑based validation of a scaled‑down model. Next, JAXA plans to mount the experimental vehicle on a sounding rocket (a suborbital rocket typically used to take measurements and conduct scientific experiments in space) and attempt an actual flight at Mach 5. Assuming success and that regulatory and technical hurdles can be cleared, the goal is commercial hypersonic passenger service by the 2040s.

You might not know it, but the hot water and rocks deep within Earth are teeming with undiscovered life. Dr. Tanvi Govil is one of the biologists studying this new frontier of microbial life that thrives in extreme places.

Govil and a multidisciplinary team of researchers discovered a set of microbes living 4,100-feet underground at SURF that essentially eat carbon dioxide gas (CO2) and turn it into rock at an incredibly fast rate. The initial research, funded by the National Science Foundation, showed a vast improvement in the efficiency to sequester CO2 in storage underground—speeding up the process from years to a few weeks. Govil realized that instead of piping CO2 underground, this technology enables direct removal of greenhouse gas emissions on site.

"The microbes we found at SURF help prove these biochemical reactions can be used to efficiently remove carbon from power-plant emissions. The discovery at SURF was the spark that started the whole thing," said Govil, who is an assistant professor in the Karen M. Swindler Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering at South Dakota Mines.

Today, Govil is leading the effort to build a library of microbes from different parts of the world that have the right properties for carbon capture. Researchers are combining the best attributes from each microbe to engineer enzymes that can convert CO2 from coal-fired power plant emissions into calcium carbonate—a mineral that can later be sold as a concrete additive or for other industrial purposes.

Europe, which [was] in the throes of a record-smashing heat wave [last] week, is the world's fastest-warming continent and stretches into an even more rapidly heating Arctic.

After record high temperatures for May were broken in Britain, Ireland and France on Monday and Tuesday, the continent still faces more brutal heat in the coming days.

A so-called "heat dome" of warm air from northern Africa trapped under a high-pressure system over western Europe is behind the sort of heat not usually seen until high summer.

Here is a look at why Europe is warming faster than elsewhere:

A higher degree
The planet is around 1.4C warmer than in preindustrial times, defined as 1850-1900.

By comparison, Europe is around 2.4 hotter than the preindustrial era, according to the EU's Copernicus Climate Change Service.

"Almost all of this heat is driven by the human-induced greenhouse effect from fossil fuel emissions, with the actual distribution of this excess heat determined by (several) factors," Ben Clarke, researcher in extreme weather and climate change at Imperial College London, told AFP.

Changing weather patterns
Shifts in atmospheric circulation have driven more frequent and more intense heat waves in the European summer, according to Copernicus.

High-pressure systems, which bring settled weather and higher temperatures, have become more common in Europe, Copernicus Director Carlo Buontempo said.

"If you look over the last 20, 30 years, there has been a prevalence, especially in summer, of those sort of anticyclonic conditions that are making heat waves more likely," Copernicus Director Carlo Buontempo told AFP.

Whether the increased frequency of that specific type of high-pressure system is due to climate change or is just a "statistical fluctuation" is still a scientific debate, Buontempo said.

Such high-pressure systems are also known as "blocking highs" as they can remain stationary and stop other weather systems from moving into a region.

Explaining how they work, Mary Bourke, geography professor at Trinity College Dublin, told AFP: "The sky is exposed to us, there are no clouds. It's a stable mass of air that is bringing warm air down to the surface and taking away moist air, so the air is not only warm, but it's also dry."

Researchers at ETH Zurich have demonstrated a means of generating "perfect randomness" by using entangled superconducting qubits.

Creating true randomness is extremely difficult. Even the most sophisticated conventional random number generator can carry tiny biases. While in most everyday uses those biases are harmless, in cryptography — where the security of encrypted systems depends on unpredictability — even the most subtle pattern can become an exploitable weakness.

The team at ETH Zurich, led by physics professors Renato Renner and Andreas Wallraff, say they have shown how to overcome this flaw and create perfectly random numbers using quantum physics, a milestone they describe as the first certified realization of perfect randomness.

Traditional random-number generators often rely on physical processes such as photon behavior, but those systems can still be slightly skewed and exhibit a bias that causes certain numbers to appear more frequently than others. The ETH team's approach uses quantum entanglement to push randomness beyond that limit.

On May 28th, at Launch Complex-36 A (LC-36A), located at the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station (CCSFS) in Florida, Blue Origin was conducting a hot-fire test of its New Glenn Rocket. During the test, which was meant to prepare the rocket for its fourth launch, an anomaly led to a spectacular explosion that damaged the facility and sent debris flying. Fortunately, no one was harmed, but the explosion represents a major setback for Blue Origin that could affect its plans to deliver a Human Landing System (HLS) for NASA's Artemis Program.

Shortly after the explosion, Blue Origin announced the situation via their X account, saying: "We experienced an anomaly during today's hotfire test. All personnel have been accounted for. We will provide updates as we learn more." What followed were a few days of debris advisories for local residents, and the company claiming it had regained limited access to LC36 and would begin clearing away debris and investigating the cause of the explosion shortly. They also indicated that the fireball did not appear to damage the New Glenn 1st stage or the 2nd stages (GS2s) in the nearby integration facility.

Yesterday, in what was the largest update yet, Blue Origin CEO Dave Limp took to X to share some good news. He wrote:

Now that we’ve had access to the pad and integration facility we can share a bit of good news. The propellant farm, oxygen, liquid hydrogen and LNG tanks are all in good shape. This is good luck because these are very long lead items. The water tower is also good. The big support tower is damaged, but it can be repaired in place rather than torn down and replaced. The booster “Never Tell Me The Odds” and the three GS-2s that were onsite in the integration facility also look good.

NASA has confirmed that a bright fireball meteor exploded in the sky over New England on Saturday (May 30), releasing the equivalent energy of about 230 tons of TNT and generating a sonic boom heard across multiple U.S. states and two Canadian provinces.

The meteor was relatively small — about 5 feet (1.6 meters) in diameter, NASA wrote in a statement on X. However, it faced incredible friction while tumbling through the atmosphere at about 42,000 mph (67,000 kilometers per hour). The meteor broke the sound barrier as it split apart roughly 31 miles (50 km) over Earth, raining debris onto Cape Cod, according to NASA.

No injuries or property damage were reported in connection to the fireball. But onlookers in several northeastern states said they heard a loud boom and felt buildings shake as the meteor exploded around 2:06 p.m. EDT, according to The Guardian.

A train line in western Switzerland now carries two kinds of traffic: passengers above, and sunlight below.

On a 100-meter stretch of active railway near the village of Buttes, 48 solar panels sit between the rails, low enough for trains to pass over them and removable enough for crews to take them away when the track needs work. The installation, developed by the Swiss startup Sun-Ways, is small. Its 18 kilowatts of capacity could generate about 16,000 kilowatt-hours of electricity a year, roughly the annual use of a few European households.

But this is just a pilot program. If the system works safely on a busy rail line, it could point to a new way of expanding solar power without covering farmland, forests or mountain slopes with panels. That’s perhaps important in Switzerland, more so than in other places, where renewable energy is urgently needed, but new solar projects can face resistance when they move into cherished landscapes. NIMBY is sadly a global phenomenon.

Current evidence indicates that nearly every large galaxy contains a supermassive black hole at its center, with a mass ranging from millions to billions of times that of the Sun. Exactly how these objects grow so large remains a major unanswered question. Accumulating (accreting) gas from their surroundings alone would be too slow, suggesting that mergers with other massive black holes play a crucial role in their growth.

Galaxy collisions are common throughout the Universe, making it likely that the supermassive black holes at their centers also eventually merge. Before combining into a single object, the two black holes are expected to orbit one another while gradually moving closer together.

Yet scientists have struggled to model the final stages of this process accurately. Despite the frequency of galaxy mergers over cosmic timescales, no close pair of supermassive black holes had been definitively identified. A new study of the galaxy Markarian 501 (Mrk 501) in the constellation Hercules has now provided compelling evidence.

An international team led by Silke Britzen of the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy (MPIfR) in Bonn discovered direct signs of a supermassive black hole pair at the center of Mrk 501. The findings have been published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

Ever since the first protoplanetary disk was discovered in 1984 around the star Beta Pictoris, these objects have presented astronomers with laboratories to study the births and evolution of worlds around distant stars. A team at France's National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) and the University of Bordeaux, made a recent breakthrough in understanding these planetary birthplaces when they directly observed the rotation of a protoplanetary disk around the young star AB Aurigae.

The disk appears to rotate as you might expect based on based on the laws of physics. However, there are several regions there that don't quite move as predicted by theory. Such a rotational anomaly likely is caused by the presence of giant planets in the process of formation in the disk.

The team used an instrument called SPHERE (for Spectro-Polarimetric High-contrast Exoplanet REsearch), installed on European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope in Chile. This highly sensitive infrared tool allowed the team to track the disk's rotation by focusing on emissions from dust grains embedded in the disk.

Astronauts working on the International Space Station briefly sheltered in a docked capsule Friday as Russian colleagues assessed leak repairs, NASA said.

Five astronauts had briefly entered the docked Dragon spacecraft as a precautionary measure—the capsule functions as a lifeboat of sorts in the case an evacuation is needed.

NASA gave the all clear and the astronauts were able to return to their stations.

A NASA spokesperson told AFP that Roscosmos cosmonauts took measurements of the leaks and were now assessing data.

"With today's operations, they wanted to be extra safe, extra precautionary, and have the crew move into the safe haven posture," the spokesperson said.

NASA spokesperson Bethany Stevens then said on social media that "NASA has instructed the crew members inside the Dragon spacecraft to end the safe haven procedures and return to planned operations aboard the International Space Station."

In a statement cited by Russian state media, Russia's Roscosmos space agency said that while pressurizing the transfer chamber, known as PrK, a leak was recorded.

"During an inspection of the PrK, the cosmonauts discovered two potential air leak sites. The first was promptly sealed by applying the first layer of the two-component sealant 'Germetall‑1.' The second site is located on the conical part of the PrK. Work is underway to prepare for its sealing," read the statement.

NASA's Stevens had previously said the transfer tunnel had suffered cracks and leaks for some time.

A fly that deposits its parasitic, flesh-eating offspring inside cows has been detected in Texas for the first time in decades, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) reported Wednesday (June 3).

Here's what to know about the New World screwworm (Cochliomyia hominivorax), a pest that was eradicated from the U.S. in the 1960s.

What is the New World screwworm?
New World screwworms are parasites that feed exclusively on the living flesh of warm-blooded animals, according to the American Society for Microbiology (ASM). The screwworms are the larvae, or maggots, of adult C. hominivorax flies...

Humans are the only species known to use fully symbolic language: a system capable of expressing abstract ideas, imaginary worlds and endless combinations of meaning. But how did we get there?

The origins of language have fascinated philosophers, scientists and storytellers for thousands of years. Despite all our advances in linguistics, archaeology and cognitive science, we still don't know exactly how language began.

That uncertainty hasn't stopped people from trying to solve the mystery. In fact, some of the earliest theories of language's origins are among the strangest and most entertaining ideas in the history of science.

The natural climate cycle, which supercharges temperatures and shifts weather patterns across the planet, officially took hold over the past month, according to a June 11 update by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's (NOAA) Climate Prediction Center.

What's more, an accompanying average of various forecasting models gives a "63% chance of a very strong El Niño during November-January that would rank among the largest El Niño events in the historical record going back to 1950," NOAA officials wrote in the update.

This is no longer much of a surprise. Last week, the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts, considered the "gold standard" of global weather models, suggested that this year's brewing El Niño would likely become the strongest ever recorded.

What is El Niño?
El Niño events occur every two to seven years as part of the El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) natural climate cycle in the Pacific Ocean. The ENSO cycle flips between the warmer El Niño phase and the cooler La Niña phase, with neutral periods in between. El Niño periods bring elevated sea surface temperatures in the central and eastern Pacific, thereby weakening or reversing trade winds and strongly disrupting global temperatures and rainfall patterns.