Scientists at the University of Cambridge have created miniature brain and spinal cord circuits in the lab that mimic the neural pathways responsible for movement. Using this advanced model, they discovered that damage to these connections, long considered permanent, may actually be reversible.

As the human body develops from embryo to fetus and eventually into infancy, nerve cells called neurons form networks that allow signals to travel between the brain and spinal cord. A crucial part of these cells is the axon, a long nerve fiber that carries information to other neurons and helps trigger muscle movement.

However, at some point during development, neurons in the central nervous system lose much of their ability to grow new axons. As a result, damage to the brain or spinal cord often becomes permanent, leading to severe disabilities such as paralysis or loss of hand function. This limited regenerative capacity is a major challenge in traumatic spinal cord injuries and neurological disorders including motor neurone disease and multiple sclerosis.

Earth's underground fungal network is so vast that, if it were in outer space, it would span roughly 10% of the Milky Way if placed in a straight line, a new study finds.

These subterranean structures, called arbuscular mycorrhizal fungal networks, work in partnership with most of the world's land plants, feeding plants nitrogen and phosphorus in return for their carbon. Now, the first global map of this fungal network has revealed where their intricate branching structures are most densely packed.

In grasslands that are high-altitude or flooded grasslands, such as the Everglades in Florida, the top 6 inches (15 centimeters) of soil are especially dense, containing around 40% of the global fungal biomass. This highlights that undisturbed grasslands are an essential, reliable carbon sink, according to the research, which was published Thursday (June 11) in the journal Science.

Deep in Book VII of Plato's Republic, Socrates describes prisoners chained inside a cave, mistaking shadows cast on a wall by firelight for reality itself. They name the shadows, debate them and develop expertise about them. The prisoners are completely, sincerely wrong, and they have no idea. The cave isn't a place of stupidity; it's a place of convincing, well-organized illusion.

But Plato's real interest wasn't the cave; it was in the periagoge—a Greek word meaning the turning of the soul away from shadows and toward the light. For Plato, this was education itself: not the filling of an empty vessel with facts, but a fundamental reorientation of how a person relates to truth and how they come to know that truth.

The shadows persist, but today they aren't cast by firelight; they are generated by machines. Large language models (LLMs), image-making and AI-powered search produce outputs that are fluent, confident and immediate.

But here's the crucial difference from Plato's original problem: His shadows were at least connected to something real. What AI produces is different in that a language model has no built-in commitment to truth, only a statistical relationship to an enormous quantity of text. When it tells you something, it isn't reporting; it's composing.

The outputs can be correct. But they can also be wrong in ways that are structurally indistinguishable from being right. The shadow no longer flutters on a cave wall. It speaks now, and sometimes it speaks beautifully.

This is why periagoge—turning toward the light—matters more now than ever and why AI threatens it so quietly. Knowledge isn't merely true belief; it's true belief held for the right reasons, connected to the world through justification, evidence and process.

AI disrupts this at the root. It is useful precisely because it decouples output quality from the slow, demanding work of verification. You don't need to consult a primary source, triangulate between perspectives or sit with the discomfort of not yet knowing.

Bypassing learning
GenAI poses many problems for learning. When an AI hands us an answer, we risk bypassing the process through which learning happens. We've received a product that looks like knowledge from the outside but is hollow at its core; it's a shadow that convinces us of something we haven't actually understood.

GenAI doesn't just help us think. It thinks instead of us. And there's growing evidence it's making us measurably worse at doing it ourselves.

NASA on Tuesday revealed the crew for its Artemis III mission, the next step in the space agency's plan to eventually land astronauts on the moon.

The announcement came two months after Artemis II's record-breaking trip around the moon that surpassed the distance record of Apollo 13.

NASA's Randy Bresnik, Frank Rubio, Andre Douglas and the European Space Agency's Luca Parmitano won't fly to the moon or land on the surface. Instead, they'll orbit Earth while practicing docking their Orion capsule with two lunar landers.

"To the Artemis III crew, we wish you Godspeed on the journey ahead," said NASA administrator Jared Isaacman.

Elon Musk's SpaceX and Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin are racing to deliver the lunar landers. The two-week demo is targeted for 2027. Blue Origin suffered a recent setback when its massive rocket exploded during an engine-firing test on the launch pad in Florida, shaking nearby homes and illuminating the sky with an orange fireball.

Think about a train sitting at a station. Passengers have boarded, conductors are checking tickets, and everything is ready to go. But if the engineer’s watch never signals departure, the doors stay open, the whistle never blows, and the train never leaves the platform.

A similar problem can occur inside living organisms when developmental timing goes wrong. Instead of delaying a trip, a breakdown in the body’s internal schedule can prevent normal growth and maturation.

Researchers at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) have now identified what appears to be a master developmental clock in the tiny worm C. elegans. The discovery helps explain how cells know exactly when to activate key genetic programs during growth and development.

A Master Clock for Development
Previous work by CSHL Professor Christopher Hammell and his colleagues showed that development in C. elegans is driven by bursts, or pulses, of gene activity. What remained unclear was how those pulses were timed with such precision.

The new study reveals that two proteins already known to scientists, MYRF-1 and LIN-42, form a feedback circuit that acts as a central developmental clock. Together, they determine when each pulse of gene expression begins and how long it lasts.

According to the researchers, this is the first example of a biological clock designed to run through a finite sequence of events rather than repeating continuously.

“This is the central clock for all cells in the worm,” Hammell explains. “It’s responsible for coordinating a finite series of sequential pulses of gene expression that must occur only once, and in order, for proper developmental progression. It’s like a ratchet. It turns genes on and off multiple times during development, but ultimately, it’s only going in one direction.”

Researchers from Brown University and the University of Michigan College of Engineering have succeeded in stabilizing a previously elusive state of matter that had existed only in theoretical models.

Using carefully engineered nanoparticles as building blocks, the team created a new material structure that locks in a fleeting intermediate state between two of the most common crystal arrangements found in metals. The achievement not only provides new insight into how materials change their internal structure, but also reveals unusual optical properties that could one day prove useful for quantum computing and other quantum information technologies.

More broadly, the work demonstrates a powerful new strategy for designing materials from custom-made nanoparticles, opening possibilities for creating entirely new materials with tailored characteristics.

“Our work is a little bit like kids playing with LEGO blocks,” said Ou Chen, an associate professor of chemistry at Brown and a corresponding author of the research. “We synthesize unique nanoscale building blocks and stack them into interesting structures. In this case, we were able to stabilize these theorized transitional structures and demonstrate important quantum optical properties.”

In the next few decades, many physicists are hopeful that nuclear fusion could become a realistic source of practically limitless energy. But before this can happen, it will be critical to ensure that reactors cannot be covertly misused to produce materials for nuclear weapons.

Through new analysis published in Physical Review Applied, a team led by Patrick Huber at Virginia Tech has shown that an existing type of particle detector could be used to flag any such misuse.

Dangerous tampering
Fusion reactors generate energy by forcing two hydrogen nuclei to fuse together, releasing enormous amounts of energy along with a stream of neutrons. Alongside their energy-related advantages, these reactors are also particularly desirable because, unlike conventional nuclear fission reactors, they generally don't require any weapons-grade materials.

However, the neutron stream produced in the reaction presents the possibility of a dangerous scenario: If uranium-238 were secretly introduced into the reactor, those neutrons would convert it into plutonium-239—a key ingredient in certain nuclear weapons. To ensure this can never happen, future fusion reactors will need reliable monitoring.

Detecting covert plutonium
In their study, Huber's team focused on whether this purpose could realistically be served with an antineutrino detector. Antineutrinos are chargeless, extremely low-mass particles that are abundantly produced during nuclear reactions. Crucially, it is impossible either to block them with a shield or to produce them with any non-nuclear process—making them ideal for covert monitoring.

When uranium-238 absorbs neutrons created in the fusion process, it undergoes fission, splitting into smaller nuclei and releasing a distinctive pattern of antineutrinos. The team ran simulations to see whether this signal could be distinguished from the antineutrinos produced during normal reactor operation, as well as those arriving from space.

Reassuringly, the team's results confirmed that even a relatively compact detector would be capable of confirming the production of just a few kilograms of plutonium over a 30-day period, enough to raise the alarm about any weapons program in its early stages.

Crucially, the detector would not need to be housed inside the reactor itself—it could operate at a distance, making the monitoring process minimally intrusive and practical to deploy at real facilities.

Food labels make calorie counts look straightforward. The number listed per serving is calculated from the food’s fat, carbohydrate, and protein content.

In reality, the digestive process is much more complex. As food moves through the body, it interacts with trillions of microbes in the gut that can affect how many calories are ultimately absorbed.

Researchers at Arizona State University have developed a mathematical model called DAMM, short for digestion, absorption, and microbial metabolism, to better capture this process. The model tracks food as it moves through the digestive system, estimating what is absorbed by the body, what reaches the colon, and how gut microbes transform the remaining material into substances that are either absorbed or eliminated.

The researchers say the model could improve understanding of obesity, diabetes, and other metabolic disorders by revealing how different diets influence both the body and the microbial communities living in the colon.

Gut Microbes Change the Calorie Equation
With further development, DAMM could help health care providers create more personalized nutrition plans.

“Digestion is not just a human process—it is a collaboration between our bodies and trillions of microbes living in the gut,” said Professor Rosa Krajmalnik-Brown. “DAMM gives us a powerful new way to quantify how those microbial partners contribute to human health and energy balance and also points at the importance of properly feeding our gut microbes.”

Unfortunately there’s more bad news to report on the clear skies front. A new paper, available in pre-print on arXiv from researchers at NASA’s Ames Research Center, reports that 73.3% of images the agency’s new SPHEREx space telescope collected between May and September of last year were contaminated by at least one artificial satellite trail. And it’s only going to get worse from here.

Unfortunately this doesn’t come as a surprise. The Spectro-Photometer for the History of the Universe, Epoch of Reionization, and Ices Explorer (SPHEREx) was designed to map the entire sky in near-infrared light. Meaning it would have long exposure times and cover a very large chunk of the visible sky at any one time. Both of which are a recipe for interruption from orbiting satellites.

Typically this type of light pollution is primarily associated with ground telescopes. But, SPHEREx is an orbital satellite, traveling along an orbit that is 700km above the Earth’s surface. Apparently even that wasn’t enough to escape from the light trails. On average there were 2.18 trails per exposure, most of which are concentrated in an “X” pattern that mimics the orbital paths of the satellite megaconstellations.

There appears to be no easy way to handle this interruption, either. SPHEREx uses an automated “sample up-the-ramp” algorithm to protect itself from stray cosmic rays. When a sudden energy blast from one of those rays hits a pixel, the system halts data collection on that pixel to prevent saturation. But commercial satellites are now so bright that they are triggering this system without the help of any stray cosmic rays.

The resultant images have what the authors describe as “railroad” tracks, where the blinding center of the trail is scrubbed out but parallel lines running alongside it are permanently etched into the science imagery. As a result, the images lose the photometric data of anything hidden beneath the rails.

As if that news wasn’t bad enough, SPHEREx isn’t the only one suffering from this fate. A few years ago another team led by Sandor Kruk published a study that found the fraction of Hubble images crossed by satellites rose from 2.8% in the early 2000s to 5.9% in 2021. Admittedly Hubble doesn’t take as wide of shots as SPHEREx, but the fact that one of the most venerable space telescopes still operating is suffering from the same problem is not a good sign.

Most people think they are open-minded and would like others to perceive them as such. But for the things that matter most—religious beliefs, for example, or the meaning of life—few of us are genuinely willing to consider that we might be wrong, let alone do the hard work of revising beliefs. At a fundamental level, we humans are somewhat closed-minded.

As a social psychologist, I research big questions, such as what makes life meaningful and the nature of humility. I've had a long-standing interest in why people are so resistant to changing their cherished core beliefs. After all, isn't it better to remain open-minded when you may be wrong or can't know for certain?

As decades of research have revealed, it turns out that our deepest convictions serve important psychological functions that make them hard to change. It's unsettling to admit that our core beliefs about how the world works may be wrong.

I call that openness "existential humility": a willingness to change our minds about our deepest convictions when presented with new evidence. And though holding beliefs in this way can be difficult, it can also be a bridge to creating stronger relationships and more inclusive communities.

Power of worldview
All of us hold myriad beliefs that range from the mundane to the magnificent. "Is pineapple a legitimate pizza topping?" is very different from "Is there life after death?" Yet these seemingly disparate beliefs are connected through an interlocking set of ideas and principles that help us make sense of ourselves and the world around us.

Psychologists call these sets of beliefs "worldviews," and they provide people with a sense of meaning in an otherwise confusing and chaotic world. They are a constellation of beliefs that shape what people value, view as important and perceive as morally right and wrong.

It's natural to take worldviews for granted, assuming that other intelligent people see the world the same way.

At the core of these worldviews are your most cherished beliefs: who you are, what the meaning of life is, what constitutes right and wrong. Ask yourself how willing you are to revise those beliefs. How sure are you that you are right? What would it take to alter those convictions?

Probably a lot.

Did you know that the New Mexico Whiptail Lizard is entirely female? 🦎

But how do they reproduce? Find out in this episode of Surprising Science!

Something doesn’t quite add up about the orbits of our solar system’s eight planets and their hundreds of moons, a new study hints.

According to the research — which compared more than 100 simulations of our cosmic neighborhood’s early history — there may have once been two extra giant planets careening around the outer solar system, helping to reshape the orbits of the other planets before ultimately being kicked out into interstellar space.

The infant solar system was constantly being reshuffled. One drastic rearrangement, called the giant planet instability, may have caused the giant planets — Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune — to migrate from their initial positions, ending up farther from the sun.

This migration, first proposed in 2005 by astronomers in Nice, France, as a part of the "Nice Model," likely started due to extra-close encounters between the planets and leftover planetary building blocks called planetesimals. Additionally, modifications proposed in 2011 suggested there may have been a fifth giant planet whose gravitational encounters with its neighbors ultimately tossed it out of our cosmic neighborhood.

However, astronomers don't know much about this missing planet. To find out more, the new study "systematically tested the effects of giant-planet close encounters on the orbital stability of their satellites," Matthew Clement, a research scientist at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory and the study's first author, told Live Science in an email.

Engineers at the University of California, San Diego, have developed a soft, wearable ultrasound patch that can continuously monitor a fetus for hours at a time while maintaining reliable performance even as the fetus and umbilical cord move throughout pregnancy.

The device could help physicians identify complications earlier in high-risk pregnancies. During clinical testing, the patch detected prolonged abnormal fetal signals in one case, prompting an early Cesarean delivery. Researchers said the intervention may have helped save the baby’s life. The technology could also improve access to prenatal care in low-resource regions where trained ultrasound specialists and continuous monitoring are often unavailable.

“Wearable ultrasound technology has the potential to enable continuous prenatal monitoring and improve pregnancy outcomes in ways that were previously not possible,” said study co-first author Geonho (Tom) Park, a chemical and nanoengineering PhD student at the UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering. Park co-led the study with fellow UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering co-first authors Yizhou Bian, Hao Huang, and Sai Zhou.

Autonomous Tracking Overcomes Fetal Movement Challenges
Most prenatal ultrasounds provide only a brief look at fetal health and require trained sonographers to operate the equipment. In contrast, the new patch is designed to remain on the body and continuously monitor a baby’s anatomy and blood flow in real time without the need to manually position an ultrasound probe.

“To comprehensively monitor mothers and babies over the amount of time needed to catch complications like preeclampsia, you need a system that can work continuously and largely on its own,” Bian said. “That is why the sensing depth, functional capabilities, and autonomy of this ultrasound technology are critical.”

Global migration has risen sharply from approximately 13 million people per year in 2000 to around 35 million people per year in 2023. This is according to a new dataset on human migration published in Nature by researchers from the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), IIASA and the University of Hong Kong.

This rise in migration outpaces global population growth, showing a true per capita increase in human mobility. The trend is contrary to previous research efforts to quantify global migration flows.

Using deep learning, the researchers built the first dataset of migration flows between all countries for the period 1990–2023, offering a far more detailed picture of global movement than traditional data, which is highly fragmented.

Current analysis of migration is heavily reliant on migrant population data published at five-year intervals by the United Nations and at 10-year intervals by the World Bank, providing counts of migrants in each country by country of birth. Thus, they offer only a snapshot at a fixed point in time. As a result, big events—such as wars, recessions, pandemics or climate shocks—have sometimes been missed in the data capture.

More detailed migration data matters because it shows not just how many people move, but when, where and why—helping policymakers respond to crises, plan services and understand global trends.

How the dataset fills gaps
Through the use of advanced machine learning (deep neural networks) to combine official statistics, census data and other sources with geographic and economic factors, the new dataset helps fill in the gaps. It shows migration has become more common overall since 2000, with dips only during the 2008–09 financial crisis and the COVID-19 pandemic.

Globally, the Middle East experienced the highest total inflow of migrants, chiefly from South Asia and the Philippines, with immigration from Bangladesh to Saudi Arabia alone averaging around 300,000 people per year from 2010 onward.

I pulled a jar of pond water and discovered a swarm of microscopic piranhas known as Coleps. Watch what happens when these armored scavengers find their next meal under the microscope!

Meet the Coleps, a barrel-shaped, single-celled ciliate with a reputation as the vulture of the micro-world. In this video, we observe a sample of local pond water under high magnification to see how these microbes hunt and scavenge. Using chemosensation, they can "smell" injured prey like a dead blue water mite or a ruptured Stentor coeruleus.

You'll see them use their reinforced oral baskets (nematodesmata) to drill into tissue, and learn how they fire microscopic harpoons called toxicysts to paralyze struggling prey. Covered in interlocking plates of calcium carbonate, these tiny armored tanks are the ultimate cleanup crew of the microscopic ecosystem.

Timestamps
0:00 - Looking Inside the Pond Water
0:11 - Meet the Coleps (The Micro Vultures)
0:40 - Piranha-like Behavior (swarm)
1:08 - Feeding on a Blue Water Mite
1:33 - The Secret Weapon: Toxicysts & Toxins
2:11 - Calcium Carbonate Armor Plates
2:51 - A Giant Stentor Coeruleus Bursts
3:42 - The Stentor's Secret to Survival

Researchers have long linked perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), often called “forever chemicals,” to serious birth defects.

However, scientists have struggled to explain exactly how these pollutants affect fetal development. A new study now offers the first detailed molecular explanation, revealing how a PFAS compound known as perfluorodecanoic acid (PFDA) can cause craniofacial abnormalities before birth.

“Most people are exposed to small amounts of PFAS in everyday life, but higher exposure can occur through contaminated water, living near manufacturing sites, or certain jobs like firefighting and ski waxing, which is why it’s so important to understand the chemicals better,” said the paper’s senior author, Jed Lampe, PhD, associate professor at University of Colorado Anschutz Skaggs School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences.

“We wanted to understand which PFAS compounds are truly harmful during fetal development, especially for people with higher exposure, and how they cause damage.”

PFDA Identified as the Most Toxic PFAS
Around 15,000 PFAS compounds are used in consumer and industrial products, but growing evidence suggests only a portion of them present major health concerns. To identify the most harmful compounds, Lampe and colleagues Michaela Hvizdak and Sylvie Kandel examined 13 commonly detected PFAS. Their results showed that PFDA was the most toxic to craniofacial development in a fetus.

The researchers found evidence linking PFDA to significant facial abnormalities seen in both people and laboratory animals. Some estimates suggest the compound may increase the risk of these defects by about 10%, even at very low exposure levels.

“This finding moves us beyond association by providing a clear explanation for how PFDA can interfere with fetal development. It’s a critical step toward understanding a vast and complex class of environmental chemicals,” said Lampe.

The Very Large Array, the iconic field of radio antennas featured in the film "Contact" (inspired by Carl Sagan's novel), has a long and distinguished history of service. But after more than 45 years of studying the radio sky and probing the mysteries of the universe, the U.S. National Science Foundation National Radio Astronomy Observatory, which operates the VLA, is looking to create a new generation of telescopes that will pick up where the VLA leaves off.

The first step in the process was the creation of the next-generation Very Large Array, or ngVLA, prototype, a single radio antenna located on the NSF VLA grounds in the deserts of New Mexico. This prototype recently achieved a major milestone by gathering its "first light," making independent observations and working in collaboration with the NSF VLA.

This achievement marks the transition from the construction phase to astronomical testing and will serve as the blueprint for the proposed 244-antenna array.

Tony Beasley, director of NSF NRAO and AUI vice president for radio astronomy operations, explained the significance of this event in an NSF NRAO press release:

"First light from the ngVLA prototype antenna is a real-world demonstration of the engineering progress required to build America's—and the world's—next great radio astronomy facility. This milestone reflects the leadership and expertise we've tapped into among NRAO staff, our contractors, and the U.S. and international scientific community."

Scientists at the SETI Institute recently searched for technological signals from 3I/ATLAS, the third interstellar object observed in our solar system. Using the Allen Telescope Array (ATA) at the Hat Creek Radio Observatory in Northern California, the team scanned a wide range of radio frequencies for signs of extraterrestrial technology and found none, as expected based on other astronomical observations showing that the object exhibits natural comet-like composition and behavior. The paper is published in The Astronomical Journal.

Discovered in July 2025, 3I/ATLAS is the third confirmed object from another star system to enter our solar system, after 1I/'Oumuamua and 2I/Borisov. Its interstellar origin makes 3I/ATLAS a rare opportunity to study material from another stellar system and better understand how planetary systems form and evolve.

While observations strongly indicate that 3I/ATLAS is a natural object, interstellar visitors are also compelling technosignature targets because an artificial object—however unlikely—could represent detectable extraterrestrial technology and potentially provide the first evidence of life beyond Earth.

"Eventually, our own Voyager spacecraft will be extraterrestrial artifacts in other stellar systems," said Dr. Sofia Sheikh, lead author on the paper. "Given that, it is important that we understand the natural distribution of interstellar objects so that we will be able to identify any anomalies that could one day be signs of an artificial interstellar object."

The Spirit rover (Mars Exploration Rover A) left our planet to begin the journey to its new home OTD in 2003. This view captured 20 years ago at the beginning of 2006 shows rippled sand deposits of the "El Dorado" ripple field in Gusev Crater on Mars.

Designed for a 90-day mission, Spirit operated for more than 6 years on Mars. It's twin, Opportunity, operated for almost 15 years.

Ten days ago, in a moment of very high drama in orbit, NASA directed its astronauts living on the International Space Station to briefly seek emergency refuge in a Crew Dragon spacecraft.

Since then, neither the US space agency nor Roscosmos has provided additional public information about the situation in orbit. But according to sources who spoke to Ars, following the spectacle in space, the problem has been successfully fixed.

At issue were persistent cracks in a small area of the International Space Station attached to the Russian Zvezda service module, known as the PrK module. The problem has been ongoing since 2019, and Russian astronauts have been attempting various fixes, often using a sealant called Germetall-1.