“Quarks are basic building blocks of matter,” said Dr. Paula Collins, incoming deputy spokesperson of the LHCb Collaboration. “There are six types of quarks (up, down, charm, strange, top and bottom), which bond into pairs or triplets, known as mesons and baryons respectively.”

“Sixty years ago, as experiments started to reveal the underlying quark structure of matter, researchers began to build theoretical models to classify how quarks can combine into composite particles.”

“Soon, scientists were able to predict the properties of as-yet-undiscovered particles.”

“Included in these predictions were the doubly charmed baryons.”

“These are particles that each consist of two charm quarks and either an up, a down or a strange quark as the third of the triplet.”

“Physicists are particularly interested in this family of particles as the large mass differences between the quarks could provide useful insight into the strong force, which binds quarks together into composite particles.”

“However, the experiments of the time were neither able to produce the doubly charmed baryons, nor did they have sensitive enough equipment to detect them.”

The LHCb physicists discovered the first of these doubly charmed baryons in 2017 and the second earlier this year.

The discovery of Ωcc⁺, the third and final member of this particle family, is based on data collected in 2024 from high-energy proton-proton collisions at the LHC.

These collisions produced the new doubly charmed baryons, which are short-lived, travelling a fraction of a millimeter in the detector before decaying into more stable particles.

The LHCb team traced the tracks left by these particles in the detector back to their points of origin.This revealed the characteristic signature of the new short-lived particle with a distinct mass around four times heavier than a proton.

“This is a moment of beautiful historical significance,” Dr. Collins said. “Out of the 85 composite particles discovered so far at the LHC, these three doubly charmed baryons are unique.”

“They decay by the weak force and live long enough to give measurable flight distances in our experiment.”

A scientist at the University of Birmingham has created a “mini universe” that could help answer one of science’s most fundamental questions: What is time?

In a study published in Physical Review Research, Professor Giovanni Barontini demonstrates that it is possible to track the passage of time without relying on a clock. The research introduces a model in which a form of time emerges naturally from the behavior of the system being studied.

Some physics theories, including the Wheeler–DeWitt equation, suggest that time is not a fundamental property of the universe. Instead, the universe may exist as a single quantum state that does not change, with particles displaying both wave-like and particle-like behavior. In this view, there is no external clock, and the experience of time arises from relationships between different parts of the system.

It has often been suggested that we now live in a "post-truth" world. People increasingly rely on their own feelings as a yardstick for what is true. Psychologists at the University of Amsterdam (UvA) have now developed the "Youniversalism" scale to allow them to measure people's belief in subjective and experiential truths. The research is published in the journal Personality and Individual Differences.

When emotions and personal beliefs outweigh facts and expertise, it makes it harder to recognize and correct disinformation. "That can have serious consequences," says Bastiaan Rutjens, a psychologist at the UvA and one of the researchers involved. "For example, people could negatively impact their health by following unfounded medical advice, such as we see increasingly on social media."

Researchers call this way of thinking "intuitive epistemology": the idea that you can sense what is true and that everyone's truth is equally valid. "This concept has been described before in the humanities, by Wouter Hanegraaff among others, but until now there was no good way to measure it," says Rutjens.

The new term 'youniversalism'
By combining "you" and "universalism," the new term encompasses the idea that the individual sees themselves as central in constructing and explaining the world around them. The scale has been tested on more than 1,500 people...

Topology is a field of math that focuses on how molding or stretching a shape alters the space it takes up.

In a way, topology is similar to geometry. Both fields study shapes. However, geometry focuses on rigid measurements, such as the length of lines in a triangle. It answers questions like: If I change the length of this line, how will the other lines change? In geometry, the new triangle is considered a different triangle altogether.

But topology does not focus on such rigid measurements. Instead, topology treats the study of shapes like a game. As in a game, a topologist sets out certain rules. Then, they explore what shapes are possible within those rules.

For instance, a rule might be that all the shapes in a certain family can morph into one another without tearing or gluing parts together. You could explore this yourself by squeezing a water balloon. As you watch the balloon warp, you see continuous changes to its shape. Squeezing the middle causes the outsides to bulge. But the balloon doesn’t break or form new connections. So, all the shapes the balloon takes still obey the rule.

A mathematician might say that all the shapes of this balloon belong to the same topological group...

When astronauts explore the Moon, Mars, and other destinations far from Earth in the future, they will need to be as self-sufficient as possible. This is an absolute necessity, given that missions operating beyond Low Earth Orbit (LEO) cannot be resupplied within hours. This essentially means that deep-space exploration and outposts will need to produce enough air, water, food, propellant, and other necessities to see to their needs and keep the mission going.

Typically, this falls under the heading of In-Situ Resource Utilization (ISRU), in which local resources are harvested and used to produce building materials and necessities. Otherwise, astronauts need to bring what they need with them, including plants that remove carbon dioxide, produce oxygen, and even provide a source of plant-based protein. According to new research being conducted at the University of California San Diego (UCSD), bringing plants along on the journey could have the added benefit of producing medicines.

The research was led by engineers with the UCSD Aiiso Yufeng Li Family Department of Chemical and Nano Engineering. They were joined by researchers from the UCSD Center for Nano-ImmunoEngineering, the Shu and K.C. Chien and Peter Farrell Collaboratory, the Institute for Materials Discovery and Design, the Moores Cancer Center, the Center for Engineering in Cancer at the Institute of Engineering in Medicine, and more. The interdisciplinary team's findings were published on June 5th in npj Science of Plants.

In their paper, the team described a simple method for growing and repeatedly harvesting pharmaceuticals from plants in microgravity, without destroying the plants or generating large amounts of waste. For more than a decade, Steinmetz and her colleagues have been studying a plant virus called cowpea mosaic virus (CPMV). This virus is commonly known to infect legumes, but Steinmetz's team was focused on its ability to stimulate the immune system to attack cancer cells.

In 2025, Yonsei University’s Professor Young-Wook Lee and colleagues shocked the space community with claims that the evidence of dark energy was weakening such that the expansion is no longer accelerating.

They suggested the methods used to measure the Universe’s expansion using supernovae were fundamentally flawed.
...
“What we find is that when we calibrate these supernovae, accounting for different host environments and populations, the evidence for cosmic acceleration remains remarkably consistent.”

To measure the Universe, the authors looked closely at Type Ia supernovae to calculate vast cosmic distances.

The 2025 study had claimed that, as the Universe aged, these supernovae had different maximum brightnesses, tricking astronomers into thinking the cosmos was accelerating when it was slowing.

However, the new study found the error lay in how the age of these stars was estimated.

They proved that the previous findings incorrectly assumed the age of a galaxy was the same as the age of the star that exploded.

They also said the 2025 paper failed to account for the mass of host galaxies, a standard correction used in modern cosmology to prove accuracy.

“Challenging accepted theories and observations is fundamental to science,” said University of Southampton’s Professor Mark Sullivan, co-author of the study.

“This is how progress is made. Although this idea did not turn out correct, it has opened up new ways of thinking about how supernovae explode and how we can measure dark energy more accurately.”

Most of the universe is not made of stars, galaxies, or beautiful glowing nebulae. Instead, the majority of it is what seems to be vast, silent emptiness. Huge cosmic voids stretching hundreds of millions of light years across, containing almost nothing at all. But these dark regions are not just empty space. They are dynamic structures that grow, merge, and shape the entire architecture of the universe.

What exactly are cosmic voids and how did they form? What makes them so strange, and what role might they play in the future of the universe?

Prime editing can potentially repair the vast majority of known disease-causing human mutations, but the technology, first developed in 2019, has not yet been widely used in the body, or in vivo, to treat genetic disease. The only clinical application of prime editing that has been publicly announced uses the technology to edit cells outside the body before transplanting them back into the patient.

Now, scientists from the David Liu lab at the Broad Institute have addressed bottlenecks that previously impeded the use of prime editing in animals and human patients. In two studies published last month in Nature Biotechnology and one published today in Nature Nanotechnology, the team described multiple changes to key components of the prime editing system and also optimized prime editing for delivery with lipid nanoparticles, which deliver genetic medicines to tissues in the body and are already used in several approved therapeutics. These advances together increase the efficiency and potency of prime editing and improve its potency when delivered into the body, a key requirement for in vivo prime editing therapeutics.

"Collectively, these three papers improve the overall efficiency and clinical relevance of prime editing, which we hope will make the technique more useful both for research purposes and for therapeutic clinical applications," said Liu, who is also the Richard Merkin Professor and director of the Merkin Institute for Transformative Technologies in Healthcare at Broad, the Dudley Cabot Professor of the Natural Sciences in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard University, and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator.

Smartphones, online learning, generative AI: The way we read has changed more in the last decade than in the previous century. So what do we actually know about what reading does for the mind? In his new book, Falk Huettig, senior investigator at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, brings together research spanning psychology, linguistics, neuroscience and education to answer that question. The result is a systematic account of how literacy reshapes memory, attention, language processing and reasoning—and even abilities readers might not expect, like face recognition.

Cognitive enhancement is having a moment, with people turning to better sleep, exercise, nutrition, stress management and tools like caffeine or neurostimulation in search of a sharper mind. According to Huettig, one of the most powerful enhancers of all has largely flown under the radar.

"One of the most powerful cognitive enhancers, with broad and increasingly well-documented effects, is rarely emphasized in these discussions: the ability to read," he says.

An unexpected finding: Reading and face recognition
One of the more surprising threads in the book concerns face recognition. A long-standing idea in cognitive neuroscience holds that because reading is a relatively recent cultural invention, the brain has no dedicated reading network of its own, so literacy training has to borrow space from older visual systems, including the one used for recognizing faces.

"Neuroscientists have proposed that the development of reading expertise may therefore partially displace or encroach upon the face recognition network in the brain," Huettig explains. "This postulated cortical 'invasion' could result in a measurable decline in face or object recognition performance, as neural resources are reallocated to support the newly acquired reading skill."

Huettig's own research points the other way.

"Our alternative perspective challenges the idea of destructive competition by proposing that learning to read may actually enhance sensitivity to faces and other visual object categories, rather than intrusively co-opting existing face recognition territory," he says.

In studies conducted in India comparing literate and illiterate adults, his team found that "such co-opting leads to functional fine-tuning, where older networks are not diminished but rather adapted and even enhanced. We confirmed this explanation in behavioral studies: Literate people were better at face recognition than illiterate people."

A continuum, not a switch
The book argues that literacy keeps developing long after someone learns to decode text.

"Reading proficiency does not end once a reader can fluently decode a writing system," Huettig says. "Avid readers continue to automatize and refine these subprocesses and their coordination, training both lower- and—with increasing practice—higher-level cognitive functions. As a result, literate people come to 'see' the world through a fundamentally different lens than those who are illiterate or less literate."

Few people, he notes, ever reach the very top: "Only a small proportion of individuals reach the highest levels of critical reading in international assessments such as the PISA tests."

Content matters, too.

"It matters a great deal what people read," Huettig says. "Reaching these advanced levels of literacy requires regular engagement with sophisticated texts, along with the development of strong critical thinking and reasoning skills."

Today, ESA's Euclid mission revealed the largest, most detailed photo ever taken of our galaxy's centre in visible light 🙌

This video takes you on a journey across this region. 

Turn up the volume and enjoy our galactic centre 🤩 ‍

Find out more about this image 👉 esa.int/Science_Explor…

For more than 5,000 years, Ötzi the Iceman has carried an invisible community of microbes through ice, time, and modern museum preservation. Now, scientists have taken the most detailed look yet at this microbial ecosystem, separating the microorganisms that accompanied Ötzi in life from those that arrived after his death and during decades of conservation.

By analyzing a wide range of samples with multiple genetic and microbiological techniques, the researchers identified traces of bacteria from Ötzi’s original gut microbiome in internal tissues. They also uncovered an unexpected group of cold-adapted yeasts that likely originated in the glacier environment and have remained associated with the mummy to this day.

The findings, published in the journal Microbiome, offer new insights into the long-term preservation of ancient remains and the remarkable survival strategies of microorganisms in extreme cold.

The investigation was extensive. Researchers analyzed surface ice, meltwater collected from inside the mummy, and numerous swab samples. They also incorporated data from earlier studies of intestinal tissue and stomach contents. To better understand environmental influences, the team examined a soil sample from the discovery site that had been collected and frozen during Ötzi’s recovery in 1991.

Scientists at the Garvan Institute of Medical Research have, for the first time, recorded immune cells known as the body’s “housekeepers” actively attacking and consuming live melanoma cells. The discovery could reshape how researchers approach treatment for melanoma, one of Australia’s most common and deadliest cancers.

The study, published in the Journal of Experimental Medicine, identifies a previously underappreciated group of immune cells called macrophages. These cells gather around the edges of melanoma tumors, where they continuously engulf cancer cells and help slow tumor growth.

“This is the first time anyone has captured a macrophage attacking and engulfing a live cancer cell in real time,” says Dr. Yuki Keith, first author of the research. “We always suspected macrophages were doing more than we gave them credit for – now we have the video footage to prove it. Studying this in a living system is crucial because it is more representative of what happens in real life, showing the complexity of the immune system and paving the way for the treatments of the future.”

Every time a smartphone is charged or an electric vehicle is plugged in, billions of lithium ions move through a battery to store energy. Future devices could perform far better with solid-state batteries, a technology that promises longer-lasting phones, safer energy storage, and electric vehicles capable of traveling much farther on a single charge. Yet one stubborn problem has kept these batteries from reaching the mainstream: tiny structures called dendrites that can destroy a battery from the inside.

Now, researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Sustainable Materials (MPI-SusMat) have uncovered exactly how these microscopic defects trigger battery failure. Their findings, published in Nature, provide new insight into one of the most important challenges facing next-generation energy storage.

Unlike conventional lithium-ion batteries, which rely on a liquid electrolyte to move ions between electrodes, solid-state batteries use a solid ceramic electrolyte. Eliminating the liquid component offers several advantages. Solid-state designs can potentially store more energy in the same amount of space, reduce fire risks, and remain functional for longer periods.

The technology has attracted enormous interest from automakers and electronics manufacturers because it could dramatically improve battery performance. In theory, smartphones could go days without charging, while electric vehicles could achieve driving ranges up to three times greater than current models.

Five carmakers are involved in a case at the High Court in London over claims that they cheated on emissions tests. A decade ago, the "dieselgate" scandal broke, eventually forcing Volkswagen to pay billions of euros in fines and settlements. These carmakers (Mercedes, Ford, Peugeot/Citroën, Renault and Nissan) have all faced accusations that selling cars was more important to them than their environmental responsibilities. They all deny the allegations.

Back in 2015, all United Nations member states adopted 17 sustainable development goals (SDGs) as a global blueprint to end poverty and inequality, protect the planet and promote peace by 2030. Central to this agenda is the pledge to "leave no one behind", affirming that progress in any area matters only if it reaches the world's most vulnerable communities.

The allegations against the carmakers sit within this wider pattern. When firms treat a crisis—in this case, environmental regulations—as justification for bending the rules, sustainability stops being a real commitment and becomes a fair-weather promise.

The same logic can appear in geopolitics, but with far more devastating consequences. At the extreme end, conflict shows how quickly the SDG blueprint can unravel.

For decades, magnons have shown enormous promise for quantum technologies, but one critical limitation has kept them from practical use: they disappear almost as soon as they form.

Now, an international team of physicists led by Andrii Chumak at the University of Vienna has increased magnon lifetimes by nearly two orders of magnitude, from just a few hundred nanoseconds to as long as 18 microseconds.

The researchers also discovered that this limit is set not by fundamental physics, but largely by material quality, pointing to a clear path toward even longer-lived magnons. The breakthrough could ultimately help enable highly compact quantum computers, potentially no larger than a 1-cent coin. The findings were published in Science Advances.

Why Magnons Matter
Magnons move through magnetic solids as small waves in magnetization, similar to ripples spreading across water after a stone is dropped into a pond. Unlike photons, which can move through empty space or optical fibers, magnons travel inside solid magnetic materials.

Their wavelengths can shrink to the nanometer scale, meaning magnonic circuits could, in principle, be built on chips no larger than those already used in today’s smartphones. Because a magnon is an excitation inside a solid, it also naturally interacts with many other fundamental quasiparticles, including phonons and photons. That makes magnons promising building blocks for hybrid quantum systems and quantum metrology.

Scientists have developed a new type of "virtual" metasurface—capable of controlling light in ways traditional lenses and optics can't—which they say is superior to the current approach, which relies on ultrathin engineered materials. The Nottingham Trent University team says the work will help fully optimize metasurface potential for a range of real-world applications and paves the way for a move from physical to virtual platforms in nanotechnology.

Metasurfaces are many times thinner than a human hair and can bend and focus light, change its color and steer it in different directions, meaning they can replace bulky optical elements in small devices such as lenses, mirrors and filters.

While they are powerful, however, the materials and dimensions of physical metasurfaces are fixed—once built, they can't change their shape, which can limit how useful they are in real-world technologies.

The study, published in the journal Advanced Photonics Nexus, demonstrates the potential for virtual metasurfaces, which use emulated two-dimensional optical patterns on a flat surface rather than tiny physical particles.

The process uses a device called a spatial light modulator, which can control light pixel by pixel to change its shape and function faster than the blink of an eye.

Because the patterns are programmable and can change instantly, the metasurface can perform many different functions within the same device. This could include mixing colors, turning invisible infrared images visible, or acting like a lens to adjust focus.

The researchers argue that making the material "tunable" by using such synthesized metasurfaces is what is required to move metasurfaces out of laboratories and onto production lines for new technologies.

While the approach requires additional research and development, the team says it could benefit a range of technologies, spanning imaging and microscopy, quantum photonics, sensing, beam steering, semiconductor manufacturing, telecommunications and holography.

In the new study, the researchers demonstrate the technology's potential by using the approach to turn invisible infrared signals into visible pictures and adjust the images' focal lengths on demand. Conventional lenses and mirrors are unable to perform these two functions concurrently.

Natural hallucinogens, such as psilocybin, mescaline, N,N-dimethyltryptamine (DMT) and related compounds, have generally received attention for their effects on human perception, emotion and cognition. Recently, interest in these compounds has expanded to include their potential roles in psychiatric treatment, neuroplasticity research and the study of consciousness.

Yet their ecological origins remain poorly understood. Why have unrelated plants, fungi and animals repeatedly evolved molecules capable of strongly modulating animal nervous systems?

Now, researchers led by Prof. Wang Xiaohui from the Changchun Institute of Applied Chemistry of the Chinese Academy of Sciences propose that natural hallucinogens may have primarily evolved as ecological tools that help organisms survive, defend themselves and interact with other species.

The research was discussed in a Perspective published in PNAS.

Chemical ecology offers a new frame
The study integrates chemical ecology, comparative genomics, biosynthesis, neuropharmacology and evolutionary biology to create an ecological and evolutionary framework for understanding psychoactive natural products.

The researchers argue that natural hallucinogens should be viewed as products of chemical ecology—the study of how organisms use chemicals to interact with one another and with their environment—and of convergent evolution, in which similar traits evolve independently in unrelated organisms because they face similar environmental challenges.

According to the study, these hallucinogenic compounds are not accidental "chemical anomalies." Rather, they may represent ecological tools shaped by interactions among producer organisms and their consumers, predators, competitors or symbiotic partners.

Imagine pouring two cups of warm water together and expecting to get one cup of boiling water. That is impossible in everyday life, but something similar can happen in the quantum world. There, two low-energy particles of light, known as photons, can combine their energy to create a single photon with much higher energy.

Researchers at Kyushu University have now developed a solid-state molecular material that can convert ordinary visible sunlight into ultraviolet (UV) light. The material achieved a conversion efficiency of 1.9% under natural outdoor sunlight. Their findings were published in Nature Communications on June 23.

Converting Visible Sunlight Into UV Light
Although most people try to avoid UV exposure during the summer, ultraviolet light plays an essential role in many technologies. It is used for air purification, curing resins in 3D printing, and hardening gels in dental fillings and nail products. Even so, UV light makes up only about 6% of the sunlight that reaches Earth’s surface, and only part of that small amount is useful for practical applications.

“What we do here is ‘add together’ the energy from two visible light photons to make one ultraviolet photon. It’s a fascinating process called photo upconversion,” explains Yoichi Sasaki, Associate Professor at Kyushu University’s Faculty of Engineering and the study’s corresponding author.

The two powerful earthquakes that struck Venezuela's northern coast, killing more than 180 people, were an event known as a "doublet."

Doublet earthquakes happen when a pair of similar-sized quakes hit close in location and time, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. On Wednesday evening, a 7.2 magnitude quake hit first, followed by a magnitude 7.5 just 39 seconds later.

The deadly one-two punch toppled buildings in Venezuela's capital, Caracas and beyond. Some 1,500 people were injured and thousands were reported missing. The coastal region of La Guaira, which is north of Caracas, experienced some of the heaviest damage and casualties, officials said.

How rare are doublets?
While not as common as a typical earthquake where a main shock is followed by much smaller aftershocks, doublets can happen anywhere in the world, Christine Goulet, director of the USGS earthquake science center in California, told The Associated Press.

Doublets indicate a complex fault structure, like the one in Venezuela. Known as the Bocono fault, it runs along the backbone of the Venezuelan Andes for about 300 miles (500 kilometers). A previous doublet—of magnitudes 6.2 and 6.3—struck an area west of Caracas in September 2025, killing at least one person and injuring more than 100 others. Most of the damage was reported in the states of Zulia and Lara.