A new study by a doctoral researcher at The University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH), part of The University of Alabama System, suggests global dust storms on Mars may organize the Martian atmosphere into regions favorable for electrical activity, increasing the potential for electrostatic discharges that could affect missions to the red planet by interfering with electronics, causing arcing between conductive surfaces, and damaging exposed scientific instruments and spacecraft systems. The research, conducted by Chali Idosa Uga, a third-year Ph.D. student in the Department of Space Science at UAH, is published in The Planetary Science Journal.

The work focuses on the Martian Year 34 global dust storm, a planet-encircling event that occurred on Mars in 2018. It is one of the best-studied Martian weather events because multiple orbiters and rovers observed it simultaneously. Uga's research focused on whether such events can create conditions in which electric fields may build up to levels favorable for electrical breakdown in localized regions of the lower atmosphere. The researcher was advised by Dr. Gary Zank, director of the UAH Center for Space Plasma and Aeronomic Research (CSPAR), and Dr. Dennis Gallagher at NASA Marshall Space Flight Center.

"Mars does not have thunderstorms in the terrestrial sense, but it does have intense dust storms in a thin carbon dioxide atmosphere," Uga explains. "During such events, dust is lifted, transported and mixed through the lower atmosphere, creating conditions in which grain collisions can separate electric charge while the weakly conducting atmosphere may allow that charge to persist."

Electrified dust as a mission hazard
The study also highlights potential implications for future Mars missions, which may need to account for electrostatic environments during dust storms.

"For future Mars exploration, our study suggests that major dust storms should be evaluated not only as atmospheric, thermal and visibility hazards, but also as structured electrostatic environments," Uga notes. "We do not quantify risk to a specific spacecraft, habitat, instrument or communication system. What we show is that during the Martian Year 34 global dust storm, the lower atmosphere developed localized and altitude-dependent regions where charge separation could persist, and modeled electric fields approached breakdown-favorable conditions."

A mysterious wavelength of light is missing from the dwarf planet Pluto and Saturn's supersized moon Titan, new James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) observations show. The surprising discovery hints that these worlds harbor an unknown molecule that has not been seen in any other solar system world or exoplanet so far.

Every element or molecule in the universe absorbs unique wavelengths of electromagnetic radiation. Therefore, one of the main ways astronomers study distant worlds — both inside and outside the solar system — is by closely examining the light that reflects off them and searching for dark "absorption lines" that correspond to the wavelengths of known chemical compounds.

For example, molecular oxygen absorbs light at 230 nanometers, so if the electromagnetic spectrum of a faraway exoplanet has an absorption line at this frequency, researchers can be confident that its atmosphere contains oxygen, according to a 2021 study.

JWST has proved to be exceptionally good at capturing electromagnetic spectra and identifying specific chemicals in exoplanet atmospheres, around distant stars and within primitive galaxies. It has even identified a molecule on one alien world that could point to extraterrestrial life.

In a new study, uploaded June 11 to the preprint server arXiv, researchers analyzed JWST data from Pluto and Titan, focusing on very small wavelengths that have been relatively unexplored until now. This revealed a specific absorption line at around 5.11 micrometers in both worlds' spectra. (These findings have not been published in a peer-reviewed journal yet.)

The team pored through similar studies on other planetary spectra but "did not find any band referenced in these publications that corresponds to the location of the observed absorption in Titan and Pluto," the researchers wrote in the paper.

A molecular mystery
The discovery is even stranger because there are very few similarities between Pluto and Titan that could explain why they share a molecule not found anywhere else.
...
The researchers proposed that it could be benzene — a ring-shaped hydrocarbon — mixed with an unknown molecule, or some form of acetylene or ketene ice. However, much more work is needed to prove that any of these potential candidates are responsible for absorbing this specific wavelength, they wrote.

Researchers at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) have found how plant cells respond to stress. If their energy supply is disrupted by heat, drought or saline soils, chloroplasts—the cells' powerhouses—send an intracellular distress signal by forming tiny, finger-like projections. This signal specifically activates protection programs that help limit damage. The study, published in Plant Physiology, reveals the function of these previously mysterious structures and presents an approach for making crops more resilient to climate stress.

Each plant cell contains chloroplasts, which work like little solar power stations. The tiny structures are the green energy centers of plant cells. Absorbing sunlight and extracting carbon dioxide from the air, they produce sugar—the energy source every plant needs for growth and survival. Without these solar power stations, plants would not be able to produce energy and thus could not serve as a food resource for other living beings. Another effect would be that less oxygen would be released into the atmosphere.

Protection against heat, drought, or salt
If plants are under stress because of, for example, a lack of water, high temperatures such as those Germany and Central Europe are currently experiencing, or saline soils, this delicate energy system gets out of balance. Aggressive substances develop that can affect and damage important parts of the cell. To survive, the plant needs to respond quickly and activate protective measures.

In this stress situation, chloroplasts react by forming the "fingers" that were recently investigated. The researchers revealed that these structures send a signal to the central control of the cell. "Particular genes are enabled or disabled, which triggers protection programs that support the damaged areas," said Professor Peter Nick from KIT's Botanical Institute.

The human brain evolved for a world of familiar faces, immediate threats and small social groups. But the world around us is changing far faster than human biology can keep pace. That mismatch may help explain some of the stress, loneliness and constant comparison people experience today.

The review, co-authored by Dr. Jose Yong, senior lecturer at James Cook University, Singapore, and Dr. Sarah Chan, research fellow at the Lee Kuan Yew Centre for Innovative Cities at SUTD, is published in Behavioral Sciences. Titled Evolutionary mismatch, stress, and competition: Making sense of psychosocial problems in the polycrisis era, it examines how stress, competition and loneliness can be understood through an evolutionary lens.

Evolutionary mismatch describes what happens when human instincts shaped in one kind of environment are forced to operate in a very different one. Humans evolved in smaller, close-knit groups, where danger, belonging, status and trust were read through familiar people and everyday face-to-face signals. Now, those same instincts are being triggered in dense cities, digital platforms, unequal societies and a world shaped by overlapping pressures. The result is internal confusion: Responses that once made sense in a small, familiar group can feel out of place, or simply overwhelming, in modern life.

Social media makes this mismatch especially visible. The urge to understand our place within a group may once have helped people maintain trust and cooperation among familiar faces. Today, that same instinct can be triggered by an endless stream of curated lives, achievements and status signals.

At the center of the paper is competition. Modern environments can intensify the feeling that others are judging, outperforming or leaving us behind. The authors propose that this heightened sense of competition may be one pathway through which evolutionary mismatch contributes to stress and poorer well-being.

"Competition is not new, but modern life can make it feel constant," said Yong. "An evolutionary perspective may help explain why people respond so strongly to comparison and the fear of falling behind, even when those signals come from strangers or screens rather than a small social group."

The paper draws on existing research and theory rather than new data. It presents evolutionary mismatch as one way of understanding modern social and psychological problems, alongside psychological, social and economic explanations. These ideas will need to be tested through real-world research.

That matters because the response to modern stress cannot rest only on telling individuals to be more resilient. If environments are activating old instincts in new and unhelpful ways, then cities, workplaces, digital platforms and communities also need to be part of the solution.

The state of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) has been a hot topic among climate scientists in recent years. The AMOC is crucial for climate regulation because it pulls warm surface water from the tropics north and sends colder, deeper water south, redistributing large amounts of heat, helping to sustain marine ecosystems and keeping global weather patterns steady. However, most standard AMOC-focused climate models may be missing an important piece of the puzzle—they don't include the growing pulse of freshwater from Greenland ice melt, which could further disrupt the AMOC.

But now, a study published in Science Advances has incorporated the freshwater influx from Greenland's ice melt into a new model. The results show that while the meltwater plays a significant role, it may not push the AMOC over the edge just yet.

To tip or not to tip?,
Most climate models agree that the AMOC will continue to weaken this century, but the abrupt collapse that some models suggest remains debated. A recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) model found that none of the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project phase 6 (CMIP6) models show an abrupt AMOC collapse during the 21st century.

Yet another recent study found that the Atlantic "cold blob" indicated a tipping point was nearing if conditions worsen. Earlier work has suggested that the Greenland meltwater contributes to the weakening of the AMOC, but it's been unclear whether that weakening would lead to an abrupt tipping point in which the AMOC collapses completely or is very difficult to reverse.

"However, it currently remains an open question whether these meltwater-induced AMOC changes are associated with tipping point characteristics such as abruptness and irreversibility. In addition, the physical mechanisms of how Greenland meltwater affects the AMOC beyond 2100 have, to our knowledge, not yet been explored," write the authors of the new study.

The Solar System is surrounded by a vast bubble of plasma created by solar wind flowing outward from the Sun. This bubble shields the system from most of the cosmic radiation that passes through the interstellar medium. Meanwhile, as our system orbits the center of the Milky Way, it creates a rounded "nose" region ahead of it and a "tail" in its wake. Scientists are divided as to the shape of the heliosphere, with some arguing that it resembles a comet, while others favor a croissant-shaped profile.

The boundaries of the heliosphere are dynamic, the outer edge constantly shifting in response to changing solar conditions, expanding during solar maximum and contracting at solar minimum. Researchers at the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) are busy studying the heliosphere so astronomers can create predictive models that will tell them the location of the termination shock - the heliosphere's outer boundary - in the direction the New Horizons probe is traveling.

Their findings were presented in two scientific papers that appeared in The Astrophysical Journal and the journal Advances in Space Research. The team, led by SwRI Post-Doctoral Researcher Dr. Jonathan Gasser, combined a solar wind forecasting method with analytical and numerical heliosphere models to determine where New Horizons will encounter the first plasma boundary in the outer heliosphere.

As temperatures rise around the world, air conditioning is saving lives. But a growing reliance on it is also placing unprecedented pressure on electricity grids, increasing greenhouse gas emissions and making cities even hotter.

A global review led by UNSW Sydney's Professor Mat Santamouris AM—an expert in innovative heat mitigation technologies and strategies for cities—argues that keeping buildings cool without relying solely on air conditioning will be critical for adapting to climate change.

Published in Nature Reviews Clean Technology, the review examines the latest advances in passive cooling technologies, from emerging materials for radiative, evaporative and combined radiative/evaporative cooling to sophisticated solar control systems and personalized intelligent ventilation technologies that can help buildings shed heat without consuming electricity.

Professor Santamouris says passive cooling should no longer be viewed as a niche architectural feature, but as essential infrastructure for a warming world.

"Air conditioning saves lives and will remain essential during extreme heat," he says. "But we cannot air-condition our way out of climate change. If every building depends entirely on mechanical cooling, we create enormous pressure on electricity systems while adding even more heat to our cities."

Demand for cooling is soaring
The review highlights the rapid growth in cooling demand worldwide. Global electricity consumption for cooling has reached almost 10 percent of total electricity use, with around 10 new air conditioners sold every second. By 2050, the number of residential air-conditioning units is projected to increase to almost 5.6 billion worldwide.

At the same time, billions of people living in hot climates still lack access to affordable cooling.

When Charlotte Mason ponders cosmic mysteries, she likes to doodle. “I am quite a visual person,” she said. “I usually draw a lot of pictures trying to understand what’s going on.”

Mason, an astrophysicist at the Cosmic Dawn Center in Copenhagen, has lately been filling pages with sketches of “little red dots,” perplexing objects discovered by the hundreds in images from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). Little red dots were never seen before the telescope came online in 2022. But we now know that they started to appear in significant numbers roughly 650 million years after the Big Bang.

These dots are just one of the thrilling mysteries that have emerged from JWST’s observations of the early universe. Others include black holes that seem impossibly large for their age, as well as ancient galaxies that defy what we thought we knew about the first billion years after the Big Bang. At first, scientists were astounded: The universe revealed by JWST simply didn’t square with our understanding of astrophysics. Now, a wave of new theories offers tantalizing solutions — but which ones portray reality is an open question.

Recent ideas suggest that little red dots could be black holes cocooned in thick gas, possibly representing a completely new type of object called a black hole star, in which the tight shroud of gas emits light like a stellar atmosphere.

“This would be my black hole,” Mason said, drawing a small circle and filling it in. “I might put a disk on it, because we think that’s where some of the emission comes from.” She slashed a line through the circle’s center. “Then the kind of naïve picture is just this dense gas cloud around the black hole.” She drew a larger circle surrounding the object.

But Mason thinks there may be more to these cosmic enigmas. She and colleagues recently analyzed the spectrum of light emitted by one little red dot. If the dense-cloud picture is correct, then some of the light should have been altered from passing through the gas — but that’s not what they saw.

“Now what do I do? Start again. But now if I make my gas clumpy,” Mason said, drawing a new diagram with holes in the clouds surrounding the black hole, “I should be able to get [a signal] that looks closer.”

All around the world, researchers like Mason are eagerly piecing together JWST’s glimpses of the ancient cosmos to create a clearer picture of our universe’s beginnings. And like the photons that travel billions of light-years to reach us, new fragments are constantly falling into place.

🆕 The NIR Cam on Webb has captured the protostars of the FS Tau system. These are just 1 to 3 million years old – young by cosmic standards! 👶⭐ ‍

A pair known as FS Tau A is responsible for the large diffraction pattern left of centre, while the red and orange outflows seen amidst the dust are thought to be caused by FS Tau B, the orange protostar just right of centre. 

Read more: esawebb.org/images/FS-Tau/

For decades, age-related memory loss has largely been viewed as a problem that begins in the brain. But growing evidence suggests that some of the processes shaping cognition may start much farther south — in the gut, home to trillions of microbes that help regulate everything from digestion to immunity.

A new mouse study from researchers at Stanford Medicine and the Arc Institute in Palo Alto, California, points to a surprising gut-brain connection behind cognitive aging.

The team found that age-related changes in gut bacteria can interfere with signals traveling along the vagus nerve, a major communication highway linking the gastrointestinal tract and the brain. Their findings suggest that memory decline may be influenced by changes outside the brain itself, opening new possibilities for preserving cognitive function later in life.

“Although memory loss is common with age, it affects people differently and at different ages,” said Christoph Thaiss, PhD, assistant professor of pathology. “We wanted to understand why some very old people remain cognitively sharp while other people see significant declines beginning in their 50s or 60s. What we learned is that the timeline of memory decline is not hardwired; it’s actively modulated in the body, and the gastrointestinal tract is a critical regulator of this process.”

The study found that the gut microbiome, the natural community of bacteria living in the intestine, changes as mice grow older. Some bacterial species become more common while others decline. Immune cells in the gastrointestinal tract detect these changes and trigger inflammation that weakens signaling through the vagus nerve to the hippocampus, the brain region involved in memory formation and spatial navigation. When researchers stimulated vagus nerve activity in older mice, the animals regained the ability to remember unfamiliar objects and escape mazes as well as younger mice.

After more than two decades, the orbit of NASA’s Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory has entered a phase of rapid decay. While NASA could allow the observatory to re-enter Earth’s atmosphere, as many missions do at the ends of their lifetimes, this situation has presented an opportunity to advance American spacecraft servicing technology while also extending the life of a productive science mission. To accomplish this, NASA awarded the U.S. company Katalyst Space a contract in September 2025 to attempt to raise Swift’s orbit.

A mission to raise the altitude of NASA’s Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory is underway after launching at 8:36 p.m. Marshall Islands Time (4:36 a.m. EDT), Friday, July 3, from Kwajalein Atoll in the South Pacific Ocean. Source

The 1.7 million satellites that companies are aiming to launch into Earth's orbit in the coming years will have "devastating consequences for astronomy," new research warned Wednesday.

The plans to swarm Earth with huge, extremely bright satellites represent an "existential threat" to telescopes viewing the universe, according to the European Southern Observatory (ESO), which conducted the research.

To retain humanity's ability to properly explore the night sky, the team of researchers called for a maximum limit of 100,000 satellites orbiting Earth.

The study is the first to calculate how much the constellations of big and particularly bright satellites being planned would affect astronomical observations by making the night sky brighter.

The number of satellites orbiting Earth has now reached 14,000 after surging in recent years, many of them part of trillionaire Elon Musk's Starlink internet constellation.

But that is just the start.

Musk's SpaceX has announced plans to launch more than 1 million satellites by 2028 to serve as data centers powering the artificial intelligence boom.

Other projects such as the "Cinnamon" plans of startup E-Space and Chinese constellations CTC-1 and CTC-2 would add hundreds of thousands more satellites spinning around our planet.

And U.S. startup Reflect Orbital hopes to launch 50,000 huge satellites that use giant mirrors to point sunlight back down to Earth, with the aim of providing light during the night.

In total, more than 1.7 million satellites could soon be lighting up the night sky, obscuring or blotting out the view of ground-based telescopes.

RMIT University researchers have tested a more effective way to capture microplastics from wastewater, using a combination of microbubbles and nanobubbles to achieve removal rates of more than 90%.

The dual-bubble approach can be adopted by wastewater treatment plants without major infrastructure changes by optimizing existing operating conditions, including air pressure, saturation time and bubble size.

The paper "Micro-Nanobubble Integrated Dissolved Air Flotation: A High-Efficiency Strategy for Microplastic Mitigation in Wastewater," is published in ACS ES&T Water. Lead author, Associate Professor Biplob Pramanik, said the approach suggests a practical way to reduce microplastic pollution—a growing global issue.

"Wastewater treatment plants are a major pathway for microplastics because they slip through filtration processes, posing risks to ecosystems and human health," Pramanik said. He is also the director of RMIT's Water Effective Technology and Tools Research Center.

"Our approach is simple to implement and significantly increases the removal of microplastics during the primary stage of treatment."

The study investigated an enhanced version of dissolved air flotation, a widely used water treatment process that removes contaminants by attaching them to air bubbles and lifting them to the surface.

A major new resource that provides one of the most comprehensive pictures yet of what people are eating around the world has been introduced in a new study by a UCL and University of Oxford researcher.

From obesity and heart disease to climate change and food affordability, many of today's biggest challenges are shaped by what we eat. But there is a surprisingly basic problem facing researchers and policymakers: We often don't know with enough accuracy what people are actually consuming.

The new study, published in Nature Food and authored by Professor Marco Springmann (UCL Institute for Global Health as well as the Environmental Change Institute at the University of Oxford), introduces the Global Dietary Database for Impact Assessments (GDD-IA), which is freely available through an interactive online explorer, allowing users to investigate dietary patterns across countries and over time.

The GDD-IA combines information on food production, food waste, dietary surveys and human energy requirements to estimate what people eat from 1990 to 2020. It includes detail by age, sex and whether people live in urban or rural areas.

The resource has been designed to support research into some of the world's most pressing questions: How do diets affect human health? What impact do they have on climate change and the environment? How affordable are healthy and sustainable diets for different populations?

Professor Springmann said, "Many of the decisions we make about food policy rely on assumptions about what people eat. But existing global datasets often have important limitations. Our aim was to create a more complete and biologically realistic picture of food consumption that can support better assessments of health, environmental and economic impacts."

With new technologies come new opportunities. And that is especially true in astronomy - with every new advanced telescope we have the potential to see (or in some cases, listen) further and more clearly than we ever have before. That is certainly the case for the new Square Kilometre Array (SKA), which is currently undergoing a multi-year roll out phase. Despite that drawn out process, astronomers are already excited about its potential, and a new book chapter from Dr. Chenoa Tremblay and her co-authors details how this new technology could be used to answer one of the most fundamental questions - are we alone?

The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) has always been constrained by its resources. This constraint required researchers to focus mainly on tight signals such as the narrow band between hydrogen and hydroxyl. Early SETI pioneers justified this by claiming that such a narrow beacon would be a clear signal of intent. However, it also meant that they were only able to find signals that were intentionally sent in our direction. And the likelihood of that happening is miniscule compared to the chances there were advanced civilizations that did not feel the need to reach out to us.

Enter the SKA. Its design, which spans two continents (Australia and Africa) allows it to scan an absolutely gigantic amount of the sky. Critically, this will enable it to pick up “leakage” radiation. The authors calculated that one hour of observational time on the SKA itself would be enough to pick up signals from the equivalent of a modern-day mobile phone network similar to what we currently have on Earth from an exoplanet four light years away.

That is a massive step change in our ability to detect unintentional emissions. But actually getting the time to do so is a huge part of the challenge. Telescope time on world-leading instruments like the SKA is notoriously difficult to get. So SETI researchers came up with a productive solution - they will simply piggy-back off of the data the SKA is already collecting for other surveys, such as watching supernovae or bright radio galaxies.

Duplicating radio data is easy enough - so the SETI researchers plan to use their own data pipeline, without disrupting the instrument’s primary science mission. They can also cross-reference their data with other large catalogues, such as Gaia, to evaluate signals from potentially promising sources.

For decades, archaeologists have debated whether these early Paleoindians were megafauna specialists, focused on hunting massive animals, or dietary generalists who ate a broad mix of small game, fish, plants, and shellfish depending on their local environment.

Over the past ten years, many scientists had drifted toward the generalist view.

However, a new study led by the University of Alaska Fairbanks pushes back hard against that trend.

“One of two competing ideas is dietary generalization: exploiting a wide variety of resources that would differ based on region,” explained University of Alaska Fairbanks Professor Ben Potter.

“The other is megafaunal specialization: focusing on just a few large-bodied prey.”

In the study, the researchers examined 50 archaeological sites across three regions: Eastern Beringia (ancient Alaska, roughly 14,000 to 13,300 years ago), the Clovis culture of North America (about 13,400 to 12,800 years ago), and the Fishtail Projectile Point culture of South America (roughly 12,900 to 11,600 years ago).

Together, these represent the earliest continent-spanning human societies in the western hemisphere.

Analyzing measures such as species abundance, minimum number of individuals, and edible biomass, the scientists found that megafauna accounted for 83% to 88% of the meat and fat these groups likely consumed.

Woolly mammoths dominated diets in Beringia, Columbian mammoths in North America, and giant ground sloths and gomphotheres in South America.

Smaller animals were present at many sites but contributed almost nothing nutritionally.

“The test of dietary specialization isn’t just how many of a given animal you find at an ancient campsite,” Professor Potter said.

“It’s what the record looks like relative to natural abundance. If early people were dietary generalists, you’d expect to find the most common animals would be more common in peoples’ campsites.”

“Animals like mammoths and ground sloths, which were actually quite rare in the landscape, completely dominate the archaeological record.”

“Rabbits and mice, which would have been everywhere, barely register.”

The authors also point to independent evidence: a chemical analysis of a Clovis-era child called Anzick-1 found that roughly 96% of his mother’s protein came from megafauna, mostly mammoth.

Beyond diet, these early groups shared other hallmarks of specialized hunters: highly efficient, well-maintained toolkits carried over long distances; extremely mobile, far-ranging lifestyles instead of settled home territories; and little to no evidence of plant-processing tools like grinding stones.

Picture a bright red apple. Most people can do this easily. They imagine the apple's shape, color and shine. But for others, the image is vague and blurry or they "see" nothing at all. This is known as aphantasia—a "blind mind's eye."

What we are dealing with here are individual differences in mental imagery. Research suggests mental imagery exists on a continuum, and this can affect how we learn.

Every day in class, students are encouraged to "visualize," "imagine," or "picture" concepts. For example, in geography, students need to imagine landscapes or weather systems. In science, they are asked to mentally represent atoms, electric currents or molecular processes.

But what happens when a student cannot easily do this?

Our study examines whether differences in mental imagery affect students' learning—and how teachers and parents can reduce any disadvantage this may cause.

Why mental imagery matters
When students can create a clear mental picture, that image may help them understand, organize and remember new information. This is all helpful for their learning.

But research suggests students with weak mental imagery may need to work harder and may not experience these benefits to the same extent.

This can sometimes show up as students taking longer to understand new ideas or needing more support to remember what they have learned.

Instead of relying on mental images, they may have to process information in other ways—through words, logic, memorization or repeated rehearsal. This can increase what psychologists call cognitive load, or the amount of mental effort required to learn something new.

How can you tell if your child struggles here?
Children with weak mental imagery may be less likely to report "seeing pictures in their mind" when reading stories, recalling past events or imagining future situations.

They may rely more on verbal descriptions, facts or step-by-step reasoning than on visualization strategies.

This is not uncommon. In our study, we estimated about 10% of students had "no" or "dim" mental imagery. About 30% reported their mental imagery was only "somewhat" vivid.

Following its longest hibernation period ever of nearly a year, NASA's New Horizons spacecraft has emerged in good health and is ready to begin transmitting science data gathered in the distant Kuiper Belt far beyond Pluto.

On June 23, flight controllers at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Maryland, confirmed New Horizons, acting on stored commands uplinked to its main computer last July, had safely awakened from a 321‑day hibernation period that began Aug. 7. With the spacecraft now approximately 5.9 billion miles (9.5 billion kilometers) from Earth, the radio signals carrying that confirmation took about 8 hours and 52 minutes to reach the APL Mission Operations Center via NASA's Deep Space Network station near Madrid, Spain.

The mission team typically places New Horizons in resource‑saving hibernation mode during long cruise periods. While the spacecraft is hibernating, operators do not send commands or retrieve data, but the spacecraft continues gathering and storing data around the clock from its heliospheric plasma sensors, Solar Wind at Pluto and the Pluto Energetic Particle Spectrometer Science Investigation, as well as its space dust detector, the Venetia Burney Student Dust Counter.

Alice Bowman, the New Horizons mission operations manager at APL, said the spacecraft reported back to Earth, via the Deep Space Network, with a weekly status beacon.

"Every status report through this hibernation period was 'green,' meaning all was well aboard New Horizons each and every week," she said.

As New Horizons resumes active operations, Bowman noted, the team will begin downlinking spacecraft health and safety data, followed by data from the three scientific instruments. In about three weeks, the spacecraft's onboard Alice ultraviolet spectrograph will look at the hydrogen gas distribution in the outer heliosphere, while the Solar Wind at Pluto, the Pluto Energetic Particle Spectrometer Science Investigation, and the Venetia Burney Student Dust Counter instruments continue their measurements, and the ground team conducts a series of spacecraft and instrument checkouts.

The team also is completing upgrades to the ground‑system software that will make it easier to maintain operations of the spacecraft. Tests are already underway and are expected to continue through the year.

New Horizons is operating on updated autonomy logic designed for operations farther from the sun and to accommodate the expected reduction in power and the naturally occurring increase in radio‑signal travel time.

The NASA spacecraft's exploration of this distant region of the solar system marks the latest step in a journey that began in January 2006 with the fastest launch on record; a flyby of Jupiter in February 2007 that included stunning views of the gas giant and its moons; the first exploration through the Pluto system in July 2015; the first exploration of a Kuiper Belt object, Arrokoth, in January 2019, and unique studies of the sun's outer heliosphere and dozens of additional Kuiper Belt objects since then.

In 1993, a team led by the planetary scientist Carl Sagan tentatively concluded that there is life on Earth. Not much of a deduction, you might think — except that the researchers confined their evidence to observations made by the Galileo spacecraft(opens a new tab), which had flown past our planet three years earlier on a looping journey to Jupiter. So great is the transformative power of life that its presence can be detected just from the light and radio waves our planet emits or reflects into space. Today we scan the cosmos for some of these telltale signatures light-years away.

Life leaves a mark, yet even now there’s no scientific consensus about what makes living things so different from inorganic substances like the rocks, gases, and oceans that are the sole components of dead worlds. Many scientists cite properties such as replication or metabolism. Others speak in more abstract terms about the way life is out of thermodynamic equilibrium with its surroundings. But some give another kind of answer. Living organisms are different because they do stuff for reasons.

It’s not enough to say that life is a nonequilibrium organized state through which there’s a constant flux of matter and energy. That description applies to hurricanes, too. But hurricanes just are. Only living entities have goals: to find food, to reproduce, to survive, sometimes simply to experience good things. (Dog owners will recognize that this is not just a human attribute.)

One way to express this idea is to say that living organisms have “agency.” It’s a hotly contested term. Some biologists reject it outright, at least for any organisms except humans, because we decide on our actions with conscious deliberation. (Whether we’re truly the only species to do so is another issue.) Others think that agency is a fundamental attribute of all life. Since there’s no agreed-upon definition of the term, to some extent it can mean whatever you want it to mean. But the debate about biological agency touches on fundamental issues in our understanding of what it means to be alive, because agency evokes a notion that biologists and philosophers have always wrestled with: teleology, the apparent purposiveness of life. If we admit agency into biology, do we open the floodgates to ideas about design, vitalism, or cosmic meaning? Or is it just a recognition of what makes life such a special state of matter?

To me, the notion of agency indeed speaks to our intuitive sense of what makes living things so special: not mere machines pushed around by environment and circumstance. I suspect that aversion to agency betrays a queasiness about confronting life as something more than some kind of genetic program. But there’s danger in the idea, too: It could so easily derail the work of studying the mechanistic explanations of how life works. I’m not looking to either bury or praise agency, but to explore whether it can be a scientifically productive idea.

Popular science fiction is no stranger to escape-pod scenarios, typically featuring characters who narrowly avoid their demise by jettisoning from a spaceship—think R2-D2 and C-3PO shooting away from a rebel spaceship in the opening of Star Wars: A New Hope. Biologists at the University of California San Diego have found that communities of bacteria feature a similar ejection capability.

Groups of bacteria known as biofilms thrive on surfaces all around us. These microscopic clusters are abundant in aquatic environments, from the slick surface of lake rocks to the slimy buildup in plumbing pipes. Biofilms also inhabit select parts of our bodies, including our skin and the surfaces of our teeth.

UC San Diego scientists from Professor Gürol Süel's laboratory in the School of Biological Sciences documented the biofilm ejection phenomenon for the first time while studying a bacterium known as hay bacillus (Bacillus subtilis).

Previous views held that biofilms facing death simply dissolved and faded away. Adding to the researchers' surprise, they reviewed similar ejection capabilities across the animal kingdom and found that the only other organisms that feature similar mechanisms are jellyfish.

A hidden rupture mechanism
"We found that at the end of their life cycles, these bacterial biofilms forcefully ejected specific cells from the community," said Süel, a professor in the Department of Molecular Biology, of the study, published in Nature Microbiology. "The biofilm senses that it is in trouble so it shoots cells out of the community like an escape pod."

Survival through expelled cells
The researchers say the ejection capability allows a biofilm facing nutrient starvation or other threats to ensure that the community can survive by releasing mobile cells that have the potential to swim away and colonize a new location.

"The biofilm knows it is going to die, so it ejects some of its cells so they can survive and live to fight another day," said Süel.