Researchers have developed fluorescent molecules that permit imaging of how DNA is packaged inside living cells at unprecedented resolution and, in preserved cells, at a resolution close to the width of the double helix itself.

The team tested the fluorescent probes on slices of bowel tissue taken from three cancer patients. These are ordinary wax-preserved samples, which is how almost all hospitals store patient biopsies.

In the tumors, the DNA was noticeably looser and more spread out than in the healthy tissue sitting right beside it.

Other studies have found that DNA unpacks steadily as cancer takes hold, and the researchers suggest that how loosely a cell's DNA is folded could eventually serve as a measure of how far a tumor has progressed or how aggressive it is.

Doctors currently examine these types of biopsies by eye, using a staining method more than a century old. The advance, described today in the journal Molecular Cell, raises the possibility that one day they could also look at how DNA occupies three-dimensional space inside cells as an additional clue for diagnosing and treating cancer.

"With the same dye we can do two very different things. In a living cell we can watch DNA moving, which tells us how chromatin, the natural state of DNA in cells, behaves. In a preserved cell we can zoom in until we are almost at the scale of the DNA molecule itself. Combining both approaches helps us see one of the main layers of control in human biology in unprecedented resolution," explains ICREA Research Professor Pia Cosma, senior author of the study.

Watching DNA in living cells
Every cell in the human body holds 2 meters of DNA squeezed into a very small space. How tightly it is folded up decides which genes are switched on and which stay off.

Almost all images of DNA folding come from cells that are already dead. Powerful microscope techniques needed to track individual components of DNA in cells typically require treating samples with harsh chemicals and strong laser lights that living cells cannot survive.

A team at the Centre for Genomic Regulation (CRG) in Barcelona, the City University of Hong Kong and the Guangdong Provincial People's Hospital (Guangdong Academy of Medical Sciences) Southern Medical University found a way to overcome this challenge by designing fluorescent probes.

Called HoTs, the dyes can navigate inside living cells on their own and stick to DNA. The probes are designed to blink intermittently, meaning they flicker on and off like fairy lights. The researchers tested them in living human skin cells and in living HeLa cancer cells grown in the laboratory.

If every dye lit up at once, microscopes would take a blurry picture. By blinking one at a time, an advanced microscope works out exactly where each probe is. After taking thousands of snapshots, a computer program builds up a picture 10 times sharper than conventional microscopes.

Does the devastating flooding unleashed by the collapse of a section of a glacier in the Nepali Himalayas signal a new kind of risk in a world warmed by climate change? Here's what scientists told AFP.

Repeat collapse risk
On Friday, Nepal issued an alert about the risks posed by a large body of water formed in China's Tibet region following the collapse of a section of a glacier two days earlier. That collapse killed at least 584 people, and more than 2,400 remain missing.

"Once you take a piece of mountain away, then there's probably another piece right beside it that's been destabilized by the removal. And so you could have a similar thing collapse," Simon Cox, principal scientist at New Zealand's GNS Science research institute, told AFP.

"You may well have more material to fall down right from up at the source area, and the same thing could happen immediately again."

According to the United States Geological Survey (USGS), the resulting flood was triggered by a glacier collapse so violent that it generated energy equivalent to a magnitude 5.2 earthquake and caused numerous landslides.

Rising global hazard
Etienne Berthier, a glaciologist at the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS), told AFP, "we can't rule out" the risk of similar phenomena occurring elsewhere.

"They reach such proportions in the Himalayas because the terrain and the region's high tectonic activity amplify the likelihood of such events occurring on that scale," he explained.

Other regions may have similarly "dynamic" glaciers—such as Alaska—but "this happens in completely uninhabited areas."

"We have seen a dramatic increase in the number of extremely hazardous flows such as this globally in the past decade or so,"

Scientists may have found a way to regenerate the neurons that are lost due to conditions like Alzheimer's disease, a new laboratory study hints.

The research, published Aug. 26 in the journal Cell Biomaterials, suggests that reducing levels of a key protein in another type of cell in the brain, called astrocytes, may convert those cells into neurons. The adult brain has a limited capacity to produce new neurons, at baseline, and an even more limited ability to replace neurons lost to disease.

If successfully developed into a treatment for humans, this new approach could replenish lost neurons and thus restore brain function, the study authors say.

Astrocytes are abundant, star-shaped cells in the brain that protect and support the functions of neurons. A crucial protein for astrocyte development is called PTBP1, and previously, scientists suggested that eliminating this protein in astrocytes may convert them into neurons. In that study, researchers reported converting astrocytes in the mouse brain into neurons by eliminating the gene that coded for PTBP1.

However, later experiments contradicted these results, suggesting that newly formed neurons could not be traced back to the astrocytes. So Peisheng Xu, a co-author of the new study and a pharmaceutical scientist at the University of South Carolina, set out to investigate that contradiction...

‍Success! Roman’s planned mid-course correction burn went as expected, ensuring that we are on track for our orbit around the second Lagrange point, a million miles from Earth.
go.nasa.gov/4A3zDi2

Did you miss NASARoman lift off into space yesterday?

Check out our recap of the launch — and what we're learning from Roman. Next, the telescope will spend the next few months flying to its new home 1 million miles from Earth.

You can track the new space telescope's current position in real time at: eyes.nasa.gov/apps/solar-sys…

Roman Silhouette. 👤

In real-time, relive the moment where SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy and NASA’s Roman Space Telescope transited the solar disk during yesterday’s launch.

Carnegie Mellon University scientists have uncovered a new phenomenon that challenges a longstanding assumption about how electronic materials respond to magnetic fields. The discovery broadens the fundamental understanding of the Hall effect, a principle widely used to measure the magnetic and electronic properties of materials.

Published in Nature Materials, the research could lay the groundwork for simpler, more versatile magnetic sensing technologies used in electronics, transportation and medical imaging.

The Hall effect has been a key tool for studying material properties for more than a century. In 1879, Edwin Hall showed that applying a magnetic field perpendicular to a material deflects moving charges, producing a measurable voltage. By analyzing this signal, scientists can determine whether electric current is carried by negative or positive charges, how many of those charges are moving through the material and how easily they flow.

Today, the Hall effect is integral to widely used sensing technologies found in systems ranging from automobiles to computer keyboards.

In the latest work, researchers in Carnegie Mellon's Department of Physics, working in the Lab for Investigating Quantum Materials, Interfaces and Devices (LIQUID), identified a new form of the Hall effect.

"For a long time, people thought the Hall effect only worked when the magnetic field was applied perpendicular to the plane of the film. We've shown that that's not true—you can also get a response when the field is in-plane," said Simranjeet Singh, an associate professor of physics.

The discovery expands the role of the Hall effect as a core tool in physics because it allows for a magnetization-dependent Hall response in more than one direction. This allows researchers to probe and understand multidimensional magnetic and topological configurations in condensed matter systems.

"Beyond fundamental importance, this discovery can enable novel planar device architectures and sensor types, such as vector magnetometry, by measuring the out-of-plane and in-plane anomalous Hall effect signals in the same device," Singh said.

From theory to reality
The idea of an in-plane anomalous Hall effect was proposed theoretically but never experimentally demonstrated—until now.

"People proposed it and ideas were out there, but it's very difficult to make a magnetic material with the right symmetry to do it," Singh said. "What we did was we found a material with the right symmetry and we made it magnetic."

Researchers use tightly focused laser beams to image biological samples, shape materials with microscopic precision and generate displays. But using those beams in three dimensions requires more than sweeping light from side to side, as the light must also rapidly refocus at different depths.

That often requires separate optical components, one to steer the light and another to change where it comes into focus. Penn State researchers have developed a state-of-the-art tiny mirror that can do both at record speeds, potentially slimming down and speeding up future optical systems used in brain imaging, augmented reality goggles and precision manufacturing.

"Being able to quickly control light in three dimensions with a single device offers a significant improvement in the overall size and weight of an optical system," said Hunter Shillingburg, doctoral student in electrical engineering and first author of the study published in Microsystems & Nanoengineering.

A neuroscience use case
For Shillingburg, one potential application stands out: neuroscience.

"Although the fields are all strongly related, I see the most potential being in neurobiology," he said. "The system could lead to smaller, mountable miniature microscopes for studying neurobiology in active subjects as well as lighter glasses and headsets for augmented reality."

Neurons, the tightly packed nerve cells that send and receive signals in the brain, can become active in just thousandths of a second. Studying that activity requires fast-acting and precise tools. A small device that rapidly directs a focused beam of light to different spots and depths could eventually help miniature microscopes study brain activity in moving subjects or examine very small regions of the brain.

Faster scanning could have another benefit in biological imaging, Shillingburg said. Sensitive samples can be damaged or fade when exposed to too much light, so reducing exposure time can help researchers image living cells and other biological materials while limiting those effects.

Dark matter is the invisible stuff that accounts for roughly 85% of the mass in the universe, and for decades, physicists have been trying to figure out what it's made of. Now an experimental facility located nearly a mile below ground in South Dakota has recorded a single interaction between subatomic particles that doesn't match what's expected from normal matter.

Has a dark-matter particle been detected at last? It's too early to say, but the anomaly is definitely attracting attention from dark-matter detectives.

The detection was made at the Sanford Underground Research Facility, or SURF, a converted gold mine that now houses the world's most sensitive detector for dark matter. Since 2021, the LUX-ZEPLIN Dark Matter Experiment has been recording flashes of light in a shielded tank that's filled with 10 tons of ultra-pure liquid xenon. Those flashes occur when weakly interacting massive particles, or WIMPs, collide with xenon atoms. The results are analyzed by an international team of 250 scientists and engineers from 39 institutions.

Researchers recently reviewed 220 days' worth of data collected by the detector between March 2023 and April 2024. An earlier analysis searched for faint signals from the simplest kinds of WIMP interactions, but the follow-up review widened the search parameters to look for more energetic interactions. One event exhibited a spectrum of nuclear recoil energy that was difficult to explain in the context of known background signals involving normal matter.

"We’re very intrigued to see this event in the data, in the region where we expect dark matter to show up and the competing backgrounds are very low,” Rick Gaitskell, a professor at Brown University and the spokesperson for LUX-ZEPLIN, said in a news release. “With only one event, we don’t want to get ahead of ourselves. We are not claiming to have seen dark matter. But we have seen something interesting that we want to share with the scientific community for their input.”

A report on the research was presented this week in a scientific talk at the 2026 TeV Particle Astrophysics conference in Japan. The report will be submitted to Physical Review Letters for peer-reviewed publication.

The research team's analysis determined that the particle behind the anomalous event would have more than 200 times the mass of a proton — if it was truly a piece of dark matter. But it's too early to make that assumption. The significance level for the detection was 2.6 sigma, which is well below the 5-sigma standard for claiming a discovery. For now, the statistics suggest there's a roughly 0.5% chance that the event could be explained by known background interactions...

New research from the University of St Andrews has developed a novel hypothesis of how firelight was critical to the evolution of sophisticated storytelling.

In a paper published today in Proceedings of the Royal Society, researchers from St Andrews, alongside colleagues from Dartmouth College, suggest that fireside storytelling may have provided the key catalyst to move human communication away from the ape-like systems our modern ape cousins still use today and toward our uniquely human use of language.

Charles Darwin described fire as man's greatest discovery, excepting language. Recent work has argued that these two touchstones of human evolution may be fundamentally entwined. While the importance of fireside storytelling for human societies has previously been recognized, earlier work assumed that stories emerged from an existing human proto-language.

This new work highlights how our current understanding of modern apes shows them capable of many of the fundamental basics of human communication and social problem-solving—from meaningful gestures to a theory of mind.

Researchers also argue that many of the day-to-day problems of life in a small social group can be solved without language.

The puzzle beyond ape communication
Lead author Catherine Hobaiter, professor in the School of Psychology and Neuroscience at the University of St Andrews, said, "Decades of research with other species has shown us that you don't need language to learn from each other, to organize where and when to forage, to learn cultural knowledge about tools and songs, to coordinate hunting, or navigate social politics. It starts to look like human language didn't evolve for anything very useful!"

Hobaiter added, "While other species share all these skills, there is a fundamental puzzle: We struggle to find evidence of key differences between human and ape communication, and yet we are surrounded by evidence of human distinctiveness. For all their incredible, rich communication and cultures, no other ape is inventing algebra, writing King Lear or heading out into interstellar space."

The work argues that the first steps toward language may have emerged in fireside storytelling and goes on to provide one of the first descriptions of this fireside niche and how it could influence human behavior.

A cooling system powered directly by heat rather than an electric motor has worked in laboratory tests, offering a possible way to turn waste heat or solar energy into cooling. The prototype, developed by researchers at Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) and the University of Tsukuba, uses two ultrathin nickel-titanium films that convert heat first into mechanical motion and then into cold.

The concept addresses a limitation of elastocaloric cooling, an emerging solid-state alternative to conventional refrigeration. Shape-memory alloys cool when a mechanical load applied to them is released, but existing elastocaloric systems still need electrically powered actuators to supply that force. The new design instead uses heat itself to drive the process.

That distinction matters because cooling and heating account for almost half of global energy consumption as demand continues to grow. Conventional refrigerators, air conditioners, and data centers have relied for more than a century on electricity-driven compressors that move heat with refrigerants, many of which also contribute to global warming.

Heat replaces the electric actuator
The system pairs two nickel-titanium films with different jobs. When heated, the first film shrinks through a shape-memory effect, converting thermal energy directly into mechanical work without an electric motor.

That movement acts on the second film. Repeated loading and unloading cause reversible changes in its crystal structure that produce cooling. In effect, the first film replaces the electrically driven actuator that elastocaloric systems have previously required...

After an eight-year journey, a spacecraft carrying European and Japanese probes began the monthslong, high-risk approach to Mercury on Thursday to study the sun-scorched planet.

The BepiColombo mission set off from Earth in 2018 on a winding path to study the smallest and least understood planet in our solar system, with the aim of releasing the two probes into its orbit.

On Thursday, it began its arrival phase, described by the European Space Agency (ESA) as its "most operationally challenging planetary arrival sequences ever attempted."

Mercury's relatively tiny mass—it is only slightly bigger than the moon—means its gravitational pull is extremely weak compared to the sun, making it complex for spacecraft to approach the planet without ending up incinerated or lost in space.

"It's a very ambitious mission," Santa Martinez, the mission manager at ESA, told a news conference ahead of its arrival.

The spacecraft had to travel more than 10 billion kilometers (6.2 billion miles), executing a series of nine flybys to speed up, slow down and perfect its trajectory.

The two probes, which are attached to each other, finally separated Thursday from the transfer module that had propelled them—a crucial first step in the final approach.

It was the equivalent of "launching a new spacecraft. Only this spacecraft happens to be around a different planet," explained Ignacio Tanco, ESA's head of inner solar system mission operations, before the separation began.

All went to plan
On Thursday, Mercury was some 63 million km (39 million miles) from the sun and 200 million km (124 million miles) from Earth.

"At these distances ... any real-time operation becomes impossible," Tanco said, explaining that there was about a 30-minute delay between checks being performed and commands being executed from the ground to the craft.

It means the spacecraft had to check and execute the separation autonomously—a "tricky business," Tanco said.

But all went to plan...

Tonight, Isar Aerospace successfully reached orbit with their Spectrum launcher, lifting off from Andøya Spaceport in Norway.

Congratulations to all the teams involved 👏🚀

At 22:12 CEST Isar Aerospace’s two-stage launch vehicle soared from the launch pad. Spectrum is 28 m tall, 2 m in diameter and, with its ten engines, it is targeting to launch payloads of up to 1000 kg to low Earth orbit.

“A historic launch from Andøya Spaceport in Norway today, the first European Launcher Challenger to reach orbit” said ESA’s Director General Josef Aschbacher, “Spectrum quite literally rose to the challenge and delivered its payloads in low Earth orbit. An astounding achievement by German company Isar Aerospace, founded only eight years ago, and backed by the European Space Agency. This is yet another step towards a more diverse autonomous European launch service sector, and I am excited for what is still to come!”
esa.int/Enabling_Suppo…

Heat, it turns out, has a memory. A cooling cup of coffee may not seem particularly thoughtful. At the scale of a kitchen, heat appears to follow a straightforward rule: it moves from warmer places to cooler ones. Leave the cup unattended long enough, and the disappointing result offers convincing evidence that this rule works.

But shrink the system to the dimensions of a modern computer chip—or observe it over just trillionths of a second—and this simple description can become incomplete. Heat flowing at one place and time may still carry the influence of a temperature disturbance that occurred earlier or somewhere else in the material.

In other words, heat can retain a kind of physical memory. A new theoretical framework, provides a unified way to describe that memory.

"Heat does not remember in the way that we remember a person or an event," Dong said. "Its memory is stored in the microscopic motion of the material. The heat flowing at this moment can still carry information about a temperature disturbance that occurred earlier."

When the textbook rule begins to bend
For roughly two centuries, scientists and engineers have relied on Fourier's law to describe heat conduction. It assumes that heat flow at a particular location responds immediately to the temperature gradient at that same location.

This local and instantaneous description works remarkably well for familiar objects and at ordinary scales. It helps engineers predict how buildings retain heat, how engines cool and how warmth spreads through cookware. In simple terms, Fourier's law describes heat flow as responding to conditions "here and now."

At very small length scales and short times, however, "here and now" may no longer tell the complete story.

In crystalline solids, heat is often carried by collective atomic vibrations called phonons. At large scales, enormous numbers of phonons scatter and interact, producing the smooth diffusion described by Fourier's law. At very short distances and times, some of those phonons can travel significant distances before scattering. The resulting heat flow can also retain the influence of an earlier disturbance.

Depending on the material and experimental scale, heat transport may then appear diffusive, quasi-ballistic, spatially nonlocal or even wave-like. Scientists have developed equations for each of these regimes, but those equations are usually introduced as separate models suited to different conditions.

The new framework places those behaviors inside one mathematical description.

"Instead of choosing a different theory every time heat begins to behave differently, we wanted to identify the deeper microscopic structure connecting those behaviors," Zeng said. "In our framework, familiar diffusion, nonlocal transport and wave-like or hydrodynamic behavior emerge as different limits of the same underlying theory."

Researchers at Lund University have developed a new type of light-emitting diode based on thin, branched nanowires that could offer significantly higher efficiency and lower production costs than current technology. By controlling where in the structure the light is generated, the researchers have reduced the losses that would otherwise limit the amount of light that can be used. Their study is published in the journal Nano Research.

Escaping light trapped in LEDs
In materials used for conventional light-emitting diodes—such as the LED bulbs found in most households—a large proportion of the light is trapped inside the material because of what is known as total internal reflection. This phenomenon means that only a small proportion of the light comes out, even though it is generated inside the material.

The new design aims to overcome this problem. The method is based on the fact that light is emitted from very thin side branches that extend from a central nanowire. "If the structures are made thin enough—thinner than the wavelength of light—the light cannot be trapped inside the material in the same way.

"Theoretically, this could enable a very high light output. In principle, it would be possible to release virtually all the light," said Magnus Borgström, professor of solid-state physics at Lund University.

In materials used for today's LEDs, only around 4% of the light is emitted without additional surface treatment. To improve efficiency, various techniques and methods of processing the material are used to increase light extraction. If the new technology proves successful, it would be possible to avoid these costly processes. Although LEDs are already inexpensive, any improvement in efficiency is important for industrial production.

Small robots and drones have increasingly been used to help respond to disasters, reaching locations that are too hard or too dangerous to send humans, such as collapsed buildings. Many of these efforts have been focused on search and rescue. But new research shows how bugs—with their ability to crawl through even narrower gaps in rubbled—outfitted with electrodes could be used as the next generation of first responders.

A research team from the University of Queensland (UQ) and the University of New South Wales (UNSW) have developed the “Paraborg” to not only help with searching for victims, but also administer first aid. While the idea of receiving medical care from a cockroach might be a little skin-crawling, the new cyborg bug could one day help buy human rescuers valuable time in a disaster zone.

“Cyborg insects have been designed for ‘search and explore’ missions for the past couple of decades,” Tan Vo Doan, a bio-robotics researcher at UQ, says in a press release. “We wanted to take the next step.”

The team relied on a giant burrowing cockroach that inhabits northern Queensland to develop the Paraborg, which they documented in a recent paper published the journal Advanced Science. The armored cockroach is up to 87 millimeters (3.5 inches) in length and weighs up to 40 grams (1.4 ounces).

Taking advantage of this large size, the research team developed two types of Paraborgs with different functions: one equipped with a camera to film the condition of disaster victims, and another with an automatic injection mechanism to administer medication. Cockroaches can carry up to 1.5 times its body weight. In practice, a cockroach equipped with the injection mechanism saw its total height increase by about 15 millimeters and its weight by about 17 grams, which the study found did not significantly impair its normal movements. To create the cyborg cockroaches, the team anesthetized them when the electrodes and microchips were attached, and they lived as normal cockroaches once the equipment was removed...

The Pantone color of the year for 2026 is white. It's called Cloud Dancer, which is described as a "lofty white." This choice reflects a growing trend away from color in our visual world.

You might have noticed this yourself. Where an area once had a distinct sense of place, we are seeing more cookie-cutter developments popping up. Take the London borough of Elephant and Castle, which has seen billions of pounds of development in recent years. The area has gone from a Latin American enclave full of distinct and varied buildings to what Oli Mould, a professor of social, cultural and historical geography, has warned is an "identikit homogeneous gentrified place" that risks "destroying the very thing that makes a community thriving and beautiful in the first place."

There is a similar increasing sense of uniformity and sameness in urban design around the world. In 1993, architect Rem Koolhaas traveled 360,000 km (224,000 miles) around the world, observing the rationalization of urban design (the movement toward efficiency rather than creativity in the process) through what he termed the "generic city." Functional, efficient but colorless.

Algorithms of taste
This trajectory toward blandness is reinforced and sustained by the increasing tendency to allow algorithms to mediate the choices we make. This has the effect of training perspectives to converge in "a strong pull toward sameness."

Algorithms make predictions based on our choices, from music to home furnishings. The algorithm takes that choice and suggests similar products based on it, ultimately reinforcing and producing a monotonous and generic aesthetic taste. For instance, if you like a pop song by Sabrina Carpenter, you will then be served many songs exactly like it until your Spotify Wrapped says you are among the top listeners of something Spotify has bafflingly called "Pink Pilates Princess Strut Pop."

These sorts of algorithms, in turn, reinforce the production of products to meet those generic tastes, ultimately flattening the diversity of creative work in everything from the songs we listen to to the urban surroundings in which we live.

Algorithmically driven taste results in a monoculture where art, pets and everything in between are chosen to match the generic palette of an algorithmic world.

This generic algorithmic taste is also having an impact at the design stage, particularly where metrics and investment desires overwhelm other considerations. Environments are increasingly considered by key decision-makers such as developers not in terms of their contribution to lived experience and cultural life, but as investment objects or financial assets, readily translated and transacted. The result is a flattening not only of our visual environment but also of our engagement with that environment. This loss is significant for our social well-being.

Back in 1983, American sociologist George Ritzer introduced the concept of the "McDonaldization" of society to explain the business rationalization of moving the design process toward faster, easier-to-manage, cheaper and more predictable outcomes. Like a McDonald's burger, the production process becomes standardized. The burger is the same no matter where in the world you have one. Ritzer described this in environments ranging from restaurants to hospitals.

Ritzer acknowledged some of the advantages, such as cost savings and customers knowing what to expect. However, the main problem he identified with this streamlining is that there is no space for experimentation or personality because creativity and design are organized around efficiency. In this control of process, we paradoxically lose control because we lose choice and creativity...

The planet Venus is arguably the most mischievous planetary body in the solar system. This is because like Saturn’s largest moon, Titan, Venus is shrouded in a thick atmosphere that can’t be viewed with optical telescopes and require radar images to see the surface. Unlike Titan, whose atmosphere looks quite dull, Venus’s swirling and awe-inspiring clouds give observers the impression that its surface is covered in wonderous features. However, the truth is far from ideal, as Venus’s surface is a living hell with searing temperatures and crushing pressures. But, unlike its surface and Titan, Venus’s atmosphere provides many more ideal conditions, even Earth-like conditions. But while life would be hard to exist on its surface, could we find life in the atmospheric clouds of Venus?

Now, an international team of researchers led by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) might have shed new light regarding whether life could exist in the clouds of Venus. As discussed in a recent study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the researchers provided evidence that non-Earth-like planets could be just as viable of hosting life as we know it along with Earth-like planets. While astrobiologists have long focused on liquid water being the driver in the search for life beyond Earth, this study proposes that life might exist even under the harshest environmental conditions.

For the study, the researchers focused on whether peptides, which consist of short amino acid chains, could survive within the sulfuric acid clouds of Venus. To accomplish this, the researchers conducted a series of laboratory experiments using nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy, which examines the molecular structure and physical composition of chemical compounds.

Through this, the researchers successfully observed three peptides successfully forming the necessary folded structures enabling them to remain stable for several weeks under environmental conditions of 98 percent sulfuric acid. The team attributes this to the lack of water within the system, with water being known for breaking apart peptide chemical bonds. Folding is important because it enables amino acids to form specific structures that eventually become chemical reactions.

“Life needs to have specially shaped proteins so that they have a specific target they can latch onto and perform their function,” said Dr. Sara Seager, who is a Professor of Planetary Science at MIT and a co-author on the study. “Before this, people thought that peptides couldn’t survive in sulfuric acid, so showing peptides are not only stable, but also fold, is a really big deal.”

The abrupt defunding of USAID sent shockwaves worldwide. In the first of a series supported by Pulitzer Center and in collaboration with Science Magazine, we take an on-the-ground look at the impact of defunding health services in key places worldwide.

Listen to Big Picture Science here: bigpicturescience.org/episodes/malaw…

A fruit fly's brain is roughly the size of a poppy seed — and yet that tiny package contains over 100,000 neurons. A new map charts every single neuron in the male fruit fly brain, as well as the insect's equivalent of a spinal cord, totaling more than 166,000 neurons.

This new map joins a map of a female fruit fly brain that was unveiled in 2024 and covers about 140,000 neurons. These two wiring diagrams, also called "connectomes," can now be compared to see if there are differences between the sexes' brains that help to explain behavioral differences reflected during mating or in aggressive actions, including sex-specific fighting moves.

"It is the first time we can compare both sexes of an animal with complex social behavior," study co-author Gerry Rubin, head of biology and a senior group leader of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute's Janelia Research Campus, said in a statement. "Male and female flies have a lot of differences in their behavior, and neuroscientists want to understand how the brain controls those behaviors. This now allows us to easily home in on the neurons that are causing those differences."

Initially released as a preprint, the new fly brain map was published in the journal Cell and Current Biology Thursday (Sept. 3). The study describing the map was published alongside three other papers, each of which uses the new data to explore a specific aspect of fruit fly neurobiology.

"The fly nervous system performs remarkably sophisticated computations with relatively few neurons and little energy, and its architecture could suggest principles for designing more efficient artificial systems," said Carlos Ribeiro, a principal investigator at the Champalimaud Foundation in Lisbon, Portugal, whose team contributed to the brain map and led one of the related studies.