Some of the strangest weather in the solar system doesn’t happen on Earth, or even Jupiter’s Great Red Spot - it happens in the interior of the Ice Giants like Neptune and Uranus. Specifically, scientists have long believed that, at certain pressure and temperatures, it literally rains diamonds inside of these planets. And for the first time, scientists have mimicked the process they believe creates that. A new paper by physicists at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), published in Nature Physics, resolves a 20 year old scientific mystery, and shows how the same physics that makes it rain diamonds inside Neptune could also help us triple our fusion energy output.

Let’s talk about the actual experiment first. The LLNL scientists set up their experiment at the University of Rochester’s Omega Laser Facility - which does exactly what is advertised in its name. In this specific case, the laser vaporized the outer layer of a diamond sample - and the scientists were watching it with as many sensors as they could, including an ultra-fast technique called X-ray diffraction. That vaporization sent a huge shockwave through the interior of the diamond itself, compressing it to pressures more than three times that of Earth’s core, with resultant temperatures equivalent to the surface of the Sun - but only for a billionth of a second.

What they saw helped solve a 20 year old mystery. This wasn’t the first time scientists have melted diamond. However, previous physical measurements of the melting point of diamond disagreed with computer models based on quantum mechanics by up to 20%. That might not sound like a lot, but in the context of these experiments, that 20% represented a more than 1,000 degree Kelvin difference in the theoretical and observed melting point.

Despite their best efforts, scientists couldn’t get the two numbers to match up - until now. Armed with the new X-ray diffraction data, the authors were able to confirm their measured melting point of diamond aligned with modern quantum-physics based models. But that wasn’t their most interesting finding - they also discovered that, under the right conditions, diamonds would float on a sea of carbon.

As a press release from LLNL points out, we’re all familiar with one specific example where the solid version of a material is less dense than the liquid version - ice and water. But finding that solid diamond is actually less dense than liquid metallic carbon was somewhat of a surprise for the researchers. And it opened up the possibility of what, on paper, sounds like one of the coolest weather features anywhere in the solar system - diamond rain...

This summer, you may have wondered why you are seeing so few insects squished on your car's windshield compared with a road trip several years ago. This is because insects are declining globally at an alarming rate.

One extensive citizen science survey looked at insect numbers over several years by tracking insect deaths on car license plates. Participants were asked to clean their license plates before a journey, then photograph them afterward and count the number of bugs killed.

The survey was conducted from 2021 to 2025. It found the number of flying insects sampled on vehicle license plates across the UK had fallen by 60% in five years. Analysis of records from more than 25,000 journeys showed an annual average decline in bug splats of 19% since the survey began in 2021.

Some people may look at these statistics and wonder why they should care. But the decline of insect life is a significant cause for concern. It's not just in the UK that we are seeing declines, but also across Europe and in tropical rainforests, including some of the most biodiverse spots on the planet. Agricultural land is seeing some of the worst effects.

There are an estimated 10 quintillion (10,000,000,000,000,000,000) insects alive on this planet, with more than a million described species and estimates of millions more yet to be discovered. But we are losing insects far faster than other animals, and at an unprecedented rate.

A review in 2019 suggested 40% of insect species are threatened with extinction. Ants, bees and wasps (Hymenoptera), butterflies and moths (Lepidoptera), and dung beetles are thought to be the most affected. More recent reviews show similar declining trends on a global scale.

Why are insects disappearing?
The reasons for losing our insects include habitat loss, disease, pollution and pesticides. Agriculture is a major concern because converting land to farming can remove existing habitats—essentially removing some insects' homes. Agricultural chemicals, such as pesticides designed to kill agricultural pests, are also negatively affecting the nontarget insects that we want to protect.

Climate change is a major concern and one that potentially exacerbates other factors. When it's hotter, water availability becomes more difficult, plants become more stressed and food becomes harder for insects to find...

A Mars probe from the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) may answer some longstanding questions about the Red Planet and its moons. The mission—dubbed MMX for “Martian Moons eXploration”—aims to collect at least 10 grams of samples from Phobos, one of two moons orbiting the planet, and if successful, these will be the first rocks from a Martian moon ever brought to Earth.

They won’t arrive quickly, however. The MMX probe will take approximately one year to reach Mars. It will then collect samples during three years of operations while orbiting the red planet before taking another year to return to Earth. If all goes well, scientists expect to receive the moon rocks in 2031.

One of the most interesting questions the probe can answer is how Mars’ moons, Phobos and Deimos, formed. There are two main possibilities. One is that the moons condensed from material ejected during a massive collision with Mars. The other hypothesis is that the moons were asteroids from the outer solar system that were captured by Mars’ gravity.

The moons are dark in color, and their light-reflecting properties closely resemble those of asteroids rich in water and carbon. Their orbits, however—which are nearly circular along Mars’ equatorial plane in the same direction as the planet’s rotation—are better explained by the giant impact hypothesis. Comparing samples from Mars’ moons to those previously collected from the Martian surface could help settle this debate.

A large Norwegian study found that students who exercised infrequently were more likely to develop clinically defined depression, anxiety, or another common mental disorder over the following year. How often they exercised appeared to matter more consistently than how hard or how long they worked out.

The findings were published in the open-access journal PLOS One by Michael Grasdalsmoen of Western Norway University of Applied Sciences and his colleagues.

Why Student Mental Health Matters
Depression and anxiety are leading causes of disability among young adults worldwide. The transition into higher education can bring academic pressure, financial concerns, disrupted routines, and separation from familiar support systems, making this period an important window for prevention.

Exercise has long been associated with better mental health, but much of the earlier evidence has relied on snapshots taken at a single point in time. Fewer studies have followed students prospectively and then used a standardized diagnostic assessment to identify mental disorders.

To examine how different exercise habits might shape later risk, the researchers tracked 10,460 full-time students in Norway between the ages of 18 and 35.

Frequency May Matter Most
At the beginning of the study, participants reported how frequently they exercised, how demanding the activity was, how long their sessions lasted, and their total weekly exercise time. One year later, they completed a self-administered diagnostic instrument that assessed common mental disorders.

Students with lower overall activity levels were more likely to meet clinical criteria for anxiety or depression at follow-up. Of the different measures examined, exercise frequency produced the most consistent association with mental health.

The patterns were not identical for everyone. Among women, lower exercise intensity predicted anxiety and depression, while among men, shorter weekly exercise duration emerged as a stronger risk factor...

Put forward by MIT Professor Joe Formaggio and Dr. Ben Jones from the University of Texas at Arlington, the idea of the neutrino laser was elegant in its ambition.

Cool a cloud of radioactive atoms down to nanokelvin temperatures — a billionth the chill of interstellar space — and the atoms should settle into a Bose-Einstein condensate, a bizarre quantum state where they act as a single, synchronized entity.

In this state, the physicists proposed, the atoms’ radioactive decay would speed up dramatically, and the neutrinos they emit as a byproduct would stream out together in a tight, laser-like beam, dramatically shortening radioactive half-lives in the process.

But according to MTI Professor Wolfgang Ketterle, the Nobel laureate who co-discovered Bose-Einstein condensates in 1995, the idea was too good to be true.

Working with MIT physicists Hanzhen Lin and Yu-Kun Lu, Professor Ketterle presents a two-part analysis demonstrating that the neutrino laser concept, along with a similar proposal for gamma-rays, is physically and fundamentally impossible.

Neutrinos are emitted with roughly a million times more energy than the visible photons used in ordinary lasers, meaning the atom releasing one recoils at velocities equivalent to Mach 10, fast enough that it essentially vanishes from the condensate almost instantly. This leaves no time for the kind of quantum ‘imprint’ the amplifying effect would require.

“As long as the recoil atom stays in the condensate, it can make the condensate superradiant,” Professor Ketterle said.

“But when a neutrino is emitted at a million electronvolts, the atom recoils at velocities equivalent to Mach 10, faster than a fighter jet. This is so fast that the atom would almost instantly disappear.”

Even in an idealized scenario where an imprint could form, the researchers found it would function backward: rather than telling the condensate to emit the next neutrino in the same direction, it would signal the opposite, preventing any beam from building up.

They trace this anti-correlation to the fact that neutrinos are fermions — a class of particle, including electrons, that behaves fundamentally differently from the photons that make ordinary superradiant lasers possible...

A common blue pigment could help turn carbon dioxide (CO2) from an industrial waste product into a useful fuel. A joint research team led by Tohoku University's Advanced Institute for Materials Research (WPI-AIMR), in collaboration with Hokkaido University and startup AZUL Energy, has developed a catalyst that converts CO2 directly into methane (CH4) with high efficiency using copper phthalocyanine, an inexpensive and readily available blue pigment.

Strong methane output and stability
The researchers applied the copper phthalocyanine catalyst to a gas diffusion electrode, enabling CO2 to be reduced to methane in a single electrochemical step. The system achieved a maximum current density of 575 mA cm-2 and a maximum Faradaic efficiency of 79.5% for methane production, demonstrating that the catalyst can selectively convert CO2 into methane at high rates.

The catalyst also showed stable performance during long-term operation. At a current density of 150 mA cm-2, the system maintained methane selectivity above 60% for approximately 80 hours. This durability and selectivity represent an improvement over conventional copper nanoparticle catalysts, which can produce a mixture of different products and make subsequent gas separation more difficult.

The challenge of direct conversion
Converting CO2 into useful chemicals and fuels using electricity generated from renewable energy is known as electrochemical CO2 reduction (ECR).

The approach has attracted attention as a potential means of recycling carbon while reducing reliance on fossil resources. Methane is particularly attractive as a target product because it is a widely used gaseous fuel and can potentially be integrated into existing gas infrastructure.

However, producing methane directly from CO2 is challenging. Electrochemical reduction involves a complex network of reaction pathways, and conventional catalysts can produce several different carbon-containing products alongside methane. Separating and purifying these products adds complexity and energy requirements to the overall process.

A team of Griffith University archaeologists has uncovered evidence that humans were using mind-altering substances much earlier than previously supposed.

Led by Professor Adam Brumm from Griffith's Australian Research Centre for Human Evolution (ARCHE), and involving ARCHE colleagues Associate Professors Carney Matheson and Michelle Langley, the team combined biochemical and archaeological evidence to trace the prehistoric roots of one of the world's most popular addictive stimulants, "betel nut," an ancient drug used throughout much of the Asia-Pacific region.

The group's research, conducted in collaboration with Indonesian archaeologists from Makassar's University of Hasanuddin and the National Research and Innovation Agency (BRIN), shows that the use of betel nut as a drug emerged among some Indonesian communities up to 25,000 years ago, predating the previously suggested Neolithic or Bronze Age origins (about 3,500 years ago).

Europe's climate monitor said Thursday that August was the hottest month ever recorded around the world and warned of worse to come as an unprecedented El Niño pattern grows stronger.

Global temperatures over land and sea soared to all-time highs in August and capped an extreme summer of heat waves and wildfires that ranked as the hottest on record for western Europe and the contiguous United States.

The Copernicus Climate Change Service said global average air temperatures in August were 16.96°C (62.5°F)—surpassing the previous record for a single month, set in July 2023, by 0.01°C. The EU monitor said it considered the two months joint-highest given the narrow difference.

Copernicus observations go back to 1940, but evidence from ice cores, tree rings and coral skeletons puts today's climate in a much starker historical context.

"Humans haven't seen temperatures as hot as today for, arguably, at least the last 100,000 years," Samantha Burgess from the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts, which oversees Copernicus, told AFP.

U.N. climate chief Simon Stiell said the "evidence is irrefutable: this is the spiraling price of humanity's fossil fuel addiction."

Striking
The exceptional summer also drove ocean temperatures to record highs for three straight months, said Simon van Gennip from Mercator Ocean International on Thursday.

Marine heat waves have persisted in some overheated basins for more than 60 days, "highlighting just how unusual and persistent" the situation was, he said.

Global sea surface temperatures set a new all-time daily high in August and equaled the hottest month for oceans ever recorded.

Copernicus said the main driver was global heating from burning coal, oil and gas, but also sharply rising temperatures in the Pacific, where a historic El Niño is gaining strength.

El Niño episodes are characterized by unusually warm Pacific waters but trigger major global changes in rainfall and winds, raising the odds of wild weather thousands of miles away.

Global forecasters predict this year's event will peak later this year at an intensity never observed in the modern era.

On Thursday, the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) said there was a 75% chance it "would exceed the strength of previous El Niño events dating back to 1950."

Copernicus said its influence was already being felt in Indonesia, where a long, intense dry season has fed wildfires that have torched swaths of Borneo island.

But climate scientists said the worst was yet to come—and August's extraordinary heat was just a preview

Key figures from Europe's space industry and other international players have converged on Paris to discuss how to advance the continent's ambitions in a global market dominated by the United States.

The two-day International Space Summit that started Wednesday gathers officials, astronauts, researchers and industry leaders from about 120 countries to discuss the future of the space industry and pursue potential business deals.

"Europe is taking its destiny into its own hands, including in space," French President Emmanuel Macron said in a message posted on X. He called for innovation and investment "to build a powerful Europe, independent even in space."

Here's what to know about Europe's efforts to compete in the global space race.

Europe seeks to build up sovereign space capabilities
Macron's space summit underlines his push to reduce Europe's reliance on the U.S. for vital tech services, which extends to space launches as well as satellites for communications and reconnaissance...

The compound, called oxalate, is abundant in foods such as spinach, almonds, and sweet potatoes. It is best known for contributing to certain kidney stones, but new research suggests that oxalate left inside the digestive tract may also aggravate intestinal inflammation in people with Crohn’s disease or ulcerative colitis.

Published in Cellular and Molecular Gastroenterology and Hepatology (CMGH), the study combined patient data with experiments in mice and cultured immune cells. The work was led by postdoctoral scholar Anna Salvador, PhD, RD, LDN, in the laboratory of Shehzad Z. Sheikh, MD, PhD, professor of medicine and genetics at the UNC School of Medicine.

When bacteria invade the urinary tract, the body has its own arsenal for fighting back. Among those weapons is an unlikely tool: copper. Researchers at the Texas A&M College of Veterinary Medicine and Biomedical Sciences (VMBS) are investigating how the body uses the essential trace mineral to fight urinary tract infections (UTIs), how bacteria manage to survive that attack and whether those discoveries could eventually lead to new ways of treating infections that are increasingly difficult to control with antibiotics.

The research builds on previous findings from the lab of Dr. Sarguru Subash, an associate professor in the VMBS Department of Veterinary Pathobiology, showing that the body pumps copper into the urinary tract during infection to kill UTI-causing bacteria.

"We know that copper plays an important role, but that also raises so many questions about how these pathogens adapt to the presence of increased copper," Subash said.

"If we better understand how the bacteria overcome the host-imposed copper resistance, then we can develop therapies that make the bacteria more susceptible to copper and, more broadly, to everything that the immune system throws at them."

Turning a nutrient into a weapon
Copper is an essential nutrient for both people and animals, but in the right environment and concentration, it can also be toxic to bacteria.

The immune system takes advantage of that property when responding to infection.

As part of the body's early, or innate, immune response, specialized immune cells can engulf invading bacteria and expose them to an antimicrobial mixture that includes copper. During a UTI, Subash's previous research has shown that the body increases copper levels in the urine.

But bacteria aren't defenseless. Because they encounter copper naturally in the environment, many bacteria have evolved mechanisms that allow them to remove or detoxify the metal.

"Bacteria do have adaptations, but when it's presented in the context of this cocktail, the bacterial defense mechanisms are not as effective," Subash said. "Sometimes the balance tips in favor of the host, so we can control the infections. Other times, the balance tips in favor of pathogens. As a result, we get clinical disease."

That creates what Subash describes as a tug-of-war between the host and pathogen: Sometimes, the immune system successfully controls bacterial growth before it causes noticeable illness; other times, bacteria overcome those defenses, allowing an infection to become established.

Understanding what tips that balance could reveal new vulnerabilities that researchers can target to control bacterial infections.

Sometimes your eyes need a minute to focus when you wake up. Roman's Wide Field Instrument just woke up for the first time EVER, and scientists have started adjusting its "eyes" so they can focus on the bigger picture. Check out its first test image above.

NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope team has successfully activated the Wide Field Instrument, a 300-megapixel infrared camera that will allow scientists to explore wide swaths of the cosmos very quickly without sacrificing exquisite detail.

Roman’s planet imager — the Coronagraph Instrument — also stretched its digital, electronic, and mechanical “limbs” as part of an initial test after waking up earlier this month.

These steps are part of a monthslong series of calibrations and tests, as Roman continues its million-mile journey to its destination at the second Lagrange point, L2.

Read more go.nasa.gov/4j51w30

The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope hasn't yet reached its Sun-Earth L2 orbit and it already has some good news. NASA has announced that the mission has enough fuel to potentially double its mission length. Though initially scheduled for five years of initial observations, followed by a five year extended mission, the entire mission length could now reach 22 years.

“As a result of exquisite planning by our orbital dynamics team, brilliant execution by the operations team, and a precise launch from SpaceX, Roman has fuel for at least 22 years of potential science operations,” said Jamie Dunn, center director at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.

Fuel is the Roman's only consumable resource and is the limiting factor for mission length. Several things contributed to its new, extended mission length, starting with the precise launch. The SpaceX Falcon Heavy helped set the stage with its accurate low-Earth orbit departure burn. The more accurate this is, the less fuel is required for the Roman's subsequent burns.

The next reason is the spacecraft's actual weight vs planned weight.

“A spacecraft’s mass changes throughout the design and build process, so we base the propellant budget on a set maximum value so we won’t come up short,” said Alison Rao, the Roman propulsion lead at NASA Goddard. “We track the propellant needed based on actual mass throughout integration and testing as well, to make sure we have wiggle room. Since Roman’s was lower than we budgeted for, we were able to fill the propellant tanks to their capacity rather than only filling them as much as we needed to for the 10-year requirement.”

A study by researchers at Columbia University Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons has found that new cutting-edge techniques can accurately edit genes in human embryos—giving scientists indispensable tools for understanding normal human development—but has also uncovered important risks that currently preclude the use of the techniques in the clinic.

Editing the genome is an essential technique for scientists seeking to understand the genome. Editing genes in human embryos allows us to understand the earliest steps of human development. Early human embryos accrue a surprising amount of DNA damage as they grow, and most human embryos made with IVF stop their development in the first few days.

"By introducing such damage using editors, we are starting to understand how human embryos handle damage in their genomes. In the long term, we hope to learn how to prevent genetic and developmental abnormalities during IVF to create more efficient, safer and more affordable fertility treatments," says Dieter Egli, the study's leader and associate professor of developmental cell biology in the Department of Pediatrics.

In the study, published Sept. 9 in Nature, Egli's team used base editing—a more meticulous genetic editor than earlier techniques—to make changes in individual letters in the DNA of single-cell human embryos. They then followed each embryo's development for 6–7 days (a stage when IVF embryos can be implanted) to determine if the edit was made correctly and passed on to all cells in the embryo. Remarkably, in some experiments, the editing was 100% successful and development was apparently normal.

But the editing sometimes caused unpredictable changes and is not safe to use in the clinic. Editing human embryos has the potential to give people who carry disease-causing mutations an opportunity to have healthy children through IVF. "But given our findings, it is currently not possible to do so safely," says Egli.

"As a scientist, the first goal is to uncover new knowledge, which we hope will lead to new ways to help people. But identifying the risks is just as important because it draws the boundaries for meaningful use of a powerful technology. I think our study will discourage inappropriate use of these techniques in the clinic because we clearly demonstrate the risks."

Given that it's the closest planet to the sun, Mercury seems like it should be the hottest planet in our solar system.

However, at a blistering 900 degrees Fahrenheit (480 degrees Celsius), Venus tops Mercury's 800 F (430 C) highest surface temperature, despite being an average of 31 million miles (50 million kilometers) farther from the sun. So how can the second planet from our star be hotter than the closest planet to it?

It all comes down to reflectivity, atmospheric composition and geological history, experts told Live Science.

Totally different atmospheres
A planet's distance from its star is not the only factor that influences the planet's temperature.

"Distance tells us how much sunlight arrives at a planet, but it does not tell us how much is reflected … absorbed, how efficiently heat escapes, or how effectively the atmosphere transports heat around the planet," Stephen Kane, an astrophysicist who studies planetary habitability at the University of California, Riverside, told Live Science in an email. "Those properties can be just as important as distance, and sometimes much more important."

Mercury makes the case in miniature. According to Kane, the planet has essentially no atmosphere, so incoming sunlight strikes bare rock directly, heating it to extreme temperatures during the day. But with barely anything overhead to trap that warmth, Mercury radiates it straight back into space the moment the sun sets. As a result, nighttime temperatures plunge from roughly 800 F (430 C) during the day to about minus 290 F (minus 180 C) at night — a swing of well over 1,000 degrees, he added.

Venus tells the opposite story. Wrapped in an atmosphere that's roughly 90 times as dense as Earth's and consists almost entirely of carbon dioxide, Venus traps heat so effectively that its surface temperature barely changes at all, no matter where the sun happens to be, Kane explained...

Tyrannosaurus rex was a hottie with a body temperature similar to our own, according to a new analysis of their teeth. MThe finding supports the idea that T. rex was a fast, energetic predator and scavenger, not an animal that basked in the sun to gain energy like most modern-day reptiles.

T. rex, which lived between about 68 million and 66 million years ago, at the end of the Cretaceous period (143.1 million to 66 million years ago), was one of the largest carnivorous dinosaurs that ever lived.

Previous studies have already suggested that T. rex and its relatives were warm blooded, but now scientists have estimated the dinosaur's body temperature for the first time by studying different isotopes, or forms, of the same chemical elements in the enamel of three T. rex teeth from specimens found in the Hell Creek Formation in Montana.

Rare, heavy isotopes of carbon and oxygen bond together differently in growing tooth enamel depending on the temperature. The number of bonds formed between these rare isotopes is greater at cooler temperatures than it is at warmer temperatures, which means warm-blooded, or endothermic animals, that can regulate their own body temperature, have fewer of these chemical bonds in their teeth than cold-blooded, or ectothermic, animals, which rely on their environment for warmth...

Have you ever bought something not because you wanted it, but because you were afraid of what might happen if you didn't? Maybe you worried about looking older, falling behind at work or simply not fitting in.

While marketing often promises an aspirational lifestyle, some of the most effective campaigns work in the opposite direction: making you feel bad about your current reality, then presenting a product as the solution.

This is the logic of pain-point advertising, and emotions are central to its effectiveness.

Emotional content in advertising can be framed positively or negatively. When advertisers choose to frame it negatively, they aim to show that not using their product could lead to negative experiences, often illustrated by the characters' negative emotions in the ad.

How pain-point advertising works
Companies that develop goods and services need to establish a presence in the market, stimulate consumer demand and generate profits. Advertising uses a range of strategies to achieve those goals, but emotional content remains a staple across the industry.

Research in cognitive and behavioral science suggests that consumers don't make decisions through rational calculation alone, and that emotions play an important role.

One reason may be the way our brains make sense of the world. The human brain is a predictive machine that constantly uses past experiences to anticipate what will happen next.

Throughout our lives, we accumulate experiences that help us form increasingly accurate expectations and make better decisions. When our experiences confirm those expectations, there is little reason for the brain to change course. We can continue relying on what we already know.

But when reality contradicts what we expected, the mismatch can trigger a negative emotional response. The discrepancy signals that something about our expectations or behavior may need to change.

This is the very mechanism that pain-point advertising exploits. For instance, an advertisement might draw attention to a gap between how we see ourselves and how we believe we should look. The advertised product is then presented as a way to close that gap...

Webb reveals one of its largest images to date! 😲

This starry view shows the nearby star-forming region IC 348. Here, astronomers searched for brown dwarfs, objects which are less massive than the smallest stars. Read more 👉 esa.int/Science_Explor…

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