Francis Halzen won the Nobel Prize in physics on Tuesday for his efforts to demystify a rare group of neutrinos, tiny cosmic particles that scientists believe offer clues to how the universe evolved.

"It was a great surprise and I obviously didn't expect it," Halzen said, speaking to the committee by phone from Italy, in a call broadcast at the news conference to announce the winner.

Halzen said it was predicted before that he would win the Nobel Prize but the announcement still made him feel "strange."

"I am working on a proposal, and I hope that this prize will help getting it approved," he said to chuckles from the audience.

Halzen paved the way for a new kind of astronomy
The Nobel Committee for Physics also said Halzen's work was instrumental to the construction of the IceCube Neutrino Observatory in Antarctica.

"Francis Halzen realized that the ice at the South Pole could visualize these neutrino messengers from cosmos," committee member Eva Olsson said during the news conference. "People joined him in the quest for these neutrino messengers. The messenger is bringing information from cosmos. They opened the door to distant galaxies and tell us about the processes of exploding stars."

Born in Belgium, the 82-year-old scientist is affiliated with the University of Wisconsin–Madison in the U.S, which operates the IceCube Neutrino Observatory. Efforts by The Associated Press to reach him were not immediately successful.

Neutrinos are tiny cosmic particles with a mind-bogglingly small mass. Yet they are everywhere: they spew from stars like the sun and trillions zip through our bodies every second.

Scientists can't glimpse the mysterious ghost particles zooming around on their own. Instead, they measure what happens when the tiny particles collide with other bits of matter, producing flashes of light or charged particles.

Halzen helped pull the curtain back on a rare gang of neutrinos that scientists consider messengers from the cosmos, offering clues to how the universe evolved.

"This experiment in the Antarctic is a revolutionary way of understanding the universe that we didn't have before," said Michael Moloney, chief executive officer for the American Institute of Physics...

National happiness is influenced by complex relationships beyond basic economic factors, according to a study by Javier I. Borráz-León of the Secretariat of Science, Humanities, Technology, and Innovation in Mexico City and colleagues.

Published Sept. 30, 2026, in the journal PLOS One, the study finds that cats and their parasites are strongly correlated with both positive and negative happiness scores worldwide.

The general well-being of a country's populace is often represented by a national happiness score. Such scores are known to be associated with economic factors such as family income and health costs, but other factors have rarely been explored. In this study, researchers investigated the nuanced relationships underlying national well-being by factoring in the presence of domestic cats and their parasites.

The team compiled data from 93 countries, including income, health costs, GDP, domestic cat density and the prevalence of Toxoplasma, a parasite that can be transferred from cats to humans.

The data revealed that greater numbers of cats are associated with higher national happiness—consistent with studies on the benefits of pet ownership—but also that greater Toxoplasma prevalence is associated with lower national happiness, despite the parasite being spread by cats. These counterintuitive results suggest complex factors at work.

This study does not resolve the underlying causes of these associations, but the authors suggest that the influence of cats on happiness might be tied to economic factors; higher income and better public health, for example, might encourage pet ownership while reducing infection rates.

This study demonstrates that biological factors as well as economic ones can correlate with happiness, revealing new avenues for investigating national well-being. The authors note that while this study unveils previously unrecognized relationships, future studies will be needed to determine the underlying mechanisms.

The authors add, "What we found is that countries with more cats tended to report higher levels of happiness, while countries with higher exposure to Toxoplasma gondii tended to report lower levels of happiness. Of course, these are associations at the country level, so we cannot say that having more cats makes people happier or that Toxoplasma makes people less happy, but the patterns are interesting enough to deserve further investigation."

"What we find most interesting is that these results bring together factors that are usually studied separately: wealth, health, human–animal relationships and infectious disease. Our study suggests that understanding why some populations report greater well-being may require us to consider biological and ecological factors alongside the socioeconomic conditions that have traditionally received most attention"...

Scientists Henri B. Kagan and Kenso Soai won the Nobel Prize in chemistry Wednesday for untangling mysterious mirror images in molecules, a discovery that has been used to develop countless drugs and transformed modern medicine.

Many molecules come in versions that look alike but are not exactly identical, like right and left hands. One mirror image of the chemical carvone smells like mint, for example, while the other has a whiff of caraway, a spice often used in rye bread.

Even life itself prefers one mirror image over the other. DNA twists to the right, and the proteins in human bodies are made of mostly left-handed building blocks.

Versions of the same molecule can behave differently when interacting with other chemicals. When designing drugs to treat diseases, scientists want to be choosy about which mirror image they get. They want the version of a molecule to treat a cold, not one that will make the sniffles worse.

Kagan, who is from France, and Soai, from Japan, found ways to make chemistry pick a side, designing and manipulating reactions to produce the desired mirror image.

"The medicines we have today would not be possible without this chemistry," said Rigoberto Hernandez, president of the American Chemical Society.

The discovery enabled most modern medicines
Scientists paid tribute to Kagan and Soai's work, which the Nobel committee described as a feat never previously achieved by anyone "other than life itself."

"It might be difficult to say that this drug, or that drug, was developed using this," said Peter Somfai, a member of the Nobel Committee for Chemistry. "I would say all of them, because we use this as a tool, we use this as an understanding, how to develop catalysts, how they function."

In the 1980s, Kagan's work showed there might be a way to design reactions to produce one form of a molecule over the other. Years later, Soai perfected the process. He created the first-ever chemical reaction to efficiently produce only one of a molecule's mirror images, in what's now known as the Soai reaction.

"This is probably the coolest experiment in organic chemistry," Somfai said.

In addition to developing better medicines or fragrances, deciphering the mirror images of molecules can help scientists understand the chemical architecture of life, said chemist Holden Thorp, editor-in-chief of the journal Science...

The formation and evolution of planets is the driving force behind both where and how we might find life beyond Earth. This complex and lengthy process first begins with a massive ball of gas and dust that swirls until it flattens into a disk, followed by rocks ranging in size from pebbles to kilometer-scale objects clumping together in a process known as accretion, as they too swirl around within the larger disk and form rocky planets closer to the star and the farther out planets collect the gas, ice, and dust that the star couldn’t evaporate. Until now, researchers have been limited to visualizing the swirling gas and dust forming planets through computer models.

Now, an international team of researchers just announced a remarkable discovery that could change how astronomers understand planetary formation and evolution. This discovery involves the first direct image of a planet forming in a swirling ball of gas and dust, also called a protoplanet. Their discovery, which is discussed in a recent study published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, focused on the protoplanets WISPIT 2b, which is re located about 430 light-years from Earth, is estimated to be about five times as massive as Jupiter, and was directly imaged using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) observatory in northern Chile.

A companion protoplanet, WISPIT 2c, orbits interior of WISPIT 2b at 15 astronomical units (AU) and is estimated to be 8 to 12 Jupiter masses, while WISPIT 2b is located about 57 AU from its host star. While WISPIT 2b’s discovery was announced in August 2025, WISPIT 2c’s discovery was announced shortly afterwards in March 2026.

“We clearly see both planets shaping their environment,” said Dr. Myriam Benisty, who is the Director of the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Germany and lead author of the study. “WISPIT 2c has carved a cavity, and WISPIT 2b a gap. Around WISPIT 2b, we find swirls of gas that had been predicted by simulations of disk-planet interactions, but never actually seen before. Now there is an image of them!”

There is a distinct difference between a cavity and a gap within a protoplanetary disk, as a cavity indicates a total clearing of gas and dust while a gap indicates a decrease in disk material but still enough for a protoplanet to keep forming. The image obtained by ALMA demonstrates these with symbols of the locations of the host star, WISPIT 2c with its cavity, and WISPIT 2b with its gap. The major difference is WISPIT 2b is shown swirling in the gas and dust it is collecting, with blue and red denoting gas that is moving towards us and away from us, respectively...

There's big news from the quantum world. A quantum computer has been used in space for the first time. The device was aboard a spacecraft in low Earth orbit and demonstrated technology that could eventually help solve a problem that has been bugging satellites for years.

The issue is that when orbiting satellites send their raw data back down to Earth, bottlenecks and bandwidth limits slow everything down. One way to overcome this would be to process the raw data in situ before sending it.

So a team of physicists led by Philip Walther at the University of Vienna came up with a way that could eventually do just that. Their solution was to build a quantum photonic processor that uses individual light particles, or photons, to perform complex operations using compact optical hardware.

But taking the idea from the drawing board to orbit was not without its challenges. Quantum photonic systems are delicate, and radiation, large temperature changes and the vacuum of space could damage their components or disrupt their operation.

Of course, it first had to get there...

NASA has just released about 800 gigabytes of scientific data generated by the Artemis II mission. The archive documenting the astronauts’ return to the far side of the moon includes 11,000 full-resolution images and videos, 8.5 hours of spoken observations, notes taken by the astronauts, transcripts, and photographs from the cameras aboard the Orion capsule.

The space agency describes this effort as the first set of planetary science data obtained outside Earth and—for the most part—directly by humans in more than half a century. The closest comparable precedent dates back to the Apollo era and its missions to the lunar surface.

In addition to the public database, NASA released three reports summarizing what was learned during the first crewed spacecraft mission to approach the moon in five decades. These are the Artemis II Preliminary Lunar Science Report, the Artemis II Lunar Science Operations Report, and the Artemis II Lunar Science Data User Guide.

Anyone can access the near terabyte of data, though the release is primarily intended for the scientific community. While the astronauts capture and collect the data during the mission, it’s the researchers on Earth who will be able to analyze it and produce new findings about the moon. The information may be particularly useful for planetary geologists, flight engineers, heliophysicists, experts in telecommunications and remote sensing, as well as specialists in meteoroid impacts.

For space and astronomy enthusiasts, some of the most accessible materials include mission transcripts and lunar photographs annotated by the astronauts themselves. NASA has centralized access through its Planetary Data System, the public repository where it stores data from its planetary missions. In the section dedicated to the moon, users can access Artemis II and browse the various available collections, documents, and files...

Dragonflies have roamed the Earth for over 300 million years, with ancestors' wingspans reaching up to 70 cm (28 inches). Their unique independent control of each of their wings, due to directly attached muscles, gives them impeccable control in flight. They can hover and move like a helicopter in all directions, and even fly upside down, reaching speeds of roughly 56 km/h (35 mph). Read more

The sea surface temperature in a key section of the central equatorial Pacific Ocean has now surpassed all previous temperatures on record for this region, exceeding 86 degrees Fahrenheit (30 degrees Celsius) for the first time, according to preliminary data released Monday (Oct. 5).

Specifically, these temperatures occurred in the Niño 3.4 region, located between 5 degrees north and 5 degrees south latitude, and 120 degrees west and 170 degrees west longitude. Researchers use this region to monitor the progression of El Niño, the warm phase of a multiyear natural climate pattern that's currently in full swing and steadily intensifying. But how significant is this new record, and could it be a harbinger of increasingly extreme El Niño events in the future?

At this time of the year, sea surface temperatures above 86 F are common in the western Pacific warm pool, a mass of water located northeast of Australia. But the Niño 3.4 region is nowhere near the warm pool and usually has much cooler temperatures. This latest data indicates "an exceptionally warm state for this part of the tropical Pacific," said Jin-Yi Yu, a professor of Earth system science at the University of California, Irvine.

"If the reported daily El Niño 3.4 temperature above 30°C is verified in the observational dataset, it would be an extraordinary record," Yu told Live Science in an email.
...

El Niño events happen when warm water in the western tropical Pacific Ocean migrates eastward along the equator, toward South America. This boosts global temperatures, triggering heavy rainfall and floods in regions like East Africa, southern China, the southern U.S. and the Pacific coast of equatorial South America, while places such as Indonesia, the Philippines, southern Africa and northern South America experience drought.
...

The world is on the brink of crossing a critical warming threshold, raising the question of whether the current conditions can be considered a new normal for future El Niños.

While it's likely that future El Niños will be more extreme than past ones, on average, not every El Niño will be record-breaking and as dramatic as the one unfolding now, because these events tend to be very variable, Collins said...

In early 2024, laboratory-grown neurospheres (i.e. clusters of neural stem cells) were sent to the International Space Station (ISS) to be exposed to microgravity. The return trip was delayed several times due to bad weather in the landing zone. As a result, the cells were outside controlled culture conditions for longer than anticipated—beyond the limit of what they were expected to survive.

When they finally arrived at the laboratory at the Uppsala Biomedical Center (BMC), no one knew whether it would be possible to complete the experiment.

"When the cells came back, they didn't look normal, but we were still cautiously optimistic. It looked as though there were only small fragments of neurospheres in some groups, but not all of them. Only the cells that had previously been in space on the sounding rocket had survived. So we changed the medium and waited. Then some of the cells recovered and began to grow, very slowly," explains Elena Kozlova.

A month later, the experiments could begin. The results have now been analyzed and are presented in an article in npj Microgravity.

The 3D structure protected the cells
Despite being subjected to severe stress, some of the cells survived. After recovery, they were still able to develop into nerve cells and glial cells and functioned normally in the researchers' tests.

A key finding is that cells placed in 3D-printed support structures fared particularly well across all groups. They survived and continued to divide.

"Thanks to the experiment being extended, we were able to see just how significant the 3D-printed structure was for the cells' survival...

It's well-known that regular exercise comes with health benefits, but exactly how those benefits manifest at the cellular level isn't clear. Now, researchers have identified a series of changes in metabolism and the immune system that differentiate regular exercisers from people with sedentary lifestyles.

The findings, published Sept. 18 in the journal Science Advances, point to potential pathways for managing chronic diseases, such as diabetes, heart disease and cancer, the scientists say.

The team of researchers analyzed data from the Chinese Immune Multi-omics Atlas (CIMA), which includes data from 400 adults who gave blood samples and answered an in-depth questionnaire about their lifestyles.

To capture the biggest possible effects of exercise, the team included only data from participants who did the most or least exercise. One group worked out at least three times a week, racking up more than 150 minutes of moderate exercise or 75 minutes of high-intensity exercise in that timeframe. The sedentary group said they did not work out at all.

The researchers then analyzed their volunteers' blood samples for physiological markers, such as blood sugar and fat levels. They found that the participants who exercised more had signs of boosted sugar and fat metabolism, stronger muscle metabolism, and higher levels of antioxidant molecules, which combat cell-damaging processes.

Many of these systems and their links to exercise were already known, said Dr. Michael Siebers, a researcher at the University of Duisburg-Essen who wasn't involved with the study. The study's real step forward was its subsequent cellular analysis, he said.

"It's a really good paper, which is showing, for the first time, what is really happening when you're doing sports on the intercellular level," he said...

“We used to think of the body as an isolated system that regulates itself,” said Professor Shir Atzil, a researcher at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. “Our findings show that human physiology is inherently social. Being close to someone you love lowers the physical energy your body spends on regulating itself.”

“This gives us a direct metabolic benefit to being together and reveals a core evolutionary reason why humans form bonds in the first place: our bodies run better together.”

In one experiment, 108 adults ate a standardized carbohydrate meal — first alone, then with their romantic partner — while the researchers tracked their blood glucose for two hours.

Glucose levels rose less and returned to baseline faster when partners were present, producing about a 15% reduction in overall glucose exposure compared with the alone condition.

The scientists then repeated the design with two other physiological systems.

In a cold-exposure test with 116 participants, skin temperature dropped less and recovered more quickly when a partner was nearby.

In a mild-shock stress test with 115 adults, skin conductance — a marker of nervous-system arousal — likewise showed a smaller, shorter-lived response in the social condition.

A related pilot study of 56 mother-infant pairs found the same pattern: infants showed reduced stress responses to a loud noise when their mother was present in the room, compared with a separate-room condition.

Across all three adult experiments, a combined statistical analysis found a consistent effect, with roughly 8 to 12% lower cumulative physiological ‘cost’ in the social condition than when participants faced the same challenges alone.

Professor Atzil and colleagues argue the findings point to something they call Social Physiology, the idea that being near another person doesn’t just buffer stress or provide comfort, but can make routine bodily regulation itself more efficient, even in systems like glucose metabolism that aren’t usually thought of as socially responsive.

Notably, the glucose effect didn’t appear to be explained by reduced stress: markers of physiological arousal didn’t differ between the alone and social conditions during the eating experiment, and the effect held up even after statistically accounting for stress levels and physical touch between partners.

The authors suggest the benefit may instead involve the brain’s predictive regulation of the body — a process called allostasis, in which prior social experience helps the brain anticipate and manage physical demands before they fully unfold.

Sleeping less than five hours a night was associated with a higher risk of dozens of diseases in a large study that tracked nearly 100,000 adults for almost nine years. The analysis also found that people who spent more time in REM and deep sleep tended to have lower risks of several major conditions, suggesting that both sleep duration and sleep structure may be linked to long-term health.

Researchers analyzed 95,559 UK Biobank participants who wore wrist accelerometers continuously for seven days and nights. A deep learning algorithm estimated total sleep time, REM sleep, deep sleep, light sleep, wakefulness after sleep onset, and how much sleep patterns varied from night to night.

More REM Sleep Was Linked to Lower Disease Risk
Greater REM sleep was associated with lower rates of 83 diseases. Each additional 47.6 minutes of REM sleep was linked to a 26 percent lower rate of heart failure, a 46 percent lower rate of dementia, and an 80 percent lower rate of Parkinson’s disease during follow-up.

More deep sleep was associated with reduced risk of seven conditions, including type 2 diabetes and major depressive disorder. By contrast, greater night-to-night sleep irregularity and more wakefulness after falling asleep were associated with higher risks of several conditions, including anxiety and substance use disorders.

The study did not prove that these sleep patterns directly cause or prevent disease. Because the research was observational, other health, behavioral, or biological factors could contribute to the associations.

A Six to Eight Hour Window Stood Out
Total sleep time showed a nonlinear relationship with many health outcomes. For most of the conditions showing this pattern, the lowest risk was concentrated between six and eight hours of sleep per night.

People who slept less than five hours had the greatest overall vulnerability, with higher risks of 37 conditions. Across the full analysis, researchers identified 156 statistically significant associations between sleep patterns and newly diagnosed diseases after correcting for the large number of comparisons...