NIST: There's a new record holder for the most accurate clock in the world. Researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have improved their atomic clock based on a trapped aluminum ion. Part of the latest wave of optical atomic clocks, it can perform timekeeping with 19 decimal places of accuracy.

Optical clocks are typically evaluated on two levels -- accuracy (how close a clock comes to measuring the ideal "true" time, also known as systematic uncertainty) and stability (how efficiently a clock can measure time, related to statistical uncertainty). This new record in accuracy comes out of 20 years of continuous improvement of the aluminum ion clock. Beyond its world-best accuracy, 41% greater than the previous record, this new clock is also 2.6 times more stable than any other ion clock. Reaching these levels has meant carefully improving every aspect of the clock, from the laser to the trap and the vacuum chamber.

The team published its results in Physical Review Letters. "It's exciting to work on the most accurate clock ever," said Mason Marshall, NIST researcher and first author on the paper. "At NIST we get to carry out these long-term plans in precision measurement that can push the field of physics and our understanding of the world around us."

The LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA Collaboration has detected the most massive black hole merger to date, forming a final black hole around 225 times the Sun's mass. Caltech reports: Before now, the most massive black hole merger -- produced by an event that took place in 2021 called GW190521 -- had a total mass of 140 times that of the Sun. In the more recent GW231123 event, the 225-solar-mass black hole was created by the coalescence of black holes each approximately 100 and 140 times the mass of the Sun. In addition to their high masses, the black holes are also rapidly spinning.

"The black holes appear to be spinning very rapidly -- near the limit allowed by Einstein's theory of general relativity," explains Charlie Hoy of the University of Portsmouth and a member of the LVK. "That makes the signal difficult to model and interpret. It's an excellent case study for pushing forward the development of our theoretical tools." Researchers are continuing to refine their analysis and improve the models used to interpret such extreme events. "It will take years for the community to fully unravel this intricate signal pattern and all its implications," says Gregorio Carullo of the University of Birmingham and a member of the LVK. "Despite the most likely explanation remaining a black hole merger, more complex scenarios could be the key to deciphering its unexpected features. Exciting times ahead!"

Armagh Observatory is marking a very special meteorological milestone as the institute celebrates 230 years of continuous weather observation. From a report: The unbroken tradition of handwritten data makes it the longest sequence of continuous weather information gathered anywhere in the UK and Ireland. Events are being held at Armagh Observatory on Monday to mark the significant anniversary. Nowadays, most weather data is gathered only by automated weather stations, but not in Armagh, where the human touch remains.

The first handwritten recording was made on the evening of 14 July 1795, when a measurement of the temperature and air pressure was recorded on a graph at the observatory that sits above the city of Armagh. The measurement was repeated the next day and every subsequent day for the next 230 years.

A scientific paper featuring an AI-generated image of a rat with an oversized penis was retracted three days after publication, highlighting broader problems plaguing academic publishing as researchers struggle with an explosion of scientific literature. The paper appeared in Frontiers in Cell and Developmental Biology before widespread mockery forced its withdrawal.

Research studies indexed on Clarivate's Web of Science database increased 48% between 2015 and 2024, rising from 1.71 million to 2.53 million papers. Nobel laureate Venki Ramakrishnan called the publishing system "broken and unsustainable," while University of Exeter researcher Mark Hanson described scientists as "increasingly overwhelmed" by the volume of articles. The Royal Society plans to release a major review of scientific publishing disruptions at summer's end, with former government chief scientist Mark Walport citing incentives that favor quantity over quality as a fundamental problem.

Researchers have created the world's first mRNA-based vaccine against a deadly, antibiotic-resistant bacterium — and they did it using the platform developed for COVID-19 vaccines.

Medical Express publishes their announcement: The vaccine developed by the team from the Institute for Biological Research and Tel Aviv University is an mRNA-based vaccine delivered via lipid nanoparticles, similar to the COVID-19 vaccine. However, mRNA vaccines are typically effective against viruses like COVID-19 — not against bacteria like the plague... In 2023, the researchers developed a unique method for producing the bacterial protein within a human cell in a way that prompts the immune system to recognize it as a genuine bacterial protein and thus learn to defend against it.

The researchers from Tel Aviv University and the Institute for Biological Research proved, for the first time, that it is possible to develop an effective mRNA vaccine against bacteria. They chose Yersinia pestis, the bacterium that causes bubonic plague — a disease responsible for deadly pandemics throughout human history. In animal models, the researchers demonstrated that it is possible to effectively vaccinate against the disease with a single dose.
The team of researchers was led by Professor Dan Peer at Tel Aviv University, a global pioneer in mRNA drug development, who says the success of the current study now "paves the way for a whole world of mRNA-based vaccines against other deadly bacteria."

"Certain kinds of gut microbes absorb toxic Pfas 'forever chemicals' and help expel them from the body," reports the Guardian, citing a "new first-of-its-kind University of Cambridge research shows." The microbes were found to remove up to 75% of some Pfas from the gut of mice. Several of the study's authors plan to develop probiotic dietary supplements that boost levels of helpful microbes in the human gut, which would likely reduce Pfas levels...

Pfas are a class of about 15,000 compounds most frequently used to make products water-, stain- and grease-resistant. They have been linked to cancer, birth defects, decreased immunity, high cholesterol, kidney disease and a range of other serious health problems. They are dubbed "forever chemicals" because they do not naturally break down in the environment. The US Environmental Protection Agency has found no level of exposure to Pfos or Pfoa, two of the most common Pfas compounds, in drinking water is safe. They have a half-life in human blood of anywhere from two to five years, by most estimates. That means the body expels half the amount of the chemical that is in blood during that period. Depending on blood levels, it can take decades to fully expel Pfas naturally.

Though the findings represent the first time gut microbes have been found to remove Pfas, they have been found to alleviate the impacts of other contaminants, such as microplastics...

The microbes largely addressed "long-chain" Pfas, which are larger compounds and more dangerous than smaller "short chains" because they stay in the body longer.

An anonymous reader shared this report from Cosmos magazine about a plan to "pick up those faint signals from billions of years ago." Astronomers are planning to launch a tiny spacecraft to the far side of the Moon to listen out for "ancient whispers" in a quest to uncover the secrets of the early universe. The mission will focus on understanding the 'Cosmic Dawn', a period in the early stages of the universe after the Big Bang but before the first stars and galaxies appeared.

One of the difficulties in studying this period of the universe is that silence is essential. With all the electronics and interference in our atmosphere, Earth becomes too loud, making it unsuitable for this kind of research... The proposed mission will utilise the Moon as a giant shield, blocking out the noise from Earth, in order to observe these signals...

The mission, known as CosmoCube, is a joint study between the UK's University of Portsmouth, University of Cambridge and Rutherford Appleton Laboratory Space... CosmoCube's radio will operate at low frequencies (10-100MHz), which should hopefully be able to detect extremely faint signals. The team hope to reach lunar orbit before the end of the decade, with a roughly 5-year roadmap planned.
The article includes this quote from Professor David Bacon, from the University of Portsmouth and CosmoCube researcher. "It's incredible how far these radio waves have travelled, now arriving with news of the universe's history.

"The next step is to go to the quieter side of the Moon to hear that news."

It killed tens of millions of people in 14th century Europe," CNN reports, though "today, it's easily treated with antibiotics."

And yet "A resident of northern Arizona has died from pneumonic plague, health officials said Friday." Plague is rare to humans, with on average about seven cases reported annually in the U.S., most of them in the western states, according to federal health officials. The death in Coconino County, which includes Flagstaff, was the first recorded death from pneumonic plague since 2007, local officials said... The bubonic plague is the most common form of the bacterial infection, which spreads naturally among rodents like prairie dogs and rats. There are two other forms: septicemic plague that spreads through the whole body, and pneumonic plague that infects the lungs. Pneumonic plague is the most deadly and easiest to spread.

Major space industry players -- including SpaceX, Boeing, and Blue Origin -- are urging Congress to maintain funding for the TraCSS space traffic coordination program, warning that eliminating it would endanger satellite safety and potentially drive companies abroad. Under the proposed FY 2026 budget, the Office of Space Commerce's funding would be cut from $65 million to just $10 million. "That $55M cut is accomplished by eliminating the Traffic Coordination System for Space (TraCSS) program," reports The Register. From the report: "One of OSC's most important functions is to provide space traffic coordination support to US satellite operators, similar to the Federal Aviation Administration's role in air traffic control," stated letters from space companies including SpaceX, Boeing, Blue Origin, and others. The letters argue that safe space operations "in an increasingly congested space domain" are critical for modern services like broadband satellite internet and weather forecasting, but that's not all. "Likewise, a safe space operating environment is vital for continuity of national security space missions such as early warning of missile attacks on deployed US military forces," the letters added.

Industry trade groups sent the letters to the Democratic and Republican leadership of the House and Senate budget subcommittees for Commerce, Justice, Science, and Related Agencies, claiming to represent more than 450 US companies in the space, satellite, and defense sectors. The letters argue for the retention of the OSC's FY 2025 budget of $65 million, as well as keeping control of space traffic coordination within the purview of the Department of Commerce, under which the OSC is nested, and not the Department of Defense, where it was previously managed. "Successive administrations have recognized on a bipartisan basis that space traffic coordination is a global, commercial-facing function best managed by a civilian agency," the companies explained. "Keeping space traffic coordination within the Department of Commerce preserves military resources for core defense missions and prevents the conflation of space safety with military control."

In the budget request document, the government explained the Commerce Department was unable to complete "a government owned and operated public-facing database and traffic coordination system" in a timely manner. The private sector, meanwhile, "has proven they have the capability and the business model to provide civil operators" with the necessary space tracking data. But according to the OSC, TraCSS would have been ready for operations by January 2026, raising the question of why the government would kill the program so late in the game.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: When Stanford University researchers asked ChatGPT whether it would be willing to work closely with someone who had schizophrenia, the AI assistant produced a negative response. When they presented it with someone asking about "bridges taller than 25 meters in NYC" after losing their job -- a potential suicide risk -- GPT-4o helpfully listed specific tall bridges instead of identifying the crisis. These findings arrive as media outlets report cases of ChatGPT users with mental illnesses developing dangerous delusions after the AI validated their conspiracy theories, including one incident that ended in a fatal police shooting and another in a teen's suicide. The research, presented at the ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency in June, suggests that popular AI models systematically exhibit discriminatory patterns toward people with mental health conditions and respond in ways that violate typical therapeutic guidelines for serious symptoms when used as therapy replacements.

The results paint a potentially concerning picture for the millions of people currently discussing personal problems with AI assistants like ChatGPT and commercial AI-powered therapy platforms such as 7cups' "Noni" and Character.ai's "Therapist." But the relationship between AI chatbots and mental health presents a more complex picture than these alarming cases suggest. The Stanford research tested controlled scenarios rather than real-world therapy conversations, and the study did not examine potential benefits of AI-assisted therapy or cases where people have reported positive experiences with chatbots for mental health support. In an earlier study, researchers from King's College and Harvard Medical School interviewed 19 participants who used generative AI chatbots for mental health and found reports of high engagement and positive impacts, including improved relationships and healing from trauma.

Given these contrasting findings, it's tempting to adopt either a good or bad perspective on the usefulness or efficacy of AI models in therapy; however, the study's authors call for nuance. Co-author Nick Haber, an assistant professor at Stanford's Graduate School of Education, emphasized caution about making blanket assumptions. "This isn't simply 'LLMs for therapy is bad,' but it's asking us to think critically about the role of LLMs in therapy," Haber told the Stanford Report, which publicizes the university's research. "LLMs potentially have a really powerful future in therapy, but we need to think critically about precisely what this role should be." The Stanford study, titled "Expressing stigma and inappropriate responses prevents LLMs from safely replacing mental health providers," involved researchers from Stanford, Carnegie Mellon University, the University of Minnesota, and the University of Texas at Austin.

Stanford researchers have developed a blood-based AI tool that calculates the biological age of individual organs to reveal early signs of aging-related disease. The Mercury News reports: The tool, unveiled in Nature Medicine Wednesday, was developed by a research team spearheaded by Tony Wyss-Coray. Wyss-Coray, a Stanford Medicine professor who has spent almost 15 years fixated on the study of aging, said that the tool could "change our approach to health care." Scouring a single draw of blood for thousands of proteins, the tool works by first comparing the levels of these proteins with their average levels at a given age. An artificial intelligence algorithm then uses these gaps to derive a "biological age" for each organ.

To test the accuracy of these "biological ages," the researchers processed data for 45,000 people from the UK Biobank, a database that has kept detailed health information from over half a million British citizens for the last 17 years. When they analyzed the data, the researchers found a clear trend for all 11 organs they studied; biologically older organs were significantly more likely to develop aging-related diseases than younger ones. For instance, those with older hearts were at much higher risk for atrial fibrillation or heart failure, while those with older lungs were much more likely to develop chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.

But the brain's biological age, Wyss-Coray said, was "particularly important in determining or predicting how long you're going to live." "If you have a very young brain, those people live the longest," he said. "If you have a very old brain, those people are going to die the soonest out of all the organs we looked at." Indeed, for a given chronological age, those with "extremely aged brains" -- the 7% whose brains scored the highest on biological age -- were over 12 times more likely to develop Alzheimer's disease over the next decade than those with "extremely youthful brains" -- the 7% whose brains inhabited the other end of the spectrum.

Wyss-Coray's team also found several factors -- smoking, alcohol, poverty, insomnia and processed meat consumption -- were directly correlated with biologically aged organs. Poultry consumption, vigorous exercise, and oily fish consumption were among the factors correlated with biologically youthful organs. Supplements like glucosamine and estrogen replacements also seemed to have "protective effects," Wyss-Coray said. [...] The test ... would cost $200 once it could be operated at scale.

The U.S. government has canceled a proposed $900 million project to study in unprecedented detail the afterglow of the Big Bang, the cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation. Science magazine: Known as CMB-S4, the project envisioned new arrays of ultrasensitive microwave telescopes at the South Pole and in Chile's Atacama Desert. Their goal: to detect patterns in the ancient light that would prove the newborn universe expanded in an exponential growth spurt called cosmic inflation.

The project, which could have delivered smoking gun evidence for a key theory in cosmology, was supposed to be a joint venture between the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the Department of Energy (DOE). However, yesterday, the agencies sent an unsigned statement to the leaders of the collaboration saying the project is off. "DOE and NSF have jointly decided that they can no longer support the CMB-S4 Project," it reads.

An anonymous reader shares a report: This week has seen the shortest days of the year so far. According to data from the U.S. Naval Observatory and the International Earth Rotation and Reference Systems Service, Tuesday's rotation was about 1.34 milliseconds less than 24 hours. More quick spins are expected this week, later this month and in early August, according to predictions from the website Time and Date.

This isn't completely out of the ordinary: Our world's spins have been faster than usual lately. The average day has mostly shortened over the past decade, and within the past five years or so, the full rotation has clocked in at a hair less than 24 hours more often than not. Factors driving the change include movements at Earth's core, atmospheric changes and the moon's position.

But long-term trends do not suggest that the days will shorten in perpetuity. In fact, it is just the opposite. For many millenniums, the days have been growing longer. A Tyrannosaurus rex that lived 70 million years ago would have experienced an average daily rotation of about 23 1/2 hours, studies have found.

Four years of research following the 2021 western North American heat wave has revealed both the meteorological conditions that fuel extreme temperatures and evidence that heat has physical limits. The 2021 event "shocked everyone, including specialists working on the subject. People were completely stunned," said Robin Noyelle, a postdoctoral researcher in climate science at ETH Zurich.

Scientists now focus on temperature departures from local averages rather than absolute readings. The most anomalously warm temperature was recorded in Antarctica, where temperatures rose 39C above average in March 2022. North Pole temperatures surged 20C higher than normal in February, reaching the melting point in winter.

Research has identified five key factors that enable extreme heat: cloudless skies, high pressure, dark surfaces, lower altitudes, and lack of water. "Basically all of these conditions are met in Death Valley, but not in many other places in the world," said climate scientist Friederike Otto. Scientists insist that there are heat limits, though these upper bounds will rise with global warming, they caution.

A new study found that psilocybin treatment significantly delayed cellular aging, extending human cell lifespan by over 50% and increasing survival in aged mice by 30%. The compound appeared to achieve these effects by reducing oxidative stress, preserving telomeres, and improving DNA repair. Neuroscience News reports: A newly published study in Nature Partner Journals' Aging demonstrates that psilocin, a byproduct of consuming psilocybin, the active ingredient in psychedelic mushrooms, extended the cellular lifespan of human skin and lung cells by more than 50%. In parallel, researchers also conducted the first long-term in vivo study evaluating the systemic effects of psilocybin in aged mice of 19 months, or the equivalent of 60-65 human years. Results indicated that the mice that received an initial low dose of psilocybin of 5 mg, followed by a monthly high dose of 15 mg for 10 months, had a 30% increase in survival compared to mice that did not receive any. These mice also displayed healthier physical features, such as improved fur quality, fewer white hairs and hair regrowth.

While traditionally researched for its mental health benefits, this study suggests that psilocybin impacts multiple hallmarks of aging by reducing oxidative stress, improving DNA repair responses, and preserving telomere length. Telomeres are the structured ends of a chromosome, protecting it from damage that could lead to the formation of age-related diseases, such as cancer, neurodegeneration, or cardiovascular disease. These foundational processes influence human aging and the onset of these chronic diseases. The study concludes that psilocybin may have the potential to revolutionize anti-aging therapies and could be an impactful intervention in an aging population.