On the International Space Station, air has been slowly leaking out for years from a Russia-controlled module, reports CNN. But recently "station operators realized the gradual, steady leak had stopped. And that raised an even larger concern." It's possible that efforts to seal cracks in the module's exterior wall have worked, and the patches are finally trapping air as intended. But, according to NASA, engineers are also concerned that the module is actually holding a stable pressure because a new leak may have formed on an interior wall — causing air from the rest of the orbiting laboratory to begin rushing into the damaged area. Essentially, space station operators are worried that the entire station is beginning to lose air.

Much about this issue is unknown. NASA revealed the concerns in a June 14 statement. The agency said it would delay the launch of the private Ax-4 mission, carried out by SpaceX and Houston-based company Axiom Space, as station operators worked to pinpoint the problem. "By changing pressure in the transfer tunnel and monitoring over time, teams are evaluating the condition of the transfer tunnel and the hatch seal," the statement read.

More than a week later, the results of that research are not totally clear. After revealing the new Wednesday launch target Monday night, NASA said in a Tuesday statement that it worked with Roscosmos officials to investigate the issue. The space agencies agreed to lower the pressure in the transfer tunnel, and "teams will continue to evaluate going forward," according to the statement... The cracks are minuscule and mostly invisible to the naked eye, hence the difficulty attempting to patch problem areas.
Axiom Space launched four astronauts to the International Space Station on Wednesday.

But its four-person crew had previously "remained locked in quarantine in Florida for about a month, waiting for their chance to launch," notes CNN, as NASA and the Russian space agency Roscosmos "attempted to sort through" the leak issue.

Seven people have now received Neuralink's N1 brain implant, which enables individuals with ALS or spinal cord injuries to control a computer with their thoughts. PCMag reports: In a February 2025 update, Neuralink confirmed that three people had received its brain-computer interface (BCI). That increased to five by June, when it also reported a $650 million funding round. We're now at seven, Barrow tweeted today; Neuralink retweeted that message.

Six of the seven are participating in the PRIME study, conducted by Barrow, which handles the implantations from its Phoenix, Arizona, office. It aims to prove that the N1 implant, the R1 surgical robot, and the N1 User App on the computer are safe and effective, according to the program brochure. (No BCIs have been approved by the US Food and Drug Administration.)

Participants in the study get the implant through a surgery in which a custom-built robotic arm drills a hole in their skull and implants the device. The implant connects to a computer via Bluetooth, allowing patients to move the cursor, select words to type, browse the web, and even play video games -- a favorite activity of Neuralink's first human patient, Noland Arbaugh, who can do this all without moving any limbs or fingers. [...] Arbaugh, now 31, became paralyzed during a diving accident. Other Neuralink patients include Alex, a former machine parts builder who lost function of his arms and uses his N1 Implant to design 3D machine parts with computer-aided design (CAD). The third patient is Brad, the first person with ALS to receive the N1 implant, according to Barrow.

Mike is the fourth patient, and "the first person with a full-time job to use the N1 Implant," Barrow says. "He worked as a survey technician for city government and spent the majority of his time in the field until his ALS made the work too difficult. Like Alex, Mike has used CAD software with his Neuralink device to continue doing survey work from home and provide for his family." The fifth publicly named patient is RJ, a veteran who became paralyzed after a motorcycle accident, according to the University of Miami. The other two patients remain anonymous, but we can expect Neuralink to continue recruiting more people (here's how to apply).

A new study challenges previous research about which sleep stages help people achieve breakthrough moments in problem-solving. Researchers found that N2 sleep, a deeper stage of non-REM sleep, significantly increased participants' likelihood of experiencing sudden insights during a perceptual task. The preregistered study involved 90 participants who performed a visual pattern recognition task before and after a 20-minute daytime nap while researchers monitored their brain activity with EEG.

Participants who reached N2 sleep showed an 85.7% rate of achieving insights about a hidden strategy in the task, compared to 63.6% for those who only reached N1 sleep (the first stage of non-rapid eye movement sleep) and 55.5% for participants who remained awake. The findings contradict earlier work by Lacaux and colleagues, which suggested that lighter N1 sleep promoted insight while deeper sleep hindered it.

News coverage: Stuck on a problem? Take a nap!

alternative_right shares a report from Phys.Org: A new study from the University of Bath's School of Management has found that individuals with a higher IQ make more realistic predictions, which supports better decision-making and can lead to improved life outcomes. The research, published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, shows that people with a low IQ (the lowest 2.5% of the population) make forecasting errors that are more than twice as inaccurate as those made by people with a high IQ (the top 2.5% of the population).

The research used data from a nationally representative sample of people over 50 in England (English Longitudinal Study of Aging ELSA), assessing their ability to predict their own life expectancy. Individuals were asked to predict their probability of living to certain ages, and these estimates were compared with the probabilities taken from Office for National Statistics life tables (a demographic tool used to analyze death rates and calculate life expectancies at various ages). The study controlled for differences in lifestyle, health, and genetic longevity.

By analyzing participants' scores on a variety of cognitive tests, as well as genetic markers linked to intelligence and educational success, Chris Dawson, Professor of Economics and Behavioral Science at the University of Bath, showed that smarter individuals tend to have more accurate beliefs about uncertain future events - they are more skilled at assessing probability. Individuals with a higher IQ are significantly better at forecasting, making fewer errors (both positive and negative) and showing more consistent judgment compared to those with a lower IQ.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Neuroscience News Science Magazine: Surgeons have performed the first fully robotic heart transplant in the U.S., using advanced robotic tools to avoid opening the chest. [...] Using a surgical robot, lead surgeon Dr. Kenneth Liao and his team made small, precise incisions, eliminating the need to open the chest and break the breast bone. Liao removed the diseased heart, and the new heart was implanted through preperitoneal space, avoiding chest incision.

"Opening the chest and spreading the breastbone can affect wound healing and delay rehabilitation and prolong the patient's recovery, especially in heart transplant patients who take immunosuppressants," said Liao, professor and chief of cardiothoracic transplantation and circulatory support at Baylor College of Medicine and chief of cardiothoracic transplantation and mechanical circulatory support at Baylor St. Luke's Medical Center. "With the robotic approach, we preserve the integrity of the chest wall, which reduces the risk of infection and helps with early mobility, respiratory function and overall recovery."

In addition to less surgical trauma, the clinical benefits of robotic heart transplant surgery include avoiding excessive bleeding from cutting the bone and reducing the need for blood transfusions, which minimizes the risk of developing antibodies against the transplanted heart. Before the transplant surgery, the 45-year-old patient had been hospitalized with advanced heart failure since November 2024 and required multiple mechanical devices to support his heart function. He received a heart transplant in early March 2025 and after heart transplant surgery, he spent a month in the hospital before being discharged home, without complications.

The James Webb Space Telescope has discovered its first new exoplanet, TWA 7b -- a young, low-mass planet about 100 times the mass of Earth, making it the lightest planet ever directly imaged beyond the solar system. Space.com reports: TWA 7b was discovered in the debris rings that surround the low-mass star CE Antilae, also known as TWA 7, located around 111 light-years from Earth. CE Antilae is a very young star, estimated to be around just a few million years old. If that seems ancient, consider the sun, a "middle-aged" star, is around 4.6 billion years old.

[...] The disk of CE Antilae is divided into three distinct rings, one of which is narrow and bounded by two empty "lanes" mostly devoid of matter. When imaging this ring, the JWST spotted an infrared-emitting source, which the team of astronomers determined is most likely a young exoplanet. They then used simulations that confirmed the formation of a thin ring and a "hole" exactly where this planet is positioned, corresponding to JWST observations. The research has been published in the journal Nature.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Swarms of tiny robots, each no larger than a speck of dust, could be deployed to cure stubborn infected sinuses before being blown out through the nose into a tissue, researchers have claimed. The micro-robots are a fraction of the width of a human hair and have been inserted successfully into animal sinuses in pre-clinical trials by researchers at universities in China and Hong Kong. Swarms are injected into the sinus cavity via a duct threaded through the nostril and guided to their target by electromagnetism, where they can be made to heat up and catalyze chemical reactions to wipe out bacterial infections. There are hopes the precisely targeted technology could eventually reduce reliance on antibiotics and other generalized medicines.

[...] The latest breakthrough, based on animal rather than human trials, involves magnetic particles "doped" with copper atoms which clinicians insert with a catheter before guiding to their target under a magnetic field. The swarms can be heated up by reacting to light from an optical fibre that is also inserted into the body as part of the therapy. This allows the micro-robots to loosen up and penetrate viscous pus that forms a barrier to the infection site. The light source also prompts the micro-robots to disrupt bacterial cell walls and release reactive oxygen species that kill the bacteria.

The study, published in Nature Robotics, showed the robots were capable of eradicating bacteria from pig sinuses and could clear infections in live rabbits with "no obvious tissue damage." The researchers have produced a model of how the technology could work on a human being, with the robot swarms being deployed in operating theatre conditions, allowing doctors to see their progress by using X-rays. Future applications could include tackling bacterial infections of the respiratory tract, stomach, intestine, bladder and urethra, they suggested. "Our proposed micro-robotic therapeutic platform offers the advantages of non-invasiveness, minimal resistance, and drug-free intervention," they said.

Overfishing has led to a collapse in the eastern Baltic cod population, but over the past three decades the size of the fish themselves has also been dramatically and mysteriously shrinking. From a report: Now scientists have uncovered genomic evidence that intensive fishing has driven rapid evolutionary changes that have contributed to these fish roughly halving in average body length since the 1990s. The "shrinking" of cod, from a median mature body length of 40cm in 1996 to 20cm in 2019, has a genetic basis and human activities have left a profound mark on the population's DNA, the study concluded.

[...] The dramatic shrinking of cod has been a source of concern for several decades, but it was not clear to what extent the phenomenon has been driven by environmental factors such as hypoxic conditions caused by algal blooms, pollution and more extreme marine seasonal temperature changes. [...] The study used an archive of tiny ear bones, called otoliths, of 152 cod, caught in the Bornholm Basin between 1996 and 2019. Otoliths -- a bit like tree rings -- record annual growth, making them valuable biological timekeepers.

A groundbreaking stem cell treatment developed by Vertex Pharmaceuticals has allowed 10 out of 12 patients with severe type 1 diabetes to stop insulin therapy after one year. While the trial included some side effects and two unrelated deaths, the results mark a major step forward and have progressed to phase 3 clinical testing. ScienceAlert reports: The pancreas's islet cells are responsible for maintaining most of our bodies' insulin levels. Donor transplants of healthy versions of these cells have shown promise in treating type 1 diabetes in the past, but multiple donors are required, and donors are rare. So University of Toronto surgeon Trevor Reichman and colleagues infused 12 patients with islet cells derived from human stem cells in a treatment known as zimislecel. The patients also received immunosuppressive treatment before and after their zimislecel infusion. The islets not only produced insulin inside their bodies, but they did so at safe levels, reducing the patients' dependence on costly doses of insulin. "These findings showed that zimislecel islet cells were functional and self-regulated appropriately," the researchers write in their paper.

The mild to moderate side-effects, including decreased kidney function and the anticipated drop in immune cells, were all linked with the immunosuppressive therapy. Sadly, two additional participants died during the trial; one from an infection arising from surgery and the other from complications due to an unrelated condition. As there were no serious adverse events attributed to the new islet cell therapy, the clinical trials are have progressed into phase 3. "These findings provide evidence that pancreatic islets can be effectively produced from pluripotent stem cells and used to treat type 1 diabetes," Reichman and team conclude. The research has been published in the journal NEJM.

alternative_right shares a report from Phys.Org: In new research published by scientists studying fission yeastâ"a single-celled organism surprisingly similar to human cellsâ"researchers found that caffeine affects aging by tapping into an ancient cellular energy system. A few years ago, the same research team found that caffeine helps cells live longer by acting on a growth regulator called TOR (target of rapamycin). TOR is a biological switch that tells cells when to grow, based on how much food and energy is available. This switch has been controlling energy and stress responses in living things for over 500 million years. But in their latest study, the scientists made a surprising discovery: Caffeine doesn't act on this growth switch directly. Instead, it works by activating another important system called AMPK, a cellular fuel gauge that is evolutionarily conserved in yeast and humans.

"When your cells are low on energy, AMPK kicks in to help them cope," explains Dr. Charalampos (Babis) Rallis, Reader in Genetics, Genomics and Fundamental Cell Biology at Queen Mary University of London, the study's senior author. "And our results show that caffeine helps flip that switch." Interestingly, AMPK is also the target of metformin, a common diabetes drug that's being studied for its potential to extend human lifespan together with rapamycin. Using their yeast model, the researchers showed that caffeine's effect on AMPK influences how cells grow, repair their DNA, and respond to stress -- all of which are tied to aging and disease. The study has been published in the journal Microbial Cell.

More than 110 million people across Europe suffer high levels of health-damaging noise pollution, according to a report. The resulting physiological stress and sleep disturbance leads to 66,000 early deaths a year and many cases of heart disease, diabetes and depression. The Guardian: The report, from the European Environment Agency (EEA), focuses on noise from cars, trains and aeroplanes and found that 20% of the population of the European Economic Area (EEA) were affected. Separate research, using a slightly lower threshold for dangerous noise pollution, found that 40% of the UK population were exposed to harmful transport noise.

Seventeen million people endure particularly high noise pollution -- "long-term, high-annoyance" -- and almost 5 million suffer "severe" sleep disturbance. Fifteen million children live in areas of harmful noise. The harm to health from noise is greater than that from higher-profile risks including secondhand tobacco smoke or lead exposure, and incurs an economic cost of almost $116bn a year, the analysis found.

The damage to health is likely to be an underestimate, the researchers said. Using the World Health Organization's stricter threshold for risky noise pollution gives an estimate of 150 million people across Europe exposed. The EU's target to cut the number of people chronically disturbed by transport noise by 30% by 2030 will not be met without further action, the researchers said.

The number of doctoral graduates globally has grown steadily over recent decades, creating a massive imbalance between PhD holders and available academic positions. Among the 38 OECD countries, new doctorate holders almost doubled between 1998 and 2017.

China's doctoral enrollment has exploded from around 300,000 students in 2013 to more than 600,000 in 2023. This growth has forced PhD graduates into non-academic careers at unprecedented rates. A 2023 study of more than 4,500 PhD graduates in the United Kingdom found over two-thirds were employed outside academia.

In South Africa, 18% of more than 6,000 PhD graduates reported difficulty finding jobs related to their expertise. Some countries have begun adapting their doctoral programs. Japan, Germany and the United Kingdom now offer training and paid internships during doctoral studies, including "industrial PhD" programs where students conduct research in collaboration with companies.

Bacteria can be used to turn plastic waste into painkillers, researchers have found, opening up the possibility of a more sustainable process for producing the drugs. From a report: Chemists have discovered E coli can be used to create paracetamol, also known as acetaminophen, from a material produced in the laboratory from plastic bottles. "People don't realise that paracetamol comes from oil currently," said Prof Stephen Wallace, the lead author of the research from the University of Edinburgh. "What this technology shows is that by merging chemistry and biology in this way for the first time, we can make paracetamol more sustainably and clean up plastic waste from the environment at the same time."

Writing in the journal Nature Chemistry, Wallace and colleagues report how they discovered that a type of chemical reaction called a Lossen rearrangement, a process that has never been seen in nature, was biocompatible. In other words, it could be carried out in the presence of living cells without harming them. The team made their discovery when they took polyethylene terephthalate (PET) -- a type of plastic often found in food packaging and bottles -- and, using sustainable chemical methods, converted it into a new material.

Microplastics are present in all beverages, but those packaged in glass bottles contain more microplastic particles than those in plastic bottles, cartons or cans. This was the surprising finding of a study conducted by the Boulogne-sur-Mer unit of the ANSES Laboratory for Food Safety. The scientists hypothesised that these plastic particles could come from the paint used on bottle caps. Water and wine are less affected than other beverages. These findings have highlighted a source of microplastics in drinks that manufacturers can easily take measures to address.

Perched in Chile's Andes mountains, "A revolutionary new space telescope has just taken its first pictures of the cosmos," reports National Geographic — "and they're spectacular." Formerly known as the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope, it's expected to bring "unprecedented detail" to space photography: The observatory has a few key components: A giant telescope, called the Simonyi Survey Telescope, is connected to the world's largest and highest resolution digital camera. Rubin's 27-foot primary mirror, paired with a mind-boggling 3,200-megapixel camera, will repeatedly take 30-second exposure images of vast swaths of the sky with unrivaled speed and detail. Each image will cover an area of sky as big as 40 full moons. Every three nights for the next 10 years, Rubin will produce a new, ultra-high-definition map of the entire visible southern sky. With this much coverage, scientists hope to create an updated and detailed "movie" they can use to view how the cosmos changes over time....

For the next decade, Rubin will capture millions of astronomical objects each day — or more than 100 every second. Ultimately, it's expected to discover about 17 billion stars and 20 billion galaxies that we've never seen before... When the observatory begins science operations in earnest later in 2025, its instruments will yield a deluge of astronomical data that will be too overwhelming to process manually. (Each night, the observatory will generate around 20 terabytes of data.) Astronomers expect high-quality observations taken with the telescope will help map out the structure of the universe, find comets and potentially hazardous asteroids in our solar system, and detect exploding stars and black holes in distant galaxies.

The observatory will also examine the optical counterparts of gravitational wave events — ripples in the fabric of space caused by some of the most energetic processes in the cosmos. By studying these events, astronomers hope to uncover the secrets of the invisible forces that shape the universe like dark matter and dark energy.
"Already, in just over 10 hours of test observations, the observatory has discovered 2,104 never-before-seen-asteroids," reports NPR, "including seven near-Earth asteroids, none of which pose any danger..." The basic idea is that the data "should let astronomers catch transient phenomena that they otherwise wouldn't know to look for, such as exploding stars, asteroids, interstellar objects whizzing in from other solar systems, and maybe even the movement of a giant planet that some believe is lurking out in our own solar system, beyond Pluto."

The telescope is a joint project between the U.S. Energy Department and its National Science Foundation — and it will stream a special live broadcast of its first images today at 11 a.m. EDT (1500 GMT) on their official YouTube channel (also simulacast at Space.com).