An anonymous reader writes: A massive storm has been raging on Jupiter for centuries, and, for the most part, has appeared very serious. A new series of detailed images, however, revealed that the famous red cyclone can get a little squiggly, bulging into different shapes and sizes over a short period of time.

Astronomers used the Hubble space telescope to look at Jupiter's Great Red Spot (GRS) from December 2023 to March 2024, and they observed the massive storm changing dimensions over the 90-day period. The reason behind this unexpected shapeshifting is unknown, but it revealed that the famous red storm is not as stable as it seemed. The results of the Hubble observations are detailed in a study published Wednesday in The Planetary Science Journal.

Using Hubble's observations, the team of astronomers behind the new study measured the Great Red Spot's size, shape, brightness, color, and vorticity over one full oscillation cycle. The combined images act like a time-lapse of the storm's changing behavior, revealing its famous red eye varying in size, while its core gets brighter when the Great Red Spot is at its largest during the 90-day cycle.

The rapid increases in life expectancy seen in the 20th century have slowed significantly, according to a new analysis published in the journal Nature. The Guardian reports: According to the study, children born recently in regions with the oldest people are far from likely to become centenarians. At best, the researchers predict 15% of females and 5% of males in the oldest-living areas will reach 100 this century. "If you're planning for retirement, it's probably not a good idea to assume you're going to make it to 100," said Jay Olshansky, professor of epidemiology and biostatistics at the University of Illinois at Chicago. "You'd probably have to work for at least 10 years longer than you'd think. And you want to enjoy the last phase of your life, you don't necessarily want to spend it working to save for time you're not going to experience."

Advances in public health and medicine sparked a longevity revolution in the 20th century. In the previous 2,000 years, life expectancy crept up, on average, one year every century or two. In the 20th century, average life expectancy rocketed, with people gaining an extra three years every decade. For the latest study, Olshansky delved into national statistics from the US and nine regions with the highest life expectancies, focusing on 1990 to 2019, before the Covid pandemic struck. The data from Hong Kong, Japan, South Korea, Australia, France, Italy, Switzerland, Sweden, and Spain showed that rises in life expectancy had slowed dramatically. In the US, life expectancy fell [T]he researchers describe how on average, life expectancy in the longest-living regions rose only 6.5 years between 1990 and 2019. They predict that girls born recently in the regions have only a 5.3% chance of reaching 100 years old, while boys have a 1.8% chance.

"In the modern era we have, through public health and medicine, manufactured decades of life that otherwise would not exist," Olshansky said. "These gains must slow down. The longevity game we're playing today is different to the longevity game we played a century ago when we were saving infants and children and women of child-bearing age and the gains in life expectancy were large. Now the gains are small because we're saving people in their 60s, 70s, 80s, and 90s." Olshansky said it would take radical new treatments that slow ageing, the greatest risk factor for many diseases, to achieve another longevity revolution. Research in the field is afoot with a dozen or so drugs shown to increase the lifespan of mice.

Cutting calorie intake can lead to a leaner body -- and a longer life, an effect often chalked up to the weight loss and metabolic changes caused by consuming less food. Now, one of the biggest studies of dietary restrictions ever conducted in laboratory animals challenges the conventional wisdom about how dietary restriction boosts longevity. From a report: The study, involving nearly 1,000 mice fed low-calorie diets or subjected to regular bouts of fasting, found that such regimens do indeed cause weight loss and related metabolic changes. But other factors -- including immune health, genetics and physiological indicators of resiliency -- seem to better explain the link between cutting calories and increased lifespan. "The metabolic changes are important," says Gary Churchill, a mouse geneticist at the Jackson Laboratory in Bar Harbor, Maine, who co-led the study. "But they don't lead to lifespan extension."

To outside investigators, the results drive home the intricate and individualized nature of the body's reaction to caloric restriction. "It's revelatory about the complexity of this intervention," says James Nelson, a biogerontologist at the University of Texas Health Science Center in San Antonio. The study was published today in Nature by Churchill and his co-authors, including scientists at Calico Life Sciences in South San Francisco, California, the anti-ageing focused biotech company that funded the study. Scientists have long known that caloric restriction, a regimen of long-term limits on food intake, lengthens lifespan in laboratory animals. Some studies have shown that intermittent fasting, which involves short bouts of food deprivation, can also increase longevity.

Three scientists won the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry on Wednesday for their groundbreaking work in predicting and designing protein structures, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced in Stockholm. David Baker of the University of Washington shares the prize with Demis Hassabis and John Jumper of Google DeepMind. Baker pioneered the creation of novel proteins, while Hassabis and Jumper developed AlphaFold, an AI model that predicts protein structures from amino acid sequences.

The laureates will split the 11 million Swedish kronor ($1 million) award for their contributions to computational protein design and structure prediction. Baker's team has produced proteins with applications in medicine and materials science since his initial breakthrough in 2003. Hassabis and Jumper's AlphaFold, announced in 2020, has predicted structures for nearly all 200 million known proteins. "We glimpsed at the beginning that it might be possible to create a whole new world of proteins that address a lot of the problems faced by humans in the 21st century," Baker said at a press briefing.

"Now it's becoming possible," Heiner Linke, chair of the Nobel chemistry committee, called the discoveries "spectacular," noting they fulfilled a 50-year-old dream of predicting protein structures from amino acid sequences. The breakthroughs have wide-ranging implications, from understanding antibiotic resistance to developing enzymes that decompose plastic. Over 2 million researchers worldwide have already utilized AlphaFold in various applications.

Researchers at BitEnergy AI, Inc. have developed Linear-Complexity Multiplication (L-Mul), a technique that reduces AI model power consumption by up to 95% by replacing energy-intensive floating-point multiplications with simpler integer additions. This method promises significant energy savings without compromising accuracy, but it requires specialized hardware to fully realize its benefits. Decrypt reports: L-Mul tackles the AI energy problem head-on by reimagining how AI models handle calculations. Instead of complex floating-point multiplications, L-Mul approximates these operations using integer additions. So, for example, instead of multiplying 123.45 by 67.89, L-Mul breaks it down into smaller, easier steps using addition. This makes the calculations faster and uses less energy, while still maintaining accuracy. The results seem promising. "Applying the L-Mul operation in tensor processing hardware can potentially reduce 95% energy cost by element wise floating point tensor multiplications and 80% energy cost of dot products," the researchers claim. Without getting overly complicated, what that means is simply this: If a model used this technique, it would require 95% less energy to think, and 80% less energy to come up with new ideas, according to this research.

The algorithm's impact extends beyond energy savings. L-Mul outperforms current 8-bit standards in some cases, achieving higher precision while using significantly less bit-level computation. Tests across natural language processing, vision tasks, and symbolic reasoning showed an average performance drop of just 0.07% -- a negligible tradeoff for the potential energy savings. Transformer-based models, the backbone of large language models like GPT, could benefit greatly from L-Mul. The algorithm seamlessly integrates into the attention mechanism, a computationally intensive part of these models. Tests on popular models such as Llama, Mistral, and Gemma even revealed some accuracy gain on certain vision tasks.

At an operational level, L-Mul's advantages become even clearer. The research shows that multiplying two float8 numbers (the way AI models would operate today) requires 325 operations, while L-Mul uses only 157 -- less than half. "To summarize the error and complexity analysis, L-Mul is both more efficient and more accurate than fp8 multiplication," the study concludes. But nothing is perfect and this technique has a major achilles heel: It requires a special type of hardware, so the current hardware isn't optimized to take full advantage of it. Plans for specialized hardware that natively supports L-Mul calculations may be already in motion. "To unlock the full potential of our proposed method, we will implement the L-Mul and L-Matmul kernel algorithms on hardware level and develop programming APIs for high-level model design," the researchers say.

Political polling, once hailed as a revolutionary tool for democracy, is facing a crisis of confidence amid high-profile failures and fundamental critiques. Data scientist G. Elliott Morris, Nate Silver's successor at FiveThirtyEight, has defended polling's relevance in a new book, arguing it remains crucial for revealing public opinion despite challenges like plummeting response rates and rising costs.

But critics, including political scientist Lindsay Rogers and sociologist Leo Bogart, have long questioned polling's ability to capture the complexities of public sentiment, arguing it reduces nuanced political matters to simplistic yes/no questions and potentially records opinions that don't exist outside the survey context. Social media platforms, promising to transform democracy by facilitating constant public feedback, have further complicated the polling landscape. The story adds: Today that product remains overwhelmingly popular: polls saturate election coverage, turn politics into a spectator sport, and provide an illusion of control over complex, unpredictable, and fundamentally fickle social forces. That isn't to say that polls don't have uses beyond entertainment: they can be a great asset to campaigns, helping candidates refine their messages and target their resources; they can provide breakdowns of election results that are far more illuminating than the overall vote count; and they can give us a sense -- a vague and sometimes misleading sense -- of what 300 million people or more think about an issue. But, pace Morris, the time for celebrating polls as a bastion of democracy or as a means of bringing elites closer to voters is surely over. The polling industry continues to boom. Democracy isn't faring quite so well.

Silicon Valley ultimately peddled the same feel-good story about democracy as the polling industry: that the powerful are unresponsive to the wider public because they cannot hear their voices, and if only they could hear them, then of course they would listen and act. The virtue of this diagnosis is that structural inequalities in wealth and power are left intact -- all that matters in democracy is that everyone has a voice, regardless of background. In a very narrow, technical sense, their innovations have made this a reality. But the result is a loud, opinionated, and impotent public sphere, coarsened by social and economic divisions and made all the more disillusioned by the discovery that, in politics, it takes more than a voice to be heard.

John J. Hopfield of Princeton University and Geoffrey E. Hinton of the University of Toronto were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics on Tuesday for their groundbreaking work in machine learning. The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences recognized the scientists for developing artificial neural networks capable of recognizing patterns in large data sets, laying the foundation for modern AI applications like facial recognition and language translation.

Hopfield, 91, created an associative memory system for storing and reconstructing data patterns. Hinton, 76, invented a method for autonomous data property identification. "This year's physics laureates' breakthroughs stand on the foundations of physical science," the Nobel Committee stated. "They have shown a completely new way for us to use computers to tackle many of society's challenges." The laureates will share the 11 million Swedish kronor ($1.1 million) prize.

The Hera spacecraft, launched by the European Space Agency on Monday, is on a mission to study the aftermath of NASA's 2022 test that successfully knocked the Dimorphos asteroid off course by intentionally crashing a probe into it. It's scheduled to arrive in December 2026. The BBC reports: The Hera craft launched from Cape Canaveral in Florida at 10:52 local time (15:52BST) on Monday. [...] The Hera mission, which is run by the European Space Agency, is a follow-on from Nasa's Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) project. Dimorphos is a small moon 160m-wide that orbits an asteroid close to Earth called Didymos in something called a binary asteroid system. In 2022 Nasa said it successfully changed Dimorphos's course by crashing a probe into it. It altered the rock's path by a few meters, according to Nasa's scientists. The asteroid was not on course to hit Earth, but it was a test to see whether space agencies could do it when there is genuine risk. When it arrives in two years, the Hera craft will look at the size and depth of the impact crater created on Dimorphos. Two cube-shaped probes will also study the make-up of the asteroid and its mass.

American scientists Victor Ambros and Gary Ruvkun won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine on Monday for discovering microRNA, tiny molecules that regulate gene expression. Their groundbreaking work in the 1990s revealed a new layer of genetic control, opening fresh avenues for understanding human development and disease.

Ambros first identified microRNA in 1993, while Ruvkun later found similar molecules in humans and other species. These RNA fragments, about 100 times smaller than typical messenger RNA, can silence genes and fine-tune protein production. The discovery has spurred research into potential treatments for cancer, heart disease, and neurological disorders. Several biotechnology companies are now developing drugs that target or mimic microRNAs.

800,000 tons of rock have been excavated from a South Dakota research facility — part of a multi-year process "to help answer some of physics' biggest questions," writes America's Energy Department.

"The caverns they excavated will hold a massive particle detector and accompanying equipment." Along with partners from more than 35 countries, the Department of Energy's Office of Science is supporting the Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment at the Long-Baseline Neutrino Facility (LBNF-DUNE)... To study how neutrinos change type as they travel, LBNF-DUNE will be sending a stream of neutrinos from DOE's Fermilab National Accelerator Laboratory in Illinois [nearly 600 miles away] to South Dakota. At the beginning and end of the particles' journey, detectors will measure the types of neutrinos and antineutrinos. By comparing the rates of how both particles change type, scientists may find a difference that accounts for that ancient misalignment.
There's also hope they'll detect neutrinos from supernovae explosions — and maybe even decaying protons LBNF-DUNE will use massive, seven-story tall detectors. Each detector will have 17,000 tons of liquid argon. That vast quantity of liquid maximizes the likelihood that scientists will detect as many neutrinos as possible. The far detector — the one in South Dakota — will be located about a mile underground. That distance places it in the right location compared to Fermilab and blocks the detector from other cosmic particles.
"Just carrying out the excavation took three years," the announcement notes. ("The team had to dissemble the equipment, move it deep underground, and then reassemble it.) The 800,000 tons of rock were moved to the surface and then stored in a former mine.

"Now that the excavation is complete, the LBNF-DUNE team is moving on to the next steps. Currently, they are installing the far detector in the Sanford Underground Research Facility. They anticipate finishing construction and starting to operate the detector in 2028. The team will then move on to installing the near detector at Fermilab.

"The launch of LBNF/DUNE will be the beginning of a new era in understanding neutrinos and knowing more about our universe as a whole."

"Scientists can't agree on the exact rate of expansion of the universe, dictated by the Hubble constant," a new article at Space.com reminds us: The rate can be measured starting from the local (and therefore recent) universe, then going farther back in time — or, it can be calculated starting from the distant (and therefore early) universe, then working your way up. The issue is both methods deliver values that don't agree with each other. This is where the James Web Space Telescope (JWST) comes in. Gravitationally lensed supernovas in the early cosmos the JWST is observing could provide a third way of measuring the rate, potentially helping resolve this "Hubble trouble." "The supernova was named 'supernova Hope' since it gives astronomers hope to better understand the universe's changing expansion rate," Brenda Frye, study team leader and a University of Arizona researcher, said in a NASA statement.

This investigation of supernova Hope began when Frye and her global team of scientists found three curious points of light in a JWST image of a distant, densely packed cluster of galaxies. Those points of light in the image were not visible when the Hubble Space Telescope imaged the same cluster, known as PLCK G165.7+67.0 or, more simply, G165, back in 2015. "It all started with one question by the team: 'What are those three dots that weren't there before? Could that be a supernova?'" Frye said.
The team noted a "high rate of star formation... more than 300 solar masses per year," according to NASA's statement: Dr. Frye: "Initial analyses confirmed that these dots corresponded to an exploding star, one with rare qualities. First, it's a Type Ia supernova, an explosion of a white dwarf star. This type of supernova is generally called a 'standard candle,' meaning that the supernova had a known intrinsic brightness. Second, it is gravitationally lensed. Gravitational lensing is important to this experiment. The lens, consisting of a cluster of galaxies that is situated between the supernova and us, bends the supernova's light into multiple images...

To achieve three images, the light traveled along three different paths. Since each path had a different length, and light traveled at the same speed, the supernova was imaged in this Webb observation at three different times during its explosion... Trifold supernova images are special: The time delays, supernova distance, and gravitational lensing properties yield a value for the Hubble constant... The team reports the value for the Hubble constant as 75.4 kilometers per second per megaparsec, plus 8.1 or minus 5.5... This is only the second measurement of the Hubble constant by this method, and the first time using a standard candle.
Their result? "The Hubble constant value matches other measurements in the local universe, and is somewhat in tension with values obtained when the universe was young."

The Washington Post on scientists who "discovered that bacteria commonly found in wastewater can break down plastic to turn it into a food source, a finding that researchers hope could be a promising answer to combat one of Earth's major pollution problems." In a study published Thursday in Environmental Science and Technology, scientists laid out their examination of Comamonas testosteroni, a bacteria that grows on polyethylene terephthalate, or PET, a plastic commonly found in single-use food packaging and water bottles. PET makes up about 12 percent of global solid waste and 90 million tons of the plastic produced each year... Unlike most other bacteria, which thrive on sugar, C. testosteroni has a more refined palate, including chemically complex materials from plants and plastics that take longer to decompose.

The researchers are the first to demonstrate not only that this bacteria can break down plastic, but they also illuminate exactly how they do it. Through six meticulous steps, involving complex imaging and gene editing techniques, the authors found that the bacteria first physically break down plastic by chewing it into smaller pieces. Then, they release enzymes — components of a cell that speed up chemical reactions — to chemically break down the plastic into a carbon-rich food source known as terephthalate...

The bacteria take a few months to break down chunks of plastic, according to Rebecca Wilkes [a lead author on the study and postdoctoral researcher at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory]. As a result, if the bacteria are going to be efficient tools, a lot of optimization needs to take place to speed up the rate at which they decompose pollutants. One approach is to promote bacterial growth by providing them with an additional food source, such as a chemical known as acetate.
A senior author on the study (and associate professor of civil and environmental engineering at Northwestern University) tells the Washington Post that "The machinery in environmental microbes is still a largely untapped potential for uncovering sustainable solutions we can exploit."

Concern over potential human-to-human transmission of bird flu has risen after six Missouri healthcare workers developed mild respiratory symptoms following contact with a patient infected with H5N1. The CDC reports only the original patient has tested positive for the virus. Scientists are ramping up efforts to develop mRNA vaccines against H5N1, with researchers at the University of Pennsylvania and major pharmaceutical companies like Moderna, Pfizer, and GSK leading the charge. While mRNA technology offers rapid vaccine production, clinical trials have shown mixed results, particularly against influenza B strains. Wired adds: [...] Traditionally, flu vaccines contain inactivated viruses that are grown in hens' eggs. This works reasonably well, but it takes a long time to make such jabs, which means health authorities have to publish their predictions about which strains of flu will be circulating during the upcoming winter well in advance. If you could manufacture vaccines more quickly, you could make more accurate predictions nearer to flu season.

Not only that, researchers hope that a single mRNA shot could one day target 20 or more strains of flu at once, relieving the need for some of this guesswork. Scher's colleagues are working on such a "universal" flu vaccine. With clinical trials ongoing, it's still early days. Sheena Cruickshank, an immunologist at the University of Manchester, has watched reports about emerging mRNA flu jabs with interest but says that questions remain. "We don't yet know how long-lasting the immunity they produce is," she says. Michael Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota, concurs, though he notes that all flu jabs, regardless of how they are made, have a waning immunity problem -- your protection could decline by around 10 percent every month following injection.

An anonymous reader shares a report: The year 1963 was surely one of the most significant of the 20th century. President John F Kennedy was assassinated, Martin Luther King delivered his "I have a dream" speech, and the Beatles recorded and released their debut album. But for all the huge political and cultural events, it was arguably an even more momentous year for public health: 1963 was the year cigarette sales peaked and began to fall in the US.

A generation from now, we may look back on 2020 in a similar way. Yes, there was the small matter of a global pandemic, but this may also have been the year obesity levels ceased their inexorable rise and began to descend. Around the world, obesity rates have been stubbornly climbing for decades, if anything accelerating in recent years. But now newly released data finds that the US adult obesity rate fell by around two percentage points between 2020 and 2023.

We have known for several years from clinical trials that Ozempic, Wegovy and the new generation of diabetes and weight loss drugs produce large and sustained reductions in body weight. Now with mass public usage taking off -- one in eight US adults have used the drugs, with 6 per cent current users -- the results may be showing up at the population level. While we can't be certain that the new generation of drugs are behind this reversal, it is highly likely. For one, the decline is steepest among college graduates, the group most likely to be using them.

Crucially, the US National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, which reported the unprecedented decline in obesity levels, uses weight and height measurements taken by medical examiners, not self-reported values. This makes it far more reliable than other surveys. American waistlines really do seem to be shrinking. What makes this all the more remarkable is the contrast in mechanisms behind the respective declines in smoking and obesity.

Researchers have discovered that a popular food dye used in Cheetos "alters the optical qualities of skin, allowing light to pass through (Source paywalled; alternative source)," according to the Wall Street Journal. Larger doses of the dye used on humans could make searching veins for blood draw easier. From a report: Tartrazine, the yellowing agent for the "dangerously cheesy" snack, was tested on the stomachs and heads of mice -- with surprising results. Researchers were even able to see muscle pulsations and blood vessels in their brains, the Wall Street Journal reported.

How does this ultimate magic trick work? It has to do with how cells are comprised of membranes that hold fats in a watery style, the outlet stated. The fats and water manage light differently. In this case, when the dye is applied, it causes light to pass through when it hits their cells. Thus, ta-da! the transparent opacity of invisible mice skin. The findings have been published in the journal Science.

The one-and-done nature of 23andMe is "indicative of a core business problem with the once high-flying biotech company that is now teetering on the brink of collapse," reports NPR. As 23andMe struggles for survival, many of its 15 million customers are left wondering what the company plans to do with all the data it has collected since it was founded in 2006. An anonymous reader shares an excerpt from the report: Andy Kill, a spokesperson for 23andMe, would not comment on what the company might do with its trove of genetic data beyond general pronouncements about its commitment to privacy. "For our customers, our focus continues to be on transparency and choice over how they want their data to be managed," he said. When signing up for the service, about 80% of 23andMe's customers have opted in to having their genetic data analyzed for medical research. "This rate has held steady for many years," Kill added. The company has an agreement with pharmaceutical giant GlaxoSmithKline, or GSK, that allows the drugmaker to tap the tech company's customer data to develop new treatments for disease. Anya Prince, a law professor at the University of Iowa's College of Law who focuses on genetic privacy, said those worried about their sensitive DNA information may not realize just how few federal protections exist. For instance, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, also known as HIPAA, does not apply to 23andMe since it is a company outside of the health care realm. "HIPAA does not protect data that's held by direct-to-consumer companies like 23andMe," she said.

Although DNA data has no federal safeguards, some states, like California and Florida, do give consumers rights over their genetic information. "If customers are really worried, they could ask for their samples to be withdrawn from these databases under those laws," said Prince. According to the company, all of its genetic data is anonymized, meaning there is no way for GSK, or any other third party, to connect the sample to a real person. That, however, could make it nearly impossible for a customer to renege on their decision to allow researchers to access their DNA data. "I couldn't go to GSK and say, 'Hey, my sample was given to you -- I want that taken out -- if it was anonymized, right? Because they're not going to re-identify it just to pull it out of the database," Prince said.

Vera Eidelman, a staff attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union who specializes in privacy and technology policy, said the patchwork of state laws governing DNA data makes the generic data of millions potentially vulnerable to being sold off, or even mined by law enforcement. "Having to rely on a private company's terms of service or bottom line to protect that kind of information is troubling -- particularly given the level of interest we've seen from government actors in accessing such information during criminal investigations," Eidelman said. She points to how investigators used a genealogy website to identify the man known as the Golden State Killer, and how police homed in on an Idaho murder suspect by turning to similar databases of genetic profiles. "This has happened without people's knowledge, much less their express consent," Eidelman said.

Neither case relied on 23andMe, and spokesperson Kill said the company does not allow law enforcement to search its database. The company has, however, received subpoenas to access its genetic information. According to 23andMe's transparency report, authorities have sought genetic data on 15 individuals since 2015, but the company has resisted the requests and never produced data for investigators. "We treat law enforcement inquiries, such as a valid subpoena or court order, with the utmost seriousness. We use all legal measures to resist any and all requests in order to protect our customers' privacy," Kill said. [...] In a September filing to financial regulators, [23andMe CEO Anne Wojcicki] wrote: "I remain committed to our customers' privacy and pledge," meaning the company's rules requiring consent for DNA to be used for research would remain in place, as well as allowing customers to delete their data. Wojcicki added that she is no longer considering offers to buy the company after previously saying she was.

fjo3 shares a report from the BBC: They can walk, hover and the males can even sing love songs to woo mates -- all this with a brain that's tinier than a pinhead. Now for the first time scientists researching the brain of a fly have identified the position, shape and connections of every single one of its 130,000 cells and 50 million connections. It's the most detailed analysis of the brain of an adult animal ever produced. One leading brain specialist independent of the new research described the breakthrough as a "huge leap" in our understanding of our own brains. One of the research leaders said it would shed new light into the mechanism of thought." [...]

The images the scientists have produced, which have been published in the journal Nature, show a tangle of wiring that is as beautiful as it is complex. Its shape and structure holds the key to explaining how such a tiny organ can carry out so many powerful computational tasks. Developing a computer the size of a poppy seed capable of all these tasks is way beyond the ability of modern science. Dr Mala Murthy, another of the project's co-leaders, from Princeton University, said the new wiring diagram, known scientifically as a connectome, would be "transformative for neuroscientists." [...] The researchers have been able to identify separate circuits for many individual functions and show how they are connected. The wires involved with movement for example are at the base of the brain, whereas those for processing vision are towards the side. There are many more neurons involved in the latter because seeing requires much more computational power. While scientists already knew about the separate circuits they did not know how they were connected together. Anyone can view and download the fly connectome here.

A study published in Nature has found that conservative social media users were more likely to face sanctions, but attributes this to their higher propensity to share low-quality news rather than political bias. Researchers analyzed 9,000 Twitter users during the 2020 U.S. election, finding pro-Trump users were 4.4 times more likely to be suspended than pro-Biden users.

However, they also shared significantly more links from sites rated as untrustworthy by both politically balanced groups and Republican-only panels. Similar patterns were observed across multiple datasets spanning 16 countries from 2016 to 2023. The study concludes that asymmetric enforcement can result from neutral policies when behavior differs between groups.

Newsweek writes that the missing atmosphere of Mars "may be locked up in the planet's clay-rich surface, a new study by MIT geologists has suggested." According to the researchers, ancient water trickling through Mars' rocks could have triggered a series of chemical reactions, converting CO2 into methane and trapping the carbon in clay minerals for billions of years...

The dominant explanation relies on an interaction between the sun's rays and gases in the atmosphere. Mars lost its protective magnetic field billions of years ago, likely allowing high-energy solar particles to strike the upper atmosphere, kicking molecules off into space, according to NASA... But this might not be the whole story. The researchers focused on a type of clay mineral called smectite, known for its ability to trap carbon. These minerals, abundant on Mars, contain tiny folds that can store carbon molecules for aeons. The study was published in the journal Science Advances.

"There is plenty of evidence for a thick clay layer on the Martian surface. Almost 80 percent of satellite spectra detect these high-surface-area clay minerals on the Martian surface. Clay has been detected in craters as deep as 17 kilometers [10.5 miles]," [lead author Joshua] Murray said... Their model suggested that Mars' surface could contain up to 1.7 bar of CO2 — roughly 80 percent of its early atmospheric volume — sequestered as methane within clay deposits. This methane could still be present today, lying beneath the planet's dry and barren crust. "We know this process happens, and it is well-documented on Earth. And these rocks and clays exist on Mars," Oliver Jagoutz, the study's author, said in a statement. "So, we wanted to try and connect the dots."

The discovery that Mars' ancient atmosphere could be hidden within its surface clays offers a new perspective on the planet's history and raises intriguing possibilities for future exploration. For example, if the sequestered carbon could be recovered and converted, it could serve as a propellant for future space missions between Earth, Mars and beyond.
"In some ways, Mars' missing atmosphere could be hiding in plain sight," says the study's lead author — and the article adds that this raises some interesting possibilities.

"For example, if the sequestered carbon could be recovered and converted, it could serve as a propellant for future space missions between Earth, Mars and beyond..."

Scientific American has surprising news about the possibility of black holes the size of an atom but containing the mass of an asteroid — the so-called "primordial black holes" formed after the birth of the universe which could solve the ongoing mystery of the missing dark matter.

These atom-sized black holes "may fly through the inner solar system about once a decade, scientists say... And if they sneak by the moon or Mars, scientists should be able to detect them, a new study shows." If one of these black holes comes near a planet or large moon, it should push the body off course enough to be measurable by current instruments. "As it passes by, the planet starts to wobble," says Sarah R. Geller, a theoretical physicist now at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and co-author of the study, which was published on September 17 in Physical Review D. "The wobble will grow over a few years but eventually it will damp out and go back to zero."

Study team member Tung X. Tran, then an undergraduate student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, built a computer model of the solar system to see how the distance between Earth and nearby solar system objects would change after a black hole flyby. He found that such an effect would be most noticeable for Mars, whose distance scientists know within about 10 centimeters. For a black hole in the middle of the mass range, "we found that after three years the signal would grow to between one to three meters," Tran says. "That's way above the threshold of precision that we can measure." The Earth-Mars distance is particularly well tracked because scientists have been sending generations of probes and landers to the Red Planet...

In a coincidence, an independent team published a paper about its search for signs of primordial black holes flying near Earth in the same issue of Physical Review D. The researchers' simulations found that such signals could be detectable in orbital data from Global Navigation Satellite Systems, as well as gravimeters that measure variations in Earth's gravitational field.
"For decades physicists thought dark matter was likely to take the form of so-called weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs)," the article points out. "Yet generations of ever more sensitive experiments meant to find these particles have come up empty."

California astrophysicist Kevork Abazajian tells the site that now in the scientific community, "Primordial black holes are really gaining popularity."