alternative_right shares a report from Phys.org: Now, for the first time, quantum scientists at the Quantum Control Laboratory at the University of Sydney Nano Institute have demonstrated a type of quantum logic gate that drastically reduces the number of physical qubits needed for its operation. To do this, they built an entangling logic gate on a single atom using an error-correcting code nicknamed the "Rosetta stone" of quantum computing. It earns that name because it translates smooth, continuous quantum oscillations into clean, digital-like discrete states, making errors easier to spot and fix, and importantly, allowing a highly compact way to encode logical qubits.

The curiously named Gottesman-Kitaev-Preskill (GKP) code has for many years offered a theoretical possibility for significantly reducing the physical number of qubits needed to produce a functioning "logical qubit." Albeit by trading efficiency for complexity, making the codes very difficult to control. Research published in Nature Physics demonstrates this as a physical reality, tapping into the natural oscillations of a trapped ion (a charged atom of ytterbium) to store GKP codes and, for the first time, realizing quantum entangling gates between them.

Led by Sydney Horizon Fellow Dr. Tingrei Tan at the University of Sydney Nano Institute, scientists have used their exquisite control over the harmonic motion of a trapped ion to bridge the coding complexity of GKP qubits, allowing a demonstration of their entanglement. "Our experiments have shown the first realization of a universal logical gate set for GKP qubits," Dr. Tan said. "We did this by precisely controlling the natural vibrations, or harmonic oscillations, of a trapped ion in such a way that we can manipulate individual GKP qubits or entangle them as a pair." [...] Across three experiments described in the paper, Dr. Tan's team used a single ytterbium ion contained in what is known as a Paul trap. This uses a complex array of lasers at room temperature to hold the single atom in the trap, allowing its natural vibrations to be controlled and utilized to produce the complex GKP codes. This research represents an important demonstration that quantum logic gates can be developed with a reduced physical number of qubits, increasing their efficiency.

Reviewers are more likely to approve a manuscript if their own work is cited in subsequent versions than are reviewers who are not cited, according to an analysis of 18,400 articles from four open-access publications. From a report: The study, which is yet to be peer reviewed, was posted online as a preprint earlier this month. The study was inspired by anecdotes from authors who cited articles only because reviewers asked them to, says study author Adrian Barnett, who researches peer review and meta-research at Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane, Australia. Sometimes, these requests are fine, he says. But if reviewers ask for too many citations or the reason to cite their work is not justified, the peer-review process can become transactional, says Barnett. Citations increase a researcher's h-index, a metric reflecting the impact of their publications.

Light pollution extends the active hours of birds worldwide by nearly an hour, fundamentally altering the natural rhythms of over 500 species across multiple continents. Analysis of 60 million bird call recordings reveals that artificial lighting causes birds to begin vocalizing 20 minutes earlier each morning and continue 30 minutes later each evening. The effect varies significantly by species anatomy and behavior.

Birds with proportionally larger eyes experience the strongest responses, with American Robins in highly illuminated areas beginning their songs up to two hours before sunrise. Species nesting in tree cavities or enclosed spaces show minimal changes, as opaque barriers shield them from artificial light. The research, drawing from BirdWeather devices deployed globally by birdwatchers, is the largest analysis of light pollution's biological impacts to date.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Serbian scientists have been experimenting with mealworms as a way to break down polystyrene. Larisa Ilijin, a principal research fellow at Belgrade's Institute for Biology, said the scientists had discovered that mealworms can digest various plastics, including polystyrene, which is used in packaging, insulation and food containers. In the project endorsed by the government and the United Nations' agency for international development, UNDP, and other international donors, they have been including the polystyrene in the regular food of the larval form of the yellow mealworm beetle, or Tenebrio molitor.

They habitually eat more or less anything, but need the training to eat the plastic products. "We have larvae that have been adapted over a long time to biodegrade plastic, to be as efficient as possible in the process," Ilijin told Reuters. She said the bacteria living in their guts break down the plastic into carbon dioxide and water, and showed no evidence of leaving microplastic residue in their innards or faeces. The work builds on similar research projects in the U.S. and Africa. [...]

The institute has given Belgrade-based Belinda Animals several containers of the mealworms. It is now breeding them and hoping to attract a network of similar farms. "When breaking down 1 kg of Styrofoam, larvae emit one to two grams of carbon dioxide ... If we incinerate it ... (Styrofoam) emits over 4,000 times more," owner Boris Vasiljev said. He also envisages the larvae being used as animal feed, should it reach a large commercial scale. The use of mealworms is still in its infancy, Ilijin said, as Serbia still needs to adopt regulations that would allow the use and sale of insect products for animal fodder. "Styrofoam takes over 500 years to decompose in nature ... this would be one of the good ways for solving the problem of plastic waste in nature," Ilijin said.

A new review of nearly 700 studies on portable air cleaners found that over 90% of them were tested in empty spaces, not on people, leaving major gaps in evidence about whether these devices actually prevent infections or if they might even cause harm by releasing chemicals like ozone or formaldehyde. The Conversation reports: Many respiratory viruses, such as COVID-19 and influenza, can spread through indoor air. Technologies such as HEPA filters, ultraviolet light and special ventilation designs -- collectively known as engineering infection controls -- are intended to clean indoor air and prevent viruses and other disease-causing pathogens from spreading. Along with our colleagues across three academic institutions and two government science agencies, we identified and analyzed every research study evaluating the effectiveness of these technologies published from the 1920s through 2023 -- 672 of them in total.

These studies assessed performance in three main ways: Some measured whether the interventions reduced infections in people; others used animals such as guinea pigs or mice; and the rest took air samples to determine whether the devices reduced the number of small particles or microbes in the air. Only about 8% of the studies tested effectiveness on people, while over 90% tested the devices in unoccupied spaces.

We found substantial variation across different technologies. For example, 44 studies examined an air cleaning process called photocatalytic oxidation, which produces chemicals that kill microbes, but only one of those tested whether the technology prevented infections in people. Another 35 studies evaluated plasma-based technologies for killing microbes, and none involved human participants. We also found 43 studies on filters incorporating nanomaterials designed to both capture and kill microbes -- again, none included human testing.

Global fertility rates have fallen from five children per woman in the mid-twentieth century to 2.2 today, with approximately half of countries now below the 2.1 replacement threshold, according to data from the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington.

Mexico's rate dropped from seven children in 1970 to 1.6 in 2023. South Korea recorded 0.75 in 2024, down from 4.5 in 1970. The IHME projects over three-quarters of countries will fall below replacement level by 2050. A UN survey of 14,000 people across 14 countries found 39% cited financial limitations as a primary reason for not having children. China's population peaked around 2022 at 1.4 billion, while the U.S. Census Bureau predicts America's population will peak in 2080 at 370 million.

Bill Gates is funding a $1 million competition to spur the use of AI to find innovative treatments for Alzheimer's disease, the latest effort to deploy the promising technology to find cures for humanity's toughest illnesses. From a report: The Alzheimer's Insights AI prize will be awarded to the team that comes up with the most original way to program AI-powered agents that are "capable of independent planning, reasoning, and action to accelerate breakthrough discoveries from existing Alzheimer's data."

 The winning tool will be released for free on the Alzheimer's Disease Data Initiative's cloud "workbench" to be used by scientists globally, the organisation said on Tuesday. The prize is being financed by Gates Ventures, the family office of the billionaire philanthropist and Microsoft co-founder.

"The U.S. is currently home to more than 18 million cancer survivors," reports the Wall Street Journal, "over 5% of the total population" (including those who are living with the disease).

Their article tells the story of Gwen Orilio, who was diagnosed with stage-four lung cancer at age 31. Ten years later she's still alive — and she still has metastatic cancer... Keeping her going is a string of new treatments that don't cure the disease but can buy months — even years — of time, with the hope that once one drug stops working a new one will come along. Orilio started on chemotherapy, and then switched to a new treatment, and then another, and another, and another... A small but growing population is living longer with incurable or advanced cancer, navigating the rest of their lives with a disease increasingly akin to a chronic illness. The trend, which started in breast cancer, has expanded to patients with melanoma, kidney cancer, lung cancer and others. The new drugs can add years to a life, even for some diagnoses like Orilio's that were once swift death sentences. They also put people in a state of limbo, living on a knife's edge waiting for the next scan to say a drug has stopped working and doctors need to find a new one. The wide range of survival times has made it more difficult for cancer doctors to predict how much time a patient might have left. For most, the options eventually run out....

More than 690,000 people were projected to be living with stage-four or metastatic disease of the six most common cancers — melanoma, breast, bladder, colorectal, prostate or lung cancer — in 2025, according to a 2022 report from the National Cancer Institute. That's an increase from 623,000 in 2018 and a significant rise since 1990, the report found... Nearly 30% of survivors diagnosed with metastatic melanoma and 20% of those diagnosed with metastatic colorectal or breast cancer had been living with their disease for a decade or more, the NCI paper estimated... Even for lung cancer, the biggest U.S. cancer killer, the five-year relative survival rate for advanced disease has inched up, from 3.7% for patients diagnosed in 2004 to 9.2% for patients diagnosed in 2017, federal data show. The overall lung cancer survival rate has risen by 26% in the past five years, according to the American Lung Association, as declining cigarette use, screening and new drugs have driven down deaths.

The expanding number of therapies that target a cancer's mutations or boost the immune system are improving the outlook for several cancers. In breast cancer, treatment for metastatic disease accounted for 29% of the drop in deaths between 1975 and 2019, according to one 2024 estimate, with screening and treatment for early-stage disease accounting for the rest.
The number of American cancer survivors (or those living with cancer) is expected to grow to 26 million by 2040," the article points out.

Take a look at what being called "a stunning phenomenon," captured in a photo taken from the International Space Station as it passed above a thunderstorm over Mexico and the American Southwest.

So what was it? "A rare form of Transient Luminous Event (TLE) called a gigantic jet," according to a new blog post at Notebookcheck.net: A gigantic jet happens above thunderstorms, firing powerful bursts of electrical charge from the top of the thunderstorm (about 20 km [12.4 miles] above the ground) into the upper atmosphere (about 100 km [62.1 miles] above the ground). The upper part of gigantic jets produces red emissions identical to sprites [large-scale electric discharges above thunderclouds]. But while gigantic jets burst directly from the top of thunderstorms, sprites form independently, much higher in the atmosphere, appearing around 50 miles (80 km) above the Earth's surface.
"If ordinary lightning seems pretty ordinary, upper-atmosphere lightning is something else — an entire zoo of various upper-atmosphere electrical discharges," writes the Severe Weather Europe site.

And NASA made a request in a new blog post this week to any aspiring citizen scientists. "Have you captured an image of a jet, sprite, or other type of TLE? Submit your photos to Spritacular.org to help scientists study these fascinating night sky phenomena!"

Click here to see some of the photos from around the world that have already been uploaded and collected at Spritacular.org.

Sunlight becomes energy when plants convert four photons of light. But unfortunately, most attempts at synthetic light-absorbing chemicals can only absorb one photon at a time, write two researchers from the University of Melbourne. "In the Polyzos research group at the School of Chemistry, we have developed a new class of photocatalysts that, like plants, can absorb energy from multiple photons." This breakthrough allows us to harness light energy more effectively, driving challenging and energy-demanding chemical reactions.

We have applied this technology to generate carbanions — negatively charged carbon atoms that serve as crucial building blocks in the creation, or synthesis, of carbon- and hydrogen-rich chemicals known as organic chemicals. Carbanions are vital in making drugs, polymers and many other important materials. However, traditional methods to produce carbanions often require lots of energy and dangerous reagents, and generate significant chemical waste, posing environmental and safety challenges... Our new method offers a greener, safer alternative [using visible light and renewable starting materials]...

We've used it to synthesize important drug molecules, including antihistamines, in a single step using simple, cheap and commonly available "commodity chemicals" — amines and alkenes. And importantly, the reaction scales well in commercial-scale continuous flow reactors, highlighting its potential for industrial applications.
"By learning from the subtle mastery of photosynthesis," the researchers write, their group "is forging a new paradigm for chemical manufacturing — one where sunlight powers sustainable and elegant solutions for the molecules that shape our world."

"The planet Uranus emits more heat than it gets from the Sun," reports Science Daily , citing a new study led by University of Houston researchers, in collaboration with planetary scientists worldwide. "This means it's still slowly losing leftover heat from its early history," says the first author on the paper, "a key piece of the puzzle that helps us understand its origins and how it has changed over time."

The study found the planet emitting about 12.5% more heat than it absorbs via sunlight, which "suggests Uranus does have its own internal heat — an advance that not only informs NASA's future missions but also deepens scientists' understanding of planetary systems, including processes that influence Earth's climate and atmospheric evolution." The discovery resolves a long-standing scientific mystery about the giant planet, because observational analyses from Voyager 2 in 1986 didn't suggest the presence of significant internal heat — contradicting scientists' understanding of how giant planets form and evolve...

Additionally, the team's methodology provides testable theories and models that could also be applied to explore radiant energy of other planets within and beyond our solar system... It could even impact technology innovation and climate understanding on Earth [giving insights into "the fundamental processes that shape planetary atmospheres, weather systems and climate systems," said one of the paper's authors.]
The article adds that the researchers now think the planet "may have a different interior structure or evolutionary history compared to the other giant planets."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the BBC: Drug treatment can help people newly diagnosed with ADHD (attention deficit hyperactivity disorder) to reduce their risk of substance misuse, suicidal behavior, transport accidents and criminality, a study suggests. These issues are linked to common ADHD symptoms such as acting impulsively and becoming easily distracted. Some 5% of children and 2.5% of adults worldwide are thought to be affected by the disorder -- and growing numbers are being diagnosed. The findings, published in the British Medical Journal (BMJ), confirm the wider potential benefits of drug treatment and could help patients decide whether to start medication, the researchers say. The researchers found taking ADHD medication was linked to reductions of first-time instances of:
- suicidal behavior - 17%
- substance misuse - 15%
- transport accidents - 12%
- criminal behavior - 13%

When recurrent events were analyzed, the researchers found ADHD medication was linked to reductions of:
- 15% for suicide attempts
- 25% for substance misuses
- 4% for accidental injuries
- 16% for transport accidents
- 25% for criminal behavior

alternative_right shares a report from Phys.org: Take note of the name: ReHMGB1. A new study pinpoints this protein as being able to spread the wear and tear that comes with time as it quietly travels through the bloodstream. This adds significantly to our understanding of aging. The researchers were able to identify ReHMGB1 as a critical messenger passing on the senescence signal by analyzing different types of human cells grown in the lab and conducting a variety of tests on mice. When ReHMGB1 transmission was blocked in mice with muscle injuries, muscle regeneration happened more quickly, while the animals showed improved physical performance, fewer signs of cellular aging, and reduced systemic inflammation. The findings have been published in the journal Metabolism.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ScientificAmerican: After a brain stem stroke left him almost entirely paralyzed in the 1990s, French journalist Jean-Dominique Bauby wrote a book about his experiences -- letter by letter, blinking his left eye in response to a helper who repeatedly recited the alphabet. Today people with similar conditions often have far more communication options. Some devices, for example, track eye movements or other small muscle twitches to let users select words from a screen. And on the cutting edge of this field, neuroscientists have more recently developed brain implants that can turn neural signals directly into whole words. These brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) largely require users to physically attempt to speak, however -- and that can be a slow and tiring process. But now a new development in neural prosthetics changes that, allowing users to communicate by simply thinking what they want to say.

The new system relies on much of the same technology as the more common "attempted speech" devices. Both use sensors implanted in a part of the brain called the motor cortex, which sends motion commands to the vocal tract. The brain activation detected by these sensors is then fed into a machine-learning model to interpret which brain signals correspond to which sounds for an individual user. It then uses those data to predict which word the user is attempting to say. But the motor cortex doesn't only light up when we attempt to speak; it's also involved, to a lesser extent, in imagined speech. The researchers took advantage of this to develop their "inner speech" decoding device and published the results on Thursday in Cell. The team studied three people with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) and one with a brain stem stroke, all of whom had previously had the sensors implanted. Using this new "inner speech" system, the participants needed only to think a sentence they wanted to say and it would appear on a screen in real time. While previous inner speech decoders were limited to only a handful of words, the new device allowed participants to draw from a dictionary of 125,000 words. To help keep private thoughts private, the researchers implemented a code phrase "chitty chitty bang bang" that participants could use to prompt the BCI to start or stop transcribing.

New research suggests exposure to some common Pfas or "forever chemical" compounds causes changes to gene activity, and those changes are linked to health problems including multiple cancers, neurological disorders and autoimmune disease. From a report: The findings are a major step toward determining the mechanism by which the chemicals cause disease and could help doctors identify, detect and treat health problems for those exposed to Pfas before the issues advance. The research may also point toward other diseases potentially caused by Pfas that have not yet been identified, the authors said.

The study is among the first to examine how Pfas chemicals impact gene activity, called epigenetics. "This gives us a hint as to which genes and which Pfas might be important," said Melissa Furlong, a University of Arizona College of Public Health Pfas researcher and study lead author.

alternative_right shares a report from ScienceAlert: In February 2023, a detector called KM3NeT, located deep under the Mediterranean Sea, picked up a signal that seemed to indicate a neutrino with a record-shattering energy of 220 petaelectronvolts (PeV). For reference, the previous record was a mere 10 PeV. Now, an exhaustive analysis of all the data on and around the event, designated KM3-230213A, not only supports the conclusions that the signal was caused by a 220-PeV neutrino, but adds to the mystery about where the heck in the Universe it came from."The patterns of light detected for KM3-230213A show a clear match to what is expected from a relativistic particle crossing the detector, most likely a muon, ruling out the possibility of a glitch," the KM3NeT Collaboration told ScienceAlert. "Thanks to the reconstructed energy and direction of this muon, the most likely scenario by far is that the muon originated in the interaction of an astrophysical neutrino in proximity to the detector, making it the most natural explanation."

The scientists believe that it's very, very unlikely that the neutrino originated within the Milky Way galaxy. Work is underway to come closer to tracing its origin point. "KM3-230213A opened a new window on ultra-high-energy neutrino astronomy," the Collaboration said. "Our analysis is the first effort to combine the observations of multiple telescopes over a wide energy range to characterize the ultra-high-energy spectrum. This represents our best chance to gain knowledge on the most extreme objects that populate our Universe."

The research has been published in the journal Physical Review X.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Astronomers have observed the calamitous result of a star that picked the wrong dance partner. They have documented what appears to be a new type of supernova, as stellar explosions are known, that occurred when a massive star tried to swallow a black hole with which it had engaged in a lengthy pas de deux.

The star, which was at least 10 times as massive as our sun, and the black hole, which had a similar mass, were gravitationally bound to one another in what is called a binary system. But as the distance separating them gradually narrowed, the black hole's immense gravitational pull appears to have distorted the star -- stretching it out from its spherical shape -- and siphoned off material before causing it to explode. An AI algorithm detected the event in real time, enabling astronomers to conduct comprehensive observations. Data from four years before the supernova showed bright emissions as the black hole consumed its companion's outer hydrogen layer. The exact mechanism remains uncertain -- either gravitational distortion triggered the star's collapse or the black hole completely tore it apart first. Following the explosion, the black hole consumed residual stellar debris, growing more massive.

Twenty years after Michelin introduced the Tweel in 2005, airless tires remain absent from passenger vehicles despite their promise to "eliminate nearly 200 million scrap tires a year caused by flats and underinflation," according to Michelin's internal testing cited in a Jalopnik report. Current prototypes "tend to transfer more road noise and vibration into the cabin than traditional radials -- making the ride harsher, especially at highway speeds." Heat dissipation poses additional challenges as "airless designs -- particularly those with internal webbing or solid cores -- have fewer ways to shed thermal load." The added structural mass "can affect fuel economy and increase unsprung weight -- bad news for handling and suspension tuning." Federal regulations compound these technical barriers since vehicle tires are subject to rigorous performance standards, many of which assume air pressure as a baseline.

An anonymous reader New Atlas: An engineered protein that acts like a molecular sponge has the potential to change how carbon monoxide poisoning is treated, chasing down CO molecules in the bloodstream and helping the body flush them out in just minutes, without the risk of short- or long-term health issues that come with the current frontline treatment, pure oxygen. Researchers at the University of Maryland School of Medicine (UMSOM) were focused on a natural protein known as RcoM, found in the bacterium Paraburkholderia xenovorans. In bacteria, RcoM detects trace amounts of CO in the environment, so the engineers believed this could be harnessed to scavenge for CO molecules attached to red blood cells instead.

The re-engineered protein is the basis of the therapy they call RcoM-HBD-CCC. While it's not exactly a catchy name, it possesses somewhat of a superpower when it comes to cleaning out CO. It selectively binds tightly to the poisonous CO molecules, while ignoring oxygen (O2) and other critical chemical compounds, such as blood-pressure-regulating nitric oxide (NO), in the body. [...] In mouse models, RcoM-HBD-CCC therapy was able to clear CO from the blood in minutes, with it safely flushed out of the body through urine. The engineered antidote acts like a sponge, seeking out and soaking up CO attached to red blood cells. In mice, half the CO in the bloodstream was cleared out in less than a minute, freeing the hemoglobin on the cells to once again start carrying O2.

Importantly, other experimental scavenger hemoproteins haven't been able to selectively target CO, and as a result also bind to NO – so infusions of such hemoproteins can lead to a reduction of NO in the blood, tightening blood vessels and spiking blood pressure. In the study, RcoM-HBD-CCC showed it didn't have this affinity with the vital molecule. "Unlike other protein-based treatments, we found the compound caused only minimal changes in blood pressure, which was an exciting finding and raised the potential for this new molecule to have clinical applications," said study corresponding author Dr Mark T. Gladwin, Dean of UMSOM. "This has the potential to become a rapid, intravenous antidote for carbon monoxide that could be given in the emergency department or even in the field by first-responders." The study was published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

A countrywide study of smartphone users who relocated between US cities found that moving to more walkable environments increased daily walking by 1,100 steps on average. Stanford University researchers analyzed 248,266 days of step data from 5,424 users of the Azumio Argus smartphone app who relocated 7,447 times among 1,609 cities between March 2013 and February 2016. Participants who moved from cities at the 25th percentile of walkability to those at the 75th percentile sustained the increased activity levels for at least three months after relocation.

The additional steps consisted predominantly of moderate-to-vigorous physical activity, with large walkability increases of 49-80 points associated with about one hour per week more of such activity. The study found that 42.5% of participants met national physical activity guidelines for moderate-to-vigorous activity after moving to highly walkable locations, compared to 21.5% before relocation. Computer simulations based on the data suggest that increasing all US cities to the walkability level of Chicago or Philadelphia could result in 36 million more Americans meeting aerobic physical activity guidelines.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the BBC: Experts at the University of Edinburgh carried out a post-mortem brain examination on 25 cats which had symptoms of dementia in life, including confusion, sleep disruption and an increase in vocalization. They found a build-up of amyloid-beta, a toxic protein and one of the defining features of Alzheimer's disease. The discovery has been hailed as a "perfect natural model for Alzheimer's" by scientists who believe it will help them explore new treatments for humans.

Dr Robert McGeachan, study lead from the University of Edinburgh's Royal (Dick) School of Veterinary Studies, said: "Dementia is a devastating disease -- whether it affects humans, cats, or dogs. Our findings highlight the striking similarities between feline dementia and Alzheimer's disease in people. This opens the door to exploring whether promising new treatments for human Alzheimer's disease could also help our ageing pets." [...]

Previously, researchers have studied genetically-modified rodents, although the species does not naturally suffer from dementia. "Because cats naturally develop these brain changes, they may also offer a more accurate model of the disease than traditional laboratory animals, ultimately benefiting both species and their caregivers," Dr McGeachan said. [...] Prof Danielle Gunn-Moore, an expert in feline medicine at the vet school, said the discovery could also help to understand and manage feline dementia. The findings have been published in the European Journal of Neuroscience.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Can deleting old emails and photos help the UK tackle ongoing drought this year? That's the hope, according to recommendations for the public included in a press release today from the National Drought Group.

There are far bigger steps companies and policymakers can take to conserve water of course, but drought has gotten bad enough for officials to urge the average person to consider how their habits might help or hurt the situation. And the proliferation of data centers is raising concerns about how much water it takes to power servers and keep them cool.

"Simple, everyday choices -- such as turning off a tap or deleting old emails -- also really helps the collective effort to reduce demand and help preserve the health of our rivers and wildlife," Helen Wakeham, Environment Agency Director of Water, said in the press release.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from MIT Technology Review: Physicists have created a new type of radar that could help improve underground imaging, using a cloud of atoms in a glass cell to detect reflected radio waves. The radar is a type of quantum sensor, an emerging technology that uses the quantum-mechanical properties of objects as measurement devices. It's still a prototype, but its intended use is to image buried objects in situations such as constructing underground utilities, drilling wells for natural gas, and excavating archaeological sites. [...] The glass cell that serves as the radar's quantum component is full of cesium atoms kept at room temperature. The researchers use lasers to get each individual cesium atom to swell to nearly the size of a bacterium, about 10,000 times bigger than the usual size. Atoms in this bloated condition are called Rydberg atoms.

When incoming radio waves hit Rydberg atoms, they disturb the distribution of electrons around their nuclei. Researchers can detect the disturbance by shining lasers on the atoms, causing them to emit light; when the atoms are interacting with a radio wave, the color of their emitted light changes. Monitoring the color of this light thus makes it possible to use the atoms as a radio receiver. Rydberg atoms are sensitive to a wide range of radio frequencies without needing to change the physical setup... This means a single compact radar device could potentially work at the multiple frequency bands required for different applications.

[Matthew Simons, a physicist at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), who was a member of the research team] tested the radar by placing it in a specially designed room with foam spikes on the floor, ceiling, and walls like stalactites and stalagmites. The spikes absorb, rather than reflect, nearly all the radio waves that hit them. This simulates the effect of a large open space, allowing the group to test the radar's imaging capability without unwanted reflections off walls.The researchers placed a radio wave transmitter in the room, along with their Rydberg atom receiver, which was hooked up to an optical table outside the room. They aimed radio waves at a copper plate about the size of a sheet of paper, some pipes, and a steel rod in the room, each placed up to five meters away. The radar allowed them to locate the objects to within 4.7 centimeters. The team posted a paper on the research to the arXiv preprint server in late June.

Researchers at Kyushu University have developed a solid-oxide fuel cell that operates at just 300C, less than half the usual operating temperature. The team was able to do this by engineering a "ScO6 highway" in the electrolyte, allowing protons to move quickly without losing performance. "The team expects that their new findings will lead to the development of low-cost, low-temperature SOFCs and greatly accelerate the practical application of these devices," said the researchers in a press release. Interesting Engineering reports: "While SOFCs are promising due to their high efficiency and long lifespan, one major drawback is that they require operation at high temperatures of around 700-800C (1292F-1472F)," added the researchers in a press release. Such heat requires costly, specialized heat-resistant materials, making the technology expensive for many applications. A lower operating temperature is expected to reduce these manufacturing costs.

The team's success comes from re-engineering the fuel cell's electrolyte, the ceramic layer that transports protons (hydrogen ions) to generate electricity. Previously, scientists faced a trade-off. Adding chemical dopants to an electrolyte increases the number of available protons but also tends to clog the material's crystal lattice, slowing proton movement and reducing performance. The Kyushu team worked to resolve this issue. "We looked for oxide crystals that could host many protons and let them move freely -- a balance that our new study finally struck," stated Yamazaki.

They found that by doping two compounds, barium stannate (BaSnO3) and barium titanate (BaTiO3), with high concentrations of scandium (Sc), they could create an efficient structure. Their analysis showed that the scandium atoms form what the researchers call a "ScO6 highway." This structure creates a wide and softly vibrating pathway through the material. "This pathway is both wide and softly vibrating, which prevents the proton-trapping that normally plagues heavily doped oxides," explained Yamazaki. The resulting material achieves a proton conductivity of more than 0.01 S/cm at 300C, a performance level comparable to conventional SOFC electrolytes that run at more than double the temperature. The research has been published in the journal Nature Materials.

Biochar produced from solid human excrement could supply up to 7% of global phosphorus fertilizer needs annually, according to a Cornell University study published in PNAS. When combined with nutrients extracted from urine, the process could provide 15% of phosphorus, 17% of nitrogen, and 25% of potassium used in agriculture worldwide.

The biochar production process reduces solid waste volume and weight by up to 90%, while allowing nutrient proportions to be adjusted for specific crop requirements.

Wedneday Beyond Meat "missed Wall Street estimates for second-quarter revenue," reports Reuters. "Consumers' growing concerns about processed foods are severely diminishing the appeal of Beyond Meat's product line, causing retailers and quick service restaurants to pull back sharply on orders," Rachel Wolff, analyst at Emarketer, said.

Retail sales of refrigerated plant-based meat alternative products in the U.S. have fallen 17.2% so far this year, and frozen plant-based meat alternatives have fallen 8.1%, according to data from SPINS... [Beyond's] revenue for the quarter ended June 28 fell nearly 20% to $75 million, compared with analysts' average estimate of $82 million, according to data compiled by LSEG.
While the company arguably invented a new market for plant-based meat substitutes, it also "owns no real intellectual property," argues The Street. "And every company in the meat and grocery business (more or less) now sells a take-off of a product that already had limited appeal..." Beyond Meat has admitted it's in trouble by hiring corporate restructuring expert John Boken from consultancy AlixPartners as interim chief transformation officer [with a focus that includes "operating expense reduction" and "broader operational efficiency"]. It has also let go of 44 employees in North America (6% of its global workforce) as it seeks to cut operating expenses amid disappointing sales... Beyond Meat also has a significant cash problem. As of June 28, 2025, Beyond Meat's cash and cash equivalents balance was $117.3 million, and total outstanding debt was $1.2 billion. The company does have time to fend off a Chapter 11 bankruptcy filing, but it also has limited, if any, prospects to meet its impending cash needs.

Imagine this. Lightning sparks a wildfire, but "within seconds, a satellite dish swirling overhead picks up on the anomaly and triggers an alarm," writes the Los Angeles Times. "An autonomous helicopter takes flight and zooms toward the fire, using sensors to locate the blaze and AI to generate a plan of attack. It measures the wind speed and fire movement, communicating constantly with the unmanned helicopter behind it, and the one behind that. Once over the site, it drops a load of water and soon the flames are smoldering. Without deploying a single human, the fire never grows larger than 10 square feet.

"This is the future of firefighting." On a recent morning in San Bernardino, state and local fire experts gathered for a demonstration of the early iterations of this new reality. An autonomous Sikorski Black Hawk helicopter, powered by technology from Lockheed Martin and a California-based software company called Rain, is on display on the tarmac of a logistics airport in Victorville — the word "EXPERIMENTAL" painted on its military green-black door. It's one of many new tools on the front lines of firefighting technology, which experts say is evolving rapidly as private industry and government agencies come face-to-face with a worsening global climate crisis...

Scientific studies and climate research models have found that the number of extreme fires could increase by as much as 30% globally by 2050. By 2100, California alone could see a 50% increase in wildfire frequency and a 77% increase in average annual acres burned, according to the state's most recent climate report. That's largely because human-caused climate change is driving up temperatures and drying out the landscape, priming it to burn, according to Kate Dargan Marquis, a senior advisor with the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation who served as California's state fire marshal from 2007 to 2010.... "[T]he policies of today and the technologies of today are not going to serve us tomorrow."

Today, more than 1,100 mountaintop cameras positioned across California are already using artificial intelligence to scan the landscape for the first sign of flames and prompt crews to spring into action. NASA's Earth-observing satellites are studying landscape conditions to help better predict fires before they ignite, while a new global satellite constellation recently launched by Google is helping to detect fires faster than ever before.
One 35-year fire service veteran who consults on fire service technologies even predicts fire-fighting robots will also be used in high-risk situations like the Colossus robot that battled flames searing through Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris...

And a bill moving through California's legislation "would direct the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection to establish a pilot program to assess the viability of incorporating autonomous firefighting helicopters in the state."

"It sounds like science fiction: a spacecraft, no heavier than a paperclip, propelled by a laser beam," writes this report from ScienceDaily, "and hurtling through space at the speed of light toward a black hole, on a mission to probe the very fabric of space and time and test the laws of physics."

"But to astrophysicist and black hole expert Cosimo Bambi, the idea is not so far-fetched." Reporting in the Cell Press journal iScience, Bambi outlines the blueprint for turning this interstellar voyage to a black hole into a reality... "We don't have the technology now," says author Cosimo Bambi of Fudan University in China. "But in 20 or 30 years, we might." The mission hinges on two key challenges — finding a black hole close enough to target and developing probes capable of withstanding the journey.

Previous knowledge on how stars evolve suggests that there could be a black hole lurking just 20 to 25 light-years from Earth, but finding it won't be easy, says Bambi. Because black holes don't emit or reflect light, they are virtually invisible to telescopes... "There have been new techniques to discover black holes," says Bambi. "I think it's reasonable to expect we could find a nearby one within the next decade...."

Bambi points to nanocrafts — gram-scale probes consisting of a microchip and light sail — as a possible solution. Earth-based lasers would blast the sail with photons, accelerating the craft to a third of the speed of light. At that pace, the craft could reach a black hole 20 to 25 light-years away in about 70 years. The data it gathers would take another two decades to get back to Earth, making the total mission duration around 80 to 100 years... Bambi notes that the lasers alone would cost around one trillion euros today, and the technology to create a nanocraft does not yet exist. But in 30 years, he says that costs may fall and technology may catch up to these bold ideas.
"If the nanocraft can travel at a velocity close to the speed of light, the mission could last 40-50 years," Bambi writes in the article, while acknowledging his idea is certainly very speculative and extremely challenging..."

"However, we should realize that most of the future experiments in particle physics and astrophysics will likely require long time (for preparation, construction, and data collection) and the work of a few generations of scientists, be very expensive, and in many cases, we will not have other options if we want to make progress in a certain field."

The BBC reports: A meteorite that crashed into a home in the U.S. is older than planet Earth, scientists have said...

Researchers at the University of Georgia examined a fragment of the rock that pierced the roof of a home in the city of McDonough [30 miles south of Georgia, on June 26]. They found that, based on the type of meteorite, it is expected to have formed 4.56 billion years ago, making it roughly 20 million years older than Earth... The rock quickly diminished in size and speed, but still travelled at least 1 km per second, going through a man's roof in Henry County...

Using optical and electron microscopy, Scott Harris [a Univeristy of Georgia geologist] and his team determined the rock was a chondrite — the most abundant type of stony meteorite, according to NASA — which meant that it was approximately 4.56 billion years old.
"The home's resident said he is still finding pieces of space dust around his home from the hit."

After five months on the International Space Station, four astronauts splashed down in the Pacific Ocean in a SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule named Endurance, reports Space.com.

It was NASA's 10th commercial crew rotation mission: The flight launched atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket on March 14 and arrived at the orbiting lab two days later. Crew-10's four astronauts soon set to conducting science work, which consumed much of their time over the ensuing months... The wheels for Crew-10's departure began turning last Saturday (Aug. 2), when SpaceX's four-person Crew-11 mission arrived at the International Space Station. The Crew-10 astronauts spent a few days advising their replacements, then set their minds to gearing up for the return to Earth — and reflecting on their orbital experience.

"We got to accomplish a lot of really amazing operational things," Ayers said during a farewell ceremony on Tuesday (Aug. 5). "We got to see some amazing views, and we have had some really big belly laughs and a wonderful time together," she added. "I think that [we're] leaving with a heart full of gratitude, and [we're] excited to see where the International Space Station goes after we get home." The hatches between Endurance and the ISS closed on Friday (Aug. 8) at 4:20 p.m. EDT (2020 GMT), and the capsule undocked about two hours later, at 6:15 p.m. EDT (2205 GMT). Endurance then began maneuvering its way back to Earth, setting up its splashdown today.

It was the first Pacific Ocean return for a SpaceX CCP mission; all previous such flights have come down off the Florida coast. SpaceX recently shifted to West Coast reentries for all of its Dragon missions, both crewed and uncrewed, to minimize the chance that falling space debris could damage property or injure people.
"During their mission, crew members traveled nearly 62,795,205 million miles," NASA announced, "and completed 2,368 orbits around Earth..." Along the way, Crew-10 contributed hundreds of hours to scientific research, maintenance activities, and technology demonstrations. McClain, Ayers, and Onishi completed investigations on plant and microalgae growth, examined how space radiation affects DNA sequences in plants, observed how microgravity changes human eye structure and cells in the body, and more. The research conducted aboard the orbiting laboratory advances scientific knowledge and demonstrates new technologies that enable us to prepare for human exploration of the Moon and Mars.

McClain and Ayers also completed a spacewalk on May 1, relocating a communications antenna, beginning the installation of a mounting bracket for a future International Space Station Roll-Out Solar Array, and other tasks.

They haven't built a spacecraft for travelling to our nearest star system. But "Engineers have designed a spacecraft that could take up to 2,400 people on a one-way trip to Alpha Centauri," reports LiveScience: The craft, called Chrysalis, could make the 25 trillion mile (40 trillion kilometer) journey in around 400 years, the engineers say in their project brief, meaning many of its potential passengers would only know life on the craft. Chrysalis is designed to house several generations of people until it enters the star system, where it could shuttle them to the surface of the planet Proxima Centuri b — an Earth-size exoplanet that is thought to be potentially habitable.

The project won first place in the Project Hyperion Design Competition, a challenge that requires teams to design hypothetical multigenerational ships for interstellar travel.

Before boarding the ship, the Chrysalis project would require initial generations of ship inhabitants to live in and adapt to an isolated environment in Antarctica for 70 to 80 years to ensure psychological wellbeing. The ship could theoretically be constructed in 20 to 25 years and retains gravity through constant rotation. The vessel, which would measure 36 miles (58 km) in length, would be constructed like a Russian nesting doll, with several layers encompassing each other around a central core. The layers include communal spaces, farms, gardens, homes, warehouses and other shared facilities, each powered by nuclear fusion reactors....

This plan is purely hypothetical, as some of the required technology, like commercial nuclear fusion reactors, don't yet exist.
Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader fahrbot-bot for submitting the article — and for sharing this observation...

"My first thought was that someone read Arthur C. Clarke's book, Rendezvous with Rama and used it as a model design!"

NASA's Crew-10 mission has departed the International Space Station after 146 days, with astronauts Nichole Ayers, Anne McClain, Takuya Onishi, and Kirill Peskov set to splash down off California's coast on Saturday morning. You can watch a recording of the SpaceX Crew-10 undocking and departure on X. Reuters reports: The four-person crew launched to the ISS on March 14 in a routine mission that replaced the Crew-9 crew, which included NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams, the astronaut pair left on the station by Boeing's Starliner capsule. Five months after the Starliner mission's conclusion, Wilmore this week retired from NASA after a 25-year career in which he flew four different spacecraft and logged a total of 464 days in space. Wilmore was a key technical adviser to Boeing's Starliner program along with Williams, who remains at the agency in its astronaut corps. [...] NASA said they are returning to Earth with "important and time-sensitive research" conducted in the microgravity environment of the ISS during the 146-day mission. The astronauts had over 200 science experiments on their to-do list.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: They are supposed to monitor you throughout the working day and help make sure that life is not getting on top of you. But a study has concluded that smartwatches cannot accurately measure your stress levels -- and may think you are overworked when really you are just excited. Researchers found almost no relationship between the stress levels reported by the smartwatch and the levels that participants said they experienced. However, recorded fatigue levels had a very slight association with the smartwatch data, while sleep had a stronger correlation.

Eiko Fried, an author of the study, said the correlation between the smartwatch and self-reported stress scores was "basically zero." He added: "This is no surprise to us given that the watch measures heart rate and heart rate doesn't have that much to do with the emotion you're experiencing -- it also goes up for sexual arousal or joyful experiences." He noted that his Garmin had previously told him he was stressed when he was working out in the gym and when excitedly talking to a friend he had not seen for a while at a wedding. "The findings raise important questions about what wearable data can or can't tell us about mental states," said Fried. "Be careful and don't live by your smartwatch -- these are consumer devices, not medical devices." The research has been published in the Journal of Psychopathology and Clinical Science.

Jim Lovell, the legendary NASA astronaut who commanded the Apollo 13 "successful failure" mission, has died at age 97. From a report: Lovell was already well-known among NASA astronauts, having flown to space on the Gemini 7, Gemini 12 and Apollo 8 missions, before he was selected to command Apollo 13, which would have marked the third successful crewed moon landing for NASA. But during the ill-fated mission -- which carried Lovell as well as astronauts John Swigert Jr. and Fred Haise Jr. on board -- an oxygen tank located on the crew's service module exploded when they were about 200,000 miles (322,000 kilometers) away from Earth.

Lovell delivered the news to mission control, saying "Houston, we've had a problem." With the damage effectively taking out the crew's power source and other life support supplies, the Apollo 13 crew had to abruptly abandon their trek to the lunar surface and use several engine burns to swing around the far side of the moon and put themselves on a course back toward Earth. The three-person crew made a high-stakes splashdown return in the South Pacific Ocean about three days after the tank explosion, marking the conclusion of what has come to be known as the "successful failure" of the Apollo missions. The ordeal was fictionalized in Ron Howard's 1995 film "Apollo 13." [...]

Lovell was the first astronaut to make four spaceflights, totaling more than 715 hours in space. He was part of NASA's second-ever astronaut class, selected in September 1962 and nicknamed the "New Nine." And joining the Apollo 13 crew after having first served on Apollo 8, which intentionally circumnavigated the moon but did not land on its surface, made Lovell the first human ever to see the moon up close for a second time. Further reading: Acting NASA Administrator Reflects on Legacy of Astronaut Jim Lovell (Source: NASA)

People who experience nightmares weekly or more frequently face three times higher risk of dying before age 70 compared to those having nightmares less than monthly, according to research by Dr. Abidemi Otaiku at Imperial College London. His analysis of six long-term studies covering more than 180,000 adults and 2,500 children found frequent nightmares predict early death more strongly than smoking, obesity, poor diet, or physical inactivity.

Among 174 people who died prematurely, 31 experienced at least weekly nightmares. Otaiku's research shows chromosomes of nightmare-prone individuals display accelerated aging patterns linked to stress hormones, accounting for roughly 40% of their increased mortality risk. Effective nightmare treatment options are currently limited and require more medical research, the report adds.

Computer scientists at Tsinghua University and Stanford have developed an algorithm that surpasses a fundamental speed limit that has constrained network pathfinding calculations since 1984. The team's approach to the shortest-path problem -- finding optimal routes from one point to all others in a network -- runs faster than Dijkstra's 1956 algorithm and its improvements by avoiding the sorting process that created the decades-old computational barrier.

Led by Ran Duan at Tsinghua, the researchers combined clustering techniques with selective application of the Bellman-Ford algorithm to identify influential nodes without sorting all paths by distance. The algorithm divides graphs into layers and uses Bellman-Ford to locate key intersection points before calculating paths to other nodes. The technique works on both directed and undirected graphs with arbitrary weights, solving a problem that stymied researchers after partial breakthroughs in the late 1990s and early 2000s applied only to specific weight conditions.

alternative_right quotes a report from The Register: Space fans looking to camp out in style have a chance to pick up an Airstream trailer that once served as the Convoy Command Vehicle for NASA's Space Shuttle operations at Edwards Air Force Base -- if they have a couple hundred thousand to spare, that is. "This is the NASA 025 Command Vehicle," current owner Jonathan Kitzen says of the once-silver, now paint-daubed and otherwise unassuming Airstream trailer. "NASA 025 was designed to land crewed missions at Edwards Air Force Base. [Airstream] informed me that this was, in their, words, 'the only NASA Airstream ever sold,' and the others [001-024] were all crushed or in museums. The sister crew vehicle (a 28-ft with one rear axle) is sitting at Kennedy museum [the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex]. All the rest are gone, except for this one."

Kitzen picked up the vehicle in 2022 up after spotting it on a government surplus auction site, where it had been listed with few details and at a very low starting price. As for how the rare vehicle ended up for sale in the first place, Kitzen says he was told it was a mistake. "Apparently there was some miscommunication when the vehicle was decommissioned," he claims in the sale listing. "It should have been offered to museums but the sales team did not know what it was. They were told it was just a 'NASA vehicle,' they did not know it had any special status or history. To the sellers they thought it was just a van that could have been for moving laundry around the base. It was an accidental (yet valid) sale.

"When I pulled up to Vandenberg Air Force Base after getting my NASA contractor badge I was greeted by the senior asset manager," Kitzen continues. "'We didn't know what we were selling!' were the first words out of her mouth. 'We didn't advertise it or offer it up to museums, the phone has exploded. Nobody told us what it was!'" [...] The listing on vehicle sale site Hemmings.com has an asking price of $199,000, though with no offers yet submitted. A listing on eBay with a $50,000 minimum bid and $290,000 buy-it-now price ended in May with no takers.

alternative_right shares a report from Phys.org: Three nano-glass spheres cling to one another. They form a tower-like cluster, similar to when you pile three scoops of ice cream on top of one another -- only much smaller. The diameter of the nano cluster is ten times smaller than that of a human hair. With the help of an optical device and laser beams, researchers at ETH Zurich have succeeded in keeping such objects almost completely motionless in levitation. This is significant when it comes to the future development of quantum sensors, which, together with quantum computers, constitute the most promising applications of quantum research.

As part of their levitation experiment, the researchers, led by adjunct professor of photonics Martin Frimmer, were able to eliminate the gravitational force acting on the glass spheres. However, the elongated nano object still trembled, similar to how the needle on a compass moves when settling into position. In the case of the nano cluster, the trembling motion was very fast but weak: the object made around one million deflections per second, each measuring only a few thousandths of a degree. This tiny rotational oscillation is a fundamental quantum motion exhibited by all objects, which physicists call zero-point fluctuation.

To date, no one has been successful in detecting these tiny movements for an object of this size as precisely as the ETH researchers have now done. They achieved this because they were able to largely eliminate all motions that originate from the field of classical physics and obscure the observation of quantum movements. The ETH researchers attribute 92% of the cluster's movements in their experiment to quantum physics and 8% to classical physics; they therefore refer to a high level of quantum purity. And the records do not stop there: The researchers accomplished all of this at room temperature. Quantum researchers usually have to cool their objects to a temperature close to absolute zero (-273 degrees Celsius) using special equipment. This was not required here. The research has been published in the journal Nature Physics.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from New Scientist: People withAlzheimer's disease have lower levels of lithium in their brains, and giving lithium to mice with symptoms of the condition reverses cognitive decline. Together, the findings suggest that lithium deficiency could be a driver of Alzheimer's disease and that low-dose lithium medications could help treat it. [...] [Bruce Yanknerat Harvard University] and his colleagues analyzed levels of 27 metals in the brains of 285 people after they died, 94 of whom were diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease and 58 of whom had mild cognitive impairment, a precursor of the condition. The other participants showed no signs of cognitive decline at the time of their death.

Lithium levels in the prefrontal cortex -- a brain region crucial for memory and decision-making -- were about 36 percent lower, on average, in people with Alzheimer's disease than in those without any cognitive decline. For those with mild cognitive impairment, lithium levels were about 23 percent lower. "We suspect that's due to a number of environmental factors: dietary intake, genetics and so forth," says Yankner. Yet there seemed to be another reason, too. In those with Alzheimer's disease, clumps of proteins called amyloid plaques contained nearly three times the amount of lithium as plaque-free regions of their brain. "Lithium becomes sequestered in these plaques," says Yankner. "We have two things going on. There is impaired uptake of lithium [in the brain] very early on and then, as the disease progresses, the lithium that is in the brain is further diminished by being bound to amyloid."

To understand how this influences cognition, the team genetically engineered 22 mice to develop Alzheimer's-like symptoms and reduced their lithium intake by 92 percent. After about eight months, the animals performed significantly worse on multiple memory tests compared with 16 mice on a standard diet. It took lithium-deficient mice around 10 seconds longer to find a hidden platform in a water maze, for example, even after six days of training. Their brains also contained nearly two and a half times as many amyloid plaques. Genetic analysis of brain cells from the lithium-deficient mice showed increased activity in genes related to neurodegeneration and Alzheimer's. They also had more brain inflammation and their immune cells were less able to clear away amyloid plaques, changes also seen in people with Alzheimer's disease.

The team then screened different lithium compounds for their ability to bind to amyloid and found that lithium orotate -- a naturally occurring compound in the body formed by combining lithium with orotic acid -- appeared to be the least likely to get trapped within plaques. Nine months of treatment with this compound significantly reduced plaques in mice with Alzheimer's-like symptoms, and they also performed as well on memory tests as normal mice. These results suggest lithium orotate could be a promising treatment for Alzheimer's. The findings have been published in the journal Nature.

Two fundamentally different methods for measuring the universe's expansion rate continue to produce incompatible results -- with direct observations of receding galaxies yielding approximately 73 kilometers per second per megaparsec and cosmic microwave background radiation analysis producing closer to 67 km/s/mpc.

The discrepancy, known as the Hubble tension, has strengthened annually for the past decadem, according to Duke University astronomer Dan Scolnic. The persistent disagreement prevents calculation of the universe's precise age or size. The Lambda-CDM model, which holds that dark energy and dark matter comprise 95% of the universe while visible matter constitutes just 5%, assumes dark energy's nature has remained constant since the Big Bang.

Some theorists propose dark energy's potency changes over time, while others suggest the Milky Way sits within a comparatively empty region of space. A June study using gravitational lensing of quasar light, bypassing traditional distance measurements, matched the higher value. New telescopes including the Vera Rubin Observatory and Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope may provide additional data. Past improvements in measurement precision have only reinforced rather than resolved the tension.

Nearly one-third of all retracted papers at PLoS ONE can be traced back to just 45 researchers who served as editors at the journal, an analysis of its publication records has found. Nature: The study, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), found that 45 editors handled only 1.3% of all articles published by PLoS ONE from 2006 to 2023, but that the papers they accepted accounted for more than 30% of the 702 retractions that the journal issued by early 2024.

Twenty-five of these editors also authored papers in PLoS ONE that were later retracted. The PNAS authors did not disclose the names of any of the 45 editors. But, by independently analysing publicly available data from PLoS ONE and the Retraction Watch database, Nature's news team has identified five of the editors who handled the highest number of papers that were subsequently retracted by the journal. Together, those editors accepted about 15% of PLoS ONE's retracted papers up to 14 July.

For years, whistle-blowers have warned that fake results are sneaking into the scientific literature at an increasing pace. A new statistical analysis backs up the concern. From a report: A team of researchers found evidence of shady organizations churning out fake or low-quality studies on an industrial scale. And their output is rising fast, threatening the integrity of many fields.

"If these trends are not stopped, science is going to be destroyed," said LuÃs A. Nunes Amaral, a data scientist at Northwestern University and an author of the study, which was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on Monday. Science has made huge advances over the past few centuries only because new generations of scientists could read about the accomplishments of previous ones. Each time a new paper is published, other scientists can explore the findings and think about how to make their own discoveries. Fake scientific papers produced by commercial "paper mills" are doubling every year and a half, according to the report. Northwestern University researchers examined over one million papers and identified networks of fraudulent studies sold to scientists seeking to pad their publication records. The team estimates the actual scope of fraud may be 100 times greater than currently detected cases. Paper mills charge hundreds to thousands of dollars for fake authorship and often target specific research fields like microRNA cancer studies.

BrianFagioli shares a report from NERDS.xyz: Synchron has just released a public demo showing something that used to feel impossible. A man with ALS is now using his iPad with nothing but his brain. No hands. No voice. No eye-tracking. Just thought. The man in the video is named Mark. He's part of Synchron's COMMAND clinical study and has an implant called the Stentrode. It sits inside his brain's blood vessels and picks up his motor intention. Those signals get sent wirelessly to an external decoder, which then tells the iPad what to do. It's all made possible by Apple's new Brain-Computer Interface Human Interface Device protocol, which lets iPadOS treat brain activity like an actual input method.

Apple's built-in Switch Control feature makes the whole thing work on the software side. The iPad even sends back screen context to the BCI decoder to make everything run more smoothly and accurately. [...] Synchron was the first company to start clinical trials with a permanently implanted BCI. The big difference here is that it doesn't require open brain surgery. The device is implanted through the blood vessels, which makes it way more practical for real-world use.

NASA's Lunar Trailblazer mission ended prematurely after losing contact with the satellite just one day post-launch, the agency announced today. Engadget reports: The NASA satellite was part of the IM-2 mission by Intuitive Machines, which took off from a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Kennedy Space Center on February 26 at 7:16PM ET. The Lunar Trailblazer successfully separated from the rocket as planned about 48 minutes after launch. Operators in Pasadena, CA established communication with the satellite at 8:13PM ET, but two-way communication was lost the next day and the team was unable to recover the connection. From the limited data ground teams received before the satellite went dark, the craft's solar arrays were not correctly positioned toward the sun, which caused its batteries to drain. "While it was not the outcome we had hoped for, mission experiences like Lunar Trailblazer help us to learn and reduce the risk for future, low-cost small satellites to do innovative science as we prepare for a sustained human presence on the Moon," said Nicky Fox, associate administrator at NASA Headquarters' Science Mission Directorate. "Thank you to the Lunar Trailblazer team for their dedication in working on and learning from this mission through to the end."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Politico: Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy will announce expedited plans this week to build a nuclear reactor on the moon, the first major action by the former Fox News host as the interim NASA administrator. NASA has discussed building a reactor on the lunar surface, but this would set a more definitive timeline -- according to documents obtained by POLITICO -- and come just as the agency faces a massive budget cut. [...] The reactor directive orders the agency to solicit industry proposals for a 100 kilowatt nuclear reactor to launch by 2030, a key consideration for astronauts' return to the lunar surface. NASA previously funded research into a 40 kilowatt reactor for use on the moon, with plans to have a reactor ready for launch by the early 2030s.

The first country to have a reactor could "declare a keep-out zone which would significantly inhibit the United States," the directive states, a sign of the agency's concern about a joint project China and Russia have launched. The directive also orders NASA to designate a leader for the effort and to get industry input within 60 days. The agency is seeking companies able to launch a reactor by 2030 since that's around the time China intends to land its first astronaut on the moon. The nuclear initiative means that NASA will continue to have a hand in nuclear development even after the Pentagon's recent cancellation of a joint program on nuclear-powered rocket engines. "While the budget did not prioritize nuclear propulsion, that wasn't because nuclear propulsion is seen as a non-worthy technology," the NASA official said.

Plastics are a "grave, growing and under-recognised danger" to human and planetary health, a new expert review has warned. From a report: The world is in a "plastics crisis," it concluded, which is causing disease and death from infancy to old age and is responsible for at least $1.5 trillion a year in health-related damages. The driver of the crisis is a huge acceleration of plastic production, which has increased by more than 200 times since 1950 and is set to almost triple again to more than a billion tonnes a year by 2060.

[...] Plastic pollution has also soared, with 8 billion tonnes now polluting the entire planet, the review said, from the top of Mount Everest to the deepest ocean trench. Less than 10% of plastic is recycled.

"Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin launched a crypto billionaire and five other people to the final frontier on Sunday," reports Space.com: The mission — known as NS-34, because it was the 34th overall flight of Blue Origin's New Shepard vehicle — lifted off from the company's West Texas spaceport at 8:43 a.m. EDT (1243 GMT; 7:43 a.m. local time in West Texas).

The highest-profile NS-34 passenger was Justin Sun, a 34-year-old billionaire who founded the blockchain platform Tron. In June 2021, Sun won an auction for a seat aboard the first-ever crewed flight of New Shepard, plunking down $28 million. [Sun was unable to take that flight due to a scheduling conflict, but Blue Origin says "the proceeds from the $28 million bid benefitted 19 space-focused charities"...] The people flying with Sun on Sunday were Arvinder (Arvi) Singh Bahal, an Indian-born American real estate investor and adventurer; Turkish businessman and photographer Gökhan Erdem; Deborah Martorell, a journalist and meteorologist from Puerto Rico; Englishman Lionel Pitchford, who has run an orphanage in Nepal for three decades; and American entrepreneur James (J.D.) Russell... All six passengers were spaceflight rookies except Russell, who flew on Blue Origin's NS-28 mission in November 2024.

NS-34 was the 14th human spaceflight to date for New Shepard, which consists of a rocket topped by a crew capsule. Both of these elements are reusable; the rocket comes back to Earth for a vertical, powered touchdown like those performed by SpaceX's Falcon 9 rockets, and the capsule lands softly under parachutes. Each New Shepard flight lasts 10 to 12 minutes from liftoff to capsule touchdown.
"New Shepard has now flown 75 people into space," Blue Origin said in a statement, "including five people who have flown twice."

Slashdot reader ffkom writes: The air around you mostly consists of nitrogen [78%]. And in that air exist happy little monogamous pairs of two nitrogen atoms per molecule, also known as N2. Researchers from the University of Giessen, Germany, recently managed to synthesize N6 molecules, "the first, to our knowledge, experimentally realized neutral molecular nitrogen allotrope beyond N2 that exhibits unexpected stability."

And these appear to be pretty angry little molecules, as they detonate at more than twice the energy density than good old TNT:

A kiloton of N6 is 1.19×10**7mol, which can release an energy of 2.20×109kcal (9.21terajoules) based on the enthalpy. Considering that the standard kiloton TNT equivalent is 4.184terajoules, N6 can release 2.2 times the energy of TNT of the same weight. On the basis of the documented TNT equivalent based on weight for HMX (1.15) and RDX (1.15), N6 can release 1.9 times the energy of HMX or RDX with the same weight.

In interviews the researchers contemplated the possibility of using N6 as rocket fuel, given its superior energy density and that its reaction product is just N2, so basically air, but no smoke, no CO2 or other potentially harmful substances.

After it began "peering into the distant universe" in 2022, NASA's James Webb Space Telescope "has discovered a rash of 'little red dots'," reports Science magazine. There's "hundreds of them, shining within the first billion years of the 13.8-billion-year-old universe, so small and red that they defied conventional explanation."

"Only in the past few months has a picture begun to emerge. The little red dots, astronomers say, may be an entirely new type of object: a colossal ball of bright, hot gas, larger than the Solar System, powered not by nuclear fusion, but by a black hole..." The objects, which some astronomers are calling "black hole stars," could be a missing link in the evolution of galaxies and help explain the rapid growth of supermassive black holes that lie at their hearts. "The big breakthrough of the past 6 months is actually the realization that we can throw out all these other models we've been playing with before," says astronomer Anna de Graaff of the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy... JWST couldn't resolve the dots into a recognizable shape, which meant they must have been tiny — less than 2% of the diameter of the Milky Way. "It was a mystery ... as to why they were so spatially compact," says Caitlin Casey of the University of Texas at Austin. An impossibly dense packing of stars would be needed to explain their brightness. "I was excited," Casey says...

For Mitch Begelman, a theoretical astrophysicist at the University of Colorado Boulder, the observations are a vindication. Earlier this month, he and a colleague posted a preprint on arXiv reviving a scenario for the formation of hypothetical "quasi-stars" that he and others had proposed 20 years ago. The first generation of stars, they calculated, could have grown to colossal size in the early universe, which was made up almost entirely of hydrogen, the raw material of stars. When a giant star ran out of fuel, they said, its core would have collapsed into a black hole, but the outer envelope of hydrogen was so dense it survived the blast, enclosing the newborn black hole. As the black hole chewed at its shroud of gas, the entire system glowed as a quasi-star larger than the Solar System. "That's what the quasi-star envelope is doing, it's force-feeding the black hole by pushing matter into it," Begelman says.

Given how common little red dots appear to be in the early universe, theorists are beginning to wonder whether this giant-ball-of-gas phase is an essential part of black hole growth and the evolution of galaxies. "We're probably looking at kind of a new phase of black hole growth that we didn't know about before," de Graaff says.
"If the red dots do turn out to be black hole stars, it will be precisely the sort of breakthrough expected from JWST — and the kind of discovery astronomers live for."

Thanks to Slashdot reader sciencehabit for sharing the news.

The vehicle "once led the Space Shuttle down the runway at Edwards Air Force Base," The Drive reported in 2022, noting it was won in an auction for $21,061 (beating 18 other bidders). "I just figured the NASA brand combined with Airsteam hip seemed like a can't lose combination," the buyer says now, in a listing for the vehicle on the on the automotive sales site Hemmings.com asking $199,000..

They're touting it as a priceless marketing/publicity prop — "a once in a lifetime opportunity" to own what was once an "onsite command center complete with communications and atmospheric monitoring... Imagine pulling into Burning Man driving this..." The seller points out it's the only custom-built "Airstream" trailer ever sold by NASA. (The others were crushed, except for one donated to the Kennedy museum.) But for this one "Apparently there was some miscommunication when the vehicle was decommissioned. It should have been offered to museums but the sales team did not know what it was.")

"Has only 8240 miles on it as driven from Ohio to California then around the Edwards base."

The seller apparently first tried listing it on eBay in May for $50,000. ("Reserve not met," says that listing page now. "Very well maintained, minor dings on exterior...")

Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 for sharing the news.