Ultra-processed foods (UPFs) have more in common with cigarettes than with fruit or vegetables, and require far tighter regulation, according to a new report. The Guardian: UPFs and cigarettes are engineered to encourage addiction and consumption, researchers from three US universities said, pointing to the parallels in widespread health harms that link both.

UPFs, which are widely available worldwide, are food products that have been industrially manufactured, often using emulsifiers or artificial colouring and flavours. The category includes soft drinks and packaged snacks such as crisps and biscuits. There are similarities in the production processes of UPFs and cigarettes, and in manufacturers' efforts to optimise the "doses" of products and how quickly they act on reward pathways in the body, according to the paper from researchers at Harvard, the University of Michigan and Duke University.

They draw on data from the fields of addiction science, nutrition and public health history to make their comparisons, published on 3 February in the healthcare journal the Milbank Quarterly. The authors suggest that marketing claims on the products, such as being "low fat" or "sugar free," are "health washing" that can stall regulation, akin to the advertising of cigarette filters in the 1950s as protective innovations that "in practice offered little meaningful benefit."

ClickOnThis writes: NASA has delayed the Artemis II launch to March of this year, after a wet dress-rehearsal uncovered a hydrogen leak. From the NASA article:

Scientists at the University of Utah have analyzed nearly a century's worth of human hair samples and found that lead concentrations dropped 100-fold after the EPA began cracking down on leaded gasoline and other lead-based products in the 1970s.

The findings, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, drew on hair collected from Utah residents -- some preserved in family scrapbooks going back generations. Lead levels peaked between 1916 and 1969 at around 100 parts per million, fell to 10 ppm by 1990, and dropped below 1 ppm by 2024. The decline largely tracks the phase-out of leaded gasoline after President Nixon established the EPA in 1970; before the agency acted, most gasolines contained about 2 grams of lead per gallon, releasing nearly 2 pounds of lead per person into the environment each year.

The study arrives amid the Trump administration's broader push to scale back the EPA. Lead regulations have not yet been targeted, but the authors note concerns about loosened enforcement of the 2024 Lead and Copper rule on replacing old lead pipes.

The EU "has switched on parts of its homegrown secure satellite communications network for the first time," reports Bloomberg, calling it part of a €10.6 billion push to "wean itself off US support amid growing tensions."

SpaceNews notes the new government program GOVSATCOM pools capacity from eight already on-oribit satellites from France, Spain, Italy, Greece and Luxembourg — both national and commercial. And they cite this prediction by EU Defense and Space Commissioner Andrius Kubilius.

The program could expand by 2027. "All member states can now have access to sovereign satellite communications — military and government, secure and resilient, built in Europe, operated in Europe, and under European control," [Kubilius said during his opening remarks at the European Space Conference]... Beginning in 2029, GOVSATCOM is expected to integrate with the 290 satellites in the Infrastructure for Resilience, Interconnectivity and Security by Satellite constellation, known as IRIS2, and be fully operational... "The goal is connectivity and security for all of Europe — guaranteed access for all member states and full European control."

Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania and University of Michigan "have created the world's smallest fully programmable, autonomous robots," according to a recent announcement.

The announcement calls them "microscopic swimming machines that can independently sense and respond to their surroundings, operate for months and cost just a penny each." Barely visible to the naked eye, each robot measures about 200 by 300 by 50 micrometers, smaller than a grain of salt. Operating at the scale of many biological microorganisms, the robots could advance medicine by monitoring the health of individual cells and manufacturing by helping construct microscale devices. Powered by light, the robots carry microscopic computers and can be programmed to move in complex patterns, sense local temperatures and adjust their paths accordingly... "We've made autonomous robots 10,000 times smaller," says Marc Miskin, Assistant Professor in Electrical and Systems Engineering at Penn Engineering and the papers' senior author. "That opens up an entirely new scale for programmable robots."
The announcement describes them as "the first truly autonomous, programmable robots at this scale" (as described in two recent academic articles). The team had to design a new propulsion system that utilized the unique locomotion physics in the microscopic realm, according to the university's announcement. So the robots "generate an electrical field that nudges ions in the surrounding solution." Those ions, in turn, push on nearby water molecules, animating the water around the robot's body. "It's as if the robot is in a moving river," says Miskin, "but the robot is also causing the river to move." The robots can adjust the electrical field that causes the effect, allowing them to move in complex patterns and even travel in coordinated groups, much like a school of fish, at speeds of up to one body length per second...

To be truly autonomous, a robot needs a computer to make decisions, electronics to sense its surroundings and control its propulsion, and tiny solar panels to power everything, and all that needs to fit on a chip that is a fraction of a millimeter in size. This is where David Blaauw's team at the University of Michigan came into action... The robots are programmed by pulses of light that also power them. Each robot has a unique address that allows the researchers to load different programs on each robot. "This opens up a host of possibilities," adds Blaauw, "with each robot potentially performing a different role in a larger, joint task."
Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader fahrbot-bot for sharing the news.

"A box full of viruses and bacteria has completed its return trip to the International Space Station," reports ScienceAlert, "and the changes these 'bugs' experienced in their travels could help us Earthlings tackle drug-resistant infections..." Scientists aboard the space station incubated different combinations of bacteria and phages for 25 days, while the research team led by biochemist Vatsan Raman carried out the same experiments in Madison, down here on Earth. "Space fundamentally changes how phages and bacteria interact: infection is slowed, and both organisms evolve along a different trajectory than they do on Earth," the researchers explain. In the weightlessness of space, bacteria acquired mutations in genes involved in the microbe's stress response and nutrient management. Their surface proteins also changed. After a slow start, the phages mutated in response, so they could continue binding to their victims.

The team found that certain space-specific phage mutations were especially effective at killing Earth-bound bacteria responsible for urinary tract infections (UTIs). More than 90 percent of the bacteria responsible for UTIs are antibiotic-resistant, making phage treatments a promising alternative.

TechCrunch reports: Jeff Bezos' space company Blue Origin is pausing its space tourism flights for "no less than two years" in order to focus all of its resources on upcoming missions to the moon, the company announced Friday. The decision puts a temporary halt on a program that Blue Origin has been using to fly humans past the Kármán line, the recognized boundary of space, for the last five years. Blue Origin made the announcement just a few weeks ahead of the expected third launch of its New Glenn mega-rocket, which is slated for late February...

The company said Friday that New Shepard has flown 38 times and carried 98 humans to space, along with more than 200 scientific and research payloads.
"The move is a clear sign that Blue Origin is going all in on its moon program as the company races with rival SpaceX," reports the Business Standard, "to be the first private company to land humans on the lunar surface for Nasa's Artemis program." Blue Origin holds a $3.4 billion contract with Nasa to develop its Blue Moon lander, designed to shuttle astronauts to and from the moon, with a landing originally targeted for 2029... The company is targeting the launch and landing of a cargo version of its lander as soon as this year, as a test ahead of eventually landing humans. Blue Origin has also presented an accelerated plan to Nasa for developing a lander that may be ready for carrying astronauts ahead of Starship, the large new rocket from Elon Musk's SpaceX.

Slashdot reader alternative_right writes: Quantum computers need extreme cold to work, but the very systems that keep them cold also create noise that can destroy fragile quantum information. Scientists in Sweden have now flipped that problem on its head by building a tiny quantum refrigerator that actually uses noise to drive cooling instead of fighting it. By carefully steering heat at unimaginably small scales, the device can act as a refrigerator, heat engine, or energy amplifier inside quantum circuits.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: About a decade ago, many media outlets -- including WIRED -- zeroed in on a weird trend at the intersection of mental health, drug science, and Silicon Valley biohacking: microdosing, or the practice of taking a small amount of a psychedelic drug seeking not full-blown hallucinatory revels but gentler, more stable effects. Typically using psilocybin mushrooms or LSD, the archetypal microdoser sought less melting walls and open-eye kaleidoscopic visuals than boosts in mood and energy, like a gentle spring breeze blowing through the mind. Anecdotal reports pitched microdosing as a kind of psychedelic Swiss Army knife, providing everything from increased focus to a spiked libido and (perhaps most promisingly) lowered reported levels of depression. It was a miracle for many. Others remained wary. Could 5 percent of a dose of acid really do all that?

A new, wide-ranging study by an Australian biopharma company suggests that microdosing's benefits may indeed be drastically overstated -- at least when it comes to addressing symptoms of clinical depression. A Phase 2B trial of 89 adult patients conducted by Melbourne-based MindBio Therapeutics, investigating the effects of microdosing LSD in the treatment of major depressive disorder, found that the psychedelic was actually outperformed by a placebo. Across an eight-week period, symptoms were gauged using the Montgomery-Asberg Depression Rating Scale (MADRS), a widely recognized tool for the clinical evaluation of depression. The study has not yet been published. But MindBio's CEO Justin Hanka recently released the top-line results on his LinkedIn, eager to show that his company was "in front of the curve in microdosing research."

He called it "the most vigorous placebo controlled trial ever performed in microdosing." It found that patients dosed with a small amount of LSD (ranging from 4 to 20g, or micrograms, well below the threshold of a mind-blowing hallucinogenic dose) showed observable upticks in feelings of well-being, but worse MADRS scores, compared to patients given a placebo in the form of a caffeine pill. (Because patients in psychedelic trials typically expect some kind of mind-altering effect, studies are often blinded using so-called "active placebos," like caffeine or methylphenidate, which have their own observable psychoactive properties.) This means, essentially, that a medium-strength cup of coffee may prove more beneficial in treating major depressive disorder than a tiny dose of acid. Good news for habitual caffeine users, perhaps, but less so for researchers (and biopharma startups) counting on the efficacy of psychedelic microdosing. "It's probably a nail in the coffin of using microdosing to treat clinical depression," Hanka says. "It probably improves the way depressed people feel -- just not enough to be clinically significant or statistically meaningful."

Researchers at the University of New South Wales are developing a "reverse solar panel" that generates small amounts of electricity at night by harvesting infrared heat radiated from Earth. "In the past, scientists have demonstrated that a 'thermoradiative diode' can convert infrared radiation directly into electricity; when used to convert heat from Earth, they exploit the temperature difference between Earth and the night sky, generating a current directly from heat," notes ExtremeTech. "This approach completely eliminates the need for heat to generate steam, though the resulting capacity is fairly low." From the report: The researchers estimate they could generate only about a watt per square meter, which isn't much. One reason for the low output is that the Earth's atmosphere lessens the heat differential that drives the generative process; in space, though, that's not an issue.

Now, researchers believe that the ability to generate power in the moments between direct sunlight could help power satellites. That could be especially true in deep space, where periods without sunlight can be longer, and sunlight is often weaker; in these situations, losing electricity to heat loss is unacceptable.

Many satellites already use heat to generate electricity, though with a much more rarified "thermoelectric generator" that uses rare, expensive materials like plutonium to create heat. With thermoradiative diodes, the heat source can be the Sun-warmed body of the satellite itself.

A large Swedish study of 100,000 women found that using AI to assist radiologists reading mammograms reduced the rate of aggressive "interval" breast cancers by 12%. CBC News reports: For the study -- published in Thursday's issue of the medical journal The Lancet -- more than 100,000 women had mammography screenings. Half were supported by AI and the rest had their mammograms reviewed by two different radiologists, a standard practice in much of Europe known as double reading. It is not typically used in Canada, where usually one radiologist checks mammograms.

The study looked at the rates of interval cancer, the term doctors use for invasive tumors that appear between routine mammograms. They can be harder to detect and studies have shown that they are more likely to be aggressive with a poorer prognosis. The rate of interval cancers decreased by 12 percent in the groups where the AI screening was implemented, the study showed. [...] Throughout the two-year study, the mammograms that were supported by AI were triaged into two different groups. Those that were determined to be low risk needed only one radiologist to examine them, while those that were considered high risk required two. The researchers reported that numerically, the AI-supported screening resulted in 11 fewer interval cancers than standard screening (82 versus 93, or 12 per cent).

"This is really a way to improve an overall screening test," [said lead author, Dr. Kristina Lang]. She acknowledged that while the study found a decrease in interval cancer, longer-term studies are needed to find out how AI-supported screening might impact mortality rates. The screenings for the study all took place at one centre in Sweden, which the researchers acknowledged is a limitation. Another is that the race and ethnicity of the participants were not recorded. The next step, Lang said, will be for Swedish researchers to determine cost-effectiveness.

The preprint repository arXiv will require all submissions to be written in English or accompanied by a full English translation starting February 11, a policy change that explicitly permits the use of AI translators even as research suggests large language models remain inconsistent at the task.

Until now, authors only needed to submit an abstract in English. ArXiv hosts nearly 3 million preprints and receives more than 20,000 submissions monthly, though just 1% are in languages other than English.

Ralph Wijers, chair of arXiv's editorial advisory council, advises authors to verify any AI-generated translations. "Our own experience is that AI translation is good but not good enough," he says. A 2025 study from ByteDance Seed and Peking University ranked 20 LLMs on translation quality between Chinese and English; GPT-5-high scored nearly 77, just below the human expert benchmark of 80, but most models including GPT-4o, Claude 4, and Deepseek-V3 scored under 60.

Scientific American's Elizabeth Anne Brown recently "polled the great art houses of Europe" about whether they'd had any recent experiences with mold in their collections. Despite the stigma that keeps many institutions silent, she found that extremophile "xerophilic" molds are quietly spreading through museums and archives, thriving in low-humidity, tightly sealed storage and damaging everything from textiles and wood to manuscripts and stone. An anonymous Slashdot reader shares an excerpt from the article: Mold is a perennial scourge in museums that can disfigure and destroy art and artifacts. [...] Consequently, mold is spoken of in whispers in the museum world. Curators fear that even rumors of an infestation can hurt their institution's funding and blacklist them from traveling exhibitions. When an infestation does occur, it's generally kept secret. The contract conservation teams that museums hire to remediate invasive mold often must vow confidentiality before they're even allowed to see the damage.

But a handful of researchers, from in-house conservators to university mycologists, are beginning to compare notes about the fungal infestations they've tackled in museum storage depots, monastery archives, crypts and cathedrals. A disquieting revelation has emerged from these discussions: there's a class of molds that flourish in low humidity, long believed to be a sanctuary from decay. By trying so hard to protect artifacts, we've accidentally created the "perfect conditions for [these molds] to grow," says Flavia Pinzari, a mycologist at the Council of National Research of Italy. "All the rules for conservation never considered these species."

These molds -- called xerophiles -- can survive in dry, hostile environments such as volcano calderas and scorching deserts, and to the chagrin of curators across the world, they seem to have developed a taste for cultural heritage. They devour the organic material that abounds in museums -- from fabric canvases and wood furniture to tapestries. They can also eke out a living on marble statues and stained-glass windows by eating micronutrients in the dust that accumulates on their surfaces. And global warming seems to be helping them spread. Most frustrating for curators, these xerophilic molds are undetectable by conventional means. But now, armed with new methods, several research teams are solving art history cold cases and explaining mysterious new infestations...

The xerophiles' body count is rising: bruiselike stains on Leonardo da Vinci's most famous self-portrait, housed in Turin. Brown blotches on the walls of King Tut's burial chamber in Luxor. Pockmarks on the face of a saint in an 11th-century fresco in Kyiv. It's not enough to find and identify the mold. Investigators are racing to determine the limits of xerophilic life and figure out which pieces of our cultural heritage are at the highest risk of infestation before the ravenous microbes set in.

For decades, researchers have noted that cancer and Alzheimer's disease are rarely found in the same person, fuelling speculation that one condition might offer some degree of protection from the other. Nature: Now, a study in mice provides a possible molecular solution to the medical mystery: a protein produced by cancer cells seems to infiltrate the brain, where it helps to break apart clumps of misfolded proteins that are often associated with Alzheimer's disease. The study, which was 15 years in the making, was published on 22 January in Cell and could help researchers to design drugs to treat Alzheimer's disease.

"They have a piece of the puzzle," says Donald Weaver, a neurologist and chemist at the Krembil Research Institute at the University of Toronto in Canada, who was not involved in the study. "It's not the full picture by any stretch of the imagination. But it's an interesting piece." [...] A 2020 meta-analysis of data from more than 9.6 million people found that cancer diagnosis was associated with an 11% decreased incidence of Alzheimer's disease. It has been a difficult relationship to unpick: researchers must control for a variety of external factors. For example, people might die of cancer before they are old enough to develop symptoms of Alzheimer's disease, and some cancer treatments can cause cognitive difficulties, which could obscure an Alzheimer's diagnosis.

Early hominins in Europe were creating tools from raw materials hundreds of thousands of years before Homo sapiens arrived there, two new studies indicate, pushing back the established time for such activity. From a report: The evidence includes a 500,000-year-old hammer made of elephant or mammoth bone, excavated in southern England, and 430,000-year-old wooden tools found in southern Greece -- the earliest wooden tools on record.

The findings suggest that early humans possessed sophisticated technological skills, the researchers said. Katerina Harvati, a paleoanthropologist at the University of Tubingen in Germany and a lead author of the wooden-tool paper, which was published on Monday in the journal PNAS, said the discoveries provided insight into the prehistoric origins of human intelligence. Silvia Bello, a paleoanthropologist at London's Natural History Museum and an author on the elephant-bone study, which was published last week in Science Advances, concurred.

The artifacts in both studies, recovered from coal-mine sites, were probably produced by early Neanderthals or a preceding species, Homo heidelbergensis. Homo sapiens emerged in Africa more than 300,000 years ago, and the oldest evidence of them in Europe is a 210,000-year-old fossil unearthed in Greece. By the time Homo sapiens established themselves in Britain 40,000 years ago, other hominins had already lived there for nearly a million years.