alternative_right shares a report from Phys.org: Scientists from the Czech Republic have created microscopic cleanup robots that successfully removed microplastics from both soil and aquatic environments in the lab. Details of their work are published in the journal npg Asia Materials. To build the robots, researchers started with microscopic MXene particles made of ultrathin, stacked layers. The material has a large surface area and surface chemistry that help it attract and hold plastic. They then coated the particles with magnetic nickel nanoparticles so rotating magnetic fields could drive the tiny robots.

Then came the testing phase. The team placed swarms of these microbots into water and soil samples contaminated with plastic. The externally generated magnetic fields made the robots spin and tumble through the liquid and squeeze through tiny water-filled gaps in the soil. "In soil environments, the microrobots can navigate through water-permeated soil microenvironments, actively disrupt microplastic entrapment within soil matrices, and extract them," the study authors commented in their paper. As they moved, their sticky surfaces collided with microplastics, binding to them and dragging them along. The researchers then used a magnet to pull the microrobots, along with their trapped plastic cargo, out of the samples.

They performed well. In water, they removed about 94% of test polystyrene particles and 89% of PET (polyethylene terephthalate) in around an hour. In the model soil, they removed about 81% of the polystyrene and 72% of PET. This outperformed the same MXene material used without magnetic motion, which relied on passive adsorption rather than actively moving through soil and water.

sciencehabit shares a report from Science Magazine: For more than half a century, physicists have searched for one of the strangest particles predicted by modern theory. It would be made almost entirely of gluons, the elusive subatomic particles that carry the strong nuclear force. Now, using a particle collider in Beijing, researchers say they have effectively proved the existence of such a "glueball."

In a preprint posted last month on arXiv and in a presentation last week at the International Conference on High Energy Physics (ICHEP), the researchers argue that a particle called X(2370), which they produced by smashing electrons into positrons at high energies, has the properties expected of a glueball. "It's an experimental triumph," says Colin Morningstar, a particle physicist at Carnegie Mellon University who was not involved in the finding. "It's the strongest evidence yet that particles dominated by a glueball component can exist in nature."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the BBC: England is on track to become one of the first countries in the world to eliminate hepatitis C, a dangerous virus that attacks the liver, figures show. The target of treating 80% of all known cases has already been met, and deaths from the virus have fallen by 36% in the last decade, just short of what is needed by 2030. Taking antiviral tablets for 8 to 12 weeks can cure more than 95% of cases. Initiatives including A&E blood tests, GP registration testing and free at-home tests have helped to find people who were previously undiagnosed, says NHS England.

NHS England says that since 2015, more than 100,000 people have been diagnosed and treated for hepatitis C, meaning the country is already meeting that target. Another goal -- a 65% reduction in hepatitis C-related mortality compared with 2015 levels -- has yet to be met, but might be before the 2030 target date. Around 50,200 adults are living with hepatitis C, figures for England in 2024 suggest. Estimates indicate 84.6% of those living with hepatitis C have been diagnosed -- just short of the 90% target. The Hepatitis C Trust says England is "on the cusp" of one of the most significant public health achievements in our country's history.

An anonymous reader shares a report from The Conversation, written by Hatim Sharif, a civil and environmental engineer who has "spent more than two decades staring at maps" and spatial data. Sharif finds one connection especially fascinating: the link between spatial reasoning and why taxi drivers seem to have lower rates of Alzheimer's. From the report: Taxi and ambulance drivers are less likely than workers in almost any other job to die of Alzheimer's disease. That was the surprising result of a 2024 study examining the death certificates of nearly 9 million people in the U.S. [...] Of the 9 million death certificates from January 2020 to December 2022 that researchers examined, taxi and ambulance drivers had the lowest risk of dying from Alzheimer's disease out of 443 occupations. After adjusting for age, sex, race, ethnicity and education, roughly 1 in 100 taxi and ambulance drivers died of Alzheimer's, compared with 1 in 60 people overall. This pattern did not extend to other driving jobs.

The researchers concluded that the key to reducing the risk of Alzheimer's was not driving itself but continuous real-time navigation: the constant work of locating yourself in space, tracking a destination and updating a mental map as conditions change. Drivers whose jobs relied on fixed or predetermined routes, like bus drivers and aircraft pilots, didn't seem to experience a similar advantage. Researchers believe the association between navigation-heavy work and lower Alzheimer's risk centers on the hippocampus, a part of the brain that governs memory and spatial navigation. It's one of the first brain regions that Alzheimer's damages: Problems with spatial navigation and orientation are among the earliest signs of the disease, sometimes surfacing before obvious memory loss.

In one landmark 2000 study, neuroscientists compared the brains of licensed London taxi drivers with those of people who did not drive cabs. Their findings provided the first evidence via structural imaging that regions of the adult brain can measurably change under sustained navigational demand. To earn a license, London cabbies must memorize more than 25,000 streets within a 6-mile radius of Charing Cross, a challenge known as "The Knowledge" that takes three to four years.

The researchers found that London taxi drivers had measurably more gray matter in the posterior hippocampus, a brain area tied to storing large-scale spatial maps. That volume tracked with experience: The longer someone had driven, the larger that part of the brain. The change was built through practice, not inherited. While people who are good at navigation might gravitate to this kind of job, the job itself does have an impact on the brain. Together, these two studies make a coherent case: Work that intensively exercises the hippocampus may reshape it, and that reshaping may protect against one of the most feared diseases of aging.

Researchers believe they've found evidence that brain signals reveal the pitches of notes in imagined musical melodies, reports Medical Express: Study participants were 10 epilepsy patients with electrodes on the surfaces of their brains for clinical monitoring. Participants quietly listened to the first bars of children's tunes, then imagined the melodies of subsequent bars before humming their imagined melodies. Brain activity from the patients carried information about relative pitches within the imagined melodies. Combining note-level pitch predictions over time allowed the research team to recreate melodic changes that reflected the structure of the imagined songs...

"The model we created decodes relative pitch classes — such as do, re, mi, fa, sol, and la — rather than exact, absolute pitches," [said tudy co-lead Jii Kwon of Seoul National University]. "This is useful because people often recognize melodies by the relationships between notes, even when the same melody is played in a different key."

A South Korean lunar orbiter has captured the first before-and-after images of the Moon's crash scene caused by a stray SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. The Associated Press reports: The Korea Aerospace Research Institute's Danuri spacecraft flew over the impact site soon after the Falcon 9 upper stage inadvertently plowed into the moon on Wednesday. Danuri made multiple passes, snapping photos from lunar orbit that were released by the space agency Thursday. The terrain is noticeably darker where the rocket hit and carved out a crater, sending dust and rock everywhere. Korean space officials said Danuri gathered before and after shots. NASA expects its Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter to fly over the crash site next week to view the aftermath. You can view the images here.

NASA has squeezed at least another year of science out of Voyager 2 by cutting power to nonessential systems and switching to lower-power alternatives. Voyager 1 is expected to receive the same power-saving changes in the coming months. Space.com reports: Voyager 2 and its twin launched in 1977, called Voyager 1, rely on a form of nuclear battery known as a radioisotope thermoelectric generator that uses the heat produced by the decay of plutonium. But the supply of plutonium on each probe drops at about four watts a year on each spacecraft. To keep the probe running on this dwindling power supply, engineers recently reduced Voyager 2's power requirements by turning off a few non-science devices and using "lower-power alternatives" that are still effective enough to keep the spacecraft warm while it's so far from the sun, NASA officials said in a statement. "The spacecraft power margins have grown razor thin, requiring the team to conserve energy by shutting off non-essential devices and systems," NASA officials wrote of the mission, which is managed by the agency's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

The drop in power is having a measurable science impact on both spacecraft -- each has turned off two of their science instruments since 2024 alone. While some of these instruments were shut off after the spacecraft finished their historic planetary flybys decades ago, others were turned off due to power requirements. Each spacecraft initially launched with 10 instruments, and Voyager 2 is now down to only three instruments. At first it looked as though Voyager 2 would have to shut down another of these instruments later this year, but luckily, the new power shifts will allow all three to operate "for at least another year," NASA said.

A new study argues that life may have emerged twice on Earth. "Two of the main lineages of life -- bacteria and archaea -- may have independently figured out the secrets of metabolism that upgraded them from non-living to living," reports ScienceAlert, citing a new study that "focused on the most rudimentary set of chemical reactions thought to enable this transformation." From the report: "The surprise is that the enzymes that catalyze those reactions are not conserved across the evolutionary divide that separates bacteria and archaea," says William Martin, a biologist at Heinrich Heine University Dusseldorf in Germany.

"The new data leave only one conclusion. The bacterial and archaeal lineages made the transition to the free-living state independently. Only free-living cells are alive. "Let's call it by name: we are looking at one origin of the genetic code, but two origins of life." That's a huge claim to make, especially when defining what life even is can be surprisingly tricky. The findings have been published in the journal Science Advances.

Researchers in China have developed a living mycelium textile that can self-clean, renew its surface, and partially repair holes when treated with a nutrient solution and fresh fungus. The material can also gain added properties such as blue pigmentation or UV resistance by co-culturing it with yeast or other fungi. Dezeen reports: The breakthrough from the researchers at the Shenzhen Institutes of Advanced Technology is a type of engineered living material (ELM) -- a material built off living organisms that stay active even after they're fabricated into their final form. [...] By working with living but dormant cordyceps militaris fungus instead, the researchers have been able to take advantage of its biological functions. The result is a material that is self-renewing and responsive to its environment, in ways that could one day transform architecture and clothing -- as seen in a prototype dress created together with material innovation company Peelshere.

It can also be adapted by mixing in other fungi or yeast, lead researcher Ke Li and her team detail in a paper in the peer-reviewed journal Science Advances. In it, they describe a "programmable fungal platform" where mycelium is treated like a modular system, with the sheet material forming a base structure and extra biological abilities, such as colour and UV resistance, becoming "plug-and-play" add-ons via other organisms. This gets their textile closer to the self-repair, environmental responsiveness and controllable functionality that is the promise of engineered living materials, they argue.

The ELM's self-renewing and semi-repairing functionality comes from the mycelium base structure. Following drying at 45 degrees, the material is not quite living and not quite dead, but instead in a "low-metabolic, dormant-like state", Li told Dezeen, meaning it is not actively growing. However, new growth can be triggered by applying a nutrient solution of potato water, leading the dormant mycelium to germinate, send out new fungal filaments and renew the material's surface. When this nutrient solution is applied over a hole, along with a small patch of fresh fungus, it triggers the living cells to grow across the gap, seamlessly repairing the surface without any adhesives or stitching. The material is also naturally self-cleaning, as it is hydrophobic. "Its distinctive surface texture, biological colouring, controlled repair and biodegradability may be particularly useful in applications where visual expression and a defined product lifetime are important," said Li.

"Further improvements in durability, moisture resistance, safety and manufacturing consistency would be needed before it could be considered for routine clothing or permanent architectural use."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Scientists have made the first viruses designed by artificial intelligence in a milestone that raises hopes for new medicines but also concerns over how to ensure the technology remains safe. The viruses are specific kinds known as bacteriophages, which only infect bacteria and are used around the world to treat patients with persistent infections. In lab tests, a cocktail of the AI-designed viruses killed E coli bugs that were resistant to natural bacteriophages.

Dr Brian Hie, a chemical engineer at Stanford University in California, used genome language models, the genetic equivalent of the large language models behind AI chatbots, to design functioning genomes for bacteriophages. The viruses were then made in the laboratory and pitted against E coli in a dish. The ability to "rapidly design" genomes and tune them for specific bugs while overcoming resistance could "transform phage therapy" and "expand biotechnological toolkits," the researchers wrote in the journal Science.

But beyond the potential benefits, the scientists said the work raised "important biosafety, biocontainment and biosecurity considerations" and urged others who were designing whole genomes to "consult both safety and security professionals throughout the project." In an accompanying article, Prof Tom Inglesby and Dr Moritz Hanke at the Center for Health Security at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, reinforced the warning, writing: "Although this is promising for life sciences applications, it also raises urgent biosafety and biosecurity questions. The ability to compose viral genomes using generative AI now exists; the governance to safely steer it does not." Tom Ellis, a professor of synthetic genome engineering at Imperial College London, said the work was impressive, but revealed how hard it would be to make more complex genomes. "This is literally the smallest and easiest genome to make," he said. An AI trained on the genetic code of dangerous bugs could be used to design more harmful viruses, Ellis said, but controlling access to genetic data and having restrictions on making genomes that look dangerous would help. "Governments are working hard to do this already," he added. "But honestly," he said, "the threat from full AI design and writing of a genome of a virus or bacteria is very overblown when we consider that just taking existing pathogens and making gain-of-function changes to their genomes is so much easier and much more likely to be a real pathogenic threat."

Dr Filippa Lentzos, a reader in science and international security at King's College London, said the most important point to intervene at the moment was when DNA was being manufactured. "It's important to see the bigger governance picture and not focus regulation solely on the AI model," she said. "A layered approach makes more sense: safeguards around model development and access, responsible research review, synthesis screening, and established laboratory biosafety and biosecurity."

The FDA has approved the first mRNA flu vaccine in the United States after a clinical trial found it was about 27% more effective than a standard flu shot. Manufactured by Moderna and marketed as mFlusiva, the vaccine is expected to be available this fall for adults ages 50 to 64 and those 65 and older, though approval for the older group is conditional on Moderna conducting an additional clinical trial, NBC News reports. From the report: Many scientists and public health experts have touted the idea of an mRNA-based flu vaccine, which uses the same messenger RNA platform as the Covid vaccines from Moderna and Pfizer. That's because mRNA vaccines can be manufactured much faster than traditional vaccines, allowing scientists to better match circulating influenza strains. Moderna said it takes two to three months from picking the strain to rolling out its flu shot, compared with about six months for traditional flu shots.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Associated Press: Scientists have captured images of the sun's surface in the finest detail yet, revealing a strange and dynamic facade. It's dangerous to look directly at the sun without proper eye protection. But researchers were able to peek at its scorching surface with the help of the National Science Foundation's Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope, located on the island of Maui in Hawaii.

Scientists originally took the images for a different reason: to fine-tune and test the limits of the telescope. But when they looked at the results, they realized they'd photographed the sun's bright outer shell at higher resolution than ever before. What's more, they saw strange feathery patterns rippling across the surface. "That reminds me of famous paintings, like the swirling skies in Van Gogh's Starry Night," said solar physicist Ruizhu Chen with Stanford University, who was not involved with the new research.

Researchers saw ripples of instability on the sun's surface caused by bits of magnetized plasma moving past each other at different speeds -- similar to waves that stir when a gust of wind blows over water. It's a well-known phenomenon that guides how fluids move. This has been glimpsed on Earth and other planets like Jupiter and Saturn, but "it has not been observed ever at that level on the solar surface," according to study co-author Friedrich Woger with the National Solar Observatory. The findings were published Wednesday in the journal Nature.

A four-ton SpaceX Falcon 9 upper stage left drifting after a 2025 lunar mission is expected to crash into the Moon at about 5,400 mph, likely striking Einstein Crater. The impact should occur at approximately 2:35 a.m. ET (0635GMT). Reuters reports: Such stages typically fall back into Earth's atmosphere and burn up or plunge into the ocean after boosting the rocket's payload to a precise spot in orbit. But because the January lunar lander mission required more thrust than missions closer to Earth, the rocket's second stage remained in space, floating aimlessly among thousands of other pieces of space junk that active satellites must steer clear of. It was not until earlier this year that astronomers determined that the rocket stage, which had dumped its remaining fuel and cannot be controlled, was on an orbital trajectory ending at the moon.

"What has happened is essentially a mixture of solar activity and gravity forces have put it on a path toward the moon," Julianna Scheiman, SpaceX director of NASA science and Dragon programs, told reporters on Monday. "This may be of some -- probably minor -- scientific interest, and we may learn some things from it," said Bill Gray, creator of widely used astronomy software who published a report on the stage's impact in April. "It doesn't present any danger to anyone, though it does highlight a certain carelessness about how leftover space hardware (space junk) is disposed of." You can try to watch the impact via a livestream on YouTube; however, the area it's expected to hit (Einstein Crater) is on the moon's western limb, "which is often difficult to see from Earth," notes Reuters. It will also likely "kick up a plume of lunar dust that will likely be illuminated by sunlight but difficult to spot with the naked eye from Earth."

Longtime Slashdot reader schwit1 shares a report from Behind the Black: In a new bid to get the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) to move from Hawaii, which has blocked its construction for more than a decade, the Spanish government has put together a $1.14 billion package that would not only pay for construction on the Canary Islands, but would finance an additional half century of operations. Tech Times provides some additional details: The package is conditional on the TMT International Observatory formally choosing La Palma as its construction site. The financing architecture has three pillars and two additional contingent instruments. The first pillar is 400 million euros (approximately $456 million USD) from Spain's Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities, routed through the Centre for Technological Development and Innovation (CDTI). This figure was first pledged a year ago in July 2025 as Spain's initial bid.

The second pillar is a 300 million-euro (approximately $342 million USD) loan from the EIB [European Investment Bank] itself -- subject to satisfactory completion of the bank's technical, financial, and legal due diligence and approval by its governing bodies.

The third is a potential 300 million-euro (approximately $342 million USD) participation from the Instituto de Credito Oficial (ICO), Spain's state development finance institution, evaluated under equivalent conditions to the EIB loan but subject to its own separate analysis. Spain's export credit agency, Cesce, may also provide coverage instruments, and the EIB has left open the possibility of expanding its support through intermediated financing mechanisms or guarantees.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Forbes: The cost of producing new results on ten longstanding mathematical problems just fell to $2,000, according to OpenAI, which says its Astra model generated machine-checkable proofs for questions that had resisted human progress for decades. OpenAI published the work on August 1 and used it to give its next major model family a name: Astra. The results run across group theory, high-dimensional geometry, coding theory, quantum complexity, lattice cryptography and extremal combinatorics. They arrived as a 249-page manuscript collection and, alongside it, something the field has not seen attached to an AI claim before at this scale: a machine-checkable certificate for every single result.

The problems were not textbook exercises dressed up as discoveries. Each had been open for at least ten years, most of them far longer, and several sit at the center of their subfields:
- A construction establishing the existence of non-sofic groups, a question that has occupied group theorists for years.
- A disproof of Connes's rigidity conjecture, a long-standing problem in the theory of von Neumann algebras.
- An improvement to the general upper bound on sphere-packing density in high dimensions, a bound that had stood since 1978.
- Three problems come from the catalogue of open questions left behind by Paul Erdos. The announcement follows another result from May, when OpenAI used a similar reasoning model to produce an original mathematical proof disproving a famous unsolved conjecture in geometry, which was first posed by Paul Erdos in 1946.