3+ week, 21+ hour ago (501+ words) A new space mission plans to use quantum sensors to search for faint forces that may reveal the true nature of dark matter. (CREDIT: Ralf Kaehler/SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, American Museum of Natural History) For decades, you have heard scientists say that most of the universe is missing. They are not being dramatic. They mean it in a literal sense. To turn this idea into a real experiment, the team built a prototype space sensor designed for long missions and constant radiation exposure. A sensor in orbit faces three big problems. The geomagnetic field shifts in time and space. The station vibrates. Cosmic particles strike the equipment dozens of times a day. The engineers answered these issues with three key technologies. They built a dual noble-gas system using isotopes of xenon that have opposite gyromagnetic ratios. This pairing cancels…...

3+ week, 4+ day ago (635+ words) An all-electric plane's quiet landing in Seattle marks a major step toward sustainable aviation and a cleaner future for flight. (CREDIT: BETA Technologies) This week, the roar of engines at Boeing Field gave way to the quiet hum of progress as a different kind of airplane landed, a plane with a flight that is entirely electric. For a moment, the usual thunder of takeoffs paused as onlookers watched a piece of the future glide in almost silently, leaving behind not exhaust but excitement. "That's the first electric aircraft to land at Boeing Field," said David Decoteau, Deputy Airport Director. This is not just monumental in terms of engineering; this signals a new age of aviation that's better for the environment, has a lower cost, and has reimagined travel. The airplane is called an ALIA CTOL, can travel up to 336 nautical…...

1+ week, 6+ day ago (534+ words) Earl Miller delivers his lecture to the audience at Neuroscience 2025, the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience. (CREDIT: MIT) A new set of studies now points to a rhythm that seems to run through the primate brain. When researchers placed thin probes through the cortical sheet of macaque monkeys, they found a reliable pattern of brain waves. Fast gamma activity, which reflects local processing and information flow, was strongest in the upper layers. Slower alpha and beta activity, which helps regulate networks and set goals, dominated deeper layers. The team called this arrangement the spectrolaminar motif. Its consistency surprised them because earlier work often reported scattered and conflicting findings. This strong link between anatomy and rhythm suggested something deeper. It meant the cortex might follow a shared rulebook for how it organizes electrical patterns that support perception, memory and…...

1+ week, 3+ day ago (410+ words) New 3D imaging shows that giant magnetofossils acted as ancient magnetic sensors, offering the earliest evidence of internal navigation in animals. (CREDIT: Wikimedia / CC BY-SA 4.0) These particles, now called giant magnetofossils, came in several forms. One spearhead design drew special attention because of its size. Bacterial magnetic particles tend to measure less than 200 nanometers long, but these fossils reached up to two micrometers. That difference hinted at a much larger builder, most likely a tiny eukaryotic organism rather than a microbe. Scientists wondered whether these unusually large crystals acted like armor plates for a wormlike creature or served as internal sensors that detected Earth's magnetic field. The debate continued for years since no one could examine the crystals closely enough to see how they stored magnetism. After gathering dozens of images, they used magnetic vector tomography to build a full three…...

3+ day, 9+ hour ago (1017+ words) Ancient DNA from hundreds of graves shows dark skin dominated Europe for most of its history. (CREDIT: RTE) For most of Europe's history, the people who lived there did not resemble the pale figures often shown in history books. New genetic research now shows that dark skin, dark hair, and dark eyes dominated Europe for tens of thousands of years and that lighter traits became common only very recently. When you picture early Europeans, you might imagine icy landscapes filled with blue-eyed faces. A major DNA study challenges that image and asks you to rethink it from the ground up. Researchers at the University of Ferrara in Italy studied the genomes of 348 people who lived between 45,000 and 1,700 years ago across Europe and western Asia. Their findings show that about 63% of ancient Europeans had dark skin. Only about 8% had pale skin....

3+ week, 5+ day ago (728+ words) Laser light flips magnetism in common crystal, no heat required. (CREDIT: AI-generated / The Brighter Side of News) A flash of light hits a simple iron crystal. In the space of a trillionth of a second, its magnetic behavior shifts, as if the solid briefly becomes something else. You might feel a jolt of hope reading that. If light can change matter this cleanly, your phone, your laptop, even a future medical device could run cooler and faster. That is the promise behind a study from the University of Konstanz, where physicists led by Davide Bossini showed how laser pulses can reshape a material's magnetic identity at room temperature. Their work, published in Science Advances, replaces heat with light as the main tool of control. "The result was a huge surprise for us. No theory has ever predicted it," says Bossini....

6+ day, 4+ hour ago (1214+ words) A new Nature Climate Change study shows that if Europe's past heat wave patterns recur in today's warmer climate, weekly deaths could double and, under higher warming, even rival the worst weeks of the COVID pandemic, exposing sharp limits to current adaptation. (CREDIT: Shutterstock) Some of the same weather patterns that brought Europe its worst heat waves in recent decades are still out there, circling the globe. The difference now is the background climate. The planet is hotter than it was when those events first struck, and that extra heat could turn a bad week into something closer to a mass casualty disaster. A new study in Nature Climate Change warns that if those familiar "heat dome" patterns return in today's climate, weekly deaths in Europe could approach the levels seen in the worst weeks of COVID. It is a…...

1+ day, 2+ hour ago (947+ words) A new ion beam study of the disputed Jordan lead codices finds some pieces made from clearly modern lead and others from metal more than 200 years old, reopening the debate over whether any of these strange little books could be genuinely ancient. (CREDIT: Wikimedia / CC BY-SA 4.0) For more than a decade, a set of tiny lead books from Jordan has sat in a strange place between wonder and doubt. Some people claimed they might come from the earliest days of Christianity. Many scholars called them outright fakes. Now, after years of argument, a detailed scientific study has taken a hard look at the metal itself and given you a more complex answer than a simple real or fake. The objects, known as the Jordan lead codices, look like miniature books cast in lead, with pages joined by metal rings. Their…...

3+ week, 4+ hour ago (711+ words) New infrared analysis shows Io releases far more heat than past studies found. (CREDIT: SwRI) The reassessment focuses on data from JIRAM, the infrared mapper aboard NASA's Juno spacecraft. That instrument watches the moon shine at specific wavelengths that reveal volcanic activity. The work, led by Federico Tosi of Italy's National Institute for Astrophysics, shows that some widely used measurements can distort the true scale of Io's heating. According to the study, the moon's surface may release hundreds of times more energy than earlier estimates. The problem is not a lack of data. It is how one narrow slice of the infrared spectrum has been used to stand in for the whole. Many analyses of Io rely on a region of light near 4.8 micrometers called the M band. This part of the spectrum is incredibly useful for spotting the hottest…...

3+ week, 6+ hour ago (752+ words) Astronomers using the Gemini South telescope in Chile, operated by NSF NOIRLab, have observed the first compelling evidence of a dying Sun-like star engulfing an exoplanet. (CREDIT: International Gemini Observatory/NOIRLab/NSF/AURA/M. Garlick/M. Zamani) The quiet fear of losing your home is usually a human story, but in the sky, entire worlds may face something similar. As stars age and swell, the space around them shifts in ways that can destroy planets that once circled close and safe. New research from teams at the University of Warwick and University College London shows that giant planets in tight orbit to their stars do not survive long once the stars begin to cool and grow. The discovery comes from a vast study of nearly half a million aging stars observed with NASA's TESS mission, and it offers the clearest look yet…...