37+ min ago (1166+ words) Stormlike swirls of warm water beneath Antarctic ice shelves are carving the ice from below, sometimes tripling melt rates within hours and forcing scientists to rethink how fast West Antarctica can contribute to sea level rise. (CREDIT: Shutterstock) Scientists have uncovered a new threat hiding under the floating edges of Antarctica: fast moving, stormlike swirls of water that attack the ice from below. These secretive currents, spinning in the dark beneath vast ice shelves, are melting glacier fronts far more aggressively than anyone realized. The new research, led by the University of California, Irvine and NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, focuses on West Antarctica's Amundsen Sea Embayment. This remote region holds Thwaites and Pine Island glaciers, two giants that already lose ice at alarming rates. Instead of looking at slow, seasonal changes, the team zoomed in on "weather scale" events that…...

2+ hour, 37+ min ago (917+ words) A new study shows that the brain solves hard problems by reusing simple mental parts across many tasks, much like snapping together pieces of a toy set. (CREDIT: AI-generated / The Brighter Side of News) Scientists have long puzzled over how the brain links small actions into more complex behavior. You learn when fruit is ripe, then apply that skill while shopping, cooking and choosing meals. Your brain does not rebuild each skill every time. It reuses what it already knows and mixes those skills in fresh ways. In the study, Princeton University researchers trained two male rhesus macaques to handle three related visual games. Each trial showed a squidgy image that changed in color and form. The animal had to judge either the shape or the color, then signal the answer with a fast eye move to one of four…...

20+ hour, 37+ min ago (1027+ words) New fossil scans reveal pterosaurs flew with smaller, reptile-like brains. (CREDIT: AI-generated image / The Brighter Side of News) For more than a hundred years, scientists believed flying reptiles called pterosaurs took to the air with birdlike brains. Old fossils seemed to show it. Hard stone casts inside skulls hinted at big vision centers, short smell regions, and strong balance controls, much like birds. Those clues tied flight to a special brain design. Bigger brains, the thinking went, meant better control in the sky. Birds helped cement the idea. Many birds have large brains for their size, and some rival primates. It felt simple. Smart brain equals smooth flight. New research now tells a different story, and it is far more surprising. A team led by Matteo Fabbri at Johns Hopkins Medicine used high-resolution CT scans to peer inside ancient skulls....

23+ hour, 37+ min ago (1200+ words) Nathalie de Leon, an associate professor of electrical and computer engineering and the study's senior author, said the work opens a new window into nature's smallest movements. "You have this totally new kind of playground," de Leon said. "You just can't see these things with traditional techniques." The heart of the sensor is something called a nitrogen vacancy center. It sounds complex, but the idea is simple. In a perfect diamond, carbon atoms form a rigid crystal. Remove one carbon atom and replace another with a nitrogen atom, and you get a tiny defect. That flaw traps electrons whose behavior shifts when a magnetic field is nearby. Those shifts can be read with laser light. Over the past decade, scientists have learned how to use single defects as magnetic sensors. They have studied electronic currents, tiny nuclear signals and even…...

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…...

1+ day, 4+ hour ago (1063+ words) A tiny spider inspired soft robot designed at the University of Macau can roll, climb, and even move upside down inside the digestive tract. Guided by magnetic fields and real time imaging, it may one day give doctors a painless way to detect and treat gastrointestinal disease in hard to reach places. (CREDIT: Shutterstock) Traditional endoscopes are long, rigid or semi rigid tubes with cameras at the tip. They can scrape delicate tissue, cause discomfort, and sometimes fail to reach deep or sharply bent sections of the intestines. The stomach and intestines are not smooth pipes. They are lined with sticky mucus, sharp turns, folds, and height changes of several centimeters. Micro robots have promised a gentler alternative, but most designs fail when they meet real gut conditions. They slip on mucus, get stuck in folds, or cannot climb steep…...

1+ day, 8+ hour ago (925+ words) AI-generated image of red giant star orbiting a quiet black hole in the Gaia BH2 system. (CREDIT: ESO/L. Cal'ada/Space Engine) You live in a galaxy packed with black holes that never announce themselves. They do not blaze in X-rays or glow with stolen gas. They hide. Astronomers find them by watching the stars that dance around them. Two such systems, called Gaia BH2 and Gaia BH3, sit in your own Milky Way. Each pairs a red giant with a dormant black hole, meaning the black hole feeds on almost nothing and gives off almost no light. A new investigation shows that the visible stars tell sharply different stories about their pasts, and those stories reshape how you think about quiet black holes. Red giants flicker. Their surfaces rise and fall in tiny rhythms that change the light you see. Space telescopes such…...

1+ day, 20+ hour ago (900+ words) Optical Trap. Catching a micron-sized particle is challenging. To get the job done, two laser beams come in handy. Acting like tweezers, they can trap, secure, and charge a solitary particle. (CREDIT: Andrea St'llner/ISTA) A single green laser, a glass bead smaller than a bacterium and a lab in Austria are helping you see lightning in a new way. Scientists have found a way to watch an object build electric charge in real time, one electron at a time. They did it by catching a tiny silica particle in midair with light and letting a powerful laser do the rest. The work revisits the spirit of the famous oil drop test from a century ago, but with tools that can track the smallest changes imaginable. At the Institute of Science and Technology Austria, two laser beams intersect inside a…...

1+ day, 23+ hour ago (1098+ words) Scientists at Utrecht University created a gentle fluorescent sensor that tracks DNA damage and repair in living cells and animals, reshaping cancer and aging research. (CREDIT: Nature Communications) In a quiet lab at Utrecht University, researchers have built a tool that lets you watch one of life's most serious crises unfold in real time. Inside every cell, DNA breaks, repairs, and sometimes fails to heal. Until now, you could only see this drama as frozen snapshots. Now, a new fluorescent sensor lets scientists follow the full story inside living cells and even inside living animals. The work links basic cell biology with cancer research, drug safety testing and the science of aging. It gives you a moving picture of DNA damage and repair, instead of a stack of still images that miss most of the action. Every moment, your DNA…...

2+ day, 2+ hour ago (1132+ words) A high resolution climate model reveals that as Arctic and Antarctic sea ice melts, horizontal stirring and turbulence in the polar oceans surge, changing how heat, nutrients, fish larvae and pollutants move through the seas and adding a new layer of risk to a warming world. (CREDIT: Shutterstock) Polar sea ice is vanishing far faster than most people expected, and the change is not only visible from above. Beneath the thinning ice cover, the Arctic and Southern Oceans are becoming far more restless, with swirling currents that could reshape marine life and the fate of pollutants for decades to come. An international team led by scientists at the IBS Center for Climate Physics at Pusan National University has now shown that this hidden motion will likely intensify in a warming world. Their study finds that "horizontal stirring" and turbulence in…...