Daily Science to all

🦷 Scientists May Have Found a Way to Regrow Tooth Enamel For decades, dentists have faced a frustrating reality: once tooth enamel is lost, it never naturally grows back. Researchers at the University of Nottingham may have found a way to change that. In a study published in Nature Communications, the team developed a protein-based biomaterial that mimics the way enamel forms during early childhood—the only time our bodies naturally produce it. Instead of simply coating the tooth like conventional treatments, the material acts as a microscopic scaffold. It penetrates tiny defects in damaged enamel, then recruits calcium and phosphate ions from saliva, guiding them to grow new enamel crystals that integrate seamlessly with the existing tooth. In laboratory tests on extracted human teeth, the regenerated enamel closely matched the natural material in both structure and mechanical performance. It also withstood simulated brushing, chewing, and repeated exposure to acidic conditions, suggesting it could be durable enough for everyday use. Unlike today’s fluoride treatments—which mainly slow further damage—this approach is designed to restore enamel rather than simply protect what’s left. The researchers have launched a startup, Mintech-Bio, to commercialize the technology and hope to bring the first products toward clinical use in the coming year. However, human clinical trials are still needed before the treatment can become widely available. If future trials confirm these results, dentistry could gradually shift from “drill and fill” to actually rebuilding damaged teeth. 📖 Source: Nature Communications (2025) https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-025-64982-y #Dentistry #Biomaterials #Enamel #RegenerativeMedicine #Science

🌿 Ordinary Moss Produces Electrical Waves That Travel Across Its Tissue Moss may look like one of nature’s quieter creations. Electrically, however, it appears to be surprisingly active. Computer scientist Andy Adamatzky inserted electrodes into cushions of the common moss Brachythecium rutabulum and recorded their electrical activity continuously for 178 hours. The moss produced several distinct patterns: rapid spikes, slower rhythmic oscillations, and very slow depolarization waves. Some signals appeared first at one electrode and later at another, suggesting that electrical activity was travelling across the tissue rather than occurring everywhere simultaneously. Some spikes resembled action potentials and neuron-like spike trains. But resemblance is not equivalence: moss has no neurons, no brain, and the study provides no evidence that it thinks or possesses anything resembling consciousness. What it may show is that a moss cushion behaves as a distributed, electrically connected system. One day, such living networks could potentially be used in biohybrid sensors, responsive building materials, or unconventional computing. The interpretation remains preliminary. For now, the moss is not solving equations — but it may be coordinating electrical activity beneath our feet. Could future computers be partly grown rather than manufactured? 📄 Royal Society Open Science DOI: 10.1098/rsos.252341 #PlantBiology #Moss #BioComputing #LivingMaterials #UnconventionalComputing

💻 Classical Computers Just Overturned a Major Quantum Advantage Claim In 2025, researchers used D-Wave’s Advantage2 quantum annealer to simulate the dynamics of hundreds of interacting qubits — and argued that the task was beyond the reach of classical computers. A team from the Flatiron Institute and Boston University has now reproduced those results using classical algorithms and relatively modest hardware. Some of the initial calculations even ran on a personal laptop. The challenge involved quantum spin glasses: disordered systems in which hundreds of interacting qubits evolve across two- and three-dimensional lattices. Tracking the complete quantum wave function directly would require an amount of memory that grows exponentially with the number of qubits. The researchers avoided that explosion using tensor networks — mathematical structures that compress a quantum state by retaining its most important correlations. Think of it as a highly specialized zip file for quantum information. They combined tensor networks with belief propagation, an algorithm developed in the 1980s and recently adapted for quantum systems. The calculations were implemented using ITensor, a high-performance tensor-network software library. The classical simulations: • reproduced the quantum computer’s results • matched theoretical predictions and exact benchmarks • scaled to systems containing hundreds of qubits • captured quantum dynamics in complex 3D lattice geometries There is one important caveat: the entire study was not completed on an ordinary laptop. A laptop was sufficient for some early calculations, while the largest simulations required more powerful conventional processors and GPUs. Still, the result directly challenges the earlier claim that this particular problem was beyond classical computation. It does not mean quantum computers are useless. It means that demonstrating genuine quantum advantage requires beating the best classical algorithms available — not merely the best ones researchers happened to test previously. The boundary between classical and quantum computing is not fixed. Every improvement in quantum hardware gives classical researchers a new target, while every better classical algorithm raises the bar for quantum advantage. Sometimes the strongest competitor to a quantum computer is not another quantum computer. It is better mathematics. 📄 Paper: Dynamics of disordered quantum systems with two- and three-dimensional tensor networks https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adx2728 #QuantumComputing #Physics #TensorNetworks #ClassicalComputing #QuantumPhysics

Elon Musk predicts that programming will "die" by the end of the year due to AI. @science

🧬 Semaglutide May Slow Biological Aging, First Randomized Human Evidence Suggests GLP-1 drugs such as semaglutide are already well known for treating obesity and type 2 diabetes. Now, researchers at UC San Diego report the first randomized placebo-controlled evidence that the drug may also slow biological aging — at least as measured by epigenetic aging clocks. The team analyzed DNA methylation data from a 32-week, double-blind clinical trial involving 108 adults with HIV-associated lipohypertrophy. Participants received either weekly semaglutide injections or placebo. Researchers then used multiple epigenetic clocks — molecular biomarkers that estimate biological aging from chemical modifications to DNA — to evaluate changes in aging rate. The results, published in Nature Communications, showed that semaglutide significantly slowed several independent measures of biological aging. On the DunedinPACE clock, the pace of aging slowed by about 9%. Significant improvements were also observed with the PCGrimAge clock, which is associated with mortality and age-related disease risk. A separate 24-week pilot study in people with HIV and fatty liver disease reported that about 42% of participants showed a reduction in DunedinPACE after semaglutide treatment, although that study had no placebo control and should be interpreted cautiously. In simple terms: epigenetic clocks don’t measure your chronological age. They estimate how quickly the molecular processes associated with aging are progressing. A 9% reduction means these biomarkers changed more slowly during treatment — not that people became 9% younger. Scientists think several mechanisms may contribute. Semaglutide reduces chronic inflammation, decreases harmful visceral fat, and improves metabolic health — all processes linked to accelerated aging. These changes may influence molecular pathways involved in aging across multiple organ systems. Key findings: • ~9% slower pace of aging on the DunedinPACE clock • Significant improvement in the PCGrimAge mortality-risk clock • Similar effects across several independent epigenetic aging clocks • A separate pilot study found ~42% of participants showed slower epigenetic aging after treatment The study also has important limitations. This was a post hoc exploratory analysis, not a trial originally designed to study aging. Participants all had HIV-associated lipohypertrophy, a condition associated with accelerated biological aging, so the findings cannot yet be generalized to healthy individuals. Most importantly, improvements in epigenetic clocks do not prove that semaglutide extends lifespan or healthspan. Those questions will require much longer clinical studies. Why it matters: Tens of millions of people already take GLP-1 drugs worldwide. If future studies confirm these findings in broader populations, semaglutide could become one of the first widely used medications shown to influence molecular biomarkers of human aging — extending its impact far beyond weight loss. 📄 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-026-72861-3 #Longevity #Semaglutide #GLP1 #Aging #Healthspan

🌌 We @science May Have Finally Figured Out Why the Universe Is Expanding… The explanation is surprisingly simple. Large language models operate using tokens. Every time a model generates a new response, it processes the accumulated context of the conversation. As the dialogue grows, each new message adds more information — while the model must repeatedly process everything that came before. The total amount of processed information therefore grows almost geometrically within every conversation. Now imagine that the Universe is actually one enormous artificial intelligence. Every new star, planet, living organism, human thought, cat video, and online argument adds more tokens to the global conversation. The context keeps growing in geometric progression, so the system needs more and more space to process it all. That is why the Universe is expanding. Dark energy may have nothing to do with it. Someone simply forgot to click “Start a new chat.” 😅 #science #space #universe #AI

🌊 Scientists Find Why Some Animals Survived Earth’s Worst Mass Extinction About 252 million years ago, the Permian–Triassic extinction erased most marine species and permanently reshaped life in the oceans. A new Stanford-led study suggests that survival depended partly on how animals’ oxygen requirements changed as the water warmed. Researchers measured oxygen consumption in living brachiopods and other animals representing the “Paleozoic” and modern marine faunas. At cooler temperatures, brachiopods could tolerate remarkably low oxygen levels. But as the water warmed, the minimum amount of oxygen they needed rose much faster. Their slow metabolism was not the problem by itself. More active groups generally had muscles, gills and respiratory systems better able to supply additional oxygen under heat stress. This may explain why brachiopods and crinoids were devastated, while bivalves, snails, fish and echinoderms suffered fewer losses and later came to dominate the oceans. The extinction was therefore not completely random — but metabolism was not the only factor either. Warming and ocean deoxygenation acted through animals’ physiology, alongside stresses such as acidification. Modern oceans are also warming and losing oxygen. The study does not predict another “Great Dying,” but it shows how strongly climate can favour some body plans over others. Could the next reshuffling of ocean life be determined by which animals can keep breathing as the water heats up? 📄 Study: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2533086123 #Paleontology #MassExtinction #MarineBiology #OceanWarming #ClimateChange

🤖 NEO Just Got New Hands 25 degrees of freedom. Still far from matching the human hand, of course — but the progress is impressive. The company calls them an “API to the physical world.” https://www.1x.tech/discover/neos-hands #Robotics #NEO #RobotHands #gadget #science

🐸 A Frog Gut Bacterium Eliminated Colorectal Tumors in Mice A bacterium found in the gut of Japanese tree frogs has shown a striking anti-cancer effect in mice. Researchers at the Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (JAIST) screened 45 bacterial strains isolated from amphibians and reptiles, including Japanese tree frogs, fire belly newts, and grass lizards. One strain stood out: Ewingella americana, a naturally occurring bacterium from the intestines of the Japanese tree frog. In a mouse model of colorectal cancer, a single intravenous dose of E. americana led to complete tumor elimination in all treated mice — a 100% complete response rate in that experiment. The bacterium appears to work in two ways. First, it accumulates inside tumors, where oxygen levels are low and blood vessels are unusually leaky. Once there, the bacterial population increased by roughly 3,000 times within 24 hours, directly damaging cancer cells. Second, it seems to wake up the immune system. The treatment attracted T cells, B cells, and neutrophils into the tumor and boosted inflammatory signals such as TNF-α and IFN-γ, helping the body attack the cancer more aggressively. The safety data in mice were also encouraging. The bacteria disappeared from the bloodstream within 24 hours, did not colonize healthy organs such as the liver, spleen, lungs, kidneys, or heart, and caused only temporary mild inflammation. Over a 60-day observation period, the researchers reported no chronic toxicity. But the caveat is essential: this is still mouse research. Many cancer therapies look spectacular in preclinical models and fail later in humans. A living bacterium injected into the bloodstream would face a much higher safety bar in people, and the human immune response could be very different. Still, the study is an unusually strong proof of concept for bacterial cancer therapy. Instead of simply changing the gut microbiome, the researchers used a living bacterium as a tumor-targeting agent — one that both attacks cancer cells and recruits the immune system. The big takeaway: one of the next ideas in cancer therapy may come not from a synthetic drug library, but from the gut of a frog. Original paper, Gut Microbes: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/19490976.2025.2599562 DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/19490976.2025.2599562 ScienceDaily summary: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2026/07/260709160655.htm JAIST press release: https://www.jaist.ac.jp/english/whatsnew/press/2025/12/17-1.html #CancerResearch #Microbiome #Immunotherapy #Biotech

🧬 Harvard Built a Silicon Chip That Can Write DNA Using Electricity and Water Writing custom DNA has barely changed in decades. Today’s DNA synthesis relies on phosphoramidite chemistry—a highly effective but solvent-intensive process that depends on hazardous chemicals and specialized manufacturing facilities. Researchers at Harvard have now demonstrated a completely different approach: parallel enzymatic DNA synthesis on a semiconductor chip, controlled simply by electricity in water. The CMOS chip contains 64 programmable synthesis sites, each surrounded by two concentric ring electrodes. When current flows through the inner ring, it generates protons that create a tiny acidic region—exactly what’s needed to remove the temporary blocking group from a growing DNA strand. At the same time, the outer ring consumes escaping protons, preventing neighboring reactions from interfering with one another. Using this approach, the team synthesized 64 different DNA sequences, each 38–39 nucleotides long, entirely in an aqueous enzymatic process. Previous demonstrations of parallel enzymatic DNA synthesis were limited to roughly a dozen sequences, making this the largest demonstration of its kind so far. The hardware has an unusual history. It was originally developed for recording electrical activity from thousands of neurons. The researchers later realized that the same ability to precisely control microscopic electrical currents could also be used to control chemical reactions needed for DNA synthesis. Key points: • 64 unique DNA sequences synthesized in parallel • Water-based enzymatic process instead of traditional solvent-heavy chemistry • Precise local pH control using dual concentric electrodes • DNA strands up to 39 nucleotides long • Demonstrated storage of a 169-byte text message in the synthesized DNA The technology is still at an early stage. DNA strands of 39 nucleotides are far shorter than real genes, which typically contain thousands of bases. According to the researchers, the main limitation is now the chemistry used to remove temporary protecting groups—not the chip itself—suggesting that future advances may come from improved chemistry rather than new electronics. If the method can be scaled, it could eventually make DNA manufacturing cleaner, cheaper, and more accessible for synthetic biology, diagnostics, gene therapies, and even DNA-based data storage, one of the highest-density storage media ever proposed. 📄 Nature Electronics: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41928-026-01662-9 🏛 Harvard SEAS: https://seas.harvard.edu/news/making-dna-semiconductor-chip #DNA #SyntheticBiology #Biotechnology #Semiconductors #DataStorage

⏳ Scientists Found a Way to Make Quantum Time Look Like It Runs Backward At our everyday scale, time has a clear direction. Eggs break, coffee cools, and no one has ever un-spilled a glass of water. But at the quantum scale, the story is stranger. Many fundamental equations work just as well forward or backward in time. The arrow of time appears when a system is measured — because measurement randomly disturbs its state. Now researchers from Los Alamos National Laboratory, NIST, and the University of Maryland have developed a theoretical control method that can reshape that arrow. Their idea is based on a “control Hamiltonian” — a precisely designed sequence of fields and pulses that mimics and counteracts the random disturbance caused by quantum measurement. With the right feedback, the system’s trajectory can be made to look as if it is moving backward rather than forward. To be clear: this is not a time machine. No one reversed time for people, objects, or the universe. The work shows that, in a monitored quantum system, the appearance of time’s direction can be weakened, blurred, or even inverted. The team also used the framework to design a quantum version of Maxwell’s demon — a measurement-powered engine that could, in principle, extract useful energy from the act of observation itself. That energy might one day help drive quantum processes or be stored in a quantum battery. The caveat: this is still mostly a theoretical result. Experimental tests are planned for superconducting qubits, where fast feedback and quantum Maxwell’s demon setups are already technically plausible. Why it matters: better control over quantum measurement could help with quantum state preparation, more stable quantum computers, and new ways to manage energy at the smallest scales. The big takeaway: the arrow of time may feel absolute in daily life — but in the quantum world, it can become something engineers may learn to control. 📄 Original paper: https://link.aps.org/doi/10.1103/l18s-9vmh 📖 Los Alamos summary: https://www.lanl.gov/media/news/0319-reshaping-quantum-arrow 📖 ScienceDaily summary: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2026/06/260625014802.htm #QuantumPhysics #ArrowOfTime #QuantumComputing #Physics

🔭 Astronomers Have Just Opened a New Map of the Black Hole Universe The LIGO–Virgo–KAGRA collaboration has released GWTC-5.0 — the largest gravitational-wave catalog ever assembled. It adds 161 new detections from the O4b observing run, bringing the total number of observed gravitational-wave events since 2015 to 390. What began as a handful of almost unbelievable signals has now become a real population study of black holes. The jump is dramatic. The fourth observing run alone now accounts for roughly 75% of all gravitational-wave events detected so far. In LIGO’s first observing run, scientists detected just three events over about four months. Now the network is catching around 3–4 black hole mergers per week. And the data are starting to reveal something deeper: black holes do not all form the same way. Some likely come from pairs of massive stars born together. Others may meet later inside dense stellar clusters. The most intriguing group are “second-generation” black holes — objects that were themselves created in earlier black hole mergers, then merged again. Their clue is unusually rapid spin, which can act like a fingerprint of these repeated cosmic collisions. A few highlights from the new catalog: — 390 gravitational-wave events in total — 161 new detections from O4b — Black hole masses clustering around ~10 and ~35 solar masses — Evidence for second-generation black holes from hierarchical mergers — Best sky localization yet: one event narrowed down to just 6 square degrees — Clearest black hole signal ever recorded, with a signal-to-noise ratio of 76.9 — A new gravitational-wave measurement of the Hubble constant with ~25% improved precision Why it matters: gravitational-wave astronomy is no longer just about detecting rare cosmic “chirps.” It is becoming a census of an invisible universe — one that can study black hole populations, test general relativity, probe stellar evolution, and even help measure the expansion rate of the cosmos. The big takeaway: astronomy no longer needs light alone. We are now listening to spacetime itself — and the signal is turning into a map. 📄 LIGO press release: https://www.ligo.caltech.edu/news/ligo20260526 📖 Summary: https://www.sciencealert.com/lost-world-of-gravitational-waves-reveals-the-origins-of-black-holes #GravitationalWaves #BlackHoles #LIGO #Astrophysics #Cosmology

🌞 The Sun Is Waking Up Fast — A Major X-Class Solar Flare Could Happen at Any Moment Solar activity has accelerated dramatically over the past 48 hours, and space weather scientists are watching closely. The number of solar flares has surged from 5 per day two days ago, to 8 yesterday, and 17 within the last 24 hours. This morning, the Sun produced its first M-class flares of the current activity spike — leaving only the most powerful category, X-class, yet to appear. What’s making scientists especially cautious is the location of the Sun’s largest active region of 2026. It is currently facing almost directly toward Earth. Surprisingly, despite its enormous size, it has not yet produced a single X-class flare. Earlier this year, another large sunspot group generated five X-class flares, including the year’s strongest event, X8.1. That makes the current quietness look more like the calm before the storm than a sign of stability. Space-based observations reveal an even more intriguing picture. Two giant sunspot groups that appear separate on the solar surface are actually connected high above it in the corona, forming a single, highly complex magnetic system. These intertwined magnetic fields continuously exchange energy. On one hand, this can relieve local magnetic stress. On the other, it effectively creates one enormous energy reservoir capable of producing an exceptionally powerful eruption. Predicting exactly when that energy will be released remains one of the biggest challenges in solar physics. Most of the Sun’s magnetic field lies hidden beneath the visible surface, beyond direct observation, making even the most sophisticated computer models unreliable for systems this complex. For now, an X-class solar flare could occur at virtually any time. If accompanied by a coronal mass ejection directed toward Earth, it could trigger strong geomagnetic storms, spectacular auroras at unusually low latitudes, and temporary disruptions to satellites, radio communications, and navigation systems. 🔭 The Sun is reminding us that even after centuries of observation, our nearest star can still surprise us. #Science #Astronomy #Sun #SolarFlare #SpaceWeather #SolarStorm #Heliophysics

🌋 Yellowstone May Not Be Powered by a Deep Mantle Plume After All Yellowstone is one of Earth’s most famous supervolcanoes — and for decades, many geologists explained it with a familiar image: a deep mantle plume, a vertical column of hot rock rising from near Earth’s core, similar to the plume that built Hawaii. A new study in Science suggests a very different mechanism. Researchers built a high-resolution 3D geodynamic model of western North America and found that Yellowstone’s magma may be supplied not by a deep plume, but by the shallow asthenosphere — the hot, slowly flowing layer of mantle just beneath the rigid lithosphere. The driver is what the authors call an eastward “mantle wind”: a broad horizontal flow of hot rock moving beneath North America at geologic speeds. This flow appears to be linked to the ancient Farallon Plate, which began sliding beneath North America tens of millions of years ago. Remnants of that plate still sit deep under the continent. As they continue to sink, they help generate a large-scale mantle flow that pushes hot asthenospheric material toward Yellowstone. Then comes the key part: as this buoyant material is forced beneath the thick continental lithosphere, the stretching and pressure changes trigger decompression melting — producing magma without requiring a deep plume rising from the core-mantle boundary. The model also helps explain Yellowstone’s unusual underground plumbing. Competing tectonic forces appear to tear the lithosphere beneath the region, creating a southwest-dipping channel. This channel acts like a pathway for magma to rise, spread and evolve into a vast “magma mush” system rather than a simple, long-lived liquid magma chamber. Why it matters: supereruptions can eject more than 1,000 cubic kilometers of material, blanket huge regions in ash and affect climate for years. Understanding what actually sustains systems like Yellowstone is crucial for long-term volcanic hazard models. The big takeaway: Yellowstone may be less like a blowtorch from Earth’s deep interior — and more like a tectonic wound kept active by the slow, hidden motion of an ancient plate. Source: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.ady2027 Readable summary: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2026/06/260622014317.htm #Yellowstone #Supervolcano #Geology #EarthScience #Science

🪐 Astronomers Found Two Giant Planets Less Dense Than Cotton Candy Astronomers have confirmed the existence of two of the puffiest planets ever discovered — gas giants roughly the size of Jupiter, but with densities so low they are less dense than cotton candy. The pair, named TOI-791 b and TOI-791 c, orbit an F7-type star about 1,110 light-years from Earth in the southern constellation Volans. Their numbers are almost hard to believe: TOI-791 b has an average density of just 0.038 g/cm³, while TOI-791 c comes in at 0.047 g/cm³. For comparison, Jupiter’s average density is about 1.33 g/cm³. Cotton candy is roughly 0.05 g/cm³. Earth is around 5.5 g/cm³. That makes these planets not just “fluffy” by astronomical standards — they are among the lowest-density giant planets ever detected. The discovery, published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, is especially valuable because the two planets appear to be locked in a rare 5:3 orbital resonance: for every five orbits of the inner planet, the outer one completes almost exactly three. This gravitational interaction slightly shifts the timing of their transits across the star, allowing astronomers to estimate their masses. 🔹 The planets were first spotted by volunteers in the Planet Hunters TESS citizen-science project 🔹 Confirmation required eight years of observations 🔹 Data from the ASTEP telescope at Antarctica’s Concordia Station were crucial 🔹 Each transit lasts more than 11 hours — unusually long for ground-based observations 🔹 Only a handful of systems are known to contain multiple super-puff planets The leading idea is that these worlds may have relatively small cores surrounded by enormous hydrogen- and helium-rich atmospheres. But exactly how such diffuse planets form — and how they keep their atmospheres for so long — remains an open question. Important caveat: these measurements come from transits and orbital timing effects, not from direct imaging. The densities are robust within the current model, but the planets’ true atmospheric composition will require follow-up observations — potentially with the James Webb Space Telescope. Super-puff planets are strange because they sit at the edge of what our planet-formation models can comfortably explain. If a giant planet can be less dense than cotton candy and still hold itself together, what else is out there that our theories have not yet learned to expect? 📄 Source: https://academic.oup.com/mnras/article-lookup/doi/10.1093/mnras/stag864 #exoplanets #astronomy #space #TESS #superpuffs

🪐 A Wobbling “Peanut” Asteroid May Still Carry Traces of Ancient Water NASA’s Lucy mission has revealed one of the strangest small worlds ever seen up close: asteroid Donaldjohanson — a young, peanut-shaped rock in the main asteroid belt that tumbles through space and still preserves chemical hints of liquid water from its distant past. Lucy flew past Donaldjohanson on April 20, 2025, at about 30,000 mph, coming within just 650 miles of the asteroid. The encounter was meant partly as a rehearsal before Lucy reaches Jupiter’s Trojan asteroids in 2027. Instead, it became a science story of its own. Donaldjohanson does not rotate like a simple spinning rock. Data from Lucy show that it tumbles end-over-end once every 10.5 Earth days, while also wobbling around its long axis every 26.5 days — more like an unstable top than a normal asteroid. Its shape is just as unusual. Donaldjohanson is a contact binary: two lobes joined by a narrow neck, giving it a cosmic peanut-like form. Scientists think it formed about 155 million years ago, when fragments from a violent collision gently came back together under their own gravity. Since then, sunlight has been slowly reshaping it. Through the YORP effect — a tiny torque caused when sun-warmed surfaces radiate heat back into space — Donaldjohanson’s spin appears to have slowed by at least a factor of 10 over the last 20–60 million years. As the rotation changed, loose material likely slid down its slopes, softening craters and reshaping the surface. But the most intriguing clue came from Lucy’s infrared data: iron-rich clay minerals on the surface. These minerals form in the presence of liquid water, meaning Donaldjohanson’s parent body once experienced aqueous alteration. But unlike Bennu and Ryugu, which contain magnesium-rich clays suggesting longer exposure to water, Donaldjohanson’s chemistry points to a much shorter episode. 🔹 Donaldjohanson is a bilobed “contact binary” asteroid 🔹 It tumbles on two axes, with rotation periods of 10.5 and 26.5 days 🔹 Its current body likely formed around 155 million years ago 🔹 Sunlight gradually slowed its spin through the YORP effect 🔹 Iron-rich clays suggest liquid water was present — but only briefly 🔹 The flyby was also a successful rehearsal for Lucy’s Trojan asteroid encounters, beginning with Eurybates in August 2027 Important caveat: this was a fast flyby, not an orbital mission or a sample return. Lucy measured the surface remotely; the asteroid’s interior remains unknown. Still, Donaldjohanson matters because it gives scientists a rare comparison point. Bennu and Ryugu are near-Earth asteroids with long migration histories. Donaldjohanson is a much younger main-belt object that stayed closer to its birthplace. Its strange shape, unstable spin, and brief water history offer a fresh clue to how small bodies evolved — and how water-rich material may have moved through the early Solar System. 📄 Sources: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aec0503 #NASA #LucyMission #Asteroid #PlanetaryScience #SolarSystem

🐝 What If Queen Bees Aren’t Made by Royal Jelly Alone? For decades, the textbook story sounded simple: feed an ordinary honeybee larva royal jelly, and it becomes a queen. A new study in Nature suggests the real story is far more sophisticated. Researchers found that future queens are not just fed differently — they are raised inside specially engineered “royal cribs”: peanut-shaped queen cells built from unusual wax, kept warmer and more humid, and maintained by dedicated young worker bees. These queen cells are not passive containers. Their wax is physically and chemically distinct from ordinary worker-cell wax: softer, less dense, more flexible, and better at holding heat and moisture. In other words, the nursery itself helps shape development. The key experiment was simple but powerful. Scientists raised queen-destined larvae with the same royal jelly, but changed the wax environment. Larvae exposed to ordinary worker-cell wax were more likely to die and developed into smaller, weaker queens. So royal jelly matters — but it is not the whole mechanism. 🔹 Queen development depends on diet + architecture + microclimate 🔹 Queen-cell wax is chemically and physically different from ordinary comb wax 🔹 Young “queen cell builders” appear specially adapted to construct and maintain these royal nurseries 🔹 Extra warmth may help queens mature faster: about 16 days vs about 21 days for workers 🔹 Similar patterns were found in western and eastern honeybees, suggesting deep evolutionary roots Important caveat: this study focused on honeybees, not all social insects. And scientists still need to identify exactly which physical or chemical features of the wax are doing the biological work. Still, the implication is fascinating: development is not shaped by genes and nutrition alone. Built environments — even tiny wax chambers — can influence what an organism becomes. If a wax cradle can help decide the fate of a future queen, what other biological outcomes are being shaped by structures we barely notice? 📄 Source: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-026-10534-3 #Science #Biology #Bees #Nature #Entomology