EverythingScience

Plastics are supposed to be chemically inert. It's the reason they're used so frequently to package food, bottle water and create children's toys: They're safe. But something important happens when a large piece of plastic fragments into micro- and nanoparticles. Its surface area increases dramatically relative to its volume. Vastly more of the material is now exposed to its surroundings. A new study by researchers from Columbia University and the University of California, Berkeley, found that this newly created surface is not necessarily safe and identified the chemical reasons why. "As plastic fragments into smaller and smaller particles, its surface area increases enormously. Then microplastics change the water that surrounds them, generating high-energy, reactive radicals (reactive oxygen species, ROS) that very likely contribute to biological damage that we see in animals and potentially in humans as a result of microplastic exposure," said Wei Min, a Columbia professor of chemistry and biomedical engineering. The work challenges the common view of microplastics as largely passive fragments of inert material and contributes to a growing understanding of why the large-scale presence of microplastics is a cause for concern. The research was published today in the journal Nature. Water-rich tissues raise health concerns This is particularly noteworthy for human health because human blood is approximately 50% water, and individual human cells are generally 60% to 80% water. The new research suggests that microplastics that enter the bloodstream or cells could remain chemically active in this water-rich biological environment.

Snapshots of Saturn 🪐 OTD in 1997, 29 years ago, NASA’s Cassini spacecraft launched to begin its long voyage to Saturn. For 13 years, Cassini orbited Saturn, revealing unexpected features of the planet, its rings, and its icy moons, and expanding our understanding of the kinds of worlds where life might exist. What Cassini taught us during its 20-year mission: go.nasa.gov/4zsEFmY

After five-and-a-half years on Mars, NASA's Perseverance Rover has set a distance record for travel on another world. Since landing in Mars' Jezero Crater, an ancient paleolake, on February 18, 2021, Perseverance has travelled 45.22 km, or 28.10 miles. That puts it slightly ahead of NASA's Opportunity rover, which travelled 45.16 kilometers (28.06 miles) during its mission. It must be noted, however, that Perseverance took only 5.5 years to travel this far, while Opportunity required almost 15 years. Comparing the plutonium-powered Perseverance to the solar-powered Opportunity is unfair. But in any case, Perseverance deserves recognition for this milestone. “The original mission called for no more than 12.4 miles of driving. We’ve blown well past that..." - Steven Lee, Perseverance and Curiosity project manager, JPL/NASA. Perseverance is currently in a region named “Lac de Charmes,” which is off the western end of Jezero Crater. It reached its new milestone while heading toward a feature named "Idubi," a scientific target notable for its ancient rocks. On Earth, there are no rocks as old as these because they've all been destroyed by plate tectonics. Perseverance has found igneous rocks, a surprising result considering that scientists expected to find mostly sedimentary rocks. In fact, a primary reason Jezero Crater was chosen as the mission's landing site is because sedimentary rocks are good at preserving evidence of ancient life. While the rover found plenty of sedimentary rocks, it found igneous rocks, along with fluorite, which forms when rock interacts with heated water. This is evidence of hydrothermal activity, and scientists are hoping Perseverance will find more traces of ancient hydrothermal systems at Idubi...

When Christopher Columbus made landfall in the Americas on Oct. 12, 1492, he encountered Indigenous Lucayans living on the Bahamian island now called San Salvador. Columbus wrote in his diary about "great multitudes of men" who greeted him that day, bartered with him and told him about other groups who lived on nearby islands. But within a few decades after Columbus' arrival, the Indigenous people of the Americas were decimated by what anthropologist Eric Wolf called the "Great Dying" — a combination of epidemic disease, warfare and enslavement that led to a rapid decline in the Native population. For centuries, researchers have been trying to figure out how many Indigenous people lived in the Americas just prior to the fateful arrival of European colonizers. The answer to that question has been surprisingly elusive, and estimates based on historical censuses, archaeological sites and land carrying capacity in the Western Hemisphere have varied wildly. Recent research into Native American demography has revealed that the population peaked several centuries before Europeans showed up on the shores of North America — and that if Europeans had arrived at that peak, the entire history of the continent may have been different...

Imagine a medicine that stops seizures at their source, switches off instructions that keep a cancerous tumor growing and prevents Alzheimer's from stealing memories and wreaking havoc on the brain. The basis for such treatment is already here. Known as oligonucleotides [pronounced ah-lee-go-noo-klee-oh-tides], these drugs are made from small bits of DNA or RNA—the blueprint cells use to make proteins. While most drugs act on the finished products, oligonucleotides cut to the chase and intervene upstream, before the proteins have a chance to roll off the cellular assembly line. They can block production of harmful proteins or help cells make ones they need by tinkering with the instructions. There's one big catch, however. "Knowing what gene to target is only part of the problem," said Northeastern chemistry and chemical biology professor Ke Zhang, who is developing ways to make oligonucleotides more effective. "The other part is getting the drug to the right place in the right cells." In the Journal of the American Chemical Society, Zhang and his colleagues present research that suggests a new way to get oligonucleotides into body tissues. The molecular structures his lab is developing shuttle the drugs to their destinations. They resemble tiny bottlebrushes, with bristles that protect the medicines attached to them. The secret to their success lies in a short sequence of chemical building blocks incorporated into their structure. It acts as a set of delivery instructions to steer the medicine toward particular tissues. By helping genetic medicines reach their target, this approach could unlock their potential to tackle diseases that are currently untreatable...

Everything that’s swept the world since the 2022 release of ChatGPT — “the AI economy”; data centers; chatbots acting as best friends, doctors, and mathematicians; talk of existential risk — it all starts, in some sense, with an intern in a University of Montreal lab named Dzmitry Bahdanau. It was 2014. The 23-year-old Belarusian, who had been coding competitively since he was a kid but hadn’t done academic research before, was asked to help figure out how to get a computer to translate sentences from English to French. Bahdanau was working with artificial neural networks, which had already shown promise in pattern-recognition tasks such as deciphering handwriting and identifying objects in photos. The networks learn to recognize patterns by strengthening and weakening connections between nodes in response to training data. Bahdanau quietly doubted their potential to achieve anything like human-level intelligence, but his adviser, the computer scientist Yoshua Bengio, and the postdoc on the project, Kyunghyun Cho, were believers. And translation was widely seen as a formidable and interesting problem for neural networks to try to solve. Translation is not as simple as swapping each English word for a French one. Languages have different grammatical structures and are riddled with idioms and connotations, all of which had long stymied attempts to automate the process. You can’t simply implement rules of translation because there are none. But neural networks seemed promising because they learn by example. They can be trained on huge databases of paired English and French sentences to, eventually, absorb the quasi-rules, exceptions, and subtleties. Results had been mediocre, though; the longer the sentence, the worse neural networks performed. That’s because researchers were trying to cram each sentence’s data into a fixed amount of memory before decoding the sentence in the target language. It was a bottleneck that limited how complex and sophisticated translations could be. The network architecture just wasn’t right. So Bahdanau tried something different. “It was just obviously the right thing to do — one of these things that happens once in a while in science where it’s just very clear to someone who is not very experienced in the field,” he recalled, speaking to me from Montreal, where he still works in AI. “And it just worked. From the very first attempt.” Bahdanau’s trick, a mathematical operation that he, Cho, and Bengio referred to as “attention,” enabled their neural network to translate long sentences just as well as short ones. That meant the approach was scalable. Other AI researchers at the time quickly integrated attention into their neural network designs. Then, in 2017, a team at Google devised a new kind of neural network architecture called a transformer that supercharged the attention method and stripped away everything else. The team’s paper, “Attention Is All You Need,” reported that transformers achieved state-of-the-art translation while requiring a fraction of the computation needed to train prior models. The paper, which has since been cited more than 250,000 times, was a watershed moment in AI. Large language models such as ChatGPT and Claude followed. Given the staggering power that’s been unleashed, it’s worth asking what this attention mechanism is exactly, why it is “all you need,” and why machine translation was the task that unlocked it all. Attention is a way for us to understand how a single AI model can converse with us, diagnose diseases, generate realistic videos, solve long-standing math problems, and more. Is it somehow at the heart of intelligence — artificial and otherwise?

If humanity intends to engage in interstellar exploration in the near future, lightsails are currently the best option. This technology, consisting of laser arrays pushing a reflective sail and tiny spacecraft to relativistic speeds (a fraction of the speed of light), is presently the only promising method for sending missions to the nearest stars within a human lifetime. Alas, several major hurdles need to be overcome and technological developments made before any such missions are possible. These range from developing space-based laser systems and creating materials that can survive the journey through interstellar space to testing proof of concepts in space. According to recently published results, engineers at Cornell University's Space System Design Studio (SDSS) successfully deployed two lightsail experiments - Alpha CubeSat and Sailing to the Stars - from the International Space Station (ISS). The missions were created as part of the Museum of Science Fiction’s 2016 CubeSat Competition, a design competition for next-generation spacecraft concepts using off-the-shelf technologies. The experiments were funded by NASA's CubeSat Launch Initiative, which launched to the ISS in late 2025 aboard the NG-23 and Crew-11 missions, respectively. Both consist of origami-style lightsails and chip satellites (ChipSat) that were folded for launch (to conserve room for other payloads) and unfurled upon deployment...

Could a psychedelic drug help the brain recover from mild injuries? New research suggests that psilocybin, the mind-bending ingredient in magic mushrooms, might protect the brain from the damage caused by minor head impacts. Even mild head impacts that don't count as concussions can raise the risk of neurodegenerative disorders such as chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), so finding an effective treatment for these blows could be useful for warding off debilitating conditions down the line. The new research, published in the journal Communications Biology, included only lab rats, so there's more work to be done to translate the findings to humans. But the early results hint at a new application for psilocybin — a drug that's already been explored for a range of other conditions, including depression, PTSD and anorexia. Live Science spoke with study co-author Argel Aguilar-Valles, an associate professor of neuroscience at Carleton University in Ontario, about the new study and how the research might eventually translate to treatments for repetitive head injuries.

Margaret Hamilton, a groundbreaking computer scientist who led the team that created the onboard flight software for NASA's moon-bound Apollo program and later in life was celebrated as a powerful symbol of women in technology, has died. She was 90. Hamilton died Sept. 30 at a hospital in Cambridge, Massachusetts, her daughter, Lauren Hamilton, told The Associated Press on Thursday. NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman said on the social platform X that her work helped make humanity's first journeys to the moon possible. "To say Margaret Hamilton was a pioneer—to say she was ahead of her time—would be a dramatic understatement," Olivier de Weck, the Apollo program professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and interim head of its aeronautics and astronautics department, told MIT News, a publication of the university's communications office. "She was a software engineer at a time when that field was in its infancy," de Weck continued, "and she not only developed advanced code herself but also led a team in using that nascent technology to develop one of the most complex systems humanity had ever achieved"...

Sleeping less than five hours a night was associated with a higher risk of dozens of diseases in a large study that tracked nearly 100,000 adults for almost nine years. The analysis also found that people who spent more time in REM and deep sleep tended to have lower risks of several major conditions, suggesting that both sleep duration and sleep structure may be linked to long-term health. Researchers analyzed 95,559 UK Biobank participants who wore wrist accelerometers continuously for seven days and nights. A deep learning algorithm estimated total sleep time, REM sleep, deep sleep, light sleep, wakefulness after sleep onset, and how much sleep patterns varied from night to night. More REM Sleep Was Linked to Lower Disease Risk Greater REM sleep was associated with lower rates of 83 diseases. Each additional 47.6 minutes of REM sleep was linked to a 26 percent lower rate of heart failure, a 46 percent lower rate of dementia, and an 80 percent lower rate of Parkinson’s disease during follow-up. More deep sleep was associated with reduced risk of seven conditions, including type 2 diabetes and major depressive disorder. By contrast, greater night-to-night sleep irregularity and more wakefulness after falling asleep were associated with higher risks of several conditions, including anxiety and substance use disorders. The study did not prove that these sleep patterns directly cause or prevent disease. Because the research was observational, other health, behavioral, or biological factors could contribute to the associations. A Six to Eight Hour Window Stood Out Total sleep time showed a nonlinear relationship with many health outcomes. For most of the conditions showing this pattern, the lowest risk was concentrated between six and eight hours of sleep per night. People who slept less than five hours had the greatest overall vulnerability, with higher risks of 37 conditions. Across the full analysis, researchers identified 156 statistically significant associations between sleep patterns and newly diagnosed diseases after correcting for the large number of comparisons...

“We used to think of the body as an isolated system that regulates itself,” said Professor Shir Atzil, a researcher at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. “Our findings show that human physiology is inherently social. Being close to someone you love lowers the physical energy your body spends on regulating itself.” “This gives us a direct metabolic benefit to being together and reveals a core evolutionary reason why humans form bonds in the first place: our bodies run better together.” In one experiment, 108 adults ate a standardized carbohydrate meal — first alone, then with their romantic partner — while the researchers tracked their blood glucose for two hours. Glucose levels rose less and returned to baseline faster when partners were present, producing about a 15% reduction in overall glucose exposure compared with the alone condition. The scientists then repeated the design with two other physiological systems. In a cold-exposure test with 116 participants, skin temperature dropped less and recovered more quickly when a partner was nearby. In a mild-shock stress test with 115 adults, skin conductance — a marker of nervous-system arousal — likewise showed a smaller, shorter-lived response in the social condition. A related pilot study of 56 mother-infant pairs found the same pattern: infants showed reduced stress responses to a loud noise when their mother was present in the room, compared with a separate-room condition. Across all three adult experiments, a combined statistical analysis found a consistent effect, with roughly 8 to 12% lower cumulative physiological ‘cost’ in the social condition than when participants faced the same challenges alone. Professor Atzil and colleagues argue the findings point to something they call Social Physiology, the idea that being near another person doesn’t just buffer stress or provide comfort, but can make routine bodily regulation itself more efficient, even in systems like glucose metabolism that aren’t usually thought of as socially responsive. Notably, the glucose effect didn’t appear to be explained by reduced stress: markers of physiological arousal didn’t differ between the alone and social conditions during the eating experiment, and the effect held up even after statistically accounting for stress levels and physical touch between partners. The authors suggest the benefit may instead involve the brain’s predictive regulation of the body — a process called allostasis, in which prior social experience helps the brain anticipate and manage physical demands before they fully unfold.

Webb has found the origin of the farthest fast radio burst yet! Fast radio bursts (FRBs) 💥 are mysterious, millisecond-long flashes of radio emission from the distant Universe. In 2024, astronomers using the MeerKAT telescope spotted an FRB which appeared extremely distant – perhaps more than any other yet discovered. With help from Webb, the FRB was confirmed to have originated 3 billion years after the Big Bang, in a surprisingly small and young galaxy. This has implications for the origin of FRBs. They are unlikely to come from the merger of neutron stars (associated with older galaxies) as one theory suggested. They may, however, come from a type of neutron star known as a magnetar 🧲⭐ which can form in younger galaxies. Read more: esawebb.org/news/weic2621/

Webb has found the origin of the farthest fast radio burst yet! Fast radio bursts (FRBs) 💥 are mysterious, millisecond-long flashes of radio emission from the distant Universe. In 2024, astronomers using the MeerKAT telescope spotted an FRB which appeared extremely distant – perhaps more than any other yet discovered. With help from Webb, the FRB was confirmed to have originated 3 billion years after the Big Bang, in a surprisingly small and young galaxy. This has implications for the origin of FRBs. They are unlikely to come from the merger of neutron stars (associated with older galaxies) as one theory suggested. They may, however, come from a type of neutron star known as a magnetar 🧲⭐ which can form in younger galaxies. Read more: esawebb.org/news/weic2621/

It's well-known that regular exercise comes with health benefits, but exactly how those benefits manifest at the cellular level isn't clear. Now, researchers have identified a series of changes in metabolism and the immune system that differentiate regular exercisers from people with sedentary lifestyles. The findings, published Sept. 18 in the journal Science Advances, point to potential pathways for managing chronic diseases, such as diabetes, heart disease and cancer, the scientists say. The team of researchers analyzed data from the Chinese Immune Multi-omics Atlas (CIMA), which includes data from 400 adults who gave blood samples and answered an in-depth questionnaire about their lifestyles. To capture the biggest possible effects of exercise, the team included only data from participants who did the most or least exercise. One group worked out at least three times a week, racking up more than 150 minutes of moderate exercise or 75 minutes of high-intensity exercise in that timeframe. The sedentary group said they did not work out at all. The researchers then analyzed their volunteers' blood samples for physiological markers, such as blood sugar and fat levels. They found that the participants who exercised more had signs of boosted sugar and fat metabolism, stronger muscle metabolism, and higher levels of antioxidant molecules, which combat cell-damaging processes. Many of these systems and their links to exercise were already known, said Dr. Michael Siebers, a researcher at the University of Duisburg-Essen who wasn't involved with the study. The study's real step forward was its subsequent cellular analysis, he said. "It's a really good paper, which is showing, for the first time, what is really happening when you're doing sports on the intercellular level," he said...

In early 2024, laboratory-grown neurospheres (i.e. clusters of neural stem cells) were sent to the International Space Station (ISS) to be exposed to microgravity. The return trip was delayed several times due to bad weather in the landing zone. As a result, the cells were outside controlled culture conditions for longer than anticipated—beyond the limit of what they were expected to survive. When they finally arrived at the laboratory at the Uppsala Biomedical Center (BMC), no one knew whether it would be possible to complete the experiment. "When the cells came back, they didn't look normal, but we were still cautiously optimistic. It looked as though there were only small fragments of neurospheres in some groups, but not all of them. Only the cells that had previously been in space on the sounding rocket had survived. So we changed the medium and waited. Then some of the cells recovered and began to grow, very slowly," explains Elena Kozlova. A month later, the experiments could begin. The results have now been analyzed and are presented in an article in npj Microgravity. The 3D structure protected the cells Despite being subjected to severe stress, some of the cells survived. After recovery, they were still able to develop into nerve cells and glial cells and functioned normally in the researchers' tests. A key finding is that cells placed in 3D-printed support structures fared particularly well across all groups. They survived and continued to divide. "Thanks to the experiment being extended, we were able to see just how significant the 3D-printed structure was for the cells' survival...

The sea surface temperature in a key section of the central equatorial Pacific Ocean has now surpassed all previous temperatures on record for this region, exceeding 86 degrees Fahrenheit (30 degrees Celsius) for the first time, according to preliminary data released Monday (Oct. 5). Specifically, these temperatures occurred in the Niño 3.4 region, located between 5 degrees north and 5 degrees south latitude, and 120 degrees west and 170 degrees west longitude. Researchers use this region to monitor the progression of El Niño, the warm phase of a multiyear natural climate pattern that's currently in full swing and steadily intensifying. But how significant is this new record, and could it be a harbinger of increasingly extreme El Niño events in the future? At this time of the year, sea surface temperatures above 86 F are common in the western Pacific warm pool, a mass of water located northeast of Australia. But the Niño 3.4 region is nowhere near the warm pool and usually has much cooler temperatures. This latest data indicates "an exceptionally warm state for this part of the tropical Pacific," said Jin-Yi Yu, a professor of Earth system science at the University of California, Irvine. "If the reported daily El Niño 3.4 temperature above 30°C is verified in the observational dataset, it would be an extraordinary record," Yu told Live Science in an email. ... El Niño events happen when warm water in the western tropical Pacific Ocean migrates eastward along the equator, toward South America. This boosts global temperatures, triggering heavy rainfall and floods in regions like East Africa, southern China, the southern U.S. and the Pacific coast of equatorial South America, while places such as Indonesia, the Philippines, southern Africa and northern South America experience drought. ... The world is on the brink of crossing a critical warming threshold, raising the question of whether the current conditions can be considered a new normal for future El Niños. While it's likely that future El Niños will be more extreme than past ones, on average, not every El Niño will be record-breaking and as dramatic as the one unfolding now, because these events tend to be very variable, Collins said...

Dragonflies have roamed the Earth for over 300 million years, with ancestors' wingspans reaching up to 70 cm (28 inches). Their unique independent control of each of their wings, due to directly attached muscles, gives them impeccable control in flight. They can hover and move like a helicopter in all directions, and even fly upside down, reaching speeds of roughly 56 km/h (35 mph). Read more

NASA has just released about 800 gigabytes of scientific data generated by the Artemis II mission. The archive documenting the astronauts’ return to the far side of the moon includes 11,000 full-resolution images and videos, 8.5 hours of spoken observations, notes taken by the astronauts, transcripts, and photographs from the cameras aboard the Orion capsule. The space agency describes this effort as the first set of planetary science data obtained outside Earth and—for the most part—directly by humans in more than half a century. The closest comparable precedent dates back to the Apollo era and its missions to the lunar surface. In addition to the public database, NASA released three reports summarizing what was learned during the first crewed spacecraft mission to approach the moon in five decades. These are the Artemis II Preliminary Lunar Science Report, the Artemis II Lunar Science Operations Report, and the Artemis II Lunar Science Data User Guide. Anyone can access the near terabyte of data, though the release is primarily intended for the scientific community. While the astronauts capture and collect the data during the mission, it’s the researchers on Earth who will be able to analyze it and produce new findings about the moon. The information may be particularly useful for planetary geologists, flight engineers, heliophysicists, experts in telecommunications and remote sensing, as well as specialists in meteoroid impacts. For space and astronomy enthusiasts, some of the most accessible materials include mission transcripts and lunar photographs annotated by the astronauts themselves. NASA has centralized access through its Planetary Data System, the public repository where it stores data from its planetary missions. In the section dedicated to the moon, users can access Artemis II and browse the various available collections, documents, and files...

There's big news from the quantum world. A quantum computer has been used in space for the first time. The device was aboard a spacecraft in low Earth orbit and demonstrated technology that could eventually help solve a problem that has been bugging satellites for years. The issue is that when orbiting satellites send their raw data back down to Earth, bottlenecks and bandwidth limits slow everything down. One way to overcome this would be to process the raw data in situ before sending it. So a team of physicists led by Philip Walther at the University of Vienna came up with a way that could eventually do just that. Their solution was to build a quantum photonic processor that uses individual light particles, or photons, to perform complex operations using compact optical hardware. But taking the idea from the drawing board to orbit was not without its challenges. Quantum photonic systems are delicate, and radiation, large temperature changes and the vacuum of space could damage their components or disrupt their operation. Of course, it first had to get there...

The formation and evolution of planets is the driving force behind both where and how we might find life beyond Earth. This complex and lengthy process first begins with a massive ball of gas and dust that swirls until it flattens into a disk, followed by rocks ranging in size from pebbles to kilometer-scale objects clumping together in a process known as accretion, as they too swirl around within the larger disk and form rocky planets closer to the star and the farther out planets collect the gas, ice, and dust that the star couldn’t evaporate. Until now, researchers have been limited to visualizing the swirling gas and dust forming planets through computer models. Now, an international team of researchers just announced a remarkable discovery that could change how astronomers understand planetary formation and evolution. This discovery involves the first direct image of a planet forming in a swirling ball of gas and dust, also called a protoplanet. Their discovery, which is discussed in a recent study published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, focused on the protoplanets WISPIT 2b, which is re located about 430 light-years from Earth, is estimated to be about five times as massive as Jupiter, and was directly imaged using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) observatory in northern Chile. A companion protoplanet, WISPIT 2c, orbits interior of WISPIT 2b at 15 astronomical units (AU) and is estimated to be 8 to 12 Jupiter masses, while WISPIT 2b is located about 57 AU from its host star. While WISPIT 2b’s discovery was announced in August 2025, WISPIT 2c’s discovery was announced shortly afterwards in March 2026. “We clearly see both planets shaping their environment,” said Dr. Myriam Benisty, who is the Director of the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Germany and lead author of the study. “WISPIT 2c has carved a cavity, and WISPIT 2b a gap. Around WISPIT 2b, we find swirls of gas that had been predicted by simulations of disk-planet interactions, but never actually seen before. Now there is an image of them!” There is a distinct difference between a cavity and a gap within a protoplanetary disk, as a cavity indicates a total clearing of gas and dust while a gap indicates a decrease in disk material but still enough for a protoplanet to keep forming. The image obtained by ALMA demonstrates these with symbols of the locations of the host star, WISPIT 2c with its cavity, and WISPIT 2b with its gap. The major difference is WISPIT 2b is shown swirling in the gas and dust it is collecting, with blue and red denoting gas that is moving towards us and away from us, respectively...