Science in telegram

🧠 Depression May Disrupt the Adult Brain’s Ability to Make New Neurons For decades, scientists have suspected that depression may interfere with neurogenesis — the formation of new neurons in the adult hippocampus. Most of the strongest evidence, however, came from animal studies. Now researchers have found evidence of the same process directly in human brains. The team analyzed nearly 500,000 individual cell nuclei from hippocampal tissue donated by people with major depressive disorder and people without psychiatric illness. Using single-cell gene sequencing, chromatin analysis, spatial transcriptomics and protein measurements, they reconstructed what is effectively a molecular atlas of the hippocampus. They found a lineage of cells consistent with ongoing adult neurogenesis — but in people with depression, that developmental process appeared to stall before new neurons fully matured. The surrounding hippocampal circuitry also showed signs of inflammation, cellular stress, disrupted synaptic plasticity, altered metabolism and an imbalance between excitatory and inhibitory signaling. The finding could help explain something particularly characteristic of depression: the tendency for negative memories and experiences to dominate. New hippocampal neurons are thought to contribute to pattern separation — our ability to distinguish a new experience from similar memories in the past. There is an important caveat: this study shows an association in post-mortem human brains. It does not prove that reduced neurogenesis causes depression, nor does it mean simply increasing neuron production would cure it. But it moves one long-standing theory of depression from animal experiments much closer to human biology. Depression may not simply change how neurons communicate. It may change how the brain renews itself. #Neuroscience #Depression #Brain #Neurogenesis #MentalHealth #Science https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-026-04571-8

💥 CERN Just Created a Tiny Version of the Early Universe Physicists at the Large Hadron Collider have recreated the strange state of matter that filled the Universe shortly after the Big Bang — using atomic nuclei much smaller than researchers once thought would be sufficient. The ALICE experiment smashed oxygen-16 and neon-20 nuclei together at enormous energies. The collisions produced evidence of collective hydrodynamic flow consistent with tiny droplets of quark–gluon plasma — the ultra-hot state in which quarks and gluons are no longer confined inside protons and neutrons. But the most elegant part came afterward. The particles emerging from the miniature fireballs still carried information about the shape of the nuclei that created them. Oxygen produced a more rounded flow pattern, while neon generated a distinctly elongated signal — reflecting its predicted bowling-pin-like nuclear shape. That means the same experiment can probe two extremes at once: matter as it behaved during the Universe’s first microseconds, and the tiny internal geometry of atomic nuclei. Next, researchers want to go smaller still — potentially testing helium nuclei to discover just how tiny a system can be while still behaving like a liquid made of free quarks and gluons. The Universe once existed in this state everywhere. At CERN, it now survives for only a fraction of a fraction of a second. #CERN #Physics #BigBang #QuarkGluonPlasma #ParticlePhysics #Science https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/gymp-vp87⁠

🧠 Singapore Just Opened a Data Center Powered by Living Human Neurons This sounds like science fiction, but it went live on July 16. Australian startup Cortical Labs, together with the National University of Singapore and data-center operator DayOne, has launched a biological computing facility where part of the processing is performed not by GPUs — but by living human neurons grown in a lab. Inside are 20 CL1 biological computers. Each contains at least 200,000 neurons grown on a silicon chip covered with electrodes. The neurons originate from human blood cells that are reprogrammed into stem cells and then differentiated into neurons. And yes, the computers have to be fed. Every three days, technicians supply the cells with sugar, micronutrients and pH buffers, while a life-support system regulates oxygen, nitrogen and CO₂. The strange part is that these neurons can actually learn. Cortical Labs’ earlier DishBrain experiment showed human and mouse neurons learning to play Pong, with measurable learning appearing within just minutes. Earlier this year, developer Sean Cole connected around 200,000 human neurons to DOOM — allowing them to navigate the game and shoot at enemies. Biology is nowhere near silicon in raw speed. But it has another advantage: efficiency. A CL1 consumes around 30 watts. An NVIDIA H100 SXM can draw up to 700 W, while an eight-H100 server may consume roughly 10 kW including supporting hardware. Cortical Labs also argues that biological neural networks may learn from far smaller datasets — closer to how humans adapt from limited experience. Access to one CL1 currently costs about $2,200 per month. Cortical Labs already operates 120 units in Melbourne with around 20 paying customers, and Singapore could eventually expand to 1,000 biological computers. So no, neurons aren’t replacing GPUs tomorrow. But we have officially reached the stage where a data center needs electricity, an internet connection… and food. Cyberpunk is becoming an engineering discipline. #Biocomputing #Neuroscience #AI #DataCenters #CorticalLabs https://www.straitstimes.com/tech/forget-silicon-chip-servers-singapores-newest-data-centre-needs-to-be-fed

🤖 AI Found 15 Cancers That Radiologists Had Missed A new clinical study offers a glimpse of what medical AI may actually be best at: not replacing doctors, but quietly checking their work. Researchers deployed an AI system called LiON alongside radiologists reading contrast-enhanced CT scans in routine hospital practice. In a prospective trial involving 10,333 patients, the system flagged 51 liver lesions that had initially been overlooked. Fifteen of them turned out to be malignant. The alerts were not merely theoretical. They led doctors to amend 37 radiology reports, send 22 cases for multidisciplinary review, and change clinical management for some patients. Before the live trial, LiON had been trained on 6,443 patients and validated retrospectively on another 22,251. The important nuance is that this was not a randomized trial comparing AI-assisted doctors against doctors alone, and the study did not show that the system improves survival. The researchers themselves say larger prospective comparative studies across different healthcare systems are still needed. But this is a meaningful step beyond “AI beats doctors on a test set.” Here, the algorithm sat inside an actual clinical workflow — and found cancers that humans had missed. Perhaps the most useful medical AI will not be the doctor in the room. It will be the second pair of eyes that never gets tired. #AI #Medicine #Cancer #Radiology #MedicalAI #Science https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-026-04589-y⁠

🧬 A Personalized mRNA Cancer Vaccine Has Passed Its Biggest Test Yet For the first time, a personalized mRNA cancer therapy has succeeded in a Phase 3 clinical trial — the final major testing stage before regulators can consider approval. The treatment, called intismeran autogene, is not an off-the-shelf vaccine. Doctors sequence each patient’s tumour, identify mutations unique to their cancer, and manufacture an individual mRNA therapy encoding up to 34 of those tumour-specific targets. The goal is essentially to give the immune system a personalized wanted poster for the cancer. In the trial, 1,137 people with stage IIB–IV melanoma whose tumours had been completely removed received either the personalized mRNA therapy plus the immunotherapy drug pembrolizumab (Keytruda), or pembrolizumab alone. The combination produced statistically significant and clinically meaningful improvements in both recurrence-free survival and distant-metastasis-free survival. No new safety signal was reported. There is an important caveat: the companies have so far announced only top-line Phase 3 results. They have not yet released the detailed numbers, and it is not yet known whether the treatment ultimately extends overall survival. The therapy also remains investigational and has not been approved. But the principle is now much harder to dismiss. Instead of finding one cancer vaccine that works for everyone, medicine may be able to manufacture a different vaccine for each individual tumour. Cancer is personal. The vaccine might have to be too. #Cancer #mRNA #Melanoma #Immunotherapy #Biotechnology #Medicine #Science

🌌 Scientists May Have Seen “Empty” Space Bend Light Almost 90 years ago, quantum theory made a bizarre prediction: a perfect vacuum is not truly empty. Under an unimaginably strong magnetic field, empty space itself should behave a little like a transparent material — changing the way light passes through it. Now astronomers may finally have seen the effect in nature. Researchers studied 1E 1547.0−5408, a magnetar — an ultra-dense neutron star with a surface magnetic field above 100 trillion gauss. Using NASA’s IXPE X-ray telescope together with NICER and Australia’s Parkes/Murriyang radio telescope, the team measured extraordinarily polarized X-rays: about 65% at 2 keV, rising to nearly 80% during parts of the star’s rotation. Ordinary models struggled to reproduce what they saw. But when the researchers included vacuum birefringence — a prediction of quantum electrodynamics in which extreme magnetic fields make the quantum vacuum refract different polarizations of light differently — the observations fell naturally into place. The idea goes back to work by Werner Heisenberg and Hans Euler in the 1930s. In modern quantum field theory, even a vacuum contains fluctuating quantum fields, and extreme magnetic fields can alter how photons propagate through them. This is not yet considered a definitive detection. The researchers say more observations and improved simulations are needed to rule out competing explanations. But if confirmed, the result would turn one of the strangest properties of quantum theory into something astronomers can actually observe across the Galaxy. Empty space, apparently, may not be very empty at all. #Physics #QuantumPhysics #Magnetar #Astronomy #QED #Science https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-026-10859-z

💎 Telegram has applied for the .gram domain zone. If the application is approved by ICANN, a billion Telegram users could get their own second-level domains. 🖥 For example, @durov would get durov.gram, and @monk would get monk.gram. Users would be able to set up their interactive websites hosted by Telegram — just by typing one prompt ✨

🌌 Astronomers Found the Remains of a Galaxy the Milky Way Ate 12 Billion Years Ago The Milky Way did not grow up quietly. Astronomers have found strong evidence that our Galaxy swallowed a substantial dwarf galaxy about 12.3 billion years ago — when the Universe was still very young. The merger happened roughly 1.8 billion years before the better-known Gaia–Sausage–Enceladus collision, previously one of the earliest major events firmly traced in the Milky Way’s history. The clue came from globular clusters — ancient, densely packed groups of stars that preserve a kind of archaeological record of the Galaxy. Using extremely precise Hubble Space Telescope measurements, researchers identified a third distinct age-and-metallicity sequence among clusters in the inner Milky Way. That sequence points to a separate progenitor galaxy with a stellar mass of about 500 million Suns. The team named the lost galaxy Low-energy-Kraken-Heracles, or LKH. Most of its stars appear to have been deposited within the inner 6,000 parsecs of the Milky Way, where their original identity has long since been erased by billions of years of mixing. In other words, parts of the night sky above us may be made from the remains of another galaxy that disappeared before Earth existed. Galaxies do not simply form. They assemble themselves by consuming one another. #MilkyWay #Astronomy #Hubble #Galaxies #Cosmology #Science https://www.nature.com/articles/s41550-026-02931-5

🪱 Animals Have Been Eating Nature’s “Bioplastic” for Millions of Years Long before humans invented biodegradable plastics, bacteria were already making their own. Many microorganisms produce compounds called polyhydroxyalkanoates, or PHAs — natural polyester-like materials that they store inside their cells as reserves of carbon and energy. Scientists had long assumed that breaking down these microbial plastics was essentially a job for microorganisms themselves. Then researchers studied a very strange animal: Olavius algarvensis, a tiny marine worm with no mouth and no gut. It survives by hosting bacteria beneath its skin and digesting them for nutrition. Some of those bacteria store as much as 42% of their cellular carbon in PHA. The researchers discovered that the worm produces its own enzyme capable of breaking PHA into smaller molecules it can use. And it is not alone. Related enzymes turned up in more than 66 animal species across nine major animal groups, including sponges, starfish, earthworms and springtails. Laboratory experiments confirmed that enzymes from several distantly related animals really can degrade PHA. The finding reveals a previously overlooked route through which carbon stored by microbes enters animal food webs — and suggests animals may have been consuming nature’s original bioplastics for hundreds of millions of years. Humans invented biodegradable plastic. Evolution apparently invented both the plastic and something to eat it. #Biology #Evolution #Bioplastic #Ecology #Microbiology #Science https://www.nature.com/articles/s41559-026-03153-8

⚛️ Physicists May Have Finally Found Matter Made Mostly of Force For nearly 50 years, physicists have searched for a bizarre particle predicted by quantum chromodynamics: the glueball. Ordinary matter is built from quarks. Gluons are the particles that carry the strong nuclear force and “glue” quarks together inside protons and neutrons. But because gluons also interact with each other, theory predicts that they should be able to bind together — creating a particle with no ordinary valence quarks at its core. Now the BESIII experiment in China says X(2370), a particle first detected in 2011, finally fits the bill. Using a dataset of roughly 10 billion J/ψ particles, researchers have gradually established its mass, spin and parity, unusual decay patterns, and now its flavor-singlet behavior. Taken together, the team argues that these properties are best explained if a pseudoscalar glueball is the dominant component of X(2370). That distinction matters: scientists are not yet claiming X(2370) is a perfectly pure ball of gluons. Quantum particles can mix with other states, and the newest analysis is currently a preprint awaiting peer review. But independent physicists describe it as the strongest glueball evidence produced in decades. If confirmed, it would be an extraordinary demonstration of one of QCD’s strangest predictions: the particles responsible for holding matter together can apparently bind together themselves. Matter made mostly from the force that binds matter. Physics occasionally writes its own headlines. #Physics #ParticlePhysics #QuantumPhysics #QCD #Glueball #Science https://english.ihep.cas.cn/nw/han/y26/202608/t20260804_1186878.html

👁️ Scientists Have Mapped the Wiring Behind Human High-Resolution Vision Researchers have created the first complete cell-by-cell and synapse-level wiring map of the human fovea — the pinhead-sized region of the retina that lets us read, recognize faces and see fine detail in color. The team reconstructed roughly 3,000 neurons and more than 300,000 connections, tracing how signals move through this tiny patch of nervous tissue. What they found was unexpectedly elegant: while much of the retina uses many overlapping pathways, the human fovea funnels visual information through just three major circuits. That streamlined architecture may be one reason human central vision is so precise. The researchers describe it as more like an expressway than a maze of side streets — sacrificing redundancy for speed and efficiency. The fovea is technically part of the central nervous system, which makes this the first complete connectivity map of a human CNS structure at this level of detail. Beyond basic neuroscience, the map could become a reference for treatments aimed at retinal diseases that destroy central vision. We often talk about the brain as the organ that “sees.” But the first stage of high-resolution vision may already be doing far more sophisticated processing than we realized. #Neuroscience #Vision #HumanBrain #Retina #Connectome #Science https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2603286123

🔴 A Rock From Mars Just Filled a 2-Billion-Year Hole in the Planet’s History Scientists have dated an unusual Martian meteorite to 1.273 billion years old — placing it almost exactly inside a huge missing chapter in our geological record of Mars. The meteorite, called NWA 13441, was discovered in Algeria in 2019. Most Martian volcanic meteorites of its type are either younger than about 600 million years or around 2.4 billion years old. Until now, researchers had essentially no samples from the enormous interval between them. But its age may not even be the strangest part. The rock’s neodymium isotopes suggest that the magma it formed from came from a portion of the Martian mantle that had remained remarkably untouched since the earliest days of the Solar System. Mars formed very quickly and, unlike Earth, has no active plate tectonics constantly remixing its interior — potentially allowing ancient chemical reservoirs to survive for billions of years. In other words, a small rock blasted off Mars by an impact and eventually found in the Sahara may contain a chemical fingerprint preserved from almost the beginning of the planet itself. How much of Mars’s earliest history could still be locked inside rocks already lying somewhere on Earth? #Mars #Space #Meteorite #PlanetaryScience #Geology #Science https://doi.org/10.1016/j.gca.2026.06.035

🛰 We May Be Building Satellite Constellations Too Large for Earth’s Orbit A new analysis suggests that some satellite megaconstellations could cross a dangerous threshold where collisions create debris faster than Earth’s atmosphere can remove it — potentially triggering a runaway increase in space junk. The study introduces the idea of a “critical size” for a satellite constellation. Above that point, even if individual satellites follow good disposal practices and actively avoid collisions, the constellation as a whole may still generate an unstable debris environment. The model found that several planned, partially deployed and existing constellations exceed that threshold under some assumptions. The scale of what is being proposed is enormous. The paper notes that the number of active satellites in low-Earth orbit increased by nearly 12,000 in just five years, while applications submitted to the U.S. FCC in 2026 included proposed constellations totaling more than 1.2 million satellites. That would be over 78 times the current operational satellite population cited by the study. The feared endpoint is related to the Kessler syndrome: one collision produces fragments, those fragments cause more collisions, and eventually parts of low-Earth orbit become increasingly difficult to use safely. The important caveat: this is a modelling study and currently a preprint, not peer-reviewed research. It does not predict that a catastrophic debris cascade is about to happen tomorrow. But it raises a bigger question: should regulators evaluate satellites one by one — or the cumulative risk of entire constellations? Space may be enormous. Useful orbit around Earth is not. #Space #Satellites #SpaceDebris #Astronomy #SpaceTech #Science https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.29644

📡 6G May Be Able to Detect People Through Walls — And Privacy Experts Are Alarmed The next generation of mobile networks won’t just transmit data. Under development for the 2030s, 6G is expected to integrate Integrated Sensing and Communication (ISAC) — a technology that combines wireless communications with radar-like sensing. According to Germany’s Data Protection Conference (Datenschutzkonferenz), ISAC could allow networks to detect people through walls and remotely measure breathing and heart rate. Combined with machine learning, the system may also identify individuals by analyzing their gait, gestures, posture, and even facial movements. The privacy concern is obvious: anyone within the network’s coverage could potentially be sensed, making meaningful user consent nearly impossible. Researchers at the Barkhausen Institut in Dresden are already working on countermeasures. Their proposed solutions include a hardware switch to disable sensing functions on compatible devices and a mobile app capable of detecting when surrounding space is being scanned. The concepts are expected to be presented at an international expert meeting in September 2026. Germany has invested around €700 million into 6G research, with commercial deployment widely expected around 2030. Source: https://www.datenschutzkonferenz-online.de/ and https://www.barkhauseninstitut.org #6G #ISAC #Privacy #Wireless #Technology #Science

🔭 NASA Discovers a “Wandering” Supermassive Black Hole Devouring a Star Far from Any Galactic Center Astronomers have observed something never before seen in optical light: a supermassive black hole tearing apart a star more than 30,000 light-years from the center of its host galaxy — far from where such giants are normally found. The event, designated TDE 2025abcr, was first detected in November 2025 by the Zwicky Transient Facility. An AI algorithm scanning roughly 500,000 transient events every night flagged an unusual flare despite its highly unexpected location in the outskirts of a galaxy. At its peak, the flare shone with the luminosity of roughly 10 billion Suns, briefly outshining its host galaxy in ultraviolet light. Follow-up observations with NASA’s Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory showed that the culprit is a black hole with a mass of about one million Suns, feeding on a star that wandered too close. So how did such a massive black hole end up so far from the galactic center? Astronomers propose two leading explanations: • it was gravitationally ejected during a past merger involving multiple supermassive black holes; • or it originally belonged to a dwarf galaxy that is still merging with the larger host galaxy. The discovery demonstrates a new way to find these otherwise invisible wandering supermassive black holes. With the Vera C. Rubin Observatory beginning operations and NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope on the horizon, astronomers expect to uncover many more—revealing how common these cosmic wanderers really are and providing new clues about the violent merger history of galaxies. Sources: NASA: https://science.nasa.gov/missions/swift/nasas-swift-sees-wandering-mega-black-hole-shredding-star/ The Astrophysical Journal Letters: https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/2041-8213/ae77f3 #Astronomy #BlackHoles #NASA #Astrophysics #SpaceScience

🔭 The Largest Eye on Earth Is Rising Above the Atacama At an altitude of 3,046 metres on Cerro Armazones in Chile’s Atacama Desert, engineers are building the most powerful optical telescope ever attempted: ESO’s Extremely Large Telescope, or ELT. Its primary mirror will span an astonishing 39 metres — far too large to manufacture as a single piece. Instead, it will function as one perfectly synchronised surface made from 798 hexagonal segments, each about 1.45 metres across. The ELT will collect roughly 100 million times more light than the human eye and more than all existing 8–10-metre-class telescopes combined, observing the Universe in visible and infrared light. (ELT) But size is only part of the story. Earth’s turbulent atmosphere makes stars twinkle — beautiful to us, disastrous for precision astronomy. The ELT’s 2.4-metre adaptive mirror, M4, will be controlled by more than 5,000 actuators, reshaping its surface as often as 1,000 times per second to cancel atmospheric distortion and vibrations almost in real time. (ELT) The result could transform the search for life beyond Earth. The ELT will directly image some exoplanets, including potentially rocky worlds in nearby habitable zones, and examine their atmospheres for molecules such as water, methane, carbon dioxide and even oxygen. (ELT) First test observations are currently planned for March 2029, followed by the first scientific observations in December 2030. (ELT) What will it see first: an Earth-like world, the earliest galaxies — or something astronomers have not yet imagined? #Astronomy #Space #ELT #Exoplanets #Science #Atacama

🧠 An Ordinary Laptop Just Solved a Quantum Problem That Challenged a Quantum Computer Last year, researchers using D-Wave’s quantum annealer argued that a particularly difficult quantum simulation was beyond the reach of classical computers. Now physicists at the Flatiron Institute have shown otherwise. Using tensor networks together with belief propagation—an algorithm first developed in the 1980s—they reproduced the same results using classical hardware, with some of the calculations running on a personal laptop. The challenge involved simulating hundreds of interacting qubits arranged in complex 2D and 3D lattices. Instead of storing the impossibly large quantum wave function directly, the researchers compressed it into a far more efficient mathematical representation. The work doesn’t diminish quantum computing. Instead, it raises the bar for what counts as quantum advantage. Every breakthrough in classical algorithms forces quantum hardware to tackle even harder problems—and advances in quantum computing continue to inspire smarter classical methods in return. 📄 Paper (Science): https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adu9960 Preprint: https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.01466 #QuantumComputing #Physics #TensorNetworks #Science

👁️ Your Eyes May Have Evolved From an Ancient “Cyclops” Organ Every vertebrate eye — including yours — may trace its origins to a single light-sensitive organ that sat in the middle of the head of a distant ancestor nearly 600 million years ago. In a new Current Biology study, researchers from Lund University and the University of Sussex propose that an early worm-like ancestor lost its paired eyes after adopting a sedentary lifestyle. What remained was a simple median light-sensitive organ. Millions of years later, as its descendants became active swimmers, evolution may have repurposed this central organ to form the paired retinas of vertebrates. The same ancestral system also appears to have given rise to the pineal gland, which today regulates our circadian rhythms and melatonin production. If correct, this model could explain why vertebrate eyes are fundamentally different from those of insects and squid — and why the systems controlling vision and sleep may share a common evolutionary origin. One important caveat: this is an evolutionary reconstruction, supported by anatomy, developmental biology, and neuroscience, rather than the discovery of a fossil “cyclops.” 📄 Paper: https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(25)01676-8 #Evolution #Biology #Vision #Neuroscience #Science