Daily Science to all

The brain of a dead male fruit fly was connected to a ROBOT — giving the fly a new body and allowing it to move freely through our world again. The fly’s neural activity is translated into commands for motors that control the robot’s legs. So, in a sense, the fly is… alive again. “Black Mirror” was a documentary. @science

🧬 Life Uses 4 DNA Letters. Scientists Just Made 8 Work. Every known organism on Earth writes its genetic instructions using the same four DNA letters: A, T, C and G. Scientists have now shown that one of biology’s most fundamental molecular machines can read an alphabet containing eight. Researchers tested E. coli RNA polymerase — the enzyme that reads DNA and turns its information into RNA — with synthetic DNA containing four additional chemical letters known as P, Z, B and S. Remarkably, the enzyme successfully recognized and transcribed the artificial base pairs using much of the same molecular machinery it employs for natural DNA. Using cryo-electron microscopy at resolutions down to about 2.4 ångströms, the team could watch how the synthetic letters fit inside the polymerase. The artificial pairs adopted almost the same geometry as ordinary Watson–Crick DNA pairs, allowing the enzyme’s catalytic machinery to close around them and continue transcription. Researchers also engineered a modified version of one synthetic letter to reduce copying errors. The implications are potentially enormous. A larger genetic alphabet could eventually produce RNA molecules with chemical capabilities unavailable to natural biology and might help scientists design new diagnostics, drugs and engineered biological systems. Expanded genetic alphabets have already been used experimentally to create molecules that recognize cancer cells. But there is an important boundary: scientists have not created an eight-letter living organism here. The experiment demonstrates transcription by bacterial RNA polymerase; reliably replicating a full eight-letter genome and translating that expanded information into proteins inside living cells remain much harder problems. For four billion years, life on Earth has been writing with four letters. Apparently, biology’s machinery can read a bigger alphabet than evolution ever gave it. #Genetics #DNA #SyntheticBiology #Biotechnology #RNA #Science Primary paper — Nature Communications⁠

🌍 The US Was the Only Country to Vote Against the UN's New World Map On Friday, the UN voted to adopt the Equal Earth map projection. 164 member states voted in favour of the resolution to change the map, 6 abstained — and only the United States voted against. ⚡️ The breakthrough in a nutshell: The Equal Earth projection aims to "provide a fair representation of the real sizes of the world's regions, in particular Africa." 🔬 Key findings: • The world — including Google Maps — still mostly uses the Mercator projection, created in 1569. • Mercator is great for navigation: north–south lines keep constant true bearings relative to the equator. But it distorts country sizes: regions farther from the equator look disproportionately bigger than those closer to it. • On a Mercator map, Greenland looks about the size of Africa. In reality, Africa is roughly 14 times larger than Greenland. Equal Earth is designed to fix that. 💼 Why it matters: Critics of the most popular projection have long noted it isn't abandoned partly because it "enlarges and centres" Europe and North America. The UN resolution states that "the Mercator projection, due to its distortion, perpetuates an unbalanced representation of the world." The first image shows the Equal Earth projection; the second shows the Mercator projection. #Maps #Cartography #Geography #UN #Science @science

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🧠 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

🧬 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

🪱 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

👁️ 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

👁️ 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

📊 The U-Curve of Happiness: Why Life Often Gets Better After 50 For decades, the “midlife crisis” was dismissed as little more than a cultural stereotype. But large-scale research suggests it reflects a real statistical pattern. Economist David Blanchflower (Dartmouth College) analyzed well-being data from 145 countries, controlling for income, education, employment, and marital status. Published in the Journal of Population Economics (2021), the study found a remarkably consistent U-shaped relationship between age and life satisfaction. Finding Detail 🌍 Scope 145 countries across Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Americas 📉 Lowest point Life satisfaction typically reaches its minimum in the late 40s (around age 47 in developed countries) 📈 Recovery Happiness generally rises again through the 50s and 60s, often returning to — or even exceeding — earlier levels 🔁 Consistency The U-shaped pattern appears across a wide range of cultures and economies, although its strength varies ⚖️ Controls Results remain after accounting for income, education, marital status, and employment Why might this happen? Several explanations have been proposed: • During midlife, expectations often collide with reality as career growth slows and responsibilities peak — raising children, caring for aging parents, and managing financial pressures. • Later in life, many people experience fewer competing demands, adjust their expectations, and become more emotionally resilient. • Neuroscience may offer part of the explanation as well. Separate studies suggest that older adults tend to respond less strongly to negative experiences and naturally focus more on positive ones — although this was not the primary focus of Blanchflower’s research. One important caveat: this is a population-level trend, not a prediction for any individual. Physical health, close relationships, financial security, and life events remain far more important determinants of happiness than age itself. Blanchflower’s analysis suggests that the U-shaped pattern of well-being is surprisingly widespread across countries, although its exact shape varies between populations. 📄 Source: Blanchflower D.G. Is happiness U-shaped everywhere? Age and subjective well-being in 145 countries. Journal of Population Economics (2021). DOI: 10.1007/s00148-020-00797-z #Psychology #Happiness #WellBeing #Science #Aging

🦷 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