Science

Research found that participants who were expert bird watchers showed "differences in both brain structure and brain activity."

Columnist Philip Ball thinks the phenomenon of decoherence might finally bridge the quantum-classical divide.

DENVER—The US Air Force’s new Sentinel intercontinental ballistic missile is on track for its first test flight next year, military officials reaffirmed this week.

But no one is ready to say when hundreds of new missile silos, dug from the windswept Great Plains, will be finished, how much they cost, or, for that matter, how many nuclear warheads each Sentinel missile could actually carry.

The LGM-35A Sentinel will replace the Air Force’s Minuteman III fleet, in service since 1970, with the first of the new missiles due to become operational in the early 2030s. But it will take longer than that to build and activate the full complement of Sentinel missiles and the 450 hardened underground silos to house them.

Amid the massive undertaking of developing a new ICBM, defense officials are keeping their options open for the missile’s payload unit. Until February 5, the Air Force was barred from fitting ballistic missiles with Multiple Independently targetable Reentry Vehicles (MIRVs) under the constraints of the New START nuclear arms control treaty cinched by the US and Russia in 2010. The treaty expired three weeks ago, opening up the possibility of packaging each Sentinel missile with multiple warheads, not just one.

It's weird to see Eric Berger's byline in The Guardian instead of Ars ...

Scientists have captured a beautiful image in unprecedented detail of the vast Milky Way galaxy, of which our own solar system is a part.

The stunning image is the largest ever obtained by the specialist telescope in Chile called the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (Alma) radio telescope, according to the group behind the project.

The picture not only serves to stir the public imagination of outer space but is also incredibly important for understanding our own origins as a planet, said Steven Longmore, the principal investigator and a professor of astrophysics at Liverpool John Moores University.

“The conditions at the center of our galaxy – the extreme temperatures, pressures, and turbulence – are very similar to the conditions in galaxies in the early universe, when most of the stars that exist today were being formed. Those galaxies are so far away that we cannot observe individual stars and planets forming within them, but we can in the center of our galaxy, and that’s what our survey has been able to do,” Longmore said. He has worked with more than 160 scientists over several years on a project called the Alma CMZ Exploration Survey.

I hate heds like that, but in trying to rework it, I realized anything short enough to fit the space (figuratively) would not adequately convey the story.

Plenty of research has amassed on the benefits of applying biochar to soil to lock in carbon. Now, an unusual new study looks at a novel way to get it there: feed biochar to cows, it says, and they’ll do the work for you.

The new research finds that when cows consume and excrete biochar, it remains almost completely intact and stable, suggesting that cows could spread biochar across the land and become architects of better soil health while tackling their own climate impacts.

Led by a team of Swiss researchers, the study took a group of eight dairy cows and fed them a diet containing trace amounts of biochar, about 1%. The feeding trial had two periods of 35 days each. In one, half the cows received the biochar additive, and the other half did not. In the second, the researchers switched the two groups of cows, so that each cow ultimately acted as its own control.

While lifesaving vaccines face a relentless onslaught from the Trump administration—with fervent anti-vaccine advocate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. leading the charge—scientific literature is building a wondrous story: A vaccine appears to prevent dementia, including Alzheimer’s, and may even slow biological aging.

For years, study after study has noted that older adults vaccinated against shingles seemed to have a lower risk of dementia. A study last month suggested the same vaccine appears to slow biological aging, including lowering markers of inflammation.

“Our study adds to a growing body of work suggesting that vaccines may play a role in healthy aging strategies beyond solely preventing acute illness,” study author Eileen Crimmins, of the University of Southern California, said.

Another study this month suggested the positive findings against dementia from the past may even be underestimates of the vaccination’s potential, with a newer vaccine against shingles providing even more protection.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration is reportedly mulling whether more prescription drugs should be sold over the counter (OTC) at pharmacies. In an interview on Wednesday, FDA commissioner Martin Makary told CNBC that “everything should be over the counter” except drugs that are deemed unsafe or addictive or that require clinical monitoring.

Makary said the agency is reviewing how it decides which drugs can be sold with or without a prescription from a health care practitioner. He suggested prescription vaginal estrogen or antinausea medications, for example, could become OTC.

It’s unclear exactly how the FDA is reviewing the rules around OTC drugs or what the timing will be, but in the same interview, Makary said the agency is going through “the proper regulatory processes.”

In June 2025, a year-long investigation exposed an illegal trade smuggling timber from protected areas in the Congolese rainforest into neighbouring Burundi.

Award-winning Burundian journalist Arthur Bizimana and his collaborator Martin Leku, from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, risked their safety by travelling deep into the rainforest — the world’s second-largest — to gather material for their exclusive story on the impact on this crucial carbon sink.

Their assignment was financially supported by InfoNile, a journalism network focusing on cross-border investigations in the Nile Basin, and Global Forest Watch, a data platform funded by the United Nations Environment Programme and the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), among others. It’s the kind of in-depth investigative work that far exceeds the reporting budgets of most research news publications, such as Nature or Science — and that attracts little attention from large media organizations and newspapers. Often, such reporting is made possible only because of grants given to journalists by private philanthropies or government donors.

But with these grants drying up as philanthropic donors tighten their purse strings in the wake of US-led cuts to international development and health budgets, the ability of journalists such as Bizimana and Leku to hold power to account is diminishing.

Marius Dragomir, a Romanian journalist and director of the Media and Journalism Research Center in Tallinn, a think tank and global research hub he founded in 2022, describes the funding threats to science journalism as “a disaster”. He adds: “If you look at the geopolitical situation today, I think science is critical.” There is a need for balanced reporting of science-related topics, but “a lot of that coverage is disappearing” at the exact moment it’s needed, he explains.

One of the oldest known pieces of art on the planet is a figurine of a mammoth that was carved in ivory by a Stone Age artisan some 40,000 years ago. Found in what is now Germany, it is marked with crosses and dots. The meaning of these markings is a mystery—but a new analysis of the object and hundreds of others found in the same region reveal that the markings may have meant something specific to their ancient creators.

Researchers analyzed more than 3,000 markings on 260 objects, including the mammoth, that were found in caves in Germany. They determined that the markings’ patterns are as statistically complex as protocuneiform, an early form of writing that was found on tablets from ancient Mesopotamia that were dated to around 3,500 B.C.E.

cross-posted from: https://ibbit.at/post/182620

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In 2023, I wrote for STAT about GLP-1 shortages leading to treatment delays, interruptions, and difficult decisions about who “deserved” to get these precious medications. I struggled in particular with the ethical dilemma of robbing Peter to pay Paul: prescribing GLP-1s that are specifically approved for type 2 diabetes to people without diabetes for weight loss.

Today, my most troubling clinical dilemma is ironically due to excess GLP-1s: I’m trying to slow down runaway trains, and even spot them before they leave the station. By this I mean people who seek to reach an unhealthy and likely unsustainable body weight.

Everyone eventually reaches a weight loss plateau at the maximum tolerated dose of GLP-1 treatment. And I have had very few people tell me that the plateau weight is their Goldilocks weight. It’s not uncommon for people to become so fixated on seeing a certain number on the scale that they lose sight of having made tremendous improvements in their overall health. Almost everyone wants more weight loss, and I am learning in real time how to best support patients who have reached a weight loss plateau at a weight that is higher than they hoped at the start of treatment. I feel like I’m asking someone who trained for a marathon to feel satisfied after completing 10 kilometers.

An hour before dawn, in a nameless rock pile in the world’s largest hot desert, Djimet Guemona clambered up a narrow gully. The route was hemmed by high walls, where uncountable centuries of weathering had cinched the sandstone into a rumpled, reptilian skin. From its base, the outcropping had looked like any one of the numerous rock formations, or hoodoos, in the northwest corner of the Ennedi Natural and Cultural Reserve, in eastern Chad.

But this one, Guemona assured me, contained a special treasure. Though the formation’s interior was labyrinthine, the archaeologist moved swiftly, ignoring the GPS coordinates stored on his phone. He had the location committed to memory.

Rounding a scarp, Guemona stopped in front of a rare expanse of vertical plane where the rock ran smooth. Under torchlight, I could see that hundreds of figures had been carved into its surface. There were ostriches with lollipop heads beside stick-legged giraffes, their necks comically exaggerated. Human forms stood among this crowded bestiary, and beneath them all, in palimpsest, were larger etchings of elephants, older and more deeply inscribed.

“When I found it, I yelled with excitement,” Guemona told me, casting his headlamp left and right so that the shapes appeared to dance across the rock face. These were prehistoric etchings that hadn’t been mentioned in any of the colonial literature he’d studied. Nor had Guemona received any rumor of their existence from the herders whom he often canvassed for information. Whoever carved them inhabited a deeper past, perhaps 10,000 years ago, when the creatures they depict­ed could still be found throughout North Africa. These images were ghosts from a time when the Sahara was green.

In April 2025, less than three months after Donald Trump returned to the White House, the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) put out its latest public health alert on so-called “superbugs”, strains of bacteria resistant to antibiotics.

These drug-resistant germs, the CDC warned, are responsible for more than 3m infections in the US each year, claiming the lives of up to 48,000 Americans.

Globally, the largely untreatable pathogens contribute annually to almost 5m deaths, and health experts fear that unless urgent steps are taken they could become a leading killer, surpassing even cancer, by 2050.

“We’re in a war against bacteria,” said Ian Morgan, a postdoctoral fellow at the US National Institutes of Health (NIH), the world’s largest funder of biomedical research. He is on the frontlines of that war against superbugs; the NIH lab in which he works is driving what he described as “high-risk, high-reward research”.

But over the past year, the battlefield has toughened. Under the Trump administration, Morgan, 33, and thousands of other young American scientists like him have grappled with wave after wave of disruptions.

Billions of dollars have been wiped from research budgets, almost 8,000 grants have been cancelled at NIH and the US National Science Foundation alone, and more than 1,000 NIH employees have been fired.

Heating accounts for nearly half of the global energy demand, and two-thirds of that is met by burning fossil fuels like natural gas, oil, and coal. Solar energy is a possible alternative, but while we have become reasonably good at storing solar electricity in lithium-ion batteries, we’re not nearly as good at storing heat.

To store heat for days, weeks, or months, you need to trap the energy in the bonds of a molecule that can later release heat on demand. The approach to this particular chemistry problem is called molecular solar thermal (MOST) energy storage. While it has been the next big thing for decades, it never really took off.

In a recent Science paper, a team of researchers from the University of California, Santa Barbara, and UCLA demonstrate a breakthrough that might finally make MOST energy storage effective.

In the past, MOST energy storage solutions have been plagued by lackluster performance. The molecules either didn’t store enough energy, degraded too quickly, or required toxic solvents that made them impractical. To find a way around these issues, the team led by Han P. Nguyen, a chemist at the University of California, Santa Barbara, drew inspiration from the genetic damage caused by sunburn. The idea was to store energy using a reaction similar to the one that allows UV light to damage DNA.

On average, single adults in the U.S. report they have fallen in passionate love twice in their life so far, according to a new survey. And 14 percent of the 10,036 respondents said they had never fallen in passionate love at all.

The results highlight the diversity of people’s experiences with love, says the study’s lead author Amanda Gesselman, a psychologist at Indiana University’s Kinsey Institute. “There's a lot more variation than we really know about,” she says.

Stories of passionate love are everywhere—in movies, books and the narratives we tell ourselves about what it means to live a fulfilling life. These stories often “really center the experience of passion and talk about how universal this is and how everyone feels it,” Gesselman says. Despite this, researchers have relatively little data about how common the experience is across the population.

Gesselman and her team analyzed data from 2022 and 2023 studies of singles in the U.S. Respondents between 18 and 99 years old were asked to report how many times during their life so far they had experienced passionate love. The average was 2.05 times across the whole sample and increased slightly with participants’ age.

Cool, so at twice, I'm disturbingly average.

The World Health Organization on Friday released a formal statement blasting a US-funded vaccine trial as “unethical,” because it would withhold an established, safe, and potentially lifesaving vaccine against hepatitis B from some newborns in Guinea-Bissau, Africa.

“In its current form, and based on publicly available information, the trial is inconsistent with established ethical and scientific principles,” the WHO concluded, after providing a bullet-point list of reasons the trial was harmful and low quality.

The trial has drawn widespread condemnation from health experts since notice of the US funding was published in the Federal Register in December. The notice revealed that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention—under anti-vaccine Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.—had awarded $1.6 million to Danish researchers for their non-competitive, unsolicited proposal to conduct the trial.

The Danish researchers are led by Christine Stabell Benn and her husband Peter Aaby of the Bandim Health Project, which is based at the University of Southern Denmark in Copenhagen. Benn and her colleagues have long been controversial for their questionable practices in research into alleged vaccine safety concerns. Kennedy has cited their work in his decision to cut global vaccine funding.

I was originally made aware of this article by a 404 Media newsletter. It's pretty interesting, largely confirms what has already been known so far, but also gives some fresh knowledge, like how nutrients from insects might not be quite as available, even if they technically have a very similar macronutrient profile to meats. That's because the present chitin reduces the bioavailability to a certain degree.

CONCLUSION Edible insects represent a promising complementary protein source capable of contributing to the growing global demand for sustainable and nutritionally adequate foods. They provide high-quality protein and relevant amounts of macronutrients and micronutrients, often comparable to or exceeding those of conventional animal-derived foods, while offering clear environ- mental advantages. Nevertheless, their integration into human diets requires a cautious and evidence-based approach. Current limitations include substantial variability related to insect species, developmental stage, rearing substrate and processing methods, as well as methodological heterogeneity in the assessment of pro- tein content, digestibility and bioavailability. Inconsistencies in analytical approaches, particularly regarding digestibility proto- cols and the handling of chitin-derived nitrogen, hamper compa- rability across studies and may bias protein-quality indices such as PDCAAS and DIAAS. Moreover, most evidence supporting biological activities (e.g., antioxidant, anti-inflammatory and cyto- toxic effects) is derived from in vitro and animal models, while human data remain limited to small, short-term studies and are insufficient to substantiate health or clinical claims. Food safety concerns, including allergenic cross-reactivity, microbial contami- nation and chemical residues, together with regulatory heteroge- neity and persistent barriers to consumer acceptance, further constrain large-scale application. To support responsible uptake, regulatory authorities and industry stakeholders should prioritize the harmonization of guidelines for rearing substrates, hygienic production, analytical methods and labeling, including clear allergen disclosure. The implementation of robust quality- management systems (good manufacturing practices (GMPs)/ HACCPs), validated processing protocols and transparent com- munication regarding origin, processing and safety is essential to build consumer trust and enable the sustainable incorporation of insect-based ingredients into food systems.

Sitting in his family’s living room in New York City, 14-year-old Miles Wu was astonished to find that a simple piece of paper, folded into a Miura-ori origami pattern, could hold 10,000 times its own weight. For a total of more than 250 hours, Wu had diligently designed, folded and tested copious variations of the technique—a series of tessellating parallelograms that can fold or unfold in one fell swoop—to find one that could be used to build deployable shelters for emergency situations like natural disasters.

“I was really shocked by how much [weight] these simple pieces of paper could hold,” says Wu, who’s currently a ninth-grade student at Hunter College High School in New York City.

Wu had always been fascinated with the ancient Japanese art of origami, but he really began indulging in it as a hobby about six years ago. In 2024, he started exploring paper folding beyond its appeal as a creative pursuit. “I started reading about how different types of geometric origami were being studied and applied in STEM for their various physical properties,” he says.

The teenager was researching the Miura-ori fold when Hurricane Helene made landfall in Florida and wildfires raged in Southern California. “I thought maybe these origami patterns, which are strong and collapsible, could be used as emergency shelters in these natural disasters—kind of like a tent,” he explains.

Wu noticed that existing structures were sturdy, easy to deploy or cost-efficient, but rarely all three. “This creates a problem during emergency situations, such as hurricanes or wildfires, as deployable shelters ideally need to be produced quickly, set up easily, and able to withstand the elements,” he says.

The big bang wasn’t a bang in the traditional sense—but it was nonetheless the start of important things: for one, space; another, time. Thirdly, it began the conditions and processes that eventually resulted in us humans, who can sit here and wonder about space and time. The big bang was, effectively, the beginning of the universe. According to the logic of human brains, it seems like there must have been something before the big bang, even if “before” is the wrong word because there was no time until after.

The good news for us is that physicists do have ways of thinking about—and even empirically studying—the origins of the origin of the universe. Counterintuitive and impossible as it may seem, cosmologists are even making progress in determining which wild ideas might peel back the veil on that early era, even though it remains inaccessible to telescopes.

Even after cosmology became a hard science, the field was a bit sketchy, Ismael says. “The science was one-and-a-half facts,” she adds. The sentiment, she says, is usually attributed to physicist James Jeans. But that has changed in the past century or so as the philosophers’ musings have wandered into the realm of theory, experiment and data. “These old conceptual questions are arising in ways that have new angles, a new spin and a new framework,” Ismael continues.

It’s unclear whether science as a discipline—and scientists as people—will ever be able to answer some questions definitively. After all, no one can “see” before the big bang, and no one will ever be able to—at least not directly. But the current and future universe, researchers are learning, may contain clues about the distant past.