Science

Stephen Hawking, a British physicist and arguably the most famous man suffering from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), communicated with the world using a sensor installed in his glasses. That sensor used tiny movements of a single muscle in his cheek to select characters on a screen. Once he typed a full sentence at a rate of roughly one word per minute, the text was synthesized into speech by a DECtalk TC01 synthesizer, which gave him his iconic, robotic voice.

But a lot has changed since Hawking died in 2018. Recent brain-computer-interface (BCI) devices have made it possible to translate neural activity directly into text and even speech. Unfortunately, these systems had significant latency, often limiting the user to a predefined vocabulary, and they did not handle nuances of spoken language like pitch or prosody. Now, a team of scientists at the University of California, Davis has built a neural prosthesis that can instantly translate brain signals into sounds—phonemes and words. It may be the first real step we have taken toward a fully digital vocal tract.

Some interesting developments here that definitely seem to advance the state of the art.

The U.S. Department of Defense will no longer provide satellite weather data, leaving hurricane forecasters without crucial information about storms as peak hurricane season looms in the Atlantic.

For more than 40 years, the Defense Department has operated satellites that collect information about conditions in the atmosphere and ocean. A group within the Navy, called the Fleet Numerical Meteorology and Oceanography Center, processes the raw data from the satellites, and turns it over to scientists and weather forecasters who use it for a wide range of purposes including real-time hurricane forecasting and measuring sea ice in polar regions.

This week, the Department of Defense announced that it would no longer provide that data, according to a notice published by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, NOAA.

Well, that's just great at the start of hurricane season.

More Info About Open Access.

First off, that hed is terrible. And this could have gone in either Food and Drink or Environment; for that reason, I'm splitting the baby and putting it here, as the "this" referenced is still in research phases.

Inside an anonymous building in Oxford, Riley Jackson is frying a steak. The perfectly red fillet cut sizzles in the pan, its juices releasing a meaty aroma. But this is no ordinary steak. It was grown in the lab next door.

What's strangest of all is just how real it looks. The texture, when cut, is indistinguishable from the real thing.

"That's our goal," says Ms Jackson of Ivy Farm Technologies, the food tech start-up that created it. "We want it to be as close to a normal steak as possible."

Lab-grown meat is already sold in many parts of the world and in a couple of years, pending being granted regulatory approval, it could also be sold in the UK too - in burgers, pies and sausages.

The elephant in the room is the reporter got to see it and smell it being cooked, but because of the lack of approval, couldn't speak to the taste.

Bacteria can be used to turn plastic waste into painkillers, researchers have found, opening up the possibility of a more sustainable process for producing the drugs.

Chemists have discovered E coli can be used to create paracetamol, also known as acetaminophen, from a material produced in the laboratory from plastic bottles.

“People don’t realise that paracetamol comes from oil currently,” said Prof Stephen Wallace, the lead author of the research from the University of Edinburgh. “What this technology shows is that by merging chemistry and biology in this way for the first time, we can make paracetamol more sustainably and clean up plastic waste from the environment at the same time.”

The publication of AviList today means that, for the first time ever, there is a unified global checklist of all bird species found on planet Earth.

AviList is a brand-new, complete global checklist of species and taxonomy. Containing 11,131 species, 19,879 subspecies, 2,376 genera, 252 families and 46 orders, it brings together the latest global thinking on what constitutes a species and shakes up our understanding of the avian world.

Until now, ornithologists, conservationists and birders have used a selection of global checklists, each with its own reasoning on what constitutes a specific species of bird. AviList’s unified view has been developed by the Working Group on Avian Checklists, containing representatives from BirdLife International, the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, the American Ornithological Society, the International Ornithologists’ Union IOU) and Avibase. The new checklist will replace the International Ornithological Congress and Clements lists, and will be updated annually.

Newswise — Cambridge, MA— A new landmark study has pinpointed the location of the Universe's "missing" matter, and detected the most distant fast radio burst (FRB) on record. Using FRBs as a guide, astronomers at the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian (CfA) and Caltech have shown that more than three-quarters of the Universe's ordinary matter has been hiding in the thin gas between galaxies, marking a major step forward in understanding how matter interacts and behaves in the Universe. They’ve used the new data to make the first detailed measurement of ordinary matter distribution across the cosmic web.

"The decades-old 'missing baryon problem' was never about whether the matter existed," said Liam Connor, CfA astronomer and lead author of the new study. "It was always: Where is it? Now, thanks to FRBs, we know: three-quarters of it is floating between galaxies in the cosmic web." In other words, scientists now know the home address of the “missing” matter.

And this is just the beginning for FRB cosmology. "We're entering a golden age," said Ravi, who also serves as the co-PI of Caltech’s Deep Synoptic Array-110 (DSA-110). "Next-generation radio telescopes like the DSA-2000 and the Canadian Hydrogen Observatory and Radio-transient Detector will detect thousands of FRBs, allowing us to map the cosmic web in incredible detail."

The study is published today in Nature Astronomy.

Direct link to the image in the browser: https://cosmos2025.iap.fr/fitsmap/?ra=150.1203188&dec=2.1880050&zoom=2

Article copied:

In the name of open science, the multinational scientific collaboration COSMOS on Thursday has released the data behind the largest map of the universe. Called the COSMOS-Web field, the project, with data collected by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), consists of all the imaging and a catalog of nearly 800,000 galaxies spanning nearly all of cosmic time. And it’s been challenging existing notions of the infant universe.

“Our goal was to construct this deep field of space on a physical scale that far exceeded anything that had been done before,” said UC Santa Barbara physics professor Caitlin Casey, who co-leads the COSMOS collaboration with Jeyhan Kartaltepe of the Rochester Institute of Technology. “If you had a printout of the Hubble Ultra Deep Field on a standard piece of paper,” she said, referring to the iconic view of nearly 10,000 galaxies released by NASA in 2004, “our image would be slightly larger than a 13-foot by 13-foot-wide mural, at the same depth. So it’s really strikingly large.” An animated zoom-out from the center of the COSMOS-Web field to a full-size comparison between COSMOS-Web and the Hubble Ultra Deep Field

The COSMOS-Web composite image reaches back about 13.5 billion years; according to NASA, the universe is about 13.8 billion years old, give or take one hundred million years. That covers about 98% of all cosmic time. The objective for the researchers was not just to see some of the most interesting galaxies at the beginning of time but also to see the wider view of cosmic environments that existed during the early universe, during the formation of the first stars, galaxies and black holes.

“The cosmos is organized in dense regions and voids,” Casey explained. “And we wanted to go beyond finding the most distant galaxies; we wanted to get that broader context of where they lived.” A 'big surprise'

And what a cosmic neighborhood it turned out to be. Before JWST turned on, Casey said, she and fellow astronomers made their best predictions about how many more galaxies the space telescope would be able to see, given its 6.5 meter (21 foot) diameter light-collecting primary mirror, about six times larger than Hubble’s 2.4 meter (7 foot, 10 in) diameter mirror. The best measurements from Hubble suggested that galaxies within the first 500 million years would be incredibly rare, she said.

“It makes sense — the Big Bang happens and things take time to gravitationally collapse and form, and for stars to turn on. There’s a timescale associated with that,” Casey explained. “And the big surprise is that with JWST, we see roughly 10 times more galaxies than expected at these incredible distances. We’re also seeing supermassive black holes that are not even visible with Hubble.” And they’re not just seeing more, they’re seeing different types of galaxies and black holes, she added.

“Since the telescope turned on we’ve been wondering ‘Are these JWST datasets breaking the cosmological model? Because the universe was producing too much light too early; it had only about 400 million years to form something like a billion solar masses of stars. We just do not know how to make that happen." 

'Lots of unanswered questions'

While the COSMOS-Web images and catalog answer many questions astronomers have had about the early universe, they also spark more questions.

“Since the telescope turned on we’ve been wondering ‘Are these JWST datasets breaking the cosmological model? Because the universe was producing too much light too early; it had only about 400 million years to form something like a billion solar masses of stars. We just do not know how to make that happen,” Casey said. “So, lots of details to unpack, and lots of unanswered questions.”

In releasing the data to the public, the hope is that other astronomers from all over the world will use it to, among other things, further refine our understanding of how the early universe was populated and how everything evolved to the present day. The dataset may also provide clues to other outstanding mysteries of the cosmos, such as dark matter and physics of the early universe that may be different from what we know today.

“A big part of this project is the democratization of science and making tools and data from the best telescopes accessible to the broader community,” Casey said. The data was made public almost immediately after it was gathered, but only in its raw form, useful only to those with the specialized technical knowledge and the supercomputer access to process and interpret it. The COSMOS collaboration has worked tirelessly for the past two years to convert raw data into broadly usable images and catalogs. In creating these products and releasing them, the researchers hope that even undergraduate astronomers could dig into the material and learn something new.

“Because the best science is really done when everyone thinks about the same data set differently,” Casey said. “It’s not just for one group of people to figure out the mysteries.” Image Caitlin Casey wears a puffy coat in front of a lake Photo Credit Courtesy Photo Caitlin Casey

Caitlin Casey is an observational astronomer with expertise in high-redshift galaxies. She uses the most massive and unusual galaxies at early times to test fundamental properties of galaxy assembly (including their gas, stars, and dust) within a ΛCDM cosmological framework. Read more

For the COSMOS collaboration, the exploration continues. They’ve headed back to the deep field to further map and study it.

“We have more data collection coming up,” she said. “We think we have identified the earliest galaxies in the image, but we need to verify that.” To do so, they’ll be using spectroscopy, which breaks up light from galaxies into a prism, to confirm the distance of these sources (more distant = older). “As a byproduct,” Casey added, “we’ll get to understand the interstellar chemistry in these systems through tracing nitrogen, carbon and oxygen. There’s a lot left to learn and we’re just beginning to scratch the surface.”

The COSMOS-Web image is available to browse interactively ; the accompanying scientific papers have been submitted to the Astrophysical Journal and Astronomy & Astrophysics.

Extractive activity in international waters – including fishing, seabed mining, and oil and gas exploitation – should be banned forever, according to top scientists.

The high seas, the vast international waters beyond national jurisdiction, remain largely unprotected and are increasingly threatened.

Writing in the journal Nature, Professor Callum Roberts and co-authors argue that stopping all extractive activity in international waters would prevent irreversible damage to marine biodiversity, the climate, and ocean equity.

This would also be a decisive step toward achieving the goal of protecting 30% of the world’s oceans by 2030, as set out in the Global Biodiversity Framework agreed in 2022.

“Life in the high seas is vital to the ocean’s ability to store carbon and is too important to lose,” said lead author Professor Callum Roberts, Professor of Marine Conservation at the University of Exeter and lead researcher with the Convex Seascape Survey. “This paper makes the case that we must stop extractive activities in the high seas permanently, to protect the climate, restore biodiversity and safeguard ocean function for future generations.”

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-01216-7

A cure for HIV could be a step closer after researchers found a new way to force the virus out of hiding inside human cells.

The virus’s ability to conceal itself inside certain white blood cells has been one of the main challenges for scientists looking for a cure. It means there is a reservoir of the HIV in the body, capable of reactivation, that neither the immune system nor drugs can tackle.

Now researchers from the Peter Doherty Institute for Infection and Immunity in Melbourne, have demonstrated a way to make the virus visible, paving the way to fully clear it from the body.

It is based on mRNA technology, which came to prominence during the Covid-19 pandemic when it was used in vaccines made by Moderna and Pfizer/BioNTech.

In a paper published in Nature Communications, the researchers have shown for the first time that mRNA can be delivered into the cells where HIV is hiding, by encasing it in a tiny, specially formulated fat bubble. The mRNA then instructs the cells to reveal the virus.

TL;DR

Conclusion

We have searched for evidence of the effect of gravity on the motion of particles of neutral antimatter. The best fit to our measurements yields a value of (0.75 ± 0.13 (statistical + systematic) ± 0.16 (simulation)) g for the local acceleration of antimatter towards the Earth. We conclude that the dynamic behaviour of antihydrogen atoms is consistent with the existence of an attractive gravitational force between these atoms and the Earth. From the asymptotic form of the distribution of the likelihood ratio as a function of the presumed acceleration, we estimate a probability of 2.9 × 10−4 that a result, at least as extreme as that observed here, could occur under the assumption that gravity does not act on antihydrogen. The probability that our data are consistent with the repulsive gravity simulation is so small as to be quantitatively meaningless (less than 10−15). Consequently, we can rule out the existence of repulsive gravity of magnitude 1g between the Earth and antimatter. The results are thus far in conformity with the predictions of General Relativity. Our results do not support cosmological models relying on repulsive matter–antimatter gravitation.

https://archive.is/K5mdP

Medieval alchemists dreamed of transmuting lead into gold. Today, we know that lead and gold are different elements, and no amount of chemistry can turn one into the other.

But our modern knowledge tells us the basic difference between an atom of lead and an atom of gold: the lead atom contains exactly three more protons. So can we create a gold atom by simply pulling three protons out of a lead atom?

As it turns out, we can. But it’s not easy.

While smashing lead atoms into each other at extremely high speeds in an effort to mimic the state of the universe just after the Big Bang, physicists working on the ALICE experiment at the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland incidentally produced small amounts of gold. Extremely small amounts, in fact: a total of some 29 trillionths of a gram.

A German experiment proved that simple concrete spheres make fantastic batteries. Now, California plans to submerge a 9-meter diameter sphere in the ocean and is already planning versions of 30 meters. - farmingdale-observer.com/2025/…

You might think that a power plant could easily start generating power, but in reality, only a limited number of facilities have everything they need to handle a black start. That's because it takes power to make power. Facilities that boil water have lots of powered pumps and valves, coal plants need to pulverize the fuel and move it to where it's burned, etc. In most cases, black-start-rated plants have a diesel generator present to supply enough power to get the plant operating. These tend to be smaller plants, since they require proportionally smaller diesel generators.

The initial output of these black start facilities is then used to provide power to all the plants that need an external power source to operate. This has to be managed in a way that ensures that only other power plants get the first electrons to start moving on the grid, otherwise the normal demand would immediately overwhelm the limited number of small plants that are operating. Again, this has to be handled by facilities that need power in order to control the flow of energy across the grid. This is why managing the grid will never be as simple as "put the hardware on the Internet and control it remotely," given that the Internet also needs power to operate.

The load-shedding that happened in Texas during the 2021 Snowpacolypse was (according to ERCOT) to avoid this precise situation. It was sold (somewhat retroactively) as millions being without power for a week was better than the months a black start could take.

In 1924, motivated by the rising eugenics movement, the United States passed the Johnson–Reed Act, which limited immigration to stem “a stream of alien blood, with all its inherited misconceptions”. A century later, at a campaign event last October, now US President Donald Trump used similar eugenic language to justify his proposed immigration policies, stating that “we got a lot of bad genes in our country right now”.

If left unchallenged, a rising wave of white nationalism in many parts of the globe could threaten the progress that has been made in science — and broader society — towards a more equitable world1.

As scientists and members of the public, we must push back against this threat — by modifying approaches to genetics education, advocating for science, establishing and leading diverse research teams and ensuring that studies embrace and build on the insights obtained about human variation.