Scientists have made a surprising finding about how an asexually reproducing stick insect has evolved. Research led by Dr. Darren Parker, lecturer in evolutionary biology at Bangor University, studied the genes of several species of Timema (a type of stick insect), which have not engaged in sexual reproduction for 1 million years—the longest known asexual period for any insect.

The wingless stick insects are native to the far western United States and reproduce by a form of virgin birth in which an embryo develops from an unfertilized egg, bypassing the need for male fertilization. This phenomenon, known as parthenogenesis, occurs naturally in some animal species.

Because some species of Timema have reproduced without sex for so long, the scientists behind the study, published in PNAS, expected that the system that evolved to balance gene expression on the sex chromosomes would have eroded over time. But that was not the case.

Parker explained, "Males and females have a different number of X chromosomes; males have one (XY), and females have two (XX). As a result, gene expression needs to be balanced equally between them. Species have evolved a wide range of mechanisms known as 'dosage compensation' to do just this. But what happens when these mechanisms for equally sharing male and female genes are no longer needed? That's the question we set out to answer.

"This is the precise situation found in asexually reproducing stick insects. Because the females reproduce without fertilization from males, there is no need to equalize gene expression. By investigating gene expression in rare males, our study found that rather than decaying away as we expected, dosage compensation mechanisms remained fully functional despite not being needed for over a million years."

The findings challenge long-standing assumptions about how quickly biological systems decay when they are no longer under strong evolutionary pressure and offer a reminder that evolution does not always discard what it no longer needs.

Scientists are preparing for an interstellar rescue of humanity's most distant spacecraft, Voyager 1, after fixing up its twin from billions of miles away.

According to a NASA statement released Aug. 4, a clever power-saving maneuver known as the "Big Bang" helped the agency avoid having to shut off another one of the Voyager 2 probe's three remaining science instruments later this year. The Big Bang procedure involves selectively shutting off some high-power instruments on the Voyager probes while switching on lower-power alternatives, all while keeping the spacecraft warm enough to operate in the frigid environment of interstellar space.

"The idea is to swap out a group of powered devices all at once — hence the nickname — turning some things off, and replacing them with lower-power alternatives, to keep the spacecraft warm enough to continue gathering science data," representatives from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which manages the mission, wrote in an April blog post.

NASA carefully ran tests on Voyager 2 before implementing the procedure in May and June. Now, sharing the results of those tests in the Aug. 4 statement, NASA reports a successful power transfer that should keep Voyager 2 running a while longer.

"The savings should provide power to keep its three instruments operating for at least an extra year," NASA wrote of the Big Bang.

In a laboratory 2 kilometers underground, a crane lowers Matt Depatie, a detector technologist, through a hatch into a white-walled cavern filled with about 7,000 tons of ultrapure water that glows as blue as wiper fluid in the light. “Splashdown,” Depatie says over a radio as he steps into an inflatable raft waiting below.

Normally, the cavern is one of the darkest places on Earth, but today, it is lit up for maintenance, offering us a rare chance to see inside. I peer through the hatch at Depatie as he paddles over to examine the submerged experiment. He’s inspecting a house-size detector built to catch some of the most elusive particles known to physics: neutrinos.

This is the SNO+ neutrino experiment, buried deep within the Creighton mine at Snolab, an underground physics laboratory in Sudbury, Canada. SNO+ consists of an acrylic sphere lined with nearly 10,000 sensitive light detectors and filled with 780 tons of oily liquid scintillator, which flashes when lit up by energetic particles. The water around the device and the rock above it shield the detector from the glare of cosmic radiation, allowing the flickers of less common particle interactions to shine through.

Our whole journey down has been part of the crusade to maintain absolute darkness, even beyond the visible spectrum of light. As we descended the main shaft and walked through a rocky tunnel to the lab, our bodies and clothes collected minute amounts of radioactive radon dust. Before entering the main laboratory space, we tossed our mine clothes, showered, and changed into electric blue jumpsuits and hairnets to minimize the contamination we carried in with us. “The showers aren’t for you,” Depatie said as we changed, “they’re for the science.”

The dodo has been extinct for more than 300 years, wiped out within decades of humans arriving on its home island of Mauritius, but it lives on in the public imagination.

This famous flightless bird has become a symbol of extinction. Its demise is often portrayed as almost inevitable: a supposedly foolish creature that naïvely approached the sailors who killed it.

Early accounts even describe people holding a captured dodo and letting it cry out so others would wander over. In the 18th century, Swedish naturalist Carl Linnaeus dubbed the species Dodus ineptus after its reputation for dim wits and silliness.

But new research shows this image is misleading. The dodo was likely no less intelligent than any modern bird. It may also have possessed a rare and overlooked ecological trait: an adaptation to life in low light.

A closer look inside a vanished bird's head
With a team of collaborators across Canada, Australia, the United States, Europe and the UK, our new study looked in detail at the reconstruction of the dodo's brain.

There are only three completely preserved dodo skulls in existence. Using high-resolution CT scans of all three, we could reconstruct the shape of the dodo skull and get a detailed idea of the size and shape of its brain.

This also allowed us to digitally measure the structures associated with vision, smell and cognition (or "smarts"). These scans can also be shared with the research community.

The dodo was a member of the pigeon family, so its living relatives include the pigeons in our cities and the doves whose calls accompany mornings around the world. Pigeons are famous for their navigational skills and are widely used by scientists to study animal cognition.

Is there any indication that the dodo's brain was much different? When we compared the dodo's brain to that of pigeons, we found that the dodo's forebrain, linked to cognition and memory, was similar in proportion to that of other pigeons when compared to the rest of the brain.

In other words, there is no evidence the dodo was less intelligent than any other pigeon. This is also backed up by previous research suggesting that brain size relative to body mass was similar to that of other pigeons.

So we think the dodo's trusting behavior was because it simply had nothing to fear until humans arrived, as is common for island species with no predators.

A giant pigeon with an unexpected twist
Where the dodo does differ dramatically from other pigeons is in its sensory systems, particularly its vision. The dodo's optic lobes, the brain region that first processes visual information in the bird brain, are unusually small—not just compared to pigeons, but also compared to another extinct flightless relative, the Rodrigues solitaire.

In the past 20 years, an increasing number of bacterial infections caught by children have been resistant to antibiotics, a new study finds.

The research, published in July in the journal JAMA Pediatrics, looked back at the past two decades, as well as looked forward, to predict how resistance rates might change in the decade to come. By 2035, some critical antibiotics will be met with "steep increases" in resistance among common bacteria, such as Acinetobacter baumannii and Klebsiella, the analysis found.

Antibiotic resistance contributed to 840,000 deaths among children under 5 in 2021, global estimates suggest, so if resistance continues to increase, that number could grow.

"These forecasts are warning scenarios, not inevitable outcomes," said study co-author Dr. Yanhong Jessika Hu, a clinical epidemiologist and public health researcher at Murdoch Children's Research Institute (MCRI) in Australia. "The projections broadly assume that historical patterns continue without a major change in direction," Hu told Live Science in an email.

If significant action is taken, that trajectory could be altered, she said.

"Resistance increased across all regions"
Antibiotic resistance is sometimes called "a silent pandemic," as it poses a formidable threat without stirring as much concern as other health crises, such as viral outbreaks. Resistance has gained attention in recent years, but the data on how it has affected children is patchy, said study co-author Dr. Penelope Bryant, a clinician-researcher at MCRI, Royal Children's Hospital Melbourne, and the University of Melbourne.

"It's perceived as being a lesser problem in children," Bryant told Live Science. "It's not a theoretical problem; it's real, and it's happening. But I think the visibility is just substantially less than in adults."

In a global first, researchers at the Institute of High Energy Physics (IHEP) in China have found experimental evidence to confirm the presence of a glueball, a new form of matter. The research findings were made at the Beijing Spectrometer III (BESIII) experiment, as part of an international collaboration headed by the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS). 

The Standard Model of physics states that the building blocks of our universe, atoms, are made up of matter particles and force carriers. Matter particles, or fermions, named quarks, build up protons and neutrons, the positively and neutrally charged particles inside the atomic nucleus. A force carrier holds the quarks together; this carrier is called a gluon. 

Physicists have long held that gluons can also attract each other and bind together to form a glueball, an entirely new form of matter that is composed only of a force carrier. For the past five decades, multiple experiments have been carried out to prove the existence of a glueball. However, it was only in 2011 that scientists in China spotted a potential glueball candidate in the experiments conducted at the Beijing Spectrometer III (BES III). 
...
Why is it important? 
More recently, the researchers also found many new decay modes of X(2370) while also determining its ‘flavor-singlet’ nature, where they lack quark flavor signatures. This is the most important and defining characteristic of a glueball and establishes a complete chain of experimental evidence for a pseudoscalar glueball. 

This confirms the theoretical prediction that gluons can bind to each other and form an entirely new kind of matter. The discovery is also a direct test of the non-Abelian gauge structure in quantum chromodynamics (QCD), which also states that gluons are capable of attracting and binding each other, without the involvement of quarks. 

This is important, since it also helps establish that QCD is a correct theory and it has been validated at low energies. As the clearest experiment in over 50 years to have found the evidence for glueballs, the finding also demonstrates the importance of the BEPC II in studies of strong interactions. 

Roughly 660 million years after the Big Bang, a strange bright red spot has been hiding in plain sight in one of the deepest fields ever imaged by the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope. Astronomers at MIT now believe it may be the first confirmed example of an entirely new class of object: a black hole star.

MIT astronomer Rohan Naidu and colleagues spotted the object while hunting for some of the earliest galaxies in the Universe, as part of Webb’s Mirage or Miracle survey.

Labeled MoM-BH*-1, the source was essentially invisible in Webb’s bluer filters but blazed in the redder ones, giving it one of the most extreme colors ever recorded in a distant object.

Follow-up spectroscopy revealed why: the object shows the strongest ‘Balmer break’ ever measured at any redshift, a sharp drop in brightness at a wavelength normally associated with dense gas in the outer layers of stars.

Ordinary starlight simply can’t produce a break this severe; even the reddest known stellar populations top out at less than a third of the strength seen here.

The spectrum of MoM-BH*-1 also showed unusually broad emission from hydrogen gas, along with deep absorption features cutting through that emission — a combination that points to gas far denser than anything found in a typical star.

“The break we observed in this object is the deepest break we have ever observed in any object, ruling out ‘ordinary’ stars as the source,” Dr. Naidu said.

“But it made us wonder if we were seeing a new kind of ‘stellar atmosphere,’ but on a spectacular scale.”

“What’s more, the red dot’s light contained almost no signature of metals or any elements other than hydrogen and helium. It was truly singular in so many ways.”

To explain the pattern, the researchers modeled the object as a massive black hole, with a mass on the order of 100,000 to 10 million times that of the Sun, wrapped in an extraordinarily dense, turbulent envelope of hydrogen gas roughly 10 to 100 astronomical units across — about the scale of our Solar System.

Radiation from the black hole’s accretion disk filters through this gas cocoon, which absorbs and scatters the light to produce the object’s odd spectral fingerprint, while essentially no dust is needed to explain its redness.

Notably, MoM-BH*-1’s light output vastly exceeds what nuclear fusion could generate at that size, ruling out a normal star as the source and instead implicating an actively feeding black hole, possibly growing at or above the Eddington limit — the theoretical cap on how fast a black hole can accrete matter while still being pushed outward by its own radiation.

The scientists also detected tentative evidence the object brightened by around 30% over roughly two months, another hallmark of active black hole feeding...

Solar eclipse as seen from space!

From its vantage point in space, the Meteosat Third Generation Imager satellite (MTG-I1) captured the Moon’s dark shadow as it passed over Earth’s surface – converging with the advancing twilight shadow as dusk fell over Europe.
esa.int/ESA_Multimedia…

Adjusting to a new time zone or work schedule can leave the body's internal clock out of sync for days, contributing to sleep disruption, metabolic changes and other health consequences. Researchers at Rice University and Northwestern University have developed an implantable cell therapy that may help the body adapt more quickly to these disruptions.

In a recent study titled "Encapsulated Leptin-Producing Cells Facilitate Entrainment of Circadian Rhythms in Rodents and Nonhuman Primates," encapsulated cells engineered to continuously produce the metabolic hormone leptin reduced the time required for animals to adjust to shifts in the light-dark cycle that mimic jet lag and shift work. Published in Advanced Science, the study's findings demonstrate a new approach to regulating circadian rhythms through metabolic signaling and provide early evidence that engineered cell therapies could be used to address circadian disruption.

A temporary metabolic nudge
"Current approaches for adjusting circadian rhythms rely heavily on precisely timed behaviors such as light exposure, meal schedules or melatonin administration," said Omid Veiseh, professor of bioengineering at Rice. "We wanted to explore whether a temporary cell therapy could provide a more practical way to help the body adapt to changing schedules."

The therapy consists of human retinal pigment epithelial cells engineered to produce leptin, a hormone best known for regulating appetite and metabolism. The cells are encapsulated within microscopic alginate spheres that protect them from the immune system while allowing therapeutic proteins to diffuse into the body. Following a simple subcutaneous injection, the encapsulated cells temporarily elevate circulating leptin levels before naturally losing viability over time.

"Metabolism and circadian rhythms are closely connected, but the therapeutic potential of that relationship remains largely unexplored," said Martha Hotz Vitaterna, professor of neurobiology at Northwestern University and co-corresponding author on the study. "These findings suggest that metabolic signals can be leveraged to accelerate adaptation to circadian disruptions."

Faster adjustment across species
In mouse studies, animals receiving the leptin-producing cell therapy adjusted significantly faster following both phase advances and phase delays in the light-dark cycle. Mice treated with the therapy adapted to a four-hour schedule delay 50% faster than control animals.

Long-term memories may not "stick" in the brain for the reasons we thought, a study of mice in artificial hibernation reveals.

Instead of relying on many individual, strong links between neurons — which would typically be pared down during hibernation — long-lasting memories seem to require higher-level patterns in connectivity, the study found.

"This topological architecture of the broader network seems to be more important" than individual, sturdy connections, said study co-author Kazumasa Tanaka, head of the Memory Research Unit at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology.

The findings, published Thursday (Aug. 13) in the journal Science, may complicate the picture of how memory retention works.

Tanaka and colleagues used hibernation to study memory because past studies of hibernating animals have found that their brains shrink and pare down cell-to-cell connections during these extended periods of low metabolic activity. At the same time, the brain's activity slows to a crawl, and the loss of connections is thought to be related to this energy-saving mechanism.

Despite this brain shrinkage, hibernating animals, such as alpine marmots (Marmota marmota) and European ground squirrels (Spermophilus citellus), still retain memories they formed before they went into hibernation. "Some studies report their memories are intact, even after, so they can remember conspecifics [members of the same species], like their friends, or they can remember the locations of their food," Tanaka told Live Science.

The new study aimed to tackle the question of what allows those memories to stick around even after many connections between brain cells disappear.

What is the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope? Why do we need it? What will it unveil?

Learn more about Roman and how it will help us investigate some of the many mysteries of the universe. ⬇️

Roman is set to launch Aug 30th at 7:26 am ET. Stay up to date on the mission: go.nasa.gov/45skR6q

A tiny UK-developed satellite, roughly the size of a small carry-on suitcase, could help answer one of the biggest questions in cosmology: What happened during the roughly 150 million years of the cosmic dark ages, before the universe's first stars appeared?

An international team of scientists led by the University of Cambridge will use the far side of the moon as a "shield" so the satellite—called CosmoCube—can block out all the noise from Earth and listen for a faint whisper from the very early universe.

This whisper, known as the 21-centimeter line, is a signal emitted by hydrogen atoms in the period between the afterglow of the Big Bang and cosmic dawn, when nuclear fusion lit up the first stars. No one has directly observed this era before.

Detecting this signal from more than 13.5 billion years ago is extremely difficult with Earth-based telescopes because Earth's ionosphere blocks the right frequencies, and interference from FM radio, satellites and telecommunications drowns it out.

However, the moon provides a natural shield. As CosmoCube orbits the far side of the moon, it will be shielded from all the noise from Earth for roughly 40 minutes of each 2-hour orbit. Over an expected 2-year mission, it will build up 1,000 hours of data on one of the last unexplored periods of the universe, helping us understand how the universe transitioned from dark and nearly empty to the complexity we see today.

From smartphones to data centers, modern electronics rely on billions of tiny switches that consume electricity every time they turn on or off. As global demand for computing continues to grow, so does the energy required to power it. Scientists are therefore searching for alternatives that can perform the same tasks while using far less energy.

One promising approach uses clusters of tiny magnets, each thousands of times smaller than a grain of sand. A new study led by the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory, with contributions from the DOE's Los Alamos National Laboratory and Adolfo Ibáñez University in Chile, has uncovered a geometric rule that determines whether clusters of nanomagnets behave predictably or probabilistically as they relax toward a stable state. The finding challenges standard modeling assumptions and opens new possibilities for ultralow-energy computing.

Nanomagnetic devices have already demonstrated the potential to operate using extremely small amounts of energy—possibly millions of times less than conventional electronic components. If such systems can be made reliable and scalable, they could help reduce the growing energy demands of computing infrastructure worldwide.

The new research offers a practical step toward that goal.

"We've shown that geometry alone can determine how energy moves through these magnetic systems," Arava said, "and that insight gives us a new way to design computing devices."

Over the past two decades, researchers using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), which tracks the iron in the hemoglobin supplying oxygen to neurons, have been building up increasingly detailed maps and inventories of the mammalian cortex. Thanks to huge advances in machine-learning artificial intelligence—computer algorithms that are able to sort through enormous amounts of information and use statistical methods to make classifications and predictions—fMRI scans can now be used to identify everything from depressive thoughts to the nuanced feelings of envy and schadenfreude. Other algorithms have been able to accurately piece together reconstructions of movie clips watched by subjects, just by analyzing their brain scans; or have detected, in probing the brain activity of swing voters in the US presidential election, responding to photographs and videos of presidential candidates, which candidates provoked anxiety or even disgust, and which elicited positive responses or feelings of empathy

In just the last few years, neuroscience researchers have progressed from decoding images and emotions as they play across the cortex to sounds, words, phrases, and even language. In 2023, in a remarkable demonstration of this emerging technology, a woman called Ann Johnson, who had been paralyzed for 18 years by a brain-stem stroke, was able to speak again through the insertion of a grid of 253 electrodes onto the surface of her brain, which translated her neuronal signals into sentences, in real time, at a rate of 78 words per minute (just about half the speed of standard conversation). The research team at the University of California, led by neurosurgeon Edward Chang, had combined this brain-computer interface with an animated avatar of Johnson’s head, which spoke in her own voice, as reconstructed from a recording of a 15-minute toast she had given at her wedding. Just as the avatar’s mouth spoke Johnson’s words as she thought them, so its expressions were similarly influenced by the nuances of her brain activity, which turned her thoughts about facial gestures into displays of emotion—from smiles to pursed lips and frowns...

The artificial intelligence boom is driving unprecedented demand for data centers, raising concerns about their growing energy consumption, water use and carbon footprint. These challenges are making companies look beyond traditional land-based data centers.

Some developers are now exploring the ocean as a new location for AI infrastructure, hoping underwater data centers could improve energy use and cooling efficiency while using less fresh water and land area than onshore buildings.

My research focuses on the societal, organizational and environmental implications of emerging technologies, particularly artificial intelligence and the digital infrastructure—including data centers—that supports its development and deployment. I see underwater data centers as a promising new approach for supporting the growth of AI.

But moving servers into the ocean does not make other underlying environmental challenges, such as energy consumption and carbon emissions, disappear. It also creates new concerns about harm to the marine environment, as well as questions about how these data centers can be regulated—and how companies can maintain and expand them if needed. Whether underwater data centers can become sustainable alternatives to traditional data centers depends on solving these economic, technical and environmental problems.