In a scene that feels more like a midnight vigil than a routine inspection, NASA engineers and scientists gathered in near darkness inside a pristine cleanroom. Armed with flashlights and ultraviolet lamps, members of the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope team carefully examined the observatory’s primary mirror, searching for even the smallest trace of contamination.

The eerie green glow illuminating the cleanroom wasn’t festive lighting but the result of a long exposure combined with a small indicator lamp on the wall, an unassuming signal that the airflow in the room was just right.

In its own way, it looked a bit like a high-tech holiday scene: dim lights, hushed voices, and a priceless object being checked one last time before a long journey.

You may like

What is it?

The Roman Space Telescope is one of NASA’s next great observatories, designed to explore some of the biggest questions in modern astronomy. From probing the mysterious nature of dark energy to discovering thousands of new exoplanets, Roman will survey the universe with a wide-field view far beyond what previous space telescopes have achieved.

To do this science, Roman will employ extraordinarily sensitive optics, especially its primary mirror. Even microscopic dust particles or residues can scatter light and degrade observations. That’s why inspections take place in cleanrooms that are cleaner than hospital operating theaters, under lighting conditions carefully chosen to reveal what the naked eye might otherwise miss.

Ultraviolet light causes certain contaminants to fluoresce, making them easier to spot. The team’s slow, methodical work under flashlights and UV lamps ensures that the mirror meets the strict standards required for spaceflight. It’s meticulous, patient labor — more “silent night” than spotlight moment — but it is essential to the telescope’s future success.

Where is it?

This image was taken at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.

Breaking space news, the latest updates on rocket launches, skywatching events and more!

The Roman Space Telescope gets carefully inspected for contaminants. (Image credit: NASA/Michael Guinto)

Why is it amazing?

Once Roman launches in late 2026 or early 2027, there will be no opportunity to wipe down a mirror or redo an inspection. Every careful check on Earth protects years of future science.

As Roman moves closer to launch, images like this remind us that the science of space telescopes starts in cleanrooms, with flashlights, UV light and people dedicated to making sure humanity’s next window on the universe is as clear as possible.

Want to learn more?

You can learn more about the Roman Space Telescope and astronomy.

SOURCE PAGE

Scientists are developing a simple blood test to predict who is most at risk from the world’s most common inherited heart condition.

Millions of people worldwide have hypertrophic cardiomyopathy (HCM), a disease of the heart muscle where the wall of the heart becomes thickened. It is caused by a change in one or more genes and mostly passed on through families.

Some feel fine most of the time and have few or no symptoms. But others can suffer complications, such as heart failure and abnormal heart rhythms, which can lead to a cardiac arrest.

The problem is there is no cure. Doctors also do not know which patients with the genetic condition are most at risk from deadly complications.

But now a team of scientists from universities including Harvard and Oxford have found a way to forecast risk for people living with HCM.

The blood test could identify those patients most in danger of complications, enabling them to be monitored more closely or receive life-saving treatment.

In a landmark study, the team measured the levels of a protein, N-terminal Pro-B-type natriuretic peptide (NT-Pro-BNP), in the blood of 700 HCM patients.

NT-Pro-BNP is released by the heart as part of normal pumping. But high levels are a sign the heart is working too hard. Those with the highest levels had poorer blood flow, more scar tissue and changes in their heart which could lead to atrial fibrillation or heart failure.

A blood test measuring NT-Pro-BNP could transform the care of millions of people with the world’s most common inherited heart condition.

The study leader, Prof Carolyn Ho, the medical director of the cardiovascular genetics centre at Harvard medical school, said the test could help “target the right therapies to the right patients at the right time”.

She added: “Continued studies on blood biomarkers will lead to better understanding of HCM so that, in future, we can offer our patients a blood test to identify who is at high versus low risk of experiencing serious consequences of the disease.

“People with the highest risk could be targeted for potentially life-saving treatments as they stand to receive the greatest benefit, while those at lowest risk could avoid unnecessary treatment.”

Lara Johnson, 34, from Southampton in the UK, is one of many who could benefit.

Eight years ago, she began experiencing breathlessness and fatigue. After being referred by her GP for hospital tests, she was diagnosed with HCM. Several relatives on her father’s side were subsequently also diagnosed with the condition.

“One of the hardest parts of living with HCM is the constant uncertainty, never knowing what might change next,” Johnson said. “A simple blood test, which could help identify future risks earlier, would take away so much of that anxiety.”

She added: “It could give people like me a chance to prepare and adjust our lifestyles as needed, and help us to feel more in control. That kind of clarity wouldn’t only help me, it would make a world of difference for my whole family.”

Prof Bryan Williams, the chief scientific and medical officer of the British Heart Foundation, which funded the research, said the test “could benefit patients around the world”.

“After a diagnosis of HCM, patients and their families want to know what the future holds. This study shows that measuring various proteins circulating in the blood could help predict how the heart is functioning and future risk of complications from heart disease.

“This new method may also provide insights in the evolution of the structure and function of the heart in people with HCM that could point to new ways of treating this condition to reduce future risk.”

SOURCE PAGE

Milestone: James Webb Space Telescope launches

Date: Dec. 25, 2021

Where: Guiana Space Centre, Kourou, French Guiana

Who: NASA, European Space Agency and Canadian Space Agency scientists

On a cloudy winter’s day, in the Amazon jungle, a shuttle blasted off into space — and changed our view of the universe forever.

The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) left Earth aboard an Ariane 5 rocket at 25,000 mph (40,000 km/h) “from a tropical rainforest to the edge of time itself,” according to a live broadcast from NASA.

About a month later, it reached its orbiting parking place in space, a gravitationally-stable Lagrange point 930,000 miles (1.5 million kilometers) away, in perfect equilibrium between Earth and the sun’s gravity. The telescope would beam back its first, spectacular pictures in July 2022. And the firehose of data it has sent back since has transformed our understanding of the cosmos.

“The James Webb Space Telescope has proven itself capable of seeing 98% of the way back to the Big Bang,” Peter Jakobsen, an affiliate professor of astrophysics at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark, previously told Live Science in an email.

Yet Webb, which was first conceived at Lockheed Martin in the late 1990s, almost didn’t launch at all. The now-iconic, $10 billion project was catastrophically over budget, plagued by years’ worth of delays and snarled by “stupid mistakes.”

That was in part because, when it launched, it was by far the most complex telescope ever built.

Get the world’s most fascinating discoveries delivered straight to your inbox.

It took more than 20,000 engineers and hundreds of scientists to design, build and launch the eye in the sky. That 21.3 feet (6.5 meter) mirror had to be folded into a honeycomb shape to be lofted on a rocket, then unfolded once in space. Yet despite being foldable, it also had to be so smooth that if it were as big as a continent, “it would feature no hill or valley greater than ankle height,” according to Quanta Magazine.

This stunning image of the Cosmic Cliffs was the first one released by JWST. In it, you can see a profusion of stars in their earliest stages of star formation, a frenetic period which lasts between 50,000 and 100,000 years. (Image credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, and STScI)

To see the earliest epochs of cosmic history, Webb needed infrared vision. That’s because ancient light has been stretched, or red-shifted, into infrared wavelengths as it travels across space-time. On Earth, humans and every other living thing give off heat in the form of infrared radiation, and that would drown out the faint infrared signals from the most distant, ancient starlight. So JWST needed to be lofted into the cold dark of outer space to use its infrared instruments.

Once JWST started imaging the cosmos, it promptly began breaking our existing models of the universe. It rapidly confirmed the Hubble tension — the discrepancy between the universe’s expansion rates depending on where and what astronomers measure. It has found hints of potentially life-sustaining atmospheres shrouding distant exoplanets. And it has spotted shockingly bright galaxies and seemingly “impossible” black holes at the dawn of time. All these clues are pointing to new understandings of the universe.

Some of the questions JWST is raising, such as whether other planets harbor life, it will probably not be able to answer in its planned 10-year lifespan. But future telescopes — such as the currently operational Vera C. Rubin Observatory, meant to create a real-time “movie of the universe”; the recently completed Nancy Grace Roman Telescope, set to launch in 2027 and resolve questions about dark matter and energy; the Extremely Large Telescope, set to turn on in 2029; or the recently announced Habitable Worlds Observatory, which may come online in the 2030s — could start to answer the questions that Webb is raising.

SOURCE PAGE

Psychologists have typically believed that we become less curious as we age, but recent research has shown curiosity actually becomes more targeted and specific in our later years. In this episode from September, Madeleine Finlay hears from Dr Mary Whatley, an assistant professor of psychology at Western Carolina University, and Dr Matthias Gruber of Cardiff University’s Brain Research Imaging Centre to find out why we change in this way, and how maintaining broad curiosity into older age can help keep our brains young

SOURCE PAGE

Every year, millions of people sing the beautiful carol Silent Night, with its line “all is calm, all is bright”.

We all know the Christmas story is one in which peace and joy are proclaimed, and this permeates our festivities, family gatherings and present-giving. Countless Christmas cards depict the Holy Family – starlit, in a quaint stable, nestled comfortably in a sleepy little village.

However, when I began to research my book on the childhood of Jesus, Boy Jesus: Growing up Judaean in Turbulent Times, that carol started to sound jarringly wrong in terms of his family’s actual circumstances at the time he was born.

And far from being a sleepy village, Bethlehem was so significant as a town that a major aqueduct construction brought water to its centre. Fearing Herod, Jesus’ family fled from their home there, but they were on the wrong side of Rome from the start.

They were not alone in their fears or their attitude to the colonisers. The events that unfolded, as told by the first-century historian Josephus, show a nation in open revolt against Rome shortly after Jesus was born.

When Herod died, thousands of people took over the Jerusalem temple and demanded liberation. Herod’s son Archelaus massacred them. A number of Judaean revolutionary would-be kings and rulers seized control of parts of the country, including Galilee.

It was at this time, in the Gospel of Matthew, that Joseph brought his family back from refuge in Egypt – to this independent Galilee and a village there, Nazareth.

But independence in Galilee didn’t last long. Roman forces, under the general Varus, marched down from Syria with allied forces, destroyed the nearby city of Sepphoris, torched countless villages and crucified huge numbers of Judaean rebels, eventually putting down the revolts.

Archelaus – once he was installed officially as ruler – followed this up with a continuing reign of terror.

Instead, viewers have now been offered The Carpenter’s Son, a film starring Nicholas Cage. It’s partly inspired by an apocryphal (not biblical) text named the Paidika Iesou – the Childhood of Jesus – later called The Infancy Gospel of Thomas.

THE CARPENTER’S SON | OFFICIAL TRAILER | IN CINEMAS NOW | ON DIGITAL DEC 22 | Altitude Films – YouTube

Watch On

You might think the Paidika would be something like an ancient version of the hit TV show Smallville from the 2000s, which followed the boy Clark Kent before he became Superman.

But no, rather than being about Jesus grappling with his amazing powers and destiny, it is a short and quite disturbing piece of literature made up of bits and pieces, assembled more than 100 years after the life of Jesus.

The Paidika presents the young Jesus as a kind of demigod no one should mess with, including his playmates and teachers. It was very popular with non-Jewish, pagan-turned-Christian audiences who sat in an uneasy place within wider society.

The miracle-working Jesus zaps all his enemies – and even innocents. At one point, a child runs into Jesus and hurts his shoulder, so Jesus strikes him dead. Joseph says to Mary, “Do not let him out of the house so that those who make him angry may not die.”

Such stories rest on a problematic idea that one must never kindle a god’s wrath. And this young Jesus shows instant, deadly wrath. He also lacks much of a moral compass.

But this text also rests on the idea that Jesus’ boyhood actions against his playmates and teachers were justified because they were “the Jews”. “A Jew” turns up as an accuser just a few lines in. There should be a content warning.

The nativity scene from The Carpenter’s Son is certainly not peaceful. There is a lot of screaming and horrific images of Roman soldiers throwing babies into a fire. But, like so many films, the violence is somehow just evil and arbitrary, not really about Judaea and Rome.

It is surely the contextual, bigger story of the nativity and Jesus’ childhood that is so relevant today, in our times of fracturing and “othering”, where so many feel under the thumb of the unyielding powers of this world.

In fact, some churches in the United States are now reflecting this contemporary relevance as they adapt nativity scenes to depict ICE detentions and deportations of immigrants and refugees.

In many ways, the real nativity is indeed not a simple one of peace and joy, but rather one of struggle – and yet mystifying hope.

This edited article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

SOURCE PAGE

How do you search for invisible hypothetical particles? One way is to see how quickly they could kill white dwarfs — the dense, leftover cores of dead stars.

In recent years, astronomers have become increasingly interested in a theoretical particle known as the axion, which was concocted decades ago to solve a challenging problem with the strong nuclear force. After initial attempts to find it in particle collider experiments turned up empty, however, the idea sunk into the background.

But further research revealed that the axion could be a contender to explain the mystery of dark matter. Theorists realized that there might be ways for axions to flood the universe but so far evade direct detection.

You may like

Just because this little particle would be largely invisible, it doesn’t mean it would go completely unnoticed in the universe. In a pre-print paper published in November 2025 in the open access server arXiv, researchers reported a way to test axion models using old archival data from the Hubble Space Telescope. Although they didn’t find any evidence for axions, they beat other attempts and gave us a much clearer picture of what is and isn’t allowed in this universe.

The targets for this study were white dwarfs — the dense, dim cores of dead stars. A single white dwarf can pack the mass of the sun into an object smaller than Earth, making white dwarfs among the most exotic objects in the universe. Crucially, white dwarfs support themselves against collapse through something called electron degeneracy pressure, in which a huge sea of free-floating electrons resists collapse because, according to quantum mechanics, electrons can never share the same state.

Some models of how axions might behave say these particles could be created by electrons: If an electron were moving quickly enough, it would trigger the formation of an axion. And because the electrons deep inside a white dwarf are moving very, very quickly — at nearly the speed of light — as they buzz around in their tight confines, they could produce a lot of axions.

The axions would then go speeding off, leaving the white dwarf altogether. This production of escaping axions would rob the white dwarf of energy. And because white dwarfs don’t produce energy on their own, this would cause them to cool off faster than they would otherwise.

Breaking space news, the latest updates on rocket launches, skywatching events and more!

The researchers fed this model of axion cooling into a sophisticated software suite that can simulate the evolution of stars and how their temperature and brightness change as their interiors evolve.

This model allowed the researchers to predict the typical temperature of a white dwarf, given its age, both with and without axion cooling. With the results in hand, they turned to data of the globular cluster 47 Tucanae collected with Hubble. Global clusters are crucial because all of the white dwarfs in them were born at roughly the same time, giving the astronomers a large sample to study.

In short, the researchers found no evidence for axion cooling in the white dwarf population. But their results did give brand-new constraints on the ability for electrons to produce axions: They can’t do it more efficiently than once every trillion chances.

This result doesn’t rule out axions entirely, but it does say it’s unlikely that electrons and axions directly interact with each other. So, if we’re going to keep searching for axions, we’re going to have to find even more clever ways to look.

SOURCE PAGE

NASA has a new high-tech sensor to help the search for critical minerals in the American West.

The sensor is called AVIRIS-5 (Airborne Visible/Infrared Imaging Spectrometer-5), and it comes from technology developed by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) back in the 1970s. About the size of a microwave, AVIRIS-5 fits inside the nose of one of NASA’s ER-2 high-altitude research aircraft. The sensor’s first iteration was employed in 1986, and JPL has worked to improve it ever since.

AVIRIS-5 is one of the newest tools in a joint research project from NASA and the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) called GEMx. The project is designed to search for surface traces of critical minerals, which are central to manufacturing consumer electronics and military technology.

You may like

GEMx is an ongoing project. One of the reasons why deserts are an ideal spot for mineral spectroscopy is because few trees grow there. Since 2023, the joint team has covered more than 366,000 square miles (950,000 square kilometers) in the vast expanse of the American West.

Many of the minerals that the GEMx project is trying to find have “unique chemical structures,” that reflect different wavelengths of light. By detecting this reflected light, AVIRIS-5 is able to uncover the “spectral fingerprints” that are specific to the critical minerals.

The USGS defines critical minerals as those that have “significant consequences for the economic or national security of the U.S.” These include aluminum, lithium, zinc, graphite, tungsten and titanium. Minerals such as these are used in the manufacturing supply chains for crucial technologies such as semiconductors, solar electricity systems or electric vehicle batteries.

In March 2025, the White House issued an Executive Order to boost the production of these minerals “to the maximum possible extent,” stating that American national and economic security are “now acutely threatened by our reliance upon hostile foreign powers’ mineral production”

Breaking space news, the latest updates on rocket launches, skywatching events and more!

Aside from helping hunt for critical minerals, spectrometers similar to AVIRIS-5 that JPL has designed over the years have also been used on spacecraft to help NASA scientists understand more about planets in our solar system, like Mars, Mercury, and Pluto.

“One is en route to Europa, an ocean moon of Jupiter, to search for the chemical ingredients needed to support life,” a JPL spokesperson wrote in a statement.

Dana Chadwick, a JPL Earth system scientist, envisions many more uses for the new sensor besides hunting minerals in the desert.

“The breadth of different questions you can take on with this technology is really exciting, from land management to snowpack water resources to wildfire risk,” Chadwick said in a statement. “Critical minerals are just the beginning for AVIRIS-5.”

SOURCE PAGE

China is rounding off what has been a year of big progress in space, including major crewed lunar landing tests, new rockets and booster landing attempts, a new deep space mission and even successfully resolving its first human spaceflight emergency.

The country has already smashed its previous record for launches in a calendar year (68, set in 2024), amassing more than 80 orbital launch attempts at time of reporting, with a couple of weeks still to go. Two of these launches ended in failure, both from commercial launch providers, but the venerable Long March rocket series continued a long, failure-free run dating back to 2020.

China hit a major milestone in 2025 with the country’s first launch and landing attempt of a reusable orbital rocket. Commercial company Landspace successfully sent its first Zhuque 3 rocket into orbit, but the first stage landing effort ended in spectacular failure during the landing burn. To end the year, China is looking to launch its new reusable Long March 12A rocket in late December as China closes in on attaining reusable launch capabilities, a decade after SpaceX successfully landed a Falcon 9 first stage for the first time.

You may like

Chinese space successes in 2025

Driving some of this growth in launches are the country’s two megaconstellations: the national Guowang project and the Shanghai-backed Thousand Sails constellation, both of which are to consist of more than 10,000 satellites each. These are China’s response to SpaceX’s Starlink and other Western low Earth orbit communications constellations. There were 15 launches this year for Guowang alone, but expect launches for these projects to increase in 2026.

One area of major progress for China in 2025 was its crewed lunar program. The country aims to land a pair of its astronauts on the moon before 2030 and this year saw some of the first major hardware tests for the ambitious project. Key tests included testing a shortened stage of the new moon rocket, a liftoff and landing test in simulated lunar conditions for the Lanyue crew lander, and a pad abort test for the crew spacecraft. This progress has contributed to concerns in the U.S. that China will land its astronauts on the moon before America can return to the lunar surface with Artemis 3.

China also made a launch to deep space, with the Tianwen 2 near-Earth asteroid sample return mission launching in May and now on its way to the mysterious asteroid Kamo’oalewa. The spacecraft is expected to reach the asteroid in July 2026, providing us with images and eventually samples of another new world. Tianwen 2 is China’s second deep space exploration mission, following the 2020 Tianwen 1 Mars rover and orbiter. Incidentally, the orbiter for that mission is still active and in October, captured images of interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS; one of the major space events of the year.

A series of photos of the interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS, captured from Mars orbit by Tianwen 1 in early October 2025.  (Image credit: CNSA)

Closer to Earth, China also appeared to have completed a pioneering satellite refueling in geostationary orbit, high above the equator. The test could mark a breakthrough for extending spacecraft lifetimes, reducing debris, and bringing strategic flexibility.

Breaking space news, the latest updates on rocket launches, skywatching events and more!

China resolves 1st spaceflight emergency

Not everything went according to plan for China in 2025. The country planned three missions to its Tiangong space station in 2025: the crewed Shenzhou 20 and Shenzhou 21 missions, which launched in April and October respectively, and the Tianzhou 9 cargo spacecraft in July.

These plans were upended, however, when routine checks found an external crack in a Shenzhou 20 spacecraft viewport window on Nov. 5, likely caused by space debris, just before it was due to carry its three astronauts back to Earth. The spacecraft was deemed not to be safe to carry astronauts through the heat of reentry, meaning emergency protocols were initiated.

The Shenzhou 20 astronauts instead returned to Earth in the recently-arrived Shenzhou 21 spacecraft, while the Shenzhou 22 spacecraft — on standby for just a scenario at Jiuquan spaceport — was readied in 16 days and launched to Tiangong uncrewed to provide a lifeboat for the Shenzhou 21 astronauts. The incident was the first major human spaceflight emergency for China, with its orderly response quickly solving the crisis.

You may like

Astronaut Chen Dong, who was the commander of China’s Shenzhou-20 mission, salutes a crowd. (Image credit: VCG/Getty Images)

The year ahead for Chinese space missions

China’s already accelerating launch rate is only likely to increase in 2026, with further reusable rocket test flights and landing attempts, megaconstellation launches, and the continued expansion of its spaceports, particularly in Jiuquan in the Gobi Desert, the Hainan commercial launch pads, and the maritime spaceport in the Eastern province of Shandong.

There will also be flagship missions. The second half of the year will see the launch of the Chang’e 7 robotic lunar mission, which will target a landing at the lunar south pole and aim to seek out water-ice. There will also be a joint space weather mission, named SMILE, from the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the European Space Agency (ESA), launching in the spring.

China’s Yutu 2 lunar rover, as seen by the Chang’e 4 lander, on the far side of the moon. The 2026 Chang’e 7 mission will also feature a large rover, as well as a lander and a small hopper that will explore lunar craters. (Image credit: CNSA)

China will also take new steps in human spaceflight in 2026. The country will send a pair of missions to Tiangong, namely Shenzhou 23 and Shenzhou 24. One of these is expected to carry the first International astronaut from Pakistan to the space station. The stay is expected to be short, launching on a Shenzhou as part of a three-person crew, and returning days later with two Chinese astronauts returning to Earth after their six-month-long stay in orbit. That will leave one Chinese astronaut from the completed mission to stay in orbit for a further six months, becoming the first Chinese astronaut to spend an entire year in orbit continuously.

Maybe the most closely watched and consequential missions will be related to China’s crewed moon plans. China plans debut flights for its Long March 10 rocket and the Mengzhou spacecraft in 2026, with success being crucial to achieving its goal of landing its astronauts on the moon before 2030.

SOURCE PAGE

A distant exoplanet appears to sport a sooty atmosphere that is confusing the scientists who recently spotted it.

The Jupiter-size world, detected by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), doesn’t have the familiar helium-hydrogen combination we are used to in atmospheres from our solar system, nor other common molecules, like water, methane or carbon dioxide.

“This was an absolute surprise,” study co-author Peter Gao, a staff scientist at the Carnegie Earth and Planets Laboratory, said in a statement. “I remember after we got the data down, our collective reaction was, ‘What the heck is this?’ It’s extremely different from what we expected.”

Researchers probed the bizarre environment of the planet, known as PSR J2322-2650b, in a paper published Tuesday (Dec. 16) in The Astrophysical Journal Letters. Although the planet was detected by a radio telescope survey in 2017, it took the sharper vision of JWST (which launched in 2021) to examine PSR J2322-2650b’s environment from 750 light-years away.

PSR J2322-2650b orbits a pulsar. Pulsars are fast-spinning neutron stars — the ultradense cores of stars that have exploded as supernovas — that emit radiation in brief, regular pulses that are visible only when their lighthouse-like beams of electromagnetic radiation aim squarely at Earth. (That’s bizarre on its own, as no other pulsar is known to have a gas-giant planet, and few pulsars have planets at all, the science team stated.)

The infrared instruments on JWST can’t actually see this particular pulsar because it is sending out high-energy gamma-rays. However, JWST’s “blindness” to the pulsar is actually a boon to scientists because they can easily probe the companion planet, PSR J2322-2650b, to see what the planet’s environment is like.

Get the world’s most fascinating discoveries delivered straight to your inbox.

“This system is unique because we are able to view the planet illuminated by its host star, but not see the host star at all,” co-author Maya Beleznay, a doctoral candidate in physics at Stanford University, said in the statement. “We can study this system in more detail than normal exoplanets.”

An artist’s concept of the exoplanet PSR J2322-2650b. (Image credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, Ralf Crawford (STScI))

Formation mystery

PSR J2322-2650b’s origin story is an enigma. It is only a million miles (1.6 million kilometers) from its star — nearly 100 times closer than Earth is to the sun. That’s even stranger when you consider that the gas giant planets of our solar system are much farther out — Jupiter is 484 million miles (778 million km) from the sun, for example.

The planet whips around its star in only 7.8 hours, and it’s shaped like a lemon because the gravitational forces of the pulsar are pulling extremely strongly on the planet. At first glance, it appears PSR J2322-2650b could have a similar formation scenario as “black widow” systems, where a sunlike star is next to a small pulsar.

You may like

In black-widow systems, the pulsar “consumes” or erodes the nearby star, much like the myth of the black widow spider’s feasting behavior after which the phenomena is named. That happens because the star is so close to the pulsar that its material falls onto the pulsar. The extra stellar material causes the pulsar to gradually spin faster and to generate a strong “wind” of radiation that erodes the nearby star.

But lead author Michael Zhang, a postdoctoral fellow in exoplanet atmospheres at the University of Chicago, said this pathway made it difficult to understand how PSR J2322-2650b came to be. In fact, the planet’s formation appears to be unexplainable at this point.

“Did this thing form like a normal planet? No, because the composition is entirely different,” Zhang said in the statement. “It’s very hard to imagine how you get this extremely carbon-enriched composition. It seems to rule out every known formation mechanism.”

One possibility for what happened comes from study co-author Roger Romani, a professor of physics at Stanford University and the Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology. After the planet cooled down from its formation, he suggested, carbon and oxygen in its interior crystallized.

But even that doesn’t account for all of the odd properties. “Pure carbon crystals float to the top and get mixed into the helium … but then something has to happen to keep the oxygen and nitrogen away,” Romani explained in the same statement. “And that’s where the mystery [comes] in.”

Scientists hope to continue studying PSR J2322-2650b. “It’s nice to not know everything,” Romani said. “I’m looking forward to learning more about the weirdness of this atmosphere. It’s great to have a puzzle to go after.”

SOURCE PAGE

Using the Hubble Space Telescope, astronomers have imaged the largest and most chaotic site of planetary birth humanity has ever seen.

Appearing like a stunning cosmic bat, this protoplanetary disk, located around 1,000 light-years away, stretches out for around 400 billion years, around 40 times the size of our solar system, out to the ring of cometary bodies known as the Kuiper belt.

This protoplanetary disk with an infant star at its heart has the official designation IRAS 23077+6707, but also has the incredible nickname “Dracula’s Chivito.” But it isn’t just its staggering size and unique nickname that make IRAS 23077+6707 so remarkable.

A Hubble image of Dracula’s Chivito, the largest protoplanetary disk ever seen (Image credit: NASA, ESA, STScI, Kristina Monsch (CfA); Image Processing: Joseph DePasquale (STScI))

“The level of detail we’re seeing is rare in protoplanetary disk imaging, and these new Hubble images show that planet nurseries can be much more active and chaotic than we expected,” team leader Kristina Monsch of the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian (CfA) said in a statement. “We’re seeing this disk nearly edge-on, and its wispy upper layers and asymmetric features are especially striking.”

You may like

Monsch added that both Hubble and the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) have glimpsed similar structures in other disks, but Dracula’s Chivito provides astronomers with an exceptional perspective that allows them to trace its substructures in visible light at an unprecedented level of detail.

“This makes the system a unique, new laboratory for studying planet formation and the environments where it happens,” Monsch continued.

The full Hubble image of IRAS 23077+6707, appearing like a cosmic steak sandwich (Image credit: NASA, ESA, STScI, Kristina Monsch (CfA); Image Processing: Joseph DePasquale (STScI))

The unsymmetrical appearance of the gas and dust lanes in Dracula’s Chivito in this stunning Hubble image indicates that dynamic processes are occurring within the disk as its morphology is gradually shaped by interactions with its surroundings.

“We were stunned to see how asymmetric this disk is,” team member Joshua Bennett Lovell, also an astronomer at the CfA, said. “Hubble has given us a front row seat to the chaotic processes that are shaping disks as they build new planets — processes that we don’t yet fully understand but can now study in a whole new way.”

Breaking space news, the latest updates on rocket launches, skywatching events and more!

Not only does this give scientists a better picture of planetary birth, but Dracula’s Chivito also offers a look at what the solar system may have looked like when it was forming planets 4.6 billion years ago, albeit on a much larger scale.

“In theory, IRAS 23077+6707 could host a vast planetary system,” said Monsch. “While planet formation may differ in such massive environments, the underlying processes are likely similar.

“Right now, we have more questions than answers, but these new images are a starting point for understanding how planets form over time and in different environments.”

By the way, in case you are wondering, the “Dracula” element of this protoplanetary disk’s nickname is a playful reference to the Transvaniian heritage of one of the team members behind this research. Meanwhile, a “Chivito” is a massive steak sandwich, an iconic national dish from Uruguay, the homeland of another of the crew of scientists.

Don’t panic, Drac, that’s “steak,” not “stake.”

SOURCE PAGE

Whether you’re cooking up chemistry, getting physical with physics or bending your mind over mathematics, one thing that remains constant is, well, constants. Some numbers are so fundamental to the way we conduct science that we’d be lost without them, and their discovery has helped us better understand the world around us.

So how many of these key figures do you know? Try our new quiz and find out. We’ll be dropping another number in the mix every day for you to guess, and if you prove yourself to be a numberphile, maybe you’ll make it to the top of our leaderboard. All you need to do is register and your score will be saved, and be sure to leave a comment and share how you got on (but no spoilers please).

—Live Science crossword: Test your knowledge on all things science with our weekly, free puzzle!

SOURCE PAGE

Social media often feels overwhelmingly toxic, but the reality is more restrained. Research finds that most harmful content comes from a tiny fraction of users who post frequently and loudly. Many Americans believe that hostile behavior dominates online spaces, but research suggests this belief is far off the mark. People often assume that nearly half […]



SOURCE PAGE

Removing old furniture made with flame retardants from people’s homes can significantly reduce the amount of the toxic chemicals in blood, a new 10-year, peer-reviewed study by California regulators and public health groups has found.

The drop that researchers found was a “super big deal”, said Arlene Blum, the director of the Green Science Policy Institute who has for decades worked to reduce the level of flame retardants in consumer goods.

“To my mind, that’s a pretty dramatic change, and it shows how you can effect change and improve public health with a regulation,” Blum said.

Most furniture made with foam between about 1975 and 2015 contained any of a range of toxic flame retardants that are linked to serious health problems, and especially present a risk for kids.

In 2015, California scrapped requirements for several of the most toxic and common flame retardants used in furniture. The California department of public health and environmental non-profits at the time checked for flame retardants in the blood of dozens of people that had furniture with the chemicals, and monitored levels over the next 10 years.

Flame retardant levels dropped about four times faster in the blood of those that removed furniture with flame retardants compared with those who didn’t. The levels in blood on average were reduced by about half within just 1.4 years.

Flame retardants commonly used in furniture are linked to serious health issues, including cancer, neurotoxicity, thyroid disease, pre-term birth, decreased fertility, deficits in motor skills, and a drop in IQ in children.

During the mid-1970s, state and federal legislators passed laws requiring a range of products to meet flammability standards, including furniture, electronics, car seats and kids’ pyjamas. But the first generation of flame retardants were found to be highly toxic, and Blum led advocacy in 1977 that helped stop the use of the most dangerous in kids’ pyjamas.

Later generations of flame retardants have proven to be nearly as toxic as the first. In 2015, after years of pressure, California updated its flammability standards to eliminate a requirement for chemical flame retardants in furniture.

The retardants often break off from furniture and attach to dust that is inhaled or ingested. Researchers found much lower levels of flame retardants in the dust of homes from which the furniture was removed.

A few years later, the state banned some of the most dangerous flame retardant compounds in furniture and other goods, and Congress adopted a similar measure in 2020. The furniture industry has largely moved away from using any flame retardants, Blum said, meaning the level of the chemicals in Americans’ blood more broadly is probably dropping as the furniture is disposed of.

Blum recommends replacing furniture made between 1975 and 2015 with products made before or after that period. Replacing foam in couch cushions can be a more economical safeguard, she said. If those options are not in the budget, regularly dusting and using a vacuum with a Hepa filter can help reduce the amount of flame retardants in a home.

SOURCE PAGE

The Predator | Holiday Special | 20th Century FOX – YouTube

Watch On

The holiday season evokes majestic memories of family, friends, gifts, and… the Predator?! Wait, that last one doesn’t sound right, but it’s true. Everyone’s favorite intergalactic trophy hunting species has a Christmas connection, as he battled Santa Claus’ reindeer in a forgotten animated short titled “The Predator Holiday Special.”

Directed by David Brooks and Alex Kamer from a script by Matthew Senreich (of “Robot Chicken” fame) and Matt Motschenbacher, the stop-motion actioner kicks off in an unassuming manner in the North Pole, as Santa’s elf Sprinkles (Xander Mobus) brushes the reindeer Blitzen (Dave B. Mitchell) and discusses their exciting plans for Christmas Eve.

Blitzen spots three red laser dots pointed in their direction, so he shoves the elf out of harm’s way, whips out a heavy-duty gun, and opens fire in the direction of the presumed threat. It doesn’t end well for Blitzen, though, as the Predator shows up and blasts a hole through the beloved reindeer. What? Did you expect the Yautja to offer it grass, or a bowl of water?

You may like

(Image credit: 20th Century Studios)

What follows is a pulsating hunting mission, as Sprinkles runs for the hills but appears to fall victim to the rabid Yautja’s sharp blades. Santa’s trusty reindeer – all kitted out like they have posters of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Dutch Schaefer above their beds – assemble in a coordinated military fashion, but their efforts prove to be futile, since the Predator savages and makes mincemeat out of them.

It’s glory kills galore, as the hunter recreates some of the franchise’s most brutal moments with the reindeer. All those weapons and training seemed to be lost on them, with the chances of “Reindeer vs. Predator” replacing “Alien vs. Predator” as the mega-money crossover evaporating with each dead reindeer.

Now, the heart-in-throat anxiety pounds faster and harder, as the Yautja approaches Santa’s house. This is it – Christmas is about to be cancelled, folks! The Grinch cheers from his home on Mount Crumpit. Or maybe not. Jolly ol’ Saint Nick (Keith Silverstein) steps out to face the enemy, and he has an ace up his sleeve: Larry the reindeer! Like a force of nature out of every single ’80s action movie and powered by the testosterone of Stallone, Schwarzenegger, and Van Damme, Larry unloads on the Predator, sending him to the great big trophy hunting museum in the sky.

(Image credit: 20th Century Studios)

Of course, Santa and Larry celebrate accordingly by reenacting the iconic handshake between Dutch and Al Dillion (Carl Weathers) from 1987’s “Predator.”

Breaking space news, the latest updates on rocket launches, skywatching events and more!

Then more Predators show up. Uh-oh! Actually, scratch that. They’re here to take away their deceased clan member, and one of them even leaves a basket of decorated eggs with Santa. Aw! The kind gesture does nothing to endear the gift givers to the North Pole residents, as Sprinkles returns and unleashes the fury of John Wick on the remaining Predators.

Related: Predator movies ranked, from worst to best

(Image credit: 20th Century Studios)

Despite Santa and his crew having the Yautja’s number here, the creatures have the last laugh, thanks to a carefully placed Trojan horse: The basket of eggs. In the final scene of the film, one of the eggs opens up to reveal it’s an Ovomorph, indicating that a Facehugging Xenomorph is imminent here. Drats! And sadly, in the North Pole, no one can hear you scream…

You may like

Where did this idea even come from? According to Senreich’s comments to Entertainment Weekly, it was born out of “a random hangout moment.” Then, the concept evolved into chucking the Predator into the world of “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer”-styled animation, because nothing screams Christmas quite like a Yautja hunt in the North Pole.

Ultimately, “The Predator Holiday Special” was created as a neat promo to drum up anticipation for the home release of Shane Black’s “The Predator,” which arrived in December 2018. Who could have guessed that this barely two-minute short was better than all 108 minutes of Black’s baffling blockbuster that almost sent the Yautja into extinction?

The special is still available to watch on YouTube, so make it a holiday tradition like watching the best Christmas movie of all time (Die Hard, obviously) every year. If you’d rather check out some more serious Predator movies, they’re all available to watch on Hulu (US) and Disney+ (UK).

If you’re going to be out of the country this holiday season, you can still watch your streaming service of choice using a VPN. You’ll be able to connect to the service you’ve paid for, no matter where you are (on Earth, it won’t work in space, sorry).

There are loads of great VPN services out there, but if you’re looking for a recommendation, NordVPN is our top pick.

SOURCE PAGE

The last two decades have seen a revolution in scientists’ ability to reconstruct the past. This has been made possible through technological advances in the way DNA is extracted from ancient bones and analyzed.

These advances have revealed that Neanderthals and modern humans interbred — something that wasn’t previously thought to have happened. It has allowed researchers to disentangle the various migrations that shaped modern people. It has also allowed teams to sequence the genomes of extinct animals, such as the mammoth, and extinct agents of disease, such as defunct strains of plague.

While much of this work has been carried out by analyzing the physical remains of humans or animals, there is another way to obtain ancient DNA from the environment. Researchers can now extract and sequence DNA (determine the order of “letters” in the molecule) directly from cave sediments rather than relying on bones. This is transforming the field, known as paleogenetics.

You may like

Caves can preserve tens of thousands of years of genetic history, providing ideal archives for studying long-term human–ecosystem interactions. The deposits beneath our feet become biological time capsules.

It is something we are exploring here at the Geogenomic Archaeology Campus Tübingen (GACT) in Germany. Analyzing DNA from cave sediments allows us to reconstruct who lived in ice age Europe, how ecosystems changed and what role humans played. For example, did modern humans and Neanderthals overlap in the same caves? It’s also possible to obtain genetic material from faeces left in caves. At the moment we are analyzing DNA from the droppings of a cave hyena that lived in Europe around 40,000 years ago.

The oldest sediment DNA discovered so far comes from Greenland and is 2 million years old.

In 2022, the Nobel prize in physiology or medicine was awarded to Svante Pääbo, a leading light in this field. It highlighted the global significance of this research. Ancient DNA now regularly makes headlines, from attempts to recreate mammoth-like elephants, to tracing hundreds of thousands of years of human presence in parts of the world. Crucially, advances in robotics and computing have allowed us to recover DNA from sediments as well as bones.

One of the most exciting aspects of sediment DNA research is its ability to detect species long gone, even when no bones or artifacts remain. A particular focus lies on humans: who lived in the cave, and when? How modern humans and Neanderthals use the caves and, as mentioned, were they there at the same times? Did cave bears and humans compete for shelter and resources? And what might the microbes that lived alongside them reveal about the impact humans had on past ecosystems?

This edited article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

SOURCE PAGE