EverythingScience

Personal change thresholds may explain why popular policies fail to spread Why do widely supported solutions to major problems, such as climate change, so often struggle to gain real traction? A new study suggests that part of the answer lies in understanding why people resist change, and how the combination of their preferences and social networks can help overcome that resistance. A study published in Nature Human Behaviour by researchers at the University of Zurich (UZH) shows that it is possible to measure people's individual thresholds for change. This threshold value describes how much social support a person needs before adopting a new behavior. Personal thresholds vary widely The research brings together two fields that have traditionally studied social change separately: behavioral science, which examines what drives individual decisions, and complexity science, which looks at how behaviors spread through complex social networks. "People don't change in isolation," says Manuel S. Mariani from the Department of Business Administration. "They respond to what others around them are doing, but the amount of encouragement they need varies from person to person. Some people will try a new idea the moment they hear about it. Others wait until everyone else is doing it." Source:Phys.org @EverythingScience

Global study finds majority of people worldwide prioritize environmental protection over economic growth A new study by University of Vermont researchers finds that a majority of people across the globe favor protecting the environment over growing the economy when the two goals conflict. The paper, published recently in the journal Ecological Economics, analyzed data from two major international surveys, encompassing responses from residents in 92 countries. Overall, the researchers found nearly 58% of people worldwide value environmental protection over economic growth when the two goals are at odds. "The political discourse is often very much focused around the goal of economic growth, but our results show that this is actually not people's priority," said Jukka Kilgus, a master's student studying natural resources at the Rubenstein School of Environment and Natural Resources and the lead author of the paper. "Instead, they often favor ecological and social well-being. And these are not just left-leaning college graduates in rich countries, but a diverse group of people with many different backgrounds across countries." A more complex global picture Previous studies have largely focused on residents of the Global North and have identified characteristics common among individuals in those countries who favor environmental protection over economic growth. They tend to be well-educated, lean politically to the left, are younger, and female. Kilgus, who is also a Gund Graduate Fellow, said this analysis showed a drop off in support for environmental protection over economic growth among some less wealthy or only recently industrialized nations. But it also showed that in many non-Western countries, commonly assumed traits like education, gender, age, income, and political orientation do not behave as expected. In some cases, stronger environmental support is found among men, older individuals, lower-income groups, or those leaning politically to the right, underscoring how deeply cultural, political, and economic context shapes public opinion. "This shows that there is no universal set of factors that influences people's prioritization of the environment over the economy," the authors write. Source:Phys.org @EverythingScience

From cleanroom to ocean world – our Dragonfly mission has begun integration and testing at JHUAPL. Engineers are powering up key systems, including the spacecraft’s “brain” and power units, preparing the rotorcraft for the journey to Saturn’s moon Titan. go.nasa.gov/4ljsD9w Source: @NASASolarSystem @EverythingScience

NASA's Hubble unexpectedly catches comet breaking up In a happy twist of fate, NASA's Hubble Space Telescope witnessed a comet in the act of breaking apart. The chance of that happening while Hubble watched is extraordinarily minuscule. The findings are published in the journal Icarus. The comet K1, whose full name is C/2025 K1 (ATLAS)—not to be confused with interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS—was not the original target of the Hubble study. "Sometimes the best science happens by accident," said co-investigator John Noonan, a research professor in the Department of Physics at Auburn University in Alabama. "This comet got observed because our original comet was not viewable due to some new technical constraints after we won our proposal. We had to find a new target—and right when we observed it, it happened to break apart, which is the slimmest of slim chances." Noonan didn't know K1 was fragmenting until he viewed the images the day after Hubble took them. "While I was taking an initial look at the data, I saw that there were four comets in those images when we only proposed to look at one," said Noonan. "So we knew this was something really, really special." Source:Phys.org @EverythingScience

A bonobo’s imaginary tea party hints that apes can pretend Humans may not be the only primates with the power to imagine. A bonobo named Kanzi recently showed that he could keep track of make-believe juice and grapes during a pretend tea party. This finding adds to a growing body of evidence that apes — primates without a tail, such as bonobos and gorillas — can picture things that aren’t really there. Scientists once thought only people did this. By a year old, human children can start playing pretend. By age three, most kids can build whole imaginary words in their minds. This ability is necessary for many complex tasks. Source:SN Explores @EverythingScience

A private space company has a radical new plan to bag an asteroid It may sound fanciful, but a Los Angeles-based company says it has conceived of a plan to fly out to a smallish, near-Earth asteroid, throw a large bag around it, and bring the body back to a “safe” gathering point near our planet. The company, TransAstra, said Wednesday that an unnamed customer has agreed to fund a study of its proposed “New Moon” mission to capture and relocate an asteroid approximately the size of a house, with a mass of about 100 metric tons. “We envision it becoming a base for robotic research and development on materials processing and manufacturing,” said Joel Sercel, chief executive officer of TransAstra. “Long term, instead of building space hardware on the ground and launching propellant up from the Earth, we could harvest it from raw materials in space.” Lots of targets Sercel said there are as many as 250 potential target asteroids, with a diameter of up to about 20 meters, that could be reached with reusable, robotic spacecraft over the next decade. He envisions aggregating dozens, and then hundreds, of small asteroids at the “New Moon” processing facility, which could potentially be located at the Earth-Sun L2 point, about 1.5 million km from Earth. Such asteroids could provide water for use as propellant and minerals for everything from solar panels to radiation shielding. Various asteroids could be targeted for their content, such as C-type asteroids as a source of water or M-types for metals. All of this may seem a little bit out there, and to some extent it is. That’s the point of the feasibility study, which Sercel said will be completed by May, which will further refine a mission plan and its trajectory and the spacecraft needed to fly it. If fully funded, the mission could rendezvous with an asteroid by as early as 2028 or 2029. TransAstra is working with the University of Central Florida, Purdue, and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory/Caltech to complete its analysis. Source:Ars Technica @EverythingScience

Tanzania's Mt Kilimanjaro, among the clouds over East Africa. Photographed in space from the ISS, and on Earth from Amboseli National Park with National Geographic's BabakTafreshi Source: @astro_Pettit @EverythingScience

Scientists Find Evidence of Worlds Colliding ... 11,000 Light-Years Away Astronomers say unusual readings from a star system 11,000 light-years away suggest that two of the planets circling the star crashed into each other, creating a huge, light-obscuring cloud of rocks and dust. The analysis, laid out this week in a paper published by The Astrophysical Journal Letters, could provide new insights into the occasionally cataclysmic process that governs the evolution of planetary objects — including our own planet Earth and its moon. “There are only a few other planetary collisions of any kind on record, and none that bear so many similarities to the impact that created the Earth and moon,” University of Washington graduate student Anastasios Tzanidakis, the study’s lead author, said in a news release. If we can observe more moments like this elsewhere in the galaxy, it will teach us lots about the formation of our world.” Tzanidakis found the first clues while combing through archival data from the Gaia spacecraft and other sky surveys. He was particularly intrigued by Gaia20ehk, a sunlike star near the constellation Puppis. “The star’s light output was nice and flat, but starting in 2016 it had these three dips in brightness. And then, right around 2021, it went completely bonkers,” Tzanidakis recalled. “I can’t emphasize enough that stars like our sun don’t do that. So when we saw this one, we were like ‘Hello, what’s going on here?’ ” Source:Universe Today @EverythingScience

Scientists Achieve Long-Sought Breakthrough Toward Oral Insulin Pills For more than 100 years, scientists have pursued the idea of delivering insulin as a pill. This goal has remained difficult to achieve because insulin breaks down in the digestive system and the intestine lacks a natural transport pathway that allows the hormone to enter the bloodstream. Because of these biological barriers, many people with diabetes still depend on daily insulin injections, which can place a significant burden on long-term treatment and quality of life. Researchers at Kumamoto University, led by Associate Professor Shingo Ito, have now developed a promising drug delivery strategy designed to overcome these obstacles. Their approach uses a cyclic peptide that can pass through the small intestine. The molecule, called the DNP peptide, helps insulin move across the intestinal barrier and into the body after oral administration. Source:SciTechDaily @EverythingScience

New Study Addresses Clotting Risks for Female Astronauts It's no secret that prolonged periods spent in microgravity takes a toll on the human body. This includes muscle atrophy, bone density loss, and changes to the cardiovascular, endocrine, and nervous systems. But for female astronauts, there is also the greater risk of developing blood clots, according to recent findings. This highlights the fact that, to date, most studies of human health in space have involved male astronauts. But as the number of female astronauts continues to grow, more research is required to address potentially gender-related health risks. This was the motivation behind a new study that examined how microgravity affects blood clotting, specifically in women. The study was conducted by Simon Fraser University (SFU) and the European Space Agency (ESA), with support provided through a grant from the Canadian Space Agency (CSA). It consisted of 18 women participating in a 5-day dry immersion test to assess the risk of developing potentially life-threatening blood clots. The results support existing evidence that women are at a greater risk of venous thromboembolism and identified hypercoagulability as a potential key mechanism. Source:Universe Today @EverythingScience

Scientists discover new heavy proton-like particle at CERN Scientists from the University of Manchester have played a leading role in the discovery of a new subatomic particle at CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC). The particle, known as the Ξcc⁺ (Xi‑cc‑plus), is a new type of heavy proton-like particle containing two charm quarks and one down quark. The result is the first particle discovery made using the upgraded LHCb detector, a major international project involving more than 1,000 scientists across 20 countries. The UK made the largest national contribution to the upgrade, with significant leadership from Manchester. The newly observed Ξcc⁺ is a heavier relative of the proton, which was famously discovered in Manchester by Ernest Rutherford and colleagues in 1917–1919. The proton contains two up quarks and a down quark. Details of the Ξcc⁺ discovery were presented at the Rencontres de Moriond Electroweak conference. The new discovery replaces the up quarks with their heavier relatives, the charm quarks. It also extends a legacy begun in the 1950s, when Manchester physicists were the first to identify a member of the Ξ (Xi) particle family. Professor Chris Parkes, head of the University's Department of Physics and Astronomy, led the international collaboration during the installation and first operation of the LHCb Upgrade detector. He also led the UK contribution to the project for over a decade, from approval through to delivery. Source:Phys.org @EverythingScience

The appendix evolved at least 32 times across 361 species, so it's 'unlikely to be a useless evolutionary accident,' research finds Most people know only two things about the appendix: You don't need it — and if it bursts, you need surgery fast. That basic story traces back at least to Charles Darwin, the English naturalist who developed the theory of natural selection. In "The Descent of Man," he described the appendix as a vestige: a leftover from plant-eating ancestors with larger digestive organs. For more than a century, that interpretation shaped both textbook and casual medical wisdom. But the evolutionary story of the appendix turns out to be much more complicated. Source:Live Science @EverythingScience