EverythingScience

Could a recently detected ultra-high-energy neutrino be linked to new physics? Neutrinos are extremely lightweight and electrically neutral particles that rarely interact with ordinary matter. Due to these rare interactions, neutrinos can travel across space almost entirely unaffected, carrying information about highly energetic cosmological events, such as exploding stars or supermassive black holes. The KM3NeT neutrino telescope, an observatory located at the bottom of the Mediterranean Sea, recently detected the presence of a neutrino carrying extremely high energy, above 100 PeV (peta-electronvolts). This is one of the most energetic neutrinos observed to date. Theoretical predictions suggested that another large-scale neutrino detector, namely the IceCube detector, would also observe similar high-energy neutrino events. However, this did not happen, which might potentially hint at some new physics, such as a new type of neutrinos or non-standard interactions, that are not included in the standard model of physics. Researchers at Oklahoma State University set out to explore a possible explanation for the reported discrepancy between predictions and recent neutrino observations. Source:Phys.org @EverythingScience

Measles' resurgence in the US is a grim sign of what's coming Measles' return is no mystery: At its root is the falling vaccination rate. Around 90% of the U.S. population has received the MMR vaccine, which protects against measles, mumps and rubella, and in some regions of the country, the rate is below 60%. Since about 2019-2020, that overall number has dropped below the 95% needed for herd immunity. It is necessary to keep that rate nationally, but maintaining herd immunity at the local level is equally important in order to prevent measles from finding pockets of unvaccinated communities. Countries that remain free of continuous transmission for 12 months are deemed to have eliminated measles — a designation the U.S. achieved in 2000. The Pan American Health Organization was scheduled to decide in April whether the U.S. should lose that designation, but the organization postponed its meeting until November. Current trends suggest that both the U.S. and Mexico, which has also been battling the disease, may lose this status — as Canada did in November 2025. All three countries have seen their vaccination rates fall below the 95% threshold, and their outbreaks may share epidemiological links. Source:Live Science @EverythingScience

Why Do Humanoid Robots Still Struggle With the Small Stuff? The last time I covered the science of humanoid robots, the state of the art looked downright Orwellian — by which I mean, “four legs good, two legs bad.” It was 2015. Boston Dynamics’ first “Spot” quadruped had taken YouTube by storm, confidently trotting up stairs and recovering from vicious kicks. Also popular at the time: humanoids falling down. Constantly. I felt sorrier for those tottering metal lobsters than I ever did for Spot. Bipedal locomotion is hard. Cut to now. Humanoids have apparently become so advanced that Tesla is mothballing some electric car models to make way for its Optimus humanoid robot, and start-ups are preselling android butlers with a straight face. Hype aside, I was genuinely curious: Did a paradigm shift happen in the field when I wasn’t looking? Sure, “AI” happened (that is, in the post-ChatGPT sense). I certainly hadn’t overlooked that. But I had no idea what it possibly had to do with robots not falling down anymore. For a reality check, I called Scott Kuindersma, who recently left Boston Dynamics after many years there, and Jonathan Hurst of Agility Robotics. Both scientists had been present and involved during the robot-faceplant days. Surely today’s robotic bipedal marvels can ascend a few stairs and open a door without breaking a nonexistent sweat, something they famously struggled with a decade ago. I asked each researcher: Can your flagship robot — Boston Dynamics’ Atlas or Agility’s Digit, two of the most credible and pedigreed humanoids on Earth — handle any set of stairs or doorway? “Not reliably,” Hurst said. “I don’t think it’s totally solved,” Kuindersma said. Don’t get me wrong: I don’t believe that some sock-faced robot zombie is close to taking over my household chores. But stairs and doors? It’s 2026. Why are humanoids still this … hard? Source:Quanta Magazine @EverythingScience

NASA’s DART Impact Actually Changed an Asteroid System’s Orbit Around the Sun NASA’s DART (Double Asteroid Redirection Test) spacecraftchanged the motion of an asteroid system in space, demonstrating that a kinetic impactor could be a viable way to deflect a near-Earth object if one ever threatened Earth. New findings show that when the spacecraft deliberately crashed into the asteroid moonlet Dimorphos in September 2022, the impact did more than alter the small body’s motion around its larger companion, Didymos. The collision also slightly changed the path that both asteroids follow around the Sun. Didymos and Dimorphos are gravitationally bound and circle a shared center of mass, forming what astronomers call a binary asteroid system. Because the two bodies are linked in this way, changing one affects the other. First Measurable Human Impact on a Solar Orbit According to a study published in the journal Science Advances, scientists carefully tracked the motion of the asteroid pair after the collision. They discovered that the system’s 770-day orbit around the Sun shifted by a fraction of a second following the DART impact. This marks the first time that a spacecraft built by humans has measurably changed the solar orbit of a natural object. “This is a tiny change to the orbit, but given enough time, even a tiny change can grow to a significant deflection,” said Thomas Statler, lead scientist for solar system small bodies at NASA Headquarters in Washington. “The team’s amazingly precise measurement again validates kinetic impact as a technique for defending Earth against asteroid hazards and shows how a binary asteroid might be deflected by impacting just one member of the pair.” Source:SciTechDaily @EverythingScience

Cats May Hold the Key to Treating Human Cancer A large international study has mapped the genetic landscape of feline cancers for the first time, revealing striking similarities between tumor-driving mutations in cats, humans, and dogs. The genetics of cat tumors are no longer a “black box,” according to researchers behind a new study that represents one of the most significant advances in feline cancer research. Published in Science, the research provides the first large-scale genetic analysis of cancers in domestic cats. The findings could deepen scientific understanding of cancer in both animals and humans. The project has also produced a publicly available resource that other researchers can use to study the genetics of feline cancers. Cancer is one of the most common causes of illness and death in cats. Even so, scientists have historically had limited information about the genetic factors behind these diseases. That gap in knowledge is something the new study aims to address, says Dr. Geoffrey Wood, a pathobiology professor at the University of Guelph and co-senior author of the international research project. “Despite domestic cats being common pets, there was very little known about the genetics of cancer in these animals,” Wood says, “until now.” Source:SciTechDaily @EverythingScience

🧭 Which way to Mars for less space radiation, please? ☢️ Data from esa's ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter confirms that travelling during solar maximum is the safest time for a trip to Mars and back. 🤯 The radiation paradox: esa.int/Science_Explor… Source: @esaspaceflight @EverythingScience

Reading the Sun's Mind Weeks Before It Erupts Our Sun is, by everyday standards, a barely believable object. A million Earths could fit inside it. Every second, it converts around four million tonnes of its own mass into pure energy and the light and heat it generates, make life on this planet possible. And yet for all its power, we understand it only imperfectly. Its surface seethes with magnetic complexity, hurling billion tonne clouds of charged particles into space and unleashing radiation bursts powerful enough to fry electronics across an entire hemisphere. We know it does these things. What we've never been able to do particularly well is predict when. Imagine receiving a severe weather forecast not hours before a storm hits, but weeks ahead. Time to batten down the hatches, reroute flights, protect critical infrastructure. For hurricanes and blizzards, that kind of foresight is still largely beyond us. But for space weather, scientists have just taken a significant first step toward making it a reality. Researchers at the Southwest Research Institute and the National Science Foundation's National Centre for Atmospheric Research have developed a new forecasting tool that could extend space weather warnings from a matter of hours to potentially weeks in advance. Given that a major solar storm can knock out GPS networks, collapse power grids and endanger astronauts in orbit, the stakes couldn't be higher. The trouble with predicting solar storms has always been the same that by the time the warning signs appear on the Sun's surface, it's almost too late. The tangled magnetic regions that generate solar flares and coronal mass ejections only become visible a few hours before they unleash their fury. That's barely enough time to do anything useful. But those active regions don't appear from nowhere. They bubble up from deep inside the Sun, driven by powerful magnetic forces operating in a thin but critical layer far beneath the surface called the tachocline, the boundary between the Sun's steadily rotating core and the more turbulent churning of its outer layers. If you could peer down there and read what's happening, you'd have weeks of warning. The problem is that the tachocline sits roughly 209,000 kilometres below the surface, you can't see it directly. The team's solution was actually really rather elegant. Using magnetic measurements from NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory, they realised that patterns visible at the surface could be mathematically inverted to reconstruct what was happening further down. They then built PINNBARDS; a ‘Physics Informed Neural Network Based Active Region Distribution Simulator’ to do exactly that at scale, connecting surface observations to subsurface magnetic dynamics in ways that weren't previously possible. Source:Universe Today @EverythingScience

Let’s learn about animals that can regrow body parts For humans, regrowing a lost body part would require superpowers. But for some other animals, it’s business as usual. Salamanders are perhaps the most famous examples. If a salamander loses a leg or a tail, it can grow a new one in a matter of weeks. Golden apple snails can rebuild eyes within months. Some sea spiders can regrow their backsides in months, too. And those aren’t even the most extreme cases of regeneration. Some sea slugs can rebuild their whole bodies from the head down! Scientists have long been fascinated by animals’ powers of regeneration. They want to know why some creatures can rebuild body parts while others can’t — and how these species pull off their feats of superhealing. Recent studies have offered some clues. Salamanders, for instance, develop very slowly. As a result, adult salamanders may still have plenty of stem cells in their bodies. Stem cells can grow into many different types of tissue, making them useful building blocks for new limbs. Lungfish — which also develop slowly and can regenerate — may have a similar trick in their genes as salamanders. Source:SN Explores @EverythingScience

How to make planet Jupiter: 1) be on the Space Station 2) make a thin film sphere of water 3) add food coloring 4) blow on the edge to create swirls This is way cool! Source: @astro_Pettit @EverythingScience

China's Space Programme Prepares for Its Busiest Year Yet The Chinese didn't invent the rocket but they came remarkably close. More than a thousand years ago, during the Song Dynasty, Chinese engineers were packing black powder into bamboo tubes and launching fire arrows that hissed across battlefields on jets of smoke and flame. Those crude devices were the distant ancestors of every launch vehicle that has ever punched through Earth's atmosphere and there's a pleasing symmetry in the fact that, today, China operates one of the most capable and ambitious space programmes on the planet. From its first satellite in 1970 to a fully operational crewed space station orbiting overhead right now, the journey has been extraordinary. And in 2026, it's about to get even more interesting. Source:Universe Today @EverythingScience

Nocturnal ants use lunar compass and sophisticated calculations to travel at night The team says that the ants' headings during accelerating and decelerating moons fit a kind of linear extrapolation prediction rule. The ants predict the moon's movement by combining linear extrapolation with a rapid "speed-step" when the moon is at its highest point in the sky—its lunar apex. However, they also found that errors in the ants' prediction peak around the speed-step due to night-to-night variability in the moon's arc. Still, these are apparently sophisticated navigation abilities, showing parallels to human-made navigation systems. Source:Phys.org @EverythingScience

An interstellar comet packed with alcohol? What ALMA found in 3I/ATLAS Comet 3I/ATLAS continues to make astonishing headlines, thanks to new findings from astronomers using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA). This new research reveals that 3I/ATLAS is packed with an unusually large amount of the organic molecule methanol—more than almost all known comets in our own solar system. "Observing 3I/ATLAS is like taking a fingerprint from another solar system," shares Nathan Roth, lead author on this research, and a professor with American University. "The details reveal what it's made of, and it's bursting with methanol in a way we just don't usually see in comets in our own solar system." Source:Phys.org @EverythingScience