EverythingScience

NASA space telescope sees interstellar visitor comet 3I/ATLAS flare up while exiting the solar system New infrared observations reveal the rare interstellar visitor comet 3I/ATLAS dramatically brightening during its farewell tour of the solar system. NASA's SPHEREx (Spectro-Photometer for the History of the Universe, Epoch of Reionization and Ices Explorer) space telescope captured views in December 2025 of the comet releasing a surge of gas, dust and complex molecules two months after the object's closest approach to the sun — a surprising outburst that's giving scientists their clearest chemical look yet at material formed around another star, according to a statement from NASA. The SPHEREx images were taken as the comet was already heading back out of the inner solar system. Instead of fading quietly into the dark, 3I/ATLAS flared with activity, developing a glowing coma rich in water vapor, carbon dioxide and organic compounds. Observations also show a pear-shaped dust tail, created by rocky material being ejected as the comet's activity increases. Source:Space.com @EverythingScience

Genetic Hints Reveal The Roots Of The Tree Of Life Before The Last Universal Common Ancestor Duplicated genes that appear in every branch of the tree of life can provide us with insight into the evolution that occurred between the first lifeform and the last from which we all descend, geneticists claim. As far as we can tell, life only evolved on Earth once, and everything alive today is a descendant of that initial breakthrough. However, the divergence that gave us mushrooms, mice, and maple trees probably didn’t take place straight away. That is, the tree of life had a trunk, possibly quite a long one, before it started branching off into familiar kingdoms like animals, plants, fungi, and bacteria, let alone into further divisions within each. The point immediately before the branching began is known as the Last Universal Common Ancestor (LUCA). We think we have learned something of LUCA’s nature by looking for traits all surviving lifeforms share. But what about LUCA’s predecessors? What can we learn about the steps that turned those first strands of RNA into LUCA? It’s widely assumed the answer is nothing, but a new paper challenges that view. “While the last universal common ancestor is the most ancient organism we can study with evolutionary methods,” said Professor Aaron Goldman of Oberlin College in a statement, “some of the genes in its genome were much older.” Attempts to reconstruct LUCA have reached the conclusion it was a relatively complex organism, one that could not have spontaneously appeared. Instead, LUCA was the product of a long period of evolution from simpler life. Remarkably, Goldman and colleagues say they can expose some of that process by reconstructing LUCA’s genes. Source:IFLScience @EverythingScience

Nuking Asteroids That Threaten Life On Earth May Make Them Stronger, Experiment At CERN Suggests In the new study, the team subjected a sample of the metal-rich Campo del Cielo meteorite to 27 high-energy pulses of the 440 gigaelectronvolt SPS proton beam, in order to recreate impact conditions and measure their effects. While not necessarily bad news for those who want a real-life Armageddon, the meteor sample didn't quite act how one would expect. “The material became stronger, exhibiting an increase in yield strength, and displayed a self-stabilising damping behaviour,” Melanie Bochmann, co-team lead, explained in a statement. "These results suggest that high-energy proton irradiation not only hardens iron meteorite material but may transform it into a composite-like structure with improved damping characteristics," the team added in their paper. In short, the meteorite held together a lot better than expected. While making a potentially-deadly asteroid stronger doesn't sound like a particularly good idea, the goal is not to shatter it apart, but to deflect it onto a safe course for Earth. On that front, this may actually be good news. Source:IFLScience @EverythingScience

Hop on board Mars Express, for a flight over Flaugergues Crater. Be sure to turn up the volume for the audio guide 🔊 More info, images and a map showing the route of the video 👉esa.int/Science_Explor… Source: @esascience @EverythingScience

Autism Probably Affects Boys And Girls Equally, Massive New Study Reveals Autism has historically been viewed as a condition that affects men and boys more frequently than women and girls. But a massive new study based on data from millions of people suggests this isn't actually the case, at least in Sweden. While boys are diagnosed with the condition at higher rates during childhood, by adulthood, the ratio is roughly 1:1. This suggests it's not a case of fewer women having autism: it's just that they aren't diagnosed until later in life. Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) diagnosis rates have been climbing since the 1990s, but diagnoses are not equal between males and females. The DSM-5, which defines mental health conditions and recommended treatments, states that for every four males diagnosed with autism, only one female receives a diagnosis. But the recent study, led by medical epidemiologist Caroline Fyfe of the Karolinska Institute in Sweden, paints a very different picture, adding to a growing body of research that suggests autistic women and girls are being let down by current systems of diagnosis and treatment. Source:ScienceAlert @EverythingScience

Why Is The Sun Throwing Out Such Epic X-Class Solar Flares Right Now – Including One Of The Strongest In 30 Years? While we are past the solar maximum, the peak of activity of the Sun in its 11-year cycle, we are still getting fireworks from our little star – fireworks that have caused several radio blackouts and one of the strongest flares in the last 30 years. They are all coming from the same sunspot complex, a region known as 4366. Since Sunday, it has released six X-class flares. The X-class is the category to which the most powerful solar flares belong; multiple occurrences from the same region indicates that a lot is happening there. Sunspots are cooler regions of the Sun’s surface where intense magnetic fields penetrate deep into the Sun. These magnetic field lines can snap and reconnect as the sunspots move, accelerating electrically charged particles to extremely high-speeds. This produces the flashes of intense light. Source:IFLScience @EverythingScience

NASA completed a wet dress rehearsal for the Artemis II mission in the early morning hours on Feb. 3. To allow teams to review data and conduct a second wet dress rehearsal, NASA will now target March as the the earliest possible launch opportunity for the Artemis II mission. go.nasa.gov/4ka7tKs Source: @NASA @EverythingScience

250-Million-Year-Old Fossil Reveals Origins of Our Unique Hearing Modern mammals have unique hearing abilities, able to sense a broad range of volumes and frequencies using middle-ear features, including our eardrums and a few small bones. A new study from paleontologists at the University of Chicago in the US has revealed these physical features began to emerge nearly 50 million years earlier than we thought. They found their evidence within a 250-million-year-old fossil of the mammal ancestor, Thrinaxodon liorhinus. Using computed tomography scans of the animal's skull and jaw, they created 3D models that allowed them to simulate how Thrinaxodon's anatomy might have reacted to the different sound pressures and frequencies, using engineering software to see how its bones 'wiggled' in response. Thrinaxodon lived during the Early Triassic, before the first dinosaurs. It was a cynodont – a close relative of early mammals – with a body that looks somewhere in between a lizard and a fox. Some of its genes follow the same blueprint modern mammals carry today, and this new study suggests the architecture of its hearing is also something we share. Early cynodonts had ear bones – the malleus, incus, and stapes – that were attached to their jaw. In later species, these tiny fragments eventually became detached from the jaw to form the distinctly mammalian middle ear. Before the middle ear and its associated 'tympanic' hearing abilities, animals relied on bone-conducted sound, where nerves carry signals from vibrations in the jawbone to the brain. Source:ScienceAlert @EverythingScience

Perseverance did something it’s never done before. On Dec. 8 and 10, 2025, the Mars rover completed drives planned by generative AI. The first-of-its-kind demonstration hints at a future of more efficient exploration and even more science. jpl.nasa.gov/news/nasas-per… Source: @NASAJPL @EverythingScience

Mini Human Brains Reveal How the Brain Wires Itself Scientists rebuilt human brain circuits in the lab and discovered that the thalamus acts as a central organizer of cortical wiring. The findings offer new insight into how brain networks form and why they sometimes go awry. A team of researchers in Japan has recreated key human neural circuits in a laboratory setting by using tiny, multi-region brain models known as assembloids. These structures are grown from induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells and combine multiple brain-like regions into a single system. Using this approach, the researchers showed that the thalamus plays a vital role in shaping specialized neural circuits within the human cerebral cortex. Source:SciTechDaily @EverythingScience

Scientists Uncover a Hidden Early Stage of Alzheimer’s That They Can Stop Stopping Alzheimer’s may begin with dissolving tiny tau protein clusters before damage takes hold. Scientists at Tokyo Metropolitan University have turned to polymer physics to better understand one of the defining features of Alzheimer’s disease: the formation of tau protein fibrils. Their research shows that these fibrils do not form directly. Instead, tau proteins first gather into large clusters, similar to how polymers begin to crystallize. When researchers disrupted these early clusters, fibrils failed to develop in solution. This finding points to a major shift in how future treatments for neurodegenerative diseases might be designed. Source:SciTechDaily @EverythingScience

NASA begins a practice countdown for its first moonshot with astronauts in more than 50 years Source:Phys.org @EverythingScience