Science

What can mapped drainage systems on Mars teach scientists about the Red Planet’s watery past? This is what a recent study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences hopes to address as a team of scientists from the University of Texas at Austin (UT Austin) conducted a first-time mapping study involving Martian river basins. This study has the potential to not only gain insight into ancient Mars and how much water existed there long ago but also develop new methods for mapping ancient river basins on Mars and potentially other worlds.

Scientists have launched COLIS, a special laboratory aboard the International Space Station designed to study how everyday materials like sunscreens, mayonnaise, and medications behave in near zero gravity. Researchers discovered that gravity influences the long term stability of soft matter far more dramatically than previously understood, affecting how these materials age and restructure at the molecular level. This research could fundamentally improve how we design everything from controlled release drugs to self assembling materials, demonstrating that understanding materials in space offers unexpected benefits for life on Earth.

On a summer day in 709 BCE, scribes at the Lu Duchy Court in ancient China looked up to witness something extraordinary. The Sun vanished completely from the sky, and in its place hung a ghostly halo. They recorded the event carefully, noting that during totality the eclipsed Sun appeared "completely yellow above and below." Nearly three millennia later, that ancient observation has helped modern scientists measure how fast Earth was spinning and understand what our Sun was doing at a time when Homer was composing poetry.

Dr. Makary desperately wants everyone to know he is a brave, free-thinker, able to see the world objectively and without bias, smarter than 99% of his peers. However, in reality his brain is cooked.

The post Dr. Marty Makary: Mad Scientists, Biowarfare, Nazi War Criminal Doctors, Half Rat-Deer Carcasses, and How COVID, AIDS, & Lyme Came from A Lab. first appeared on Science-Based Medicine.

Kyushu University scientists have achieved a major leap in fuel cell technology by enabling efficient proton transport at just 300°C. Their scandium-doped oxide materials create a wide, soft pathway that lets protons move rapidly without clogging the crystal lattice. This solves a decades-old barrier in solid-oxide fuel cell development and could make hydrogen power far more affordable.

Researchers engineered a strained germanium layer on silicon that allows charge to move faster than in any silicon-compatible material to date. This record mobility could lead to chips that run cooler, faster, and with dramatically lower energy consumption. The discovery also enhances the prospects for silicon-based quantum devices.

Researchers engineered a strained germanium layer on silicon that allows charge to move faster than in any silicon-compatible material to date. This record mobility could lead to chips that run cooler, faster, and with dramatically lower energy consumption. The discovery also enhances the prospects for silicon-based quantum devices.

An international team has made a significant breakthrough in understanding the tectonic evolution of terrestrial planets. Using advanced numerical models, the team systematically classified for the first time six distinct planetary tectonic regimes. Their work provides a unified theory on the geological evolution of both Earth and Venus.

Intermediate mass stars experience periods of rapid growth in their late stages of formation. The growing young star emits more radiation that encourages greater accretion. Rather than depleting their protoplanetary disks and preventing gas giants from forming, the opposite is true.

In a recent paper, a team of SETI and astrobiology specialists examines four controversial claims about the existence of extraterrestrial life. From these, they present recommendations for scientists and science communicators when addressing future claims of discovery.

Voters change their opinions after interacting with an AI chatbot – but, encouragingly, it seems that AIs rely on facts to influence people

The AI industry consumes vast amounts of energy, fresh water and investor cash. Now it also needs memory chips - the same ones used in laptops, smartphones and games consoles

Climate data and historical accounts suggest that crop failures in the 1340s prompted Italian officials to import grain from eastern Europe, and this may have carried in the plague bacterium

Penn State researchers created seven new high-entropy oxides by removing oxygen during synthesis, enabling metals that normally destabilize to form rock-salt ceramics. Machine learning helped identify promising compositions, and advanced imaging confirmed their stability. The method offers a flexible framework for creating materials once thought impossible to synthesize.

Please send in your good wildlife photos (with “wildlife” construed broadly) if you have them. So far we can continue on.

Today’s bird photos are by Ephraim Heller, continuing with his pictures from the Pantanal wetlands of Brazil. Ephraim’s captions and IDs are indented, and you can enlarge his photos by clicking on them.

These photos are from my July 2025 trip to Brazil’s Pantanal, the world’s largest tropical wetland area and the world’s largest flooded grasslands. Today I have photos of a toucans, aracaris, woodpeckers, and “cardinals.” It’s a random assemblage of species, but all the adult males have at least some red feathers so I declare it to be a cohesive post.

Toco toucan (Ramphastos toco). The largest and most recognizable toucan species. Despite its size, the bill is lightweight due to internal honeycomb structure. Per Wikipedia:

Research has shown that one function is as a surface area for heat exchange. The bill has the ability to modify blood flow and so regulate heat distribution in the body, allowing for the use of the bill as a thermal radiator. In terms of surface area used for this function, the bill relative to the bird’s size is amongst the largest of any animal and has a network of superficial blood vessels supporting the thin horny sheath on the bill made of keratin called the rhamphotheca. In its capacity to remove body heat, the bill is comparable to that of elephant ears.

This one kindly posed against the full moon before dawn:

The enormous beak helps the toco reach fruit on small branches:

Chestnut-eared Aracari (Pteroglossus castanotis). Just a small, cute toucan:

Green-barred Woodpecker (Colaptes melanochloros). The green-barred woodpecker’s diet is almost entirely ants including their larvae and pupae. Yum!:

Little woodpecker (Veniliornis passerinus). As you can see, it is a hard worker:

Female:

Male:

 

Pale-crested woodpecker (Celeus lugubris):

Yellow tufted woodpecker (Melanerpes cruentatus):

Now for the “cardinals.” Why the quotation marks? Because neither the yellow-billed cardinal nor the red-crested cardinal are true cardinals. Both belong to the tanager (Thraupidae) family, not the cardinal family (Cardinalidae). Now why would you go and call a tanager by the name cardinal? I’m outraged by it. How did the naming bodies allow this? In my opinion it puts all of science in a bad light with the general public, like cold fusion.

Red-crested cardinal (Paroaria coronata):

Yellow-billed cardinal (Paroaria capitata):

Please write to your congressperson and ask them to immediately address this issue. Tell them to “follow the science.”

A network of powerful ground-based telescopes captured rare starspot-crossing events on TOI-3884b, revealing cooler patches on the star’s surface and rapid changes tied to its rotation. By combining multicolor transit observations with months of high-cadence brightness monitoring, researchers nailed down the star’s rotation period with impressive precision. These measurements allowed them to map the system’s geometry—and what they found was surprising: the planet's orbit is wildly tilted relative to the star’s spin.

Searching for technosignatures - signs of technology on a planet that we can see from afr - remains a difficult task. There are so many different factors to consider, and we only have the technological capabilities to detect a relatively small collection of them. A new paper, available in pre-print on arXiv but also accepted for publication into The Astrophysical Journal Letters, from Jacob Haqq-Misra of the Blue Marble Space Institute of Science and his co-authors explores some of those capabilities by using a framework they developed known as Project Janus that estimates what technology will look like on Earth 1,000 years from now in the hopes that we can test whether or not we can detect it on another planet.

From a dragonfly to marine organisms, photographer Michael Benson zoomed in with powerful scanning electron microscopes to take these extraordinary shots for his book Nanocosmos

Misplaced concerns or opposition could lead to overregulation or even banning

The post “Gain of Function” Research Is Misunderstood – And That Is A Problem first appeared on Science-Based Medicine.

Researchers have discovered a new way to grow graphene that deliberately adds structural defects to enhance its usefulness in electronics, sensors, catalysts, and more. Using a specially shaped molecule called azupyrene, scientists can produce graphene films rich in beneficial 5–7 ring defects—imperfections that make the material more interactive, more magnetic, and more electronically versatile.