Science

Dark matter may be invisible, but scientists are getting closer to understanding whether it follows the same rules as everything we can see. By comparing how galaxies move through cosmic gravity wells to the depth of those wells, researchers found that dark matter appears to behave much like ordinary matter, obeying familiar physical laws. Still, the possibility of a hidden fifth force lingers, one that must be very weak to have evaded detection so far.

Chimps may revise their beliefs in surprisingly human-like ways. Experiments showed they switched choices when presented with stronger clues, demonstrating flexible reasoning. Computational modeling confirmed these decisions weren’t just instinct. The findings could influence how we think about learning in both children and AI.

Aalto University researchers have developed a method to execute AI tensor operations using just one pass of light. By encoding data directly into light waves, they enable calculations to occur naturally and simultaneously. The approach works passively, without electronics, and could soon be integrated into photonic chips. If adopted, it promises dramatically faster and more energy-efficient AI systems.

The Shenzhou-20 mission's three-person crew has returned home after more than a week of delays caused by damage to their spacecraft, allegedly caused by an impact with a tiny piece of space debris.

MAHA disinformation agents clearly understand the power of social media, and anyone who genuinely wishes to oppose them moving forward needs to as well.  

The post To Deny The Role of Social Media In Propagating Misinformation is a Form of Germ Theory Denial, Not For Pathogens, But For Ideas   first appeared on Science-Based Medicine.

Astronomers have discovered that the famous Pleiades star cluster, otherwise known as the "Seven Sisters" is actually the bright core of a sprawling family of stars spread across nearly 2,000 light years. By combining stellar spin measurements with precise motion tracking, researchers identified over 3,000 related stars and revealed the Pleiades is twenty times larger than previously thought.

Astronomers have discovered that our Solar System is moving through the universe more than three times faster than cosmological models predict, a finding that challenges fundamental assumptions about how the universe works. By analysing the distribution of distant radio galaxies using advanced statistical methods, the team detected motion so unexpectedly rapid it earned the rare five sigma statistical significance that scientists consider definitive evidence.

Matthew’s biography of Francis Crick just came out, and I’m delighted, as I’m sure he is, with the spate of glowing reviews. I haven’t seen a bad one yet, and some of them rate the book as superlative. It is certainly one of the best science biographies going, and I hope it wins the Royal Society Science book prize.

I’ll finish up my endorsements of the book (the reviews will keep coming, though) by highlighting two more: one in Science and the other in the Times of London. But first you can listen to Matthew talking about J. D. Watson, who just died, on this BBC show (Matthew’s bit, which is the only discussion of biology, goes from the beginning to 9:35). As Matthew says, “This is the most important discovery in biology since Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection. It transforms our understanding of heredity, of evolution–of everything to do with biology.”

The American you hear in the interview is from an old interview with Watson himself.

The moderator then wants to discuss the sexism and racism of Watson, and Matthew eventually gets to it. First, though, Matthew discusses the involvement of Maurice Wilkins and Rosalind Franklin in the DNA structure, and says, as he always does, that the history was complicated, that the discovery was more collaborative than people think, but also that Crick and Watson failed to ask Franklin for permission to use her data, which was a scientific boo-boo. Watson’s further accomplishments are discussed (the Human Genome Project, the upgrading of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratories).  The mention of Watson’s personal arrogance, sexism, and racism starts at 6:50, and Matthew manages to decry it (calling it a “terrible legacy”) while not seeming nasty, something he’s good at.

Next, two reviews, the first in Science. It’s very positive, and I’ll give the exerpts (access should be free by clicking on the headline below).

In October 1958, Francis Crick and his wife, Odile, hosted a party at their house in Cambridge to celebrate Fred Sanger’s Nobel Prize in Chemistry. During the festivities, a rocket was launched from the roof terrace, which landed on the roof of a nearby church and necessitated the services of the local fire brigade (1). This otherwise inconsequential event is an apt metaphor for the scientific assault on mysticism and vitalism that the atheist Crick and his contemporaries helped pioneer through their pursuit of a new “chemical physics” of biology—an endeavor that would eventually help describe the nature of life itself. In his magnificent and expansive new biography, Crick: A Mind in Motion, Matthew Cobb forensically explores and electrifies this important chapter in the history of science through the exploits of one of its key protagonists. Magnificent and expansive! You’ll be seeing those words on the cover.  And some of these, too:

Another intriguing theme Cobb explores is Crick’s friendship with the psychedelic beat poet Michael McClure (6). Crick was so taken by the charismatic poet, in particular, a stanza in McClure’s “Peyote Poem”—“THIS IS THE POWERFUL KNOWLEDGE / we smile with it”—that he pinned it onto a wall in his home. For Crick, the beauty inherent in the solution of a complex scientific problem and the aesthetic euphoria and sense of revelation it created were reminiscent of the perceptual effects of consuming a hallucinogenic compound, such as peyote.

Cobb also touches on Crick’s eugenicist proclamations and details some of his other disastrous forays into the social implications of science, which ultimately led him to permanently abstain from such activities. Crick’s notable lack of engagement with the 1975 Asilomar meeting, which sought to address the potential biohazards and ethics of recombinant DNA technology, was in stark contrast to Watson and biologist Sydney Brenner. Crick never explained his silence on the topic of genetic engineering (7).

Complex, energetic, freethinking, dazzling, and bohemian, Crick was also ruthless, immature, misogynistic, arrogant, and careless. The phage biologist Seymour Benzer noted that Crick was not a “shrinking violet.” Maurice Wilkins described Watson and Crick as “a couple of old rogues,” and Lawrence Bragg more politely observed that Crick was “the sort of chap who was always doing someone else’s crossword.” Cobb, however, has arrived at a somewhat more benign and nuanced interpretation of the events surrounding the discovery of the double helix, the collaborative nature of which, he asserts, was obfuscated by the fictional narrative drama of Watson’s bestseller The Double Helix.

Crick is set to become the definitive account of this polymath’s life and work. We must now wait patiently for historian Nathaniel Comfort’s upcoming biography of James Watson to complement it.

In my view, the phrase “definite account of this polymath’s life and work” is really the most powerful approbation the book could get.

You can see the review from the Times of London by clicking below, or find it archived here:

If the age of the lone scientific genius has passed, was Francis Crick among its last great specimens? His name will for ever be bound to that of James Watson and their discovery in 1953 of the double-helix structure of DNA. Yet it is a measure of Crick’s influence that this breakthrough, transformative as it was, is done and dusted barely 80 pages into Matthew Cobb’s absorbing new biography.

Cobb, a zoologist and historian of science, presents Crick (1916-2004) as the hub round which a mid-century scientific revolution revolved — a researcher and theorist of unstoppable curiosity, who unravelled the secret code behind heredity before helping to reinvent the study of the mind and consciousness. More than 70 years on, it is easy to forget how penetrating Crick’s insights were — how, before he came along, we did not know how life copies itself and the molecular mechanism behind evolution was a mystery.

But Cobb’s book is no hagiography. Briskly paced, it concentrates on Crick’s scientific life, but also offers glimpses, some unflattering, of the man behind the lab bench. The picture it builds is of a brilliant, garrulous and often exasperating individual.

. . . Cobb writes with clarity and a touch of affection for his subject. His Crick is radical in science and conservative in temperament; deeply irreligious yet moved by poetry; a philanderer who adored his wife. Above all he is insatiably curious — a mind in motion, indeed. And yes, he may also represent something that may now be lost: the era when a single intellect could sit at the centre of a scientific revolution. Crick might be best known for his collaboration with Watson and his notorious debt to Franklin. However, in the crowded, collaborative landscape of 21st-century research, where knowledge advances by increments, achieved by vast teams who work with ever growing volumes of data, it is hard to imagine another individual whose ideas will so completely redefine the life sciences.

I’d call that a good review as well. Kudos to Dr. Cobb. I told him he should celebrate by going off on a nice vacation, but I’m betting he won’t.

A new floating droplet electricity generator is redefining how rain can be harvested as a clean power source by using water itself as both structural support and an electrode. This nature-integrated design dramatically reduces weight and cost compared to traditional solid-based generators while still producing high-voltage outputs from each falling drop. It remains stable in harsh natural conditions, scales to large functional devices, and has the potential to power sensors, off-grid electronics, and distributed energy systems on lakes and coastal waters.

Carl Sagan, along with co-author Edwin Salpeter, famously published a paper in the 70s about the possibility of finding life in the cloud of Jupiter. They specifically described “sinkers, floaters, and hunters” that could live floating and moving in the atmosphere of our solar system’s largest planet. He also famously talked about how clouds on another of our solar system’s planets - Venus - obfuscated what was on the surface, leading to wild speculation about a lush, Jurassic Park-like world full of life, just obscured by clouds. Venus turned out to be the exact opposite of that, but both of those papers show the impact clouds can have on the Earth for life. A new paper by authors as the Carl Sagan Institute, led by Ligia Coelho of Cornell, argues that we should look at clouds as potential habitats for life - we just have to know how to look for it.

The next few months are likely to bring a dramatic transition for NASA, under the leadership of a new administrator who has new ideas about changing the course of the space agency.

The JWST surprised when it detected very early galaxies that were extremely luminous. This suggested that they were more massive than researchers thought they could be. Not enough time had passed for them to grow so large. New research has an explanation.

Greenland’s melt is expected to slow the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, but research suggests a collapse of the West Antarctic ice sheet could in some cases prevent it from shutting down

Mice with the same genetic variant that contributes towards red hair in people were slower to recover from wounds than their black-haired counterparts

RNA from an exceptionally well preserved woolly mammoth gives us a window on gene activity in an animal that died nearly 40,000 years ago

A galaxy in a practically empty area of the universe seems to be impossibly forming stars, and new observations have only deepened the puzzle

Hypersonic flight could one day make long-haul travel as quick as a short movie. Researchers are testing how turbulence behaves at extreme speeds, a critical hurdle for designing these aircraft. Their laser-based krypton experiments suggest turbulence at Mach 6 behaves more like slower airflow than expected. The results could simplify hypersonic vehicle design and accelerate progress toward ultra-fast travel.

Laser light can physically distort Janus TMD materials, revealing how their asymmetrical structure amplifies light-driven forces. These effects could power breakthroughs in photonic chips, sensors, and tunable light technologies.

Scientists have decoded the atomic-level secrets behind catalysts that turn propane into propylene. Their algorithms reveal unexpected oxide behavior that stabilizes the catalytic reaction by clustering around defective metal sites. The findings could help streamline industrial chemistry and inspire better catalysts for major processes like methanol synthesis.

From microscopes to geodes, New Scientist staff share their top Christmas present ideas in a gift guide unlike any you’ve seen before