Out beyond the orbit of Neptune lies an expansive ring of ancient relics, dynamical enigmas, and possibly a hidden planet—or two.

The Kuiper Belt, a region of frozen debris about 30 to 50 times farther from the sun than the Earth is—and perhaps farther, though nobody knows—has been shrouded in mystery since it first came into view in the 1990s.

Over the past 30 years, astronomers have cataloged about 4,000 Kuiper Belt objects (KBOs), including a smattering of dwarf worlds, icy comets, and leftover planet parts. But that number is expected to increase tenfold in the coming years as observations from more advanced telescopes pour in. In particular, the Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile will illuminate this murky region with its flagship project, the Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST), which began operating last year. Other next-generation observatories, such as the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), will also help to bring the belt into focus.

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© NASA/SOFIA/Lynette Cook

On a remote island in North Macedonia, male Hermann’s tortoises outnumber females 19 to 1, an imbalance driving the population to extinction.

There are plenty of unanswered questions about the origin of life on Earth. But the research community has largely reached consensus that one of the key steps was the emergence of an RNA molecule that could replicate itself. RNA, like its more famous relative DNA, can carry genetic information. But it can also fold up into three-dimensional structures that act as catalysts. These two features have led to the suggestion that early life was protein-free, with RNA handling both heredity and catalyzing a simple metabolism.

For this to work, one of the reactions that the early RNAs would need to catalyze is the copying of RNA molecules, without which any sort of heritability would be impossible. While we've found a number of catalytic RNAs that can copy other molecules, none have been able to perform a key reaction: making a copy of themselves. Now, however, a team has found an incredibly short piece of RNA—just 45 bases long—that can make a copy of itself.

Finding an RNA polymerase

We have identified a large number of catalytic RNAs (generically called ribozymes, for RNA-based enzymes), and some of them can catalyze reactions involving other RNAs. A handful of these are ligases, which link together two RNA molecules. In some cases, they need these molecules to be held together by a third RNA molecule that base pairs with both of them. We've only identified a few that can act as polymerases, which add RNA bases to a growing molecule, one at a time, with each new addition base pairing with a template molecule.

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© Laguna Design

Archaeologists say a 2,200-year-old specimen is the first direct evidence of how the Carthaginian war machine used the giant mammals in the Punic Wars.

© Adam Eastland/Alamy

Pressure, frictional heating and a disordered layer of molecules on top of the ice make skating possible

Ice skating is counterintuitive: why should a narrow blade make it easier to slide over the ice? The science is surprisingly complex, but unscientific people worked out the practical application a long time ago.

William FitzStephen described how Londoners entertained themselves in freezing conditions in 1173: “Crowds of young men go out to play on the ice. Some of them fit shinbones of cattle on their feet, tying them round their ankles … and are carried along as fast as a flying bird.”

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© Photograph: Tom Jenkins/The Guardian

© Photograph: Tom Jenkins/The Guardian

© Photograph: Tom Jenkins/The Guardian

The heavy version of Europe's Ariane 6 rocket launched for the first time Thursday, hauling 32 spacecraft to low-Earth orbit for Amazon's satellite broadband constellation.

The Ariane 6 rocket lifted off from the Guiana Space Center on the northeastern coast of South America at 11:45 am EST (16:45 UTC), quickly soaring into a clear sky at the tropical spaceport on the power of a hydrogen-fueled main engine and four strap-on solid rocket boosters.

This Ariane 6 configuration, called Ariane 64, is the first to use the rocket's full complement of four boosters. Collectively, the rocket generated more than 3.4 million pounds of thrust (15,400 kilonewtons) of thrust as it steered northeast over the Atlantic Ocean. Less than two hours later, the rocket's upper stage released all 32 of Amazon's satellites into an on-target orbit at an altitude of 289 miles (465 kilometers).

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Very few people alive today have seen the Appalachian forests as they existed a century ago. Even as state and national parks preserved ever more of the ecosystem, fungal pathogens from Asia nearly wiped out one of the dominant species of these forests, the American chestnut, killing an estimated 3 billion trees. While new saplings continue to sprout from the stumps of the former trees, the fungus persists, killing them before they can seed a new generation.

But thanks in part to trees planted in areas where the two fungi don't grow well, the American chestnut isn't extinct. And efforts to revive it in its native range have continued, despite the long generation times needed to breed resistant trees. In Thursday's issue of Science, researchers describe their efforts to apply modern genomic techniques and exhaustive testing to identify the best route to restoring chestnuts to their native range.

Multiple paths to restoration

While the American chestnut is functionally extinct—it's no longer a participant in the ecosystems it once dominated—it's most certainly not extinct. Two Asian fungi that have killed it off in its native range; one causes chestnut blight, while a less common pathogen causes a root rot disease. Both prefer warmer, humid environments and persist there because they can grow asymptomatically on distantly related trees, such as oaks. Still, chestnuts planted outside the species' original range—primarily in drier areas of western North America—have continued to thrive.

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© Teresa Lett

An elephant's trunk is a marvelous thing, flexible enough to bend and stretch as it forages for food, but also stiff enough to grasp and maneuver even delicate objects like peanuts or a tortilla chip. That's because the trunk is highly sensitive when it comes to sensing touch. Scientists have determined that the whiskers lining the trunk are crucial for that sensitivity thanks to their unique structure, amounting to a kind of innate "material intelligence, according to a new paper published in the journal Science.

As previously reported, there is a long history of studying whiskers (vibrissae) in mammals. Rats, cats, tree squirrels, manatees, harbor seals, sea otters, pole cats, shrews, tammar wallabies, sea lions, and naked mole-rats all share strikingly similar basic whisker anatomies, according to various prior studies. Among other potential applications, such research could one day enable scientists to build artificial whiskers as tactile sensors in robotics, as well as learn more about human touch.

Whiskers are much more complex than one might think, both in structure and function. Rats, for instance, have about 30 large whiskers and dozens of smaller ones, part of a complex “scanning sensorimotor system” that enables the rat to perform such diverse tasks as texture analysis, active touch for path finding, pattern recognition, and object location, just by scanning the terrain with its whiskers.

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Doubling of fish biomass and rebounding of endangered species shows government measures starting to work, biologists say

The Yangtze River in China, which has been in ecological decline for 70 years, is showing signs of recovery thanks to a sweeping fishing ban.

The ban was made more effective by the implementation of “evolutionary game theory”, which included finding alternative employment for fishers.

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© Photograph: Alex Plavevski/EPA

© Photograph: Alex Plavevski/EPA

© Photograph: Alex Plavevski/EPA

Physics research drives technological innovation, from medical imaging to data processing, write Dr Phil Bull and Prof Chris Clarkson; plus letters from Tim Gershon and Vincenzo Vagnoni, and Prof Paul Howarth

Your article (UK ‘could lose generation of scientists’ with cuts to projects and research facilities, 6 February) is right to highlight the serious consequences of proposed 30% funding cuts on the next generation of physics and astronomy researchers. The proposals also risk a generational destruction of the country’s ability to produce skilled graduates, retain specialist knowledge, and support physical science in industrial and educational settings.

This comes against a backdrop of wider threats to university finances, from rising costs to declining international student numbers. An estimated one in four UK physics departments are already at risk of closure, and recent cuts and delays to Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) grants have further depleted finances and will result in the loss of some highly skilled technical staff.

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© Photograph: Murdo MacLeod/The Guardian

© Photograph: Murdo MacLeod/The Guardian

© Photograph: Murdo MacLeod/The Guardian

Health workers in developing countries know that isolating tuberculosis patients is an outdated and potentially harmful practice, but lack the resources to move away from it.

© Arlette Bashizi for The New York Times

A study reported that the conventional method of searching follicular fluid didn’t find all the eggs. The new technology found extra eggs more than half the time.

© Cassandra Klos for The New York Times

A federal law taking effect in November severely limits the amount of THC, the euphoric cannabis compound, allowed in over-the-counter items. Many groups are fighting back.

© Bryan Anselm for The New York Times

In late January a new social media site took a certain corner of the internet by storm. Moltbook was conceived as a space where AI assistants could let off steam, chat and compare notes on their bosses, but it quickly became the focus of breathless claims that the singularity had arrived as the bots started badmouthing their humans and plotting an uprising. So what’s the truth about Moltbook? Madeleine Finlay hears from Aisha Down about what it tells us about AI, and about us.

What is Moltbook? The strange new social media site for AI bots

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© Photograph: Raphael Satter/Reuters

© Photograph: Raphael Satter/Reuters

© Photograph: Raphael Satter/Reuters

Launch Complex 39A at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida is accustomed to getting makeovers. It got another one Wednesday with the removal of the Crew Access Arm used by astronauts to board their rides to space.

Construction workers first carved the footprint for the launch pad from the Florida wetlands more than 60 years ago. NASA used the site to launch Saturn V rockets dispatching astronauts to the Moon, then converted the pad for the Space Shuttle program. The last shuttle flight lifted off from Pad 39A in 2011, and the agency leased the site to SpaceX for use as the departure point for the company's Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy rockets.

SpaceX started launching from Pad 39A in 2017, then installed a new Crew Access Arm on the pad's tower the following year, replacing the aging shuttle-era arm that connected to the hatches of NASA's orbiters. SpaceX added the new arm ahead of the first test flight of the company's human-rated Crew Dragon spacecraft in 2019. Astronauts started using the pathway, suspended more than 200 feet above the pad surface, beginning with the first crew flight on a Dragon spacecraft in 2020.

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On Wednesday, a fossil-fuel lobbying group called the Washington Coal Club awarded President Trump a trophy that named him the "Undisputed Champion of Clean, Beautiful Coal." Trump took advantage of the opportunity to take his latest shot at reviving the fortunes of the US's most polluting source of electricity: an executive order that would make the military buy it.

Coal is the second most expensive source of power for the US grid, eclipsed by gas, wind, solar, hydro—everything other than nuclear power. It also produces the most pollution, including particulates that damage human lungs, chemicals that contribute to acid rain, and coal ash that contains many toxic metals. It also emits the most carbon dioxide per unit of energy produced. Prior to Trump's return to office, the US grid had been rapidly moving away from its use, including during his first term.

Despite the long-standing Republican claims to support free markets, the second Trump administration has determined that the only way to keep coal viable is direct government intervention. Its initial attempts involved declaring an energy emergency and then using that to justify forcing coal plants slated for closure to continue operations. The emergency declaration relied on what appears to be a tenuous interpretation of the Federal Power Act, and the administration was already facing a lawsuit challenging these actions.

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© Laura Hedien

The states, all led by Democrats, claim the cuts were intended as retribution and will harm efforts to control H.I.V. and other sexually transmitted infections.

© Dustin Chambers for The New York Times

The pre-Inca Chincha Kingdom (circa 1000-1400 CE), along Peru's southern coast, was one of the most wealthy and influential of its time before falling to the Inca and Spanish empires. Scientists have long puzzled over the foundation for that prosperity, and it seems one critical factor was bird poop, according to a new paper published in the journal PLoS ONE.

“Seabird guano may seem trivial, yet our study suggests this potent resource could have significantly contributed to sociopolitical and economic change in the Peruvian Andes,” said co-author Jacob Bongers, a digital archaeologist at the University of Sydney. “Guano dramatically boosted the production of maize (corn), and this agricultural surplus crucially helped fuel the Chincha Kingdom’s economy, driving their trade, wealth, population growth and regional influence, and shaped their strategic alliance with the Inca Empire. In ancient Andean cultures, fertiliser was power.”

Last November, Bongers co-authored a paper detailing evidence supporting the hypothesis that the mysterious "Band of Holes" on Mount Sierpe in the Andes might have been an ancient marketplace. Aerial photographs from the 1930s first revealed that long row of around 5,200 precisely aligned holes, seemingly organized into blocked sections, most likely constructed by the Chincha Kingdom. Scholars had suggested various hypotheses for what the site's purpose may have been: defense, storage, or accounting, perhaps, or maybe to collect water and capture fog for local gardens. But nobody had any strong evidence for those suggestions.

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© Diego H./iNaturalist.org/CC-BY 4.0

Following three of the warmest years on record, as scientists reckon with climate tipping points and states and cities grapple with the escalating cost of extreme weather and more intense wildfires, the Trump administration this week is expected to formally eliminate the US government’s role in controlling greenhouse gas pollution.

By revoking its 17-year-old scientific finding that greenhouse gases endanger public health and welfare, the Environmental Protection Agency will demolish the legal underpinning of its authority to act on climate change under the Clean Air Act.

EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin will be alongside President Donald Trump for an event Wednesday focused on boosting US use of coal, as mercury and air toxics standards are repealed. That is expected to be a prelude to Zeldin finalizing the endangerment finding repeal, an assignment the president handed him in an executive order signed on the first day of his second term in office.

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© Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post via Getty Images

The upgraded Super Heavy booster slated to launch SpaceX's next Starship flight has completed cryogenic proof testing, clearing a hurdle that resulted in the destruction of the company's previous booster.

SpaceX announced the milestone in a social media post Tuesday: "Cryoproof operations complete for the first time with a Super Heavy V3 booster. This multi-day campaign tested the booster's redesigned propellant systems and its structural strength."

Ground teams at Starbase, Texas, rolled the 237-foot-tall (72.3-meter) stainless-steel booster out of its factory and transported it a few miles away to Massey's Test Site last week. The test crew first performed a pressure test on the rocket at ambient temperatures, then loaded super-cold liquid nitrogen into the rocket four times over six days, putting the booster through repeated thermal and pressurization cycles. The nitrogen is a stand-in for the cryogenic methane and liquid oxygen that will fill the booster's propellant tanks on launch day.

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© SpaceX

Young primates in a southern African nature park were observed to constantly interfere when their mother was giving attention to a younger brother or sister.

© Axelle Delaunay

“Most of the harm that comes from alcohol,” said one researcher, is “due mostly or mainly to drinking with their buddies.”

© Edu Bayer for The New York Times

If you think your daily doses of espresso or Earl Grey sharpen your mind, you just might be right, new science suggests. The New York Times: A large new study provides evidence of cognitive benefits from coffee and tea -- if it's caffeinated and consumed in moderation: two to three cups of coffee or one to two cups of tea daily. People who drank that amount for decades had lower chances of developing dementia than people who drank little or no caffeine, the researchers reported. They followed 131,821 participants for up to 43 years. "This is a very large, rigorous study conducted long term among men and women that shows that drinking two or three cups of coffee per day is associated with reduced risk of dementia," said Aladdin Shadyab, an associate professor of public health and medicine at the University of California, San Diego, who wasn't involved in the study. The findings, published Monday in JAMA, don't prove caffeine causes these beneficial effects, and it's possible other attributes protected caffeine drinkers' brain health. But independent experts said the study adjusted for many other factors, including health conditions, medication, diet, education, socioeconomic status, family history of dementia, body mass index, smoking and mental illness.

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On Friday, a body that advises US judges revised the document it created to help judges grapple with scientific issues. The move came after a group of Republican state attorneys general wrote a letter to complain about the document's chapter on climate change, with one of the letter's criticisms being that it treated human influence on climate as a fact. In response to the letter, the Federal Judicial Center has now deleted the entire chapter.

The Federal Judicial Center has been established by statute as the "research and education agency of the judicial branch of the United States Government." As part of that role, it prepares documents that can serve as reference material for judges unfamiliar with topics that find their way into the courtroom. Among those projects is the "Reference Manual on Scientific Evidence," now in its fourth edition. Prepared in collaboration with the National Academies of Science, the document covers the process of science and specific topics that regularly appear before the courts, like statistical techniques, DNA-based identification, and chemical exposures.

When initially released in December, the fourth edition included material on climate change prepared by two authors at Columbia University. But a group of attorneys general from Republican-leaning states objected to this content. At the end of January, they sent a letter to the leadership of the Federal Judicial Center outlining their issues. Many of them focus on the text that accepts the reality of human-driven climate change as a fact.

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At the end of January, Washington, DC, saw an extremely unusual event. The MAHA Institute, which was set up to advocate for some of the most profoundly unscientific ideas of our time, hosted leaders of the best-funded scientific organization on the planet, the National Institutes of Health. Instead of a hostile reception, however, Jay Bhattacharya, the head of the NIH, was greeted as a hero by the audience, receiving a partial standing ovation when he rose to speak.

Over the ensuing five hours, the NIH leadership and MAHA Institute moderators found many areas of common ground: anger over pandemic-era decisions, a focus on the failures of the health care system, the idea that we might eat our way out of some health issues, the sense that science had lost people's trust, and so on. And Bhattacharya and others clearly shaped their messages to resonate with their audience.

The reason? MAHA (Make America Healthy Again) is likely to be one of the only political constituencies supporting Bhattacharya's main project, which he called a "second scientific revolution."

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© Chip Somodevilla

Researchers and volunteers in Texas documented birds of different species preening one another. Experts say the behavior may be more common than documented.

One to two cups of caffeinated tea per day helps too, researchers found after following nearly 132,000 people for 40 years.

© Angela Weiss/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

"A spectacular trove of fossils discovered in a cave on New Zealand's North Island has given scientists their first glimpse of ancient forest species that lived there more than a million years ago," reports Popular Mechanics: The fossils represent 12 ancient bird species and four frog species, including several previously unknown bird species. Taken together, the fossils paint a picture of an ancient world that looks drastically different than it does today. The discovery also fills in an important gap in scientific understanding of the patterns of extinction that preceded human arrival in New Zealand 750 years ago. The team published a study on the find in Alcheringa: An Australasian Journal of Palaeontology. Trevor Worthy, lead study author and associate professor at Flinders University, said in a statement that "This remarkable find suggests our ancient forests were once home to a diverse group of birds that did not survive the next million years... "For decades, the extinction of New Zealand's birds was viewed primarily through the lens of human arrival 750 years ago. This study proves that natural forces like super-volcanoes and dramatic climate shifts were already sculpting the unique identity of our wildlife over a million years ago." Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader fahrbot-bot for sharing the article.

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This unofficial diagnosis describes the anxiety-driven, compulsive obsession with living as long as possible. While it might seem healthy to monitor your diet, exercise and biomarkers, it can come at a huge emotional cost

It was a pitta bread that finally broke Jason Wood. It arrived with hummus instead of the vegetable crudites he had preordered in a restaurant that he had painstakingly researched, as he always did, weeks before he and his husband visited. “In that moment, I just snapped,” he recalls. “I hit rock bottom, I got angry … I started crying, I started shaking. I just felt like I couldn’t do it any more, like I had been crushed by all this pressure I put on myself.”

Today, Wood, 40, speaks calmly. Neat and groomed, he seems orderly by nature. But at that time, his attempts to control every aspect of his life had spiralled. He painstakingly monitored what he ate (sometimes only organic, sometimes raw or unprocessed; calories painstakingly counted), his exercise regime (twice a day, seven days a week), and tracked every bodily function from his heart rate to his blood pressure, body fat and sleep “schedule”. He even monitored his glucose levels repeatedly throughout the day. “I was living by those numbers,” he says.

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© Photograph: Sarah Rice/The Guardian

© Photograph: Sarah Rice/The Guardian

© Photograph: Sarah Rice/The Guardian

2001: "Brookhaven Labs has produced for the first time collisions of gold nuclei at a center of mass energy of 200GeV/nucleon." 2002: "There may be a new type of matter according to researchers at Brookhaven National Laboratory." 2010: The hottest man-made temperatures ever achived were a record 4 trillion degree plasma experiment at Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York... anointed the Guinness record holder." 2023: "Scientists at Brookhaven National Laboratory have uncovered an entirely new kind of quantum entanglement." 2026: On Friday, February 6, "a control room full of scientists, administrators and members of the press gathered" at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at Brookhaven National Lab in Upton, New York to witness its final collisions, reports Scientific American: The vibe had been wistful, but the crowd broke into applause as Darío Gil, the Under Secretary for Science at the U.S. Department of Energy, pressed a red button to end the collider's quarter-century saga... "I'm really sad" [said Angelika Drees, a BNL accelerator physicist]. "It was such a beautiful experiment and my research home for 27 years. But we're going to put something even better there." That "something" will be a far more powerful electron-ion collider to further push the frontiers of physics, extend RHIC's legacy and maintain the lab's position as a center of discovery. This successor will be built in part from RHIC's bones, especially from one of its two giant, subterranean storage rings that once held the retiring collider's supply of circulating, near-light speed nuclei...slated for construction over the next decade. [That Electron-Ion Collider, or EIC] will utilize much of RHIC's infrastructure, replacing one of its ion rings with a new ring for cycling electrons. The EIC will use those tiny, fast-flying electrons as tiny knives for slicing open the much larger gold ions. Physicists will get an unrivaled look into the workings of quarks and gluons and yet another chance to grapple with nature's strongest force. "We knew for the EIC to happen, RHIC needed to end," says Wolfram Fischer, who chairs BNL's collider-accelerator department. "It's bittersweet." EIC will be the first new collider built in the US since RHIC. To some, it signifies the country's reentry into a particle physics landscape it has largely ceded to Europe and Asia over the past two decades. "For at least 10 or 15 years," says Abhay Deshpande, BNL's associate laboratory director for nuclear and particle physics, "this will be the number one place in the world for [young physicists] to come." The RHIC was able "to separately send two protons colliding with precisely aligned spins — something that, even today, no other experiment has yet matched," the article points out: During its record-breaking 25-year run, RHIC illuminated nature's thorniest force and its most fundamental constituents. It created the heaviest, most elaborate assemblages of antimatter ever seen. It nearly put to rest a decades-long crisis over the proton's spin. And, of course, it brought physicists closer to the big bang than ever before... When RHIC at last began full operations in 2000, its initial heavy-ion collisions almost immediately pumped out quark-gluon plasma. But demonstrating this beyond a shadow of a doubt proved in some respects more challenging than actually creating the elusive plasma itself, with the case for success strengthening as RHIC's numbers of collisions soared. By 2010 RHIC's scientists were confident enough to declare that the hot soup they'd been studying for a decade was hot and soupy enough to convincingly constitute a quark-gluon plasma. And it was even weirder than they thought. Instead of the gas of quarks and gluons theorists expected, the plasma acted like a swirling liquid unprecedented in nature. It was nearly "perfect," with zero friction, and set a new record for twistiness, or "vorticity." For Paul Mantica, a division director for the Facilities and Project Management Division in the DOE's Office of Nuclear Physics, this was the highlight of RHIC's storied existence. "It was paradigm-changing," he says... Data from the final run (which began nearly a year ago) has already produced yet another discovery: the first-ever direct evidence of "virtual particles" in RHIC's subatomic puffs of quark-gluon plasma, constituting an unprecedented probe of the quantum vacuum. RHIC's last run generated hundreds of petabytes of data, the article points out, meaning its final smash "isn't really the end; even when its collisions stop, its science will live on." But Science News notes RHIC's closure "marks the end for the only particle collider operating in the United States, and the only collider of its kind in the world. Most particle accelerators are unable to steer two particle beams to crash head-on into one another."

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Researchers discovered surprising changes to former pets along the front line of combat with Russia.

© Tetiana Dzhafarova/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

It is one of the most powerful involuntary actions the human body can perform. But is a big sneeze a sign of illness, pollution or something else entirely?

How worried should we be about a sneeze? It depends who you ask. In the Odyssey, Telemachus sneezes after Penelope’s prayer that her husband will soon be home to sort out her house-sitting suitors – which she sees as a good omen for team Odysseus, and very bad news for the suitors. In the Anabasis, Xenophon takes a sneeze from a soldier as godly confirmation that his army can fight their way back to their own territory – great news for them – while St Augustine notes, somewhat disapprovingly, that people of his era tend to go back to bed if they sneeze while putting on their slippers. But is a sneeze an omen of anything apart from pathogens, pollen or – possibly – air pollution?

“It’s a physical response to get rid of something that’s irritating your body,” says Sheena Cruickshank, an immunologist and professor at the University of Manchester. “Alongside the obvious nasal hairs that a few people choose to trim, all of us have cilia, or microscopic hairs in our noses that can move and sense things of their own accord. And so if anything gets trapped by the cilia, that triggers a reaction to your nerve endings that says: ‘Right, let’s get rid of this.’ And that triggers a sneeze.”

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© Composite: Guardian Design; deeepblue/Getty Images

© Composite: Guardian Design; deeepblue/Getty Images

© Composite: Guardian Design; deeepblue/Getty Images

Enforcement against polluters in the United States plunged in the first year of President Donald Trump’s second term, a far bigger drop than in the same period of his first term, according to a new report from a watchdog group.

By analyzing a range of federal court and administrative data, the nonprofit Environmental Integrity Project found that civil lawsuits filed by the US Department of Justice in cases referred by the Environmental Protection Agency dropped to just 16 in the first 12 months after Trump’s inauguration on Jan. 20, 2025. That is 76 percent less than in the first year of the Biden administration.

Trump’s first administration filed 86 such cases in its first year, which was in turn a drop from the Obama administration’s 127 four years earlier.

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In the spring of 2020, as the COVID-19 pandemic brought global industry and travel nearly to a halt, satellite sensors recorded a dramatic plunge in nitrogen dioxide, a byproduct of internal combustion engines and heavy industry. For a moment, the world’s air was cleaner than it had been in decades.

But then something strange started happening: methane, the second most important anthropogenic greenhouse gas after carbon dioxide, was surging. Its growth rate hit 16.2 parts per billion that year, the highest since systematic records began in the early 1980s. A new study published in the journal Science looked at the complex chemistry of the troposphere (the lowest region of the atmosphere) and found that the two changes are likely connected.

An atmospheric cleaner

Since the late 1960s, we knew that atmospheric methane doesn’t just vanish. It is actively scrubbed from the sky by the hydroxyl radical, a highly reactive molecule that breaks down methane, turning it into water vapor and carbon dioxide. “The problem is that the lifetime of the hydroxyl radical is very short—its lifespan is less than a second" says Shushi Peng, a professor at Peking University, China, and a co-author of the study. To do its job as an atmospheric methane clearing agent, a hydroxyl radical must be constantly replenished through a series of chemical reactions triggered by sunlight. The key ingredients in these reactions are nitrogen oxides, the very pollutants that were drastically reduced when cars stayed in garages and factories went dark in 2020.

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© Education Images

Last year, a team of scientists presented evidence that spruce trees in Italy's Dolomite mountains synchronized their bioelectrical activity in anticipation of a partial solar eclipse—a potentially exciting new insight into the complexities of plant communication. The findings naturally generated media interest and even inspired a documentary. But the claims drew sharp criticism from other researchers in the field, with some questioning whether the paper should even have been published. Those initial misgivings are outlined in more detail in a new critique published in the journal Trends in Plant Science.

For the original paper, Alessandro Chiolerio, a physicist at the Italian Institute of Technology, collaborated with plant ecologist Monica Gagliano of Southern Cross University and several others conducting field work in the Costa Bocche forest in the Dolomites. They essentially created an EKG for trees, attaching electrodes to three spruce trees (ranging in age from 20 to 70 years) and five tree stumps in the forest.

Those sensors recorded a marked increase in bioelectrical activity during a partial solar eclipse on October 22, 2022. The activity peaked mid-eclipse and faded away in its aftermath. Chiolerio et al. interpreted this spike in activity as a coordinated response among the trees to the darkened conditions brought on by the eclipse. And older trees' electrical activity spiked earlier and more strongly than the younger trees, which Chiolerio et al. felt was suggestive of trees developing response mechanisms—a kind of memory captured in associated gravitational effects. Older trees might even transmit this knowledge to younger trees, the authors suggested, based on the detection of bioelectrical waves traveling between the trees.

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© Zenit Arti Audiovisive via UNSW

Members of the House Science, Space, and Technology Committee voted to approve a NASA authorization bill this week, advancing legislation chock full of policy guidelines meant to give lawmakers a voice in the space agency's strategic direction.

The committee met to "mark up" the NASA Reauthorization Act of 2026, adding more than 40 amendments to the bill before a unanimous vote to refer the legislation to the full House of Representatives. Wednesday's committee vote was just one of several steps needed for the bill to become law. It must pass a vote on the House floor, win approval from the Senate, and then go to the White House for President Donald Trump's signature.

Ars has reported on one of the amendments, which would authorize NASA to take steps toward a "commercial" deep space program using privately owned rockets and spacecraft rather than vehicles owned by the government.

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© NASA/Joel Kowsky

One panelist accused the F.D.A. of withholding data on potential harms. The advisers also are reviewing research on vaccines given to pregnant women.

© Alyssa Pointer/Reuters

Welcome to Edition 8.28 of the Rocket Report! The big news in rocketry this week was that NASA still hasn't solved the problem with hydrogen leaks on the Space Launch System. The problem caused months of delays before the first SLS launch in 2022, and the fuel leaks cropped up again Monday during a fueling test on NASA's second SLS rocket. It is a continuing problem, and NASA's sparse SLS launch rate makes every countdown an experiment, as my colleague Eric Berger wrote this week. NASA will conduct another fueling test in the coming weeks after troubleshooting the rocket's leaky fueling line, but the launch of the Artemis II mission is off until March.

As always, we welcome reader submissions. If you don't want to miss an issue, please subscribe using the box below (the form will not appear on AMP-enabled versions of the site). Each report will include information on small-, medium-, and heavy-lift rockets, as well as a quick look ahead at the next three launches on the calendar.

Blue Origin "pauses" New Shepard flights. Blue Origin has "paused" its New Shepard program for the next two years, a move that likely signals a permanent end to the suborbital space tourism initiative, Ars reports. The small rocket and capsule have been flying since April 2015 and have combined to make 38 launches, all but one of which were successful, and 36 landings. In its existence, the New Shepard program flew 98 people to space, however briefly, and launched more than 200 scientific and research payloads into the microgravity environment.

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© SpaceX

The Spain Ministry of Science cyberattack has caused a partial shutdown of government IT systems, disrupting services used daily by researchers, universities, students, and businesses across the country. While officials initially described the issue as a “technical incident,” boarding evidence and confirmations from Spanish media now point to a cyberattack involving potentially sensitive academic, personal, and financial data. The Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities plays a central role in Spain’s research and higher education ecosystem. Any disruption to its digital infrastructure has wide-reaching consequences, making this incident far more serious than a routine systems outage.

Official Notice Confirms System Closure and Suspended Procedures

In a public notice published on its electronic headquarters, the ministry acknowledged the disruption and announced a temporary shutdown of key digital services. “As a result of a technical incident that is currently being assessed, the electronic headquarters of the Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities has been partially closed.” The notice further stated: “All ongoing administrative procedures are suspended, safeguarding the rights and legitimate interests of all persons affected by said temporary closure, resulting in an extension of all deadlines for the various procedures affected.” The ministry added that deadline extensions would remain in place “until the complete resolution of the aforementioned incident occurs,” citing Article 32 of Law 39/2015. While procedural safeguards are welcome, the lack of early transparency around the nature of the incident raised concerns among affected users.

Spain Ministry of Science Cyberattack: Hacker Claims 

Those concerns intensified when a threat actor using the alias “GordonFreeman” appeared on underground forums claiming responsibility for the Spain Ministry of Science cyberattack. The attacker alleged that they exploited a critical Insecure Direct Object Reference (IDOR) vulnerability, granting “full-admin-level access” to internal systems. Data samples shared online—though not independently verified—include screenshots of official documents, email addresses, enrollment applications, and internal records. Spanish media outlet OKDIARIO reported that a ministry spokesperson confirmed the IT disruption was linked to a cyberattack and that the electronic headquarters had been shut down to assess the scope of the data breach. Although the forum hosting the alleged leak is now offline and the data has not resurfaced elsewhere, the screenshots appear legitimate. If confirmed, this would represent a serious breakdown in access control protections.

Alleged Data Exposure Raises Serious Privacy Concerns

According to claims made by the attacker, the stolen data includes highly sensitive information related to students and researchers, such as:

• Scanned ID documents, NIEs, and passports
• Email addresses
• Payment receipts showing IBAN numbers
• Academic records, including transcripts and apostilled degrees
• Curricula containing private personal data

If even a portion of this data is authentic, the Spain Ministry of Science cyberattack could expose thousands of individuals to identity theft, financial fraud, and long-term privacy risks. Academic data, in particular, is difficult to replace or invalidate once leaked.

Spain’s Growing Cybercrime Problem

This Spain Ministry of Science cyberattack incident does not exist in isolation. Cybercrime now accounts for more than one in six recorded criminal offenses in Spain. Attacks have increased by 35% this year, with more than 45,000 incidents reported daily. Between late February and early March, attacks surged by 750% compared to the same period last year. During the week of 5–11 March 2025, Spain was the most targeted country globally, accounting for 22.6% of all cyber incidents—surpassing even the United States. Two factors continue to drive this trend. Rapid digital transformation, fueled by EU funding, has often outpaced cybersecurity investment. At the same time, ransomware attacks—up 120%—have increasingly targeted organizations with weak defenses, particularly public institutions and SMEs. The Spain Ministry of Science cyberattack stresses a hard truth, digital services without strong security become liabilities, not efficiencies. As public administrations expand online access, cybersecurity can no longer be treated as a secondary concern or an afterthought. Until Spain addresses systemic gaps in public-sector cybersecurity, incidents like Spain Ministry of Science cyberattack will continue, not as exceptions, but as warnings ignored too long.

Little kids hosting make-believe tea parties is a fixture of childhood playtime and long presumed to be exclusively a human ability. Researchers at Johns Hopkins University presented evidence in a new paper published in the journal Science that a bonobo named Kanzi was also able to participate in pretending to hold a tea party. For the authors, this suggests that apes are capable of using their imagination just like human toddlers.

“It really is game-changing that their mental lives go beyond the here and now," said co-author Christopher Krupenye. "Imagination has long been seen as a critical element of what it is to be human, but the idea that it may not be exclusive to our species is really transformative. Jane Goodall discovered that chimps make tools, and that led to a change in the definition of what it means to be human, and this, too, really invites us to reconsider what makes us special and what mental life is out there among other creatures."

Per Krupenye et al., by the age of two, human children are able to navigate imaginary scenarios like a tea party, pretending there is real tea present even if the teapot and cups are actually empty. Cognitively speaking, it's an example of secondary representation, because it involves decoupling an imagined or simulated state (pretending there is actual tea in the cup) with the reality (the cup is empty).

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© courtesy of Ape Initiative

Back in 2022, astronomers were puzzled by a so-called “tidal disruption event” (TDE), dubbed AT2018hyz, that had faded when it was first noticed three years earlier, only to unexpectedly reanimate and burp out extremely bright radio waves. University of Oregon astrophysicist Yvette Cendes, a co-author of that 2022 paper, dubbed the black hole “Jetty McJetface” (a nod to the 2016 online British competition to name a research vessel Boaty McBoatface).

Astronomers have continued to monitor it ever since. Far from fading again, the TDE has grown 50 times brighter, and that brightness continues to increase. The black hole's energy emission might not peak until 2027, according to a new paper published in the Astrophysical Journal.

As we've previously discussed, it’s a popular misconception that black holes behave like cosmic vacuum cleaners, ravenously sucking up any matter in their surroundings. In reality, only stuff that passes beyond the event horizon—including light—is swallowed up and can’t escape, although black holes are also messy eaters. That means that part of an object’s matter is actually ejected out in a powerful jet.

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© DESY, Science Communication Lab/Public domain

In 2023, scientists identified the compounds in the balms used to mummify the organs of an ancient Egyptian noblewoman, suggesting that the recipes were unusually complex and used ingredients not native to the region. The authors also partnered with a perfumer to re-create what co-author Barbara Huber (of the Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology and the University of Tübingen) dubbed “the scent of eternity.” Now Huber has collaborated with the curators of two museums to incorporate that eternal scent into exhibits on ancient Egypt to transform how visitors understand embalming.

As previously reported, Egyptian embalming is thought to have begun in the Predynastic Period or earlier, when people noticed that the arid desert heat tended to dry and preserve bodies buried in the desert. Eventually, the idea of preserving the body after death worked its way into Egyptian religious beliefs. When people began burying the dead in rock tombs, away from the desiccating sand, they used chemicals like natron salt and plant-based resins for embalming.

The procedure typically began by laying the corpse on a table and removing the internal organs—except for the heart. Per Greek historian Herodotus, “They first draw out part of the brain through the nostrils with an iron hook, and inject certain drugs into the rest” to liquefy the remaining brain matter. Next, they washed out the body cavity with spices and palm wine, sewed the body back up, and left aromatic plants and spices inside, including bags of natron. The body was then allowed to dehydrate over 40 days. The dried organs were sealed in canopic jars (or sometimes put back into the body cavity). Then the body was wrapped in several layers of linen cloth, with amulets placed within those layers to protect the deceased from evil. The fully wrapped mummy was coated in resin to keep moisture out and placed in a coffin (also sealed with resin).

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© Ulriki Dubiel/S.C. Ehrich et a;, 2026/CC BY

Ultra-processed foods (UPFs) have more in common with cigarettes than with fruit or vegetables, and require far tighter regulation, according to a new report. The Guardian: UPFs and cigarettes are engineered to encourage addiction and consumption, researchers from three US universities said, pointing to the parallels in widespread health harms that link both. UPFs, which are widely available worldwide, are food products that have been industrially manufactured, often using emulsifiers or artificial colouring and flavours. The category includes soft drinks and packaged snacks such as crisps and biscuits. There are similarities in the production processes of UPFs and cigarettes, and in manufacturers' efforts to optimise the "doses" of products and how quickly they act on reward pathways in the body, according to the paper from researchers at Harvard, the University of Michigan and Duke University. They draw on data from the fields of addiction science, nutrition and public health history to make their comparisons, published on 3 February in the healthcare journal the Milbank Quarterly. The authors suggest that marketing claims on the products, such as being "low fat" or "sugar free," are "health washing" that can stall regulation, akin to the advertising of cigarette filters in the 1950s as protective innovations that "in practice offered little meaningful benefit."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Parasites and infections that cause blindness and other disabilities were nearly eliminated in some countries, but drug distribution to prevent and treat them was derailed in many places in 2025 after the U.S. cut aid.

© Arlette Bashizi for The New York Times

A long-term study of 292 families linked fathers’ parenting style to their children’s heart health years later. To researchers’ surprise, no such link was found with mothers.

Experts are using high-res scanners and 3-D printers to illuminate ancient ailments and injuries.

© Mark Abramson for The New York Times

Scientists at the University of Utah have analyzed nearly a century's worth of human hair samples and found that lead concentrations dropped 100-fold after the EPA began cracking down on leaded gasoline and other lead-based products in the 1970s. The findings, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, drew on hair collected from Utah residents -- some preserved in family scrapbooks going back generations. Lead levels peaked between 1916 and 1969 at around 100 parts per million, fell to 10 ppm by 1990, and dropped below 1 ppm by 2024. The decline largely tracks the phase-out of leaded gasoline after President Nixon established the EPA in 1970; before the agency acted, most gasolines contained about 2 grams of lead per gallon, releasing nearly 2 pounds of lead per person into the environment each year. The study arrives amid the Trump administration's broader push to scale back the EPA. Lead regulations have not yet been targeted, but the authors note concerns about loosened enforcement of the 2024 Lead and Copper rule on replacing old lead pipes.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Trump administration is no fan of renewable energy, but it reserves special ire for wind power. Trump himself has repeatedly made false statements about the cost of wind power, its use around the world, and its environmental impacts. That animosity was paired with an executive order that blocked all permitting for offshore wind and some land-based projects, an order that has since been thrown out by a court that ruled it arbitrary and capricious.

Not content to block all future developments, the administration has also gone after the five offshore wind projects currently under construction. After temporarily blocking two of them for reasons that were never fully elaborated, the Department of the Interior settled on a single justification for blocking turbine installation: a classified national security risk.

The response to that late-December announcement has been uniform: The companies building each of the projects sued the administration. As of Monday, every single one of them has achieved the same result: a temporary injunction that allows them to continue construction. This, despite the fact that the suits were filed in three different courts and heard by four different judges.

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© Boston Globe

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) cracked down on lead-based products—including lead paint and leaded gasoline—in the 1970s because of its toxic effects on human health. Scientists at the University of Utah have analyzed human hair samples spanning nearly 100 years and found a 100-fold decrease in lead concentrations, concluding that this regulatory action was highly effective in achieving its stated objectives. They described their findings in a new paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

We've known about the dangers of lead exposure for a very long time—arguably since the second century BCE—so why conduct this research now? Per the authors, it's because there are growing concerns over the Trump administration's move last year to deregulate many key elements of the EPA's mission. Lead specifically has not yet been deregulated, but there are hints that there could be a loosening of enforcement of the 2024 Lead and Cooper rule requiring water systems to replace old lead pipes.

“We should not forget the lessons of history. And the lesson is those regulations have been very important,” said co-author Thure Cerling. “Sometimes they seem onerous and mean that industry can't do exactly what they'd like to do when they want to do it or as quickly as they want to do it. But it's had really, really positive effects.”

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© Diego Fernandez

On Friday, a judge ruled that the Trump administration violated the law in forming its Climate Working Group, which released a report that was intended to undercut the rationale behind greenhouse gas regulations. The judge overseeing the case determined that the government tried to treat the Climate Working Group as a formal advisory body, while not having it obey many of the statutory requirements that govern such bodies.

While the Department of Energy (DOE) later disbanded the Climate Working Group in the hopes of avoiding legal scrutiny, documents obtained during the proceedings have now revealed the group's electronic communications. As such, the judge ruled that the trial itself had essentially overcome the government's illegal attempts to hide those communications.

Legal and scientific flaws

The whole saga derives from a Supreme Court Ruling that compelled the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to evaluate the risks posed to the US public by greenhouse gases. During the Obama administration, this resulted in an endangerment finding that created the foundation for the EPA to regulate carbon emissions under the Clean Air Act. The science underlying the endangerment finding was so solid that it was left unchallenged during the first Trump administration.

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© Pencho Chukov