Category: 7. Science

Scientists from the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory are part of a group recognized for their advancements in chemistry-aware artificial intelligence software.

The team has received the 2025 Royal Society of Chemistry’s Materials Chemistry Horizon Prize, the result of a collaborative effort between scientists from Argonne, the University of Cambridge, STFC Rutherford Appleton Laboratory and the Australian National Science and Technology Organisation, along with other partners from around the globe.

The Argonne National Laboratory Team:

• Paul Coffman, Argonne Leadership Computing Facility
• Jeffrey Elam, Applied Materials
• Adrian Pope, Argonne Leadership Computing Facility
• Liliana Stan, Center for Nanoscale Materials
• Álvaro Vázquez-Mayagoitia, Argonne Leadership Computing Facility
• Venkat Vishwanath, Argonne Leadership Computing Facility
• Angel Yanguas-Gil, Applied Materials

Several former Argonne researchers were also part of the team.

Their work resulted in open-source materials databases and language models that have become invaluable resources for the global scientific community. Team leader and University of Cambridge Professor Jacqueline M. Cole fostered a synergistic partnership that has driven significant advancements in the design of organic dye-sensitized solar cells and other emerging technologies aimed at harnessing solar energy.

“Research is a collaborative endeavor. This award recognizes the whole team, everyone who made a significant technical or research contribution. That mix between scientific government entities and universities, there is huge added value in that,” said Cole. ​“It makes a statement to the world that we succeed by working in close partnership, and we’ve done something very tangible and useful with it.”

The Materials Chemistry Horizon Prize has been awarded to the entire 89-member team, with each team member receiving a certificate and individual recognition for their role in the groundbreaking work.

The Royal Society of Chemistry honored the team for pioneering new AI-powered tools that make it faster and easier to discover advanced materials. Their open-source software enables researchers worldwide to efficiently explore massive data sets and simulate chemical properties, turning materials discovery from a process of chance into a rational, accelerated pathway, ultimately shortening the ​“molecule-to-market” timeline and helping innovations reach real-world devices and industries faster.

The international team, which spans five continents, developed and shared databases, machine learning models and simulation workflows that are already transforming how materials are designed.

“This recognition is a testament to the power of international partnership and innovation. It highlights the years of dedicated collaboration with Professor Cole’s team and her determination to innovate at the intersection of chemistry, artificial intelligence and computing,” said Álvaro Vázquez-Mayagoitia, a computational scientist at the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility (ALCF) who worked on the project. ​“It acknowledges Professor Cole’s visionary leadership, which has inspired scientists across academia, government and industry on multiple continents to achieve high-impact research outcomes. Our team pushed the boundaries of scientific research and has provided essential tools for researchers worldwide.”

Vázquez-Mayagoitia played a key role in supporting the team’s research at the ALCF, a DOE Office of Science user facility. ​“In this project, my role was centered in facilitating large-scale simulations and analyzing their results. Our team developed the codes and scripts necessary for rapidly generating a comprehensive dye database, integrating both experimental and simulated data,” he said.

The team built a high-throughput, automated workflow that combined data mining, machine learning and quantum chemistry simulations to evaluate nearly 10,000 organic dyes. By screening for key properties like molecular structure, polarity and light absorption, they narrowed the pool to five top candidates.

“We needed one of the best supercomputers in the world, and the ALCF gave us that,” said Cole. ​“Specialized computing allowed us to make AI predictions that were fast, detailed and comprehensive. That was absolutely essential.”

These predictions were then confirmed through lab experiments and device testing. The project shows how AI and simulation, when integrated at scale, can dramatically reduce the time it takes to go from design to working technology.

“The AI tools we built are really a platform technology,” Cole added. ​“We’re already using them in other areas like magnetism, batteries and optoelectronics.”

The Center for Nanoscale Materials is one of the five DOE Nanoscale Science Research Centers, premier national user facilities for interdisciplinary research at the nanoscale supported by the DOE Office of Science.

In a surprising twist of nature, the humble apple snail from South America might hold clues to one of humanity’s most sought-after medical breakthroughs: curing certain forms of blindness. This freshwater mollusk possesses a remarkable ability to regenerate complex eyes — organs strikingly similar to those of humans. Scientists believe studying this power could unlock new pathways to restore vision in people.

The Apple Snail’s Extraordinary Eye Regrowth

The apple snail’s eyes are not simple structures. Like human eyes, they are “camera-type,” complete with a cornea, lens, and retina. What sets this snail apart is its capacity to regrow these intricate components after injury — a feat no other animal with a camera-type eye is known to achieve. Researchers have documented the full regeneration process taking about 15 days, with the eyes continuing to mature for several weeks afterward.

Dr. Alice Accorsi, a molecular and cellular biologist at the University of California, Davis, led a groundbreaking study published in Nature Communications. She explains, “The morphology and gene expression of the new eye is pretty much identical to the original one.” While it remains unconfirmed whether the snail regains sight through the regenerated eye, the anatomical rebuilding itself is a scientific marvel.

Unlocking the Genetic Code of Vision

At the heart of this regeneration is a gene called pax6, which is crucial for eye development across many species, including humans. The research team used gene-editing technology to deactivate pax6 in snails, which then lost the ability to grow new eyes. This discovery highlights pax6 as a key to understanding how eyes develop and potentially regenerate.

“Our studies reveal that, akin to humans, pax6 is indispensable for eye development in apple snails,” the researchers wrote. Dr. Accorsi suggests that if similar genes in humans could be activated, it might one day be possible to stimulate eye regeneration after injury or disease.

From Snail Science to Human Sight

The apple snail’s natural talent for eye regrowth opens a door to future therapies aimed at blindness—a condition affecting millions worldwide. Scientists are now mapping the full suite of genes responsible for this regeneration, hoping to find genetic switches that could be applied in human medicine. Though practical treatments are still years away, the implications are profound. Imagine a future where the eye’s intricate parts can heal themselves after trauma or degenerative disease, much like the apple snail’s remarkable ability to rebuild its vision.

A Glimpse Into Nature’s Healing Powers

This research not only challenges what we know about regeneration but also offers a hopeful narrative in the fight against blindness. The snail, often overlooked, serves as a tiny yet powerful model for scientific advancement.

As Dr. Accorsi states, “This work expands our understanding of complex sensory organ regeneration and offers a way to explore this process.” The path from mollusk to medicine may be long, but thanks to these pioneering studies, restoring sight might one day be more than just a distant dream.

The layer, which has been found mostly in the Northern Hemisphere at sites across the Americas and Europe, also contains peak abundances of platinum and iridium, as well as metallic melt spherules, shocked quartz, and minerals fused together forming meltglass.

“They’re preserved in marine sediments as deep as about 2,000 meters,” Kennett said. The presence of these proxies doesn’t say anything in particular about the actual shocks, he explained, but rather illustrate their force, reach and allude to the event’s subsequent climatological impacts. “The material was thrown up into the atmosphere, and was globally transported and deposited in a broadly distributed layer that we earlier have described.”

Potentially the first known crater of Younger Dryas Boundary (YDB) Age

Impacts with Earth by extraterrestrial material vary in magnitude from the daily bombardment of Earth by tons of fine extraterrestrial dust to the dinosaur killers that occur on a timescale of tens of millions of years. Because the more extreme events leave their marks on Earth in the form of craters, much of the “gold standard” evidence of cosmic impacts is aligned with these structures and the character of associated material. As a result, proving the occurrence of a touchdown airburst becomes a challenge, given that there are typically no deformations in the landscape. This makes it very difficult to prove such an occurrence in the same way that the Chicxulub crater off Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula has been linked to the massive impact that led to the extinction of dinosaurs.

“Previously, there has been no evidence for the Younger Dryas boundary (YDB) event of any crater or possible crater,” said Kennett. “So these events are more difficult to detect, especially when they are older than a few thousand years and after being buried, leave little or no superficial evidence.”

NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover continues to beam home incredible sights from the Red Planet surface.

This week, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) released an enhanced-color mosaic of 96 separate images taken by Perseverance on May 26, 2025 that together create an 360-degree panorama of a location on Mars called “Falbreen.” This area contains some of the oldest terrain Perseverance has ever explored on the Red Planet, according to JPL.

Back in the early 2000s, Barney Balch, a senior research scientist emeritus at Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Sciences, and colleagues identified something strange on satellite images. It appeared that large amounts of seawater encircling Antarctica were appearing much brighter than other areas. It turns out that this area, now known as the Great Calcite Belt, has unusually high levels of particulate inorganic carbon, such as calcium carbonate and limestone, that reflects light back at satellites.

After subsequent research, scientists confirmed that this was coming from the shiny calcium carbonate shells of vast blooms of coccolithophores. But then the scientist identified another unusually bright area of water much further south from this calcite belt. Stranger still, the team believed these waters would be far too cold to hold coccolithophores. This mystery has persisted for years because the waters in this area are hard to explore and monitor due to the rough seas, icebergs, and frequent heavy cloud cover.

But Balch and colleagues have now been able to address this issue for the first time. Sailing aboard the R/V Roger Revelle from Hawaii, they traveled to 60 degrees latitude and then took a short easterly detour to monitor a point where water from the south appears to get pinched into several eddies. Here, the team was able to measure ocean color, calcification and photosynthesis rates, and concentrations of inorganic carbon and silica. These latter two minerals reflect light and play an important role in sequestering carbon in the deep ocean.

“Satellites only see the top several meters of the ocean, but we were able to drill down with multiple measurements at multiple depths,” Balch explained in a statement. “We’ve never had such a complete suite of integrated measurements through the water column in this part of the ocean.”

This multi-tiered approach, which combined biogeochemical measurements, optical data, and visual counts of microbes (literally counting them with a microscope), allowed the team to assess how plankton communities shift as they move south. They saw that the warmer, stratified waters of the subtropics are home to dinoflagellates, a diverse form of plankton, while the coccolithophores dominate the calcite belt, and, most interestingly, that diatoms appear in the silica-rich cold waters south of the Polar Front.

This analysis amounts to a “smoking gun”, Balch said, for the causes of the weird reflections appearing on satellite images. It seems the culprit here is frustules (it is a real word) produced by diatoms that are made of silica and appear like microscopic pillboxes. These frustules reflect the light in the same way as coccolithophore shells, but it actually takes many more frustules to produce the same optical effect. This, the team says, is a testament to how dense their concentration is in these southern waters. 

The team also found small concentrations of inorganic carbon and some calcification happening in these southern waters. This was a first. They also found some coccolithophores as well, suggesting that these little creatures can survive in much colder conditions than previously thought. It is possible, Balch added, that the eddies they were observing serve as “seed populations”, offering a small and consistent stream of coccolithophores into the Great Calcite Belt.

Identifying the coccolithophores in this water is important as their presence here could influence how carbon is transported through the Southern Ocean. This is considered one of the planet’s most significant carbon sinks.

The presence of diatoms in the southern waters also highlights the need for better algorithms to translate satellite data into useful methods for predicting ocean biology. This could include combining measurements from other satellites observing other variables to help distinguish between different species of plankton.

“We’re expanding our view of where coccolithophores live and finally beginning to understand the patterns we see in satellite images of this part of the ocean we rarely get to go to,” Balch said. “There’s nothing like measuring something multiple ways to tell a more complete story.”

The study is published in Global Biogeochemical Cycles. 

The four members of the SpaceX Crew-10 mission are set to climb aboard the Crew Dragon Endurance and depart the International Space Station on Friday evening for an overnight trip back to Earth.

NASA astronauts Anne McClain and Nichole Ayers, JAXA astronaut Takuya Onishi and Roscosmos cosmonaut Kirill Peskov launched to the station back on March 14 from Kennedy Space Center arriving a day later.

After 4 1/2 months on board, they are set to depart at 6:05 p.m. Eastern time and then splash down off the coast of California at 11:33 a.m. Saturday.

“As we complete our mission on space station, we really want to lead with gratitude for the absolute privilege of getting to live and work aboard this amazing International Space Station,” Crew-10 commander McClain said during a farewell ceremony Tuesday. “All of us are keenly aware that we may never get to do this again, and we’ve been very pensive over the last days of understanding what we have all got to be a part of.”

Ayers was the first from her NASA astronaut class chosen in 2021, known as The Flies, to make it to space.

“We got to see some amazing views, and we have had some really big belly laughs and a wonderful time together,” she said about her Crew-10 crewmates. “Leaving with a heart full of gratitude and excited to see where the International Space Station goes after we get home.”

While McClain is the Crew-10 commander, Onishi had been the Expedition 73 commander for the station. He handed over command to Roscosmos cosmonaut Sergey Ryzhikov during a ceremony Tuesday before departing. Ryzhikov is part of the Soyuz crew that flew up in April and won’t leave until December. After Crew-10 leaves, its population will drop back from 11 to seven.

“I wish we could spend more time together,” Onishi said about Crew-11 replacements that arrived last weekend. “But you are in good hands. So I’m sure the second half of Expedition 73 will be even better. … Crew-10 is now leaving, but the science will continue here, because this place is the outpost for human beings to advance our technology and to explore further.”

The California splashdown marks the first time a NASA mission with SpaceX has landed on the west coast with 10 previous crewed missions for NASA (Demo-2 and Crew-1 through Crew-9) on SpaceX Crew Dragons having splashed down off the coast of Florida instead.

SpaceX made the shift in coasts, though, after several incidents of debris showing up on land around the world that turned out to be remnants of the Crew Dragon trunks, which had previously been discarded at higher altitudes during deborbit. Now the trunk is more safely discarded over the Pacific as it comes in for its landing. SpaceX has already knocked out two California landings this year on private missions Fram2 and Axiom Space’s Ax-4.

McClain thanked her family for their support during her 4 1/2 months away.

“We’ll see you back soon on the greatest planet in the solar system. We’ve checked,” she said. “We’ll back to Earth here shortly.”

For Crew-10, with around 147 days in space, it marks the shortest so far for an operational flight under NASA’s Commercial Crew Program. The longest has been Crew-8 from March-October 2024 at more than 235 days. Most have been around six months long.

The reason Crew-10 was short was twofold. It was originally targeting a February liftoff, but a delay from SpaceX with its fifth and final Crew Dragon forced a shuffle so Crew-10 flew with Endurance and the private Ax-4 mission ended up with the new vehicle, which they named Grace.

Its departure also needs to come before the planned CRS-33 cargo Dragon mission slated to arrive later this month, and will need somewhere to park. That cargo Dragon has a special reboost capacity built in that will be used to elevate the space station’s altitude, a first for SpaceX. The Russian Progress spacecraft are usually the ones responsible for space station reboost, but NASA is trying to store up fuel reserves for the eventual need to bring the space station back down to burn up in Earth’s atmosphere when its decommissioned after 2030.

Endurance is completing its fourth mission to space having debuted in 2021 on Crew-3 and having since flown on Crew-5 in 2022 and Crew-7 in 2023. Its leaving behind the Crew-11 crew who arrived last weekend in the fleet-leading Crew Dragon Endeavour, which was the first SpaceX Crew Dragon to fly with humans back in 2020 on the Demo-2 mission and is now amidst its sixth trip to space. The other Crew Dragons are Resilience and Freedom.

Crew-11 is not slated to leave the station until next year after at least six months, although NASA and SpaceX are looking into potentially stretching that mission out to eight months still.

Crew-10’s arrival in March was part of the Starliner saga as it was the relief crew to the station that allowed for Boeing Starliner’s two crew to finally come home after nearly nine months in space.

Starliner flew up to the station on the Crew Flight Test in June 2024, but the spacecraft suffered helium leaks and thruster failures on its propulsion system before docking. NASA ultimately chose to send Starliner home without crew in September meaning NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams had to remain on board the station until SpaceX was able to fly up a Crew Dragon with a pair of open seats that would allow them to fly home.

While Crew-9 arrived to the station in fall 2024, Williams and Wilmore had to remain on the station until Crew-10 arrived and Crew-9 was able to make it home.

The Commercial Crew Program originally contracted with Boeing and SpaceX to each build spacecraft to take over the responsibilities of shuttling astronauts on U.S.-based launches to and from the space station. NASA had to rely on Russia for rides to the station on Soyuz flights since the end of the Space Shuttle Program in 2011.

Both SpaceX and Boeing faced issues getting their test flights up and running, but SpaceX eventually returned U.S.-based orbital flights nearly nine years later.

Since Demo-2, SpaceX has flown its fleet of five Crew Dragons 19 times with 74 human passengers. Boeing suffered issues on its initial uncrewed Starliner flight in 2019 that forced a followup uncrewed flight that had its own issues to not fly until 2022. The CFT flight was supposed to open the door for NASA to trade off rotational flights between SpaceX and Boeing with each company flying once a year to support space station operations.

Boeing and NASA, though, are back to fixing the issues found on the CFT mission with its next flight potentially reverting to an uncrewed mission to the station to ensure its propulsion systems are safe. Then NASA could begin flying operational missions with Starliner.

SpaceX, though, is likely to fly Crew-12 for the next rotational mission sometime early next year.

NASA only needs enough flights from among the two companies to support staffing on the station until it is decommissioned. At most that would likely mean only 10 more missions, but it might become less if stays on board get stretched.

The Trump administration has recently pushed to pull back on the number of flights needed to the station before it’s decommissioned as well as limiting the number of astronauts.

This all falls within a larger plan to invest more in NASA’s efforts to get back to the moon and onto Mars while relying instead on future commercial space stations from companies like Axiom Space, Blue Origin and Vast, to satisfy any low-Earth orbit needs.

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Newswise — COLUMBUS, Ohio – People’s perceptions of the world are easily impacted by the angle at which they view objects in it, suggests a new study.  

This finding, made by researchers from The Ohio State University, was revealed by testing people’s ability to estimate the steepness of a hill. The study, recently published in the journal Perception, showed that most people, regardless of their visual orientation — or line of sight  — will consistently overestimate its steepness. 

Dennis Shaffer, lead author of the study and a professor of psychology at The Ohio State University’s Mansfield campus, said his team’s research aimed to understand why this may be, as well as how manipulating a person’s gaze might result in notable differences in their perception.

“If you’re driving toward a hill that you see in the distance, it typically looks a lot steeper from far away than when you get right on it,” he said. “Part of that is because of the way you’re looking at it, you’re changing your gaze relative to the object.”

In one study, testing this phenomenon involved having 36 participants determine the slant of a wooden ramp while either lying down or sitting on a yoga mat. Participants estimated the orientation of four slopes from about 7 feet away. 

In a second experiment, researchers further tested how eye height would impact participants’ perception by having them stand on the third rung of a step ladder or sitting cross-legged on the yoga mat while estimating the slope of the ramp.

“In general, people overestimate the slopes of surfaces by a factor of 1.5, so most people would estimate a 30 degree hill to be 45 degrees,” said Shaffer. 

In both scenarios, results show that people overestimated the slopes even more when the distance between their eye height and the surface of the slope was lessened. This phenomenon occurred when they were seated compared to standing on the step ladder, and even more so when they were lying on the yoga mat. 

According to Shaffer, this verifies long-held theories about how people tend to judge slope.

“One of our lab’s superpowers is finding interesting methodologies to get at the questions we’re interested in,” he said. “In doing so in this study, we saw a lot of our and others’ predictions pan out.”

Whereas previous work failed to find a solid connection between slope perception and a person’s eye height, this study tested a wider range of slopes and observer eye heights than other researchers had. These differences, said Brooke Hill, co-author of the study and an undergraduate student in psychology at Ohio State Mansfield, are what led this team to discover a significant negative correlation between eye height and slant estimates, meaning that shorter individuals tended to predict ramp orientations to be steeper than taller individuals would.

This helps to explain why the world might be perceived much differently by someone seated in a car versus higher up in a truck or a bus, or why a hill may look to be an even more insurmountable challenge to a small child than to a fully grown adult. 

“We don’t realize that as humans, perception is everything,” she said. Furthermore, gaining better insight into how our gaze changes our worldview is also a step toward improving systems used for road safety, GPS navigation, vehicle design and other assistive technologies. 

In the future, Shaffer and his team plan to continue demonstrating how the angle of an individual’s gaze can be influenced by various vantage points and methods, in part to discover how even unique perspectives of the environment shape our collective society. 

“Humans are really good pattern-seekers,” said Shaffer. “But by teaching people about head orientation and what it does for their perception of different things, we can help them keep a steadier version of what the world looks like.”

Montse Juarez, an undergraduate student at Ohio State Mansfield, was also a co-author. 

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Contact: Dennis Shaffer, [email protected]

Written by: Tatyana Woodall, [email protected]

Fresh data from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has revealed that Pluto’s weather is run by a high-altitude haze, not by its thin mix of nitrogen and methane.

“This is unique in the solar system,” said Tanguy Bertrand, an astronomer at the Paris Observatory who led the analysis.

His team’s Webb observations show Pluto running a climate system that shares no obvious playbook with any other Kuiper Belt world.

Faraway Pluto gets stranger

NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft skimmed 7,800 miles over Pluto on July 14, 2015 and spotted nitrogen-ice plains, water-ice peaks, and a bright, heart-shaped basin called Sputnik Planitia. The flyby proved the dwarf planet is active, overturning decades of assumptions that it was a frozen relic.

The spacecraft also photographed a blue atmospheric shell that climbs more than 125 miles (200 kilometers) above the surface, stacking into at least 20 layers. Such altitude is extraordinary for a body smaller than Earth’s Moon.

Temperature readings near the top of those layers hover around -333 degrees Fahrenheit (-202 degrees Centigrade), roughly 30 degrees colder than gas-only models predicted. Researchers guessed the particles themselves were siphoning heat away.

Pluto’s haze becomes a thermostat

In 2017 Xi Zhang proposed that organic grains forged from methane and nitrogen absorb sunlight by day and dump it as infrared energy after dusk, effectively air-conditioning Pluto’s sky. The idea challenged the textbook view that gases alone regulate atmospheric temperatures.

Webb’s Mid-Infrared Instrument, tuned from 5 to 28 micrometers, finally had the sensitivity to test that prediction during a 2022 observing window.

Its 21-foot (6.4-meter) mirror separated Pluto’s glow from its moon Charon and caught the faint thermal shimmer expected from cooling haze.

Daytime grains soak up solar energy, but at night they radiate so well that the upper atmosphere loses heat faster than it gains it.

That cycle repeats each Pluto rotation, acting like an invisible pump that keeps temperatures stable yet frigid.

Splitting Pluto from its moon

Before Webb, telescope beams blurred Pluto and Charon together, making the haze signal almost impossible to isolate.

With higher resolution, Bertrand’s group measured separate light curves at 15, 18, 21, and 25 micrometers and traced the extra emission squarely to the dwarf planet.

Spectral fitting shows the grains resemble Titan-style tholins wrapped in thin films of hydrocarbon and nitrile ice.

These complex particles weigh almost nothing, yet their collective surface area overwhelms the cooling power of any gas molecule.

Charon’s curve matched a bare icy crust, confirming that its sibling lacks an atmosphere thick enough to complicate the reading.

By removing Charon’s contribution, the team settled a debate that had lingered since New Horizons sent back its first blurry thermal maps.

Hazy worlds other than Pluto

Bertrand adds that Neptune’s moon Triton and Saturn’s moon Titan also wear photochemical veils and might rely on similar haze thermostats.

If future Webb campaigns see matching thermal glows, scientists will need to rewrite more than one atmospheric handbook.

Exoplanet surveys already detect opaque hazes on mini-Neptunes and super-Earths, so lessons from Pluto could help decode alien climates.

Accurate temperature estimates guide the search for habitable zones and influence telescope time worth billions of dollars.

Closer to home, a planned Webb program will point at Triton late next year to hunt for a similar mid-infrared excess. A positive detection would clinch the case that tiny grains can dominate energy budgets across icy bodies.

What it means for early Earth

Climate models of the Archean Earth suggest a methane-rich haze may have blanketed the young planet, scattering sunlight and moderating surface warmth while the Sun was faint.

Pluto supplies a living analog, showing how sparse organic aerosols can still steer heat flow.

By tuning their models to match Webb’s data, geochemists can refine estimates for early Earth’s surface temperature and ultraviolet shielding.

Those tweaks ripple into theories about where and when the first biological molecules stayed stable long enough to assemble life.

Organic hazes absorb ultraviolet light and can slow the breakup of fragile molecules such as ammonia, giving nascent metabolisms a kinder surface environment.

Pluto’s data provide a reality check on how thick such blankets must be before they flip from warming to cooling.

Future questions

Because Pluto orbits the Sun once every 248 Earth years, JWST snapshots in 2022 and 2025 sample only the early stages of a long arctic winter at its north pole.

Scientists expect the haze thermostat to work even harder as the Sun dims, a forecast Webb will be able to test across the next decade.

Meanwhile, laboratory chambers on Earth are freezing methane-nitrogen mixtures to replicate the unusual grains and measure their emissivity.

Step by step, a haze once spotted as a pretty blue glow is turning into a textbook example of atmospheric physics.

Why this matters for climate science

General circulation models that include aerosol physics already show that fine particles can swing global temperatures by dozens of degrees on young Earth-like planets. Pluto serves as the first natural benchmark for those calculations outside the laboratory.

Aerosol feedbacks also influence geoengineering proposals, cloud microphysics, and the interpretation of exoplanet spectra.

With Webb’s detections in hand, modelers can tighten their error bars and policymakers can better weigh the planetary-scale consequences of tiny floating grains.

The same haze-cooling principle could even moderate supercritical atmospheres on distant mini-Neptunes, hinting that some worlds dismissed as too hot might hide temperate cloud decks.

Future space telescopes will look for the thermal fingerprints of those unseen aerosols when selecting targets that could harbor life.

The study is published in Nature Astronomy.

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NASA has revealed the most detailed images yet taken of comet 3I/ATLAS, the interstellar visitor that is currently barreling its way through our solar system.

The images, taken by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, have enabled astronomers to more accurately estimate the space object’s size — and it looks like it’s smaller than we thought, NASA said in a statement.

In February, Christina Warinner was accepting an award from the American Association for the Advancement of Science when she learned one of her projects was on a list circulating in Washington of targeted federal research grants. A couple of months later, she appeared in Stockholm at a Nobel symposium and lost two National Science Foundation grants over the span of two weeks.

Warinner, Landon T. Clay Professor of Scientific Archaeology, is well-known in the field of ancient DNA, with her pioneering methods cracking several mysteries concerning early human diets and health. Hers were among the more than 1,600 NSF grants for active, ongoing projects that were terminated this spring.

“I recognize it can be hard to compare this work with medical research, which has such obvious applications for saving lives,” Warinner said. “But people also have a deep curiosity about who we are and where we come from. Our work is important because it uses our most powerful technologies to reveal how we, as humans, lived thousands of years ago so that we may better understand our world today.”

The cuts come at a critical time for practitioners of ancient DNA science, a discipline in rapid ascent due to recent advances in lab techniques and computing power. The multidisciplinary field got its start in the mid-1980s in the United States, but support here for the work has lagged behind Northern Europe during the 21^st century.

“It’s just really sad,” Warinner said. “American archeologists have been leaders in telling the stories of humankind. But if our funding is removed, we won’t be leaders anymore.”

The annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) was supposed to be a joyful occasion for Warinner, who also holds the title of Sally Starling Seaver Associate Professor at the Radcliffe Institute. AAAS, which publishes the journal Science, presented her with its 2025 Robert W. Sussman Award for Scientific Contributions to Anthropology.

At the downtown Boston reception, a fellow researcher told Warinner one of her major projects was on a database of recommended research cuts. She and her team have been in the thick of a three-year inquiry into the diplomatic role of marriage and extended kin networks in connecting ancient Maya kingdoms along a major river valley in Belize.

It’s one of the most intensely studied corners of the ancient Maya, yielding more than a century’s worth of archaeological discovery.

Cracking the civilization’s elaborate hieroglyphic script, with key breakthroughs made at Harvard in the 1950s, clarified the importance of intermarriage to maintaining inter-kingdom relations. Recent innovations in remote sensing helped researchers uncover a string of previously unknown settlements in a densely forested area known over thousands of years for its cacao harvests.

Was the Belize River Valley more tightly knit with cross-community relations than previously thought? Warinner and her collaborators were on the cusp of finding out.

“The genetic data would really help us tie it all together, to really understand how the ancient Maya political system worked,” she said.

Only in the last five or six years has such a revelation become possible with advancements in sequencing ancient genomes from hot, humid climates, where DNA is far quicker to deteriorate.

Researchers in Belize and at Harvard extracted genetic data from 400 individuals who inhabited the valley over hundreds of years, between 300 B.C.E. and 1000 A.D. To Warinner’s surprise, nearly all, sourced from newly identified sites as well as decades-old excavations, generated at least partial genomes.

“We never anticipated such a high success rate,” shared Warinner, a native Midwesterner who has been studying ancient Maya since her undergraduate years at the University of Kansas. “It’s wonderful. But it also makes our project more expensive than we originally budgeted.”

A May 15 letter canceling the project’s NSF funding dealt an unexpected second blow. Also lost was support for newer research on the practice of horse milking, with recent findings suggesting its origins may be close in age to horse domestication itself.

“Modern society was literally built on the backs of horses,” Warinner said. “But many people are surprised to learn that early domesticated horses were milked. We still don’t know where or when this practice began — that’s something we wanted to trace, to better understand these very earliest human-horse relationships.”

As an ancient DNA expert and also group leader at Germany’s Max Planck Institute, she had been invited by the Nobel Committee to present her work on ancient microbes at a Nobel Symposium on Paleogenomics. Warinner presented May 28 on the archaeology of infectious diseases, the history of fermented foods, and the evolution of the human microbiome.

The topic of horse milking fits squarely with this research focus. Of longstanding interest to Warinner is how milk and dairy products became dietary staples in a world where most are lactose-intolerant. “They are some of our oldest — and least-understood — manufactured foods,” she marveled.

Koumiss, a fermented beverage still popular in Central Asia, makes for a particularly fascinating case study. Made from horse milk, it hails from the very region where horse domestication is believed to have started more than 4,000 years ago. In fact, the mildly alcoholic drink is known to have fueled some of the great Eurasian nomadic empires, including the Mongols and the Xiongnu.

Warinner and her collaborators proposed a novel approach to identifying when, and where, these grassland dwellers got their first sips of koumiss. As a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Oklahoma, she was among the first to recognize that dental tartar functions could be a goldmine for archaeological scientists. The calcified buildup, she found, entraps and preserves biomolecules like DNA as well as proteins, providing unique insights into ancient diets.

Learning about the emergence of koumiss — or raw horse milk, for that matter — meant collaborating with researchers across Central Asia to perform dental cleanings on their archaeological collections.

“The whole reason we have undertaken this project is because we believe it is important for understanding human history,” Warinner offered. “Our grant proposal was successful because a panel of peer reviewers agreed, deeming our research vital science of high priority.

“It’s such an honor,” she added, “to receive funding this way.”