Category: 7. Science

The Exploration Company has completed a hot fire test campaign for the thrust chamber of its Huracan rocket engine. The testing put the fourth prototype of the thrust chamber through its paces, including introducing deliberate pressure disturbances to assess its performance under stress.

Developed to power The Exploration Company’s Nyx Moon spacecraft, the Huracan engine will support missions to both lunar orbit and the Moon’s surface. While the company has not recently updated progress on its Nyx Moon spacecraft, a late-2024 presentation projected completing an inaugural mission to the Moon’s surface in 2029. The presentation also revealed that the service would offer capacity for commercial payloads at a cost of around $200,000 per kilogram.

On 7 August, the company announced that it had completed a series of 11 hot fire tests of the fourth iteration of the Huracan engine’s thrust chamber. A thrust chamber is the part of a rocket engine where fuel and oxidiser mix and combust, producing hot gases that are then expelled through a nozzle to generate thrust. This version of the Huracan’s thrust chamber employs a lighter and simpler chamber architecture that reduces overall production time.

The test campaign was conducted at the Airborne Engineering testing facilities in Westcott, England. According to the company’s 7 August update, the testing, which involved imposing deliberate pressure disturbances, validated the thrust chamber’s high-frequency combustion stability, ensuring that it can manage rapid pressure oscillations that can occur during combustion without compromising performance or structural integrity.
In addition to the thrust chamber itself, testing was also focused on the company’s newly developed GOX/GCH4 ignitor. According to the company, the ignitor performed as expected with “zero missed starts.”

While the company prepares for missions to the Moon, its near-term goal is closer to home. It is preparing for the inaugural flight of Nyx Earth, which will transport cargo to and from low Earth orbit. On the road to that first flight, the company plans to launch a third subscale prototype after its Mission Possible demonstrator failed moments before parachute deployment earlier this year. The company has not yet shared when it expects to launch this third demonstration mission.

Don’t let the brilliant Moon deter you from enjoying the best meteor shower of the year: the 2025 Perseids.

It’s that time of year once again. August sees warm nights, with late summer campers out awaiting that ‘Old Faithful’ of annual meteor showers: the August Perseids. While 2025 also sees the shower peaking right around Full Moon, don’t despair; with a little bit of planning and patience, you can still catch this shower at its best.

Perseid Prospects for 2025

The radiant rises to the northeast around local midnight. The peak for 2025 is expected to occur right around August 12th at 3:00 Universal Time (UT), favoring northern Europe at sunrise. North America rotates into the stream about 4-6 hours later.

Expect rates topping 50-100 per hour to pick up towards local sunrise, as your viewing site turns into the stream. Think of a car (the Earth) speeding down the highway; the forward windshield gets the bugs (the meteors). You’ll know if you saw a Perseid, if you can trace the path of the meteor back to the shower’s radiant point along the Perseus-Cassiopeia border.

Be sure to check out the planetary parade on meteor dawn patrol, with Mercury low to the east, Saturn high to the south, and a very close together Jupiter and Venus on the morning of the 12th.

The source of the shower is periodic comet 109P/Swift-Tuttle. Discovered by astronomers Lewis Swift and Horace Tuttle in July 1862, records of apparitions for the comet go all the way back to Chinese observations in 322 BC. The comet was notable as the first linked to an annual meteor shower.

A sketch of Comet Swift-Tuttle by astronomer G.J. Chambers on the night of August 23rd. Credit: Public Domain.

On a 133 year orbit, Comet Swift-Tuttle last reached perihelion on December 12th, 1992, when rates for the Perseids picked up. Swift-Tuttle won’t visit the inner solar system again until 2126.

The orbital path of Comet Swift/Tuttle. Credit: NASA/JPL/Horizons.

Now, for the bad news: the (-90%) illuminated, waning gibbous Moon sits nearby in Pisces around the 12th, just 3 days after Full on August 9th. This will cut down on the number of faint meteors, though I wouldn’t let it deter you in your meteor shower quest.

The Perseid radiant looking to the east versus the Full Moon on the night of August 12th. Credit: Stellarium.

The Perseids are often referred to as the ‘Tears of Saint Lawrence,’ after the saint of the same name, who was martyred on August 10th, 258 AD. There’s evidence that the name is a modern construction. The earliest written reference to the saint’s association with the meteor shower seems to only go back to Edward Herrick in 1839. I’ve found that the reference is well-known in rural southern Spain.

Observing the 2025 Perseids

Meteor shower watching is actually pretty low tech. All you really need to enjoy the Perseids is a sturdy lawn chair, a hot beverage, and patience. A friend can help scan the sky, as Perseids can appear in any direction from the radiant. You can beat the Moon by selecting your observing site beforehand to place its glare behind a nearby hill or building.

A Perseid meteor seen over Oxfordshire, UK in 2022. Credit: Mary McIntyre.

The Perseids often produce a twin peak spaced a few hours apart worldwide, so it’s always worth watching on nights leading up to and after the expected maximum. The Perseids are also a prodigious producer of fireballs, which can briefly light up the scene with surprising brilliance, leaving a persistent smoke train. I once saw a Perseid while watching from northern Maine that had an audible hiss. We now know that you can ‘hear’ meteors via a localized phenomenon known as ‘electrophonic sound’. Tune an FM radio to an unused frequency, and you may just hear meteor ‘pings’ amoung the static.

A Perseid meteor pierces the scene, during a northern lights display on the night of August 12th, 2024. Imaged from Assateague Island National Seashore, Maryland. Credit: Jeff Berkes. (instagram/flickr)

Clouded out? You can still catch the Perseids live on August 12th starting at 21:00UT/5:00PM EDT, courtesy of Astronomer Gianluca Masi and the Virtual Telescope Project.

A Perseid meteor imaged from the International Space Station. Credit: NASA

Don’t miss the August Perseids, as one of the best meteor showers for 2025.

Lead image credit: Boris Štomar

Thanks to the Hubble Space Telescope, we now have the sharpest image yet of the interstellar visitor 3I/ATLAS, showing that it is clearly a comet, with a coma filled with dust particles and the first hints of a tail.

Of course, 3I/ATLAS is no ordinary comet. Discovered on July 1, 2025 by the Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System (ATLAS), 3I/ATLAS is the fastest comet ever seen. Racing in-system at 130,000 mph (209,000 kph), it is hurtling through space so fast that it will escape the sun’s gravitational grasp. Its origin is somewhere beyond the solar system, in interstellar space where it has traveled for aeons, being sped up by gravitational slingshots every time it encounters a star. As a result, 3I/ATLAS is just passing through, and will gain another slingshot from our sun to send it on its way back into interstellar space, never to be seen again.

Having reviewed the Discovery Space Projector back-to-back with the Smithsonian Planetarium Projector, it’s surprising just how similar the two are. Their functions are practically identical, just coming in a different body. Both sport a familiar brand name to give them credibility, too, but like the Smithsonian Planetarium Projector, the Discovery Space Projector is lacking where it matters: In its star projector functions.

Like the Smithsonian, this unit is technically two projectors in one. One projects images from a series of disks, while the other fills your ceiling with so-called stars. Also like the Smithsonian, the stars here are blue, blurry and unrealistic. But, you cannot project both stars and disks together: There’s a separate projector at each end of the unit, so you need to rotate it to see one or the other.

Pennington Biomedical researchers Dr. Eric Ravussin and Dr. Krisztian Stadler contributed to the study in which they and colleagues examined cysteine and discovered that it triggered the transition of white fat cells to brown fat cells, which are a more active form of fat cells that burn energy to produce heat and maintain body temperature. When researchers restricted cysteine in animal models entirely, it drove high levels of weight loss and increased fat burning and browning of fat cells, further demonstrating cysteine’s importance in metabolism.

“In addition to the dramatic weight loss and increase in fat burning resulting from the removal of cysteine, the amino acid is also central to redox balance and redox pathways in biology,” said Dr. Stadler, who directs the Oxidative Stress and Disease laboratory at Pennington Biomedical. “These results suggest future weight management strategies that might not rely exclusively on reducing caloric intake.”

The article is based on results from trials involving both human participants and animal models. For the human trials, researchers examined fat tissue samples taken from trial participants who had actively restricted calorie intake over a year. When examining the fat tissue samples, they looked for changes in the thousands of metabolites, which are compounds formed when the body breaks down food and stores energy. The exploration of these metabolites indicated a reduced level of cysteine.

“Reverse translation of a human caloric restriction trial identified a new player in energy metabolism,” said Dr. Ravussin, who holds the Douglas L. Gordon Chair in Diabetes and Metabolism at Pennington Biomedical and oversees its Human Translation Physiology Lab. “Systemic cysteine depletion in mice causes weight loss with increased fat utilization and browning of adipocytes.”

The tissue samples came from participants in the CALERIE clinical trial, which recruited healthy young and middle-aged men and women who were instructed to reduce their calorie intake by an average of 14% over two years. With the reduction of cysteine, the participants also experienced subsequent weight loss, improved muscle health, and reduced inflammation.

In the animal models, researchers provided meals with reduced calories. This resulted in a 40% drop in body temperature, but regardless of the cellular stress, the animal models did not exhibit tissue damage, suggesting that protective systems may kick in when cysteine is low.

“Dr. Ravussin, Dr. Stadler, and their colleagues have made a remarkable discovery showing that cysteine regulates the transition from white to brown fat cells, opening new therapeutic avenues for treating obesity,” said Dr. John Kirwan, Executive Director of Pennington Biomedical Research Center. “I would like to congratulate this research team on uncovering this important metabolic mechanism that could eventually transform how we approach weight management interventions.”

These solid-like clusters, thought to be irreversible, can act as sponges that soak up surrounding proteins key for brain health, contributing to neurological disorders.

How these harmful RNA clusters form in the first place has remained an open question.

Now, University at Buffalo researchers have not only uncovered that tiny droplets of protein and nucleic acids in cells contribute to the formation of RNA clusters but also demonstrated a way to prevent and disassemble the clusters.

Their findings, described in a study published recently in Nature Chemistry, uses an engineered strand of RNA known as an antisense oligonucleotide that can bind to RNA clusters and disperse them.

“It’s fascinating to watch these clusters form over time inside dense, droplet-like mixtures of protein and RNA under the microscope. Just as striking, the clusters dissolve when antisense oligonucleotides pull the RNA aggregates apart,” says the study’s corresponding author, Priya Banerjee, PhD, associate professor in the Department of Physics, within the UB College of Arts and Sciences. “What’s exciting about this discovery is that we not only figured out how these clusters form but also found a way to break them apart.”

The work was supported by the U.S. National Institutes of Health and the St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital.

How RNA clusters form

The study sheds new light on how RNA clusters form within biomolecular condensates.

Cells make these liquid-like droplets from RNA, DNA and proteins — or a combination of all three. Banerjee’s team has researched them extensively, investigating their role in both cellular function and disease, as well as their fundamental material properties that present new opportunities for synthetic biology applications.

The condensates are essentially used as hosts by repeat RNAs, disease-linked RNA molecules with abnormally long strands of repeated sequences. At an early timepoint, the repeat RNAs remain fully mixed inside these condensates, but as the condensates age, the RNA molecules start clumping together, creating an RNA-rich solid core surrounded by an RNA-depleted fluid shell.

“Repeat RNAs are inherently sticky, but interestingly, they don’t stick to each other just by themselves because they fold into stable 3D structures. They need the right environment to unfold and clump together, and the condensates provide that,” says the study’s first author, Tharun Selvam Mahendran, a PhD student in Banerjee’s lab.

“Crucially, we also found that the solid-like repeat RNA clusters persist even after the host condensate dissolves,” Mahendran adds. “This persistence is partly why the clusters are thought to be irreversible.”

Preventing — and reversing — clusters

The team was first able to demonstrate that repeat RNA clustering can be prevented by using an RNA-binding protein known as G3Bp1 that is present in cells.

“The RNA clusters come about from the RNA strands sticking together, but if you introduce another sticky element into the condensate, like G3BP1, then the interactions between the RNAs are frustrated and clusters stop forming,” Banerjee says. “It’s like introducing a chemical inhibitor into a crystal-growing solution, the ordered structure can no longer form properly. You can think of the G3BP1 as an observant molecular chaperone that binds to the sticky RNA molecules and makes sure that RNAs don’t stick to each other.”

In order to reverse the clusters, the team employed an antisense oligonucleotide (ASO). Because ASO is a short RNA with a sequence complementary to the repeat RNA, it was able to not only bind to the aggregation-prone RNAs but also disassemble the RNA clusters.

The team found that ASO’s disassembly abilities were highly tied to its specific sequence. Scramble the sequence in any way, and the ASO would fail to prevent clustering, let alone disassemble the clusters.

“This suggests our ASO can be tailored to only target specific repeat RNAs, which is a good sign for its viability as a potential therapeutic application,” Banerjee says.

Banerjee is also exploring RNA’s role in the origin of life, thanks to a seed grant from the Hypothesis Fund. He is studying whether biomolecular condensates may have protected RNA’s functions as biomolecular catalysts in the harsh prebiotic world.

“It really just shows how RNAs may have evolved to take these different forms of matter, some of which are extremely useful for biological functions and perhaps even life itself — and others that can bring about disease,” Banerjee says.

One way scientists study planets is by looking at the minerals on their surfaces. They can tell us a lot about how worlds form.

Scientists have been looking at unusual layers of iron sulfates on Mars, and these layers may represent a whole new mineral.

The endangered South African cycad Encephalartos horridus may resemble a relic from the Jurassic age, but the species itself evolved long after dinosaurs disappeared. Still, it carries a biochemical legacy inherited from its distant ancestors—plants that once thrived alongside Jurassic fauna. A team led by Hiroshima University (HU) researchers found that its spiky, silvery-blue leaves owe their color not to pigment, but to a wax-based optical effect produced by a lipid compound that may date back to the dawn of land plants.

In a study published in the Journal of Experimental Botany , researchers revealed that the coating of epicuticular wax on E. horridus leaves forms tubular crystals that reflect light from ultraviolet (UV) to blue wavelengths, giving the plant its bluish sheen. The paper will also appear on the front cover of the journal’s upcoming Volume 76, Issue 12.

Nonacosan-10-ol, the key wax compound, is found across diverse plant lineages—including gymnosperms such as ginkgos, conifers, and cycads, and has even been detected in certain mosses—suggesting the ability to produce it emerged early in the evolution of land plants. However, only a few species can organize it into specialized wax structures that produce structural color, vivid hues generated not by pigment, but by microscopic architectures that scatter light. It’s the same optical effect behind the iridescent wings of morpho butterflies and the vibrant plumage of blue jays—both of which appear blue despite lacking the pigment.

The team found, however, that this unique color in E. horridus doesn’t come from the wax alone. It also depends on how the wax interacts with the dark green, chlorophyll-rich tissues underneath.

“The blue color of Encephalartos horridus leaves comes not from pigments but from a clever natural trick. Tiny wax crystals on the surface create what’s called ‘structural coloration,’” explained study corresponding author Takashi Nobusawa , assistant professor at HU’s Graduate School of Integrated Sciences for Life .

“The leaf surface is coated with ultra-thin wax crystals about one ten-thousandth of a millimeter wide. Peeling off the leaf’s surface layer makes the blue disappear. But placing it back on a dark surface brings the blue back, as if by magic.”

UV defense and pollinator lure?

To understand why the leaves of E. horridus appear bluish, researchers ran Monte Carlo multi-layered (MCML) simulations to model how light interacts with the wax crystals about 0.1 micrometers in diameter, thousands of times smaller than a typical grain of sand. The simulations revealed that when the wax layer sits against a dark background, it minimizes unwanted reflection, intensifying the blue hue. But if there is an air gap between the wax and the underlying tissue, reflectivity increases, causing a grayish cast. Replacing the air with water restores the original color by letting more light reach the chlorophyll-rich cells beneath the wax.

Although the superhydrophobic properties of nonacosan-10-ol have been well-documented, its connection to efficient UV reflection remains less understood. Shielding against UV rays is important for survival in desert environments, where the radiation can harm plant cells. However, the researchers suspect there’s more to it. The glaucous sheen could also be a visual cue for insect pollinators like a neon sign pointing toward the plant’s reproductive organs. Insects can see UV light, which is invisible to the human eye, and many also have heightened sensitivity to blue wavelengths.

Lost to time

Although E. horridus is known to accumulate the secondary alcohol nonacosan-10-ol in its epicuticular wax, how this compound is biosynthesized remains a mystery. By contrast, wax biosynthesis has been extensively studied in Arabidopsis thaliana and other model plants in the angiosperm group (flowering plants), which evolved much later. In Arabidopsis, nonacosan-10-ol is not detected; instead, nonacosan-14-ol and nonacosan-15-ol are produced as secondary alcohols by a characterized pathway.

To investigate how the E. horridus produces its distinctive wax compound, the team focused on KCS (keto-acyl-CoA synthases) enzymes, which they suspected to be responsible for nonacosan-10-ol biosynthesis. However, introducing these enzymes into a model plant did not result in production of the compound—suggesting that additional, as-yet-unknown pathways are likely involved.

“Why do the leaves of Encephalartos horridus, an endangered South African cycad, appear strikingly blue even though they contain no blue pigments? The question itself is scientifically fascinating—it uncovers a natural optical strategy far more refined than we might expect from plants. Understanding this mechanism not only deepens our grasp of plant adaptation in extreme environments but could also inspire nature-based technologies,” Nobusawa said.

“The next step is to figure out how the plant makes the special wax compound, nonacosan-10-ol, and to uncover the genes and enzymes behind it. In the long run, the goal is to understand how this adaptation evolved and to use these insights to develop new materials inspired by nature.”

Other members of the research team were Makoto Kusaba also from HU’s Graduate School of Integrated Sciences for Life, Takashi Okamoto from Kyushu Institute of Technology, and Michiharu Nakano from Kochi University.

The first stars in the universe may have been much smaller than we thought, new research hints — possibly explaining why it’s so hard to find evidence they ever existed.

According to the new research, the earliest generation of stars had a difficult history. These stars came to be in a violent environment: inside a huge gas cloud whipping with supersonic-speed turbulence at velocities five times the speed of sound (as measured in Earth’s atmosphere).