Category: 7. Science

Low Earth orbit, or “LEO,” is convenient, but it’s getting crowded with over 9,000 metric tons of space junk, which raises the risk of a devastating collision that could kill everyone on board an orbital craft.

The moon is close but has no breathable air, hardly any atmosphere to protect against deadly space radiation, and nights there can last up to two Earth weeks.

Mars has a thicker atmosphere than the moon, but it also lacks breathable air and has toxic dirt and harmful dust storms.

“The single thing that differentiates the Earth from every other place in the solar system is that there is free oxygen in the atmosphere,” said Mike Shara, astrophysicist at the American Museum of Natural History.

“So we can go take a nice breath, and if you were to do that on essentially any other planet, you would die, almost instantly,” he said.

There may be other planets outside our solar system more similar to Earth, but they’re just too far away for current technology.

“We’re talking decades or at least a decade to get to the outer solar system. And 1,000, 2,000, or 10,000 years to get to the nearest star. Not practical,” Shara told BI.

One morning in 2009, Jacqueline Tabler woke up with the solution to a laboratory problem that had been plaguing her for months. She got out of bed, grabbed her notebook, and started sketching out an experiment that had come to her in a dream.

Tabler, then a developmental-biology PhD student at King’s College London, was struggling to reproduce data using methods from previous work in the lab that had shown the function of an enzyme, called PAR-1, in the development of frog embryos. She had the idea to perform a grafting experiment, taking a layer of cells expressing excess PAR-1 from one embryo and transplanting them onto an embryo that does not express the enzyme. By comparing these grafted embryos with control grafts expressing typical levels of PAR1, Tabler hoped to see what happened to the cells as the embryos created neurons.

“It was a fantastical answer,” she says. “I knew what I had to do was graft from one embryo to another embryo, follow the tissue, and then I would figure it out.”

Tabler, who now leads a group at the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics in Dresden, Germany, ran the grafting experiment and noticed that there was a higher-than-expected amount of PAR-1-expressing cells in certain layers of the embryos. From this, she and the lab team realized that PAR-1 had a previously unknown function controlling the orientation of cell division. The results were published in 2010 in Development¹.

Tabler says that she took a risk approaching her supervisor with the idea for a different experiment when she was meant to be running those that she had been assigned, but now sees how this kind of creative risk-taking can make you a successful lab leader. “I had to learn that what set me apart — my curiosity and creativity — was positive,” she explains. In other words, it “was a feature, not a bug”.

Learning how to be creative while an early-career scientist is important, Tabler says. However, she acknowledges that as a PhD student or postdoc, often working on a predefined project with strict timelines, deliverables and reports, it can be hard to see where the space is for creativity.

A culture problem

Tabler spoke about her experiences of creativity in science at the (In)Credible Research Conference 2024. The two-day event in Berlin last October discussed whether creativity is a valued aspect of scientific work, and how it can be nurtured at the early-career stage.

From the discussions, “the most striking result is the disparity between how important creativity is for science versus how much opportunity and value is given to it within the research environment”, says Ian Erik Stewart, a neuroscientist at the Free University Berlin, and part of the team of early-career researchers who organized the conference. When attendees were polled, the majority regarded creativity as essential for research breakthroughs. But 81% reported encountering barriers in pursuing creative or unconventional ideas owing to a variety of structural issues, including publication, funding and supervisor pressures.

Biomedical scientist Itai Yanai, at the New York University Grossman School of Medicine in New York City, thinks that the scientific culture has sidelined much creativity in favour of getting “the right fellowships and good publications”.

“The system of science is not really rewarding creativity,” says Yanai. “We have this situation, in which to advance your career as a scientist, creativity becomes a liability. It does pay off eventually, but that assumes you can survive in the business long enough.”

But defining creativity is hard. There was agreement at the Berlin conference that creativity in science is the intersection of something that is new and also worthy of pursuit, as theorized by science philosopher Julia Sánchez-Dorado in a 2023 study².

Shunichi Kasahara, a computer scientist at Sony Computer Science Laboratories in Tokyo and at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology in Japan, thinks that creativity in research is “the ability to observe, iterate and extract meaningful insights from experiences”.

Whatever the definition, it’s widely agreed that personal experiences shape creativity. Tabler attributes her creative breakthrough to embracing a non-linear way of approaching problems, and to discussions with a postdoc in her lab at the time who was running a similar experiment. “Creativity, for me, is drawing from my own experience with my environment and my colleagues, as well as using the way my brain processes information,” she says.

“The biggest takeaway from the talks, in terms of individual activities that you can undertake to improve or engage your own creativity, is to experience very widely,” says neuroscientist and conference co-organizer Leandre Ravatt at the Charité – Berlin University of Medicine and the German Center for Neurodegenerative Diseases (DZNE) in Berlin. “A lot of early-career researchers feel that they’re often pigeonholing themselves into a specialization,” Ravatt explains, “often focusing really strongly on the literature of their field.”

“What we learnt from the conference is that if you do this, you’re actually blocking out a lot of avenues for creativity. The biggest recommendation was to read from other fields; go to talks from other fields,” she says.

Investing in her science-communication skills — for example, by writing and editing for a student science magazine — has also taught Ravatt “a lot of different ways to look at the same problem”. When communicating your own science, try “to find a new creative angle, and play around with the conceptual models that are in your work”, suggests Stewart. Or keep it simple, and “just go to the beer hour in your institute”, he advises. “Meet people and then try to inspire them about what you’re doing. By doing so, you’ll make everything way more fun for yourself as well,” says Stewart.

Creating space

Time pressures on early-career researchers mean that there is a limit to how much they can do. Ravatt says that if institutions “want to encourage more interdisciplinary or creative thinking, they need to create the spaces for these sorts of transdisciplinary encounter”.

Martin Lercher, a computational cell biologist at Heinrich Heine University in Düsseldorf, Germany, thinks that creativity should be a focus of university curricula. “Implicitly, of course, a lot of people get some training on creativity from interactions with their supervisors during their PhD,” says Lercher. “But it’s just so much more efficient if there is some formal background to that, some theory, some structure,” he says.

Yanai and Lercher think that it is useful to see the creative side of science as distinct from the rest of it, a dichotomy nicknamed night-and-day science. The concept was originally outlined by French biologist and Nobel prizewinner François Jacob³. “Day science is the executive part. You have the idea and to test it, you do controlled experiments,” says Yanai. “Night science is the world of creativity, the world of ideas. In night science we don’t talk about the specifics of the experiment, instead, we use the language of metaphors and anthropomorphisms,” he explains. “We’re advocating to first of all recognize that there’s a night-science world. Once you recognize that, you realize we need training just as much in this world,” Yanai says.

Yanai and Lercher have created a website containing free materials for educators to help them teach the importance of the creative process, with tips and tricks that stimulate creativity. One of Lercher’s favourite questions to ask is, ‘why would the cell do something so crazy?’.

Both the U.S. and China have set their sights on the Moon, aiming to break ground on permanent lunar bases within the next decade. Though there’s no legal basis for claiming territory in space, whichever country gets there first will gain a coveted first-mover advantage, allowing it to set certain ground rules about who can do what, where.

But getting there first is only half the battle. Actually establishing a sustained lunar presence presents significant logistical and engineering challenges. One of the biggest hurdles is figuring out how to efficiently and affordably transport building materials from Earth to construct a Moon base, but a team of scientists at China’s Deep Space Exploration Laboratory (DSEL) in Hefei, Anhui Province, may have already solved that problem.

In July, the researchers published test results for a prototype of a lunar regolith forming system in the journal Acta Astronautica. This 3D printer-like device makes strong construction bricks out of moondust, a.k.a. lunar regolith. Being able to produce building materials with resources readily available on the Moon would reduce the need for Earth-sourced materials, Yang Hoglun, a co-author and senior engineer at DSEL, told the Chinese state media agency Xinhua.

“This printing breakthrough has validated the feasibility of using lunar soil as the sole raw building material, enabling true in-situ resource utilization and eliminating the need to transport any additional materials from Earth,” Yang said.

The system uses a parabolic mirror—a reflective dish—to gather solar radiation, focus it into a single point, then funnel it through bundles of fiber optic cables. At the focus point, light intensity exceeds 3,000 times the standard intensity of sunlight at Earth’s surface, reaching temperatures over 2,300 degrees Fahrenheit (1,300 degrees Celsius), according to Moon Daily. This is generally hot enough to melt moondust.

In a series of lab tests using artificial lunar regolith made from basalt and a xenon lamp to simulate sunlight, the prototype successfully melted the regolith and formed solid shapes, including lines, surfaces, bodies, and complex structures. Yang claims the prototype could manufacture materials to support construction of lunar roads, equipment platforms, and buildings to enable large-scale, sustainable lunar exploration and resource use.

The success of this preliminary test marks a major step toward in-situ manufacturing of lunar construction materials, but there are limitations. Yang told Moon Daily that lunar soil bricks cannot sustain pressure in the Moon’s vacuum and low-gravity environment. They could, however, act as protective layers over pressure-retaining habitat modules made of rigid and inflatable structures, Moon Daily reports.

China was already making strides in this area before the DSEL researchers tested their lunar regolith forming system. In November 2024, the nation sent a cargo rocket carrying brick prototypes made from lunar regolith simulant to its Tiangong space station for testing in space conditions. The bricks will remain outside the space station for three years to test their durability in this harsh environment, according to Space.com.

Other countries, including the U.S., are also developing methods to use lunar regolith for construction, but China’s progress within the last few years has been particularly significant. Indeed, the Chinese Lunar Exploration Program has kept pace with—and even exceeded—certain aspects of NASA’s Artemis program over the past several years. The U.S. is certainly feeling the pressure.

The Perseids — one of the strongest meteor showers of the year in the Northern Hemisphere — will peak on the night of Aug. 12-13. This meteor shower typically brings up to 75 “shooting stars” per hour, but this year, there’s a big problem: a nearly full moon.

Meteor showers are always best seen in dark, moonless skies. However, August’s full Sturgeon Moon rises on Saturday, Aug. 9. The moon always rises later each day as it orbits Earth, but in the summer, there’s less of a difference. By Tuesday, Aug. 12, it will rise at almost the same time as it begins to get dark, making the window for a moonless night sky extremely short.

Topline

Venus and Jupiter will dramatically pass each other in the night sky on the same day that the annual Perseid meteor shower peaks. The conjunction between the two brightest planets will take place in the east in the pre-dawn sky, with the Perseids due to peak overnight on Aug. 12/13.

Key Facts

Planetary Conjunction: Where And When To Look

To catch the planetary conjunction, start early — about an hour before sunrise on Tuesday, Aug. 12 — and look to the east-northeast horizon for the close encounter between Venus and Jupiter. Find a location with an unobstructed eastern horizon.

Perseid Meteor Shower 2025

Later, on Aug. 12, after sunset, turn your gaze to the northeast once again for the constellation Perseus, the radiant point of the Perseids, which will be rising as darkness falls. Give your eyes 20 minutes to adjust to the dark and avoid looking at a phone, whose bright white light will instantly kill your night vision. While the moonlight may obscure fainter meteors, there will likely be occasional bright “shooting stars.” Come back after dark on Friday, Aug. 15, when the moon will rise much later, with the darker skies potentially showing lingering Perseid meteors.

Six-Planet Parade

Although the conjunction and the Perseids will get the headlines, there’s also a “planet parade” going on, visible one hour before sunrise. As you look for Venus and Jupiter, you may notice Mercury rising into the pre-dawn sky below. Also, notice Saturn in the southern sky. Uranus and Neptune are also in the sky, but it’s not possible to see them with the naked eye.

Although it’s visible right now, this parade — mistakenly called a planetary alignment by many — will be best seen between Sunday, Aug. 17, and Wednesday, Aug. 20, when a waning crescent moon moves past them each morning, getting slimmer each day. The highlight will be on Tuesday, Aug. 20, when a 9% crescent moon will be positioned very close to Venus.

Further Reading

ForbesSee The Perseid Meteor Shower Now Before It Peaks, Experts SayBy Jamie CarterForbesStrange New Object Found In Solar System ‘Dancing’ With NeptuneBy Jamie CarterForbesHow To Easily Find The ‘Northern Cross’ In The Sky This WeekendBy Jamie Carter

Human eyes are masterpieces of biological engineering, but once damaged, they cannot rebuild themselves. Golden apple snails, by contrast, routinely replace an entire camera-type eye within a month.

In a new study, molecular and cellular biologist Alice Accorsi and colleagues at the University of California, Davis, show that snail and human eyes share both anatomical architecture and many of the genes that guide development.

By pairing those insights with new CRISPR-Cas9 genome-editing tools, the team has created a tractable system for probing the genetic logic of whole-eye regeneration. This knowledge could ultimately inform therapies for people who lose vision through injury or disease.

Invasion becomes inspiration

Pomacea canaliculata, native to South America but now invasive across the tropics, breeds fast, thrives in captivity, and possesses large, lens-bearing eyes mounted on stalks.

“Apple snails are resilient, their generation time is very short, and they have a lot of babies,” Accorsi said.

Those practical advantages overcome many of the hurdles that have deterred previous attempts to use gastropods in regenerative biology.

“When I started reading about this, I was asking myself, why isn’t anybody already using snails to study regeneration? I think it’s because we just hadn’t found the perfect snail to study – until now,” she explained.

Unlike planarians, which can regrow primordial light-sensing spots, or salamanders, which regenerate a functional retina but not an entire globe, the apple snail rebuilds every element of a complex camera-type eye. These include the transparent cornea, refractive lens, layered retina, and optic nerve.

That layout mirrors the vertebrate eye and sets the stage for meaningful cross-species comparisons.

Snail eyes mirror ours

Accorsi’s group combined high-resolution histology with transcriptome sequencing to map the similarities.

“We did a lot of work to show that many genes that participate in human eye development are also present in the snail,” she noted.

Canonical regulators such as the pax6, sox2, otx, and six gene families appear in the mollusc’s genome and activate during eye formation. Once regeneration is complete, “the morphology and gene expression of the new eye is pretty much identical to the original one.”

From the moment an eye stalk is amputated, the snail initiates replacement through coordinated phases. Wound closure seals the cut within 24 hours. Proliferating undifferentiated cells then invade the site, and by about day 15 the nascent organ shows recognizable lens fibers, retinal layers, and a reconnecting optic nerve.

Although fully formed, the tissue continues to mature for several more weeks. RNA profiling captured this transition: roughly 9,000 genes change expression early, but 1,175 remain different after 28 days, suggesting late-stage remodeling.

Editing snail genes for answers

To test gene function directly, the researchers established CRISPR-Cas9 mutagenesis in apple snail embryos.

“The idea is that we mutate specific genes and then see what effect it has on the animal,” Accorsi said.

As proof of principle, they knocked out pax6. Hatchlings carrying two inactive copies lacked eyes altogether. This demonstrates that, as in vertebrates and flies, pax6 is indispensable for initial eye assembly in snails.

The lab can now deploy the same strategy to explore whether pax6 or other regulators are also critical during regrowth in adults.

Rebuilding eyes from scratch

Imaging shows that regeneration begins with a burst of cell migration and proliferation near the stump. Accorsi hypothesizes that some of those cells originate from a reserve of stem-like cells at the base of the eye stalk. Others may derive from the surrounding epidermis or even blood-borne hemocytes.

Unraveling their lineage, and what signals tell them to adopt lens versus retina fates, will be a next challenge. With CRISPR, the team can tag cells or block signals to observe how regeneration stalls or progresses.

Behavioral tests are also on the agenda. “We still don’t have conclusive evidence that they can see images, but anatomically, they have all the components that are needed to form an image,” Accorsi said.

Designing assays that reveal light-guided behavior – perhaps tracking movement toward shaded refuges – will confirm functional recovery. These tests will also set benchmarks for comparing successful and failed genetic manipulations.

From snails to human sight

Humans carry the same developmental genes, but in mammals they’re mostly silenced after embryogenesis ends. Identifying reactivation signals may reveal molecular switches to coax human eye tissues into self-repair.

“If we find a set of genes that are important for eye regeneration, and these genes are also present in vertebrates, in theory we could activate them to enable eye regeneration in humans,” Accorsi remarked.

That long-term vision will require bridging vast evolutionary and physiological gaps, yet the new model provides a rare example of full organ restoration in a complex eye.

Because the apple snail’s genetics, life cycle, and regenerative capacity are now accessible, it offers a powerful research model. It promises to illuminate not only ophthalmology but also broader questions of stem-cell plasticity, immune modulation, and scar-free healing.

A pest becomes a pioneer

Accorsi’s project also illustrates how curiosity-driven exploration can expand the experimental repertoire of biomedicine.

A problem that seems intractable in standard lab rodents may yield to an unexpected organism with the right combination of traits.

As Accorsi’s lab continues to map the genetic circuitry of eye regrowth – and perhaps inspire other groups to adopt the apple snail – what began as an invasive pest could become a luminous guide to restoring sight.

The study is published in the journal Nature Communications.

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Mars is a world marked by dramatic landscapes and few regions showcase this better than Acheron Fossae, a spectacular network of deep cracks and valleys that slice through the red planet’s surface like ancient scars. Recent images from the European Space Agency’s Mars Express spacecraft reveal the western edge of this fascinating geological formation, offering new insights into Mars’s violent past and changing climate.

Image of Mars captured by the Hubble Space Telescope between April 27 and May 6, 1999, when Mars was 87 million kilometres from Earth (Credit : NASA/ESA)

Acheron Fossae is an extensive system of deep, fault like cracks (known as fossae), with alternating chunks of raised and lowered ground, a pattern geologists call “horst and graben.” Picture a broken chocolate bar where some pieces have been pushed up while others have dropped down, creating a jagged landscape of ridges and valleys that can be hundreds of kilometers long and several kilometers deep.

These features weren’t created overnight. Likely dating back over 3.7 billion years to when Mars was most geologically active, such a pattern was created as hot material rose upwards beneath the martian crust. As molten rock pushed upward from deep within Mars, it stretched and cracked the planet’s surface creating the deep valleys we see today.

Image of Acheron Fossae in Tharsis region on Mars (Credit : NASA)

What makes Acheron Fossae particularly intriguing isn’t just how it formed, but how it continues to change. The valley floors are relatively smooth, marked by gently weaving lines reminiscent of a flowing river. Rather than water, these valleys have been filled by a slow, viscous flow of ice rich rock, a lot like the rock glaciers we see here on Earth.

These Martian rock glaciers act like geological time capsules, preserving evidence of the Martian climatic history. Rock glaciers are very sensitive to changes in climate, and so act as good markers for how a planet’s environment has changed over time. Here, they indicate that this region of Mars has experienced alternating periods of cool and warm, freeze and thaw.

The key to understanding these climate swings lies in Mars’s unstable tilt. Unlike Earth, which maintains a relatively steady tilt thanks to the Moon’s stabilising influence, Mars wobbles dramatically over time. Mars’s tilt has swung between 15 and 45 degrees in the last 10 million years, while Earth’s has varied between 22 and 24.5 degrees.

These variations, known as the Milankovitch cycles, create alternating ice ages and warm periods on Mars. During extreme tilts, ice can creep near to the planet’s equator before shrinking back to its poles during warmer periods.

The images also reveal how erosion has transformed the landscape over millions of years. To the right of the main fossae, the deep cracks transition into flat, dark lowland plains, with a strip of raised mounds and rocky hills in between. These are the remains of what was once a continuous rock layer that has been slowly worn away by flows of ice and rock over time, leaving behind rounded hills called knobs and flat topped plateaus called mesas.

This erosion process creates a distinctive transition visible in the topographical data, from the deep red and yellow tones of higher ground gradually melting into light and darker blues indicating lower elevations. It’s like watching a mountain range slowly dissolve into a plain over geological time.

Illustration of ESA’s Mars Express spacecraft (Credit : NASA/JPL)

These remarkable insights come courtesy of ESA’s Mars Express spacecraft, which has been capturing and exploring Mars’s landscapes since 2003. Using its High Resolution Stereo Camera, the orbiter has mapped the planet’s surface in unprecedented detail, colour, and three dimensions for over two decades.

As we continue studying Mars, features like Acheron Fossae serve as natural laboratories for understanding planetary geology and climate evolution. They remind us that planets are dynamic systems, constantly changing over geological time scales. For future Mars missions, both robotic and human, understanding these processes will be crucial for navigation, resource utilisation, and safe exploration of our planetary neighbour.

Source : When Martian Ground Falls Apart