Category: 7. Science

The ambitious mission to retrieve samples from asteroid Bennu and return them to Earth is paying off.

Just as scientists had hoped, the asteroid is revealing details about the early days in our Solar System. More than just a simple space rock, Bennu contains not only material from the Solar System, but material from beyond our system.

Bennu follows an orbit that brings it close to Earth every six years. That means it’s classified as a near-Earth asteroid (NEA) and a potentially hazardous object (PHO).

Related: Breakthrough Discovery: Asteroid Fragments Reveal Ingredients For Life

When NASA was planning the OSIRIS-REx mission that visited Bennu and returned the sample, it was the result of a vigorous scientific and engineering evaluation of candidate asteroids. Since Bennu is both close to Earth and a primitive carbonaceous asteroid, NASA settled on it as the target.

The asteroid is both large enough to orbit and collect a sample from, and spectroscopic analysis of its surface showed it contained things scientists wanted to study, like carbon-rich materials and hydrated minerals.

Now, nearly nine years after OSIRIS-Rex was launched, samples are being studied in laboratories around the world.

Three newly-published papers show that Bennu is formed from materials both within and outside of our Solar System. They also show how some of the asteroid’s material has been altered by exposure to space weather and interactions with water.

Jessica Barnes, associate professor at the University of Arizona’s Lunar and Planetary Laboratory is a co-lead author on one of the publications.

“This is work you just can’t do with telescopes,” Barnes said in a press release.

“It’s super exciting that we’re finally able to say these things about an asteroid that we’ve been dreaming of going to for so long and eventually brought back samples from.”

Bennu’s parent body is part of the Polana family of asteroids. A history of collisions created Bennu, and its original parent contained material from our Solar System and beyond. As a result, so does Bennu, with material from close to the Sun, from a great distance from the Sun, and even from other stars.

The parent body was created out of this mixture of material more than 4 billion years ago, as the Solar System itself came into being. The paper The variety and origin of materials accreted by Bennu’s parent asteroid explains this in detail.

“Bennu’s parent asteroid may have formed in the outer parts of the solar system, possibly beyond the giant planets, Jupiter and Saturn,” Barnes said.

“We think this parent body was struck by an incoming asteroid and smashed apart. Then the fragments re-assembled and this might have repeated several times.”

“The first bodies to form in the Solar System acquired their materials from stars, the presolar molecular cloud and the protoplanetary disk,” the authors write.

“Asteroids that have not undergone planetary differentiation retain evidence of these primary accreted materials.”

The samples from Bennu show that much of the surface material has been altered by hydrothermal interactions that have changed their isotopic compositions, chemistry, and bulk mineralogy. But none of the samples have been altered.

“We show that some primary accreted materials escaped the extensive aqueous alteration that occurred on the parent asteroid, including presolar grains from ancient stars, organic matter from the outer Solar System or molecular cloud, refractory solids that formed close to the Sun, and dust enriched in neutron-rich Ti isotopes,” the paper states.

Perhaps the most interesting result from these samples is the abundance of material from outside our Solar System. This ancient stardust predates the Solar System, and is identified by its isotopic composition, which sets it apart from our Solar System. So Bennu’s recipe is more complex than thought.

“Those are pieces of stardust from other stars that are long dead, and these pieces were incorporated into the cloud of gas and dust from which our Solar System formed,” Barnes said.

“In addition, we found organic material that’s highly anomalous in their isotopes and that was probably formed in interstellar space, and we have solids that formed closer to the Sun, and for the first time, we show that all these materials are present in Bennu.”

While some of Bennu’s material is unaltered by space weathering, chemistry, and even collisions, much of it has been altered. The second paper, Mineralogical evidence for hydrothermal alteration of Bennu samples, shows that most of Bennu’s material has been altered by hydrothermal processes.

“The mineralogical evidence indicates alteration of accreted minerals by a fluid that evolved with time, leading to etching, dissolution, and reprecipitation,” the authors write.

“We think that Bennu’s parent asteroid accreted a lot of icy material from the outer Solar System, which melted over time,” said Tom Zega, director of the Kuiper-Arizona Laboratory who co-led the study.

Remnant heat from Bennu’s formation, or heat from subsequent impacts, could’ve melted ice in the asteroid. The resulting water could’ve interacted with silicate minerals, creating the hydrothermal reactions that changed the Bennu samples.

“Now you have a liquid in contact with a solid and heat – everything you need to start doing chemistry,” Zega said. “The water reacted with the minerals and formed what we see today: samples in which 80% of minerals contain water in their interior, created billions of years ago when the Solar System was still forming.”

The third paper, Space weathering effects in Bennu asteroid samples, shows how micrometeorite impacts have altered Bennu during its long life.

“Space weathering processes, dominated by micrometeoroid impacts and solar irradiation, modify the mineralogy and chemistry of exposed surfaces,” the authors explain.

“Comparison of Bennu samples with those collected from the asteroids Ryugu and Itokawa suggest that micrometeoroid impacts might play a more active and rapid role in the space weathering of asteroidal surfaces than was initially suggested, particularly for carbonaceous bodies.”

Some of the particles in the sample bear the imprints of micrometeoroid impacts. These impacts, along with the solar wind, are considered space weathering. With no atmosphere to prevent these tiny impacts, the surface of Bennu has been constantly bombarded. The study shows that space weathering is happening a lot faster than previously thought.

“Melt deposits occur in <0.5% of Itokawa samples, 2% of Ryugu particles and 20% of Bennu particles (although analyses of additional material may improve these statistics),” the paper states.

“Together, these results suggest that micrometeoroid impacts play a more important role in the space weathering of asteroidal surfaces than was suggested from early observations of asteroidal returned samples.”

Most asteroid fragments that reach Earth are burned up as they plunge through the atmosphere. But Earth’s atmosphere is unrelenting, and even meteorites that survive the plunge are exposed to it, and can be altered quickly. That’s why asteroid sample return missions are so important to understanding the Solar System.

“Those that do make it to the ground can react with Earth’s atmosphere, particularly if the meteorite is not recovered quickly after it falls,” Zega said, “which is why sample return missions such as OSIRIS-REx are critical.”

This article was originally published by Universe Today. Read the original article.

You’ve probably had it happen to you. You’re riding along, not a care in the world, when suddenly your handlebars twitch, and in an instant you’re scrambling to keep yourself from hitting the deck.

Maybe you’ve hit something in the road, maybe another cyclist – or, heaven forbid, a motorist – has clipped your handlebars. However it happened, it’s a horrible feeling. Sometimes you manage to keep the bike upright; other times you aren’t so fortunate.

For any given incident, there are many variables that help decide whether you fall or not – how much your handlebars moved, how much force was involved, how fast you were riding, how quickly you reacted, and so on. And yet, what if there was a way to quantify whether, for a given incident, you’re likely to fall or not? Information like that could help us to understand cycling crashes a little better and, just maybe, help reduce the number of crashes in the future and make cycling a little bit safer overall.

That’s the goal of a new piece of research out of the Netherlands, more specifically from researchers out of Delft University of Technology and Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. As per the title of their new paper, published in the journal Accident Analysis & Prevention, the researchers set out to create a mathematical model that would predict the “maximum allowable handlebar disturbance from which a cyclist can recover balance.”

The way they went about their research is quite fascinating (and more than a little anxiety-inducing).

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Scientists may have discovered a reaction that provides the “missing link” to help explain how early life formed on Earth about 4 billion years ago.

All living things contain ribonucleic acid, otherwise known as RNA, a core molecule that serves crucial functions in organisms like decoding genetic information and helping build proteins from simpler amino acids.

However, the process of RNA attaching to amino acids, RNA aminoacylation, has never been experimentally observed in conditions matching the early Earth.

In a study published Wednesday in Nature, a team of University College London researchers describes an experiment that allowed them to link amino acids to RNA in water in a neutral PH environment reminiscent of conditions around the time life was thought to have formed on Earth.

By attaching amino acids to a sulphur-bearing chemical group called a thioester, another compound found on the early Earth, the scientists observed the molecules react spontaneously and selectively with RNA.

The natural structure of the RNA even helped guide the amino acids to the end of the RNA strand, the location where they would need to be for eventual protein synthesis.

“RNA molecules communicate information between themselves in a highly predictable and extremely effective way, but RNAs do not inherently communicate with the amino acids that they need to control in protein synthesis,” Professor Matthew Powner, a senior author of the study, told BBC Science Focus. “So how and why these two molecules first came to be linked has been an open and unresolved question for decades.”

The researchers said their work helped bridge two different theories for the origin of life on Earth, known as “RNA world” and “thioester world,” each named for the compound adherents argued first set off life-forming processes.

“What we found, which is kind of cool, is that if you put them both together, they’re more than the sum of their parts,” Powner said in a separate interview with 404 Media. “Both aspects—RNA world and thioester world—might be right and they’re not mutually exclusive. They can both work together to provide different aspects of things that are essential to building a cell.”

Previous attempts to recreate this reaction were unsuccessful, sometimes with amino acids reacting with each other rather than RNA, and other times with unstable conditions in water, causing the process to break down.

Future experiments could build on the basic reactions seen in this one, with researchers aiming to someday create self-replicating structures.

“Imagine the day that chemists might take simple, small molecules, consisting of carbon, nitrogen, hydrogen, oxygen, and sulphur atoms, and from these LEGO pieces form molecules capable of self-replication,” lead author Dr. Jyoti Singh said in a news release. “This would be a monumental step towards solving the question of life’s origin.”

“Our study brings us closer to that goal by demonstrating how two primordial chemical LEGO pieces (activated amino acids and RNA) could have built peptides, short chains of amino acids that are essential to life,” she added.

The UCL team believes the reaction they demonstrated could’ve taken place in early lakes and nutrient-rich pools.

Observers said the recent breakthrough may someday be seen as a fundamental new chapter in early-life biology.

“This team of researchers has not only achieved peptide synthesis with the participation of RNA molecules, in a manner analogous to but much simpler than that of living cells, but they have also managed to do so under neutral aqueous conditions and using a form of energy activation that is highly plausible for the first steps of life on Earth,” Kepa Ruiz Mirazo, a biophysicist and philosopher at the University of the Basque Country, told El País English, arguing the researchers’ findings could be “the most significant in recent times” in the field.

“There are still many pieces to be solved in the immense puzzle of the origin of life on our planet, but science has found a very important place to fit.”

The lab is contributing to a broader initiative aimed at studying the diversity of oak gall wasps and their parasites.

Researchers, including faculty from Binghamton University, State University of New York, have discovered two parasitic wasp species in the United States that were previously unknown to science.

While oak gall wasps and the creatures that prey on them may lack the beauty of butterflies, they are increasingly drawing the attention of both scientists and nature enthusiasts.

These insects, measuring just 1 to 8 millimeters in length, create the tumor-like plant growths known as “galls.” Small as a pinhead or large as an apple, galls can take striking shapes, with some resembling sea urchins or saucers, explained Binghamton University Associate Professor of Biological Sciences Kirsten Prior, who also co-leads Binghamton’s Natural Global Environmental Change Center.

If these wasps symbolize anything, it is the richness of biodiversity. North America is home to roughly 90 species of oak trees, which in turn host about 800 species of oak gall wasps. Parasitic wasps exploit these galls by laying their eggs inside, eventually consuming the oak gall wasp within.

But how many species of parasitoid wasps are out there? That’s a question that scientists — both academic researchers traveling the globe and everyday citizens in their own backyard — are working to answer.

A recent article published in the Journal of Hymenoptera Research gives insight into a previously unknown level of species diversity. In addition to Prior, co-authors include current graduate student Kathy Fridrich and former graduate student Dylan G. Jones, as well as Guerin Brown, Corey Lewis, Christian Weinrich, MaKella Steffensen, and Andrew Forbes of the University of Iowa, and Elijah Goodwin of the Stone Barns Center for Food and Agriculture in Tarrytown, N.Y.

This discovery is part of a larger research effort. In 2024, the National Science Foundation awarded a $305,209 grant to Binghamton University for research into the diversity of oak gall wasps and parasitoids throughout North America. The project is a collaboration between Prior, Forbes at the University of Iowa, Glen Hood at Wayne State University, and Adam Kranz, one of the creators behind the website Gallformers.org, which helps people learn about and identify galls on North American plants.

The NSF grant investigates a core question: How do gall-forming insects escape diverse and evolving clades of parasitic wasps — and how do parasites catch up? To answer that question, researchers are collecting oak gall wasps around North America and using genetic sequencing to determine which parasitic wasps emerge from the galls. Among them are Fridrich and fellow Binghamton graduate student Zachary Prete, who spent the summer on a gall- and parasitoid-collection trip from New York to Florida.

“We are interested in how oak gall characteristics act as defenses against parasites and affect the evolutionary trajectories of both oak gall wasps and the parasites they host. The scale of this study will make it the most extensive cophylogenetic study of its kind,” Prior said. “Only when we have a large, concerted effort to search for biodiversity can we uncover surprises — like new or introduced species.”

Discovering unknown species

Over the past several years, researchers with Prior’s lab traveled the West Coast from California to British Columbia, collecting approximately 25 oak gall wasp species and rearing tens of thousands of parasitic wasps, which were ultimately identified as more than 100 different species.

Some of the parasitoids, reared from oak gall wasp species from several locations, turned out to be the European species Bootanomyia dorsalis in the wasp family Megastigmidae. Researchers at the University of Iowa identified a similar wasp from collections they made in New York state.

“Finding this putative European species on the two coasts of North America inspired our group to confirm this parasitic species’ identity and whether it was, in fact, an introduced parasite from Europe,” Prior explained.

Parasitic wasps are small and challenging to identify based on features alone. Because of this, researchers use genetic tools to confirm a species’ identity, sequencing “the universal barcoding gene,” Cytochrome Oxidase Subunit I (mtCOI), and comparing their results to reference libraries. What they discovered is that the European species B. dorsalis came in two separate varieties, or clades: the New York samples were related to species in Portugal, Iran and Italy, while the Pacific coast wasps were related to those from Spain, Hungary, and Iran.

“The sequences from two clades were different enough from each other that they could be considered different species. This suggests that B. dorsalis was introduced at least twice, and that the New York and West Coast introductions were separate,” Prior said.

And while they were found in at least four different oak gall wasp species from Oregon to British Columbia, all the West Coast B. dorsalis wasps were genetically identical, which means that their introduction was small and localized. The East Coast wasps had slightly more genetic diversity, which could indicate that there was less of a population bottleneck, or that the species was introduced more than once.

How did the European species get here? One possibility is that non-native oak species were intentionally introduced to North America. English oak, or Quercus robur, was widely planted for wood since the 17th century, and is found in British Columbia as well as several northeastern states and provinces. Turkey oak, Q. cerris, is an ornamental tree now found along the East Coast — including a spot near where B. dorsalis was discovered in New York.

There are other possibilities. Adult parasitic wasps can live for 27 days, so they could have hitchhiked on a plane, Prior said.

Researchers don’t yet know if these introduced species pose a hazard to native North American species. Other introduced parasite species are known to impact populations of native insects, she acknowledged.

“We did find that they can parasitize multiple oak gall wasp species and that they can spread, given that we know that the population in the west likely spread across regions and host species from a localized small introduction,” Prior said. “They could be affecting populations of native oak gall wasp species or other native parasites of oak gall wasps.”

Naturalists and citizen scientists play an important role in biodiversity research, such as the project that led to the discovery of the two B. dorsalis clades. Gall Week, a project hosted on the platform iNaturalist, encourages citizen scientists to collect galls during two seasons, and specimens from the NSF-funded study will be posted on the naturalist site Gallformers.org. Binghamton University ecology classes have participated in Gall Week, and also logged galls during the University’s annual Ecoblitz biodiversity event.

Biodiversity is a key component to healthy and functioning ecosystems — and one that is increasingly under threat due to global change.

“Parasitic wasps are likely the most diverse group of animals on the planet and are extremely important in ecological systems, acting as biological control agents to keep insects in check, including those that are crop or forest pests,” Prior explained.

Reference: “Discovery of two Palearctic Bootanomyia Girault (Hymenoptera, Megastigmidae) parasitic wasp species introduced to North America” by Guerin E. Brown, Corey J. Lewis, Kathy Fridrich, Dylan G. Jones, Elijah A. Goodwin, Christian L. Weinrich, MaKella J. Steffensen, Kirsten M. Prior and Andrew A. Forbes, 2 July 2025, Journal of Hymenoptera Research.
DOI: 10.3897/jhr.98.152867

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Swiss researchers have designed a plant-inspired molecule that mimics photosynthesis and can hold four electric charges when exposed to light.

This ability to store multiple charges could be the key to creating solar fuels such as hydrogen, methanol, or synthetic petrol — fuels that would be carbon-neutral because they release only as much CO₂ as was used to produce them.

Harnessing Plant-Inspired Solar Power

Plants capture sunlight and use it to transform carbon dioxide into sugars that store energy. This process, known as photosynthesis, underpins nearly all life on Earth. The sugars produced by plants serve as fuel for animals and humans, who release the stored energy by breaking them down. That process returns carbon dioxide to the atmosphere, completing the natural cycle.

Scientists hope to use this same principle as a guide for developing clean fuels. By copying the way plants convert light, researchers aim to generate energy-rich compounds directly from sunlight. These solar fuels include hydrogen, methanol, and synthetic petrol. When burned, they would release only the same amount of carbon dioxide that was originally required to create them. In effect, the entire process would be carbon-neutral.

A Molecule That Stores Four Charges

In Nature Chemistry, Professor Oliver Wenger and doctoral student Mathis Brändlin describe an important advance toward this goal of artificial photosynthesis. They have engineered a specially designed molecule that, when exposed to light, can hold four charges at the same time – two positive and two negative.

Being able to temporarily store several charges is a crucial step in turning sunlight into usable chemical energy. Those charges can then be applied to trigger reactions, such as splitting water into hydrogen and oxygen.

The molecule itself is built from five linked components, each with a distinct role. On one end, two parts release electrons and in doing so become positively charged. At the opposite end, two other parts absorb those electrons and turn negatively charged. At the center, the researchers placed a light-sensitive unit that captures solar energy and initiates the electron transfer.

Two Flashes of Light, Four Charges

In order to generate the four charges, the researchers took a stepwise approach using two flashes of light. The first flash of light hits the molecule and triggers a reaction in which a positive and a negative charge are generated. These charges travel outward to the opposite ends of the molecule. With the second flash of light, the same reaction occurs again, so that the molecule then contains two positive and two negative charges.

Works Even in Dim Light

“This stepwise excitation makes it possible to use significantly dimmer light. As a result, we are already moving close to the intensity of sunlight,” explains Brändlin. Earlier research required extremely strong laser light, which was a far cry from the vision of artificial photosynthesis. “In addition, the charges in the molecule remain stable long enough to be used for further chemical reactions.”

That being said, the new molecule has not yet created a functioning artificial photosynthesis system. “But we have identified and implemented an important piece of the puzzle,” says Oliver Wenger. The new findings from the study help to improve our understanding of the electron transfers that are central to artificial photosynthesis. “We hope that this will help us contribute to new prospects for a sustainable energy future,” says Wenger.

Reference: “Photoinduced double charge accumulation in a molecular compound” by Mathis Brändlin, Björn Pfund and Oliver S. Wenger, 25 August 2025, Nature Chemistry.
DOI: 10.1038/s41557-025-01912-x

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The Launch Vehicle Stage Adapter (LVSA) seen in March rolling from the Vehicle Assembly Building at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The adapter will be placed onto the Space Launch System Core Booster for Artemis II, NASA’s first crewed moon mission. On Wednesday, NASA put out a public ask seeking interested volunteers to help track its space mission. File Photo by Joe Marino/UPI | License Photo

Aug. 27 (UPI) — NASA said it’s seeking volunteers to help track its Artemis II Orion spacecraft as the crewed mission travels to the moon and back.

“By offering this opportunity to the broader aerospace community, we can identify available tracking capabilities outside the government,” Kevin Coggins, NASA’s deputy associate administrator for SCaN at NASA headquarters in Washington, said in a statement.

NASA will send astronauts to explore the moon via Artemis for scientific discovery, economic benefits and ultimately to build the foundation for the first crewed missions to Mars, according to the nation’s space agency.

The Artemis II test flight will be a space launch of the agency’s Space Launch System rocket and Orion spacecraft targeted for no later than April 2026.

It will send NASA astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover and Christina Koch on an approximately 10-day mission around the moon along with their colleague from the Canadian Space Agency, astronaut Jeremy Hansen.

On Wednesday, Coggins added that data NASA receives will help “inform our transition to a commercial-first approach, ultimately strengthening the infrastructure needed to support Artemis missions and our long-term moon to Mars objectives.”

NASA officials added that the chance to further expand its collaboration with the public in this way builds on a past request by NASA’s Space Communication and Navigation Program.

According to NASA, in 2022 about 10 volunteers successfully tracked an uncrewed Orion spacecraft on its orbital journey thousands of miles beyond the moon and then back to home to Earth.

The public request for volunteers to aid in the Artemis mission arrived after NASA this month unveiled its last piece of hardware for the Artemis II Orion mission.

Meanwhile, volunteer respondents are due by 5 p.m. EDT on Monday, Oct. 27.

Satellites confirm that mid-1990s climate projections of sea-level rise were largely accurate, though ice melt was underestimated.

For more than three decades, satellites have tracked global sea-level change, and a recent analysis shows that projections made in the mid-1990s were strikingly accurate. The findings, published in Earth’s Future, an open-access journal of the American Geophysical Union, come from two researchers at Tulane University.

“The ultimate test of climate projections is to compare them with what has played out since they were made, but this requires patience – it takes decades of observations,” said lead author Torbjörn Törnqvist, Vokes Geology Professor in the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences.

“We were quite amazed how good those early projections were, especially when you think about how crude the models were back then, compared to what is available now,” Törnqvist said. “For anyone who questions the role of humans in changing our climate, here is some of the best proof that we have understood for decades what is really happening, and that we can make credible projections.”

Co-author Sönke Dangendorf, David and Jane Flowerree Associate Professor in the Department of River-Coastal Science and Engineering, added that while the accuracy of those earlier models is encouraging, the priority today is to refine global data into localized forecasts that can guide planning in vulnerable regions such as south Louisiana.

Regional Variability in Sea-Level Rise

“Sea level doesn’t rise uniformly – it varies widely. Our recent study of this regional variability and the processes behind it relies heavily on data from NASA’s satellite missions and NOAA’s ocean monitoring programs,” he said. “Continuing these efforts is more important than ever, and essential for informed decision-making to benefit the people living along the coast.”

A new era of monitoring global sea-level change took off when satellites were launched in the early 1990s to measure the height of the ocean surface. This showed that the rate of global sea-level rise since that time has averaged about one eighth of an inch per year. Only more recently, it became possible to detect that the rate of global sea-level rise is accelerating.

When NASA researchers demonstrated in October 2024 that the rate has doubled during this 30-year period, the time was right to compare this finding with projections that were made during the mid-1990s, independent of the satellite measurements.

Comparing Projections and Reality

In 1996, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change published an assessment report soon after the satellite-based sea-level measurements had started. It projected that the most likely amount of global sea-level rise over the next 30 years would be almost 8 cm (three inches), remarkably close to the 9 cm that has occurred. But it also underestimated the role of melting ice sheets by more than 2 cm (about one inch).

At the time, little was known about the role of warming ocean waters and how that could destabilize the marine sectors of the Antarctic Ice Sheet from below. Ice flow from the Greenland Ice Sheet into the ocean has also been faster than foreseen.

The past difficulties of predicting the behavior of ice sheets also contain a message for the future. Current projections of future sea-level rise consider the possibility, albeit uncertain and of low likelihood, of catastrophic ice-sheet collapse before the end of this century. Low-lying coastal regions in the United States would be particularly affected if such a collapse occurs in Antarctica.

Reference: “Evaluating IPCC Projections of Global Sea-Level Change From the Pre-Satellite Era” by Torbjörn E. Törnqvist, Clinton P. Conrad, Sönke Dangendorf and Benjamin D. Hamlington, 22 August 2025, Earth’s Future.
DOI: 10.1029/2025EF006533

The paper was co-authored by colleagues from the University of Oslo and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory at Caltech.

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