Category: 7. Science

A “weird”, heavily armoured dinosaur just became stranger than palaeontologists even realised, following the discovery of new fossils.

The Spicomellus, a 165-million-year-old type of armoured dinosaur famous for its tail weapon, was covered in shields and huge spikes, with some even fused to its skeleton, scientists have discovered.

“We’ve got this tail weapon, we’ve this shield over its pelvis, and we’ve all these crazy spikes,” Professor Susannah Maidment, a palaeontologist at the Natural History Museum, told Sky News.

“None of those features would we have predicted to see in the earliest Ankylosaur.”

She co-led the research, which is now published in the science journal Nature.

The new fossils, discovered in the Moroccan Atlas mountain town of Boulemane, revealed spikes of up to one metre long around the dinosaur’s head, along with plates protecting its throat.

On every rib, it had foot-long spikes fused to its skeleton, leading to questions over how its muscles were formed along its ribcage.

Its spiked ribs are a protective feature not seen in any other vertebrate, living or extinct, and the dinosaur’s distinctive armour may have been used to attract mates, as well as for defence.

“Seeing and studying the Spicomellus fossils for the first time was spine-tingling,” said the project’s co-lead, Professor Richard Butler of the University of Birmingham.

“We just couldn’t believe how weird it was and how unlike any other dinosaur, or indeed any other animal we know of alive or extinct.

“It turns much of what we thought we knew about ankylosaurs and their evolution on its head and demonstrates just how much there still is to learn about dinosaurs”.

It is an early member of the ankylosaur family and appears to have had a tail weapon around 35 million years earlier than scientists had previously realised.

“We have these really kind of tantalising fragments of ankylosaurs in the Middle Jurassic [period] already,” said Professor Maidment.

“We knew that they were around, we just have a very poor fossil record from that time period.”

This is the first “really good” skeleton of an ankylosaur from that time, according to Professor Maidment.

“The amazing thing about it is that it is absolutely covered in these incredibly elaborate spikes all over its body.”

Professor Maidment was part of the team that excavated the dinosaur, working with the University of Fez in Morocco.

When she got to the farmer’s house, who had spotted the fossils initially during flash flooding, she thought: “This is the highlight of my career. I’m never going to see anything as crazy as this ever again.”

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The farmer had been pulling out fossils when they appeared, worried that more flooding would wash them away again, and then saving them in his house for the palaeontologists.

“We wouldn’t have any fossils at all if it wasn’t for him,” said Professor Maidment.

The farmer took her team to the hillside bank where he’d found the fossils, and they began digging.

Soon, they found the bone layer and were able to excavate even more of the specimen themselves.

This is the only ankylosaur known in Africa, and Professor Maidment says palaeontologists have “hardly scratched the surface” of the continent.

Because it is a fairly new region to dig in, her team are battling against black market fossil smugglers, excavating and selling precious dinosaur bones without licenses all over the world.

“The last time I went back to the site,” she said, “there were huge holes everywhere”, where the illegal diggers had been.

“They had dug huge holes, and we’re seeing material pop up on the commercial market.”

Part of the Natural History Museum’s plan to find more specimens like the Spicomellus is to work with the local community to build protections for the areas and put an end to illegal fossil smuggling.

Scientists in China have created rainbow, glow-in-the-dark succulents by injecting colorful “afterglow” particles into the leaves that absorb, and then gradually release, light.

The luminescent succulents shone for up to two hours, outperforming similar, material-engineered plants, according to a new study. The invention paves the way for sustainable, plant-based lighting to illuminate outdoor and indoor spaces, researchers said.

NASA scientists have devised a new way to use planets that cross, or “transit,” the face of their parent stars to investigate stellar “spottiness.” The new technique, called the “StarryStarryProcess,” could also be used to discover more about the atmospheres of planets.

The StarryStarryProcess builds upon the transit method that has been employed by NASA’s TESS (Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite) and now-retired Kepler space telescope missions to detect exoplanets. It could be employed by astronomers to assess data from these missions and from NASA’s forthcoming Pandora exoplanet-observing satellite.

People have long been intrigued by the possibility of life beyond Earth and how it might endure in extraterrestrial environments. There is no confirmed evidence of extraterrestrial life, not even on the planetary neighbor Mars. However, an international project led by KAUST’s Alexandre Rosado demonstrates how a particular type of black fungus, known to tolerate highly acidic conditions on Earth, could survive and even thrive in Mars-like environments [1].

“With the current advancement of space missions to Mars, both orbital and robotic, we are closer than ever to answering whether there was, or is, biological activity on the Red Planet,” says Alef Santos, who worked on the project as a visiting Ph.D. student in Rosado’s lab, together with Junia Schultz and co-workers. “Understanding the limits of life in extreme environments on Earth is a crucial step toward interpreting biosignatures beyond our planet. Extremophilic microorganisms that survive and thrive in hostile environments offer valuable natural models for how extraterrestrial life might adapt.”

The team chooses to study the black fungus Rhinocladiella similis based on genomic analyses and previous experimental evidence suggesting that the fungus possesses a robust genetic toolkit capable of withstanding multiple environmental stressors. They are particularly interested in how R. similis might survive in perchlorate salt brines, which are hypothesized to exist intermittently on Mars, along with other environmental factors, including intense UV-C radiation.

At KAUST, the researchers replicate a Mars-like environment in the lab by growing R. similis in a magnesium perchlorate solution under UV-C radiation. They also grow the same fungus under UV-C only. Analysis of the metabolic and proteomic responses of R. similis to magnesium perchlorate shows it exhibits morphological and behavioral changes compared to growth under UV-C alone. These changes include producing protective pigments like melanin and activating proteins associated with stress response and cellular stability.

“That a eukaryotic microorganism, such as a melanized fungus, can maintain activity in a magnesium perchlorate solution — a strong oxidizing agent — is highly relevant when considering the habitability of transient brine systems on Mars,” says Schultz. “Projects like this help refine the search for biosignatures by suggesting metabolic or structural traits that could indicate the presence of life, past or present, on other planets.”

Potential applications of these results extend beyond the search for extraterrestrial life. Schultz adds: “The study provides a proof of concept for space biomanufacturing: the use of microbial systems to produce pigments, enzymes, or other compounds under extraterrestrial conditions. For instance, fungal melanin could be studied for its radiation-shielding properties.”

On Earth, applications abound in bioremediation, helping to detoxify polluted environments, especially in arid and semi-arid regions where perchlorate accumulation is a growing concern. Fungi like R. similis could be used in biotechnological innovations, including the development of enzymes for industrial processes that require high tolerance to salinity or oxidative stress, such as wastewater treatment.

“This research also holds strategic importance for Saudi Arabia and the broader Middle East — a region characterized by extreme environments that can serve as terrestrial analogs for Mars,” says Rosado. “Saudi Arabia is uniquely positioned to lead in astrobiological research grounded in local biodiversity. Understanding extremophiles such as R. similis helps us expand the conceptual boundaries of habitability.”

dos Santos, A. Schultz, J., Souza, F.O., Ribeiro, L.R., Braga, T.V., Pilau, E.J., Rodrigues-Filho, E., & Rosado, A.S. Survival strategies of Rhinocladiella similis in perchlorate-rich Mars like environments. npj Microgravity 11:18 (2025)| article. (open access)

Astrobiology,

We determined the metal/silicate partition coefficients of hydrogen and carbon, DH and DC, simultaneously under typical conditions of Earth’s core formation.

Experiments demonstrate that both DH and DC diminish in the presence of carbon and hydrogen, respectively, indicating their strong interactions in liquid metal. With these partitioning data, we investigated the core and bulk Earth abundances of hydrogen and carbon based on core formation scenarios that are compatible with the bulk silicate Earth composition and the mass fraction and density deficit of the core.

The results of the single-stage core formation modelling are markedly different from those using DH and DC individually determined in earlier experiments, indicating that the Earth building blocks do not match enstatite chondrites in water abundance and require contributions by carbonaceous chondrites.

The multi-stage core formation models combined with an Earth accretion scenario accounting for isotopic composition show 0.18-0.49 wt% H and 0.19-1.37 wt% C in the core, leading to 0.53-1.40 wt% H₂O (present as H in the core) and 0.07-0.44 wt% C in the bulk Earth. Our modelling also demonstrates that up to 53% and 72% of Earth’s water (hydrogen) and carbon, respectively, could have been derived from non-carbonaceous chondritic materials.

Yutaro Tsutsumi (1), Naoya Sakamoto (2), Kei Hirose (1 and 3), Shuhei Mita (1), Shunpei Yokoo (1), Han Hsu (4), Hisayoshi Yurimoto (2 and 5) ((1) Department of Earth and Planetary Science, The University of Tokyo, Bunkyo, Tokyo, Japan (2) Institute for Integrated Innovations, Hokkaido University, Sapporo, Hokkaido, Japan (3) Earth-Life Science Institute, Tokyo Institute of Technology, Meguro, Tokyo, Japan (4) Department of Physics, National Central University, Taoyuan City, Taiwan (5) Department of Natural History Sciences, Hokkaido University, Sapporo, Hokkaido, Japan)

Subjects: Earth and Planetary Astrophysics (astro-ph.EP); Materials Science (cond-mat.mtrl-sci)
Cite as: arXiv:2508.17740 [astro-ph.EP] (or arXiv:2508.17740v1 [astro-ph.EP] for this version)
https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2508.17740
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Submission history
From: Kei Hirose
[v1] Mon, 25 Aug 2025 07:32:18 UTC (6,162 KB)
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.17740
Astrobiology,

The problem of local (e.g., interplanetary) Hubble expansion is studied for a long time but remains a controversial subject till now; and of particular interest is a plausible value of the local Hubble parameter at the scale of the Solar system.

Here, we tried to estimate the corresponding quantity by the analysis of surface temperatures on the Earth and Mars, which are formed by a competition between a variable luminosity of the Sun and increasing radii of the planetary orbits. Our work employs paleochemical and paleobiological data on the temperature of the ancient Earth, on the one hand, and geological data on the existence of an ocean of liquid water on the ancient Mars, on the other hand.

As follows from our analysis, the martian data impose only a weak constraint on the admissible values of the Hubble parameter because of the unknown salinity – and, therefore, the freezing point – of the martian water. On the other hand, the terrestrial data turn out to be much more valuable, especially, for the Precambrian period, when temperature variation was sufficiently smooth and monotonic.

For example, in the framework of standard LambdaCDM model with 70% of dark energy, contemporary value of the local Hubble parameter was found to be 70-90 km/s/Mpc under assumption that the Earth’s surface temperature in the end of Precambrian equaled 45 C. This is in reasonable agreement both with the intergalactic data and with an independent estimate of the local Hubble parameter from tidal evolution of the Earth-Moon system.

Yurii V. Dumin, Elizaveta G. Khramova, Ludmila M. Svirskaya, Eugen S. Savinykh

Comments: LaTeX2e, article documentclass, 11 pages, 2 PDF figures, accepted for publication in Gravitation and Cosmology (Springer), Vol. 31, Issue 4 (2025)
Subjects: Earth and Planetary Astrophysics (astro-ph.EP); Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics (astro-ph.IM)
Cite as: arXiv:2508.16694 [astro-ph.EP] (or arXiv:2508.16694v1 [astro-ph.EP] for this version)
https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2508.16694
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Submission history
From: Yurii V. Dumin
[v1] Thu, 21 Aug 2025 22:54:45 UTC (2,746 KB)
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.16694

Astrobiology,

Detected at an early stage of formation around a young analog of our own Sun, the planet is estimated to be about 5 million years-old and most likely a gas giant of similar size to Jupiter.

The study, which was led by Leiden University, University of Galway and University of Arizona, has been published in the international journal Astrophysical Journal Letters.

The ground-breaking discovery was made using one of the world’s most advanced observatories — the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (ESO’s VLT) in the Atacama Desert in Chile.

To coincide with the research being published, the European Southern Observatory — the world’s foremost international astronomy organization — has released a stunning image of the discovery as their picture of the week. View images here.

The new planet has been named WISPIT 2b.

Dr Christian Ginski, lecturer at the School of Natural Sciences, University of Galway and second author of the study, said: “We used these really short snapshot observations of many young stars — only a few minutes per object — to determine if we could see a little dot of light next to them that is caused by a planet. However, in the case of this star, we instead detected a completely unexpected and exceptionally beautiful multi-ringed dust disk.

“When we saw this multi-ringed disk for the first time, we knew we had to try and see if we could detect a planet within it, so we quickly asked for follow-up observations.”

It is only the second time a confirmed planet has been detected at this early evolutionary stage around a young version of our Sun. The first one was discovered in 2018, by a research team also involving Dr Ginski.

WISPIT 2b is also the first unambiguous planet detection in a multi-ringed disk, making it the ideal laboratory to study planet-disk interaction and subsequent evolution.

The planet was captured in near infrared light – the type of view that someone would see when using night-vision goggles — as it is still glowing and hot after its initial formation phase.

The team at Leiden University and University of Galway captured a spectacular clear image of the young proto-planet embedded in a disk gap. They also confirmed that the planet is orbiting its host star.

The planet was also detected in visible light by a team from the University of Arizona using a specially designed instrument. This detection at a specific wavelength or color of light indicates that the planet is still actively accreting gas as it is forming its atmosphere.

WISPIT 2b was detected as part of a five-year observational research project during which the international team sought to establish whether wide orbit gas giant planets are more common around younger or older stars. This led to the unexpected discovery of the new planet.

Dust and gas rich disks around young stars are the birth cradles of planets. They can look quite spectacular with many different structures such as rings and spiral arms, which researchers believe are related to planets forming within them. The disk around WISPIT 2b has a radius of 380 astronomical units — about 380 times the distance between Earth and the Sun.

Dr Ginski added:”Capturing an image of these forming planets has proven extremely challenging and it gives us a real chance to understand why the many thousands of older exoplanet systems out there look so diverse and so different from our own solar system. I think many of our colleagues who study planet formation will take a close look at this system in the years to come.”

The study was led by an early career PhD student, Richelle van Capelleveen from Leiden University and co-led by a graduate student team at University of Galway.

The research findings were co-authored by Dr Ginski and three Physics graduates students who are specializing in Astrophysics at University of Galway.

A companion study by the University of Arizona was led by Professor Laird Close, where observations were triggered based on the information shared about the new disk by the University of Galway and Leiden University team.

Richelle van Capelleveen said: “Discovering this planet was an amazing experience — we were incredibly lucky. WISPIT 2, a young version of our Sun, is located in a little-studied group of young stars, and we did not expect to find such a spectacular system. This system will likely be a benchmark for years to come.”

Dr Ginski said: “We were so fortunate to have these incredible young researchers on the case. This is the next generation of astrophysicists who I am sure will make more breakthrough discoveries in the years to come.”

Chloe Lawlor, PhD student in Physics with a specialization in Astrophysics at University of Galway, said: “I feel incredibly fortunate to be involved in such an exciting and potentially career defining discovery. WISPIT 2b, with its position within its birth disk, is a beautiful example of a planet that can be used to explore current planet formation models. I am certain this will become a landmark paper, owing particularly to the work of Richelle van Capelleveen and her exceptional team.”

Jake Byrne, MSc student in Physics with a specialization in Astrophysics at University of Galway, said: “The planet is a remarkable discovery. I could hardly believe it was a real detection when Dr Ginski first showed me the image. It’s a big one — that’s sure to spark discussion within the research community and advance our understanding of planet formation. Contributing to something this impactful, and doing so alongside international collaborators, is exactly the kind of opportunity early-career researchers like Chloe, Dan and I dream of.”

Dan McLachlan, MSc student in Physics with a specialization in Astrophysics at University of Galway, said: “In my experience so far working in astronomy, sometimes you can get so focused on a small task and you forget about the big picture, and when you zoom out and take in the magnitude of what you are working on it shocks you. This was one such project (an exoplanet direct detection!) and it was such a mind-blowing thing to be a part of. I feel so well treated by the University of Galway Physics department and especially my supervisor Dr Christian Ginski to have provided me with the opportunity to be part of such an exciting project.”

Abstract submission is now open for IAU symposium #404: Advancing the Search for Technosignatures, which will take place 2-6 March 2026 online everywhere. Submit your abstract using the link below. Abstracts are due by 17 October 2025.

IAUS 404: “Advancing the Search for Technosignatures” – Abstract Submission

The search for extraterrestrial life involves an effort to understand a broad range of plausible biosignatures that could arise in extraterrestrial environments. Technology is one possible consequence of planetary-scale life, which could generate “technosignatures” that could be abundant, long-lived, highly detectable, and unambiguous compared to other biosignatures.

This online symposium seeks to advance the search for technosignatures by inviting contributions on any theoretical, instrumental, observational, or data analysis ideas for characterizing and detecting technosignatures.

The goal of this symposium is to foster discussion on ways to advance the search for technosignatures by leveraging existing missions and data archives. You can visit the website for the meeting to sign up for updates and see a list of confirmed invited speakers: https://iaus404.bmsis.org/

Astrobiology