The concentric rings, expanding from the central region, as revealed by Webb’s MIRI (Mid-Infrared Instrument), may offer further evidence of a secondary star at play. The rings suggest there was some form of pulsation that caused gas or dust to be released evenly in all directions, possibly thousands of years apart.
Another striking detail captured by Webb’s MIRI is a small pinkish-white dot in the center, believed to be the star shaping this entire scene. Over time, as the central star cools and dims, the nebula will slowly disperse into the interstellar medium, enriching it with heavier elements that could one day help form new stars and planets.
By capturing such a detailed view of NGC 6072, Webb paves the way for studies into how complex planetary nebulae help feed the nurseries where new stars and planets are born. The James Webb Space Telescope is no stranger to new discoveries, it recently helped NASA correct a wrong notion regarding Uranus.
NGC 6072 is located about 3,000 light years away, which means it is visible through a telescope. However, you will need a powerful telescope, like the Celestron NexStar 8 SE (curr. $1,699.99 on Amazon), which has a 203-mm (8-inch) aperture. Keep in mind you will need good viewing conditions — a dark sky with minimal light pollution.
The ExoMars team is making major strides in their mission to land a rover on Mars, revealing new test footage of the most complex parachute system ever designed.
This parachute system is crucial for slowing down the descent of the rover as it enters the Martian atmosphere at a blistering 13,000 mph.
Europe’s ExoMars program, led by the European Space Agency (ESA), aims to land the Rosalind Franklin rover on Mars by 2030, a feat that would mark the continent’s first successful rover landing on the Red Planet.
Getting there, however, means perfecting every detail of the mission’s intricate entry, descent, and landing system.
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The ExoMars program plans to reach Mars by 2030
The ESA conducted the parachute test earlier this month at the Esrange Space Center in Kiruna, northern Sweden.
Using a stratospheric helium balloon, the agency lifted a dummy descent module equipped with the new parachute system to an altitude of 19 miles.
This height mimicked the thin density of the Martian atmosphere, which is just one percent that of Earth, and allowed the ESA to simulate near-supersonic speeds.
After a 20-second freefall, both parachutes deployed exactly as planned, providing a confidence boost ahead of the rover’s future descent.
The Rosalind Franklin rover, named after the pioneering British chemist, will launch from Earth in 2028 aboard an American rocket, and is expected to arrive at Mars two years later.
The Mars rover’s mission is to search for signs of past or present life by drilling down 6.6 feet beneath the Martian surface.
This may not seem like much, but it’s deeper than any rover has gone before.
The ESA’s Mars rover plans bring it in line with other major space agencies worldwide.
NASA’s Curiosity Rover has been on Mars since 2012, and recently found samples that may prove that there existed on the red planet.
China is not far behind, with its Mars rover discovering a possible shoreline of an ancient ocean.
A complex two-parachute system
While the success of the parachute deployment is good news, landing the rover on Mars safely could be tricky.
It requires the spacecraft to decelerate from orbital speeds using a combination of aerodynamic drag, heat shields, parachutes, and retrorockets.
The parachute system at the heart of this challenge includes two main chutes.
The first is a three-stage, 49-foot wide parachute based on technology used in NASA’s Cassini-Huygens mission to Titan.
The second is a massive 115-foot wide parachute, which is the largest ever built for use beyond Earth.
ESA
It is constructed from 8,600 square feet of fabric and over 2.5 miles of cord.
ESA engineers are now reviewing the test data to confirm the parachutes will perform as needed in 2030.
If successful, this complex system could become a blueprint for future planetary landings.
In any case, while the ESA may not have the same name recognition as NASA, they have been working on a bunch of interesting projects.
They recently built a bug-eyed telescope to spot asteroids before they hit Earth, which may come in handy.
The ESA is also working on a hypersonic space plane, with plans to get it up in the air by 2031.
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With hopes fading about finding signs of life on the exoplant K2-18b, scientists refocus on exploring the Moon and Mars, with providing food the largest challeng Genetic Literacy Project
Nearby super-Earth K2-18 b may be a water-rich ocean planet: ‘This has certainly increased the chances of habitability’ Space
Possible ‘Hints’ Of Life Found On Planet 124 Light-Years Away In James Webb Space Telescope Data MSN
EXPLAINER – Have scientists found the strongest evidence yet of life beyond Earth? AnewZ
New study revisits signs of life on K2-18 b Astronomy Magazine
Some fruit fly species sniff out just about any fruit; others are pickier, sticking to just one kind. These behavioral quirks are thought to reflect neural changes that evolved to help different species adapt to distinct environments, but how those changes came about has remained a mystery.
Some parts of the Drosophila olfactory circuitry have evolved more than others, according to a new comparison of two fly species’ connectomes. Certain characteristics, including neuron number and type, are strongly conserved between the species, but others, such as the balance of excitation and inhibition in the circuit, differ.
The findings, described in a preprint posted on bioRxiv in June, begin to reveal the evolutionary changes in the brain that may have helped the two species develop different olfactory preferences and adapt to their particular environments, says principal investigator Lucia Prieto-Godino, group leader at the Francis Crick Institute.
Numerous studies have compared gross neuroanatomy across species, but the new work is one of the most complex cross-species network comparisons, says Greg Jefferis, group leader at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology, who was not involved in the work but collaborates with Prieto-Godino on other projects. The preprint authors “make a pretty strong case that these differences that they see in the connectome are actually meaningful for the behavior of the animal,” he adds.
Still, the paper’s conclusions are based on just two connectomes, says Alexander Bates, a neurobiology postdoctoral research fellow in Rachel Wilson’s lab at Harvard Medical School. Bates has worked with the authors of the preprint before but was not significantly involved in this project. Because each connectome captures a snapshot of a single fly’s brain, there is no guarantee that the differences spotted between the connectomes are at the species level and not the individual level, Bates adds.
T
he new work compares the antennal lobe connectomes of larval Drosophila melanogaster, a commonly used model organism, and Drosophila erecta, a non-model species. The two are closely related, but the latter breeds on the fruit of a woody plant called the pandan, while the former opts for a wide range of fruits.
D. erecta “has a very different lifestyle from melanogaster, so then we thought that that probably had changed the olfactory circuit,” Prieto-Godino says.
The larval Drosophila olfactory system is well suited for the comparative analysis, in part because it is small, comprising just 21 olfactory sensory neurons.
The size of the larvae allows for “a comparative analysis on a synaptic level of the highest possible resolution, which is not yet possible in other systems. I think that that’s very exciting,” says study investigator Christoph Giez, a postdoctoral fellow in Prieto-Godino’s lab.
“If you imagine doing this in a mouse, or even a bigger brain, it’s going to be a total mess,” says Katrin Vogt, group leader at the University of Konstanz, who was not involved in the work. “I think they are really a sweet spot, because they are not too closely related species, and one is a specialist.”
Another advantage of using flies is that their olfactory neurons and circuits are organized similarly to those in humans and many vertebrates, Prieto-Godino says. “We can hopefully learn general principles about how central neural circuits evolve generally, but also things that might be transferable across olfactory systems.”
Prior work had already used electron microscopy to map every single neuron in the olfactory system of D. melanogaster. Prieto-Godino’s team created a comparable map for D. erecta, which took about two weeks of continuous scanning with a customized electron microscope, she says.
Not only did the two species show identical cell types and number of cells, but the connections between different interneuron types within the antennal lobe were also similar.
“That defines kind of a scaffold, and this is probably the general circuit blueprint that is required to process olfactory information,” Prieto-Godino says, adding that this prediction needs further validation.
O
ne way to test if this truly is a general circuit blueprint for olfaction is to look at more species and see if the same characteristics are conserved, Prieto-Godino says.
“I would love to actually go farther because we didn’t find any new cell types,” she says. “I would like to now look at the species that are more far away related, to see if we can find novel cell types and see how these integrate into the circuit.
D. melanogaster and D. erectus differ in subtle ways, such as the ratio of excitatory versus inhibitory synapses on olfactory sensory neurons and projection neurons, the preprint suggests.
“Even within a single dendritic field of a neuron, evolution can target different synaptic elements differently,” Prieto-Godino says.
Because the species the researchers picked are so similar, establishing a baseline for individual variation within each species would strengthen the claims the paper makes, Bates says. “The first step in my mind would have been to establish the baseline.”
That said, connectomes are still quite costly to produce, and relatively few full connectomes exist to compare, Bates says. And even as more connectomes are published, comparing them can be difficult because not all connectomes come from similar individuals. Ideally, those being compared would be from flies that are the same age and weight and have similar behaviors, among other characteristics.
“In the future, we’ll do more connectomes, more rigorously, and we’ll be able to make these kinds of experimental comparisons with a better n size,” Bates says.
To control for possible individual variations in a single connectome, Prieto-Godino and her colleagues compared the connectomes bilaterally, which can catch individual miswirings because the two hemispheres are expected to be symmetrical.
The “ultimate goal” is to understand how behaviors change, and understanding neural circuits is one step in that direction, Prieto-Godino says.
“The way we did the analysis hopefully will serve as the basis for people doing cross-species comparative connectomics,” Prieto-Godino says. “Kind of a guide of, ‘What are the kind of things that we can find? What are the kind of things that we can look at?’ And hopefully that will go beyond our findings.”
It’s a half moon tonight, with the whole of the right side on display for us. Keep reading to find out what this means, and where we are in the lunar cycle.
The lunar cycle is a series of eight unique phases of the moon’s visibility. The whole cycle takes about 29.5 days, according to NASA, and these different phases happen as the Sun lights up different parts of the moon whilst it orbits Earth.
See what’s happening tonight, Aug. 1.
What is today’s moon phase?
As of Friday, Aug. 1, the moon phase is First Quarter. This phase occurs when the moon is half lit up. NASA confirms this, according to the Daily Moon Observation, it is 50% lit up tonight.
It’s day eight of the lunar cycle, and the first moon in August. What can we see tonight? With the unaided eye, enjoy a glimpse of the Mare Serenitatis, the Mare Tranquillitatis, and the Mare Crisium. If you’re in the Northern Hemisphere, look to the top right. If you’re in the Southern Hemisphere, you’ll see these on the bottom left.
With binoculars, you’ll also see the Endymion Crater, the Mare Nectaris, and the Posidonius Crater, a lava-filled impact crater that’s visible from the fifth to the 19th day of the lunar cycle. Add a telescope to the mix, and you’ll also see the Linne Crater, Apollo 11, and Apollo 16.
When is the next full moon?
The next full moon will be on August 9. The last full moon was on July 10.
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What are moon phases?
According to NASA, moon phases are caused by the 29.5-day cycle of the moon’s orbit, which changes the angles between the Sun, Moon, and Earth. Moon phases are how the moon looks from Earth as it goes around us. We always see the same side of the moon, but how much of it is lit up by the Sun changes depending on where it is in its orbit. This is how we get full moons, half moons, and moons that appear completely invisible. There are eight main moon phases, and they follow a repeating cycle:
New Moon – The moon is between Earth and the sun, so the side we see is dark (in other words, it’s invisible to the eye).
Waxing Crescent – A small sliver of light appears on the right side (Northern Hemisphere).
First Quarter – Half of the moon is lit on the right side. It looks like a half-moon.
Waxing Gibbous – More than half is lit up, but it’s not quite full yet.
Full Moon – The whole face of the moon is illuminated and fully visible.
Waning Gibbous – The moon starts losing light on the right side.
Last Quarter (or Third Quarter) – Another half-moon, but now the left side is lit.
Waning Crescent – A thin sliver of light remains on the left side before going dark again.
What if a complex material could reshape itself in response to a simple chemical signal? A team of physicists from the University of Vienna and the University of Edinburgh has shown that even small changes in pH value and thus in electric charge can shift the spatial arrangement of closed ring-shaped polymers (molecular chains) – by altering the balance between twist and writhe, two distinct modes of spatial deformation. Their findings, published in Physical Review Letters, demonstrate how electric charge can be used to reshape polymers in a reversible and controllable way – opening up new possibilities for programmable, responsive materials. With such materials, permeability and mechanical properties such as elasticity, yield stress and viscosity could be better controlled and precisely ‘programmed’.
A sketch of the conformations of supercoiled ribbons in dependence of the electric charge: neutral and writhe-rich (upper left); fully charged and twist-rich (upper right); partially charged with separated writhe-rich and twist-rich domains (middle).
C: Roman Staňo
Imagine taking a ribbon and twisting it by half before connecting its ends: you create the famous Möbius band – a loop with a single twist and a continuous surface. Add more twists before closing the ribbon, and the structure becomes so called supercoiled. Such shapes are common in biology and materials science, especially in circular DNA and synthetic (artificially produced) ring polymers. Whether and how the balance between twist– the local rotation of the ribbon around its axis – and writhe – the large-scale coiling of the ribbon in space could be tuned in a controlled and reversible way is still unclear. The research team set out to investigate this question using a model system of ring-shaped polymers, where electric charge – introduced via pH-dependent ionization – serves as an external tuning parameter.
From writhe to twist
To explore the tunability of this topological balance, the researchers combined computer simulations and analytical theory to study how charge affects the conformation of supercoiled ring polymers. In their model, each monomeric unit acts as a weak acid, gaining or losing charge depending on the pH value (specifies the acidity or basicity of aqueous solutions) of the surrounding solution. This setup enabled a gradual buildup of charge and revealed how the molecule reshapes in response.
The results: Neutral polymers adopt writhe-rich, compact shapes. As charge increases, electrostatic repulsion grows – driving the molecule toward more extended conformations and shifting the internal distribution from writhe to twist. These transitions are smooth at low supercoiling. At higher levels, however, the model predicts a striking feature: the polymer can split into coexisting twist- and writhe-rich domains – a kind of topologically constrained microphase separation. This hidden form of phase coexistence had not been observed in such systems before.
To capture these mechanisms, the researchers developed a Landau-type mean-field theory. This simplified mathematical model accurately predicts when a polymer will undergo a continuous or abrupt conformational change – depending on its degree of supercoiling and charge.
Topology as a design tool
The idea of tuning not just molecular structure, but topology itself, opens up new ways to control responsive systems. “By adjusting the local charge, we can shift the balance between twist and writhe – and that gives us a handle on the shape of the whole molecule,” says first author Roman Staňo from the Faculty of Physics at the University of Vienna (currently at Cambrigde Univesrity). Because each monomer can gain or lose charge, the polymer gradually reshapes itself – a behavior that resembles real polyelectrolytes, such as chemically modified DNA. The team suggests that synthetic DNA rings with pH-sensitive side chains – not yet realized experimentally, but now feasible thanks to recent advances in nucleotide chemistry – could display this kind of controllable shape-shifting behavior. These molecules would act as topologically constrained scaffolds, adjusting their form in response to local chemical conditions.
Responsive shapes, programmable function
Polymer shape isn’t just geometry – it governs flow, function, and interaction. The ability to reversibly shift between twist- and writhe-dominated states offers a powerful strategy for designing adaptive materials. Ring polymers that respond to subtle changes in pH could one day be used in microfluidic devices, where local conditions trigger controlled changes in shape and flow behavior. “What’s remarkable,” says co-author Christos Likos, Faculty of Physics at the University of Vienna, “is that the transition from compact to extended shapes happens gradually, can be controlled via pH – and doesn’t require any changes to the molecule’s topology.”
This effect, the team notes, could be realized experimentally in synthetic DNA rings – a possibility enabled by recent advances in nucleotide chemistry. Their results also offer predictive insight: they show how function can be encoded not only in chemical composition, but also in topological state – pointing toward a new generation of shape-adaptive materials.
The Tintina fault stretches 1,000 kilometers (621 miles) across northern Canada, crossing the Yukon and ending in Alaska. The fault is thought to have been dormant for 40 million years, but that thinking is challenged by a new study that suggests a major earthquake may be imminent.
Researchers from the University of Victoria and the University of Alberta in Canada have spotted signs of two relatively recent groups of earthquakes that significantly shifted the ground: one 2.6 million years ago and one 132,000 years ago.
What’s more, the team found no evidence of notable earthquakes within the last 12,000 years. That quiet period could actually a warning; based on calculations that the fault is shifting and building up pressure at the rate of 0.2-0.8 millimeters (0.008-0.03 inches) per year, it means a major quake may be imminent.
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“Over the past couple of decades there have been a few small earthquakes of magnitude 3 to 4 detected along the Tintina fault, but nothing to suggest it is capable of large ruptures,” says geologist Theron Finley from the University of Victoria.
“The expanding availability of high-resolution data prompted us to re-examine the fault, looking for evidence of prehistoric earthquakes in the landscape.”
Using a combination of the latest high-resolution satellite imagery and LIDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) technology – measuring laser light reflections to assess terrain levels – the team carried out a fresh look at the Tintina fault.
The Tintina fault runs close to Dawson City. (Finley et al., Geophys. Res. Lett., 2025)
This close analysis helped reveal narrow surface ruptures that are usually well concealed by Canada’s forested wilderness. This turned up fault scarps (offsets in the ground surface called ‘slips’) pointing to past earthquakes, but nothing in the recent geological past.
Based on the calculations of the researchers, the fault should have slipped around 6 meters (nearly 20 feet) in that time, but hasn’t. When that pressure is eventually released, it could mean an earthquake of a magnitude more than 7.5 on the Richter scale.
“The Tintina fault therefore represents an important, previously unrecognized, seismic hazard to the region,” write the researchers in their published paper.
“If 12,000 years or more have elapsed since the last major earthquake, the fault may be at an advanced stage of strain accumulation.”
This isn’t the most populated part of the world, but lives are still in danger – including in nearby Dawson City, home to 1,600 people. Damage to infrastructure and ecosystems also needs to be considered.
The researchers want to see further studies of the Tintina fault – and other faults like it – to better figure out the chances of it triggering an earthquake in the future. The more data experts have about historical seismic activity in the area, the better the computer models will be at predicting future events.
“Further paleoseismic investigations are required to determine the recurrence intervals between past earthquakes, and whether slip rates have changed through time due to shifts in tectonic regime, or glacial isostatic adjustment,” write the researchers.
The research has been published in Geophysical Research Letters.
Chinese researchers have succeeded in synthesizing the hundred-micron-scale hexagonal diamond, a material primarily found in meteorites, which is harder than the ordinary diamond found on Earth.
The study, published on Wednesday in the journal Nature, promises to redefine the limits of superhard materials, according to the researchers.
The Earth diamond owes its reputation as the king of hardness to its carbon atoms arranged in a tetrahedral lattice, making it extremely hard and wear-resistant.
However, this structure has a weakness — certain planes can easily slip and shift when force is applied, thereby limiting its strength. As a consequence, scientists have turned their attention to another type of super diamond with a more exquisite structure and superior properties, namely the hexagonal diamond.
Chinese researchers involved in the published study innovatively proposed a method for transforming graphite into a hexagonal diamond. Under controllable high-temperature, high-pressure and quasi-hydrostatic conditions, they compressed and heated graphite single crystals to ultimately obtain a high-purity hexagonal diamond.
Previous attempts to synthesize a hexagonal diamond were largely unsuccessful due to extremely stringent formation requirements. Under high-temperature and high-pressure conditions, the end result tends to be the formation of a cubic diamond and not a hexagonal diamond.
The successful synthesis of a high-purity hexagonal diamond by the Chinese research team is attributed to their choice of high-purity natural graphite single crystals, as well as their use of high-pressure in-situ X-ray observation to monitor changes in samples, said Yang Liuxiang, one of the authors of the paper and a researcher at the Beijing-based Center for High-Pressure Science & Technology Advanced Research.
This study lays a methodological foundation for future research on diamond-like materials, according to Ho-kwang Mao, a scientist in high-pressure science and a foreign member of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
This synthesized hexagonal diamond is expected to pave new pathways for the development of superhard materials and high-end electronic devices, Mao added.
