Category: 7. Science

  • On July 3, Earth Will Reach Its Farthest Point From The Sun – 152 Million Kilometers Away

    On July 3, Earth Will Reach Its Farthest Point From The Sun – 152 Million Kilometers Away

    On July 3, 2025, at 3:54 pm ET, the Earth will officially reach its furthest point from the Sun for this year. This is called aphelion. Our planet’s orbit is very close to a circle, but it is not a circle. It’s an ellipse, so the Earth gets closer and farther from the Sun as it orbits. The closest point, the perihelion, happens around the first few days of January. The next one will be January 3, 2026.

    At the aphelion, the distance from the Earth’s center to the Sun’s center is going to be 152,087,738 kilometers (94,502,939 miles). At its closest, Earth is roughly 5.1 million kilometers (about 3.2 million miles) nearer the Sun, which means the planet gets 6.8 percent more solar radiation in January than it will tomorrow.

    If we are further away from the Sun, why is it summer?

    It is completely accidental that the aphelion and perihelion are so close to the solstices or the beginning of the year. They have nothing to do with seasons either. The seasons are dictated by the tilt of the Earth.

    An exaggerated view of Earth’s orbit.

    Image Credit: CLOUD-WALKER/Shutterstock.com

    Basically, right now the Northern Hemisphere is pointing towards the Sun, so up here we get summer and the Southern Hemisphere gets winter. In six months, it is the Southern Hemisphere that is pointing towards the Sun, so it experiences summer while it’s winter up north.

    There are cyclical processes at work that shift the actual date and time of aphelion and perihelion. It has shifted by around one day every 58 years, and that shift is for good. Smaller variation, plus the need for a leap day, makes a year-on-year variation of a couple of days common.

    In the late 19th century, New Year’s Day was also the perihelion. In the mid-1200s, the solstices would fall on these two special days.

    The shape of Earth’s orbit is not fixed

    The reason for these changes is the subtle tugging of Jupiter and Saturn on our planet. Over a period of hundreds of thousands of years, the Earth’s orbit goes from mildly elliptical to almost a circle. We are currently getting the Earth at its most circular. This is one of the Milankovitch cycles.

    Something fascinating is that while the shape of the orbit changes, due to the gravitational laws, the year’s length doesn’t change. The orbit simply gets more squished, so during spring and autumn, the Earth tends to be closer to the Sun than it currently is.

    Still, the orbit affects the seasons in a peculiar way: their length. Seasons, astronomically speaking, are defined by which quadrant in the orbit our planet is passing through. The more circular the orbit, the closer the length of the seasons. Currently, summer in the Northern Hemisphere is 4.66 days longer than winter, and spring is 2.9 days longer than autumn.

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  • The secret of why Mars grew cold and dry may be locked away in its rocks

    The secret of why Mars grew cold and dry may be locked away in its rocks

    The discovery by the Mars rovers of carbonate in sedimentary rock on the Red Planet has enabled planetary scientists to rewind the clock and tell the tale of how Mars’ warmer, watery climate 3.5 billion years ago changed to the barren, dry and cold environment that it is today.

    We know that, in the distant past, Mars was warmer than it is today and had liquid water on its surface. We can see evidence for this in the form of ancient river channels, deltas, lakes and even the eroded coastlines of a large sea in the north. Sometime in the past 3.5 billion years, Mars’ atmosphere thinned and its water either froze or was lost to space. The question is, how did that happen?

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  • New tool allows researchers to track assembly of cells’ protein-making machines

    New tool allows researchers to track assembly of cells’ protein-making machines

    Proteins are the infinitely varied chemicals that make cells work, and science has a pretty good idea how they are made. But a critical aspect underlying the machinery of protein manufacture has long been hidden inside a blobby cellular structure called the nucleolus.

    Now, a team of Princeton engineers have developed a technique to peer inside the nucleolus and reveal this hidden system of creation. Previous methods required researchers to break open the cell and destroy most of its structures, resulting in minimal access to the blob’s inner workings. By tracking the movement of RNA molecules inside the nucleolus using advanced imaging and genomics techniques, the new method allows researchers to watch these processes as they unfold without destroying the cell or its fragile components.

    “These tools give us a window into what’s happening inside the nucleolus in a way we’ve never been able to see before,” said Clifford Brangwynne, the June K. Wu ’92 Professor of Chemical and Biological Engineering, the director of Princeton’s Omenn-Darling Bioengineering Institute, and the study’s principal investigator. “Now we have a precise spatial and temporal map,” he said.

    Making an artificial nucleolus

    The nucleolus is the largest structure inside the cell’s nucleus, key to cell growth and stress response. One of its main jobs is building ribosomes, which are the scaffolds that cells use to make proteins.

    The team published details of the new method and an initial batch of findings that resulted from its use in the journal Nature on July 2.

    Members of the research team, from left: Anita Donlic, Aya Abu-Alfa, Jordy Botello, Qiwei Yu, Sofia Quinodoz, Lennard Wiesner, Cliff Brangwynne, Lifei Jiang, Troy Comi. Photo by Wright Seneres

    In a first, the team also developed a way to make a simplified, artificial nucleolus. The model nucleoli allowed them to test ideas developed with the mapping technique and will play a complementary role in future experiments, according to the researchers.

    Sofia Quinodoz, a postdoctoral fellow, and Lifei Jiang, a graduate student in molecular biology, spearheaded the work in Brangwynne’s lab.

    These tools and other technologies developed in the Brangwynne lab were also highlighted in a recent article in Nature surveying the current state of this field.

    What happens inside the nucleolus does not stay inside the nucleolus

    The nucleolus itself is globular, with an inner, middle and outer layer. These layers consist of distinct liquid-like materials with physical differences — namely, surface tension — that keep them separated like oil and water. Each of these layers plays a different role in assembling the protein-making machines called ribosomes.

    The researchers wanted to find a way to watch this ribosome-assembly process play out. Everything begins with RNA produced in the nucleolus’s innermost layer. That RNA assembles into components of what will become a new ribosome. As the components move through the layers of the nucleolus, they are assembled in a stepwise fashion to form ribosomes. With the mapping technique, Quinodoz and Jiang track this process in detail, from the initial formation of components to the finished product.

    “This is exciting because we previously didn’t know how the layers are built,” Quinodoz said.

    Nucleoli blobs rotate as points of light grow inside them, representing ribosome assembly.
    The new tool allows researchers to peer inside nucleoli and watch ribosome assembly, shedding new light on the machinery responsible for making proteins. Images courtesy of the researchers

    To watch the assembly process play out, she and Jiang applied advanced sequencing and imaging techniques, capturing snapshots as RNA moved along the assembly line that allowed them to track the movements of each part. Along with advanced microscopy techniques, they observed that properly processed ribosomal RNA moves through the nucleolus from inner to middle to outer layer and then leaves the nucleolus, and that specific assembly steps to the ribosomal RNA occur inside each layer. As this was unfolding, they observed that the ribosome’s smaller subunit is mostly assembled in the inner and middle layers while the larger subunit is assembled throughout all three layers.

    Interestingly, they found that disrupting these processes created major problems with the structure of the nucleolus. In one test, RNA accumulated within the middle layer and not in the outer layer, prompting the outer layer to detach from the middle layer and form a kind of necklace around the smaller sphere. Another test resulted in the nucleolus turning itself inside-out, reversing the order of the layers. Working with Princeton colleagues including Andrej Košmrlj, associate professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering, graduate student Qiwei Yu, and former Princeton Bioengineering Institute Innovators Fellow Hongbo Zhao, the group was able to show how the perturbations to RNA processing alter surface tension, to drive this inside-out structuring.

    “We got all these hints that the structure is being built around the RNA, and its processing is shaping the structure, making it turn inside out or fall apart when its normal function is disrupted,” said Quinodoz, a Hanna Gray Fellow at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) and a 2013 Princeton alumna.

    Quality control checkpoints

    The Princeton group teamed up with ribosome experts Denis Lafontaine of Université libre de Bruxelles and Sebastian Klinge of Rockefeller University, to disrupt different steps in the ribosome assembly line and use a system called a DNA plasmid to induce living cells to create brand new, human-designed nucleoli. They found that the synthesized structures functioned much like the natural ones, with the larger ribosome subunits assembling more slowly than the smaller ones. They were also able to replicate the inside-out structures that they saw in the defective nucleoli. By manipulating the RNA and causing the nucleolus to react accordingly, they identified a key feature that can be studied in greater detail.

    “We uncovered that this complex factory in the cell has essential quality control checkpoints,” said Quinodoz. “The ribosomal RNA is moving from one part of the factory to another only if the processing step is actually done. Then it releases into the next step.”  

    Now that they have these tools, Brangwynne and his group are looking at what happens in diseases like cancer, where more ribosomes are produced in cancerous cells than in healthy cells. Using their mapping tool, they hope to find vulnerabilities in the production process which could be targets for therapeutics. “Nobody has really mapped that in detail yet,” said Jiang.

    The paper “Mapping and engineering RNA-driven architecture of the multiphase nucleolus” was published July 2, 2025 in Nature. In addition to Brangwynne, Quinodoz, Jiang, Zhao, Yu, Košmrlj, Lafontaine and Klinge, the authors included Aya A. Abu-Alfa, Troy J. Comi, Lennard W. Wiesner, Jordy F. Botello, Anita Đonlić and Elizabeth Soehalim of Princeton University; Prashant Bhat of the California Institute of Technology and the University of California-Los Angeles; and Christiane Zorbas and Ludivine Wacheul of Université libre de Bruxelles. Support for this project was provided by HHMI, the National Science Foundation, the St. Jude Medical Foundation, Princeton University, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative Exploratory Network, the Princeton Biomolecular Condensate Program, the Princeton Center for Complex Materials (NSF MRSEC, DMR-2011750), the Princeton University Office of Undergraduate Research, W. Reid Pitts Jr. Senior Thesis Fund in Molecular Biology/Biology, the Eleanor A. Crecca Senior Thesis Research Fund for Molecular Biology, Princeton Bioengineering Institute Innovators (PBI2) Postdoctoral Fellowship, Princeton University Harold W. Dodds Fellowship, Chen Graduate Innovator Grant, Josephine De Karman Fellowship Trust, European Cooperation in Science and Technology (COST), Fonds De La Recherche Scientifique – FNRS, EOS [CD-INFLADIS 40007512] Région Wallonne (SPW EER) Win4SpinOff [RIBOGENESIS] European Joint Programme on Rare Diseases (EJP-RD) RiboEurope DBAGene Cure, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services | National Institutes of Health, and the G. Harold and Leila Y. Mathers Foundation.

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  • Clingy Planets May Trigger Doom, Say Cheops, TESS

    Clingy Planets May Trigger Doom, Say Cheops, TESS

    Astronomers using the European Space Agency’s Cheops mission mission have caught an exoplanet that seems to be triggering flares of radiation from the star it orbits. These tremendous explosions are blasting away the planet’s wispy atmosphere, causing it to shrink every year.

    This is the first-ever evidence for a ‘planet with a death wish’. Though it was theorised to be possible since the nineties, the flares seen in this research are around 100 times more energetic than expected.

    This planet’s star makes our Sun look sleepy

    Thanks to telescopes like the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope and NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite ( TESS ), we already had some clues about this planet and the star it orbits.

    The star, named HIP 67522, was known to be just slightly larger and cooler than our own host star, the Sun. But whilst the Sun is a middle-aged 4.5-billion-year-old, HIP 67522 is a fresh-faced 17-million-year-old. It bears two planets. The closer of the two – given the catchy name HIP 67522 b – takes just seven days to whip around its host star.

    Because of its youth and size, scientists suspected that star HIP 67522 would churn and spin with lots of energy. This churning and spinning would turn the star into a powerful magnet.

    Our much-older Sun has its own smaller and more peaceful magnetic field. From studying the Sun, we already knew that flares of energy can burst from magnetic stars when ‘twisted’ magnetic field lines are suddenly released. This energy can take the form of anything from gentle radio waves to visible light to aggressive gamma rays.

    A la carte research with Cheops

    Ever since the first exoplanet was discovered in the 1990s, astronomers have pondered whether some of them might be orbiting close enough to disturb their host stars’ magnetic fields. If so, they could be triggering flares.

    A team led by Ekaterina Ilin at the Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy ( ASTRON ) figured that with our current space telescopes, it was time to investigate this question further.

    “We hadn’t seen any systems like HIP 67522 before; when the planet was found it was the youngest planet known to be orbiting its host star in less than 10 days,” says Ekaterina.

    The team was using TESS to do a broad sweep of stars that might be flaring because of an interaction with their planets. When TESS turned its eyes to HIP 67522, the team thought they could be on to something. To be sure, they called upon ESA’s sensitive CHaracterising ExOPlanet Satellite, Cheops .

    “We quickly requested observing time with Cheops, which can target individual stars on demand, ultra precisely,” says Ekaterina. “With Cheops we saw more flares, taking the total count to 15, almost all coming in our direction as the planet transited in front of the star as seen from Earth.”

    Because we are seeing the flares as the planet passes in front of the star, it is very likely that they are being triggered by the planet.

    A flaring star is nothing new. Our own Sun regularly releases bursts of energy, which we experience on Earth as ‘ space weather ‘ that causes the auroras and can damage technology. But we’ve only ever seen this energy exchange as a one-way street from star to planet.

    Knowing that HIP 67522 b orbits extremely close to its host star, and assuming that the star’s magnetic field is strong, Ekaterina’s team deduced that the clingy HIP 67522 b sits close enough to exert its own magnetic influence on its host star.

    They think that the planet gathers energy as it orbits, then redirects that energy as waves along the star’s magnetic field lines, as if whipping a rope. When the wave meets the end of the magnetic field line at the star’s surface, it triggers a massive flare.

    It’s the first time we see a planet influencing its host star, overturning our previous assumption that stars behave independently.

    And not only is HIP 67522 b triggering flares, but it is also triggering them in its own direction. As a result, the planet experiences six times more radiation than it otherwise would.

    A self-imposed downfall

    Unsurprisingly, being bombarded with so much high-energy radiation does not bode well for HIP 67522 b. The planet is similar in size to Jupiter but has the density of candy floss, making it one of the wispiest exoplanets ever found.

    Over time, the radiation is eroding away the planet’s feathery atmosphere, meaning it is losing mass much faster than expected. In the next 100 million years, it could go from an almost Jupiter-sized planet to a much smaller Neptune-sized planet.

    “The planet seems to be triggering particularly energetic flares,” points out Ekaterina. “The waves it sends along the star’s magnetic field lines kick off flares at specific moments. But the energy of the flares is much higher than the energy of the waves. We think that the waves are setting off explosions that are waiting to happen.”

    More questions than answers

    When HIP 67522 was found, it was the youngest known planet orbiting so close to its host star. Since then, astronomers have spotted a couple of similar systems and there are probably dozens more in the nearby Universe. Ekaterina and her team are keen to take a closer look at these unique systems with TESS, Cheops and other exoplanet missions.

    “I have a million questions because this is a completely new phenomenon, so the details are still not clear,” she says.

    “There are two things that I think are most important to do now. The first is to follow up in different wavelengths (Cheops covers visible to near-infrared wavelengths) to find out what kind of energy is being released in these flares – for example ultraviolet and X-rays are especially bad news for the exoplanet.

    “The second is to find and study other similar star-planet systems; by moving from a single case to a group of 10–100 systems, theoretical astronomers will have something to work with.”

    Maximillian Günther, Cheops project scientist at ESA, is excited to see the mission contributing to research in a way that he never thought possible: “Cheops was designed to characterise the sizes and atmospheres of exoplanets, not to look for flares. It’s really beautiful to see the mission contributing to this and other results that go so far beyond what it was envisioned to do.”

    Looking further ahead, ESA’s future exoplanet hunter Plato will also study Sun-like stars like HIP 67522. Plato will be able to capture much smaller flares to really give us the detail that we need to better understand what is going on.

    /Public Release. This material from the originating organization/author(s) might be of the point-in-time nature, and edited for clarity, style and length. Mirage.News does not take institutional positions or sides, and all views, positions, and conclusions expressed herein are solely those of the author(s).View in full here.

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  • Research Reveals AI-Biology Parallels in Social Interaction

    Research Reveals AI-Biology Parallels in Social Interaction

    UCLA researchers have made a significant discovery showing that biological brains and artificial intelligence systems develop remarkably similar neural patterns during social interaction. This first-of-its-kind study reveals that when mice interact socially, specific brain cell types synchronize in “shared neural spaces,” and AI agents develop analogous patterns when engaging in social behaviors. The study appears in the journal Nature.

    Why it matters

    This new research represents a striking convergence of neuroscience and artificial intelligence, two of today’s most rapidly advancing fields. By directly comparing how biological brains and AI systems process social information, scientists reveal fundamental principles that govern social cognition across different types of intelligent systems. The findings could advance understanding of social disorders like autism, while simultaneously informing the development of socially-aware AI systems. This comes at a critical time when AI systems are increasingly integrated into social contexts, making understanding of social neural dynamics essential for both scientific and technological progress.

    What the study did

    A multidisciplinary team from UCLA’s departments of Neurobiology, Biological Chemistry, Bioengineering, Electrical and Computer Engineering, and Computer Science across the David Geffen School of Medicine and the Henry Samueli School of Engineering used advanced brain imaging techniques to record activity from molecularly defined neurons in the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex of mice during social interactions. Mice serve as an important model for understanding mammalian brain function because they share fundamental neural mechanisms with humans, particularly in brain regions involved in social behavior. The researchers developed a novel computational framework to identify high-dimensional “shared” and “unique” neural subspaces across interacting individuals. The team then trained artificial intelligence agents to interact socially and applied the same analytical framework to examine neural network patterns in AI systems that emerged during social versus non-social tasks.

    What they found

    The research revealed striking parallels between biological and artificial systems during social interaction. In both mice and AI systems, neural activity could be partitioned into two distinct components: a “shared neural subspace” containing synchronized patterns between interacting entities, and a “unique neural subspace” containing activity specific to each individual.

    Remarkably, GABAergic neurons—inhibitory brain cells that regulate neural activity—showed significantly larger shared neural spaces compared to glutamatergic neurons, the brain’s primary excitatory cells. This represents the first investigation of inter-brain neural dynamics in molecularly defined cell types, revealing previously unknown differences in how specific neuron types contribute to social synchronization.

    When the same framework was applied to AI agents, shared neural dynamics also emerged as artificial systems developed social interaction capabilities. Most importantly, when researchers selectively disrupted these shared neural components in artificial systems, social behaviors were substantially reduced, providing the direct evidence that synchronized neural patterns causally drive social interactions.

    The study also revealed that shared neural dynamics don’t simply reflect coordinated behaviors between individuals, but emerge from representations of each other’s unique behavioral actions during social interaction.

    What’s next

    The research team plans to further investigate shared neural dynamics in different and potentially more complex social interactions. They also aim to explore how disruptions in shared neural space might contribute to social disorders and whether therapeutic interventions could restore healthy patterns of inter-brain synchronization. The artificial intelligence framework may serve as a platform for testing hypotheses about social neural mechanisms that are difficult to examine directly in biological systems. They also aim to develop methods to train socially intelligent AI.

    From the experts

    “This discovery fundamentally changes how we think about social behavior across all intelligent systems,” said Weizhe Hong, Ph.D., professor of Neurobiology, Biological Chemistry, and Bioengineering at UCLA and lead author of the new work. “We’ve shown for the first time that the neural mechanisms driving social interaction are remarkably similar between biological brains and artificial intelligence systems. This suggests we’ve identified a fundamental principle of how any intelligent system—whether biological or artificial—processes social information. The implications are significant for both understanding human social disorders and developing AI that can truly understand and engage in social interactions.”

    About the study

    Inter-brain neural dynamics in biological and artificial intelligence systems, Nature 2025; DOI: 10.1038/s41586-025-09196-4.

    About the Research Team

    The study was led by Weizhe Hong and Jonathan C. Kao at UCLA. Co-first authors Xingjian Zhang and Nguyen Phi, along with collaborators Qin Li, Ryan Gorzek, Niklas Zwingenberger, Shan Huang, John L. Zhou, Lyle Kingsbury, Tara Raam, Ye Emily Wu, and Don Wei contributed to the research. The interdisciplinary team includes researchers from UCLA’s Department of Neurobiology, Department of Biological Chemistry, Department of Bioengineering, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, and Department of Computer Science. This work was supported in part by the NIH, NSF, Packard Foundation, Vallee Foundation, Mallinckrodt Foundation, and Brain and Behavior Research Foundation.

    /Public Release. This material from the originating organization/author(s) might be of the point-in-time nature, and edited for clarity, style and length. Mirage.News does not take institutional positions or sides, and all views, positions, and conclusions expressed herein are solely those of the author(s).View in full here.

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  • Weaving a tapestry of gravitational waves, with quasars as guides

    Weaving a tapestry of gravitational waves, with quasars as guides

    What is the significance of being able to identify and catalog a gravitational wave network? How would it benefit society?

    Chiara Mingarelli: Right now, we are combining traditional astronomy — which looks at the universe with radio waves, x-rays, optical waves, and more — with gravitational wave astronomy. It’s like we’ve discovered the fact that we have ears and can now hear the universe instead of just looking at it. Gravitational waves come straight from the source — merging supermassive black hole binaries — and aren’t affected by gas and dust on their way to the Earth. This makes them exceptionally clean probes of extreme physics, not accessible by any other means.

    It’s exciting to think about how this work will eventually benefit society. Einstein’s General Relativity gave us GPS [global positioning satellites] about 100 years later, and lasers, MRI, and Wi-Fi all came from scientists asking “why” before anyone knew “what for.” Plus, imagine 100 years ago telling people about GPS — could they even imagine what we mean? I can’t wait to see what the eventual applications of this work will be.

    How does your new study fit into NANOGrav’s overall work?

    Mingarelli: We believe there is a gravitational wave background that is composed of millions of slowly merging pairs of supermassive black holes. In 2023 we found evidence of this, and the next big thing is the detection of individual black hole pairs.

    In this paper, we predict that quasars are up to five times more likely than any other type of galaxy to host these pairs of black holes. We conclude that quasars should be the number one targets to search for pairs of merging supermassive black holes.

    Furthermore, my team of Yale graduate and undergraduate students and I are currently using the results of this paper to identify target galaxies that host supermassive black hole binaries. A paper with those results will likely come out by the end of the summer.

    What other aspects of the current study stand out?

    Mingarelli: This is the first study to statistically constrain the supermassive black hole binary population by combining the gravitational wave background measurement with quasar variability. It represents a novel approach to characterizing the binary population.

    If confirmed, even a small population of binary quasars could anchor our model of gravitational wave sources at low frequencies and pave the way for direct detections.

    Your approach hinges on the use of pulsar timing arrays. What makes pulsars an advantageous tool for locating black hole mergers?

    Mingarelli: Pulsar timing arrays monitor ultra-stable stars called pulsars, which emit signals that are, in effect, excellent clocks.

    Gravitational waves stretch and squeeze the fabric of space and time itself. When space/time is squeezed, pulsar pulses arrive early. When space/time is stretched, the pulses arrive late. The overall stretch and squash is about 1 part in a million billion — or the size of a virus divided by the diameter of the Earth. Very small!

    The fact that we can monitor these pulsars for years to decades, with amazing accuracy — within 100 nanoseconds — means that we can detect gravitational waves with intervals of years-to-decades. It makes pulsar arrays the perfect instruments to detect gravitational waves from supermassive black holes, since they create gravitational waves with such long periods.

    But without a list of targets, we can’t localize a pair of merging supermassive black holes to anything smaller than an error box big enough to contain thousands of galaxies.

    Beyond establishing the gravitational wave background network, what can we learn from the new study?

    Mingarelli: Constraining the demographics of supermassive black hole binaries is central to our understanding of galaxy evolution, black hole growth, as well as the gravitational wave background. This work provides a data-driven framework for identifying the host galaxies of supermassive black hole pairs and lays the foundations for future searches.

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  • Convexity Commonplace in Both Human and Machine Learning, Researchers Say — and Could Boost AI

    Convexity Commonplace in Both Human and Machine Learning, Researchers Say — and Could Boost AI

    Researchers from the Technical University of Denmark believe that artificial and natural intelligences may share more in common than we thought, at least in terms of the way they learn — thanks to a concept called “convexity.”

    “We’ve developed new tools to measure convexity within the complex latent spaces of deep neural networks,” explains first author Lenka Tětková of the team’s work. “We tested these measures across various AI models and data types: images, text, audio, human activity, and even medical data. And we found that the same geometric principle that helps humans form and share concepts — convexity — also shapes how machines learn, generalise, and align with us.”

    Researchers suggest that “convexity,” in which related ideas form shared conceptual spaces, may apply to both human and machine learning. (📷: Tětková et al)

    The concept of “convexity” in cognitive science was originally proposed by Peter Gärdenfors, and is based on the mathematical concept of the same name — but rather than applying to geometry is instead used to refer to the formation of “conceptual spaces,” or “convex regions,” where related ideas cluster together. It’s key to the way the human mind can generalize from a small number of examples — and may also apply to how machine learning and artificial intelligence (ML and AI) models are trained, too.

    “We found that convexity is surprisingly common in deep networks and might be a fundamental property that emerges naturally as machines learn,” says project lead Lars Kai Hansen. “Imagine that a concept, say, a cat, forms a nice, well-defined convex region in the machine before it’s even taught to identify cats specifically. Then it’s more likely to learn to identify cats accurately later on. We believe this is a powerful insight, because it suggests that convexity might be a useful indicator of a model’s potential for specific learning tasks.”

    By scoring models based on their convexity, it may be possible to better understand — and improve — AI models. (📷: Tětková et al)

    “By showing that AI models exhibit properties (like convexity) that are fundamental to human conceptual understanding,” Tětková continues, “we move closer to creating machines that ‘think’ in ways that are more comprehensible and aligned with our own. This is vital for building trust and collaboration between humans and machines in critical applications like healthcare, education, and public service. “While there’s still much to explore, the results suggest that the seemingly abstract idea of convexity may hold the key to unlocking new secrets on AI’s internal workings and bringing us closer to intelligent and human-aligned machines.”

    The team’s work, which was part of a Novo Nordisk Foundation-funded project dubbed “Cognitive Spaces — Next Generation Explainable AI,” has been published in the journal Nature Communications under open-access terms.

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  • The end of the Universe could come much sooner than expected

    The end of the Universe could come much sooner than expected

    Scientists have long predicted that the Universe’s lifetime is effectively forever – specifically, 101100 years.

    But scientists from Radboud University have found that the Universe is decaying much quicker than previously thought, calculating that the last remnants of stars will perish in just 1078 years instead.

    More mind-bending science

    Credit: Marck Garlick / Science Photo Library / Getty Images

    “The ultimate end of the Universe comes much sooner than expected, but fortunately it still takes a very long time,” says Heino Falcke, black hole expert and lead scientist on the research.

    The researchers arrived at this shorter timeframe by considering evaporation due to Hawking radiation.

    Credit: PixelParticle / Getty Images

    Hawking radiation and the end of the Universe

    Hawking radiation, proposed by Stephen Hawking in 1974, is a phenomenon where particles and radiation can escape from the immense gravitational pull of a black hole.

    If a black hole is emitting particles and radiation, it means that over time it will decay.

    Contentious among physicists, the theory implies a rare contradiction with Einstein’s theory of relativity, which suggests black holes can only grow. 

    The 1078 figure represents the time it would take for a white dwarf star to decay when considering the impact of Hawking radiation.

    White dwarfs are the dense, final evolution of stars that aren’t big enough to form black holes or neutron stars, and represent the most long-lived objects in the Universe.

    An illustration showing what generates Hawking radiation.
    An illustration showing what generates Hawking radiation. Credit: Getty Images

    What will the end of the Universe look like?

    But what does the end of the Universe look like?

    Its ultimate fate is still unclear to scientists, but can be boiled down to three main candidates: freeze, crunch or rip.

    The research by Falcke and his team fits into the Big Freeze picture: all the matter and energy in the Universe will eventually evaporate, spreading out into an endless, timeless void (or ‘heat death’).

    That’s hardly a cheering thought, but it’s one that shouldn’t give us too much to worry about; 1078 years is still vastly longer than the current age of the Universe from the Big Bang to today: 13.89 years. 

    The team hope to use this interdisciplinary study – which brought together mathematicians, quantum physicists and astrophysicists – to learn more about the Universe’s mysteries. 

    “By asking these kinds of questions and looking at extreme cases, we want to better understand the theory, and perhaps one day, we will unravel the mystery of Hawking radiation,” concludes Walter van Suijlekom, co-author of the study.

    When our current Universe ends, could we simply hop across to another? Credit: David Wall / Getty Images
    When our current Universe ends, could we simply hop across to another? Credit: David Wall / Getty Images

    A Universe reboot?

    Words: Chris Lintott

    Cheer up, there’s no need to let the sooner-than-expected decay of the last stellar remnants get you down!

    Even when the cosmos is no more than a sea of expanding radiation and particles, we’ll still get to witness the never-before-seen and incredibly rare process of proton decay play out.

    Only once the last proton goes pop will we reach the final state of the Universe.

    But, like an ageing movie franchise, the story might not be over.

    Some cosmologists believe our Universe might produce daughter universes.

    So instead of being stuck in this decaying cosmos, we can jump across to a reboot and experience the exciting first 25 billion years or so again and again and again.

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  • Chemistry Breakthrough: Safer, Effective Cancer Drugs

    Chemistry Breakthrough: Safer, Effective Cancer Drugs

    Chemists have discovered for the first time a unique way to control and modify a type of compound widely used in medicines, including a drug used to treat breast cancer.

    The research, led by the University of Bristol and published today in the journal Nature, also found a new mechanism associated with the chemical reaction which enables the shape of the compound to be flipped from being right-handed to left-handed by simply adding a common agent in the chemical reaction.

    Study lead author Varinder Aggarwal, Professor of Synthetic Chemistry at the University of Bristol, said: “The findings change our understanding of the fundamental chemistry of this group of organic molecules. It presents exciting implications because the science allows us to make alternatives of the drug Tamoxifen, with potentially greater potency and less unwanted side effects.”

    While most alkenes are easy to prepare, a specific type with four different parts – called tetrasubstituted alkenes – are much more challenging but used to make cancer-fighting medicines and natural products like essential oils.

    So the research team aimed to find a more efficient method of making tetrasubstituted alkenes, including Tamoxifen, which allows them to be easily manipulated and adapted into different forms.

    The new method offers a highly versatile solution to building complex complex tetrasubstituted alkenes from simple building blocks.

    Prof Aggarwal explained: “Our original design plan used organic boronic esters as the key ingredient but that resulted in unstable intermediates, so didn’t work.

    “We then tried a less common form of boron containing molecules, namely boranes and that’s when the clever molecular gymnastics became possible. This new boron system enabled the installation of different groups on the alkene in a controlled manner from very simple building blocks, like Lego.

    “It’s so exciting because it holds the key to finding even better drug molecules – like alternatives to Tamoxifen – with more of the properties you want and less of what is undesirable, such as side effects.”

    The scientists enlisted the help of computational chemists at Colorado State University to map exactly what was happening. That led to the full extent of their discovery being uncovered.

    Co-author Robert Paton, Professor in Chemistry at Colorado State University, said: “The mechanism showed that by just changing the reaction conditions through adding an agent, the geometry of the alkene can switch direction from left to right. This was surprising and hadn’t been seen before.”

    In addition to drug molecules like Tamoxifen, the researchers also worked with natural products such as γ-bisabolene, a fragrant compound found in essential oils, to demonstrate the broad applications of their breakthrough.

    Prof Aggarwal added: “Now we have struck upon an effective, flexible methodology, it allows us to swap in other molecules so the potential here is wide-reaching for both drug discovery and materials science.”

    The research was funded by the UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC).

    Paper

    ‘Boron-Mediated Modular Assembly of Tetrasubstituted Alkenes’ by Varinder Aggarwal et al in Nature

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  • Swiss space telescope CHEOPS discovers ‘suicidal planet’

    Swiss space telescope CHEOPS discovers ‘suicidal planet’


    This appears to be the first evidence of a suicidal planet.

    Keystone-SDA




    Generated with artificial intelligence.

    Thanks to the Swiss space telescope CHEOPS, astronomers have discovered a “suicidal” planet. Named HIP 67522 b, this exoplanet triggers solar flares so powerful that they literally blow away its atmosphere, causing it to shrink.


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    According to the European Space Agency (ESA), this planet could shrink from the size of Jupiter to that of Neptune over the next 100 million years. This is the first evidence of a “suicidal” planet, according to this work published Wednesday in the journal Nature.

    Such eruptions can also occur on our star, the Sun, when its magnetic field twists. Large quantities of radiation and charged particles are then projected into space. When these particles encounter the Earth’s magnetic field and atmosphere, they can produce the aurora borealis.

    A very young star

    But scientists have now shown for the first time that a planet can trigger such eruptions. Since the 1990s, astronomers have speculated that certain planets could orbit so close to their parent star that they could disrupt its magnetic field, triggering flares.

    The planet HIP 67522 b offered the perfect conditions for this: it is very close to its star. It takes just seven days to circle it.

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    Model of the CHEOPS space telescope

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    How a special telescope learns about new planets




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    The Swiss-led CHEOPS space telescope observes bright stars known to host planets.


    Read more: How a special telescope learns about new planets

    What’s more, the star around which it orbits is very young, just 17 million years old. By comparison, our Sun, 4.5 billion years old, is some 265 times older. The younger a star is, the more energy and magnetic activity it possesses.

    Although such effects were assumed in theory, current observations have surprised scientists: according to ESA, the flares observed during this research are 100 times more energetic than expected. The authors now plan to observe other similar star-planet systems to determine whether this behavior is more frequent.

    This research was carried out as part of CHEOPS’ Guest Observers program. Scientists outside the Cheops team were given time to make their own observations with the telescope.

    Translated from German by DeepL/jdp

    We select the most relevant news for an international audience and use automatic translation tools to translate them into English. A journalist then reviews the translation for clarity and accuracy before publication.  

    Providing you with automatically translated news gives us the time to write more in-depth articles. The news stories we select have been written and carefully fact-checked by an external editorial team from news agencies such as Bloomberg or Keystone.

    If you have any questions about how we work, write to us at english@swissinfo.ch

    Record temperature rise in Swiss lakes

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    Swiss lakes reach record high temperatures




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    Swiss lakes hit record high temperatures due to a heatwave, impacting wildlife and water quality.


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    containers

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    Switzerland and EFTA sign trade deal with Mercosur




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    Switzerland and EFTA sign a free trade deal with Mercosur, offering customs savings up to CHF160 million.


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    Global confrontation has an impact on Switzerland

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    Intelligence report finds Switzerland remains target for spies




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    Swiss report warns of rising espionage and online radicalisation threats.


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    Basel Zoo announces offspring of endangered bird species

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    Basel Zoo announces offspring of endangered bird species




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    Basel Zoo is celebrating successful breeding of endangered bird species, aiding conservation.


    Read more: Basel Zoo announces offspring of endangered bird species

    Climate change increases earthquake risk on the Mont Blanc massif

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    Study finds climate change increases earthquake risk on Mont Blanc




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    Climate change has sharply increased earthquake risk on the Mont Blanc massif according to a new study.


    Read more: Study finds climate change increases earthquake risk on Mont Blanc

    Sandoz invests $440 million in Slovenia

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    Swiss pharma firm Sandoz invests $440 million in Slovenia




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    Sandoz is investing $440 million in Slovenia for new biosimilar centers, aiming to tap into a rapidly growing market.


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    The celebration of the women's Europeans begins

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    Switzerland kicks off women’s football EURO with multi-city celebration




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    Switzerland launches the women’s football EURO with celebrations in multiple cities.


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    woman in lab

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    Swiss firm BioVersys signs deal with Shionogi for antibiotics research




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    Swiss firm BioVersys and Japanese firm Shionogi have joined forces on antibiotic research.


    Read more: Swiss firm BioVersys signs deal with Shionogi for antibiotics research

    humanitarian aid

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    Swiss government orders end to Gaza Humanitarian Foundation in Geneva




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    Swiss authorities dissolve US-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation in Geneva.


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    Federal government completely revises pandemic plan due to Covid-19

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    Swiss government completely revises pandemic plan due to Covid-19




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    The Swiss government has completely revised the pandemic plan based on its experience with the coronavirus.


    Read more: Swiss government completely revises pandemic plan due to Covid-19

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