Category: 7. Science

Asia In Brief Japan’s National Astronomical Observatory last week announced the discovery of a small body with an orbit beyond Pluto’s, and scientists think its presence means the “Planet 9” theory should be revisited.

The Observatory named the body 2023 KQ₁₄ and explained its FOSSIL (Formation of the Outer Solar System: An Icy Legacy) project spotted it during 2023 using the 8.2 meter Subaru Telescope it operates on Mauna Kea in Hawaii.

Follow-up observations in July 2024 with the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope, plus exploration of data from other sources, allowed scientists to track its orbit over 19 years and to classify it as a “Sednoid”. Readers may find that name familiar as it describes objects that, like the dwarf planet Sedna, circulate in elongated elliptic orbits that never come closer to the Sun than the planet Neptune.

The Observatory’s Dr. Yukun Huang said the discovery of this object has implications for the theory our solar system includes distant “Planet 9” that orbits well beyond Pluto and whose gravity influences bodies in the Kuiper Belt and the even more distant Oort Cloud. “The fact that 2023 KQ₁₄’s current orbit does not align with those of the other three sednoids lowers the likelihood of the Planet Nine hypothesis. It is possible that a planet once existed in the Solar System but was later ejected, causing the unusual orbits we see today.”

“The presence of objects with elongated orbits and large perihelion distances in this area implies that something extraordinary occurred during the ancient era when 2023 KQ₁₄ formed, said Dr Fumi Yoshida of the Chiba Institute of Technology, one of the scientists credited in a paper about the discovery.

The International Astronomical Union will name the object. For now, scientists have given it the nickname “Ammonite”.

Australian billionaire’s political party suffers data breach, won’t contact victims

Australian political party Trumpet of Patriots last week revealed a ransomware attack on its servers caused a data breach, but “determined it is impracticable to notify individuals” impacted by the incident.

The party said the incident saw attackers gain “access to, and the possible exfiltration of” data including email address, phone number, identity records, banking records, employment history, documents (including those provided subject to confidentiality arrangements) and the like.”

The party recommended anyone who feels they may be caught up in the breach “carefully consider whether you need to take any action in response to the data breach on the assumption that the hackers may have accessed your data” and “follow general precautionary steps and remain vigilant about the misuse of your personal information.”

Mining billionaire Clive Palmer is the principal backer of Trumpet of Patriots, which was once called the United Australia Party but was unable to use the latter name after failing to register it properly before Australia’s May election. Palmer is thought to have spent AU$60 million ($39 million) on the election, after spending around double that ahead of Australia’s 2022 vote. His parties won a single senate seat in 2022, and no seats this year.

The party won over 900,000 votes at the election. If even ten percent of those voters shared data with the party, this is a significant breach.

Perplexity accesses 360 million customers in India

India mobile carrier Bharti Airtel last week announced free accounts with Perplexity AI for its 360 million customers, all of whom will gain access to the $20/month Perplexity Pro plan which allows 500 daily deep research queries and unlimited multi-step reasoning searches.

Only Bharti Airtel’s most expensive ₹1749/month ($20.50) plan costs more than the Perplexity subscription.

New Japan-Singapore sub cable

Japanese tech giant NEC last week announced it will build a new submarine cable linking Japan and Singapore, for clients including Amazon Web Services, Microsoft, ARTERIA Networks, Chunghwa Telecom, DREAMLINE, Globe Telecom, Telekom Malaysia and Unified National Networks.

The “AUG East” cable will include branches to Brunei, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, South Korea and Taiwan. None of the parties involved revealed the capacity of the cable, but NEC assured it will use “a high-count fibre pair system delivering unprecedented bandwidth capacity, enabling support for millions of simultaneous ultra high-definition video streams.”

Grab Grabs Istio instead of Consul

Singaporean superapp Grab last week revealed it has replaced its service mesh based on Hashi Corp’s Consul with an implementation of the open source Istio.

Grab explained that its Consul implementation meant a single server issue “could trigger a fleet-wide impact, affecting critical services like food delivery and ride-hailing. Istio’s strong Kubernetes integration and native support, plus active community backing, gave the company confidence it could rebuild its service mesh quickly and with rich services that its unique operations require.

News of the change is bittersweet for IBM, which helped to create Istio but acquired Hashi Corp.

Huawei back on top of China’s mobile market

Analyst firm IDC last week reported Huawei has again become China’s top manufacturer of mobile phones.

Huawei held the crown in the late 2010s and early 2020s, before US sanctions and the sale of its midrange handset brand Honor saw it slide down the charts.

The company has since bounced back with surprisingly powerful phones and even a model with three folding display panels.

According to IDC, Huawei shipped 12.5 million handsets into China during calendar Q2, giving it 18 percent market share ahead of Vivo, OPPO, Xiaomi, and Apple (respectively 11.9, 10.7, 10.4, and 9.6 percent).

Huawei took the lead despite its shipments slipping 3.4 percent year over year. China’s smartphone market declined four percent year over year, with Apple’s 1.3 percent dip the least bad result among the top five handset vendors. ®

Weather permitting, SpaceX will launch two O3b mPOWER satellites today (July 21st) for SES.

The Boeing-built satellites are number 9 and 10 in the mPOWER fleet.

SpaceX is using a ‘flight proven’ booster stage which will be the sixth flight for the rocket.

The O3b satellites are high-throughput and very adaptable craft which feature Boeing’s fully software-defined payload technology to actively allot power to meet user needs.

“The O3b mPOWER spacecraft are the most capable and flexible commercial satellites to ever operate in space,” said Michelle Parker, VP/Boeing Space Mission Systems. “Many of us have tried to connect from an airplane or cruise ship and found the connection unreliable. Our software-defined payload technology allows SES to deliver high-speed, reliable connectivity, adapting in real-time to user demand. It’s a game changer, and the first eight satellites are showing users just how incredible this technology is.”

The O3b mPOWER system, SES’s second-generation constellation operating in medium Earth orbit (MEO, approximately 8,000 km from Earth’s surface), is designed to transform industries with terabit-level capacity, low latency, and unmatched service availability. These two spacecraft will join the first eight satellites already on orbit.

 

On July 7, ESA, the European Space Agency, successfully established Europe’s first deep-space optical communication link with NASA’s Psyche mission using a high-power fiber laser system from NKT Photonics. This groundbreaking achievement, conducted with NASA/JPL’s Deep Space Optical Communications (DSOC) demonstrator, marks a significant leap forward in high-data-rate communication across vast interplanetary distances.

This achievement was the result of collaboration between ESA, NASA/JPL, and a consortium of leading European companies including NKT Photonics. The major technical challenges that were addressed were to create a laser with enough power to be detected at extremely large distances, a pointing system with enough precision to aim accurately at the spacecraft an equally precise receiver system sensitive enough to detect the extremely faint return signals.

In collaboration with Swiss General Atomics Synopta, NKT Photonics supplied the multi-beam high-power fiber laser system, and the beam transmit system. The laser system emits a narrow-linewidth, modulated signal so that the distant spacecraft can precisely locate the ground station and lock onto it, establishing an optical link for high-speed data downlink. Located at the Kryoneri Observatory in Greece, the transmitter generates a multi-kilowatt beam capable of detection by the DSOC flight transceiver onboard the Psyche spacecraft, currently 265 million kilometers away, enroute to the metal-rich 16 Psyche asteroid.

The beam transmit system’s precision allows it to point with arcsecond precision to the spacecraft, enabling both a beacon for accurate downlink and the potential to uplink data,  providing a glimpse into the future of deep space communication.

“We are immensely proud to be part of this transformative project”, said Mike Yarrow, Senior Engineering Manager at NKT Photonics. “Our expertise in fiber laser technology has allowed us to contribute to a system that pushes the boundaries of what’s possible in free space optical communications. It doesn’t get more challenging or more awe inspiring than deep-space optical comms. This project not only showcases our ability to deliver unprecedented power and precision to meet our customers’ stringent requirements but also reinforces our commitment to forging successful collaborations and advancing knowledge to benefit society as a whole.”

This milestone is a testament to the power of international collaboration and technological innovation. As we celebrate this achievement, NKT Photonics remain dedicated to growing their experience and driving advancements that contribute to global scientific progress and inspire the next generation of exploration.

The technology developed for this project sets a new standard for future deep-space missions, particularly those to Mars and beyond, where high-speed, secure data transfer is essential. By participating in this part of the Psyche mission, NKT Photonics continues to expand their expertise in optical technologies, fostering innovations that have far-reaching applications across multiple sectors.

Getty Images

Emily Coady-Stemp/BBC

University of Surrey

Back to Article List

Though it’s dimmest at eastern elongation, Iapetus may be visible this morning. Give it a try and enjoy Saturn’s brighter moons as well.

Saturn’s tidally locked, two-toned moon Iapetus reaches eastern elongation today, standing a full 9′ east of Saturn. The moon appears faintest at eastern elongation, when its darker hemisphere is turned toward us and it glows a faint 12th magnitude. However, without our Moon lighting the early-morning sky, you might try to spot faint Iapetus — along with several other members of Saturn’s brood. 

Try around 4 A.M. local daylight time, as Saturn is heading toward its highest point in the sky but the background remains dark. At this time, Saturn is some 40° high in the south, near the Circlet of Pisces. The planet is the brightest point of light in the sky there, making it easy to find and center in your scope. Through the eyepiece, you’ll see that Saturn’s disk spans 18.5”, while its rings stretch nearly 43” from end to end. 

About 2.5’ to Saturn’s west, you’ll see its brightest moon, mid-8th-magnitude Titan. Iapetus sits more than three times this distance to Saturn’s east, and glows some four magnitudes fainter. Closer to the planet are 10th-magnitude Rhea, Tethys, and Dione; Rhea is just east of the edge of the rings, while Tethys and Dione are west of them, with the former closer to the planet than the latter.

Sunrise: 5:49 A.M.
Sunset: 8:23 P.M.
Moonrise: 2:02 A.M.
Moonset: 6:11 P.M.
Moon Phase: Waning crescent (12%)
*Times for sunrise, sunset, moonrise, and moonset are given in local time from 40° N 90° W. The Moon’s illumination is given at 12 P.M. local time from the same location.

For a look ahead at more upcoming sky events, check out our full Sky This Week column. 

Start watching for the Delta Aquariids meteor shower this week. The chart shows the view looking south-east from London at midnight on 28 July. The radiate is marked. This is the point from which the meteors appear to radiate in all directions.

Most annual meteor showers have a well-defined peak of activity, but the Delta Aquariids are a more drawn-out affair. Although the predictions place the peak somewhere between 28 and 30 July, the activity can be just as strong leading up to and after the moment.

The moon will have set by midnight, meaning that even faint meteors will be visible. The maximum hourly rate lies in the 15-to-20 range, but these meteors are known to sometimes leave persistent trails in the sky that can be seen for minutes after the bright flash of the shooting star has passed.

Generated from dust that was once in the tail of comet 96P/Machholz, the Delta Aquariids are just one meteor shower that it could have generated. The Arietids, a rare daytime meteor shower, may also have come from the same comet.

The Delta Aquariids are more favourably placed in the southern hemisphere’s skies, but observers in both hemispheres can enjoy the event.

Asteroid 2025 OS passed Earth this weekend

Astronomers detected an asteroid passing close to Earth on July 19, 2025. The discovery was made using a 20″ (0.5 meter) telescope at the Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System (ATLAS) station in Chile.

Astronomers say the asteroid was traveling at a speed of 28,409 miles per hour (45,720 km/h), or 7.9 miles per second (12.70 km/sec), relative to Earth.

After analyzing the space rock trajectory, scientists realized the asteroid was closest to Earth a few hours earlier, at around 11:20 pm ET on Friday 18, 2025. At closest approach, it passed 2,534 miles (4,078 km) from Earth. That’s extremely close, considering Earth’s diameter is about 7,926 miles (12,760 kilometers).

It was designated as asteroid 2025 OS by the Minor Planet Center.

At closest approach

According to NASA/JPL, the asteroid passed just southeast of Australia during its closest approach to Earth around 11:20 pm ET on Friday 18, 2025.

Fortunately, it posed no danger to Earth. Asteroid 2025 OS is a small asteroid with an estimated size between 8.85 to 19.7 ft (2.7 and 6.0 meters) in diameter.

If asteroid 2025 OS had entered our atmosphere, most of it would have disintegrated as a spectacular meteor.

Generally, small asteroids are difficult to detect. On the other hand, larger asteroids reflect more sunlight, so they are easier to detect.

Bottom line: Astronomers discovered asteroid 2025 OS on July 19, 2025. It passed closest to Earth on July 18. It is a small asteroid, so it posed no danger to Earth.

Via IAU Minor Planet Center

Read more: Calculating whether an asteroid might hit Earth

Read more: We’re getting better at seeing asteroids that may hit Earth

Among cartoon supervillains, Krang, the slimy nemesis of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, is a favorite of neuroscientists. After a vague accident, Krang is stripped of his body and reduced to a brain in a vat of cerebrospinal fluid. Lacking physical agency, Krang appeals to his fellow supervillain, the Shredder, to construct a new brain-machine interface and bipedal robotic skeleton. This freshly re-embodied android Krang teams up with the Shredder to take on the Ninja Turtles and conquer the Earth.

Like the visionary writers of the Ninja Turtles, neuroscientists often make the abstraction that a brain can exist in isolation from the body. They model the brain as a computational machine that exists in a realm of pure thought, receiving inputs and sending outputs as abstract information streams. Yet this “brain in a jar” worldview neglects a simple fact: Brains and nervous systems evolved jointly with the bodies they inhabit.

Indeed, coordinating body movement is the ultimate point of brain function. The brain is not connected to the external world, except through the body. It receives no sensory inputs except those transduced through the sensory organs, and it can enact no consequences except through muscles and other actuators. Thus, the biomechanical features and constraints of the body are built into the function of the brain. How animals move also determines how they gather new sensory information. Ultimately, Krang needed a robotic body to manifest his evil deeds. The cartoon spent little time elaborating on how a bipedal artificial body was tuned to be controlled by Krang’s reptilian brain, but some intense engineering (or millions of years of evolution) must have happened behind the scenes.

Embodiment, then, is the concept that the function of the brain is inexorably shaped by the body. Although it is not a new idea in neuroscience, the embodiment lens is often neglected when neuroscientists study specific brain subsystems, particularly higher-order “cognitive” functions. Fortunately, in the growing field of NeuroAI, embodiment is now garnering greater attention. In 2023, for example, Anthony Zador and his collaborators proposed an embodied Turing test, and the 2024 National Institutes of Health BRAIN NeuroAI Workshop featured embodiment as a central theme.

Here, we discuss three key features of embodied intelligence that are characteristic of animal brains: feedback, biomechanics and modularity. We argue that embracing these three features will benefit computational models of real brain function, as well as the design of artificial neural networks that move beyond large-scale word salad generation to efficiently accomplish real-world tasks.

F

irst, feedback is a ubiquitous characteristic of biological neural networks. Feedforward models in which information flows in only one direction, such as from the retina to the lateral geniculate nucleus to the primary visual cortex, are popular because they are easy to interpret. But they are valid only in very narrow contexts and more typically are mere fantasies or wishful thinking; for example, a vast majority of lateral geniculate nucleus inputs are not from the retina, and these inputs include significant feedback from the primary visual cortex. Biological systems almost always rely on constant and multiscale feedback: Animals interact with fluctuating physical environments, neural circuits rely heavily on recurrent connections, interlinked organs adjust their function based on feedback from other organs, and cells modify themselves through gene regulatory feedback mechanisms. The view of the brain as a passive computational engine that tries to understand (i.e., to form “representations” of) the world denies the essential agency of animals to act and to have an impact on the external world.

Second, biomechanical features of each specific body are essential to understand the function of the neural system within it. Consider, for instance, this video of a trout; its body undulates in the current and then surges upstream toward a small rock. What appears to be a dexterous natural behavior is, in fact, executed by a recently dead fish. So this “behavior” requires no neural activity and arises entirely from the interaction between the vortices shedding from the rock and the biomechanics of the fish body. Some neuroscientists might find this distressing. But our more optimistic view is that harnessing the mechanical intelligence of the body can simplify the demands of nonlinear neural control.

Third, brains are highly modular. Even as we advocate for an integrative approach, there is undeniable value in deeply characterizing specific parts of the brain and musculoskeletal systems in isolation. But these modules eventually need to be stitched together. Another way of thinking about modularity is in terms of bottlenecks. In the retina, for instance, retinal ganglion cells are the only cells that send outputs to the rest of the image-forming visual system, and motor-control circuits all converge onto the final common output of motor neurons that synapse onto muscles. Such bottlenecks define modules, making it possible to develop computational models of each module that nevertheless interface with one another and from which emerges the holistic behavior of the virtual animal. Importantly, models of different subsystems can be made at different resolutions and learned from different data.

Embracing these three features can help neuroscientists frame research from an embodied perspective, but there is still a chasm between the aspiration to study an embodied brain and how to implement it in practice. After all, neural dynamics are complicated enough; do we now have to model nonlinear musculoskeletal dynamics as well? And how urgent is it to integrate a model of the bladder with a model of the striatum? Choices must be made. Fortunately, a convergence of comprehensive biological datasets and artificial-intelligence approaches makes these choices slightly easier. Scientists are developing (and sharing) biomechanically realistic full-body models of animals, including rats, mice and flies. Currently, most of the published models are still quite basic—essentially, skeletons of the body—but many collaborative groups, ourselves included, are working to add biologically realistic muscles and sensors.

W

hat makes this emerging zoo of virtual animals distinct from previous generations of biomechanical models is their compatibility with models of the brain. We can think of the brain models as “controllers” that plan and execute behavior while responding to sensory stimuli from the environment. Currently, a prevailing software platform for simulating virtual animals is MuJoCo, a physics engine that simulates the biomechanics of skeletons, muscles and tendons. Because MuJoCo was developed in part to facilitate research in robotics, its core capabilities include handling advanced contact forces of dynamic body parts with an environment and learning controllers to coordinate desired body movements. A JAX-accelerated implementation called MuJoCo-MJX now makes training whole-body virtual animals tractable for researchers with access to GPU computing.

Even so, some future features would be welcome additions to this or another neuro-physical simulation platform. A flexible interface to model and fine-tune networks of neurons with recurrent architecture in a closed loop with the biomechanics would accelerate the development of fully integrated neuromechanical models. The ability to rapidly simulate non-rigid biomechanics, such as fluid-structure interactions, deformable skeletal elements and muscle actuators that slide past each other, would further expand the ability to ask questions at the interface of neural function, musculoskeletal dynamics and natural behavior.

The prospect of developing a fully integrated neuromechanical model is perhaps closest to fruition for the adult fruit fly, Drosophila. The recent completion of comprehensive synaptic wiring diagrams, known as connectomes, of the fly brain and ventral nerve cord means it is now tractable to hook up computational models of neural dynamics at the resolution of cells and synapses to whole-animal biomechanics. Such embodied models will open the door to in silico experiments that are currently not feasible in real animals, complementing existing genetics and behavioral tools. As an example, consider the sensorimotor control of robust walking. From more than a century of intense study, we know that nerve-cord circuits can generate rhythmic motor patterns autonomously, yet when the walking animal encounters a perturbation, such as uneven terrain, it must integrate feedback from sensory neurons with feedforward commands to adjust, recover and maintain walking. In silico experiments that ask how neural dynamics of recurrent circuits couple with biomechanical consequences in a virtual walking fly, complete with interactions with an unpredictable physical environment, will help untangle these dual functions.

An embodiment lens could also help shape a rapidly emerging area of NeuroAI to develop foundation models of animal brains and behaviors. The idea behind foundation models is to gather a large corpus of neural and video recordings of animals in a variety of contexts and then train neural-network models to predict neural activity and behavior in response to any arbitrary input. If such efforts are to provide any insight into biology, we argue that they must carefully consider each animal’s body, not just tracked key points on the body and other aggregate measures of behavior. An artificial neural network might learn to control swimming, but how it accomplishes this could be completely different from how the fish’s brain does it, if even a dead fish can surge upstream in a current. After all, the brain does not directly control positions of knees, elbows and shoulders; it controls muscles, which generate forces to move bodies and manifest behavior.

The convergence of software tools, open datasets and a culture of collaborative science makes it an auspicious time to pursue embodiment in NeuroAI. We stand to gain a deeper understanding of how the nervous system controls behavior and a more ethological perspective on AI—one in which the brain sits not in a jar but inside the body that it evolved to sense and control. As Master Splinter, the martial arts instructor and adoptive father of the Ninja Turtles, once wisely stated, “A creative mind must be balanced by a disciplined body.”