Far beneath the Pacific, where the Philippine Sea Plate dives under Japan, researchers have finally caught a peculiar kind of earthquake in the act.
Instead of lurching violently, the shallow end of the Nankai Trough crept for weeks, shifting only millimeters at a time while instruments buried in the seabed recorded every move.
“It’s like a ripple moving across the plate interface,” said Josh Edgington, who analyzed the data while completing his PhD at the University of Texas Institute for Geophysics (UTIG).
The event – technically a slow-slip earthquake – was first spotted in autumn 2015 and repeated in 2020. Each episode unzipped roughly 20 miles of the fault in slow motion, starting about 30 miles off Japan’s Kii Peninsula and migrating seaward toward the ocean trench.
Onshore seismometers and GPS receivers were oblivious. Only a new network of borehole observatories, drilled hundreds of feet into the seabed, was sensitive enough to detect motion so subtle.
Detecting earthquakes from below
Those boreholes are part of Japan’s ambitious scientific-drilling program, which set out to plug the blind spot in global earthquake monitoring.
Land-based arrays can pinpoint sudden jolts but cannot “listen” to the shallows of subduction zones – precisely the places where tsunami-spawning ruptures begin. Installed sensors measure fluid pressure, strain and tilt with exquisite precision, allowing scientists to see how strain accumulates and releases in real time.
For UTIG director Demian Saffer, who led the study, the advantage is obvious. Slow-slip signals, he said, give researchers a direct view of how the shallow plate boundary behaves between major quakes.
If this creeping zone regularly releases stress, it could limit the size of future tsunamis. If not, the locked portion of the fault farther down-dip might still be primed for a magnitude-8 or 9 shock, similar to 1946, when a great Nankai earthquake leveled towns and killed more than 1,300 people.
Water helps faults slip
Both slow-slip events tracked by the borehole array unfolded in regions where pore-fluid pressures are unusually high.
That correlation supports a popular but difficult-to-prove theory: overpressured fluids lubricate faults, allowing sections to move quietly rather than break catastrophically.
In the Nankai data, the link is as clear as it has ever been, offering a new metric for judging the tsunami potential of similar faults worldwide.
Tsunami signs from afar
While parts of Nankai appear to “creak and groan” in slow motion, the equivalent shallow segment off the Pacific Northwest known as Cascadia may be silent.
That worries scientists, because a silent, locked interface stores energy that can unleash one of Earth’s rare magnitude-9 megathrusts and the devastating tsunamis that follow.
“This is a place that we know has hosted magnitude 9 earthquakes and can spawn deadly tsunamis,” Saffer said.
“Are there creaks and groans that indicate the release of accumulated strain, or is fault near the trench deadly silent? Cascadia is a clear top-priority area for the kind of high-precision monitoring approach that we’ve demonstrated is so valuable at Nankai.”
Installing similar borehole observatories along Cascadia, Chile, and Indonesia – other corners of the Pacific “Ring of Fire” – could reveal whether those margins harbor their own stealthy slow quakes or remain locked tight to the trench.
The answer would refine tsunami-hazard forecasts and perhaps buy coastal communities critical minutes of warning.
Creeping fault limits big earthquakes
Taken together, the 2015 and 2020 Nankai slow-slip episodes suggest the shallow fault functions more like a tectonic shock absorber than a ticking bomb. By periodically releasing energy, it might reduce how much strain transfers to deeper, more dangerous segments.
Yet the scientists caution against complacency. The deeper Nankai interface and neighboring segments could still fail suddenly, as history shows.
For now, geophysicists are analyzing the rich new dataset to model how fluids, temperature, and rock composition govern the transition from silent creep to violent rupture.
Each slow-slip event is another frame in an expanding time-lapse of the earthquake cycle – one that could eventually reveal when the next big snap is likely to occur.
Hearing earthquakes before they roar
Catch a fault in the middle of a slow-motion glide and you learn a simple truth: not every earthquake shouts. Some only whisper, rippling quietly through kilometres of rock.
By wiring the seabed for sound, scientists have begun to hear those whispers and, with them, the hidden conversations that decide when Earth decides to roar.
The study is published in the journal Science.
Image Credit: Japan Meteorological Agency
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The long-term stability of our solar system may be far more fragile than previously thought, according to a groundbreaking new study that was published in the journal Icarus. This is because passing stars have a subtle but significant impact.
While earlier simulations treated the solar system as an isolated system, researchers have now modeled thousands of scenarios where field stars (stars drifting through the galaxy) pass near our Sun over the next 5 billion years.
The results are startling. These stellar flybys could significantly alter the orbits of planets, increasing the risk of collisions or even ejections from the solar system.
The study found that the strongest stellar encounter in each simulation played a dominant role in shaping the outcome. Because the strength of such encounters is hard to predict, the potential impact varies widely, but in many cases, it’s dramatic.
The study suggests:
Pluto, once considered stable, now shows a 5% chance of instability due to stellar encounters.
Mercury’s risk of orbital disruption rises by 50–80%.
There’s a 0.3% chance Mars could be lost through collision or ejection, and a 0.2% chance for Earth to suffer the same fate.
Astronomers may have just discovered our Sun’s long-lost sibling
These risks are significantly higher than those predicted by isolated models. The study also demonstrates that instabilities from passing stars are more likely to involve multiple planets and occur sooner, within the next 4 to 4.5 billion years.
The findings underscore the importance of considering the Sun’s galactic environment when predicting the future of our planetary neighborhood. As stars continue to drift through the Milky Way, their gravitational nudges may quietly reshape the fate of our solar system.
Authors noted, “Our simulations indicate that stellar passage effects typically scale with the impulse gradient of the most powerful stellar encounter that the solar system experiences, and they alter the future evolution of the solar system in a number of significant ways.”
Journal Reference:
Nathan A. Kaib, Sean N. Raymond et al. The influence of passing field stars on the solar system’s dynamical future. Icarus. DOI: 10.1016/j.icarus.2025.116632
Newswise — COLUMBUS, Ohio – As glaciers retreat due to a rise in global temperatures, one study shows detailed 3D elevation models could drastically improve predictions about how they react to Earth’s warming climate.
While only 10% of Earth is covered in glacial ice, these masses have far-reaching impacts on all the world’s ecosystems. Rapid melting can trigger natural disasters, and glaciers help to regulate the planet’s temperature and sea level and are sources of pristine fresh drinking water.
To better differentiate between seasonal ice loss and that caused by long-term climate trends, researchers studied the fluctuating heights of three glaciers: the La Perouse Glacier in North America, the Viedma Glacier in South America and the Skamri Glacier located in Central Asia.
Their analysis revealed that between 2019 and 2023, the Viedma Glacier (Argentina) and the La Perouse Glacier (Alaska) experienced consistent thinning, but the Skamri Glacier (Pakistan) had been stable enough to experience a small net gain of ice, said Rongjun Qin, co-author of the study and an associate professor of civil, environmental and geodetic engineering at The Ohio State University.
Measurements in this study were made using daily high-resolution images gathered by the PlanetScope satellite constellation, which researchers then used to create 3D reconstructions of how glacial ice flows evolved over time. By incorporating local and global climate data into these models to explore seasonal variations of glacier melt, the team essentially designed a way to monitor the behavior of glaciers across diverse regions.
“This is something that we’ve been thinking about for a long time, because existing glacier studies have such sparse seasonal observations since it’s difficult to get data out of remote areas,” said Qin, who is also a core faculty member of Ohio State’s Translational Data Analytics Institute. “What we wanted to do is to use medium-to-high resolution data to broaden those capabilities and improve the accuracy of the 3D models generated from that data.”
The study was recently published in the journal GIScience & Remote Sensing.
According to the study, while many modern 2D tracking techniques can provide valuable insights into glacier flow, previous studies tend to capture only short-term snapshots or else offer observations without in-depth motion analysis or high-resolution 3D data. This team’s work may help scientists keep better track of seasonal climate issues like glacier melt and expand long-term observations of these masses, and their 3D model method also reveals new data about how quickly the glaciers react to changes in the weather.
The Viedma and Skamri Glaciers, for example, exhibit a 45-day lag time in response to changes in local climate conditions like rain or snow. The La Perouse Glacier, however, was shown to react to changes almost immediately, meaning that its flow can very quickly become faster or slower based on how much precipitation it has accumulated.
In another finding, researchers concluded that behavior differences in all three are driven by distinct environmental and climatic conditions, but suggest that both local and global factors, rather than any single one, are responsible for patterns in glacier motion dynamics worldwide.
Such observations are vital to deepening our global understanding of glacier science, and with further improvements, this study’s algorithm could also be a useful tool for future disaster prediction and management, said Qin. Already, scientists have used similar systems to warn communities of natural disasters that would have led to tragedy.
In all, researchers hope that supporting modeling works like this one will inspire more scientists to utilize satellite data to investigate other types of important environmental research questions.
“Hopefully we can build on all sorts of applications that people are interested in with this,” said Qin.
Shengxi Gui of Ohio State was a co-author. This work’s data was provided by PlanetScope.
In this immense image, NSF-DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory offers a brand new view of two old friends: the Trifid and Lagoon Nebulae. The image provides a demonstration of what makes Rubin unique: its combination of an extremely wide field of view and the speed that allows it to take lots of big images in a very short time. (LSST via SWNS)
By Talker
By Dean Murray
The world’s largest digital camera has revealed its first images.
The size of a small car, the Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) camera weighs nearly 2,800 kilograms and boasts an extraordinary 3,200-megapixel resolution.
Located at the NSF–DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory atop the Cerro Pachón mountain in Chile, the camera has already captured millions of galaxies and stars in the Milky Way, as well as thousands of asteroids in just over 10 hours of initial test observations.
This image, one of the first released by Rubin Observatory, exposes a Universe teeming with stars and galaxies, transforming seemingly empty, inky-black pockets of space into glittering tapestries for the first time. Here, Rubin’s view is focused on the southern region of the Virgo Cluster, about 55 million light-years away from Earth and the nearest large collection of galaxies to our own Milky Way. (LSST via SWNS)
The images offer a preview of the observatory’s ten-year Legacy Survey of Space and Time, which aims to create an ultra-wide, ultra-high-definition time-lapse record of the Universe by scanning the sky nightly.
Each image from the LSST Camera covers an area as large as 45 full Moons and is so detailed that displaying one at full scale would require 400 ultra-high-definition televisions.
This annotated first look image of the Virgo Cluster was captured by the NSF-DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory. From sizable stars to sprawling galaxies, Rubin transforms seemingly empty pockets of space into glittering tapestries. (LSST via SWNS)
By Talker
Over the next decade, the observatory is expected to catalog around 20 billion galaxies and discover millions of new asteroids, dramatically expanding our understanding of the cosmos.
The unprecedented data gathered will help scientists investigate some of the Universe’s most profound mysteries, including the nature of dark matter and dark energy, the structure of the Milky Way, and the evolution of our Solar System.
During its ten-year survey, Rubin will generate approximately 20 terabytes of data per night, plus an additional 15 petabytes of catalog database. In 10 years, Rubin data processing will generate around 500 petabytes, and the final dataset will contain billions of objects with trillions of measurements.
Today’s Image of the Day from the European Space Agency features the Eagle Nebula, also known as Messier 16, which is located about 7,000 light-years away in the constellation Serpens.
The Eagle Nebula is one of the most iconic star-forming regions in our galaxy. It’s a vast cloud of gas and dust stretching roughly 70 light-years across.
Pillars of Creation
What makes it especially famous is a portion of the nebula captured by the Hubble Space Telescope in 1995 – an area called the “Pillars of Creation.”
Some of these towering columns of gas are several light-years tall. The towers resemble sculpted fingers reaching out into space. Inside these pillars, new stars are being born as gravity pulls material together into dense cores that eventually ignite nuclear fusion.
The Pillars of Creation are often cited as a poetic example of the cosmic cycle of birth and destruction – where new stars are born even as the surrounding material is slowly destroyed by radiation.
Hubble image of the Eagle Nebula
“This towering structure of billowing gas and dark, obscuring dust might only be a small portion of the Eagle Nebula, but it is no less majestic in appearance for it,” said ESA.
“The new Hubble image is part of ESA/Hubble’s 35th anniversary celebrations. The cosmic cloud shown here is made of cold hydrogen gas, like the rest of the Eagle Nebula. In such regions of space new stars are born among the collapsing clouds.”
The hot, energetic stars emit intense ultraviolet light and powerful stellar winds that erode and sculpt the surrounding gas. The result is the creation of fantastical structures – like the narrow pillar with a blossoming head featured in the new image.
Light and shadow in the Eagle Nebula
The thick material in the pillar blocks most light, appearing dark and heavy against the backdrop. However, its edges glow where light from the more distant nebula shines through.
The striking colors reflect the chemistry and physics at play: blues signal ionized oxygen, reds indicate glowing hydrogen, and orange shows where starlight has managed to pierce the dust.
A structure under siege
Just out of frame lie the very stars responsible for shaping this dramatic pillar. Their radiation and winds continue to batter the cloud, compressing the gas and potentially triggering the birth of even more stars within.
For now, the pillar holds firm, but this stability is temporary. Over time, the relentless energy from newly formed stars will eventually erode the entire structure.
“While the starry pillar has withstood these forces well so far, cutting an impressive shape against the background, eventually it will be totally eroded by the multitude of new stars that form in the Eagle Nebula,” explained ESA.
Life cycle of the Milky Way
The nebula’s location in the Sagittarius Arm – one of the Milky Way’s major spiral arms – places it in a zone bustling with similar star-forming regions. This highlights the role of the Eagle Nebula in shaping the structure and the future of our galaxy.
Studies of the Eagle Nebula have revealed that the region is rich in young, hot stars – some of which are only a few million years old. These stars are in various stages of development, providing a natural laboratory for astronomers to study stellar life cycles.
Evolution of the Eagle Nebula
Within the Eagle Nebula, there is a variety of stellar processes occurring in close proximity. Some stars are still forming within dense clouds of gas, while others have already matured and begun to emit powerful ultraviolet radiation.
The ongoing interaction between young stars and their environment drives the evolution of the nebula itself.
As newly formed stars heat and disperse the gas and dust around them, they trigger further waves of star formation – or in some cases, halt it altogether.
This feedback loop not only influences the pace of star birth in the Eagle Nebula but also contributes to the broader life cycle of matter within the Milky Way, enriching the galaxy with heavier elements forged in stellar cores.
Image Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, K. Noll
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Oil makes its way down the Gowanus Canal and into New York Harbor on Oct. 10, 2018, in Brooklyn, New York. A center of industrial cargo shipping in the 19th century, the Gowanus Canal is now an inhospitable place to most living organisms. Some microbes have found a way to thrive among the toxic stew of coal tar, wastewater, and heavy metal pollution.
On a cool December day in Brooklyn, New York, in 2014, a group of academic and citizen scientists set off onto one of the most polluted 3 km stretches of water in the US. They’d soon find a thriving community of microbes living in toxic sludge about a meter below the water.
One of those keen researchers was Elizabeth Hénaff, who had just joined Chris Mason’s laboratory at Weill Cornell Medicine as a postdoctoral fellow. Several months earlier, two members of the Brooklyn community biology lab Genspace had approached Mason with an intriguing proposal. They wanted to study the bottom of the Gowanus Canal, an infamously toxic body of water, before the US Environmental Protection Agency dredged its bottom and covered it with an impermeable layer.
When she heard about the plan, Hénaff was hooked.
Decked out in hazmat suits and rubber boots, Hénaff and the team paddled out into the canal, three people to a boat. When they reached their first sampling location, the person in the back operated a 4 m long polyvinyl chloride pipe, “our super scientific sampling device,” from a big-box hardware store, Hénaff says.
Credit: Elizabeth Hénaff
A group of researchers from Weill Cornell Medicine and Genspace canoe on the Gowanus Canal, with boats and arm power provided by the Gowanus Dredgers Canoe Club, on Dec. 12, 2014, to collect samples of the black sludge at the bottom of the canal. Microbes living in extreme environments like the Gowanus Canal have adapted to make use of environmental pollutants. Those same microbes could be used to clean up similar sites in the future, in a process known as bioremediation.
After plunging the pipe into the soft sediment of muck below the water and capping the top with a gloved hand, the person at the stern gently pulled it out while maintaining the vacuum. The person at the front of the boat, ready for collection with a 50 mL centrifuge tube in hand, guided the black slop from pipe to tube once the vacuum was released.
Back in the lab, the research team extracted and sequenced DNA found in that sludge. “At first it came as a surprise to me that there was anything living in there,” says Hénaff, now an assistant professor in computational biology at New York University. “Now I know. Of course there are microbes there; there are microbes everywhere.”
Since 2014, Hénaff has studied the unseen microbiology of the Gowanus Canal. She and her team recently identified a community of more than 400 different species of bacteria, archaea, and viruses living in that sludge, and more than 1,000 genes that encode for proteins that process heavy metals (J. Appl. Microbiol. 2025, DOI: 10.1093/jambio/lxaf076).).
The Gowanus Canal is a particularly contaminated area that the EPA declared a Superfund cleanup site in 2010. The origins of that designation are at Love Canalin Niagara Falls, New York, where during the 1970s, residents experienced high rates of birth defects, pregnancy losses, and cancer as a result of industrial dumping of contaminants like chlorinated hydrocarbons in a local landfill.
The disaster brought the impacts of dumping hazardous waste to the forefront of the environmental movement and garnered widespread attention. To address the environmental and health concerns of hazardous waste sites such as Love Canal, the US Congress passed the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation,and Liability Act in 1980. Part of that act established a $1.6 billion trust to clean up old waste sites, informally called Superfund sites.
Abandoned industrial sites contaminated with petroleum chemicals, nuclear waste, pesticides, heavy metals, and other anthropogenic pollutants are poisoning the environment and wreaking havoc on public health.
But while most organisms die off in such extreme environments, some microorganisms thrive. “These extremophiles have specific adaptations that let them tolerate the particular conditions they are in,” says Jeffrey Morris, an associate professor in microbiology at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. And in the case of polluted environments, those adaptations allow microbes to tolerate and degrade or otherwise detoxify environmental contaminants.
“Bacteria grow really fast and can adapt to almost any kind of environment you throw at them, anything that doesn’t just kill them out right,” Morris says. “If you give them time around a pollutant, they’ll come up with solutions to grow better in its presence.”
As researchers focused on hazardous waste sites, they began leveraging these microbes for cleanup, a process known as bioremediation. Early uses relied on microbes to clean up oil spills, such as the 1989 Exxon Valdez spill and the 2010 BP Deepwater Horizon spill. Because oil exists naturally in the environment, microbial communities that know how to consume components of oil already exist: Oceanospirillales bacteria, which use hydrocarbons as a source of carbon and energy, are one example. Microbes in sites full of human-made pollution have more pressure to evolve.
Each Superfund site is unique, with a distinct pollution history and dominant contaminants that offer scientists a “window into the process of evolution itself,” Morris says. What’s more, Morris and other researchers say, as they find new bacteria that survive in polluted sites, they can perhaps put those microbes to work. One day they may clean up pollution and do important, more sustainable chemistry. At some sites, bioremediation efforts are already under way.
A microbial history lesson
In New York, Hénaff’s team identified 455 freshwater and saltwater species of bacteria, archaea, and viruses, and identified 64 ways microbes degrade organic pollutants and 1,171 genes that encode for proteins that use or detoxify heavy metals.
Credit: Castle Light Images/Alamy Stock Photo
The K-25 Gaseous Diffusion Plant campus, Oak Ridge, Tennessee, in 2019 during the demolition process. The site is contaminated with the common industrial solvent trichloroethylene.
Hénaff identified microbes that can live in extremely salty environments, like sulfate-reducing Desulfobacterium autotrophicum, and heavy metal–contaminated environments, like Microbacterium laevaniformans. Her team also observed bacteria typically found in the human gut, which aligns with the frequent sewage overflows into the canal.
Hénaff says you can see, via the microbes that the team detected, how the Gowanus Canal was plagued by industrial waste dumping and commercial shipping activities, resulting in a chemical soup of infamous pollutants. “One interesting takeaway is this idea of microbial memory that’s maintained by these nonhuman organisms,” Hénaff says. “It’s a memory of the history of human intervention in a site.”
As a kid growing up in Brooklyn, just a few miles away from the Gowanus Canal, Lesley-Ann Giddings knew to avoid the notoriously toxic water. Years later, as a biochemistry professor at Middlebury College, Giddings set out to explore a different Superfund site, one plagued not by urban industrial pollution but by the legacy of mining that has left a microbial mark.
The Ely Copper Mine located in the old Copper Belt region of Vermont is home to abandoned mining-waste piles that are packed with rocks rich in metal sulfides. The rock piles drain acidic water into surrounding groundwater and sediment, a process known as acid rock drainage. Water in this region is contaminated with toxic levels of copper, iron, magnesium, zinc, and lead, and in 2001, the EPA designated it a Superfund site. Intrigued by the possible microbial communities thriving in the hyperacidic environment, Giddings decided to go microbe hunting.
Credit: US Environmental Protection Agency
Acid rock drainage carries sulfides in the Ely Brook to the Schoolhouse Brook on May 7, 2025, in Vershire, Vermont. Lesley-Ann Giddings hopes to find bioactive compounds by studying the microbial community in the hyperacidic environment of the Ely Brook at the Ely Copper Mine site.
The bright orange soil that clung to her boots as she stepped out of her car and made her way past the mine tailings, a by-product of mining, made it “very clear that we were at this mine with a lot of oxidized metals,” says Giddings, now a professor at Smith College. Giddings focused on a brook near the mine’s entrance and, like Hénaff, relied on a DIY approach to collect samples for DNA sequencing.
On a sunny summer day in 2015, Giddings and a small team hooked up a peristaltic pump to an old car battery, allowing them to pump water from the brook through filters that captured DNA. They later returned to the site a few more times over the next 4 years, in the winter and summer.
“The acid rock drainage environment is very nutrient deficient,” Giddings says, so to identify the acid-loving microbes surviving in this inhospitable environment, her team used shotgun metagenomic sequencing, an analysis that sequences all microbial genomes in a sample.
Hénaff’s team relied on the same sort of genetic analysis to make sense of the Gowanus sludge. To prepare samples for sequencing, the cellular membranes of the cells are cut open to release their DNA, which is then separated from cellular debris and chopped into pieces short enough for a sequencing instrument to handle.
Hénaff describes the process as taking a “mixed bag of bacteria and their genes,” from a site sample and processing it down to “a mixed bag of small pieces of DNA, each 150 base pairs long.” After that, a DNA-sequencing instrument turns molecules into data ready for computational analysis, comparing data from the mixed bag of DNA fragments with those in databases listing the unique genetic material specific to a certain microbe or assigning function to specific genes.
The Ely Brook microbiome that Giddings pieced together revealed a community of acid-tolerant bacteria, including Proteobacteria and Actinobacteria commonly found in metal-rich environments (PLOS One 2020, DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0237599). The team also identified bacteria that oxidize iron and sulfur, which are in high concentrations in the brook, as well as others, like Bradyrhizobium species, which produce nutrients for plants by reducing nitrogen gas to usable ammonia. Other researchers have found Bradyrhizobium bacteria at a former nuclear weapons production facility, the Savannah River Superfundsite.
But Giddings notes that the environment could have more microbes and genes that she wasn’t able to identify. Metagenomic analyses rely on previous research catalogued in existing databases to identify microbes and assign function to genes in a given sample, and because acid rock drainage environments are understudied, Giddings thinks there may be genes or microbes the analysis wasn’t able to label.
Breathing, eating, and immobilizing pollutants
Beyond identifying these pollution-gobbling microbes, understanding what they actually do in the presence of pollutants could pave the way for their use in bioremediation.
In the 1990s, scientists discovered that waste- and groundwater contaminated with a common industrial solvent, trichloroethylene (TCE), contained Dehalococcoides bacteria. These bacteria dechlorinate TCE, now a known human carcinogen that the EPA recently banned, and convert it to nontoxic ethene.
Dehalococcoides species “use chlorinated solvents as their electron acceptor, the same way that you and I use oxygen,” says David Freedman, an environmental engineering professor at Clemson University. “We now understand there are dechlorinating bacteria that breathe hundreds of different types of chlorinated organics,” he says, including chlorinated methanes and polychlorinated biphenyls. Dehalococcoides cultures are now commercially available for bioremediation projects that need to break down toxic chlorinated ethenes.
Unlike organic pollutants, heavy metals can’t be fully degraded, but they can be isolated and even transformed into less toxic versions.
Certain microbes get rid of toxic metals by using proteins to pump out unwanted materials, “so if the metal ends up inside the cellular membrane of the microbes, they have the capacity to pump it back out” Hénaff says.
Other microbes immobilize the metals by absorbing them into bacterial cell surfaces or binding them inside cell walls with proteins. Microbes that hyperaccumulate heavy metals could one day be used to capture precious metals like lithium from the environment for reuse. “What’s considered a contaminant in this environment is a resource in other environments,” Hénaff says.
Microbes can also manipulate the oxidation state of metals to convert them into insoluble, immobile, and nontoxic states. “Oxidation states mean everything with respect to the mobility and toxicity of heavy metals,” Freedman says.
For example, iron-reducing microbes like Geobacter metallireducens can convert hexavalent chromium, a carcinogenic industrial compound shown to cause lung cancer, into insoluble, nontoxic trivalent chromium. Other microbial species dump waste electrons onto pentavalent arsenic, reducing it to soluble and more toxic trivalent arsenic. Giddings identified certain microbial genes in the Ely Brook that reduce sulfates into sulfides.
Microbes tasked with cleanup
Several strategies exist for cleaning up contaminated Superfund sites, but Freedman says bioremediation is a favored approach for several reasons. One in particular stands out: “If you can accomplish remediation using biology, it’s going to be cheaper than using physical or chemical processes,” he says.
Ideally, remediation experts could just monitor how native microbial communities are dealing with pollutants on their own, but microbes can be slow, especially if their environment isn’t set up to maximize pollution degradation. So that’s when they step in to help.
Remediation specialists can encourage microbes to move faster by pumping in nutrients to create the ideal conditions for cleanup. At the East Tennessee Technology Park, Roger Petrie and Sam Scheffler from the US Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge Office of Environmental Management are focused on doing just that.
Part of the Oak Ridge Reservation Superfund site, the park was once home to enriched uranium production for the Manhattan Project and the commercial nuclear power industry before its closure in 1987. During its operation, the facility “used TCE as a degreaser and solvent,” Scheffler says. Now it’s the main contaminant of concern for groundwater remediation at the site.
Petrie and Scheffler’s goal is to reduce contaminant levels of TCE and related products in the most-polluted plumes on the site, which vary from 9 to 30 m in diameter. They hope to introduce a mixture of microbe-supporting components into the contaminated plumes via injection wells to help boost microbial productivity of TCE-chomping Dehalococcoides bacteria that live there.
The composition of the mixtures will depend on the geochemical characteristics of each plume, but they will all include some mix of emulsified vegetable oil, a microbial food source. Scheffler says the mix may also include a pH buffer, “since we know that Dehalococcoides runs the dechlorination mechanism at 6 to 8 pH,” zero-valent iron “to enhance anaerobic conditions,” and possibly even extra Dehalococcoides cultures to increase the rate of the remediation.
The team is still in the early phases of the project, and it is unclear how successful it will be. “We’re relying on living organisms to do the work for us,” Petrie says. “We do the best we can as far as identifying what would be ideal conditions for the microbes, but that information could still be flawed.”
The untapped potential of microbes
Giddings says it’s a long road from her lab’s work—sampling sites and identifying the microbes—to downstream work by others that can lead to bioremediation applications. After genetic analysis comes the difficult task of growing microbes in the lab to study their function further, and recreating the extreme conditions extremophiles grow in within the confines of a pristine lab is nearly impossible. “Most microbes are unculturable,” Giddings says.
Still, the untapped potential of microbes in toxic environments makes them impossible to ignore, she says. Giddings hopes to find possible bioactive natural products or biocatalysts in the Vermont mine microbiome.
In New York City, Hénaff is similarly investigating how to use genes isolated from the Gowanus Canal to develop affordable biosensors to detect heavy metal contamination in sediment.
Hénaff says we have a lot to learn from microbes about what it means to live on a damaged planet. “We’ve never not lived in a microbial world,” she says. “I think they’re the ones who are going to get us through the rapid changes our planet is experiencing.”
First space images from world’s largest digital camera | Northwest & National News | nbcrightnow.com
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NASA astronaut Anil Menon will embark on his first mission to the International Space Station, serving as a flight engineer and Expedition 75 crew member.
Menon will launch aboard the Roscosmos Soyuz MS-29 spacecraft in June 2026, accompanied by Roscosmos cosmonauts Pyotr Dubrov and Anna Kikina. After launching from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, the trio will spend approximately eight months aboard the orbiting laboratory.
During his expedition, Menon will conduct scientific investigations and technology demonstrations to help prepare humans for future space missions and benefit humanity.
Selected as a NASA astronaut in 2021, Menon graduated with the 23rd astronaut class in 2024. After completing initial astronaut candidate training, he began preparing for his first space station flight assignment.
Menon was born and raised in Minneapolis and is an emergency medicine physician, mechanical engineer, and colonel in the United States Space Force. He holds a bachelor’s degree in neurobiology from Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, a master’s degree in mechanical engineering, and a medical degree from Stanford University in California. Menon completed his emergency medicine and aerospace medicine residency at Stanford and the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston.
In his spare time, he still practices emergency medicine at Memorial Hermann’s Texas Medical Center and teaches residents at the University of Texas’ residency program. Menon served as SpaceX’s first flight surgeon, helping to launch the first crewed Dragon spacecraft on NASA’s SpaceX Demo-2 mission and building SpaceX’s medical organization to support humans on future missions. He served as a crew flight surgeon for both SpaceX flights and NASA expeditions aboard the space station.
For nearly 25 years, people have lived and worked continuously aboard the International Space Station, advancing scientific knowledge and conducting critical research for the benefit of humanity and our home planet. Space station research supports the future of human spaceflight as NASA looks toward deep space missions to the Moon under the Artemis campaign and in preparation for future human missions to Mars, as well as expanding commercial opportunities in low Earth orbit and beyond.
Learn more about International Space Station at:
https://www.nasa.gov/station
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Joshua Finch / Jimi Russell Headquarters, Washington 202-358-1100 joshua.a.finch@nasa.gov / james.j.russell@nasa.gov
Shaneequa Vereen Johnson Space Center, Houston 281-483-5111 shaneequa.y.vereen@nasa.gov
If a wildfire causes an evacuation, people are forced to leave quickly and make decisions under pressure about what to bring and what to leave behind. Households with multiple cars might want to pack into more than one vehicle to save more possessions, but doing so risks causing traffic that can block firefighter access and endanger people, especially in neighborhoods with few exits and narrow roads.
These challenging decisions can have serious impacts on the outcome of a fire, and are what players confront in ‘Firewise Residents,’ one of three simulation games created by University of California, Santa Cruz computational media researchers to build preparedness for a wildfire scenario.
An increasingly present local issue, several Baskin School of Engineering faculty have turned their expertise in serious game design toward the issue of wildfires. The labs of Professors of Computational Media Katherine Isbister, Magy Seif El-Nasr, and Sri Kurniawan, along with Visiting Professor Eddie Melcer, are using game design to help communities build resilience to wildfire. Kurniawan’s lab explores VR approaches evacuation preparation.
These games can help people think about stressful topics, initiating individual preparedness and larger dialogue. As the games reach more people, researchers hope to spark community-level change, as climate change fuels more frequent and severe wildfires locally and globally.
“We’re using game design techniques to have conversations with the communities that are grappling with these problems,” said MJ Johns, a Ph.D. student in the Social Emotional Technology Lab who is leading the game design. “They’ve been dealing with the issue of wildfire for a long time, but I think that giving them that frame of designing and playing a game about their experience helps open them up to have more productive dialogue.”
In ‘Firewise Residents,” players think through how individual decisions affect their community.
Connected communities
Isbister’s research has long focused on interactive gaming experiences that heighten social and emotional connections and wellbeing. With the increasing urgency of the climate crisis, she wanted to apply her expertise to affect change.
This motivated her connection to the “Smart and Connected Communities” project led by Kenichi Soga, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at UC Berkeley. The NSF-funded effort brings together scholars along with community members, emergency
personnel, and civic leaders to develop innovative ways to manage risk from wildfires, from serious games to digital twin models of communities to simulate crises.
Researchers from UC Santa Cruz, Berkeley, and Davis are working with communities in Alameda, Marin, and Santa Cruz counties. Workshops and interviews with utility workers, emergency responders, and local firewise councils revealed key community concerns.
“There were ideas coming out of those conversations that I think we wouldn’t get if we weren’t trying to engage them in the game design process,” Johns said. “We’re asking them to think of themselves as a game designer, and help us create games about the experience that they’ve had. It really opens up the dialogue with those communities and gets them very invested in iterative design.”
Over the past two years, the games have been iterated with input from Alameda and Marin communities, natural hazard and serious games experts, and communities in Santa Clara and Santa Cruz counties, including Highland Firewise council near UC Santa Cruz.
“All these layers of co-design and participation over the past two years that has allowed us to very rapidly iterate and develop full playable games that have a lot of different perspectives and insights embedded in the design,” Johns said.
Local residents in Santa Cruz and the Bay Area have informed the design and tested iterations of the wildfire games.
Mobile games
Now, there are three mobile mini games that are now available online: Firewise Residents, FireSafe Friends, and Find Your Things. Each deals with complex dilemmas that ask people to make hard decisions, as a recent paper reports.
In Firewise Residents, players talk with townspeople, from children to elders, about evacuation challenges. In Find Your Things, they pack a go-bag for an evacuation. FireSafe Friends, a two-player game, has players choose materials and landscaping to “harden” homes, then test them in a simulated burn. The graphics draw on fire-simulation models developed by civil engineers and fire scientists at UC Berkeley, turning the tools meant for experts into a resource for the larger community.
“We’re taking ideas from those simulation tools and putting them in a gameplay context where the general public can interact with it,” Johns said.
The games provide a safe environment to think through challenging, complex topics that people might otherwise avoid, sparking more engagement than traditional fire safety presentations. The design draws inspiration from cute, classic games such as Animal Crossing and Eco, providing a comforting environment that builds connection to the characters.
“Game simulations can give you a little flavor of the emotional texture of that experience and make it feel more real,” Isbister said. “You also have agency to make choices and see the outcome of your choices.”
‘FireSafe Friends’ teaches players techniques to harden their homes.
Measuring impact
The team hopes the game will reach communities in California and beyond, recruiting fire marshals and citizen firewise councils to facilitate running the games. They also envision the games as a lesson in middle and high school classrooms, so that students, a particularly at-risk group in a disaster, can start conversations at home.
Assessing the actual impact of the games is crucial, which is where Seif El-Nasr’s lab is taking the lead.
Serious games are typically evaluated at the individual level: did they change attitudes or teach something? But these researchers are looking at community impact: who’s playing, whether it sparks further learning, and if behavior changes. They’re applying a discourse analysis framework to study co-learning—how players talk, reason, and make decisions together. By analyzing real-time conversations between paired players, the research offers deeper insight into how collaborative reasoning and reflection can support real-world preparedness.
“We’re trying to understand if these games can be used as an instrument to foster collaborative learning among community residents,” said Mario Escarce Junior, a postdoc in Seif El-Nasr’s lab. “We have a specific framework in which we’re trying to understand if we can observe learning through conversations while players are playing in pairs and discussing their strategies.”
“It’s not just that participants are learning from each other and discovering knowledge together: it’s also planning, goals, role composition—these meta-cognitive skills are important for working together and learning,” Seif El-Nasr added. “Wildfire is a community issue; it’s not just about one house being hardened, there’s a whole community working together. There are a lot of aspects around collective action and collective resilience in a whole community – developing measures to assess and investigate these is essential.”
The researchers are also interested in evaluating the games’ performance in other countries and cultures, with Escarce Junior testing Firesafe friends in his home country of Brazil.
The researchers envision that lessons drawn from this work could inform other climate resilience efforts beyond wildfire. For example, drawing on lessons learned from these efforts, Seif El-Nasr’s Ph.D. student Mennatullah Hendawy is leading the development of various alternate reality games related to sea-level rise. In the future, the researchers hope to build more games to address resilience in the aftermath of a disaster, like the rebuilding efforts currently underway in the wake of disastrous fires.
Leveraging VR
When the CZU fires devastated parts of Santa Cruz county, Kurniawan, along with her Ph.D. student Allison Crosby, who was affected by the 2018 Paradise fire, became interested in using technology to educate on wildfire-evacuation preparedness. Kurniawan has deep experience in developing assistive-technology games, often making use of virtual reality (VR) or augmented reality (AR).
With funding through CITRIS and the Banatao Institute, a UC-wide research center, her lab is developing a timed virtual reality game on preparing a go-bag for a wildfire evacuation while managing the capacity of their car.
To inform their design, Crosy interviewed people who experienced the local CZU fire, including survivors of the local Bonny Doon fire who had to evacuate their homes at 3 a.m., people who evacuated from the UC Santa Cruz campus, and voluntary evacuees from the surrounding area. The stories they heard directly influenced the narrative of the game.
“Some of the stories were really sad, they lost their homes or they lost their pets,” Kurniawan said. “The scenarios inside those games were informed by those interviews, literally front and center are pets. The theme that came up was making decisions under pressure.”
Players pack for an evacuation under time pressure in an immersive VR game developed in Kurniawan’s lab.
Mobile vs. VR
Kurniawan and Crosby are measuring the game qualitatively, aiming for people to feel more confident and comfortable for an emergency situation, and often hear reports that the game prompts people to consider what they’d pack in an evacuation for the first time.
Realizing they were both developing wildfire go-bag games, Crosby and Johns ran a study comparing the mobile and VR versions.
They found that people had similar behavior changes and learning outcomes, although they found the VR game more exciting. So, researchers could pick the version most suitable for a specific audience—VR is not always ideal for children, older adults, or people who get motion sick with VR, and many people may not have access to VR headsets. The researchers are also experimenting with using smoke odors in the VR game to boost engagement and memory retention.
Kurniawan is working with the UC Santa Cruz fire marshall to explore integrating their VR game into the wildfire training that undergraduates on campus are given.
“Everything we have built would be good for the UC Santa Cruz fire marshall to use to attract the attention of younger people,” Kurniawan said. “If we have resources available to us, I would love to get more headsets, install the games, and just distribute them freely in the public library or on campus to get people to try them and trigger conversation.”
