Category: 7. Science

Scientists exploring two oceanic trenches in the northwest Pacific have discovered thriving communities of marine life, including thousands of worms and mollusks nearly six miles beneath the surface, making it the deepest colony of creatures ever to be observed.

Dominated by tube worms and clams, the community is able to survive at depths through a process known as chemosynthesis, meaning that life here is nourished by the fluids ‘rich in hydrogen sulfide and methane’ seeping from the seafloor, which they then turn into energy.

The discovery was made by a team of scientists – led by researchers from China – piloting a deep-sea submersible able to reach these astounding depths (up to 10 kilometres below sea level) within the northwest Pacific’s Mariana Trench.

According to the team’s research paper now published in the scientific journal, Nature the discovery of life in Earth’s deepest underwater valley suggests there could be much more life thriving in hostile conditions at the bottom of the – largely unexplored – ocean.

Co-lead author on the study, Xiatong Peng, from China’s Institute of Deep-sea Science and Engineering at the Chinese Academy of Science, said: “Hadal trenches, some of the Earth’s least explored and understood environments have long been proposed to harbour chemosynthesis-based communities. Yet, despite increasing attention, actual documentation of such communities has been exceptionally rare.”

This paper begins to change that. Within it, the team documents the discovery of the “deepest and most extensive chemosynthesis-based communities known to exist on Earth” during an expedition to the Kuril-Kamchatka Trench and the western Aleutian Trench, using the manned submersible, Fendouzhe.

The discovered communities – dominated by the species siboglinid Polychaeta and Bivalvia – span a distance of 2,500km at depths from 5,800 metres to as much as 9,533 metres. 

“Given geological similarities with other hadal trenches, such chemosynthesis-based communities might be more widespread than previously anticipated,” said Xiatong Peng. “These findings challenge current models of life at extreme limits and carbon cycling in the deep ocean.”

Like a symphony building from a single note, that lone cell divides again and again until thousands of cells are dancing in harmony. They push, pull, and glide across one another, weaving the intricate choreography that shapes a growing embryo into something astonishing: life in motion.

The coordination of cell behavior is at the heart of morphogenesis, the process by which cells collectively reshape and reorganize to form tissues and organs. In epithelial tissues, when cells change shape, they generate mechanical forces that ripple through their neighbors.

These forces aren’t just passive; they can be sensed by surrounding cells, potentially triggering active responses that help guide the entire tissue’s transformation. Yet, while scientists have long suspected that cells use these mechanical cues to communicate, the exact molecular mechanisms behind this “cellular conversation” have remained a mystery, especially how they orchestrate large-scale coordination across developing tissues.

Scientists from the Göttingen Campus, the Max Planck Institute, and the University of Marburg have discovered a surprising way that embryonic cells work together. They found that these cells use the same molecular tools that our ears use for hearing. The researchers believe this shared use comes from a common evolutionary origin, showing how nature can repurpose the same proteins for very different jobs.

A biosensing technique to monitor cellular communication

By combining tools from genetics, brain science, hearing research, and physics, researchers made a surprising discovery about how cells communicate. In thin layers of skin, cells can sense the movements of their neighbors and adjust their tiny movements to match. This teamwork allows groups of cells to pull together more strongly.

Because they’re so sensitive, the cells can respond quickly and flexibly; these gentle forces are the fastest signals moving through embryonic tissue.

But when researchers turned off the cells’ ability to “listen” to each other, the tissue stopped working correctly, and development slowed down or failed.

The researchers built computer models of tissue that included how cells coordinate with each other. These models showed that the gentle “whispers” between neighboring cells create a connected, dance-like movement across the whole tissue and help protect it from outside pressure. The team confirmed these effects by watching real-time videos of embryos developing and running more experiments.

Cell chat: Attacking disease by learning the language of cells

With the help of AI and advanced computer analysis, they studied about 100 times more cell pairs than ever before. This big data approach gave them the precision needed to understand these subtle cell-to-cell interactions truly.

The same tiny force sensors that help us hear faint sounds are now being linked to how embryos develop. In our ears, special hair cells detect incredibly small movements, just a few atoms wide, and turn them into nerve signals. This extreme sensitivity comes from unique proteins that convert mechanical pressure into electrical signals.

Scientists already knew these proteins were key to hearing, but now they’ve discovered they also help cells in embryos sense and respond to each other’s movements. It turns out that this is possible because every cell in the body carries the complete set of genetic instructions and can use any protein it needs, even ones known initially for completely different jobs.

Professor Fred Wolf, Director of the CIDBN and co-author of the study, said, “The phenomenon could also provide insights into how the perception of force at a cellular level has evolved. The evolutionary origin of these force-sensitive ion channel proteins probably lies in our single-celled ancestors, which we share with fungi and which emerged long before the origin of animal life.”

“But it was only with the evolution of the first animals that the current diversity of this protein type emerged.”

Future research will explore whether these tiny cellular “nanomachines” originally evolved to sense internal forces within the body, like those between neighboring cells, before being adapted for external sensing, such as detecting sound in hearing. This could reveal that their first job wasn’t to help us hear the world but to help our cells talk to each other during development.

Journal Reference

1. Richa P., Häring M., Wang Q., Choudhury A. R., Göpfert M. C., Wolf F., Großhans J., Kong D. Synchronization in epithelial tissue morphogenesis. Current Biology 35, 1–14 (2025). DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2025.03.066

The saga surrounding Neptune-size “super-Earth” exoplanet K2-18 b just got a whole lot more interesting. For a quick recap, this is the world a team of scientists recently suggested could host life — to the dismay of other scientists in the community, who felt the announcement failed to include necessary caution.

While signs of life on the world have failed to conclusively present themselves to the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), the powerful space telescope has discovered that this planet is so rich in liquid water that it could be an ocean, or “Hycean” world.

The energy needed for thunderstorms could come from an avalanche of electrons seeded by extraterrestrial cosmic rays, a new study claims.

Scientists already knew that lightning is an electrical discharge between thunderclouds and Earth’s surface, but exactly how storm clouds obtain an electric field powerful enough to hurl a bolt has remained a mystery for centuries.

Newswise — Scientists have discovered a new way that matter can exist – one that is different from the usual states of solid, liquid, gas or plasma – at the interface of two exotic, materials made into a sandwich.

The new quantum state, called quantum liquid crystal, appears to follow its own rules and offers characteristics that could pave the way for advanced technological applications, the scientists said.

Reporting in the journal Science Advances, a Rutgers-led team of researchers described an experiment that focused on the interaction between a conducting material called the Weyl semimetal and an insulating magnetic material known as spin ice when both are subjected to an extremely high magnetic field. Both materials individually are known for their unique and complex properties.

“Although each material has been extensively studied, their interaction at this boundary has remained entirely unexplored,” said Tsung-Chi Wu, who earned his doctoral degree in June from the Rutgers graduate program in physics and astronomy and is the first author of the study. “We observed new quantum phases that emerge only when these two materials interact. This creates a new quantum topological state of matter at high magnetic fields, which was previously unknown.”

The team discovered that at the interface of these two materials, the electronic properties of the Weyl semimetal are influenced by the magnetic properties of the spin ice. This interaction leads to a very rare phenomenon called “electronic anisotropy” where the material conducts electricity differently in different directions. Within a circle of 360 degrees, the conductivity is lowest at six specific directions, they found. Surprisingly, when the magnetic field is increased, the electrons suddenly start flowing in two opposite directions.

This discovery is consistent with a characteristic seen in the quantum phenomenon known as rotational symmetry breaking and indicates the occurrence of a new quantum phase at high magnetic fields.

The findings are significant because they reveal new ways in which the properties of materials can be controlled and manipulated, Wu said. By understanding how electrons move in these special materials, scientists could potentially design new generations of ultra-sensitive quantum sensors of magnetic fields that work best in extreme conditions – such as in space or inside powerful machines.

Weyl semimetals are materials that allow electricity to flow in unusual ways with very high speed and zero energy loss because of special relativistic quasi-particles called Weyl fermions. Spin ice, on the other hand, are magnetic materials where the magnetic moments (tiny magnetic fields within the material) are arranged in a way that resembles the positions of hydrogen atoms in ice. When these two materials are combined, they create a heterostructure, composed of atomic layers of dissimilar materials.

Scientists have found that new states of matter appear under extreme conditions, including very low temperatures, high pressures or high magnetic fields, and behave in strange and fascinating ways. Experiments such as the Rutgers-led one may lead to new, fundamental understanding of matter beyond the naturally occurring four states of matter, according to Wu.

“This is just the beginning,” Wu said. “There are multiple possibilities for exploring new quantum materials and their interactions when combined into a heterostructure. We hope our work will also inspire the physics community to explore these exciting new frontiers.”

The research was conducted using a combination of experimental techniques, led by the principal investigator for the project, Jak Chakhalian, the Claud Lovelace Endowed Professor of Experimental Physics in the Department of Physics and Astronomy and a co-author of the study. The work was theoretically supported by Jedediah Pixley, an associate professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy, also a co-author of the study.

“The experiment-theory collaboration is what really makes the work possible,” Wu said. “It took us more than two years to understand the experimental results. The credit goes to the state-of-the-art theoretical modeling and calculations done by the Pixley group, particularly Jed Pixley and Yueqing Chang, a postdoctoral researcher. We are continuing our collaboration to push the frontier of the field as a Rutgers team.”

Most of the experiments were conducted at the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory (MagLab) in Tallahassee, Fla., which provided the unique conditions to study these materials at ultra-low temperatures and high magnetic fields.

“We had to initiate the collaboration and travel to the MagLab multiple times to perform these experiments, each time refining ideas and methods,” Wu said. “The ultra-low temperatures and high magnetic fields were crucial for observing these new phenomena.”

The research builds on previous Rutgers-led research published earlier this year by Chakhalian, Mikhail Kareev, Wu and other physicists. The report described how four years of continuous experimentation led to a novel method to design and build a unique, tiny, atoms-thick structure composed of a Weyl semimetal and spin ice. The quantum heterostructure was so difficult to create, the scientists developed a machine to make it: the Q-DiP, short for quantum phenomena discovery platform.

“In that paper, we described how we made the heterostructure,” said Chakhalian. “The new Science Advances paper is about what it can do.”

In addition to Chakhalian, Wu, Chang and Pixley, Rutgers researchers on the study included Ang-Kun Wu, Michael Terilli, Fangdi Wen and Mikhail Kareev.

Explore more of the ways Rutgers research is shaping the future.

Mars, it seems, has a talent for turning chaos into chemistry. A new laboratory study published in Science Advances by Chinese researchers, shows that when quartz‑rich rocks break and meet a little water, they quickly generate hydrogen gas and mild oxidants, while also making dissolved iron switch between two useful forms.

On Earth, that trio — hydrogen, oxidants and shuffling iron — can sustain microbes living far below the surface and far from sunlight. If the same reactions occurred on Mars, the planet’s frequent quakes and ancient groundwater could have created countless tiny havens for life deep beneath the Red Planet.

The idea is relatively straightforward. Stress a rock until it snaps, and the broken surface becomes highly reactive. Touch that surface with water and within minutes, hydrogen appears along with trace amounts of peroxide‑like compounds.

In the lab, the researchers tested two fault styles. One breaks open first and then meets water; the other shatters and grinds while already soaked. Both produced hydrogen rapidly; however, the “break‑then‑wet,” style set up the sharper chemical contrast, with oxidants dissolved in the water and hydrogen trapped as gas inside the crack. Microbes on Earth thrive on exactly that sort of split, using the chemical push‑and‑pull to power their metabolisms.

Numbers put the effect in perspective. Worldwide, shallow earthquakes could create about 110 million moles of hydrogen each year — not the most significant source on the planet, but notable (about 1,000 Olympic-sized swimming pools). At the local scale, though, the punch is more Mike Tyson-like: roughly 33 moles of hydrogen per square meter of fresh fault wall per year. That is far more than underground microbes typically need to stay active.

Mars provides a stage well suited to this chemistry. Earlier in 2025, researchers mapped more than 15,000 kilometers of ancient riverbeds in the Noachis Terra highlands. These “inverted channels” are the stony remnants of long‑vanished rivers, proof that liquid water once lingered on the surface for extended periods. Where rivers flowed above, water also seeped below, filling fractures and pores that would react just as Wu’s quartz did in the lab.

The Red Planet also supplies its own oxidants. NASA’s Phoenix Lander found perchlorate salts in polar soils — roughly half a percent by mass in the samples it tested — that can attract moisture and help form salty brines. Telescopes and orbiters have detected tiny amounts of hydrogen peroxide in the thin Martian atmosphere. Underground, those oxidants become gentler and can serve as the electron‑accepting half of the chemical partnership with hydrogen.

From 2018 to 2022, NASA’s InSight Lander recorded more than 1,300 marsquakes, including some linked to deep tectonic activity. Every tremor that widened a crack or crushed grains would have triggered the same rapid chemistry the team observed, releasing hydrogen and oxidants into any lingering pockets of groundwater.

Earth offers a useful comparison. At Kidd Creek mine in Canada, waters trapped in fractures for hundreds of millions of years still hold hydrogen and other chemicals produced by rock‑water reactions. Microbial communities thrive there without sunlight, living off reactions much like those proposed for ancient Martian cracks. It is not proof that Mars followed the same script, but it shows the play is possible.

For future Mars missions, the study provides a practical checklist. Explore old fault zones and sample the minerals that fill their fractures. Look for the package of clues that tend to appear together: hydrogen, traces of peroxide or oxygen, perhaps a hint of methane and rocks showing iron in both its reduced and oxidized states near fresh breaks. No single clue would confirm life, yet the bundle would point to places where nature resets the chemical conditions over and over again. On Mars, that could be exactly where a lonely microbe might have found the means to endure.

Rather than completely burning up when a spacecraft reenters Earth’s atmosphere, its heat shield’s outer surface is sacrificed to protect the rest of the vehicle. The carbon fibers decompose, dissipating the heat. It was assumed that this only happens on the surface, but in a recent study, researchers from The Grainger College of Engineering, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and four other institutions gained new information about how the protective carbon fiber material evolves, not just at the surface, but beneath, where structural failure could occur and threaten the life of the vehicle.  

“We often assume that degradation of the heat shield only happens at the surface, which is not always a bad assumption. But given the degradation we observed throughout the material volume, our work shows that this assumption does not always hold, demonstrating that the heat shield’s structural integrity can be significantly compromised under certain conditions,” said aerospace engineering Ph.D. student Ben Ringel. “Also, this in-depth weakening could lead to spallation—when large chunks of material are torn off, causing the thermal protection system to degrade faster.”

According to Ringel’s advisor, Francesco Panerai, “The oxidation of carbon fiber is a key process in thermal protection. It is also one of the most studied in material science and its theory is very well established. But here, we executed an elegant, simple, although very difficult to execute, experiment. For the first time, we could see this theory in action, with some unexpected twists.”

Panerai and his collaborators at the Berkeley Lab Advanced Light Source performed the experiments at the Paul Scherer Institute in Switzerland. They used the TOMCAT beamline at the Swiss Light Source—a specialized facility where dynamic processes can be tracked in space and time, using an ultra-fast end station and a special camera system that resolves micron-scale structures with sub-second time resolution for extended durations.

The team subjected small samples of ablative carbon fiber material to heat under the bright X-rays of TOMCAT, collecting a time-series of 3D images of the sample as it rotated and was consumed by oxygen.

“The level of detail that TOMCAT provided was incredible,” Panerai said. “We could observe fiber ablation at a resolution that we had not seen before.”

Ringel was given about 19 TB of raw data collected in Switzerland and began processing it.

“After reconstructing the data, I used deep learning to segment it—identifying the fibers from the void,” Ringel said. “It was a huge data management challenge. From the beginning, I could qualitatively see a shift in material response between conditions.”

Next came intensive analysis. He examined how easily oxygen diffuses through the material compared to how quickly it reacts with the carbon fibers.

“There’s a finite amount of oxygen that’s available to react with the carbon fibers. In high-temperature cases, reactions happen fast, and the oxygen doesn’t have time to diffuse into the material before getting eaten up at the surface,” Ringel said. “But, as the temperature decreases, reactions slow down, giving the oxygen time to percolate through the material, leading to weakening of fibers throughout the volume of the material.

“We captured this happening. We visualized and quantified how deep into the material reactions were occurring based on temperature and pressure. We mapped them using non-dimensional analysis, which describes the competition between diffusion and reaction rates in materials. Our numbers from the images correlated with what we saw.”

The second phase of the analysis involved a close collaboration with NASA’s Ames Research Center. Ringel and colleagues used NASA’s Porous Microstructure Analysis software on the National Energy Research Scientific Center supercomputer to run over 1,600 material property simulations.

“Simulations utilized our evolving 3D images, providing us with information on properties of the material at each timepoint. We also developed a novel method to calculate the properties of the material as a function of both time and space. For the first time, we can see how the properties change throughout the heat shield material under varying diffusion-reaction regimes.”

The information generated from this research on diffusion and reaction is invaluable for advancing modern ablation models, enhancing heat shield performance, and tailoring materials to specific operational conditions.

“Our data provides valuable measurements to help other heat shield researchers validate and improve their ablation models, which are then applied to in-flight vehicles.

“With an improved understanding of how diffusion-reaction competition influences heat shield degradation throughout flight, a world of innovative engineering becomes possible. This knowledge empowers the development of advanced manufacturing approaches, such as 3D-printed heat shields with precisely engineered internal structures designed to meet the specific conditions of hypersonic reentry.”

Reference: Ringel BM, Semeraro F, Ferguson JC, et al. Carbon fiber oxidation in 4D. Adv Mater. 2025:2502007. doi: 10.1002/adma.202502007

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‘City killer’ giant asteroid, unofficially known as 2024 YR4, may hit the moon in 2032. The scientists ruled out any significant threat to Earth.

2024 YR4 made headlines in December 2024 when its probability of hitting the Earth peaked at 3% on February 18, 2025, but then it fell to 0%.

The scientist redefined its trajectory and found a 4.3% probability of it hitting the moon on December 22, 2032. The chances are still rare, but there could be some implications for planet Earth if it happens.

NASA’s James Webb Telescope took the infrared images of the asteroid. Scientists estimated its size to be 53-67 meters. That’s equal to the size of a 10-story building.

If the City killer hit the moon, it could impact at a speed of tens of thousands of miles per hour. It could create a crater of roughly one kilometre wide.

Dr. Paul Wiegert, an astronomy professor at Western University, in an interview to Western News, said, “If 2024 YR4 hits the moon, it will be the largest asteroid to have hit the moon in about 5,000 years. It’s quite a rare event.”

The lunar debris could put astronauts, satellites, cell phones, the internet, and weather forecasting at risk. It could create a meteor shower visible from Earth once in a lifetime.

“People at home will be able to see the explosion with a small telescope or even binoculars,” Prof Wiegert says, adding, “We should also get to see quite a spectacular meteor shower.”

However, there is no evidence that the lunar strike would alter the Moon’s orbit or pose any threat to life on Earth.

The 2024 YR4 asteroid is too distant because it orbits the Sun. It is expected that the asteroid’s orbit will bring it back near Earth. NASA will get a clearer picture of its trajectory and the probability of lunar impact.

2024 YR4 is called a near-earth asteroid because it is located in an orbit within Earth’s region. City Killers means it could cause damage if it hit the Earth.

Will the city-killer asteroid destroy Earth?

City-killer asteroid is no longer a threat to Earth. There is a probability that it could hit the moon on December 22, 2032

 

More than one star contributes to the irregular shape of NGC 6072 – Webb’s newest look at this planetary nebula in the near- and mid-infrared shows what may appear as a very messy scene resembling splattered paint. However, the unusual, asymmetrical scene hints at more complicated mechanisms underway, as the star central to the scene approaches the very final stages of its life and expels shells of material, losing up to 80 percent of its mass.

Since their discovery in the late 1700s, astronomers have learned that planetary nebulae, or the expanding shell of glowing gas expelled by a low-intermediate mass star late in its life, can come in all shapes and sizes. Most planetary nebulae present as circular, elliptical, or bi-polar, but some stray from the norm, as seen in new high-resolution images of the planetary nebula NGC 6072 by the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope.

In Webb’s NIRCam (Near-Infrared Camera) view of the object, it’s readily apparent that this nebula is multi-polar. This means there are several different elliptical outflows jetting out either way from the centre. These outflows compress gas towards the equatorial plane and create a disc. Astronomers say this is evidence that there are likely at least two stars at the centre of this scene. Specifically, a companion star is interacting with an aging star that had already begun to shed some of its outer layers of gas and dust.

The central region of the planetary nebula glows from the hot stellar core, seen as a light blue hue in near-infrared light. The dark orange material, which is made up of gas and dust, follows pockets or open areas that appear dark blue. This clumpiness could be created when dense molecules formed while being shielded from hot radiation from the central star. There could also be a time element at play. Over thousands of years, inner fast winds could be ploughing through the halo cast off from the main star when it first started to lose mass.

The longer wavelengths captured by Webb’s MIRI (Mid-Infrared Instrument) are highlighting dust, revealing the star researchers suspect could be central to this scene. It appears as a small pink-white dot in this image. Webb’s look in the mid-infrared wavelength also reveals concentric rings expanding from the central region, the most obvious circling just past the edges of the lobes.

This may be additional evidence of a secondary star at the centre of the scene hidden from our view. The secondary star, as it circles repeatedly around the original star, could have carved out rings of material in a spiral pattern as the main star was expelling mass during an earlier stage of its life.

The red areas in NIRCam and blue areas in MIRI both trace cool molecular gas (likely molecular hydrogen) while central regions trace hot ionized gas.

Planetary nebulae will remain a topic of study for astronomers using Webb who hope to learn more about the full life cycle of stars and how they impact their surrounding environments. As the star at the centre of a planetary nebula cools and fades, the nebula will gradually dissipate into the interstellar medium – contributing enriched material that helps form new stars and planetary systems, now containing those heavier elements.

Webb’s imaging of NGC 6072 opens the door to studying how the planetary nebulae with more complex shapes contribute to this process.

More information

Webb is the largest, most powerful telescope ever launched into space. Under an international collaboration agreement, ESA provided the telescope’s launch service, using the Ariane 5 launch vehicle. Working with partners, ESA was responsible for the development and qualification of Ariane 5 adaptations for the Webb mission and for the procurement of the launch service by Arianespace. ESA also provided the workhorse spectrograph NIRSpec and 50% of the mid-infrared instrument MIRI, which was designed and built by a consortium of nationally funded European Institutes (The MIRI European Consortium) in partnership with JPL and the University of Arizona.

Webb is an international partnership between NASA, ESA and the Canadian Space Agency (CSA).

A major fault in the Yukon, Canada, that has been quiet for at least 12,000 years may be capable of giving off earthquakes of at least magnitude 7.5, new research suggests.

Based on the amount of strain the Tintina fault has accumulated over the past 2.6 million years, it is now under an amount of stress that could lead to a large quake within a human lifespan, researchers reported July 15 in the journal Geophysical Research Letters. The finding may require experts to rethink the earthquake danger in the region, the study authors said.