Category: 7. Science

This is the first time silicate emission has been detected in planetary-mass objects.

Giant free-floating planets could make their own miniature planetary systems without needing a star to orbit around, finds a new study from Scotland’s University of St Andrews.

Scientists investigated eight young and isolated cosmic objects with masses five to 10 times that of Jupiter using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). For comparison’s sake, Jupiter is around 318 times as massive as Earth.

These objects are comparable to giant planets in their properties, but they don’t orbit around a star. Instead, they float freely in space.

Current research suggests that these are the lowest mass objects formed from the collapse of giant gas clouds, similar to stars. However, unlike stars, these planets do not accumulate enough mass to start any fusion reactions at their cores.

Scientists suggest that these free-floating planets could have formed in a similar manner to other planets, in orbit around a star, but later ejected from orbit to float on their own.

These objects are difficult to observe since they are very dim – as they do not emit light – and radiate mostly in the infrared spectrum.

So, in order to study them, the team, made up of researchers from the School of Physics and Astronomy at St Andrews, along with co-authors from Ireland, England, the US, Italy and Portugal, used instruments on the JWST that are extremely sensitive to infrared light. The team analysed detailed spectroscopic observations for these objects from August to October 2024.

Their findings characterises these objects in depth and confirm that they have masses around the same size as Jupiter. Six of them also have excess emission in the infrared spectrum caused by warm dust in their immediate surrounding.

According to the study published last week, these emissions are a sign of disks around the objects, which are generally the birthplaces of planets.

In addition, observations also show emission from silicate grains in these disks, with clear signs of dust growth and crystallisation, which is typically the first steps in the formation of rocky planets.

Although silicate emission has been found in stars and brown dwarfs before, this is its first detection in planetary-mass objects.

The latest finding builds on another study published from the University of St Andrews, which showed that disks around free-floating planetary mass objects can last several million years, giving them enough time to form planets.

“Taken together, these studies show that objects with masses comparable to those of giant planets have the potential to form their own miniature planetary systems. Those systems could be like the solar system, just scaled down,” said Dr Aleks Scholz, the principal investigator of the project.

“Whether or not such systems actually exist remains to be shown.”

In another recent study, scientists, for the first time, observed the very early stages of the creation of a new solar system around a baby star.

The newborn planetary system that was just discovered is emerging around HOPS-315, a baby star around 1,300 light-years away. Astronomers say that Hops-315 is comparable to the sun.

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The authors analyzed over one million papers and preprints published between 2020 and 2024, focusing on abstracts and introductions. These are the sections most often edited with the help of language models. To detect signs of AI use, the researchers applied statistical methods that track the frequency of certain words commonly found in AI-generated text, such as “pivotal,” “showcase,” and “intricate.”

According to James Zou, a co-author of the study and a computational biologist at Stanford University, a sharp increase in AI-generated content was seen just months after ChatGPT became publicly available. The trend was especially strong in fields closely tied to artificial intelligence, including computer science, electrical engineering, and related areas.

By comparison, signs of language model use were found in only 7.7% of math abstracts, with even lower rates in biomedical research and physics. Still, the trend is gradually spreading across all scientific fields.

Early on, the academic community tried to limit the use of generative AI. Many journals introduced policies requiring authors to disclose if such tools were used.

In practice, though, enforcing these rules has proven difficult. Some papers included obvious traces of language models, such as phrases like “regenerate response” or “my knowledge cutoff.” Researchers, including University of Toulouse computer scientist Guillaume Cabanac, began compiling databases of questionable publications.

Today, detecting AI involvement is becoming increasingly difficult. Authors have learned to avoid giveaway phrases, and current detection tools often deliver inconsistent results, especially when evaluating work by non-native English speakers.

Risks and challenges

Although the study focused mainly on abstracts and introductions, co-author and data scientist at the University of Tübingen, Dmitry Kobak warns that researchers may increasingly turn to AI to write sections that review previous studies. This could make those parts of papers more uniform and eventually create a vicious cycle, where new language models are trained on content generated by earlier ones.

The publication of AI-generated papers that include errors or fabricated information raises concerns about the reliability of the peer review process and may undermine trust in scientific publishing overall.

Earlier, Kazinform News Agency reported on the influence of artificial intelligence on the labor market and future jobs.

Publisher’s note Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

This is a summary of: Wang, G. et al. Spatial quantitative metabolomics enables identification of remote and sustained ipsilateral cortical metabolic reprogramming after stroke. Nat. Metab. https://doi.org/10.1038/s42255-025-01340-8 (2025).

Newswise — 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.”

The study, “Carbon Fiber Oxidation in 4D,” written by Benjamin M. Ringel and Francesco Panerai from Illinois; Federico Semeraro, and Bruno Dias from AMA Inc at NASA’s AMES; Joseph C. Ferguson from Stanford University; Harold S. Barnard, Sam Schickler, Kara Levy, Shawn Shacterman, Talia Benioff-White, Julian Davis, Alastair A. MacDowell and Dilworth Y. Parkinson from Advanced Light Source at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory; C.M. Schlepütz from Swiss Light Source at the Paul Scherrer Institute; and Edward S. Barnard from the Molecular Foundry at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. It is published in and featured on the cover of Advanced Materials. DOI:10.1002/adma.202502007

This work was supported by grants from the Air Force Office of Scientific Research and NASA. Advanced Light Source is a facility funded by the Department of Energy.

Get ready stargazers: the Perseid meteor shower peaks next week, Aug. 12-13, bringing up to 100 shooting stars per hour, along with the potential for dazzling fireballs

The Perseid meteor shower occurs each year as Earth barrels through the trail of ancient debris shed by comet 109P/Swift-Tuttle. These cometary fragments — often no larger than a grain of sand — collide with Earth’s atmosphere at speeds of up to 37 miles (59 kilometers) per second. The resulting friction swiftly vaporizes the debris, creating the bright flashes that we see as fiery “shooting stars”.

“Carnivorous dinosaurs took very different paths as they evolved into giants in terms of feeding biomechanics and possible behaviors,” said Andrew Rowe of the University of Bristol, UK.

“Tyrannosaurs evolved skulls built for strength and crushing bites, while other lineages had comparatively weaker but more specialized skulls, suggesting a diversity of feeding strategies even at massive sizes. In other words, there wasn’t one ‘best’ skull design for being a predatory giant; several designs functioned perfectly well.”

Rowe has always been fascinated by big carnivorous dinosaurs, and he considers them interesting subjects for exploring basic questions in organismal biology. In this study, he and co-author Emily Rayfield wanted to know how bipedalism — or walking on two legs — influenced skull biomechanics and feeding techniques.

It was previously known that despite reaching similar sizes, predatory dinosaurs evolved in very different parts of the world at different times and had very different skull shapes. For Rowe and Rayfield, those facts raised questions about whether their skulls were functionally similar under the surface or if there were notable differences in their predatory lifestyles. As there are no massive, bipedal carnivores alive today — ever since the end-Cretaceous mass extinction event — the authors note that studying these animals offers intriguing insights into a way of life which has since disappeared.

To examine the relationship between body size and skull biomechanics, the authors used 3D technologies including CT scans and surface scans analyze the skull mechanics, quantify the feeding performance, and measure the bite strength across 18 species of therapod, a group of carnivorous dinosaurs ranging from small to giant. While they expected some differences between species, they were surprised when their analyses showed clear biomechanical divergence.

“Tyrannosaurids like T. rex had skulls that were optimized for high bite forces at the cost of higher skull stress,” Rowe says. “But in some other giants, like Giganotosaurus, we calculated stress patterns suggesting a relatively lighter bite. It drove home how evolution can produce multiple ‘solutions’ to life as a large, carnivorous biped.”

Skull stress didn’t show a pattern of increase with size. Some smaller therapods experienced greater stress than some larger species due to increased muscle volume and bite forces. The findings show that being a predatory biped didn’t always equate to being a bone-crushing giant. Unlike T. rex, some dinosaurs, including the spinosaurs and allosaurs, became giants while maintaining weaker bites more suited for slashing at prey and stripping flesh.

“I tend to compare Allosaurus to a modern Komodo dragon in terms of feeding style,” Rowe says. “Large tyrannosaur skulls were instead optimized like modern crocodiles with high bite forces that crushed prey. This biomechanical diversity suggests that dinosaur ecosystems supported a wider range of giant carnivore ecologies than we often assume, with less competition and more specialization.”

This research was supported by funding from the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council.

A team of researchers in the US and China has calculated that extreme pressure could theoretically allow stable covalent helium–fluorine bonds to form, challenging the idea that helium is a chemically inert element.

Noble gases get their name due to their inherent reluctance to react. Their complete electron configurations lead them to have exceptionally high ionisation energies, resulting in an unwillingness to form compounds. Despite this, there have been numerous examples of heavier noble gas compounds forming under non-ambient conditions, notably a range of xenon fluorides. Helium equivalents, however, are much rarer, with such compounds often being unstable or existing only briefly as transition states.

Now, using an algorithmic search that varies the chemical composition and pressure, scientists have identified a compound where helium actively participates in chemical bonding. At pressures in the tera-pascal range – about 10 times the pressure found at the centre of the Earth – the energetically stable compound He₃F₂ forms. This molecule consists of HeF₂ chains and interstitial helium atoms. Within each chain, helium forms polar covalent bonds to three fluorine atoms, with helium donating electron charge. Molecular orbital calculations of each HeF₃ cluster reveal that extreme pressure allows the helium 1s and fluorine 2p orbitals to form bonds.

The emergence of helium–fluorine bonding further challenges the idea that noble gases are unreactive. The researchers say that helium-bearing interiors of giant planets may contain similar compounds. Such extreme pressures needed to synthesise these materials may be achievable in the lab, but only at a few select research facilities.

NASA has called it quits on attempts to contact its Lunar Trailblazer probe, notching up a failure in its low-cost, high-risk science program.

The probe, designed to map lunar water, launched on February 26, hitching a ride with the second Intuitive Machines robotic lunar lander. All went well at first. The spacecraft separated from the rocket approximately 48 minutes after launch and established communications.

However, by the next day, contact was lost. It appeared the solar arrays were not properly oriented toward the Sun, and the probe’s batteries had been depleted. The spacecraft was tracked from Earth, and observations indicated it was in a slow spin as it drifted off into deep space.

Andrew Klesh, Lunar Trailblazer’s project systems engineer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, said: “As Lunar Trailblazer drifted far beyond the Moon, our models showed that the solar panels might receive more sunlight, perhaps charging the spacecraft’s batteries to a point it could turn on its radio.”

NASA gave the stricken probe a few extra weeks in July to respond, but as the month drew to a close, so too did NASA’s efforts to recover the spacecraft. Even if there had been sufficient power to turn on the radio, the signal would have been too weak for controllers to receive telemetry and issue commands.

The mission aimed to produce high-resolution maps of water on the Moon’s surface and determine what form the water is in, how much is there, and how it changes over time. The data would have proved useful in future robotic and human missions to the lunar surface.

The Lunar Trailblazer was selected by NASA’s SIMPLEx (Small Innovative Missions for Planetary Exploration) competition. SIMPLEx is about lowering costs by adopting a higher risk posture and less stringent requirements for oversight and management.

Readers would be forgiven for a sense of déjà vu. At the end of the last century, NASA adopted a “faster, better, cheaper” approach to missions as it faced substantial budget cuts. The strategy, which was to increase mission cadence and lower costs by accepting greater risks, resulted in some successes, notably the Mars Sojourner rover – but also losses, such as the Mars Polar Lander.

As NASA faces further budget cuts, robotic missions with lower costs and a greater acceptance of risk are set to become more commonplace. ®