Category: 7. Science

Charleston, SC, July 23, 2025 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — In a world facing imminent collapse, Earth has been given a dismal survivability rating of 2.5 by the Earth Habitability Science Division. Humanity, confined to isolated dome cities, is at risk of extinction due to the plundering of “Outsiders.” In response, the U.S. government has ordered the immediate deployment of stellar freighters to find a new habitable planet. Captain Nick Moss commands the Stellar Freighter Newport, which embarks on a mission to the newly discovered planet Astro Major contained in the Alpha Centauri Triple Star System. Initial findings reveal a promising environment, but a shuttle malfunction forces the crew to use escape pods, resulting in a crash that leaves several members unaccounted for.

As the Newport hurtles back to Earth, Moss not only learns of the strange creatures that populate Astro’s surface, the three crew members who perished during their tenure there under suspicious circumstances, the dozen Natives apparently kidnaped and smuggled aboard the Newport by Military Police Officer Gustav Pavlich (and possibly other rogue officers), but about the fact that giant vicious fanged centipedes have wormed their way aboard with the vegetation and are now inhabiting his ship. 

As Captain Moss attempts to rectify his increasingly overwhelming challenges in a way that will allow his ship and his crew to get back to Earth safely, he suddenly finds himself embroiled in a fight almost to the death with Military Police Officer Pavlich. Moss sustains severe eye damage, and it is feared he may lose it along with his ability to maintain his role as captain.

R.G. Osborne’s Time Warp is a thrilling exploration of survival, love, and the harsh realities of a dying world.

Time Warp is available for purchase online at Amazon.com and BarnesandNoble.com.

For more information about the author, visit his website: timewarptheencounter.com.

About the Author: R.G. Osborne was born in England and grew up in America. An Air Force veteran and college graduate, he has lived extensively throughout the United States during his working career. A lifelong science fiction enthusiast, Osborne combined his passion and knowledge to create his novel, Time Warp. He enjoys stories that resonate with fans of Star Trek, Star Wars Alien, and Avatar, and is inspired by authors like Michael Crichton, Jean Auel, Clive Cussler, John Grisham, and Stephen King. R.G. resides in Oregon.

Complex regions of the human genome remained uncharted, even after researchers sequenced the genome in its entirety. That is, until today.

Researchers decoded DNA segments involved in the development of diseases like diabetes and spinal muscular atrophy that had previously been considered too complicated to sequence. Their work, published in Nature on Wednesday, could expand the future of precision medicine.

“This is a landmark paper,” said Barbara Mellone, professor of molecular and cell biology at the University of Connecticut, who was not involved in the research. “It opens the door to potentially solving cases that have been inaccessible to diagnosis for a long time.”

The first truly complete human genome was sequenced in 2022. A year later, scientists unveiled the first human “pangenome,” an effort to represent the genetic variability of populations worldwide. But still, gaps remained — gaps that Wednesday’s study has helped fill. The research solved for 92% of missing data in the human genome. And it mapped genomic variation across ancestries to a degree not reached before.

The international team of researchers co-led by the Jackson Laboratory used data from 65 human samples, which spanned five continental groups and 28 population groups. They started by sequencing the data using a combination of two technologies. The first, Oxford Nanopore Technologies’ ultra-long sequencing tools, allowed the researchers to scaffold regions that are difficult to sequence due to their density. The second, Pacific Biosciences’ high-fidelity sequencing tool, allowed the researchers to achieve high base-level accuracy when sequencing.

Christine Beck, a senior study author and geneticist at the University of Connecticut Health Center, said that this “one-two hit” is what allowed her team to overcome previous technological hurdles and surmount the missing genome regions.

The researchers then partitioned the individual sequences into haplotypes, groups of genes that are typically inherited together from a single parent. These were subsequently compiled into contiguous stretches to form haplotype-resolved assemblies, which separate and individually represent the haplotypes inherited from each parent. In the final step, researchers compared each haplotype to that of a reference genome to identify the structural variants that could lead to diseases, as well as understand the degree of genetic variation across different populations, Beck said.

The group fully sequenced several of the most complex regions that have previously been associated with genetic diseases. One such region is the major histocompatibility complex, which encodes the machinery for antigen presentation, a crucial process in the body’s immune response. This part of the genome has been linked to conditions like cancer and type 2 diabetes, as well as differences among individuals in their viral susceptibility, according to Beck.

The study resolved the sequences for the SMN1 and SMN2 genes, which are associated with spinal muscular atrophy and have previously been the target for therapies for the disease. The amylase gene cluster, which aids in the digestion of starchy foods, was also decoded.

And the researchers sequenced over 1,200 centromeres, which are specialized regions of the chromosome that are essential to cell division. They found that the alpha satellite array, which forms the foundation of human centromeres, can vary up to 30-fold in length. Centromere variation can cause chromosomal abnormalities like trisomies, when an individual has three copies of a chromosome — leading to conditions like Down syndrome, Edwards syndrome, and Patau syndrome, Beck said.

Discerning the sequences and their population variation, Beck added, is a step toward understanding the development of associated diseases. This has significant implications for precision medicine, according to Charleston Chiang, a medical population geneticist at Keck School of Medicine of USC, who was not involved in the paper.

“It’s ultimately rooted in being able to more clearly define a person’s risk,” Chiang said.

The vast majority of studies related to genetic disease diagnosis have focused on single nucleotide polymorphisms, a gene variation that occurs when one base pair is changed, according to Chiang. This means that risk assessment for genetic disorders has largely ignored structural variants across different population groups. But the new study, which lays the foundation for understanding these variants’ associations with diseases, could ultimately enable physicians to deliver much more tailored genetic diagnoses — and in turn, treatments.

The diversity of the study’s sampled individuals is also key to its significance, according to Mellone. The research revealed that African ancestry samples had the most structural variance, which supports the idea that this population harbors the deepest reservoir of human genetic diversity. Considering this finding is essential when thinking about reference genomes, which have traditionally been biased towards European ancestry, Mellone added.

Though the paper has a more diverse sample compared to previous studies, a limitation is its sample size, according to Chiang. An analysis of many more global populations is necessary to fully represent the human genetic world and possible structural variations that could lead to diseases, he added.

Still, Chiang said the paper has important implications.

“It’s clearly the direction that our field, in terms of generating genetic variation data, is moving towards,” Chiang added. “The idea has been talked about for a while, and you’re seeing them, one by one, becoming realized.”

A bizarre reptile once scurried through the Triassic treetops with an extravagant crest on its back, one made from neither scale, nor bone, nor feather.

The extinct creature’s 247-million-year-old fossils immediately stood out to paleontologists. The impressive appendage on its back looks like a frill of overlapping feathers at first glance, but it’s much older than the earliest fossilized feather, and there’s no branching to indicate a plume.

The elaborate structure also lacks bony spines, such as those seen in later dinosaurs, like Spinosaurus.

Related: ‘Beyond Doubt’: Proteins in Fossil From Actual Dinosaur, Claim Scientists

“This had to be something new,” Stuttgart State Museum of Natural History paleontologist Stephan Spiekman told ScienceAlert.

“Prior to our discovery, complex outgrowths from the skin were restricted to mammals and birds and their closest relatives, predominantly in the form of feathers and hair.

“We now have another, different type of complex appendage, in a very early reptile.”

Long before dinosaurs evolved plumage, it appears that some early reptiles were already putting together a genetic toolkit for complex appendages.

The dorsal crests discovered by Spiekman and his colleagues are “basically novel to science”, so they don’t yet have a name for the appendage. In their study, the researchers essentially refer to them as skin outgrowths, but they aren’t actually similar to reptile skin.

Spiekman thinks the outgrowths may be made of keratin, similar to nails, hairs, scales, or claws. Confirming that suspicion will require further analysis.

Altogether, Spiekman and his colleagues studied more than 80 fossils of the outgrowths, recently donated to the State Museum of Natural History in Stuttgart, Germany.

The vast majority had lost their corresponding skeletons; only one of the fossils featured the bird-like skull of a small, ancient reptile.

The extinct animal has been named Mirasaura grauvogeli, the first part of which means ‘wonderous reptile’.

Technically, the species is a drepanosaur – a small, early reptile that lived in the trees, hunting insects with its velociraptor-like claws.

But its crest is the real stand-out feature.

“Mirasaura developed an alternative to feathers very early in Earth’s history, long before the dinosaurs, which we did not expect and which will stimulate discussion and research,” says reptile paleontologist Rainer Schoch, from the State Museum of Natural History in Stuttgart.

The exact function of the Mirasaura’s dorsal appendage is unknown, but based on the physics, it probably wasn’t used for flight or insulation. A role in visual communication, such as predator deterrence or intraspecies signaling, is more likely.

The best preserved Mirasaura fossils were found to contain traces of melanosomes, which are organelles within pigment cells.

Interestingly, their geometry is consistent with the melanosomes that color feathers, but not those found in reptile skin or mammal hair.

“Mirasaura really shows how surprising evolution can be, and how much we can still learn from palaeontology,” Spiekman told ScienceAlert.

“We already knew from genetics and developmental biology that much of the pathway to form feathers, hairs, and scales, is shared between mammals, reptiles, and birds. Now, with Mirasaura, we can say that such complex structures did indeed grow in other animals, too.”

Turns out, reptiles aren’t the scaly, simple animals we often paint them out to be. They deserve more credit.

The study was published in Nature.

Scientists equipped with giant lasers have blown up gold at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, heating it to 14 times its boiling point. For a chilling second, they thought they broke physics, but they fortunately did no such thing. That said, they broke something else: a decades-long model in physical chemistry having to do with the fundamental properties of matter.

In an experiment presented today in Nature, researchers, for the first time ever, demonstrated a way to directly measure the temperature of matter in extreme states, or conditions with intensely high temperatures, pressures, or densities. Using the new technique, scientists succeeded in capturing gold at a temperature far beyond its boiling point—a procedure called superheating—at which point the common metal existed in a strange limbo between solid and liquid. The results suggest that, under the right conditions, gold may have no superheating limit. If true, this could have a wide range of applications across spaceflight, astrophysics, or nuclear chemistry, according to the researchers.

The study is based on a two-pronged experiment. First, the scientists used a laser to superheat a sample of gold, suppressing the metal’s natural tendency to expand when heated. Next, they used ultrabright X-rays to zap the gold samples, which scattered off the surface of the gold. By calculating the distortions in the X-ray’s frequency after colliding with the gold particles, the team locked down the speed and temperature of the atoms.

The experimental result seemingly refutes a well-established theory in physics, which states that structures like gold can’t be heated more than three times their boiling point, 1,948 degrees Fahrenheit (1,064 degrees Celsius). Beyond those temperatures, superheated gold is supposed to reach the so-called “entropy catastrophe”—or, in more colloquial terms, the heated gold should’ve blown up. 

The researchers themselves didn’t expect to surpass that limit. The new result disproves the conventional theory, but it does so in a big way by far overshooting the theoretical prediction, showing that it’s possible to heat gold up to a jaw-dropping 33,740 degrees F (18,726 degrees C). 

“We looked at the data, and somebody just said, ‘Wait a minute. Is this axis correct? That’s…really hot, isn’t it?’” Thomas White, study lead author and physicist at the University of Nevada, Reno, recalled to Gizmodo during a video call.

To be fair, this superheated state lasted for a mere several trillionths of a second. Also, it blew up. But that’s still “long enough to be interesting,” White said, adding that “if you could prevent it from expanding, [theoretically speaking] you could heat it forever.” To which he added: “I’m very thankful that I get to blow stuff up with giant lasers for discoveries. And that’s my job, you know.”

This conjecture will have to withstand follow-up experiments with both gold and other materials, White noted. But from a practical standpoint, the superheated gold kept itself together long enough such that the team was able to directly capture its temperature using their new technique, Bob Nagler, study senior author and staff scientist at SLAC, explained to Gizmodo in a video call. 

“Actually, it’s a funny thing; temperature is one of the physical quantities that humans have known for the longest time—but we don’t measure temperature itself,” Nagler said. “We measure something that temperature influences. For example, a mercury thermometer measures how temperature changes the volume of a blob of mercury.”

This could pose a problem when studying some real-life examples of hot, dense matter in extreme states, such as the center of a star, the nose cone of a spaceship, or the insides of a fusion reactor. Knowing the temperature—a fundamental physical property—of matter in such situations could greatly inform how we investigate or, for the latter two, manipulate them to our benefit.

Often, however, these systems operate on temperature-dependent variables that are difficult to gauge, Nagler said. Technically, you could reproduce them in labs, but they’ll “very quickly explode,” he noted—notwithstanding the fact that you’d still have to know the real-life temperature of the system being replicated to ensure the experiments are valid.

“So you have a chicken-and-egg problem,” he said. That’s why the scientists are eager to inspect how their new technique could help in this regard. 

“That’s the most exciting thing about this work—we now have a thermometer for all these crazy experiments we’ve been doing,” White said. For example, the National Ignition Facility at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory uses a gold cylinder to contain their nuclear fusion experiments, firing X-rays at this cylinder to drive the fusion reactor, White explained. 

“But we’re also thinking of doing directly fusion-related experiments now,” he said. “To recreate fusion conditions, or the materials that make the fusion reactors, and just measure their temperature—which, actually, has been a long-standing question [in physics].”

The team is already applying the technique to other materials, such as silver and iron, which they happily report produced some promising data. The team will be busy over the next few months analyzing what these metals could be telling us, the scientists said. The project, for sure, is in full ignition.

This article was originally published at The Conversation. The publication contributed the article to Space.com’s Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights

I was preparing for my early morning class back in January 2025 when I received a notice regarding an asteroid called 2024 YR4. It said the probability it could hit Earth was unusually high.

Inspired by a hitchhiking fish that uses a specialized suction organ to latch onto sharks and other marine animals, researchers from MIT and other institutions have designed a mechanical adhesive device that can attach to soft surfaces underwater or in extreme conditions, and remain there for days or weeks.

This device, the researchers showed, can adhere to the lining of the GI tract, whose mucosal layer makes it very difficult to attach any kind of sensor or drug-delivery capsule. Using their new adhesive system, the researchers showed that they could achieve automatic self-adhesion, without motors, to deliver HIV antiviral drugs or RNA to the GI tract, and they could also deploy it as a sensor for gastroesophageal reflux disease (GERD). The device can also be attached to a swimming fish to monitor aquatic environments.

The design is based on the research team’s extensive studies of the remora’s sucker-like disc. These discs have several unique properties that allow them to adhere tightly to a variety of hosts, including sharks, marlins, and rays. However, how remoras maintain adhesion to soft, dynamically shifting surfaces remains largely unknown.

Understanding the fundamental physics and mechanics of how this part of the fish sticks to another organism helped us to establish the underpinnings of how to engineer a synthetic adhesive system,” says Giovanni Traverso, an associate professor of mechanical engineering at MIT, a gastroenterologist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, an associate member of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, and the senior author of the study.

MIT research scientist Ziliang (Troy) Kang is the lead author of the study, which appears today in Nature. The research team also includes authors from Brigham and Women’s Hospital, the Broad Institute, and Boston College.

Inspired by nature

Most protein and RNA drugs can’t be taken orally because they will be broken down before they can be absorbed into the GI tract. To overcome that, Traverso’s lab is working on ingestible devices that can be swallowed and then gradually release their payload over days, weeks, or even longer.

One major obstacle is that the digestive tract is lined with a slippery mucosal membrane that is constantly regenerating and is difficult for any device to stick to. Furthermore, any device that manages to attach to this lining is likely to be dislodged by food or liquids moving through the tract.

To find a solution to these challenges, the MIT team looked to the remora, also known as the sucker fish, which clings to its hosts for free transportation and access to food scraps. To explore how the remora attaches itself to dynamic, soft surfaces so strongly, Traverso’s teamed up with Christopher Kenaley, an associate professor of biology at Boston College who studies remoras and other fish.

Their studies revealed that the remora’s ability to stick to its host depends on a few different features. First, the large suction disc creates adhesion through pressure-based suction, just like a plunger. Additionally, each disc is divided into individual small adhesive compartments by rows of plates called lamellae wrapped in soft tissue. These compartments can independently create additional suction on nonhomogeneous soft surfaces.

There are nine species of remora, and in each one, these rows of lamellae are aligned a little bit differently — some are exclusively parallel, while others form patterns with rows tilted at different angles. These differences, the researchers found, could be the key to elucidating each species’ evolutionary adaptation to its host.

Remora albescens, a unique species that exhibits mucoadhesion in the oral cavity of rays, inspired the team to develop devices with enhanced adhesion to soft surfaces with its unparallel, highly tilted lamellae orientation. Other remora species, which attach to high-speed swimmers such as marlins and swordfish, tend to have highly parallel orientations, which help the hitchhikers slide without losing adhesion as they are rapidly dragged through the water. Still other species, which have a mix of parallel and angled rows, can attach to a variety of hosts.

Tiny spines that protrude from the lamellae help to achieve additional adhesion by interlocking with the host tissue. These spines, also called spinules, are several hundred microns long and grasp onto the tissue with minimal invasiveness.

“If the compartment suction is subjected to a shear force, the friction enabled by the mechanical interlocking of the spinules can help to maintain the suction,” Kang says.

Watery environments

By mimicking these anatomical features, the MIT team was able to create a device with similarly strong adhesion for a variety of applications in underwater environments.

The researchers used silicone rubber and temperature-responsive smart materials to create their adhesive device, which they call MUSAS (for “mechanical underwater soft adhesion system”). The fully passive, disc-shaped device contains rows of lamellae similar to those of the remora, and can self-adhere to the mucosal lining, leveraging GI contractions. The researchers found that for their purposes, a pattern of tilted rows was the most effective.

Within the lamellae are tiny microneedle-like structures that mimic the spinules seen in the remora. These tiny spines are made of a shape memory alloy that is activated when exposed to body temperatures, allowing the spines to interlock with each other and grasp onto the tissue surface.

The researchers showed that this device could attach to a variety of soft surfaces, even in wet or highly acidic conditions, including pig stomach tissue, nitrile gloves, and a tilapia swimming in a fish tank. Then, they tested the device for several different applications, including aquatic environmental monitoring. After adding a temperature sensor to the device, the researchers showed that they could attach the device to a fish and accurately measure water temperature as the fish swam at high speed.

To demonstrate medical applications, the researchers incorporated an impedance sensor into the device and showed that it could adhere to the esophagus in an animal model, which allowed them to monitor reflux of gastric fluid. This could offer an alternative to current sensors for GERD, which are delivered by a tube placed through the nose or mouth and pinned to the lower part of the esophagus.

They also showed that the device could be used for sustained release of two different types of therapeutics, in animal tests. First, they showed that they could integrate an HIV drug called cabotegravir into the materials that make up the device (polycaprolactone and silicone). Once adhered to the lining of the stomach, the drug gradually diffused out of the device, over a period of one week.

Cabotegravir is one of the drugs used for HIV PrEP — pre-exposure prophylaxis — as well as treatment of HIV. These treatments are usually given either as a daily pill or an injection administered every one to two months.

The researchers also created a version of the device that could be used for delivery of larger molecules such as RNA. For this kind of delivery, the researchers incorporated RNA into the microneedles of the lamellae, which could then inject them into the lining of the stomach. Using RNA encoding the gene for luciferase, a protein that emits light, the researchers showed that they could successfully deliver the gene to cells of the cheek or the esophagus.

The researchers now plan to adapt the device for delivering other types of drugs, as well as vaccines. Another possible application is using the devices for electrical stimulation, which Traverso’s lab has previously shown can activate hormones that regulate appetite.

The research was funded, in part, by the Gates Foundation, MIT’s Department of Mechanical Engineering, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, and the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health.

Penn State University scientists have unveiled the world’s first silicon-free, complementary metal-oxide semiconductor (CMOS) computer made of 2D materials that could usher in faster, thinner, and more energy-efficient microelectronics.

A Silicon-Less Computer

Silicon has been the backbone of the semiconductor industry for decades now, but it is slowly reaching its limits as the industry transitions from the nano to the pico; any miniaturization beyond a certain threshold would render the metalloid’s properties obsolete.

Which is why Penn State’s 2D material-computer — composed of molybdenum disulfide (MoS2) and tungsten diselenide (WSe2) that create the n-type and p-type transistors vital to CMOS circuits — presents a key milestone at the right juncture for next-gen microelectronics. 

Faster, Thinner, and Better

Silicon shrinks as its electronic properties degrade, affecting the flow of current in a device. This causes performance lags and higher energy consumption. Penn State’s 2D materials, on the other hand, face no such issues as they’re just an atom thick. They can maintain their exceptional electronic properties no matter how small a transistor is made.

According to the scientists led by Prof. Saptarshi Das, scaling these materials without diminishing their electronic qualities could pave the way for ultra-thin, high-performance devices.

A Milestone for 2D Microelectronics

Das’ team used the metal-organic chemical vapor deposition (MOCVD) process to grow large sheets of MoS2 and WSe2. This allowed them to fabricate more than 1,000 individual n- and p-type transistors, proving that these 2D materials could be scaled for complex, large-scale applications.

Currently, the 2D computer’s operating frequency is 25 kilohertz — slower than conventional silicon-based computers — but the scientists say this is a work in progress. and by tweaking the threshold voltages of both the n-type and p-type transistors, they could lower the power consumption and increase the computer’s performance characteristics.

Image credit: Krishnendu Mukhopadhyay/Penn State

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Advancements in engineering have gradually pushed the possibility of sending humans into deep space closer to reality. But launching explorers into the sky with mission critical water, oxygen, and fuel is technologically challenging and enormously expensive. Taking a single kilogram of material into space can cost thousands of dollars, according to NASA.

A new study suggests that the price may soon come down. Researchers in China have shown that essential resources can be generated in space from sunlight, the moon’s soil, and astronauts’ breath (Joule 2025, DOI:10.1016/j.joule.2025.102006).

Although ice exists on the moon, it sits in hard-to-reach, extremely cold poles that have near-vacuum-like conditions—not the most attractive option for a reliable water source. But researchers have discovered that water can be generated in other ways.

By analyzing lunar soil samples collected in 2020 by Chang’E-5, China’s first mission that brought lunar samples to earth, researchers at the University of Chinese Academy of Sciences found that ilmenite, a lunar-rock mineral made of iron and titanium oxides, can be heated to high temperatures, causing hydrogen deposited by solar winds to react with the oxides and produce water.

But this method of heating is energy intensive and addresses only the water part of the resource problem. Aiming to go a step further, researchers led by Zhigang Zou and Yingfang Yao of Nanjing University and Lu Wang of the Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen, instead wanted to use the moon’s natural extreme conditions to extract additional essential resources from the dust.

The researchers shined simulated bright sunlight on lunar soil samples to replicate conditions on the moon’s surface. The ilmenite absorbed the light, converted it to heat, and released water from the soil. From there, researchers collected the water and used the soil’s high temperature and natural catalytic properties to split carbon dioxide, which would be sourced from astronauts’ exhalations, into carbon monoxide and oxygen molecules. The extreme heat can also split water, liberating hydrogen, a main ingredient in fuel, Wang says in an email.

“We’ve got this nasty habit of taking Earth processes and just packaging them,” says Matthew Shaw, an astrometallurgy expert at the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation, who was not involved in the study. “I suspect the use of solar thermal energy is one of the ways that we can stop doing that.”

One disadvantage, though, of relying on ilmenite is that the mineral is sparse in some parts of the moon, meaning this type of processing would be restricted by location, Shaw says.

Low CO₂ availability is also a problem. “The current catalytic performance remains insufficient to fully meet the demands of extraterrestrial survival,” Wang says. The team continues to work on optimizing the reaction.

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Head away from city lights in late July to see the dense core of the Milky Way arcing towards the southwestern horizon against a blissfully dark sky as the waning lunar disk approaches its new moon phase.

Our solar system orbits within a 100,000-light-year-wide spiral galaxy known as the Milky Way. On clear nights under dark skies, we can see the profile of our galactic home from within — the galactic plane — stretching across the inky darkness as a glowing band of milky light interspersed with dense filaments of cosmic clouds.