Category: 7. Science

July 18 (UPI) — The four members of NASA’s Crew-11 space mission entered quarantine in the Houston area ahead of their planned launch on July 13 from central Florida to the International Space Station.

NASA’s Crew 11 is the 11th operational mission of SpaceX’s Dragon Endeavour spacecraft aboard a Falcon 9.

On Thursday, they entered isolation at Johnson Space Center: NASA astronauts Zena Cardman and Mike Finck, as well as Japan Aerospace Exploration astronaut Kimiya Yui and Roscosmos cosmonaut Oleg Plantonov, 39.

The two-week quarantine is standard procedure for NASA since Apollo from 1968 to 1972 to reduce preflight illness and prevent subsequent symptoms during flight.

Their contact with other people is limited.

Cardman, the 37-year-old commander, is making her first spaceflight with Fincke, 58, making his fourth trip to ISS. Yui, 55, will be on his first spaceflight and Platonov on his maiden mission.

NASA released a podcast of the quartet on Friday.

The crew members spent several months training at NASA and SpaceX sites.

They participated in training simulations at SpaceX’s facility in Hawthorne, Calif., including launch, docking, undocking and departing from the ISS.

Also, they were involved in a water survival demonstration inside the Neutral Buoyancy Lab at Johnson Space Center.

At NASA, the crew trained at Launch Complex 39A on the emergency escape system, which employs slidewire baskets to deliver crew and pad teams from the launch tower to armored vehicles on the ground.

Earlier this month, the crew participated in an equipment interface test, putting on their spacesuits and familiarizing themselves with the interior of their Dragon spacecraft.

NASA and SpaceX are targeting no earlier than 12:09 p.m. EDT July 31 from Pad 39A for the launch. The Falcon 9 has flown 515 times since 2010 from Kennedy Space Center and Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida, and Vandenberg Space Force Base in California.

Crew-10 launched from Kennedy Space Center on March 14. Their arrival at ISS provided a way home for two NASA astronauts who have been on the ISS since June 2024 after arriving on June 5, 2024 on the Boeing Starling Crew Flight.

SpaceX, a private company with Elon Musk as CEO, is the only way now for NASA to send crews to the ISS from the United States. Americans also can fly on Russia’s Soyuz spacecraft.

Uranus releases about 15% more energy than it receives from the Sun, according to two new papers published in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society and the journal Geophysical Research Letters.

Uranus is unlike any other planet in our Solar System. It spins on its side, which means each pole directly faces the Sun for a continuous 42-year ‘summer.’

This planet also rotates in the opposite direction of all planets except Venus.

The data from NASA’s Voyager 2 Uranus flyby in 1986 also suggested the planet is unusually cold inside, challenging scientists to reconsider fundamental theories of how planets formed and evolved throughout our Solar System.

“Since Voyager 2’s flyby, everybody has said Uranus has no internal heat,” said Dr. Amy Simon, a planetary scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center and co-author of the first paper.

“But it’s been really hard to explain why that is, especially when compared with the other giant planets.”

“These Uranus projections came from only one up-close measurement of the planet’s emitted heat made by Voyager 2.”

“Everything hinges on that one data point. That is part of the problem.”

Using an advanced computer modeling technique and revisiting decades of data, Dr. Simon and colleagues found that Uranus does in fact generate some heat.

A planet’s internal heat can be calculated by comparing the amount of energy it receives from the Sun to the amount it of energy it releases into space in the form of reflected light and emitted heat.

The Solar System’s other giant planets — Saturn, Jupiter, and Neptune — emit more heat than they receive, which means the extra heat is coming from inside, much of it left over from the high-energy processes that formed the planets 4.5 billion years ago.

The amount of heat a planet exudes could be an indication of its age: the less heat released relative to the heat absorbed from the Sun, the older the planet is.

Uranus stood out from the other planets because it appeared to give off as much heat as it received, implying it had none of its own.

This puzzled scientists. Some hypothesized that perhaps the planet is much older than all the others and has cooled off completely.

Others proposed that a giant collision — the same one that may have knocked the planet on its side — blasted out all of Uranus’ heat.

But none of these hypotheses satisfied scientists, motivating them to solve Uranus’ cold case.

“We thought, Could it really be that there is no internal heat at Uranus?” said University of Oxford’s Professor Patrick Irwin, lead author of the first paper.

“We did many calculations to see how much sunshine is reflected by Uranus and we realized that it is actually more reflective than people had estimated.”

The researchers set out to determine Uranus’ full energy budget: how much energy it receives from the Sun compared to how much it reflects as sunlight and how much it emits as heat.

To do this, they needed to estimate the total amount of light reflected from the planet at all angles.

“You need to see the light that’s scattered off to the sides, not just coming straight back at you,” Dr. Simon said.

To get the most accurate estimate of Uranus’ energy budget yet, the scientists developed a computer model that brought together everything known about Uranus’ atmosphere from decades of observations from ground- and space-based telescopes, including the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope and NASA’s Infrared Telescope Facility in Hawai’i.

The model included information about the planet’s hazes, clouds, and seasonal changes, all of which affect how sunlight is reflected and how heat escapes.

The authors found that Uranus releases about 15% more energy than it receives from the Sun, a figure that is similar to an estimate from the second study.

These studies suggest Uranus it has its own heat, though still far less than its neighbor Neptune, which emits more than twice the energy it receives.

“Now we have to understand what that remnant amount of heat at Uranus means, as well as get better measurements of it,” Dr. Simon said.

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Patrick G.J. Irwin et al. 2025. The bolometric Bond albedo and energy balance of Uranus. MNRAS 540 (2): 1719-1729; doi: 10.1093/mnras/staf800

Xinyue Wang et al. 2025. Internal Heat Flux and Energy Imbalance of Uranus. Geophysical Research Letters 52 (14): e2025GL115660; doi: 10.1029/2025GL115660

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University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa researchers in the Department of Chemistry have created a molecule once thought too unstable to exist called methanetetrol using extreme, space-like conditions. The discovery could reshape our understanding of chemistry in the universe and shed light on the complex reactions happening in deep space.

Methanetetrol is the only alcohol which has four hydroxyl groups (OH) at a single carbon atom. Scientists have theorized its existence for more than a century, but no one had ever observed it, until now. Using ultra-cold temperatures, near-perfect vacuum and high-energy radiation to simulate the environment inside interstellar clouds, researchers produced this elusive molecule.

Complex compounds, building blocks of life

This finding shows that outer space may host a far more diverse and unexpected set of chemical reactions than previously believed. These reactions are critical to understanding the formation of organic molecules (building blocks of life) across the galaxy. By proving that methanetetrol can form under cosmic conditions, the team has revealed a surprising pathway for how complex compounds might evolve in the icy dust clouds where stars and planets form.

The team used powerful vacuum ultraviolet light to detect tiny amounts of methanetetrol made from water and carbon dioxide. They found that high-energy particles mimicking high energy cosmic rays triggered a series of chemical reactions leading to the creation of methanetetrol and related compounds.

“In collaborations with scientists from Mississippi, Samara University and Shanghai, this work pushes the boundaries of what we know about chemistry in space,” said Department of Chemistry Professor Ralf I. Kaiser.

While this alcohol does not occur naturally on Earth due to its instability in everyday conditions, its formation in space demonstrates that the universe is far more chemically dynamic than previously imagined. The findings push the boundaries of both chemistry and astronomy, and open the door to further discoveries and astronomical observations about how life’s ingredients can emerge in the coldest, darkest corners of space.

The study was published in July 2025 in Nature Communications. The Department of Chemistry is housed in UH Mānoa’s College of Natural Sciences.

The Orion Nebula Cluster, the Pleiades, and the Hyades are all open star clusters located near each other. They’re easily located in the night sky. The Pleiades, aka the Seven Sisters, and the Hyades are close together, and the ONC is a little further away below Orion’s Belt in the Orion Nebula.

Researchers in Iran and Germany have used observations of all three, alongside computer modelling, to uncover a new connection between the three. They say that these three well-known clusters represent three different evolutionary stages of open clusters. Their results are in a paper in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society titled “Are the ONC, Pleiades, and Hyades snapshots of the same embedded cluster?” The lead author is Ghasem Safaei, from the Department of Physics, Institute for Advanced Studies in Basic Sciences, in Iran.

“Most Galactic field stars are not formed in isolation; rather, they originate within star clusters (SCs) embedded in giant molecular clouds that are initially compact structures,” the authors explain in their paper. “The early evolution (first ≈10 Myr) of young, gas-embedded SCs is primarily dominated by the removal of residual gas from star formation, driven by feedback from massive stars through ultraviolet (UV) radiation, stellar winds from OB stars, and supernova explosions.” This loss of mass signals what’s to come for the clusters, as they gradually evaporate over time until the cluster association is lost and their stars become field stars.

The Hyades, Pleiades, and the ONC shown in context. The three are in the same region of the sky, prompting astronomers to wonder if they’re connected somehow. Image Credit: Safaei et al. 2025. MNRAS

The ONC, Pleiades, and Hyades are all open clusters, but they’re different ages with different stellar populations. The ONC is the youngest, only 2.5 million years old, and is an active star formation region. There are different estimates for its number of stars. Some say about 2,800, some say about 4,200 and some say as many as 10,000. The number is difficult to determine because the ONC is young and still contains clouds of gas and dust that birthed the stars, which can obscure its members.

The Pleiades is older at about 100 million years. It contains about 1,059 stars, and is dominated by 14 hot young stars that are seen with the naked eye. Its stars are more loosely scattered than the ONC’s.

The Pleiades, or Subaru in Japan, is an open cluster about 440 light-years away. It’s the most obvious naked eye open cluster in the night sky. Image Credit: NASA, ESA and AURA/Caltech

The Hyades is the oldest of the three. It’s about 700 million years old, has about 400 stars, and is more widely dispersed than the other two. About one-third of its stars are in the cluster’s extended halo, and astronomers think these stars are escaping the cluster. Eventually, all clusters ‘evaporate’ like this and generally only exist for several hundred million years.

The Hyades cluster is the closest cluster to Earth. It’s about 153 light-years away and contains hundreds of stars in a spherical grouping. Image Credit: NASA, ESA, and STScI.

The researchers used N-body simulations to study how clusters evolve. They started out with a young cluster that’s an analog of the ONC. They varied the parameters, including the total mass, the half-mass radius, and the core radius to see what combination generated the observed current ONC. “Additionally, we examine the cluster’s evolution over 800 Myr to determine whether it could reproduce the present-day properties of the Pleiades and Hyades along its evolutionary path,” the researchers explain in their paper.

They found that due to rapid gas expulsion driven by the Milky Way’s tidal field, the simulated ONC suffered significant mass loss. About 100 million years into the simulation, the cluster retained only 47% of its initial 4,200 stars. After 700 million years, it retained only 9%.

“These evolutionary stages closely match the properties of the Pleiades and Hyades, suggesting that an ONC-like cluster may have been their precursor,” the authors write in their research.

“Our highly precise stellar dynamics calculations have now shown that all three star clusters originated from the same predecessor,” says Prof. Dr. Pavel Kroupa from the Helmholtz Institute for Radiation and Nuclear Physics at the University of Bonn, a co-author of the publication.

The ONC, the Pleiades, and the Hyades are like snapshots from a family album. The ONC is the toddler, the Pleiades is the adult, and the Hyades is the grandparent.

“From this we can learn that open star clusters seem to have a preferred mode of star formation,” said Kroupa in a press release. “It appears that there is a preferred physical environment in which stars form when they evolve within these clouds,” says the astrophysicist.

The model shows that ONC likely had an initial mass of between 1200 and 2000 solar masses. It also showed that it’s initial population is between 4,000 and 5,000 stars, which lines up with the approximately 4,200 identified by some astronomers. The model also showed that to produce these three differently-aged clusters, they had to be a rich in binary stars. It also showed that mass segregation played an important role, where more massive stars “sink” toward the cluster’s center, while less massive stars gather on the periphery.

This Hubble Space Telescope image shows the Trapezium Cluster, the most well-known part of the Orion Nebula Cluster. Since the ONC is young, there’s still plenty of gas and dust that obscures its view. Image Credit: C.R. O’Dell and S.K. Wong (Rice University) and NASA/ESA

Overall, the model’s results agree well with the observed properties of all three clusters. “In this study, we successfully reproduced the dynamical evolution of the ONC, Pleiades, and Hyades, suggesting that the Pleiades may have been similar to the ONC about 100 Myr ago and will be similar to the Hyades around 700 Myr in the future,” the authors write.

Over time, according to the simulations, clusters like the ONC can lose 85% of their stars, yet still retain a coherent structure, as Hyades shows. This is after passing through an intermediate stage that resembles the current Pleiades cluster. “Our simulations reveal substantial mass loss over time, with clusters losing 50–60 per cent of their mass in 110 Myr and 70–85 per cent in 794 Myr, consistent with the observed evolution of the Hyades,” the authors write.

“This research gives us a deeper understanding of how star clusters form and develop and illustrates the delicate balance between internal dynamics and external forces such as the gravitational pull of the Milky Way,” said study co-author Prof. Akram Hasani Zonoozi.

Many discoveries in astronomy concern distant objects, impossible to observe without powerful telescopes and modern equipment. But these three clusters are easily seen and located in the night sky, with the naked eye or maybe with binoculars. Anyone with access to the night sky in the right part of the world can observe these clusters and think about these findings.

Our Sun was once a cluster star, but at almost five billion years old, it long ago left its cluster behind is just another field star, now.

NASA’s Athena Economical Payload Integration Cost mission, or Athena EPIC, is a test launch for an innovative, scalable space vehicle design to support future missions. The small satellite platform is engineered to share resources among the payloads onboard by managing routine functions so the individual payloads don’t have to.

This technology results in lower costs to taxpayers and a quicker path to launch.

“Increasing the speed of discovery is foundational to NASA. Our ability to leverage access to innovative space technologies across federal agencies through industry partners is the future,” said Clayton Turner, Associate Administrator for Space Technology Mission Directorate at NASA headquarters in Washington. “Athena EPIC is a valuable demonstration of the government at its best — serving humankind to advance knowledge with existing hardware configured to operate with new technologies.”

The NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) and the U.S. Space Force are government partners for this demo mission. Athena EPIC’s industry partner, NovaWurks, provided the space vehicle, which utilizes a small satellite platform assembled with a Hyper-Integrated Satlet, or HISat.

The HISat instruments are similar in nature to a child’s toy interlocking building blocks. They’re engineered to be built into larger structures called SensorCraft. Those SensorCraft can share resources with multiple payloads and conform to different sizes and shapes to accommodate them. This easily configurable, building-block architecture allows a lot of flexibility with payload designs and concepts, ultimately giving payload providers easier, less expensive access to space and increased maneuverability between multiple orbits.

Scientists at NASA’s Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia, designed and built the Athena sensor payload, which consists of an optical module, a calibration module, and a newly developed sensor electronics assembly. Athena EPIC’s sensor was built with spare parts from NASA’s CERES (Clouds and the Earth’s Radiant Energy System) mission. Several different generations of CERES satellite and space station instruments have tracked Earth’s radiation budget.

“Instead of Athena carrying its own processor, we’re using the processors on the HISats to control things like our heaters and do some of the control functions that typically would be done by a processor on our payload,” said Kory Priestley, principal investigator for Athena EPIC from NASA Langley. “So, this is merging an instrument and a satellite platform into what we are calling a SensorCraft. It’s a more integrated approach. We don’t need as many capabilities built into our key instrument because it’s being brought to us by the satellite host. We obtain greater redundancy, and it simplifies our payload.”

This is the first HISat mission led by NASA. Traditional satellites, like the ones that host the CERES instruments — are large, sometimes the size of a school bus, and carry multiple instruments. They tend to be custom units built with all of their own hardware and software to manage control, propulsion, cameras, carousels, processors, batteries, and more, and sometimes even require two of everything to guard against failures in the system. All of these factors, plus the need for a larger launch vehicle, significantly increase costs.

This transformational approach to getting instruments into space can reduce the cost from billions to millions per mission.  “Now we are talking about something much smaller — SensorCraft the size of a mini refrigerator,” said Priestley. “If you do have failures on orbit, you can replace these much more economically. It’s a very different approach moving forward for Earth observation.”

Athena EPIC is scheduled to launch July 22 as a rideshare on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Vandenberg Space Force Base, California. The primary NASA payload on the launch will be the TRACERS (Tandem Reconnection and Cusp Electrodynamics Reconnaissance Satellites) mission. The TRACERS mission is led by the University of Iowa for NASA’s Heliophysics Division within the Science Mission Directorate. NASA’s Earth Science Division also provided funding for Athena EPIC.

“Langley Research Center has long been a leader in developing remote sensing instruments for in-orbit satellites. As satellites become smaller, a less traditional, more efficient path to launch is needed in order to decrease complexity while simultaneously increasing the value of exploration, science, and technology measurements for the Nation,” added Turner.

For more information on NASA’s Athena EPIC mission:

https://science.nasa.gov/misshttps://science.nasa.gov/mission/athena/ion/athena/

Astronomers caught a star system at the moment when solid grains began to form planets. This snapshot reveals how planets first start to form, just as Earth once did.

The infant star HOPS-315 sits about 1,300 light-years, roughly 7.6 quadrillion miles, away in the constellation Orion. Around it whirls a disc of gas and dust where heat is high enough to bake rock yet cool enough for those rocks to re-form.

Melissa McClure of Leiden University led the international team that pieced together these first moments of planetary assembly. Their finding gives researchers a live laboratory that mirrors the opening chapter of the Solar System’s own story.

How planets form from early solids

In primitive meteorites, tiny calcium-aluminum-rich inclusions tell us that the Solar System’s clock started ticking 4.567 billion years ago. Those inclusions condensed from a searing vapor and seeded every terrestrial planet we know.

Because the clock starts with condensation, catching that step beyond the Sun has been an astronomer’s white whale.

The new observation marks the first time any telescope has seen gas-phase silicon monoxide (SiO) alongside freshly crystallizing silicates in the same patch of a protoplanetary disc.

McClure’s team spotted the minerals within an orbit comparable to our asteroid belt. That match matters, for it pins early chemistry to a region that later fed Earth with water and metals.

Crystals forming around HOPS-315

The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) collects infrared light that pierces the dust cocoon shrouding HOPS-315, revealing the distinct fingerprint of hot SiO molecules. Those molecules glow at about 2,200°F, a temperature that vaporizes most common rocks.

ALMA, the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array, then measured the same region at millimeter wavelengths and mapped where the glow comes from.

By combining the two views, scientists confirmed that both gas and solid forms of silicon occupy a ring no farther than 2 astronomical units from the star.

Handling these observations is tricky because HOPS-315 also drives a jet rich in SiO. The team disentangled the jet’s signal from the disc’s by checking velocities, the jet gas races outward, whereas disc material orbits sedately.

A final check involved comparing the brightness of different SiO lines. The ratio matched laboratory predictions for vapor that is actively condensing, adding yet another layer of confidence to the result.

Planets forming from gas and crystals

Crystalline silicates appear where cooling vapor meets a sharp fall in temperature. The presence of both phases at one location means condensation is happening right now, not long ago nor far away in another part of the disc.

“This process has never been seen before in a protoplanetary disc, or anywhere outside our Solar System,” said Edwin Bergin of the University of Michigan, a co-author on the study.

He adds that the minerals are the same kind locked inside 4.5-billion-year-old meteorites on Earth’s shelves.

“We’re really seeing these minerals at the same location in this extrasolar system as where we see them in asteroids in the Solar System,” said co-author, Logan Francis from the Advanced Functional Fabrics of America (AFFOA).

He notes that the condensation zone sits at almost the same orbital radius as our asteroid belt. 

The mineral grains measure less than a micrometer across, yet they mark the first step toward kilometer-scale planetesimals. Electrostatic forces will make them clump for thousands of years until gravity takes over.

HOPS-315 mirrors Earth’s origins

Laboratory studies show that minerals rich in silicon and oxygen condense first, followed quickly by iron-nickel alloys and then more volatile compounds.

Seeing hot SiO vapor around HOPS-315 hints that a similar chemical parade is marching there.

By estimating the star’s luminosity and the disc’s temperature gradient, McClure’s group concludes that crystalline silicates could mass about a tenth of the Moon. That is plenty to seed multiple rocky planets if subsequent growth is efficient, as models suggest.

Isotopic work on chondrules indicates that the earliest building blocks in our own Solar System formed within the first million years, a timescale now testable in real time with HOPS-315.

Matching astronomical data to isotope chronometers promises a much sharper picture of planet formation than meteoritic studies alone.

The discovery may also shed light on why Earth contains less carbon than nebular models predict. If early minerals trap oxygen and silicon immediately, carbon may remain gaseous longer and get pushed outward before it can join newborn worlds.

What’s next in watching planets form

Over the next year, ALMA will return to HOPS-315 to look for water ice farther out in the disc.

If water lines up beyond the silicate ring, astronomers can test whether rocky seeds migrate inward before they acquire ice mantles, a step that may explain why Earth ended up with oceans.

JWST will track how the SiO signature evolves. A steady decline would show vapor freezing out, whereas a surge could hint at heating bursts from magnetic flares or spiral shocks.

Beyond the specifics of HOPS-315, the result boosts confidence that rocky planets are common. If condensation begins so early, many stars may launch planet formation well before their gas discs disperse, leaving time for worlds to migrate, collide, and settle into stable orbits.

Astronomer Elizabeth Humphreys at ESO, who was not involved in the study, said she was “really impressed” that the team could pinpoint the first solids.

She argues that the synergy of Webb and ALMA is revealing a Universe “in which the steps toward life-bearing planets start earlier than we dared hope.”

The study is published in Nature.

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Astronomers have found that a weird space rock at the edge of the solar system is locked in a rhythmic dance with Neptune.

The object, designated 2020 VN40, is part of a family of distant solar system objects called trans-Neptunian objects (TNOs). 2020 VN40 is the first object discovered that orbits the sun once for every ten orbits Neptune makes. Considering that one Neptunian year lasts 164.8 Earth years, that means 2020 VN40 has one heck of a long year, lasting around 1,648 years or 19,776 months on Earth!

We spend nearly a third of our lives sleeping, yet the biological trigger behind sleep has remained elusive. Despite decades of research, scientists have struggled to identify a concrete, physical reason why the brain demands rest.

A new study from the University of Oxford might have changed that.

Researchers have found that the pressure to sleep may come from deep inside our brain cells, from the tiny power plants known as mitochondria. These structures, responsible for converting oxygen into energy, appear to sound an internal alarm when pushed into overdrive.

The team, led by Professor Gero Miesenböck and Dr. Raffaele Sarnataro, discovered that a build-up of electrical stress inside mitochondria in specific brain cells acts as a signal to trigger sleep.

The research, carried out in fruit flies, showed that when mitochondria become overcharged, they leak electrons.

“When they do, they generate reactive molecules that damage cells,” said Dr. Sarnataro.

This electron leak produces what are known as reactive oxygen species, byproducts that, in high quantities, can damage cellular structures.

The brain appears to respond to this imbalance by initiating sleep, giving the cells a chance to reset before damage spreads further. The findings open a new chapter in how scientists think about energy metabolism’s role in brain health.

Switch in the brain

The researchers found that specialized neurons function like circuit breakers. These cells measure the electron leak and trip the sleep response when the stress crosses a threshold.

By manipulating the energy flow in these neurons, either by increasing or decreasing electron transfer, the scientists could directly control how long the flies slept.

They even bypassed the system’s normal inputs by replacing electrons with energy from light using microbial proteins. The result remained the same: more energy, more leak, more sleep.

“We set out to understand what sleep is for, and why we feel the need to sleep at all,” said Professor Miesenböck.

“Our findings show that the answer may lie in the very process that fuels our bodies: aerobic metabolism.”

He explained that when the mitochondria in certain sleep-regulating neurons are overloaded with energy, they begin leaking electrons.

When this leak becomes too great, the neurons trigger sleep to prevent damage from escalating.

Ties to aging and fatigue

The findings may help explain why metabolism and sleep are so closely linked. Small animals that consume more oxygen per gram of body weight tend to sleep more and live shorter lives.

Meanwhile, people with mitochondrial disorders often experience extreme fatigue even without physical exertion. This new mechanism offers a potential explanation.

“This research answers one of biology’s big mysteries,” said Dr. Sarnataro. “Why do we need sleep? The answer appears to be written into the very way our cells convert oxygen into energy.”

These insights could reshape not just sleep science, but also how doctors understand chronic fatigue, neurological disorders, and the aging process itself.

The study is published in the journal Nature.