Category: 7. Science

This intriguing astronaut photo shows off an oddly shaped field of dunes in Kazakhstan that strongly resembles a giant slug meandering across the landscape. The mollusk mimic is covered with clusters of vegetation, suggesting its sands are slowly being frozen in place.

The dune field is located around 175 miles (280 kilometers) northeast of the Caspian Sea in the western reaches of the Kazakh Steppe — a vast region of open grassland covering north Kazakhstan and parts of Russia. It is sandwiched between the village of Oyyl to the west (left in the image) and a large floodplain to the east (right in the image).

Canada has officially unveiled its first-ever lunar rover, marking a historic leap in the nation’s space exploration journey. Developed in collaboration between the Canadian Space Agency (CSA) and domestic tech firms, the rover is designed to explore the Moon’s surface, conduct scientific experiments, and test new technologies vital for future missions. The announcement represents Canada’s entry into lunar exploration, placing it among a select group of nations pursuing robotic and human presence beyond Earth. With its rover slated for launch later this decade, Canada is not only showcasing its technological capabilities but also signaling a bold commitment to space innovation and international cooperation.

A milestone in Canada’s space journey

The lunar rover project builds on Canada’s celebrated space legacy, best known for contributions like the Canadarm on NASA’s Space Shuttle and the International Space Station. By extending its robotics expertise to planetary exploration, Canada is now pushing into an entirely new frontier on the Moon. This step underscores the country’s ambition to play a stronger role in global space exploration at a time when interest in lunar missions is rapidly accelerating.Designed for the harsh conditions of the Moon, the rover will endure extreme temperatures, rugged terrain, and abrasive lunar dust. Its instruments will be tasked with analyzing soil composition, searching for water ice, and studying the impact of lunar dust on machinery. These findings could provide essential knowledge for sustaining human presence on the Moon, making the mission not just a symbolic achievement but a scientific necessity.

Partnerships, innovation, and future vision

Canada’s lunar rover is also a story of collaboration. The mission aligns with NASA’s Artemis program and other international partnerships, ensuring that Canada’s contribution has a direct role in advancing humanity’s broader return to the Moon. By focusing on polar exploration, the rover will gather data critical for long-term lunar habitation, supporting both robotic and human-led missions in the future.Beyond science and technology, officials emphasize the rover’s inspirational role at home. Canada’s first attempt at the Moon is expected to spark curiosity among young people, encourage careers in STEM fields, and energize innovation across industries. As a symbol of national pride, the rover demonstrates that Canada is ready to transform its space legacy into a bold vision for the future, from robotic arms orbiting Earth to a rover rolling on the Moon. The mission also highlights Canada’s growing role in international space collaborations and sets the stage for more ambitious extraterrestrial projects in the decades to come.

The spontaneous coalescence of the molecules that led to life on primordial Earth, some 4 billion years ago, may have finally been observed in a laboratory.

Replicating the likely conditions of our newborn planet, chemists have joined together RNA and amino acids – the crucial first step that would eventually lead to the proliferation of living organisms that crawl all over Earth today.

The experimental work could yield important clues about the origins of one of the most important biological relationships: the one between nucleic acids and proteins.

Related: Building Blocks of Life Can Be Forged by ‘Dark Chemistry’ Far From Stars or Planets

“Life today uses an immensely complex molecular machine, the ribosome, to synthesize proteins. This machine requires chemical instructions written in messenger RNA, which carries a gene’s sequence from a cell’s DNA to the ribosome. The ribosome then, like a factory assembly line, reads this RNA and links together amino acids, one by one, to create a protein,” explains chemist Matthew Powner of University College London.

“We have achieved the first part of that complex process, using very simple chemistry in water at neutral pH to link amino acids to RNA. The chemistry is spontaneous, selective, and could have occurred on the early Earth.”

Although we know that life must have wriggled its way out of Earth’s primordial ooze – after all, here we are – scientists are not as sure about how it happened. One growing school of thought invests in RNA as a self-replicating nucleic acid, which, thanks to its knack for also performing mechanical work, can catalyze other chemical reactions. This is known as the RNA world hypothesis.

Proteins cannot self-replicate; the instructions for their exact sequencing of amino acids are encoded in sequences of nucleic acid, such as RNA.

So while proteins play a necessary role in many biological processes, molecules of nucleic acid provide a crucial template for their production. Still, this means that the two molecular components would have needed to find a way to join together in the soggy, steamy conditions of early Earth.

“Life relies on the ability to synthesize proteins – they are life’s key functional molecules. Understanding the origin of protein synthesis is fundamental to understanding where life came from,” Powner says.

“Our study is a big step towards this goal, showing how RNA might have first come to control protein synthesis.”

Many attempts have been made to replicate the natural coalescence of amino acids and RNA. This process requires a high-energy mediator, and past studies have found that some highly reactive molecules are not fit for this purpose, since they tend to break down in water, leading the amino acids to react with each other rather than the RNA.

Led by chemist Jyoti Singh of University College London, the research team took their cues instead from biology. As a mediator, they tried a thioester, a high-energy, highly reactive compound that contains carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, and sulfur – four of the six elements that are thought to be vital to life.

Thioesters are known to play a key intermediary role in some biological processes, and are thought to have been abundant in the ‘primordial organic soup’. Some scientists believe their proliferation preceded the RNA world, known as the thioester world hypothesis.

In their simulated organic soup, the researchers found that thioester provided the necessary external energy to allow the amino acid to bind to the RNA – a pretty significant breakthrough that neatly unifies the two hypotheses.

“Our study unites two prominent origin of life theories – the ‘RNA world’, where self-replicating RNA is proposed to be fundamental, and the ‘thioester world’, in which thioesters are seen as the energy source for the earliest forms of life,” Powner says.

To be clear, we’re still quite far from having a detailed, comprehensive understanding of the origins of life. The new research shows that it’s possible these components can come together with a high-energy mediator; the next step is to see if RNA will preferentially bind to the specific amino acids that would facilitate the emergence of genetic code.

“Imagine the day that chemists might take simple, small molecules, consisting of carbon, nitrogen, hydrogen, oxygen, and sulphur atoms, and from these Lego pieces form molecules capable of self-replication. This would be a monumental step towards solving the question of life’s origin,” Singh says.

“Our study brings us closer to that goal by demonstrating how two primordial chemical Lego pieces (activated amino acids and RNA) could have built peptides, short chains of amino acids that are essential to life.”

The research has been published in Nature.

The spontaneous coalescence of the molecules that led to life on primordial Earth, some 4 billion years ago, may have finally been observed in a laboratory.

Replicating the likely conditions of our newborn planet, chemists have joined together RNA and amino acids – the crucial first step that would eventually lead to the proliferation of living organisms that crawl all over Earth today.

The experimental work could yield important clues about the origins of one of the most important biological relationships: the one between nucleic acids and proteins.

Related: Building Blocks of Life Can Be Forged by ‘Dark Chemistry’ Far From Stars or Planets

“Life today uses an immensely complex molecular machine, the ribosome, to synthesize proteins. This machine requires chemical instructions written in messenger RNA, which carries a gene’s sequence from a cell’s DNA to the ribosome. The ribosome then, like a factory assembly line, reads this RNA and links together amino acids, one by one, to create a protein,” explains chemist Matthew Powner of University College London.

“We have achieved the first part of that complex process, using very simple chemistry in water at neutral pH to link amino acids to RNA. The chemistry is spontaneous, selective, and could have occurred on the early Earth.”

Although we know that life must have wriggled its way out of Earth’s primordial ooze – after all, here we are – scientists are not as sure about how it happened. One growing school of thought invests in RNA as a self-replicating nucleic acid, which, thanks to its knack for also performing mechanical work, can catalyze other chemical reactions. This is known as the RNA world hypothesis.

Proteins cannot self-replicate; the instructions for their exact sequencing of amino acids are encoded in sequences of nucleic acid, such as RNA.

So while proteins play a necessary role in many biological processes, molecules of nucleic acid provide a crucial template for their production. Still, this means that the two molecular components would have needed to find a way to join together in the soggy, steamy conditions of early Earth.

“Life relies on the ability to synthesize proteins – they are life’s key functional molecules. Understanding the origin of protein synthesis is fundamental to understanding where life came from,” Powner says.

“Our study is a big step towards this goal, showing how RNA might have first come to control protein synthesis.”

Many attempts have been made to replicate the natural coalescence of amino acids and RNA. This process requires a high-energy mediator, and past studies have found that some highly reactive molecules are not fit for this purpose, since they tend to break down in water, leading the amino acids to react with each other rather than the RNA.

Led by chemist Jyoti Singh of University College London, the research team took their cues instead from biology. As a mediator, they tried a thioester, a high-energy, highly reactive compound that contains carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, and sulfur – four of the six elements that are thought to be vital to life.

Thioesters are known to play a key intermediary role in some biological processes, and are thought to have been abundant in the ‘primordial organic soup’. Some scientists believe their proliferation preceded the RNA world, known as the thioester world hypothesis.

In their simulated organic soup, the researchers found that thioester provided the necessary external energy to allow the amino acid to bind to the RNA – a pretty significant breakthrough that neatly unifies the two hypotheses.

“Our study unites two prominent origin of life theories – the ‘RNA world’, where self-replicating RNA is proposed to be fundamental, and the ‘thioester world’, in which thioesters are seen as the energy source for the earliest forms of life,” Powner says.

To be clear, we’re still quite far from having a detailed, comprehensive understanding of the origins of life. The new research shows that it’s possible these components can come together with a high-energy mediator; the next step is to see if RNA will preferentially bind to the specific amino acids that would facilitate the emergence of genetic code.

“Imagine the day that chemists might take simple, small molecules, consisting of carbon, nitrogen, hydrogen, oxygen, and sulphur atoms, and from these Lego pieces form molecules capable of self-replication. This would be a monumental step towards solving the question of life’s origin,” Singh says.

“Our study brings us closer to that goal by demonstrating how two primordial chemical Lego pieces (activated amino acids and RNA) could have built peptides, short chains of amino acids that are essential to life.”

The research has been published in Nature.

Related News

The moon is appearing bigger and brighter to us every night right now. This is due to where we are in the lunar cycle.

The lunar cycle is a series of eight unique phases of the moon’s visibility. The whole cycle takes about 29.5 days, according to NASA, and these different phases happen as the Sun lights up different parts of the moon whilst it orbits Earth. 

So, let’s see what’s happening with the moon tonight, Sept. 2.

What is today’s moon phase?

As of Tuesday, Sept. 2, the moon phase is Waxing Gibbous, and 72% will be lit up to us on Earth, according to NASA’s Daily Moon Observation.

We’re getting closer and closer to the Full Moon, and with each night there’s more and more to see on the moon’s surface. Tonight with no visual aids, you’ll see the Mare Imbrium, Mare Serenitatis, and the Mare Vaporum. With binoculars, you’ll also get a glimpse of the Clavius Crater, the Alphonsus Crater, and the Apennine Mountains. If you have a telescope too, enjoy glimpses of the Apollo 12, Apollo 17, and the Rima Ariadaeus.

When is the next full moon?

The next full moon will be on Sept. 7. The last full moon was on Aug. 9.

What are moon phases?

According to NASA, moon phases are caused by the 29.5-day cycle of the moon’s orbit, which changes the angles between the Sun, Moon, and Earth. Moon phases are how the moon looks from Earth as it goes around us. We always see the same side of the moon, but how much of it is lit up by the Sun changes depending on where it is in its orbit. This is how we get full moons, half moons, and moons that appear completely invisible. There are eight main moon phases, and they follow a repeating cycle:

New Moon – The moon is between Earth and the sun, so the side we see is dark (in other words, it’s invisible to the eye).

Waxing Crescent – A small sliver of light appears on the right side (Northern Hemisphere).

First Quarter – Half of the moon is lit on the right side. It looks like a half-moon.

Waxing Gibbous – More than half is lit up, but it’s not quite full yet.

Full Moon – The whole face of the moon is illuminated and fully visible.

Waning Gibbous – The moon starts losing light on the right side.

Last Quarter (or Third Quarter) – Another half-moon, but now the left side is lit.

Waning Crescent – A thin sliver of light remains on the left side before going dark again.

Astronauts aboard China’s Tiangong space station have, for the first time, produced oxygen and ingredients for rocket fuel in orbit using “artificial photosynthesis” technology, in a breakthrough that could support long-term human presence beyond Earth.

In January 2025, the Shenzhou-19 crew carried out 12 experiments in a drawer-sized device using semiconductor catalysts to convert carbon dioxide and water into oxygen and hydrocarbons, state media and the China Manned Space (CMS) agency said.

The results mark the first in-orbit demonstration of the process, which mimics plant photosynthesis but functions at room temperature and normal pressure, reducing energy consumption compared with conventional systems, reports NDTV.

Researchers successfully generated ethylene, a hydrocarbon that can be used as rocket fuel, paving the way for sustained crewed missions, including China’s goal of landing astronauts on the moon before 2030, the South China Morning Post reported.

The experiments also examined gas transport and separation in microgravity and real-time detection of reaction products. Adjusting catalysts could enable the system to produce other fuels such as methane, CMS said.

“Artificial photosynthesis uses engineered physical and chemical methods to replicate how plants process carbon dioxide, producing oxygen and fuels in confined or extraterrestrial environments,” state broadcaster CCTV said.

Current life-support systems, such as those aboard the International Space Station, rely on splitting water with electricity from solar panels. While effective, this consumes nearly a third of the station’s energy, according to a 2023 study led by Katharina Brinkert of the University of Bremen.

By contrast, China’s technology could make long-duration space missions more viable by cutting energy costs and creating locally sourced propellant.

Macrophages are part of the immune system’s frontline; they attack and eat invaders to protect surrounding cells. They, along with other cells, maintain intracellular conditions through macroautophagy, using autophagosomes to help digest broken cell components.

The discovery of its molecular mechanism led researcher Dr. Yoshinori Ohsumi to be awarded the Nobel Prize. However, new findings show that internal recycling can take place through a different method entirely, bypassing the macroautophagy process.

In a study published in August 30^th, 2025 in the journal Nature Communications, researchers from The University of Osaka have revealed that macrophages can directly engulf and digest damaged mitochondria and other organelles using a process called microautophagy. Unlike traditional recycling pathways, which can be complex, this shortcut allows lysosome-like compartments inside macrophages to take in broken cell components directly.

Macroautophagy has been extensively studied, but microautophagy is not understood as extensively. We found that this process seems to play a more prominent role than macroautophagy, at least in mitochondria degradation in macrophage due to its lower energy demand.”

Shiou-Ling Lu, Study Lead Author and Assistant Professor, The University of Osaka

To do this, the researchers examined lysosome-related organelles, which share traits with lysosomes, membrane-bound organelles that contains enzymes to break down other cells. These lysosome-related organelles were present in macrophages exposed to a mitochondria-damaging chemical.

They found that the damaged mitochondria could be directly engulfed by these lysosome-like organelles, independent of macroautophagy pathways, bypassing the need to digest broken cell components first. Proteins and lipids such as Rab32 GTPase, phosphatidylinositol 3,5-bisphosphates, ubiquitin, and p62/SQSTM1 were found to be crucial for regulating this type of degradation. These proteins and lipids have their own roles in the process, including prompting the beginnings of ubiquitination, and ensuring that certain damaged components are engulfed.

“Our findings reveal that macrophages have an underappreciated way to recycle their own damaged parts, and this process directly shapes how they function,” added senior author, Takeshi Noda.

This mitochondrial cleanup is more than housekeeping; by removing damaged mitochondria, macrophages rewire their metabolism toward glycolysis, which fuels a shift into the M1 state: an activated, inflammation-ready mode critical for fighting infection. When researchers knocked out Rab32/38, macrophages lost much of this ability, showing how central microautophagy is to their immune regulation.

This study highlights the diverse and versatile protein degradation systems that work together to coordinate cellular physiology, influencing immune system function. The team suggest that further research would be beneficial for the field, to understand how this process of microautophagy is incorporated into other cellular processes.

CMS employed machine learning to probe rare Higgs decays into charm quarks. The search produced the most stringent limits so far.

The Higgs boson, first observed at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in 2012, is a cornerstone of the Standard Model of particle physics.

Through its interactions, it gives fundamental particles such as quarks their mass. Interactions between the Higgs boson and the heaviest “third-generation” quarks—the top and bottom quarks—have already been confirmed and shown to align with Standard Model predictions.

However, studying how the Higgs couples to lighter quarks remains much more difficult. Its interactions with “second-generation” quarks, like the charm quark, and “first-generation” quarks, the up and down quarks that form the nuclei of atoms, are still largely untested. This leaves open the key question of whether the Higgs boson is responsible for giving mass to the very quarks that make up everyday matter.

CMS reports first charm decay search

To explore these interactions, physicists examine how the Higgs boson decays into other particles or is produced alongside them in high-energy proton–proton collisions at the LHC. At a recent CERN seminar, the CMS collaboration presented the first search for a Higgs boson decaying into two charm quarks in events where the Higgs is produced together with a pair of top quarks. By applying advanced artificial intelligence methods, the team achieved the strongest limits so far on the strength of the Higgs boson’s interaction with the charm quark.

Producing a Higgs boson along with a top-quark pair, and then observing it decay into two quarks, is both an uncommon event at the LHC and one that is especially challenging to identify. Quarks almost instantly generate narrow sprays of hadrons, called “jets,” which travel only a short distance before decaying further. This makes it very hard to separate jets that originate from charm quarks in Higgs decays from those created by other quark types. Conventional jet identification techniques, known as “tagging,” are not efficient at recognizing charm jets, driving the need for more sophisticated approaches to improve discrimination.

“This search required a paradigm shift in analysis techniques,” explains Sebastian Wuchterl, a research fellow at CERN. “Because charm quarks are harder to tag than bottom quarks, we relied on cutting-edge machine-learning techniques to separate the signal from backgrounds.”

Neural networks for jet recognition

The CMS team addressed two central challenges by applying machine-learning techniques. The first involved detecting charm jets, which they approached using a graph neural network specifically designed for this task. The second challenge was separating genuine Higgs boson events from background collisions, handled with a transformer network—the same family of models that underlies ChatGPT, but here adapted to classify particle events rather than generate text. To train the charm-tagging system, researchers used hundreds of millions of simulated jets, enabling the algorithm to identify charm jets with much greater precision.

Using data collected from 2016 to 2018, combined with the results from previous searches for the decay of the Higgs boson into charm quarks via other processes, the CMS team set the most stringent limits yet on the interaction between the Higgs boson and the charm quark, reporting an improvement of around 35% compared to previous constraints. This places significant bounds on potential deviations from the Standard Model prediction.

Next steps at the LHC

“Our findings mark a major step,” says Jan van der Linden, a postdoctoral researcher at Ghent University. “With more data from upcoming LHC runs and improved analysis techniques, we may gain direct insight into the Higgs boson’s interaction with charm quarks at the LHC—a task that was thought impossible a few years ago.”

As the LHC continues to collect data, refinements in charm tagging and Higgs boson event classification could eventually allow CMS, and its companion experiment ATLAS, to confirm the Higgs boson’s decay into charm quarks. This would be a major step towards a complete understanding of the Higgs boson’s role in the generation of mass for all quarks and provide a crucial test of the 50-year-old Standard Model.

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UC Irvine scientists identified a novel quantum state with potential for energy-efficient devices. Its radiation resistance makes it particularly valuable for space missions.

Researchers at the University of California, Irvine have identified a previously unknown state of quantum matter. According to the team, this discovery could pave the way for computers that recharge themselves and withstand the extreme conditions of deep space exploration.

“It’s a new phase of matter, similar to how water can exist as liquid, ice, or vapor,” said Luis A. Jauregui, professor of physics & astronomy at UC Irvine and corresponding author of the new Physical Review Letters. “It’s only been theoretically predicted – no one has ever measured it until now.”

The phase behaves like a fluid formed by electrons and their counterparts, known as “holes,” which spontaneously pair together to create exotic structures called excitons. In a surprising twist, both electrons and holes rotate in the same direction. “It’s its own new thing,” Jauregui said. “If we could hold it in our hands, it would glow a bright, high-frequency light.”

Materials and experimental conditions

The phase was detected in a material engineered at UC Irvine by postdoctoral researcher Jinyu Liu, the study’s first author. Jauregui and his colleagues confirmed its existence using powerful magnetic fields at the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) in New Mexico.

To generate this unusual quantum state, the researchers exposed the material—hafnium pentatelluride—to an intense magnetic field of up to 70 Teslas. (For comparison, a strong refrigerator magnet produces about 0.1 Teslas.) Under these conditions, the material revealed its transformation into the new quantum phase.

Implications for future technology

Jauregui explained that, as his team applied the magnetic field, the “material’s ability to carry electricity suddenly drops, showing that it has transformed into this exotic state,” he said. “This discovery is important because it may allow signals to be carried by spin rather than electrical charge, offering a new path toward energy-efficient technologies like spin-based electronics or quantum devices.”

Unlike conventional materials used in electronics, this new quantum matter isn’t affected by any form of radiation, which makes it an ideal candidate for space travel.

“It could be useful for space missions,” Jauregui said. “If you want computers in space that are going to last, this is one way to make that happen.”

Companies like SpaceX are planning human-piloted space flight to Mars, and to do that effectively, you need computers that can withstand prolonged periods of exposure to radiation.

“We don’t know yet what possibilities will open as a result,” Jauregui said.

Reference: “Possible Spin-Triplet Excitonic Insulator in the Ultraquantum Limit of HfTe5” by Jinyu Liu, Varsha Subramanyan, Robert Welser, Timothy McSorley, Triet Ho, David Graf, Michael T. Pettes, Avadh Saxena, Laurel E. Winter, Shi-Zeng Lin and Luis A. Jauregui, 22 July 2025, Physical Review Letters.
DOI: 10.1103/bj2n-4k2w

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