Category: 7. Science

An international team of astronomers has uncovered new evidence to explain how pulsing remnants of exploded stars interact with surrounding matter deep in the cosmos, using observations from NASA’s IXPE (Imaging X-ray Polarimetry Explorer) and other telescopes. 

Scientists based in the U.S., Italy, and Spain, set their sights on a mysterious cosmic duo called PSR J1023+0038, or J1023 for short. The J1023 system is comprised of a rapidly rotating neutron star feeding off of its low-mass companion star, which has created an accretion disk around the neutron star. This neutron star is also a pulsar, emitting powerful twin beams of light from its opposing magnetic poles as it rotates, spinning like a lighthouse beacon.

The J1023 system is rare and valuable to study because the pulsar transitions clearly between its active state, in which it feeds off its companion star, and a more dormant state, when it emits detectable pulsations as radio waves. This makes it a “transitional millisecond pulsar.” 

“Transitional millisecond pulsars are cosmic laboratories, helping us understand how neutron stars evolve in binary systems,” said researcher Maria Cristina Baglio of the Italian National Institute of Astrophysics (INAF) Brera Observatory in Merate, Italy, and lead author of a paper in The Astrophysical Journal Letters illustrating the new findings. 

The big question for scientists about this pulsar system was: Where do the X-rays originate? The answer would inform broader theories about particle acceleration, accretion physics, and the environments surrounding neutron stars across the universe.

The source surprised them: The X-rays came from the pulsar wind, a chaotic stew of gases, shock waves, magnetic fields, and particles accelerated near the speed of light, that hits the accretion disk.  

To determine this, astronomers needed to measure the angle of polarization in both X-ray and optical light. Polarization is a measure of how organized light waves are. They looked at X-ray polarization with IXPE, the only telescope capable of making this measurement in space, and comparing it with optical polarization from the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope in Chile. IXPE launched in Dec. 2021 and has made many observations of pulsars, but J1023 was the first system of its kind that it explored. 

NASA’s NICER (Neutron star Interior Composition Explorer) and Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory provided valuable observations of the system in high-energy light. Other telescopes contributing data included the Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array in Magdalena, New Mexico. 

The result: scientists found the same angle of polarization across the different wavelengths.

“That finding is compelling evidence that a single, coherent physical mechanism underpins the light we observe,” said Francesco Coti Zelati of the Institute of Space Sciences in Barcelona, Spain, co-lead author of the findings. 

This interpretation challenges the conventional wisdom about neutron star emissions of radiation in binary systems, the researchers said. Previous models had indicated that the X-rays come from the accretion disk, but this new study shows they originate with the pulsar wind. 

“IXPE has observed many isolated pulsars and found that the pulsar wind powers the X-rays,” said NASA Marshall astrophysicist Philip Kaaret, principal investigator for IXPE at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. “These new observations show that the pulsar wind powers most of the energy output of the system.”

Astronomers continue to study transitional millisecond pulsars, assessing how observed physical mechanisms compare with those of other pulsars and pulsar wind nebulae. Insights from these observations could help refine theoretical models describing how pulsar winds generate radiation – and bring researchers one step closer, Baglio and Coti Zelati agreed, to fully understanding the physical mechanisms at work in these extraordinary cosmic systems.

More about IXPE

IXPE, which continues to provide unprecedented data enabling groundbreaking discoveries about celestial objects across the universe, is a joint NASA and Italian Space Agency mission with partners and science collaborators in 12 countries. IXPE is led by NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. BAE Systems, Inc., headquartered in Falls Church, Virginia, manages spacecraft operations together with the University of Colorado’s Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics in Boulder. Learn more about IXPE’s ongoing mission here:

https://www.nasa.gov/ixpe

Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania used a deep-learning system called APEX to screen a database of over 40 million venom-encrypted peptides (VEPs), proteins employed by animals for attack or defense, in search of potential antibiotics. In just hours, APEX flagged 368 compounds as potential antibiotics. The team published a study in Nature Communications. 

From APEX’s list, the team synthesized 58 peptides for testing. 53 of these killed drug-resistant bacteria at doses that were harmless to human red blood cells. This could have significant implications for antibiotic resistance, a growing concern. 

Fighting resistance

According to the CDC, antimicrobial resistance was associated with almost 5 million deaths worldwide in 2019. In the U.S., more than 2.8 million antimicrobial-resistant infections occur each year, and more than 35,000 people die as a result. Despite this, traditional antibiotic discovery has plateaued due to high costs and long timelines, according to the team’s study. 

Venom-derived peptides offer several advantages over conventional antibiotics that could help solve this problem. The peptides work by disrupting bacterial membranes, a mechanism that bacteria cannot evade through conventional resistance mechanisms. The peptides also exhibit broad-spectrum activity against both gram-positive and gram-negative bacteria, making them ideal for combating multidrug-resistant bacteria. 

VEPs have a flexible structure which is able to be engineered for improved stability and selectivity. The top candidates for antibiotics have high net charge and elevated hydrophobicity, both of which are conducive to the disruption of the bacterial membrane. 

Applying AI

APEX is a bacterial strain-specific antimicrobial activity predictor based on PyTorch and freely available on GitLab; it is a multiple-target tasks model that can predict minimum inhibitory concentration values of peptides against 34 bacterial strains. Some of the files on GitLab are two years old, indicating that this research has been growing for a while. The system was trained on a peptide dataset and publicly available antimicrobial peptides from DBAASP. 

The platform mapped more than 2,000 entirely new antibacterial motifs, short sequences of amino acids within a protein or peptide that are responsible for the protein’s antibacterial activity. 

“By pairing computational triage with traditional lab experimentation, we delivered one of the most comprehensive investigations of venom-derived antibiotics to date,” said co-author Marcelo Torres, PhD, a research associate at Penn.

The team is now taking the best peptide candidates and improving them to possibly create new antibiotics. They believe that venoms are a rich source of hidden antimicrobial scaffolds, and that large-scale computational mining can accelerate the discovery of antibiotics.

Recently discovered interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS may be a very old object indeed.

A new visitor to the inner solar system may in fact be an extremely old object.

All eyes are on the newly discovered interstellar object 3I/ATLAS, currently inbound to the inner solar system. Initial observations have revealed that it’s rich in water ice, and it’s believed that it originated from the Milky Way’s thick disk, which hosts a population of ancient stars that orbit above and below the galactic plane. This could mean that 3I/ATLAS is billions of years older than our solar system, making it the oldest comet ever discovered. It should reveal more as it heats up and outgasses as it gets closer to the Sun.

We wrote about the breaking news and the discovery of 3I/ATLAS on July 2nd, along with prospects for spotting the interstellar comet before and after perihelion later this year.

Comet 3I/ATLAS, remotely captured using the iTelescope 0.51-meter reflector on July 2nd. (note, it was still known by its provisional designation of A11pl3Z at this time). Credit: Filipp Romanov.

Now, a study presented at the recent meeting of the Royal Astronomical Society in Durham hints that Comet 3I/ATLAS may be something special indeed. Specifically, the comet may pre-date the formation of our solar system by over three billion years.

Already, each of the three known interstellar objects—1I/ ‘Oumuamua, 2I/ Borisov, and 3I/ATLAS—have proven to be distinctive examples in their own right.

Comet 3I/ATLAS appears to hail from the outer thick disk of the Milky Way, versus the thin inner disk where stars like our Sun typically reside. Astronomers extrapolate this from the relatively steep path of 3I/ATLAS’s orbit around the galaxy. Ancient stars tend to reside in the Milky Way’s thick disk population. If 3I/ATLAS formed and was subsequently ejected from such a system long ago, it could be on the order of over seven billion years old.

A side-view simulation of our Milky Way Galaxy, showing the orbit of 3I/ATLAS (in red) versus our Sun. Credit: M. Hopkins/Ōtautahi-Oxford team. Base map: ESA/Gaia/DPAC/Stefan Payne-Wardenaar. CC-BY-SA 4.0.

“All non-interstellar comets such as Halley’s comet formed with our solar system, so are up to 4.5 billion years old,” says lead researcher Matthew Hopkins (University of Oxford) in a recent press release. “But interstellar visitors have the potential to be far older, and of those known about so far, our statistical method suggests that 3I/ATLAS is very likely to be the oldest comet we have ever seen.”

A speedy space-dot: Comet 3I/ATLAS shortly after discovery on July 1st. Credit: ATLAS/University of Hawaii/NASA.

3I/ATLAS is currently approaching the inner solar system from the direction of the Scutum-Sagittarius constellation border, while the perihelion passage of 1.36 Astronomical Units (AU) near the Sun will eject it in the direction of the constellation Gemini, in the general direction of the star Zeta Geminorum afterwards. 3I/ATLAS is approaching our solar system at a speedy 68 kilometers per second near perihelion. For context, the fastest spacecraft, NASA’s Parker Solar Probe hit 191 kilometers per second in 2024 at perihelion, just 6.9 million kilometers or just under 10 solar radii from the Sun.

The Sun and our solar system are moving at 13.4 kilometers per second (versus the local standard of rest) in the direction of a point just south of the bright star Vega (known as the Apex of the Sun’s Way) on our quarter of a billion-year journey around the Milky Way Galaxy.

This provides researchers a chance to apply what’s known as the Ōtautahi-Oxford Model for interstellar objects into actual practice, comparing real-time data to predictions. This model uses data from the Gaia survey along with formation chemistry of the galactic disk to model the expected properties for the population of interstellar objects.

You can see just how difficult the discovery of 3I/ATLAS was, against the star-dense field along the plane of the Milky Way in this wide-field view, versus the inset showing the comet. Credit: ATLAS/University of Hawaii/NASA.

3I/ATLAS could be the first known interstellar object from the thick disk population seen, and could prove to be a water ice-rich object as well. We’ll know shortly as it nears perihelion on October 29th and heats up, growing a coma and tail characteristic of solar system comets.

The recently commissioned Vera C. Rubin Observatory is expected to find up to 50 interstellar objects (ISOs) over the next decade as it surveys the sky. This added knowledge will allow astronomers to understand the population of interstellar objects as a whole, and predict just how common—or rare—they really are.

Riding along with 3I/ATLAS would provide a mind-boggling journey in time and space. After several billion years in deep-space, a bright star looms ahead. For a brief few months, that star becomes a Sun, heating the surface of the long-frozen comet. As an added bonus, one of the planets huddled near the star hosts an intelligent civilization, determined to understand its place in the Universe, and what the fleeting passage of 3I/ATLAS promises to tell them about the unfolding story of the galaxy and their place in it. The final story of 3I/ATLAS isn’t over yet.

Scientists at the European Space Agency used a laser to communicate with a spacecraft 165 million miles (265 million kilometers) away in deep space for the first time, marking a major step forward in their efforts to build optical communication systems for future missions to the Moon and beyond.

Scientists at the Kryoneri Observatory near Athens, Greece, shot a powerful laser at NASA’s Psyche mission, which then sent a return signal to the Helmos Observatory, which lies some 23 miles (37 km) away from the signal’s origin.

“This is an amazing success. Through years of technological advancements, international standardisation efforts and adoption of innovative engineering solutions we have set a cornerstone of the Solar System Internet,” Mariella Spada, ESA’s head of Ground systems Engineering and Innovation, said in a statement.

To pull it off, mission control at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory used powerful navigation tools including the the Delta-Differential One-Way Ranging—a kind of interplanetary radio tracking—to provide the ESA with Psyche’s exact position. Flight dynamics experts at the agency then designed the test while accounting for variables like air density, temperature, and the Earth’s motion. Sections of Greece’s airspace were also temporarily closed, just to be safe.

“Enabling this two-way optical handshake meant overcoming two major technical challenges: developing a laser powerful enough to hit a distant spacecraft with pinpoint accuracy; and building a receiver sensitive enough to detect the faintest return signal, sometimes just a few photons, after a journey of hundreds of millions of kilometres,” Sinda Mejri, project manager of the ESA’s Ground Laser Receiver system, said.

The signal relay is the first of four planned exchanges this summer as part of NASA’s Deep Space Optical Communications experiment aboard Psyche.

On a mission to investigate a metal-rich asteroid beyond Mars, Psyche also carries the DSOC, a gold-capped laser transceiver designed to test long-distance communication systems for future space missions. In December 2023 for example, DSOC managed to beam a video of an orange tabby cat named Taters chasing a laser pointer some 19 million miles (31 million km) back to Earth—a technological feat of the highest order.

Psyche itself uses radio to talk to its handlers on Earth, but laser communication systems could significantly speed up the conversation.

While this test didn’t involve sending any information to Psyche, optical communication systems can pack data into the oscillations of light waves in lasers, encoding messages into an optical signal that is carried to a receiver via infrared. These invisible beams—to our eyes at least—travel at the speed of light, carrying high-definition information from one point to another. This method enables data transmission rates some 10 to 100 times greater than the radio frequency systems used by spacecraft today, according to the agency.

“Combining this technology with the ones we have for radio frequency communications is essential to transmit the ever-increasing data output of the missions exploring the universe,” Andrea Di Mira, project manager of ESA’s Ground Laser Transmitter system, said.

The entire process requires extreme precision: Laser beams are much narrower than radio signals, which means that that the DCOS’s laser reply needs to be aimed in such a way that it takes into account Earth’s orbit to determine where the ground-based receiver will be by the time the signal reaches it.

The experiment’s success marks “truly a leap step towards bringing terrestrial internet like high-speed connectivity to our deep-space spacecraft,” Rolf Densing, the agency’s director of operations, said.

Imagine a self-driving car navigating downtown traffic. To avoid a collision, it must judge whether the pedestrian at the corner is about to cross. Or consider an investment algorithm trading stocks-it needs to anticipate how human investors will react to news before making a move.

In both cases, machines must do more than compute-they must understand human behavior. But today’s general-purpose AI models, like GPT or LIama, aren’t built for that.

Enter Be.FM, short for Behavioral Foundation Model, a new AI system developed by researchers at the University of Michigan, Stanford University and MobLab. Be.FM is one of the first AI systems designed specifically to predict, simulate and reason about human actions.

Unlike traditional models that rely on generic text corpuses, Be.FM is trained on behavioral science-specific data-from controlled experiments to surveys and academic studies.

“We’re not feeding it Wikipedia,” said Yutong Xie, a doctoral student in information science at U-M and the study’s lead author. “We built a behavioral dataset-more than 68,000 subjects from experimental data, approximately 20,000 survey respondents and thousands of scientific studies-to help the model reason about why people act the way they do.”

That specialized training gives Be.FM an edge over general-purpose AIs, which often overlook minority behaviors or misread complex social cues. For instance, the team’s prior work, published in the Proceedings of National Academy of Sciences, shows that off-the-shelf AIs tend to imitate average human behaviors, but fail to cover the diversity of the human distributions. More importantly, Be.FM demonstrates a range of emerging capabilities-skills that researchers did not explicitly program-that fall into four key application areas.

The first and most visible strength of Be.FM is its ability to predict human behavior in real-life situations. For example, Xie described a scenario where a banker offers a few investment options to a group. Be.FM can be used to predict which choices people are likely to prefer and how many will cooperate or take risks. This behavioral forecasting could support economic modeling, product testing or public policy analysis, offering a way to simulate group behavior before launching costly real-world trials.

Be.FM can also deduce psychological traits and demographic information from behavior or background data. In applications, this might mean inferring whether a person is extroverted or agreeable based on their age and gender, as well as other demographic data, or estimating someone’s age based on their personality traits. This capability could help researchers segment users more effectively, guide personalized interventions or inform product design.

Human behavior often shifts in response to context, such as changes in timing, social norms or environmental signals. Be.FM can help detect and reason about these drivers.

For instance, when user behavior in an app changes from January to February, Be.FM can help identify what contextual factors might be influencing the shift-such as a design update, a seasonal trend or changes in how information is framed. By analyzing patterns across scenarios, the model can surface insights about the environmental cues shaping decision-making.

This makes it a potentially valuable tool for researchers, designers and policy analysts seeking to understand why behaviors change and how to respond effectively.

Finally, Be.FM can organize and apply behavioral science knowledge to support research workflows. Built on a large language model architecture, it can generate new research ideas, summarize literature or solve applied behavioral economics problems.

For scholars and practitioners, it could become a tool to brainstorm hypotheses, plan studies or even simulate scenarios before field testing.

Across these four categories, Be.FM consistently outperformed commercial and open-source models like GPT-4o and LIama in matching human behavior, particularly in tasks such as personality prediction and scenario simulation. Its predictions more closely reflected real-world patterns, especially at the population level.

Still, the model has limits-its performance beyond these four areas remains untested. It is not yet designed to forecast large-scale political events or predict outcomes like elections or peace deals.

The research team is already working to expand Be.FM’s domain coverage.

“Behavior in health, education, even geopolitics-the goal is to make Be.FM useful wherever people make decisions,” said Qiaozhu Mei, U-M professor of information and the corresponding author of the study.

The Be.FM models are available upon request. The team invites researchers and practitioners to use the model and share their feedback.

On a Christmas morning in the early 1990s, in a small town north of Barcelona, a young Violeta Sanchez i Nogue’s interest in chemistry was born. She unwrapped a junior chemistry lab kit that would ignite a love of science and lead to a successful career as a senior researcher at NREL.

“With the kit, you could run lots of different assays inside glass tubes with different chemical compounds,” Sanchez i Nogue said. “It even had an alcohol burner! In retrospect probably not the safest game, but you can imagine lots of color changes and fume generation when reactions were taking place. I had lots of fun playing with this game with my sister, and I was just fascinated by it.”

With visions of someday working in a chemistry lab, Sanchez i Nogue took an opportunity to expand her horizons by joining an engineering boot camp during the summer before high school graduation.

“I really enjoyed it, as it gave me exposure to university-level research,” she said. “We spent a couple of weeks taking environmental samples in the Pyrenees and analyzing them in a lab the university had installed at the mountain hostel. Most of the researchers were from the chemical engineering department, so I had the chance to learn about the types of research they were doing.”

Combining Scientific Passions

Needless to say, she was hooked. She decided to combine her two interests and pursue a degree in chemical engineering at the Autonomous University of Barcelona. During her undergraduate studies, she completed an internship at Lund University in Sweden, where she later returned to earn a Ph.D. in engineering. It was here that she became familiar with NREL’s leading work on lignocellulosics and bioethanol—the focus of her thesis.

Sanchez i Nogue worked for a startup company developing yeast strains and processes for second-generation ethanol and other biotech applications. In the summer of 2015, she joined NREL as a postdoctoral researcher working on a project to produce renewable carbon fibers.

“It just felt like a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity when a colleague from grad school sent me the job posting,” Sanchez i Nogue said. “It was a relatively big project with universities, other national labs, and industrial partners. This first project was ambitious, and the fermentations I was running were really fast, but it was an amazing experience to be able to work with a highly multidisciplinary team. After a few months of being at NREL, I had the opportunity to join another project, which I am still part of.”

Working With Microorganisms

“While one might think the challenges an organism faces when we put them in bioreactors are really different compared to their native environment, you can actually leverage lots of natural strengths and weaknesses from learning about their origins,” Sanchez i Nogue said.

Most of her projects have parallel efforts across the laboratory in metabolic engineering, separations, catalysis, and analysis.

“Working on multidisciplinary projects with people who all have unique sets of expertise and backgrounds can be challenging at times,” Sanchez i Nogue said. “But it always feels like a pivotal moment when synergies occur because people work together.”

“I love the fact that I learn something new every single day,” she said. “I have what I consider one of the greatest privileges in a job: I work with dedicated, hard-working, and kind people, and this is a pleasure not everyone has.”

Seeking New Challenges

While the development of core capabilities happens on a laboratory scale, Sanchez i Nogue also works at the pilot scale in NREL’s Integrated Biorefinery Research Facility and externally with different industrial and university project partners.

Given her proclivity for collaboration, Sanchez i Nogue is not one to shy away from a new challenge. In 2023, she worked to onboard new operations in NREL’s Field Test Laboratory Building to be able to use different types of organic waste (including food waste, manure, and wastewater). Today, she is doing similar work on setting up an aerobic gas fermentation system in NREL’s new Research and Innovation Laboratory that will allow the use of hydrogen, oxygen, and flue gases.

“Deploying new capabilities in the lab is often challenging,” Sanchez i Nogue said. “Who do we bring to the table to help moving things forward? How does it fit into the current lab operations? Which changes will be needed to implement it safely? It is a lot of work behind the scenes.”

Sanchez i Nogue’s behind-the-scenes work has a history of paying off.

“Over these last years, I have been fortunate to work with people who took our challenges as theirs, and that has allowed for instrumental changes to the system,” she said. “I am happy to contribute to expanding NREL’s bioeconomy and sustainable transportation research capabilities!”

Living Beyond the Lab

Outside of work, Sanchez i Nogue enjoys cooking, baking, reading, gardening, and raising her 2-year-old daughter, which includes answering endless whys about people and nature’s curiosities.

“We recently had a nice opportunity to see a couple of robins nesting in our front yard, so we talked about how and why they were constructing the nest, laying the eggs, incubating them, feeding them, teaching them to fly, and more,” she said. “She is also fascinated by butterflies and has just started to distinguish ants from spiders.”

Her daughter’s expanding love of learning about the world around her mirrors that of her own, nurtured by the fateful junior chemistry lab kit from many Christmases ago.