Category: 7. Science

The European Space Agency has deployed a one-of-a-kind satellite with the ability to scan more than a trillion complex organisms in the world’s rainforests.

The successful April launch was spotlighted in June in the Environmental Defense Fund’s Vital Signs newsletter, a trusted source for inspiring climate news stories, solutions, and ways you can take action. 

The Biomass satellite, nicknamed Space Brolly because of its massive 12-meter diameter antenna, sparked optimism because scientists believe it will help them accurately measure how much carbon more than 1.5 trillion trees in rainforests are storing, per the BBC.

One 2021 study detailed by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration suggests the Amazon rainforest (the largest rainforest in the world) contains around 123 billion tons of carbon above and below ground. Yet deforestation is threatening the Amazon and other crucial rainforests that help regulate the climate and keep temperatures in check. 

The 1.3-ton satellite works similar to a CT scan, able to provide scientists with deeper insight into the health of rainforests. This could help them develop solutions to more effectively mitigate the life-threatening effects of the warming climate, including food insecurity and more intense extreme weather.

“We really want to interrogate these forests. We can actually look inside,” professor John Remedios, director of the National Centre for Earth Observation, told the BBC after the satellite’s launch from Kourou, French Guiana, on April 29.

This project is just one of the initiatives spotlighted by Vital Signs that underscores how environmentally focused technologies can be lucrative long-term investments, as governments, companies, and individuals come together to work toward a brighter future. 

Ralph Cordey, head of geosciences at Airbus, told the BBC that the satellite was 20 years in the making, with its ability to penetrate clouds to gather data potentially revolutionizing how we protect rainforests and the biodiverse creatures that call them home.

“It’s exciting, because it’s going to tell us about how something that we perhaps take for granted,” he said. “Our forests, our trees, how they are contributing to the processes which govern our planet, and in particular, the processes behind climate change which are so important to us today and for the future.”

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Ever wonder what kind of videos would keep monkeys glued to a screen? Turns out, their preferences aren’t all that different from ours.

A recent study found that long-tailed macaques are especially drawn to watching aggressive behavior and familiar faces – just like us. The findings offer new insight into the social instincts we share with other primates.

The study was led by researchers at Utrecht University in the Netherlands, in collaboration with The Ohio State University.

Inside the monkey theater

The team showed two-minute videos to 28 macaques living at the Biomedical Primate Research Centre in Rijswijk, the Netherlands.

Each video featured monkeys from the same group or complete strangers, engaged in one of four activities: fighting, grooming, running, or just sitting around.

The macaques were free to enter a testing corridor where laptops played the videos. These testing areas were already familiar to the animals, so the environment wasn’t new or stressful. While watching, researchers tracked how long the monkeys looked at the screen.

The results were clear: the macaques paid the most attention to videos showing fights between monkeys. Running came in second. Grooming and sitting barely registered.

Conflict grabs attention

Brad Bushman is co-author of the study and professor of communication at The Ohio State University.

“Humans and macaques are both social animals who have a fundamental need to belong,” he said. “It’s not surprising that they both would be most interested in the video content that may help them navigate relationships in their groups.”

“We have plenty of research showing the popularity of violent media with humans. Now we have some evidence that other primates might also be attracted to conflict and aggression in videos.”

“From an evolutionary perspective, this makes sense. Both humans and other animals may be hardwired to pay attention to aggression because that is an adaptive response that increases survival,” Bushman added.

Groupmates get more views

The macaques didn’t just favor conflict – they also preferred to watch monkeys they knew. Videos of their own group members got more attention than clips featuring strangers.

“This indicates that gathering social information on group members is more important than getting information about strangers,” said Elisabeth H.M. Sterck, professor of animal behavior and cognition at Utrecht University.

“When we as humans watch movies, we like to see actors we know – we like to see the stars playing in big movies more than we do actors who are not familiar to us,” Bushman said.

Monkey social status

Not all monkeys watched with equal interest. Lower-ranking and less aggressive macaques were more attentive to the videos than their dominant peers.

“More dominant individuals can be more confident that aggression will not affect them – they don’t have to pay attention to others as much,” Sterck said.

“Lower-ranking individuals can become an aggression victim and that may be why they pay more attention to what others are doing in the videos.”

Interestingly, monkeys that were more anxious or easily stressed were less focused on group members.

“We found that the gathering of social information from the videos differed with dominance rank and behavioral tendencies, which may reflect personality,” Sterck said.

A shared curiosity across species

These monkeys, known for their visual acuity, watched the videos on their own terms – walking into the test space voluntarily. Each session was brief, but the pull of conflict on screen was undeniable.

“The macaques are very visual animals. Their eyesight is similar to that of humans, and they are very interested in watching videos,” Sterck said.

And while the videos were short, their effect was real. Bushman noted that even this brief exposure to aggressive media captured the attention of macaques in the study.

“When you see this in some of our closest primate relatives, it is easy to see why humans are so interested in violent media,” said Bushman.

A primate preference for drama

What we see on screen says a lot about who we are – and apparently, that’s true for monkeys too.

In this study, our primate cousins showed they’re drawn to social drama and familiar faces, just like humans sitting down with popcorn for a movie night.

Whether it’s about survival, curiosity, or just plain interest, the content that grabs attention may be more universal than we thought.

The full study was published in the journal Animal Cognition.

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Now, a group of researchers made up of geneticists and artificial intelligence specialists is uncovering new layers of that shared history. Led by Joshua Akey, a professor at Princeton’s Lewis-Sigler Institute for Integrative Genomics, the team has found strong evidence of genetic exchange between early human groups, pointing to a much deeper and more complex relationship than previously understood.

“This is the first time that geneticists have identified multiple waves of modern human-Neanderthal admixture,” said Liming Li, a professor in the Department of Medical Genetics and Developmental Biology at Southeast University in Nanjing, China, who performed this work as an associate research scholar in Akey’s lab.

“We now know that for the vast majority of human history, we’ve had a history of contact between modern humans and Neanderthals,” said Akey. The hominins who are our most direct ancestors split from the Neanderthal family tree about 600,000 years ago, then evolved our modern physical characteristics about 250,000 years ago.

“From then until the Neanderthals disappeared — that is, for about 200,000 years — modern humans have been interacting with Neanderthal populations,” he said.

The results of their work were published the journal Science.

Rethinking the Ice Age Stereotype

Neanderthals, once stereotyped as slow-moving and dim-witted, are now seen as skilled hunters and tool makers who treated each other’s injuries with sophisticated techniques and were well adapted to thrive in the cold European weather.

(Note: All of these hominin groups are humans, but to avoid saying “Neanderthal humans,” “Denisovan humans,” and “ancient-versions-of-our-own-kind-of-humans,” most archaeologists and anthropologists use the shorthand Neanderthals, Denisovans, and modern humans.)

Using genomes from 2,000 living humans as well as three Neanderthals and one Denisovan, Akey and his team mapped the gene flow between the hominin groups over the past quarter-million years.

The researchers used a genetic tool they designed a few years ago called IBDmix, which uses machine learning techniques to decode the genome. Previous researchers depended on comparing human genomes against a “reference population” of modern humans believed to have little or no Neanderthal or Denisovan DNA.

Akey’s team has established that even those referenced groups, who live thousands of miles south of the Neanderthal caves, have trace amounts of Neanderthal DNA, probably carried south by voyagers (or their descendants).

With IBDmix, Akey’s team identified a first wave of contact about 200-250,000 years ago, another wave 100-120,000 years ago, and the largest one about 50-60,000 years ago.

Challenging the Out-of-Africa Model

That contrasts sharply with previous genetic data. “To date, most genetic data suggests that modern humans evolved in Africa 250,000 years ago, stayed put for the next 200,000 years, and then decided to disperse out of Africa 50,000 years ago and go on to people the rest of the world,” said Akey.

“Our models show that there wasn’t a long period of stasis, but that shortly after modern humans arose, we’ve been migrating out of Africa and coming back to Africa, too,” he said. “To me, this story is about dispersal, that modern humans have been moving around and encountering Neanderthals and Denisovans much more than we previously recognized.”

That vision of humanity on the move coincides with the archaeological and paleoanthropological research suggesting cultural and tool exchange between the hominin groups.

Li and Akey’s key insight was to look for modern-human DNA in the genomes of the Neanderthals, instead of the other way around. “The vast majority of genetic work over the last decade has really focused on how mating with Neanderthals impacted modern human phenotypes and our evolutionary history — but these questions are relevant and interesting in the reverse case, too,” said Akey.

They realized that the offspring of those first waves of Neanderthal-modern matings must have stayed with the Neanderthals, therefore leaving no record in living humans. “Because we can now incorporate the Neanderthal component into our genetic studies, we are seeing these earlier dispersals in ways that we weren’t able to before,” Akey said.

Shrinking Populations and Genetic Illusions

The final piece of the puzzle was discovering that Neanderthals had a smaller population than researchers previously thought.

Scientists often estimate population size by looking at genetic diversity. In general, more variation in the genome suggests a larger group. But when Akey’s team applied their tool, IBDmix, they found that much of the apparent diversity in Neanderthal DNA actually came from genes inherited from modern humans, who had far larger populations.

With this new insight, scientists lowered their estimate of the Neanderthal breeding population from about 3,400 individuals to roughly 2,400.

Taken together, these findings help explain how Neanderthals disappeared from the fossil and genetic record around 30,000 years ago.
 

“I don’t like to say ‘extinction,’ because I think Neanderthals were largely absorbed,” said Akey. His idea is that Neanderthal populations slowly shrank until the last survivors were folded into modern human communities.

This “assimilation model” was first articulated by Fred Smith, an anthropology professor at Illinois State University, in 1989. “Our results provide strong genetic data consistent with Fred’s hypothesis, and I think that’s really interesting,” said Akey.

“Neanderthals were teetering on the edge of extinction, probably for a very long time,” he said. “If you reduce their numbers by 10 or 20%, which our estimates do, that’s a substantial reduction to an already at-risk population.

“Modern humans were essentially like waves crashing on a beach, slowly but steadily eroding the beach away. Eventually we just demographically overwhelmed Neanderthals and incorporated them into modern human populations.”

This research was supported by the National Institutes of Health (grant R01GM110068 to JMA).

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A newly developed artificial intelligence model is showing promising results in simulating human behavior with a level of accuracy not previously achieved in cognitive science. The model, called Centaur, is designed to predict how people make decisions across a wide range of situations, including unfamiliar ones.

Developed at Helmholtz Munich’s Institute for Human-Centered AI, Centaur is based on a large dataset—over ten million individual decisions made by more than 60,000 participants across 160 controlled psychological experiments, according to the press release. These included studies on risk-taking, reward processing, moral reasoning, and more. The dataset, named Psych-101, was specifically structured to train a language model on cognitive behavior.

Earlier models were built on rigid rules or task-specific designs. Centaur, on the other h learns generalizable patterns in human decision-making. It processes inputs described in natural language and predicts not just outcomes, but also likely response times—offering a layered understanding of the decision process. This capacity to model cognition dynamically brings researchers closer to replicating the underlying mechanisms of thought.

One of the model’s potential applications is in clinical psychology. By simulating how individuals with mental health conditions approach decisions, the model may help researchers identify behavioral markers for conditions like anxiety and depression. Future versions of the dataset will incorporate psychological profiles and demographic factors, expanding its relevance for personalized mental health research.

Beyond psychology, the model may offer tools for decision-making in fields such as healthcare, social policy, and behavioral economics. The ability to simulate human reasoning in response to complex, real-world scenarios could assist in designing more effective interventions or services.

The research team emphasizes ethical deployment, advocating for transparent and open systems. Their goal is to maintain full control over data and model behavior, ensuring that such tools are used responsibly—particularly in sensitive domains.

As research progresses, the team plans to examine how internal computations within the model correspond to actual cognitive strategies. This could provide further insight into how individuals process information, and how those processes differ across populations.

The findings were published in Nature and mark a step forward in the use of AI to explore human cognition at scale.

The International Space Station (ISS) is not just a place to live in space – it’s an experimental laboratory. With astronauts onboard and Earth positioned below, the ISS offers a unique opportunity: long-duration research in microgravity.

It also provides low Earth orbit views of our planet, along with a human crew who support experiments, swap samples, and troubleshoot in real time.

Since its launch, researchers have used the space station to conduct hundreds of studies. These range from characterizing fluid behavior in zero gravity to tracking changes in the human body. Their work advances science by answering questions that can’t be studied on Earth.

Science without gravity

Without Earth’s gravity pulling things down, scientists can run experiments that simply aren’t possible on the ground. For example, hot air doesn’t rise. Flames take on a spherical shape. Fluids stop behaving the way they do in a glass of water.

This gives researchers a rare opportunity to examine physical, chemical, and biological processes in new ways.

By eliminating variables like surface tension or capillary movement, they can get a much clearer picture of how things actually work.

Orbiting lab sees it all

The space station orbits Earth in about 90 minutes, traveling at 17,500 miles per hour from about 250 miles above the surface.

This low vantage point means the ISS is able to make observations of the planet both in daylight and darkness, and from various angles and lighting conditions.

By being outside Earth’s atmosphere and magnetic field, the ISS carries instruments that could not be used on Earth.

That makes it possible to study space radiation, neutron stars, and other phenomena – along with how materials and living organisms behave in space.

ISS crew makes science possible

Other satellites can carry instruments, but only the ISS has a living, breathing crew to run the science. Human operators are key. They adjust setups, monitor changes, fix problems, and pack samples for return to Earth.

This flexibility is critical for complex research on the ISS. It also means scientists can get a second chance if something doesn’t go as planned.

Since experiments can stay on the station for months or even years, there’s plenty of time to refine ideas and gather more data.

Body changes in space

Because the space station has been operating for over two decades, scientists have been able to track long-term changes – including how space affects the human body. One example: vision changes that astronauts began noticing after spending months in orbit.

Scientists launched the Fluid Shifts investigation in 2015 to understand what was happening. They suspected that in microgravity, fluids move from the lower to the upper body, increasing pressure in the head and possibly changing eye shape.

The study asked whether increased fluid pressure was the cause of these vision changes.

It ran through 2020 and tracked multiple astronauts over time. It marked a major step toward understanding the effects of spaceflight on human health.

Research on the space station

Research on the space station takes time. First, scientists have to identify a question and come up with a possible answer. Then, they design an experiment to test it, decide what data to collect, and figure out how.

Getting that experiment into space is its own process. NASA reviews proposals based on scientific value and relevance.

Once approved, studies are scheduled for future missions – often many months away. Training, hardware development, flight procedures, and data collection plans all need to be worked out.

Once the experiment is on board, astronauts begin collecting data. After that, the real work begins: analyzing results and writing them up. That alone can take a year or more.

Before a study is published, it goes through peer review. One analysis found that peer review alone takes an average of 100 days. Editors may also ask for revisions or more analysis before giving the green light.

Small crew, big science

One challenge with human research on the International Space Station is the limited number of subjects. With only about six people on board at any given time, gathering enough data takes longer.

Consider the Lighting Effects study, which tested whether adjusting the station’s lighting could improve sleep, mood, and performance by syncing with astronauts’ circadian rhythms.

Because researchers needed data from several astronauts, the study ran from 2016 to 2020. Other long-term human studies have looked at heart muscle loss and nutrition, including how to grow fresh food in space.

Space station research takes time

Research in physical science can often move more quickly. Scientists can send up batches of materials and collect results faster. But even then, one round of experiments often leads to more questions.

The Burning and Suppression of Solids (BASS) series ran from 2011 to 2017, studying how different fuels behave in space. That work led to the Saffire series, which began in 2016 and ended in 2024.

These fire safety demonstrations helped answer critical questions about how to prevent and put out fires in space.

Scientific breakthroughs don’t happen overnight, especially not in orbit. But the space station gives researchers something priceless: time, access, and the ability to keep going.

The payoff? New insights into how our bodies work, how materials behave, and how we can prepare for longer missions. That’s not just useful for life in space – it helps improve life back on Earth, too.

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NEW YORK — For sale: A 54-pound (25-kilogram) rock. Estimated auction price: $2 million to $4 million. Why so expensive? It’s the largest piece of Mars ever found on Earth.

Sotheby’s in New York will be auctioning what’s known as NWA 16788 on Wednesday as part of a natural history-themed sale that also includes a juvenile Ceratosaurus dinosaur skeleton that’s more than 6 feet (2 meters) tall and nearly 11 feet (3 meters) long.

According to the auction house, the meteorite is believed to have been blown off the surface of Mars by a massive asteroid strike before traveling 140 million miles (225 million kilometers) to Earth, where it crashed into the Sahara. A meteorite hunter found it in Niger in November 2023, Sotheby’s says.

The red, brown and gray hunk is about 70% larger than the next largest piece of Mars found on Earth and represents nearly 7% of all the Martian material currently on this planet, Sotheby’s says. It measures nearly 15 inches by 11 inches by 6 inches (375 millimeters by 279 millimeters by 152 millimeters).

“This Martian meteorite is the largest piece of Mars we have ever found by a long shot,” Cassandra Hatton, vice chairman for science and natural history at Sotheby’s, said in an interview. “So it’s more than double the size of what we previously thought was the largest piece of Mars.”

It is also a rare find. There are only 400 Martian meteorites out of the more than 77,000 officially recognized meteorites found on Earth, Sotheby’s says.

Hatton said a small piece of the red planet remnant was removed and sent to a specialized lab that confirmed it is from Mars. It was compared with the distinct chemical composition of Martian meteorites discovered during the Viking space probe that landed on Mars in 1976, she said.

The examination found that it is an “olivine-microgabbroic shergottite,” a type of Martian rock formed from the slow cooling of Martian magma. It has a course-grained texture and contains the minerals pyroxene and olivine, Sotheby’s says.

It also has a glassy surface, likely due to the high heat that burned it when it fell through Earth’s atmosphere, Hatton said. “So that was their first clue that this wasn’t just some big rock on the ground,” she said.

The meteorite previously was on exhibit at the Italian Space Agency in Rome. Sotheby’s did not disclose the owner.

It’s not clear exactly when the meteorite hit Earth, but testing shows it probably happened in recent years, Sotheby’s said.

The juvenile Ceratosaurus nasicornis skeleton was found in 1996 near Laramie, Wyoming, at Bone Cabin Quarry, a gold mine for dinosaur bones. Specialists assembled nearly 140 fossil bones with some sculpted materials to recreate the skeleton and mounted it so it’s ready to exhibit, Sotheby’s says.

The skeleton is believed to be from the late Jurassic period, about 150 million years ago, Sotheby’s says. It’s auction estimate is $4 million to $6 million.

Ceratosaurus dinosaurs were bipeds with short arms that appear similar to the Tyrannosaurus rex, but smaller. Ceratosaurus dinosaurs could grow up to 25 feet (7.6 meters) long, while the Tyrannosaurs rex could be 40 feet (12 meters) long.

The skeleton was acquired last year by Fossilogic, a Utah-based fossil preparation and mounting company.

Wednesday’s auction is part of Sotheby’s Geek Week 2025 and features 122 items, including other meteorites, fossils and gem-quality minerals.

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Collins reported from Hartford, Connecticut.

The new Vera C. Rubin Observatory detected interstellar object 3I/ATLAS and may detect up to 50 more during its 10-year mission, according to a new model.

The observatory in Chile, which unveiled its first images last month, is equipped with a unique view of the night sky, supported by the world’s largest camera.

What Is The Vera C. Rubin Observatory?

A new survey telescope in Chile, the Rubin Observatory, looks set to become astronomy’s most ambitious and productive eye on the sky ever made. It will begin a 10-year mission later this year, during which it’s expected to discover 10 million supernovas, 20 billion galaxies, and millions of asteroids and comets.

About the size of a car, Rubin’s $168 million LSSTCam imager — the most sensitive optical device ever made — weighs over three tons and captures 3,200-megapixel images. Every image is big enough to fill 378 4K screens. It took 10 years to manufacture, features six optical filters, and, crucially, has a 9.6 square-degree field of view — it can see a large portion of the sky at once.

What Is 3I/ATLAS?

Discovered on July 1, 2025, by the ATLAS telescope network at El Sauce Observatory in Chile and thought to be around 12 miles (20 kilometers) in diameter, 3I/ATLAS’s eccentric trajectory suggests that it’s from outside the solar system. The third interstellar object ever to be found after ‘Oumuamua in 2017 and a comet called 2I/Borisov in 2019, 3I/ATLAS could be three billion years older than the solar system — the oldest comet ever seen. It could even be up to 14 billion years old, according to Matthew Hopkins, an astronomer at the University of Oxford, who spoke on July 11 at the Royal Astronomical Society’s National Astronomy Meeting in Durham, U.K., about a new model, the Ōtautahi–Oxford Model, that simulates the properties of interstellar objects based on their orbits and likely stellar origins.

Why Rubin Will Find Interstellar Objects

The next interstellar object to enter the solar system is likely to be discovered by the Rubin telescope. Objets such as 3I/ATLAS are incredibly faint when they are far from the sun, but Rubin’s wide field and large aperture make it ideal for finding interstellar objects. “Rubin’s speed means it also scans 18,000 square degrees every few nights,” said Bob Blum, Director of Rubin Observatory Operations, in an email. “The combination of depth, field of view, and speed is ideal for finding rare objects.”

With all of this in its favor, Rubin is expected to find any interstellar objects sooner than other facilities because it will detect them when they’re farther away. “We expect Rubin will be able to find at least multiple 10’s of these rare interlopers over the course of its 10-year survey,” said Bloom.

It’s already begun its work, with Rubin’s team locating 3I/ATLAS in test images taken since early June and now studying the object in the night sky.

A Surprising Discovery

For astronomers working on how to best detect interstellar objects, the sudden arrival of 3I/ATLAS took them by surprise — just as they were preparing to begin using the Rubin Observatory. “The solar system science community was already excited about the potential discoveries Rubin will make in the next 10 years, including an unprecedented number of interstellar objects,” said co-researcher Dr Rosemary Dorsey of the University of Helsinki. “The discovery of 3I suggests that prospects for Rubin may now be more optimistic; we may find about 50 objects, of which some would be similar in size to 3I.”

Wishing you clear skies and wide eyes.

Why this is a big deal in our 1-minute read:

• The James Webb Space Telescope has likely captured its very first direct image of a planet orbiting another star – a major milestone for the mission.
• The planet candidate, called TWA 7 b, is about the mass of Saturn and orbits a star just 6.4 million years old – offering a rare glimpse into the early days of planetary systems.
• Using a special instrument (a coronagraph) to block the star’s glare, Webb was able to spot the faint glow of the exoplanet in the dusty disk around the star TWA 7.
• The planet’s gravity appears to be shaping the rings of dust around its star, making this the first time a directly imaged exoplanet has been linked to sculpting its home system.
• This breakthrough opens the door to finding and studying lighter, more distant exoplanets, helping scientists understand how planets and solar systems like ours are born.

Our observations reveal a strong candidate for a planet shaping the structure of the TWA 7 debris disk, and its position is exactly where we expected to find a planet of this mass

Anne-Marie Lagrange, lead researcher