Category: 7. Science

• Earth could be located inside a billion-light-year-wide void, astronomers say.
• This could explain the Hubble tension, or disagreements in measurements of how fast the universe is expanding.
• The evidence comes in the form of sound waves from the Big Bang known as baryon acoustic oscillations.

The Royal Astronomical Society published this story on July 8, 2025. Edits by EarthSky.

Is Earth in a huge void? Sound waves from the Big Bang suggest so

Earth and our entire Milky Way galaxy may sit inside a mysterious giant hole which makes the cosmos expand faster here than in neighboring regions of the universe, astronomers say.

Their theory is a potential solution to the Hubble tension and could help confirm the true age of our universe, which is estimated to be around 13.8 billion years old.

The latest research – which will be shared at the Royal Astronomical Society’s National Astronomy Meeting (NAM) in Durham, U.K., on July 9, 2025 – shows that sound waves from the early universe, which the scientists call “essentially the sound of the Big Bang,” support this idea.

Could a void explain the Hubble tension?

The Hubble constant was first proposed by Edwin Hubble in 1929 to express the rate of the universe’s expansion. It can be measured by observing the distance of celestial objects and how fast they are moving away from us.

The stumbling block, however, is that extrapolating measurements of the distant, early universe to today using the standard cosmological model predicts a slower rate of expansion than measurements of the nearby, more recent universe. This is the Hubble tension.

Study lead Indranil Banik of the University of Portsmouth explained:

A potential solution to this inconsistency is that our galaxy is close to the center of a large, local void. It would cause matter to be pulled by gravity toward the higher density exterior of the void, leading to the void becoming emptier with time.

As the void is emptying out, the velocity of objects away from us would be larger than if the void were not there. This therefore gives the appearance of a faster local expansion rate.

He added:

The Hubble tension is largely a local phenomenon, with little evidence that the expansion rate disagrees with expectations in the standard cosmology further back in time. So a local solution like a local void is a promising way to go about solving the problem.

What’s the evidence?

For the idea to stand up, Earth and our solar system would need to be near the center of a void about a billion light-years in radius and with a density about 20% below the average for the universe as a whole.

Directly counting galaxies does support the theory, because the number density in our local universe is lower than in neighboring regions.

However, the existence of such a large and deep void is controversial because it doesn’t mesh particularly well with the standard model of cosmology, which suggests matter today should be more uniformly spread out on such large scales.

Despite this, new data that Banik will present at the Royal Astronomical Society’s National Astronomy Meeting 2025 shows that baryon acoustic oscillations (BAOs) – the “sound of the Big Bang” – support the idea of a local void.

He explained:

These sound waves traveled for only a short while before becoming frozen in place once the universe cooled enough for neutral atoms to form. They act as a standard ruler, whose angular size we can use to chart the cosmic expansion history.

According to the study, a billion-light-year void around Earth would distort the relationship between the size of these sound waves and measurements of redshift, which is what astronomers use to measure how quickly things are moving away in space.

Banik said:

By considering all available baryon acoustic oscillation (BAO) measurements over the last 20 years, we showed that a void model is about 100 million times more likely than a void-free model with parameters designed to fit the cosmic microwave background (CMB) observations taken by the Planck satellite.

Next steps

The next step for researchers is to compare their local void model with other methods to estimate the history of the universe’s expansion, such as cosmic chronometers.

This involves looking at galaxies that are no longer forming stars. By observing their spectra, or light, it is possible to find what kinds of stars they have and in what proportion. Since more massive stars have shorter lives, they are absent in older galaxies, providing a way to establish a galaxy’s age.

Astronomers can then combine this age with the galaxy’s redshift – how much the wavelength of its light has been stretched – which tells us how much the universe has expanded while light from the galaxy was traveling toward us. This sheds light on the universe’s expansion history.

Bottom line: New research says sound waves from the Big Bang support the idea that Earth is in a huge void, which could explain the Hubble tension.

Source: Theoretical and observational approaches to the Hubble tension

Via Royal Astronomical Society

The New Horizons spacecraft, which has left the solar system, beamed back images that have led to the first test of deep-space navigation. That is, New Horizons imaged 2 stars, which astronomers then used to pinpoint the spacecraft’s location in the galaxy. Rowan Hooper and Penny Sarchet are hosting this New Scientist podcast. The guest is guest Alex Wilkins. Watch in the player above, or on YouTube.

The New Horizons Mission to Pluto and the Kuiper Belt published this article on June 30, 2025. Edits by EarthSky.

Figuring out how far and where a spacecraft has traveled usually requires accurate radio tracking from Earth. But NASA’s New Horizons team has used the spacecraft – now more than 5 billion miles (8 billion km) from Earth – to demonstrate that it’s possible to determine a craft’s direction and distance via the examination of its images of star fields. This is the first true demonstration of interstellar navigation, made possible because New Horizons has now traveled far enough away.

Tod Lauer, an astrophysicist and New Horizons science team member from the National Optical-Infrared Astronomy Research Laboratory in Tucson, Arizona, explained:

As a spacecraft travels deeper into space, the positions of the stars seen from its location begin to shift, in contrast to where they are seen from Earth. A spacecraft voyaging out into the Milky Way can measure these shifts, which are due to an effect called parallax.

A paper describing the results was accepted for publication in The Astronomical Journal.

A preprint is available on arXiv: A Demonstration of Interstellar Navigation Using New Horizons

They used these 2 stars

Deep-space navigation, part 1

Since its launch in 2006, New Horizons has been on a trajectory that brought it past Pluto and then Kuiper Belt object Arrokoth. Eventually, its path will take it out of the solar system, into interstellar space, over the next decade.

In 2020, Lauer led the New Horizons science team in an effort to obtain images of the starfields around the nearby stars Proxima Centauri (top) and Wolf 359. They obtained the images simultaneously from New Horizons and from Earth. This program vividly demonstrated New Horizons’ change in perspective.

Lauer worked with retired Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory researcher David Munro and members of the New Horizons team and external collaborators on this project. They used more recent and sophisticated analyses of the exact positions of the two stars in those 2020 images to deduce New Horizons’ 3-dimensional position relative to nearby stars.

They thereby accomplished the first use of stars imaged directly from a spacecraft to provide its navigational fix.

Deep-space navigation, part 2

It was also the first demonstration of interstellar navigation by any spacecraft on an interstellar trajectory. The principal investigator for New Horizons, Alan Stern from the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado, said:

This pioneering interstellar navigation demonstration and its accompanying publication show that a deep-space mission can use its onboard imaging system to find its way among the stars.

While for New Horizons, this method isn’t as accurate as NASA’s sophisticated tracking from Earth, it could be highly useful for future deep space missions in the far reaches of the solar system and in interstellar space.

More details

NASA’s Deep Space Network (DSN) is used to track most interplanetary spacecraft, including New Horizons. Engineers use the precise time it takes DSN signals, traveling at the speed of light, to reach the spacecraft to make highly accurate distance measurements.

Simultaneous ranging from two DSN stations, located 180 degrees apart on Earth, provides a precise direction to the spacecraft.

A separate project obtained precise positions with respect to X-ray pulsars in the Milky Way. That project had demonstrated spacecraft navigation for craft in low orbit around the Earth. But New Horizons provided a first for a deep space mission.

In standard celestial navigation, the stars are assumed to be in fixed locations. But in interstellar navigation, one determines how the nearby stars have appeared to shift against more distant stars to establish the spacecraft’s location in all three dimensions.

In contrast, for navigation with DSN, the position of the spacecraft remains linked to and dependent on knowing the location of Earth.

The April 2020 demonstration

Pure interstellar navigation, like what New Horizons demonstrated, is based on the ultra-precise 3D map of the Milky Way from the European Space Agency’s Gaia mission.

Images obtained with New Horizons’ Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) captured the positions of Proxima Centauri and Wolf 349 relative to much more distant background stars. Two stars are required to determine position; significantly, Proxima Centauri and Wolf 349 are positioned almost 90 degrees apart in the sky, providing nearly optimal leverage to determine New Horizons’ location.

During the April 2020 demonstration, New Horizons was 46.9 times the distance of the Earth to the sun – about 4.36 billion miles (7.02 billion km) – and would appear to be in the constellation Sagittarius, close to the center of the Milky Way, as seen from Earth.

New Horizons on April 23, 2020

The dawn of deep-space navigation

Lauer’s team cautions that the accuracy of this first demonstration of interstellar navigation is limited. That’s because of LORRI’s relatively low angular resolution; the imager was not developed to obtain ultra-precise positions of stars. The range to New Horizons estimated from the stellar imagery was roughly close to the actual distance. It showed 47.1 times the Earth-sun distance, in contrast to the DSN-derived distance of 46.9 times. Plus, its direction on the sky was accurate to a patch a little smaller than the scale of the full moon as seen from Earth. Lauer added:

The measurements were within our expected range of uncertainty for LORRI, but future deep space missions with high-resolution navigation imagers should be able to achieve dramatically better positions, using this same technique.

Bottom line: NASA’s New Horizons team has used the spacecraft – now more than 5 billion miles (8 billion km) from Earth – to demonstrate that it’s possible to determine a craft’s direction and distance via the examination of its images of star fields. This is the first true demonstration of interstellar navigation, made possible because New Horizons has now traveled far enough away.

Source: A Demonstration of Interstellar Navigation Using New Horizons

Via New Horizons Mission

Researchers have discovered a strategy to neutralize two highly lethal viruses for which there is currently no approved vaccine or cure.

A team led by Professor Daniel Watterson and Dr. Ariel Isaacs at The University of Queensland has identified the first ever nanobody to work against Nipah and Hendra, henipaviruses which have jumped from animals to people in Asia and Australia.

A nanobody is one-tenth the size of an antibody and being that small it can access hard-to-reach areas of a virus to block infection.

Nanobodies are also easier to produce and more stable at higher temperatures than traditional antibodies, so we are very excited about the potential of our discovery to lead to new treatments.”

Dr. Ariel Isaacs at The University of Queensland

The nanobody, called DS90, was among a series isolated by research partners at Universidad Austral de Chile from the immune cells of an alpaca called Pedro.

Camelids, including alpacas, are the only land animals which produce nanobodies.

DS90 was identified via a platform developed by Professor Alejandro Rojas-Fernandez which can isolate nanobodies against viruses of concern.

“Together with UQ, we aimed to construct a broad barrier against future pandemic viruses based on scalable antiviral nanobodies – this fantastic work is just the beginning,” Professor Rojas-Fernandez said.

Tests at Professor Watterson’s laboratory at UQ’s School of Chemistry and Molecular Biosciences confirmed DS90 could bind successfully to proteins in Nipah and Hendra viruses and block their ability to enter cells.

The team used cryogenic electron microscopy at UQ’s Centre for Microscopy & Microanalysis to examine the process.

“We could see exactly how the nanobody bound to the virus reaching right into deep pockets, whereas antibodies typically just bind to exposed surfaces of viruses,” Professor Watterson said.

“This new information is a crucial step towards using a nanobody to combat Hendra and Nipah, which cause outbreaks in people and can often lead to fatal respiratory and neurological disease.”

The team also combined the DS90 nanobody with a developmental antibody therapy that is used as a last resort treatment for people infected with Hendra and Nipah.

“Excitingly, we demonstrated that the combination of DS90 with the m102.4 antibody – which is made at UQ – prevents Nipah virus from mutating and evolving,” Dr Isaacs said.

“This is a powerful technique to prevent new deadly variants emerging.

“Other nanobodies have been approved for use as cancer treatments and it is now exciting to see that nanobodies can also be used to neutralise viruses.

“The next step will be to translate our findings into a therapeutic to be clinically ready in case of an outbreak of Hendra in Australia or Nipah in Asia.”

First identified in Brisbane in 1994, Hendra virus has infected people via horses and flying foxes in eastern Australia. Nipah virus outbreaks in people occur almost annually in Bangladesh and occasionally in other Asian countries where it is carried by bats.

The UQ research project was supported by the work of Professor Alejandro Rojas-Fernandez and Dr Guillermo Valenzuela Nieto at Universidad Austral de Chile, along with scientists at CSIRO’s Australian Centre for Disease Preparedness and the University of Science and Technology of China.

The research has been published in Nature Structural and Molecular Biology. 

• Scientists found high-velocity gas clouds in the galaxy Messier 83 that likely came from outside the galaxy.
• These clouds consist of dense molecular gas, the kind needed to form new stars.
• The findings suggest galaxies can sustain star formation by pulling in gas from their surroundings, including the intergalactic medium or nearby galaxies.

Why don’t galaxies run out of gas to make new stars?

Graduate student Maki Nagata of the University of Tokyo and colleagues were pondering an age-old question in astronomy: How do galaxies sustain star formation over billions of years? Stars form from gas clouds. And in our Milky Way galaxy, star formation should have stopped within a billion years after it formed, as its gas supply depleted. Yet star formation continues today. So there must be a process continually feeding gases to galaxies. On July 1, 2025, the astronomers said they found clues to this mystery in the galaxy Messier 83. They discovered high-velocity gas clouds moving faster compared to the galaxy’s overall rotation. And the scientists said these gas clouds likely originated from outside Messier 83.

Nagata said:

Gas clouds are a common feature of galaxies. Some are classed as high-velocity clouds and we suspected these might account for some of this galactic feeding material. What makes high-velocity clouds special is that their speed and direction don’t correspond to the general speed of rotation or the orientation of a typical spiral galaxy. This alone doesn’t necessarily mean they come from outside the host galaxy, though one scenario is that they start as material ejected by supernovas, or exploding stars. But we thought with the right analysis and reasoning, we could tell if at least some high-velocity clouds were from outside the galaxy.

The researchers published their findings in the peer-reviewed Astrophysical Journal on June 30, 2025.

Hunting for high-velocity clouds in Messier 83

Messier 83 is a barred spiral galaxy, 14.7 million light-years from us. In the sky, it lies at the border of the constellations Hydra and Centaurus. Its galactic disk faces us, giving a clear view of intricate spiral features.

The scientists observed Messier 83 using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), an array of radio telescopes in northern Chile. There, they mapped long wavelengths emitted by molecular clouds in the galaxy. In addition, they measured the velocity of the clouds.

Analyzing the radio telescope data

For their analysis, Nagata and her team defined high-velocity clouds as clouds moving at least 50 kilometers per second (112,000 mph) faster or slower than the rotation of the galactic disk. Plus, they focused on clouds moving perpendicular to the galactic plane.

Out of about 1,400 clouds, 10 clouds met the criteria for high-velocity clouds. Their sizes ranged from 196 to 522 light-years in diameter, with masses about 100,000 times that of our sun.

Next, the scientists ruled out other causes for those abnormal velocities. Perhaps a supernova, an exploded massive star, was driving the high velocities. Therefore, they compared the cloud locations with those of known supernova remnants. And they found that only one cloud coincided with a remnant.

For the remaining nine clouds, there were no known processes in the galaxy that could account for their aberrant velocities. Moreover, the energy in those clouds was higher than what the scientists expected from supernova ejecta. As a result, the researchers concluded that these clouds originated from outside the galaxy and were falling into it.

Galaxies are not isolated islands

The space between galaxies is not completely empty. The intergalactic medium has a low density of gases, on average about one atom in every 35 cubic feet (1 cubic meter). Some of those gases – hydrogen and helium – are remnants from the Big Bang. Other gases were swept out of galaxies by processes such as star formation, galaxy interactions and supermassive black holes.

In addition, many large galaxies have smaller satellite galaxies gravitationally bound to them. A larger galaxy could, during gravitational interactions, pull gases from a smaller satellite, providing gases to fuel new star formation.

Nagata observed:

Our results show that galaxies are not isolated but constantly interact with their surroundings. The discovery of high-velocity clouds falling into M83 suggests that galaxies can grow by accreting gas from the space around them, possibly from smaller neighboring galaxies or the intergalactic medium. While high-velocity clouds are typically low-density atomic hydrogen gas, something that surprised us in this study was that the clouds were found to be compact and made of dense molecular gas, exactly the type of gas that forms new stars. This suggests that the inflowing material may be directly connected to future star formation.

What Messier 83 teaches us about our own galaxy

Astronomers have seen high-velocity clouds in the Milky Way. But because we are inside our own galaxy, these unusual clouds are hard to characterize. That’s why looking at the full disk of another spiral galaxy, such as Messier 83, helps us better understand what could be going on in our home galaxy.

Nagata’s work has just begun. There is so much more to learn about high-velocity clouds. She said:

Our next steps include investigating how these molecular high-velocity clouds formed and whether they were once atomic gas, by examining their relationship to other gas structures such as neutral atomic hydrogen. We will also explore whether these inflowing clouds could trigger new star formation when they collide with the galaxy’s disk. This would finally help answer the outstanding question we asked ourselves before.

Bottom line: Scientists discovered high-velocity gases in Messier 83 that originate from outside the galaxy, perhaps explaining how galaxies sustain star formation over billions of years.

Source: High-velocity Molecular Clouds in M83

Via University of Tokyo

An illustration of future research base on moon surface Photo: courtesy of DSEL

The Global Times learned Tuesday from the Deep Space Exploration Lab (DSEL) that prototypes of the in-situ lunar soil 3D printing system and the lunar soil water ice thermal extraction system, which are key devices to support the country’s future long-term research facilities on the surface of moon, have made new progress. 

Dubbed the “lunar soil brick-maker,” the in-situ lunar soil 3D printing system works by using concentrated solar energy to melt lunar soil at high temperatures and form bricks, Yang Honglun, a member of the development team with the DSEL, told the Global Times. 

Specifically, a parabolic reflector of the system concentrates sunlight, which is then transmitted via fiber-optic bundles to generate solar energy about 3,000 times stronger. This intense heat raises the temperature of lunar soil above 1,300 C, allowing it to melt and form bricks, according to the lab.

Such 3D printing technology enables in-situ use of lunar resources and energy, eliminating the need to transport raw materials from Earth. Using only lunar soil and solar energy, it produces bricks with high strength and excellent thermal insulation properties—suitable for building roads, equipment platforms, and research station structures on the Moon. In essence, it makes it possible to use lunar soil to construct infrastructure on moon.

Yang disclosed that at the early stages of development, the core challenge was how to achieve reliable solar energy concentration and lunar soil forming under the Moon’s extreme environmental conditions. 

To address this, the team systematically evaluated multiple technological approaches. “For instance, in terms of solar concentration, we evaluated Fresnel lenses, thin-film lenses, and reflective concentrators,” he said.  

For lunar soil forming, the team considered powder sintering, high-temperature melting, and binder-based solidification. After a series of validation experiments, the team ultimately selected the “reflective concentration – fiber-optic energy transmission plus powder bed fusion” approach. This enabled us to overcome the full chain of challenges from energy capture and transmission to printing and shaping, he said. 

According to the lab, the prototype has validated the lunar soil forming and manufacturing technology, showing it can meet the demands of large-scale construction of lunar infrastructure such as transportation roads, equipment platforms, and buildings. This provides essential support for broader, sustained lunar exploration and resource development efforts.

The prototype also verified key technologies such as lunar energy capture, material extraction, and conversion, laying a solid technical foundation for future deep space resource utilization and the construction of lunar energy systems, the lab revealed.

In addition to the in-situ lunar soil 3D printing system, the DSEL is also carrying out comprehensive technological research focused on the development and utilization of extraterrestrial resources and has already achieved several major breakthroughs, including the development of China’s first multi-needle lunar soil water ice thermal extraction system, Global Times has learned during a tour of the lab.

The lunar polar regions are believed to contain abundant water ice resources. This ice is not only a vital source of life support for future international lunar research stations – providing drinking water and oxygen – but can also be electrolyzed to produce hydrogen and oxygen fuel, providing energy for deep space exploration missions. This would greatly reduce the cost and risk of transporting supplies from Earth.

However, the lunar surface is an extreme environment, characterized by high vacuum and extremely low temperatures, vastly different from Earth. As such, extracting usable water from lunar soil poses a major technical challenge for the future.

To tackle this, DSEL, together with Harbin Institute of Technology and other institutions, developed a device capable of extracting water from lunar soil.

The system can overcome key challenges such as the difficulty of excavating high-strength ice-bearing lunar soil, collecting water vapor in a vacuum, and achieving efficient water ice extraction, according to DSEL.

The system uses multiple slender helical drill needles to bore directly into simulated ice-rich lunar soil, where heat generates water vapor. The vapor is directed through flow channels into a low-temperature condenser, where it is solidified into ice for collection, the lab explained. 

The system’s water ice extraction efficiency and other key performance indicators have reached internationally advanced levels, the lab said. 

In Earth’s history there have been numerous catastrophic episodes that have altered the course of life on the planet, wiping out many species and paving the way for the rise of others says Sheena Harvey.

However, none were as great as the events of around 250 million years ago, when 81 per cent of marine species and 70 per cent of vertebrate terrestrial animals went extinct, as well as the greatest known number of insect species and a huge number of plants.

What was the Great Dying and what caused it?

It’s hardly surprising that this momentous event has become known as The Great Dying.

The cause of the mass extinction is thought by scientists to have been a massive increase in volcanic activity in present day Siberia. The eruptions created a vast lava plain known as the Siberian Traps, set fire to oil and coal deposits and created dangerous emissions of methane gas.

The resulting combination of atmospheric CO2, sulphur dioxide and methane destroyed much of the ozone layer, let in solar radiation and acidified the oceans to such as extent that the entire globe was affected. The Earth heated up for five million years and life died on an unprecedented scale.

The enormous level of lives lost has been established through the study of layers of sediment where the fossils of creatures have been identified and counted. For example, in a study of two sedimentary zones in south China it was found that 286 of the 329 marine animals present in the first zone had disappeared by the time the second zone had been laid down. 

The volcanic trigger for this mass extinction has been established by many different researchers through further studies of the fossil record but a question has always remained – why was the warming of the planet so prolonged on that occasion? Previous and later instances of global warming in the history of Earth did not last nearly as long as five million years.

Could the Great Dying happen again?

Now, a new paper – Early Triassic Super-greenhouse Climate Driven by Vegetation Collapse – published in the journal Nature Communications, puts forward a compelling theory linked to the demise of the tropical forests that was caused by the volcanic activity.

It is well known that plants remove and trap much of the atmosphere’s carbon dioxide, keeping the levels in the air appropriate to a gaseous mixture that will sustain life. The loss of plant cover in The Great Dying, argues the paper, made the bad atmospheric situation much worse. It was insufficient carbon capture that sounded the final death knell for a large proportion of organisms.

Lead author, Dr Zhen Xu, from the School of Earth and Environment at the University of Leeds, says: “Critically, this is the only high temperature event in Earth’s history in which the tropical forest biosphere collapses, which drove our initial hypothesis. Now, after years of fieldwork, analysis and simulations, we finally have the data which supports it.”

If we were only considering the events of 250 million years ago this study would possibly just be an interesting addition to our knowledge of the evolution of the planet. But the paper’s authors believe there is a valuable lesson to be drawn from the further evidence they have uncovered of the causes of mass extinction. Our present-day loss of tropical rainforests will potentially contribute even more than previously thought to a long-term damaging rise in Earth’s temperatures. 

Scientists believe that we are approaching a tipping point, borne out by Earth’s previous experiences, beyond which the over-heating of the planet and the death of countless species will become inevitable. In other words, without a serious focus on preventing further large losses of the world’s all-important forests, we could be facing a second Great Dying.

In the paper’s conclusion the warning is given: “We believe this case study indicates that beyond a certain global temperature, vegetation die-back will occur, and can result in further warming through removal of vegetation carbon sinks. Our study demonstrates that thresholds exist in the Earth system that can accelerate climate change and have the potential to maintain adverse climate states for millions of years, with dramatic implications for global ecosystem behavior.”

“People have been long interested in how insect flight muscles work, as these muscles power the most efficient flight systems in nature,” says Dr Charlie Woodrow, a post-doctoral researcher at Uppsala University. “However, many do not know that bees use these muscles for functions other than flight.”

These important non-flight muscle vibrations are used in communication, defense and buzz-pollination. “Buzz pollination is an incredible behavior whereby a bee will curl its body around the pollen-concealing anthers of some flowers, and contract the flight muscles up to 400 times per second to produce vibrations which shake the pollen loose,” says Dr Woodrow.

“We want to understand how variation in these vibrations affects pollen release, to understand plant reproduction and pollinator behavior,” says Dr Woodrow. “This inspired us to research how non-flight buzzes differ within and between species, and the drivers affecting these buzzes.”

Dr Woodrow’s experiments were carried out using colonies of buff-tailed bumblebees (Bombus terrestris), a common European species that are well studied. Using accelerometers, Dr Woodrow and his team were able to measure the frequency of the buzz, which corresponds to the audible pitch. “They are super easy to use in the field,” he says. “We press these against the thorax of the bee, or against the flower the bee is visiting, and we can record the vibrations the bee produces.”

Dr Woodrow and his team also coupled the accelerometry with thermal imaging, which shows them how bees deal with the extra heat that they generate when buzzing. “We have also been using high-speed filming to uncover never before seen behaviors,” says Dr Woodrow. “For example, we recently discovered that bees don’t just vibrate on flowers, but they periodically transmit these vibrations to flowers by biting.”

“We have recently found that temperature plays a vital role, much more than was previously appreciated, and this work is currently in review for publication,” says Dr Woodrow. “This has many implications for how we study buzz-pollination, as temperature is not really something that has been considered up to this point.”

As well as increased temperatures, exposure to heavy metals was also shown to reduce the contraction frequencies of the flight muscles during non-flight buzzing, which Dr Woodrow is working on in collaboration with Dr Sarah Scott at Newcastle University, UK. However, the researchers were surprised to find no differences in the effect of temperature on buzzing when the experiments were reproduced in the Arctic compared to those further south, suggesting underlying muscle physiology, rather than local adaptation, may be responsible for determining the properties of a bee’s buzz.

The benefits of understanding the impact of environmental change on a bee’s buzz include unique insights into bee ecology and behavior, helping to identify the species or regions most at risk, and the improvement of AI-based species detection based on sound recordings. “Perhaps buzzes could even be used as a marker of stress or environmental change,” says Dr Woodrow. “For example, we now know that certain environmental pollutants can affect the buzzes bees produce, so they could even serve as an indicator of ecosystem health.”

“It is important we understand how these changes will affect non-flight buzzes because they are responsible for so many aspects of a bee’s ecology,” says Dr Woodrow. “If these vibrations are disrupted, this could lead to poor communication in the colony, inefficient thermoregulation, or poor resource acquisition for their offspring.”

Perhaps most concerningly for humans and wildlife alike, a reduction in buzz-pollination could have potentially serious consequences for plant reproduction and biodiversity. “For example, buzz-pollination is energetically expensive and causes the bee to generate metabolic heat – therefore if the environment gets too warm, it may simply choose to avoid buzz-pollinated flowers,” says Dr Woodrow.

As well as furthering our understanding of how environmental change may be affecting bee buzzes, there are also applications for robotics and the future safeguarding of pollination services. “We are working towards understanding bee vibrations through micro-robotics, so our results are also going towards developing micro-robots to understand pollen release,” says Dr Woodrow.

This research is being presented at the Society for Experimental Biology Annual Conference in Antwerp, Belgium on July 8th 2025.