Category: 7. Science

The inside of Mars isn’t smooth and uniform like familiar textbook illustrations. Instead, new research reveals it’s chunky — more like a Rocky Road brownie than a neat slice of Millionaire’s Shortbread.

We often picture rocky planets like Earth and Mars as having smooth, layered interiors — with crust, mantle, and core stacked like the biscuit base, caramel middle, and chocolate topping of a millionaire’s shortbread. But the reality for Mars is rather less tidy.

Seismic vibrations detected by NASA’s InSight mission revealed subtle anomalies, which led scientists from Imperial College London and other institutions to uncover a messier reality: Mars’s mantle contains ancient fragments up to 4km wide from its formation — preserved like geological fossils from the planet’s violent early history.

History of gigantic impacts

Mars and the other rocky planets formed about 4.5 billion years ago, as dust and rock orbiting the young Sun gradually clumped together under gravity.

Once Mars had largely taken shape, it was struck by giant, planet-sized objects in a series of near-cataclysmic collisions — the kind that also likely formed Earth’s Moon.

“These colossal impacts unleashed enough energy to melt large parts of the young planet into vast magma oceans,” said lead researcher Dr Constantinos Charalambous from the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering at Imperial College London. “As those magma oceans cooled and crystallised, they left behind compositionally distinct chunks of material — and we believe it’s these we’re now detecting deep inside Mars.”

These early impacts and their aftermath scattered and mixed fragments of the planet’s early crust and mantle — and possibly debris from the impacting objects themselves — into the molten interior. As Mars slowly cooled, these chemically diverse chunks were trapped in a sluggishly churning mantle, like ingredients folded into a Rocky Road brownie mix, and the mixing was too weak to fully smooth things out.

Unlike Earth, where plate tectonics continuously recycle the crust and mantle, Mars sealed up early beneath a stagnant outer crust, preserving its interior as a geological time capsule.

“Most of this chaos likely unfolded in Mars’s first 100 million years,” says Dr Charalambous. “The fact that we can still detect its traces after four and a half billion years shows just how sluggishly Mars’s interior has been churning ever since.”

Listening into Mars

The evidence comes from seismic data recorded by NASA’s InSight lander — in particular, eight especially clear marsquakes, including two triggered by two recent meteorite impacts that left 150-metre-wide craters in Mars’s surface.

InSight picks up seismic waves travelling through the mantle and the scientists could see that waves of higher frequencies took longer to reach its sensors from the impact site. These signs of interference, they say, shows that the interior is chunky rather than smooth.

“These signals showed clear signs of interference as they travelled through Mars’s deep interior,” said Dr Charalambous. “That’s consistent with a mantle full of structures of different compositional origins — leftovers from Mars’s early days.”

“What happened on Mars is that, after those early events, the surface solidified into a stagnant lid,” he explained. “It sealed off the mantle beneath, locking in those ancient chaotic features — like a planetary time capsule.”

Unlike the interior of Earth

Earth’s crust, by comparison, is always slowly shifting and recycling material from the surface into our planet’s mantle – at tectonic plates such as the Cascadia subduction zone where some of the plates forming the Pacific Ocean floor are pushed under the North American continental plate.

The chunks detected in Mars’s mantle follow a striking pattern, with a few large fragments — up to 4 km wide — surrounded by many smaller ones.

Professor Tom Pike, who worked with Dr Charalambous to unravel what caused these chunks, said: “What we are seeing is a ‘fractal’ distribution, which happens when the energy from a cataclysmic collision overwhelms the strength of an object. You see the same effect when a glass falls onto a tiled floor as when a meteorite collides with a planet: it breaks into a few big shards and a large number of smaller pieces. It’s remarkable that we can still detect this distribution today.”

The finding could have implications for our understanding of how the other rocky planets — like Venus and Mercury — evolved over billions of years. This new discovery of Mars’s preserved interior offers a rare glimpse into what might lie hidden beneath the surface of stagnant worlds.

“InSight’s data continues to reshape how we think about the formation of rocky planets, and Mars in particular,” said Dr Mark Panning of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. JPL led the InSight mission before its end in 2022. “It’s exciting to see scientists making new discoveries with the quakes we detected!”

“These mysterious objects are candidate galaxies in the early universe, meaning they could be very early galaxies,” said Haojing Yan, an astronomy professor in Mizzou’s College of Arts and Science and co-author on the study. “If even a few of these objects turn out to be what we think they are, our discovery could challenge current ideas about how galaxies formed in the early universe — the period when the first stars and galaxies began to take shape.”

But identifying objects in space doesn’t happen in an instant. It takes a careful step-by-step process to confirm their nature, combining advanced technology, detailed analysis and a bit of cosmic detective work.

Step 1: Spotting the first clues

Mizzou’s researchers started by using two of JWST’s powerful infrared cameras: the Near-Infrared Camera and the Mid-Infrared Instrument. Both are specifically designed to detect light from the most distant places in space, which is key when studying the early universe.

Why infrared? Because the farther away an object is, the longer its light has been traveling to reach us.

“As the light from these early galaxies travels through space, it stretches into longer wavelengths — shifting from visible light into infrared,” Yan said. “This stretching is called redshift, and it helps us figure out how far away these galaxies are. The higher the redshift, the farther away the galaxy is from us on Earth, and the closer it is to the beginning of the universe.”

Step 2: The ‘dropout’

To identify each of the 300 early galaxy candidates, Mizzou’s researchers used an established method called the dropout technique.

“It detects high-redshift galaxies by looking for objects that appear in redder wavelengths but vanish in bluer ones — a sign that their light has traveled across vast distances and time,” said Bangzheng “Tom” Sun, a Ph.D. student working with Yan and the lead author of the study. “This phenomenon is indicative of the ‘Lyman Break,’ a spectral feature caused by the absorption of ultraviolet light by neutral hydrogen. As redshift increases, this signature shifts to redder wavelengths.”

Step 3: Estimating the details

While the dropout technique identifies each of the galaxy candidates, the next step is to check whether they could be at “very” high redshifts, Yan said.

“Ideally this would be done using spectroscopy, a technique that spreads light across different wavelengths to identify signatures that would allow an accurate redshift determination,” he said.

But when full spectroscopic data is unavailable, researchers can use a technique called spectral energy distribution fitting. This method gave Sun and Yan a baseline to estimate the redshifts of their galaxy candidates — along with other properties such as age and mass.

In the past, scientists often thought these extremely bright objects weren’t early galaxies, but something else that mimicked them. However, based on their findings, Sun and Yan believe these objects deserve a closer look — and shouldn’t be so quickly ruled out.

“Even if only a few of these objects are confirmed to be in the early universe, they will force us to modify the existing theories of galaxy formation,” Yan said.

Step 4: The final answer

The final test will use spectroscopy — the gold standard — to confirm the team’s findings.

Spectroscopy breaks light into different wavelengths, like how a prism splits light into a rainbow of colors. Scientists use this technique to reveal a galaxy’s unique fingerprint, which can tell them how old the galaxy is, how it formed and what it’s made of.

“One of our objects is already confirmed by spectroscopy to be an early galaxy,” Sun said. “But this object alone is not enough. We will need to make additional confirmations to say for certain whether current theories are being challenged.”

The study, “On the very bright dropouts selected using the James Webb Space Telescope NIRCam instrument,” was published in The Astrophysical Journal.

“Unlike most nearby planet-forming disks, where water vapor dominates the inner regions, this disk is surprisingly rich in carbon dioxide,” says Jenny Frediani, PhD student at the Department of Astronomy, Stockholm University.

“In fact, water is so scarce in this system that it’s barely detectable — a dramatic contrast to what we typically observe.”

A newly formed star is initially deeply embedded in the gas cloud from which it was formed and creates a disk around itself where planets in turn can be formed. In conventional models of planet formation, pebbles rich in water ice drift from the cold outer disk toward the warmer inner regions, where the rising temperatures cause the ices to sublimate. This process usually results in strong water vapor signatures in the disk’s inner zones. However, in this case, the JWST/MIRI spectrum shows a puzzlingly strong carbon dioxide signature instead.

“This challenges current models of disk chemistry and evolution since the high carbon dioxide levels relative to water cannot be easily explained by standard disk evolution processes,” Jenny Frediani explains.

Arjan Bik, researcher at the Department of Astronomy, Stockholm University, adds, “Such a high abundance of carbon dioxide in the planet-forming zone is unexpected. It points to the possibility that intense ultraviolet radiation — either from the host star or neighbouring massive stars — is reshaping the chemistry of the disk.”

The researchers also detected rare isotopic variants of carbon dioxide, enriched in either carbon-13 or the oxygen isotopes ¹⁷O and ¹⁸O, clearly visible in the JWST data. These isotopologues could offer vital clues to long-standing questions about the unusual isotopic fingerprints found in meteorites and comets — relics of our own Solar System’s formation.

This CO2-rich disk was found in the massive star-forming region NGC 6357, located approximately 1.7 kiloparsecs (about 53 quadrillion kilometers) away. The discovery was made by the eXtreme Ultraviolet Environments (XUE) collaboration, which focuses on how intense radiation fields impact disk chemistry.

Maria-Claudia Ramirez-Tannus from the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Heidelberg and lead of the XUE collaboration says that it is an exciting discovery: “It reveals how extreme radiation environments — common in massive star-forming regions — can alter the building blocks of planets. Since most stars and likely most planets form in such regions, understanding these effects is essential for grasping the diversity of planetary atmospheres and their habitability potential.”

Thanks to JWST’s MIRI instrument, astronomers can now observe distant, dust-enshrouded disks with unprecedented detail at infrared wavelengths — providing critical insights into the physical and chemical conditions that govern planet formation. By comparing these intense environments with quieter, more isolated regions, researchers are uncovering the environmental diversity that shapes emerging planetary systems. Astronomers at Stockholm University and Chalmers have helped develop the MIRI instrument which is a camera and a spectrograph that observes mid- to long-wavelength infrared radiation from 5 microns to 28 microns. It also has coronagraphs, specifically designed to observe exoplanets.

The study “XUE: The CO2-rich terrestrial planet-forming region of an externally irradiated Herbig disk” is published in Astronomy & Astrophysics.

Rogue waves are not anomalies but the result of normal ocean dynamics. New data reveals they can be predicted.

On January 1, 1995, an enormous 80-foot wave struck the Draupner oil platform in the North Sea. The force of the wave bent steel railings and hurled heavy equipment across the deck, but its most significant effect was the evidence it provided. For the first time, scientists were able to record a rogue wave in the open ocean with precise measurements.

“It confirmed what seafarers had described for centuries,” said Francesco Fedele, associate professor Georgia Tech’s School of Civil and Environmental Engineering. “They always talked about these waves that appear suddenly and are very large — but for a long time, we thought this was just a myth.”

Rethinking Rogues

That single measured wave moved rogue waves out of the realm of myth and into science, sparking decades of debate about their origins.

Francesco Fedele, who had long questioned standard theories, led an international research team to explore how these massive waves truly form. Their study, published in Nature’s Scientific Reports, highlighted the importance of their conclusions. The group examined 27,500 wave records spanning 18 years in the North Sea, creating the most extensive dataset ever assembled on the subject.

Each record documented 30 minutes of detailed information, including wave height, frequency, and direction. The results overturned long-standing ideas, showing that rogue waves do not require unusual or “exotic” mechanisms to emerge—only the precise alignment of well-known ocean processes.

Fedele explained, “Rogue waves follow the natural orders of the ocean — not exceptions to them. This is the most definitive, real-world evidence to date.”

Extraordinary Waves, Ordinary Physics

The dominant theory about rogue wave formation has been a phenomenon called modulational instability, a process where small changes in timing and spacing between waves cause energy to concentrate into a single wave. Instead of staying evenly distributed, the wave pattern shifts, causing one wave to suddenly grow much larger than the rest.

Fedele pointed out that modulational instability “is mainly accurate when the waves are confined within channels, like in lab experiments, where energy can only flow in one direction. In the open ocean, though, energy can spread in multiple directions.”

A Deep Dive Into the Data

When Fedele and his colleagues examined the North Sea records, they found no indication that modulational instability played a role in rogue waves. Instead, they concluded that the largest waves arise from the interaction of two well-understood processes:

1. Linear focusing — this occurs when waves moving at different speeds and directions meet at the same point in time and space, combining to create a crest much higher than normal.
2. Second-order bound nonlinearities — natural effects that alter the shape of a wave, sharpening and raising the crest while flattening the trough. This distortion can amplify the height of large waves by 15–20%.

Fedele noted that when these two mechanisms coincide, they generate especially powerful waves. The inherently nonlinear character of ocean motion adds another layer of amplification, driving the waves to grow even larger.

From Failure to Forecast

Fedele stressed that this research has real-world urgency. Rogue waves aren’t just theoretical, they are real, powerful, and a danger to ships and offshore structures. Fedele said many forecasting models still treat rogue waves as unpredictable flukes. “They’re extreme, but they’re explainable,” he said.

Updating those models, he added, is critical. “It’s fundamental for the safety of ship navigation, coastal structures, and oil platforms,” Fedele explained. “They have to be designed to endure these extreme events.”

Fedele’s research is already informing how others think about ocean risk. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and energy company Chevron use his models to forecast when and where rogue waves are most likely to strike.

Fedele is now using machine learning to comb through decades of wave data, training algorithms to detect the subtle combinations — height, direction, timing — that precede extreme waves. The goal is to give forecasters more accurate tools that predict when a rogue wave could strike.

The lesson from this study is simple: Rogue waves aren’t exceptions to the rules — they’re the result of them. Nature doesn’t need to break its own laws to surprise us. It just needs time, and a rare moment where everything lines up just wrong.

Although ocean waves may seem random, extreme waves like rogues follow a natural recognizable pattern. Each rogue wave carries a kind of “fingerprint” — a structured wave group before and after the peak that reveals how it formed.

“Rogue waves are, simply, a bad day at sea,” Fedele said. “They are extreme events, but they’re part of the ocean’s language. We’re just finally learning how to listen.”

Reference: “Effects of bound-wave asymmetry on North Sea rogue waves” by Sagi Knobler, Mika P. Malila, M. Aziz Tayfun, Dan Liberzon and Francesco Fedele, 1 July 2025, Scientific Reports.
DOI: 10.1038/s41598-025-07156-6

Never miss a breakthrough: Join the SciTechDaily newsletter.

We’re in a new moon phase tonight, meaning the moon is around half lit up.

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, Aug. 31.

What is today’s moon phase?

As of Sunday, Aug. 31, the moon phase is First Quarter, and 53% will be lit up to us on Earth, according to NASA’s Daily Moon Observation.

There’s a lot to see when you look up at the moon tonight. With no visual aids, you’ll see the Mare Serenitatis, the Mare Fecunditatis, and the Mare Tranquillitatis. With binoculars, you’ll also get a glimpse of the Endymion Crater, the Archimedes Crater, and the Apennine Mountains. If you have a telescope too, you’ll also spot the Apollo 15, Apollo 17, and the Rupes Altai.

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.

(Web Desk) – A Bizarre horned skull fused to a cave wall has left scientists baffled for over 60 years – but they may finally have some answers.

The eerie “Petralona Man” remains were found hidden in a Greek cave way back in 1960 to the surprise of archaeologists.

Although it appeared to be some form of human, experts have been long puzzled about the exact type of primate it is.

The skull is missing a jaw and had a unicorn-like horn on its forehead that made it all the more baffling.

They also couldn’t pinpoint how old it is, but widely speculated it was anywhere between 170,000 to 700,000 years old.

Now, scientists from the Institut de Paléontologie Humaine in France believe they’ve solved those two long-standing mysteries after carrying out fresh research.

Upon studying the minerals on and around the head, they believe it’s about 300,000 years old.

It’s thought Calcite – a mineral found in caves – protruding from the skull is at least 277,000 years-old.

But they’re still not 100 per cent sure how long the skull was in the cave before the horn started to form and admit it could be longer.

As for the what it is, well, it’s not a neanderthal.

Instead it’s part of a much rarer group, broadly known as Homo heidelbergensis.

This group lived in the Middle Pleistocene in Europe (roughly 774,000 to 129,000 years ago).

The remains were uncovered by a local villager in the Petralona Cave, about 22 miles southeast of Greek city Thessaloniki.

These new findings were published in the Journal of Human Evolution. 

New research shows that human activity is even more responsible for melting Arctic glaciers than previously thought.

What’s happening?

Yoon Jin-ho, an environmental engineering professor at South Korea’s Gwangju Institute of Science and Technology, has found that aerosol particles accelerate ice melt in the Arctic Ocean.

Maeil Business Newspaper reported on Yoon’s research, which studied the effects of these fine-dust particles on ice in the Chukchi Sea, which has seen the most rapid ice decrease in the Arctic.

Previously, aerosols — tiny particles suspended in the atmosphere — were thought to only have cooling effects, as they reflect sunlight. But Yoon found that Arctic ice melted more quickly when aerosols were combined with greenhouse gases.

Aerosols have this effect, Yoon said, because they increase high pressure, which brings stronger winds and warmer water to the Arctic.

“It shows that human activities can have a significant impact on the Arctic environment even in non-direct ways,” Yoon said. “The effects of aerosols should be reflected in future climate modeling and international environmental policy establishment.”

Why is this important?

As the study noted, aerosols aren’t the only contributing factor to Arctic ice melt.

Air pollution from greenhouse gases traps heat within our atmosphere, which is making our planet warmer. In fact, the 10 hottest years in recorded history have all occurred within the past decade, and experts don’t expect that trend to reverse anytime soon.

That warming has a devastating, cyclical effect on Arctic ice, which helps keep temperatures cool by reflecting sunlight. As temperatures increase, the ice melts, which plays a role in sea levels rising globally. So when warmer temperatures cause more ice to melt, that melting ice causes temperatures to get even warmer.

All of that plays a role in daily life far away from the Arctic. Studies have shown that, as more Arctic ice melts, weather patterns get disrupted thousands of miles away, raising the risk of extreme weather like heat waves and droughts.

What’s being done about this?

Yoon hopes his research will lead to the inclusion of aerosols’ effect on melting ice within scientific modeling, which will lead to more accurate projections about what the future of weather will look like.

Even though the Arctic may be thousands of miles away, there are still actions you can take at home to help. Seemingly small actions, such as walking more often or using less plastic each day, decrease your reliance on fossil fuels and the amount of pollution we create. And the more people that take these actions, the more of a difference it will make in our planet’s future.

Join our free newsletter for good news and useful tips, and don’t miss this cool list of easy ways to help yourself while helping the planet.

A labelled diagram of the human pelvis.
| Photo Credit: Public domain

READ MORE

An international team kept solid gold intact while superheating it to 19,000 Kelvin, about 33,740 °F (18,726 °C). They measured the temperature directly, in real time, and documented the feat in a new study. The result outstrips a long assumed ceiling on how hot a solid can get before it gives way.

The team reached this state with ultra fast laser heating and then checked the atoms with precise X-ray probes.

The work also lays out a clean way to take the temperature of extremely hot, dense matter, which is something that has frustrated experimenters for decades.

What superheating gold means

Lead author Thomas G. White of the University of Nevada, Reno (UNR), led the international collaboration with colleagues at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and partner institutions.

The study focuses on superheating, which is when a solid sits above its melting point yet does not melt because the rapid conditions do not give its structure time to reorganize.

Here, the group pushed a thin gold sample far beyond its normal melting threshold in a flash.

The superheated gold remained crystalline for a brief window, long enough to record how fast the atoms were moving and therefore how hot the lattice was.

The work touches a broader frontier known as warm dense matter (WDM), which is a high energy state relevant to planetary interiors and fusion targets.

Accurate temperatures in this regime have been hard to pin down because these hot states are tiny and very short lived.

Why superheating gold matters

In 1988, Hans J. Fecht and William L. Johnson proposed an upper stability boundary called the entropy catastrophe, arguing that a solid cannot be heated much past about three times its melting temperature without melting.

The idea was that as a crystal heats, its entropy rises until it matches the liquid, which should trigger melting.

That back of the envelope limit, about three times the melting point, became the accepted stopping point in textbooks and talks.

It also aligned with the fact that most experiments ran into disordering events at lower temperatures anyway.

The new gold measurements show that ultra fast heating sidesteps those assumptions.

By outrunning processes that normally give a crystal time to expand and unravel, the team produced a much hotter solid phase without violating basic physics.

How the team pushed past the limit

The experiment used a brief pulse, only 45 femtoseconds long, to pump energy into a thin gold foil.

Immediately after this, an intense X-ray pulse captured the atomic motion through tiny shifts in the scattered X-ray frequency. This gave a direct readout of the atoms’ speeds.

Those shifts revealed the gold’s lattice temperature without relying on indirect models.

Because the heating was so swift, the lattice could not expand significantly during the measurement window, and crystalline order persisted for a few trillionths of a second.

The diagnostic hinges on inelastic X-ray scattering (IXS) which, in this fast backscattering geometry, records a clean spectral broadening linked to atomic velocities.

In short bursts, the technique treats the ion motion much like a classical gas and translates the line width into temperature.

Obeying the laws of thermodynamics

Direct temperature tracking matters because warm dense matter only exists for fleeting instants in the lab.

A reliable, model independent measurement gives planetary physicists and fusion researchers a sharper tool to test their calculations.

“It is important to clarify that we did not violate the Second Law of Thermodynamics. [But] the entropy catastrophe was still viewed as the ultimate boundary,” said White.

Outside voices have noted that ultrafast, ultrasmall conditions may not map cleanly onto everyday solids under normal pressure.

Even so, this controlled window lets researchers test long-standing assumptions about melting and stability with far less guesswork.

Heating gold for future technology

Better temperature measurements open doors for modeling planets, where WDM controls how heat moves through cores and mantles. Getting the temperature right helps set the melting curves that guide those models.

Fusion research also stands to gain. In inertial confinement experiments, laser driven targets quickly cross from solid to ultra hot states, and design choices depend on when and how those transitions occur.

There is a materials angle as well. If rapid heating can lift other solids far beyond past expectations without immediate melting, that would invite a rethink of strength, heat capacity, and failure in extreme environments.

The upshot is not that thermodynamics has been tossed out. It is that speed, and the lack of time for expansion, can keep order in place long enough to measure and learn from it.

Future work will likely try different elements, thicker targets, and varied time delays to map exactly when order fails. Each variation will test where the practical limits really lie and how general the no-longer-so- strict ceiling might be.

The full study is published in the journal Nature.

—–

Like what you read? Subscribe to our newsletter for engaging articles, exclusive content, and the latest updates. 

Check us out on EarthSnap, a free app brought to you by Eric Ralls and Earth.com.

—–