Category: 7. Science

A four-legged robot tested under simulated Martian gravity jumps from wall to wall in a new video, demonstrating how future explorers could navigate terrain too challenging for today’s rovers.

Designed for use in low-gravity environments like on the moon and Mars, the four-legged robot, named Olympus, uses “double” limbs with jointed knees and paw-like feet for agile movement. At the European Space Agency’s (ESA) Orbital Robotics Interactive Test (ORBIT) facility in the Netherlands, the robot recently showcased its ability to stabilize, jump and reorient itself under simulated microgravity conditions.

In reduced gravity, like that of Mars, which is about 38% of Earth’s, the robot’s jumping ability could be a powerful advantage, enabling it to vault over obstacles that would stop traditional wheeled rovers in their tracks. Robots like Olympus could also access underground features such as lava tubes or caverns, which are too risky for drones or flying probes to explore, Jørgen Anker Olsen, who developed and built the robot, explained in a statement from ESA.

During the tests, Olympus was mounted upside-down on one of ORBIT’s floating platforms, which glides on a thin cushion of air across an ultra-flat floor without any friction, reproducing a state of weightless free-floating in two dimensions, similar to how pucks float on an air hockey table. This allowed the team to test the robot’s full range of leg motion.

If you happened upon this bizarre creature in the ocean, you could be forgiven for thinking someone had flung a chicken carcass into the sea and it was bobbing along on the current — hence its nickname, “the headless chicken monster.”

But this strange creature is actually a sea cucumber that lives deep beneath the surface, generally below 1,600 feet (500 meters) and down to the seafloor.

Sharing a message on Instagram, Hanks wrote: “There are people who dare, who dream and who lead others to the places we would not go on our own. Jim Lovell, who for a long while had gone farther into space and for longer than any other person of our planet, was that kind of guy.”

He added: “His many voyages around Earth and on to so-very-close to the moon were not made for riches or celebrity, but because such challenges as those are what fuels the course of being alive – and who better than Jim Lovell to make those voyages.”

Hanks ended the message by saying:”On this night of a full moon, he passes on – to the heavens, to the cosmos, to the stars. Godspeed you, on this next voyage, Jim Lovell.”

Apollo 13 was set to be NASA’s third moon landing. Instead, the mission was aborted due to an oxygen tank explosion onboard the spacecraft.

Lovell (who famously delivered the line, “Houston, we have a problem”) and his crew, Jack Swigert and Fred Haise, worked with NASA’s mission control to return safely to Earth.

In a statement sharing the news of his death, Lovell’s family said: “We will miss his unshakeable optimism, his sense of humor, and the way he made each of us feel we could do the impossible. He was truly one of a kind.”

The Apollo 13 movie was directed by Ron Howard and starred Hanks alongside Kevin Bacon, Bill Paxton, Gary Sinise, Ed Harris and Kathleen Quinlan. It was nominated for nine Academy Awards and won for for Best Film Editing and Best Sound.

Howard has shared his own statement, which reads: “Rest in peace, Commander Lovell. Navy test pilot, Gemini 7, Gemini 12, Apollo 8 and, of course, Apollo 13.

“Simply knowing Jim has been a tremendous honor. His combination of intellect, courage and commitment to duty made him one of the most remarkable individuals I’ve ever met.

“His support of our movie-making efforts inspired authenticity and elevated our process in so many ways. Thank you, sir, for your service to our country and to humankind.”

NASA has announced the probable discovery of a giant planet orbiting Alpha Centauri A, one of the closest stars to the solar system. If confirmed, it would be the nearest planet ever detected around a sun-like star. Although it’s in the habitable zone of the star, it’s a gas giant, so it would not support life as we know it.

Astronomers using the James Webb Space Telescope found a planet while observing Alpha Centauri, a system of three stars orbiting each other — binary stars Alpha Centauri A and B, along with the red dwarf star Proxima Centauri. They’re just four light-years from the solar system.

Breakthrough Discovery

It’s been known for some time that three planets are orbiting Proxima Centauri, but planets around Alpha Centauri A — a star much like the sun — have until now proved elusive.

The breakthrough came when astronomers used a coronagraph — a disk to block the bright starlight — from Alpha Centauri A, revealing a faint object around it. Around 10,000 times dimmer than the star, the planet is about twice as far from its star as Earth is from the sun. The evidence was published across two papers in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

Possible Saturn-Mass World

Based on brightness and simulations, researchers believe the object could be a gas giant about the mass of Saturn — though additional observations will be needed to confirm the planet’s existence. The discovery at Alpha Centauri A — the third brightest star in the night sky — could be a massive breakthrough for planetary scientists wanting to learn more about exoplanets (planets orbiting stars other than the sun).

“With this system being so close to us, any exoplanets found would offer our best opportunity to collect data on planetary systems other than our own,” said Charles Beichman, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the NASA Exoplanet Science Institute at Caltech’s IPAC astronomy center, co-first author on the new papers. “Yet, these are incredibly challenging observations to make, even with the world’s most powerful space telescope, because these stars are so bright, close, and move across the sky quickly.”

Disappearing Planet?

However, it’s not entirely clear that this planet exists at all. First sighted in 2019 by the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope, astronomers spotted it in August 2024, using the coronagraph in Webb’s MIRI instrument. However, light from Alpha Centauri B made it a difficult observation. Attempts to confirm the planet’s existence in February 2025 and April 2025 did not succeed.

Researchers were not surprised, having modelled where the planet ought to be on its elliptical orbit. “We found that in half of the possible orbits simulated, the planet moved too close to the star and wouldn’t have been visible to Webb in both February and April 2025,” said Ph.D. student Aniket Sanghi of Caltech in Pasadena, California, the co-first author on the two papers covering the team’s research. “Its very existence in a system of two closely separated stars would challenge our understanding of how planets form, survive, and evolve in chaotic environments.”

It’s hoped that NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, set to launch as soon as 2026, could complement Webb’s infrared data with visible-light observations, helping confirm the planet and figure out its size and composition. Either way, Alpha Centauri A’s gas giant will be a prime target for the next generation of astronomers and telescopes.

Wishing you clear skies and wide eyes.

G Caspari and M Vavulin

Daniel Riday

A maze of books 

This is one of the world’s largest private book collections, known as Anke Gowda Jnana Prathistana, or “Knowledge Shrine”, in the village of Kennalu, near Mysore, in the southern Indian state of Karnataka. It’s thought to be home to more than 1.5 million books. They’re written in 22 Indian languages, as well as foreign languages. Its founder is 76-year-old Anke Gowda, a former bus ticket collector and sugar factory worker with no formal training in library science. Photojournalist Abhishek Chinnapa recently visited the collection, and found the experience moving. “There is joy in discovering long-sought titles tucked away among the dusty shelves or stumbling upon a rare first edition from the 1800s.” However, there is a sadness there too. “The library, still a labyrinth of knowledge and curiosity, has begun to bear the weight of time.”

Getty Images

A Nasa-SpaceX launch to the ISS

Members of Nasa’s SpaceX Crew-11 crew prepared for their journey to space from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, US, on 31 July. The Falcon 9 rocket blasted off on 1 August and the crew arrived safely at the International Space Station a day later. Watch the rocket leaving its launchpad.

Have you ever felt so stressed that you just sort of froze? It’s a strange sensation. Your body goes still, you feel kind of numb but, at the same time, your senses are working overtime. You know you have to act soon, but it’s as if there’s a brake on the system.

If you know the feeling, there’s a good chance that a moment of great stress triggered it.

Psychological freezing is an adaptive defence response to stressful or dangerous situations. Like our fight-or-flight response, it evolved in animals as part of the automatic reaction our nervous system mounts when we experience either real or imagined threats.

When we freeze, our heart rate drops, our breathing slows and our blood pressure changes. Our pupils might dilate and our muscles can tense. A cascade of hormones and neurotransmitters surge through our bodies to prime us for action. It can all happen within seconds.

The freeze response can be useful

While fight-or-flight makes a certain amount of sense – to fight off an enemy or leg it from a predator – the freeze response seems a little counterproductive.

It appears to momentarily overwhelm a person, making them incapable of acting or making a decision. In extreme cases, it may prevent them from moving at all.

But is that really all that’s going on? Not according to Prof Karin Roelofs, a neuroscientist and clinical psychologist who studies freezing at Radboud University in the Netherlands.

“Many people think that freezing is a kind of shutdown of the system. Something happens and all of a sudden you’re freezing and can’t move,” she says.

“What we actually find is when you’re in a threatening situation and you have to make rapid decisions, you’re actually gaining more information. You’re preparing your actions, you’re better in perception and you’re better in decision making.”

In other words, freezing is something like an emergency flow state. It puts you ‘in the zone’ – you’re alert, but not panicking.

The parasympathetic nervous system kicks into action and gives you a degree of calm when you need it the most. “It’s a very beneficial state,” Roelofs says.

Read more:

We can learn to use the freeze state

What’s really intriguing is that Roelofs believes this system can be trained and even induced in a person. It can be a tool to pre-emptively deal with stress or to improve performance in a range of different scenarios.

She offers two very different examples of people who are able to control the freeze response to their advantage.

One is living statues, those street performers you see in tourist hotspots who are able to stay almost unnaturally still. The other? Snipers.

Military marksmen also stay incredibly still, while simultaneously making critical decisions about accuracy and when to take a shot in a life-or-death situation.

It’s something Roelofs has replicated in the lab and her work has also been integrated into training for the Dutch police.

She created a virtual reality shooting game where players “have to make decisions on a threat and we force them to keep their heart rate in a certain area.”

Roelofs says: “We found that the stronger the magnitude of the freezing [based on measurements of players’ heart rates], the better they were at the game and the faster they were in their decisions.”

How the freeze state can improve our reactions

It’s tempting to think that if you freeze in a stressful situation, your response will be slower. The opposite is true because the freeze provides a moment of clarity, Roelofs says.

“There is less noise in our brain. And we have increased perception. What we showed is that you’re actually making better decisions faster, and you have a sharper view of the potential costs and benefits of your actions.”

But let’s say you’re not a sniper, or don’t spend your weekends as a living statue. What if you’re about to take an exam or lead a big business meeting? What if you’re an athlete needing a big performance?

Those situations may not be life or death, but Roelofs has shown that the freeze response can still help, because it’s not only triggered by physical threat, but in social situations as well.

Her research found that even an angry face can cause a freeze response. Exploit that response – learn to train and maintain it, Roelofs says.

“The maintenance of this state is something we can train via breathing,” she says. “Do the opposite of hyperventilating. Have a strong focus on a very slow exhalation.

“If we can stay in the same rhythm, we keep the heart rate low, increase parasympathetic activity and have less noise in the brain.”

Instead of feeling out of control, you can master it and – sniper or not – take your best shot.

About our expert

Prof Karin Roelofs is a neuroscientist and clinical psychologist who studies freezing at Radboud University, in the Netherlands, where she is a professor of clinical psychology. She has been published in a number of scientific journals including Nature Communication, Nature Human Behaviour and Nature Reviews Neuroscience.

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What’s the story

Chinese scientists have successfully recreated the elusive “meteorite diamond” in a laboratory setting, ending a six-decade-long debate about its existence.
The first hexagonal-shaped diamond was discovered in 1967 within the Canyon Diablo meteorite that struck Arizona 49,000 years ago.
It was believed to have formed from graphite under extreme heat and pressure during its collision with Earth.

Astronomers using the Hubble Space Telescope have observed 3I/ATLAS, only the third known object from outside our Solar System to visit our neighbourhood. This interstellar interloper is putting on quite a show as it approaches the Sun, revealing secrets about visitors from the depths of space.

3I/ATLAS is clearly active at 3.8 astronomical units as it approaches the Sun, showing dust emitted from the hot Sun facing side of the nucleus and a weak, radiation pressure swept tail away from the Sun. To put this in perspective, 3.8 astronomical units means the object is nearly four times farther from the Sun than Earth is. Even at this great distance, the Sun’s energy is already causing dramatic changes to this mysterious visitor.

3I/ATLAS was discovered in a starry region of the sky. The discovery image by ATLAS is shown in the inset image, which is a zoomed in view of the location where 3I/ATLAS was discovered (red box) (Credit : ATLAS/University of Hawaii/NASA)

Unlike asteroids, which remain largely unchanged as they orbit, 3I/ATLAS is behaving more like a comet. As solar radiation heats its surface, the object is releasing streams of dust particles that form a distinctive tail pointing away from the Sun. This activity provides astronomers with a rare opportunity to study material that originated in another star system entirely.

Comets in our Solar System are a familiar sight. An image of comet C/1995 O1 (Hale-Bopp), taken on April 04, 1997 with a 225mm f/2.0 Schmidt Camera (focal length 450mm) on Kodak Panther 400 color slide film with an exposure time of 10 minutes; the field shown is about 6.5°x6.5°; at full resolution, the stars in the image appear slightly elongated, as the camera tracked the comet during the exposure (Credit : E. Kolmhofer, H. Raab; Johannes-Kepler-Observatory)

Using Hubble’s exceptional resolution, the researchers led by David Jewitt from UCLA, were able to estimate how much material 3I/ATLAS is losing as it heats up. They calculated the mass loss rate in dust as 6 to 60 kg/s, depending on the size of the dust particles being ejected. That’s roughly equivalent to losing the mass of a small car every few minutes, a significant amount for such a distant, small object.

The team also worked to determine the size of 3I/ATLAS itself, though this proved challenging since they can only see the glowing cloud of dust surrounding it, not the solid nucleus directly. By analyzing the brightness distribution of the surrounding coma, they estimated the nucleus has an effective radius of less than 2.8 kilometers, assuming it reflects only 4% of the light that hits it (similar to charcoal).

The Hubble Space Telescope as seen from the departing Space Shuttle Atlantis, flying STS-125, HST Servicing Mission 4 (Credit : NASA)

One of the most intriguing aspects of studying interstellar objects is understanding what they’re made of and where they came from. The researchers found that if the activity is driven by carbon monoxide sublimation (turning from solid to gas), the nucleus cannot be smaller than 0.16 km in radius, and must be larger if less volatile molecules are responsible for the outgassing.

This size constraint is crucial because it helps us understand the object’s composition and history. Different materials require different amounts of solar heating to begin sublimating, so by observing when and how vigorously 3I/ATLAS becomes active, it’s possible to make educated guesses about what it’s made of.

Interstellar visitors like 3I/ATLAS are extraordinarily rare. Before this object, only two others have been confirmed; ‘Oumuamua in 2017 and Borisov in 2019. Each provides a unique window into planetary systems around other stars, carrying with them the chemical signatures and physical characteristics shaped by alien environments billions of kilometres away.

These Hubble observations of 3I/ATLAS represent a significant step forward in our ability to study these cosmic messengers, offering insights into both the object itself and the distant stellar system that sent it on its journey through the Galaxy.

Source : Hubble Space Telescope Observations of the Interstellar Interloper 3I/ATLAS

Researchers identified 32 anthocyanin synthase (ANS) genes in the water lily species Nymphaea colorata and analyzed their structure, evolutionary history, and expression patterns. The study found that certain ANS genes were highly expressed in blue and red petals, while showing low activity in white flowers, directly linking gene expression with pigment production.

Anthocyanins, water-soluble pigments in the flavonoid family, give rise to the vivid red, purple, and blue hues in many plants. These pigments serve ecological functions such as attracting pollinators and protecting against environmental stress. Nymphaea (water lilies) are ancient flowering plants that exhibit a striking diversity of petal colors, making them ideal models for color evolution and genetic studies. Previous research has highlighted anthocyanins’ central role in floral coloration, but the specific regulatory genes responsible in N. colorata remain underexplored. Due to these knowledge gaps, a detailed investigation of the ANS gene family in this species is essential for understanding the molecular basis of flower color variation.

A study (DOI: 10.48130/tp-0025-0006) published in Tropical Plants on 24 March 2025 by Yang Bai & Fei Chen’s team, Hainan University, not only deepens our understanding of flower coloration in aquatic plants but also provides a foundation for targeted breeding of ornamental plants with customized petal hues.

To investigate the genetic underpinnings of flower color variation in Nymphaea colorata, researchers conducted a comprehensive analysis of the ANS gene family using genomic, phylogenetic, structural, and expression profiling methods. Initially, 32 NcANS genes were identified from the N. colorata genome and characterized based on their chromosomal positions and physicochemical features. These genes exhibited considerable variation in protein length, molecular weight, isoelectric points, and stability, with most predicted to be hydrophilic and functionally unstable—indicating diverse roles in cellular processes. Phylogenetic analysis incorporating ANS genes from six other plant species grouped the NcANS genes into seven subfamilies, highlighting both conserved and lineage-specific evolution. Motif and domain analyses revealed shared structural features such as the 2OG-FE(II)-dependent oxygenase and Diox domains, essential for anthocyanin biosynthesis. Promoter analysis uncovered a wide range of regulatory elements, including light- and hormone-responsive motifs, suggesting external stimuli may influence gene activity. Synteny and collinearity assessments revealed five syntenic gene pairs within N. colorata and multiple homologous genes shared with other dicotyledonous species, implying evolutionary conservation. Selection pressure analysis confirmed that the NcANS gene family has undergone purifying selection. Finally, transcriptome data and qPCR validation showed that several NcANS genes—including NcANS15, NcANS16, and NcANS19—were highly expressed in red and blue petals but nearly silent in white flowers. This expression pattern corresponded with measured anthocyanin content and underscores the critical role of specific NcANS genes in determining petal pigmentation. These findings collectively reveal that flower color in N. colorata is genetically regulated through a complex and evolutionarily conserved network of ANS genes, providing a foundational resource for future studies in molecular breeding and floral trait manipulation.

These findings provide critical groundwork for developing genetically customized water lily varieties with enhanced color traits through molecular breeding. The study also opens avenues for exploring how environmental cues like light and temperature influence pigment biosynthesis via hormonal and promoter-level regulation. Moreover, dynamic expression profiling across floral development stages will help elucidate temporal gene regulation patterns. Understanding ANS gene networks could ultimately contribute to broader applications in horticulture, agriculture, and ecological adaptation studies.

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References

DOI

10.48130/tp-0025-0006

Original Source URL

https://doi.org/10.48130/tp-0025-0006

Funding information

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (32172614), and Hainan Provincial Natural Science Foundation of China (324RC452).

About Tropical Plants

Tropical Plants (e-ISSN 2833-9851) is the official journal of Hainan University and published by Maximum Academic Press. Tropical Plants undergoes rigorous peer review and is published in open-access format to enable swift dissemination of research findings, facilitate exchange of academic knowledge and encourage academic discourse on innovative technologies and issues emerging in tropical plant research.