James Webb telescope finds that galaxies in the early universe were much more chaotic than we thought

When the James Webb Space Telescope examined young galaxies with its Near Infrared Camera (NIRCam), it uncovered the messy early stages 

of formation in these distant objects. (Image credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, B. Robertson (UC Santa Cruz), B. Johnson (CfA), S. Tacchella 

(Cambridge), P. Cargile (CfA))

Like cosmic toddlers, galaxies in the young universe were messy and had difficulty settling down, a new study shows.

Using the powerful James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), scientists peered at more than 250 galaxies in the early universe. The research team charted the movement of gas long ago, when the universe was growing up — between 800 million and 1.5 billion years after the Big Bang. (The cosmos is roughly 13.8 billion years old.)

Their findings, published Tuesday (Oct. 21) in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, show that galaxies were restless in their youth.     

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IBM and Moderna have simulated the longest mRNA pattern without AI

Researchers at IBM and Moderna have successfully used a quantum simulation algorithm to predict the complex secondary protein structure of a 60-nucleotide-long mRNA sequence, the longest ever simulated on a quantum computer.


Messenger ribonucleic acid (mRNA) is a molecule that carries genetic information from DNA to ribosomes. It directs protein synthesis in cells and is used to create effective vaccines capable of instigating specific immune responses.


It’s widely believed that all the information required for a protein to adopt the correct three-dimensional conformation is provided by its amino acid sequence or "folding."

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Ancient Egyptian rock art discovered near Aswan may be from the dawn of the first dynasty

The rock art panel shows a boat dragged by five figures. It has a standing figure holding an oar and the head 

and right shoulder of a seated figure inside the boat's inner structure, possibly a cabin. 

 (Image credit: Dorian Vanhulle (2025); Antiquity Publications Ltd.)

An ancient Egyptian rock engraving may have been carved at the dawn of the first dynasty, up to 5,100 years ago, a new study suggests.

The engraving depicts a boat that may have a royal figure seated in it, although only the person's head and right shoulder are visible. 

The engraving is stylistically similar to ancient Egyptian rock panels from the protodynastic period and early first dynasty — periods that aren't well known to archaeologists. 

These similarities hint that the newfound carving may hold clues about the formation of the Egyptian state, according to the study.

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Scientists discover rare planet at the edge of the Milky Way using space-time phenomenon predicted by Einstein

An artist's illustration of the Gaia space telescope, which first spotted the microlensing event in 2021.
(Image credit: ESA/ATG medialab; background: ESO/S. Brunier)

Using gravitational microlensing, scientists have discovered a rare, large planet at the edge of the Milky Way. The planet is only the third to be found on the outskirts of our galaxy's dense central bulge.  Astronomers have used a space-time phenomenon first predicted by Albert Einstein to discover a rare planet hiding at the edge of our galaxy.


The exoplanet, dubbed AT2021uey b, is a Jupiter-size gas giant located roughly 3,200 light-years from Earth. Orbiting a small, cool M dwarf star once every 4,170 days, the planet's location is remarkable — it is only the third planet in the entire history of space observation to be discovered so far away from our galaxy's dense center.

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Rhythmic mantle plume rising beneath Ethiopia is creating a new ocean

Rhythmic pulses of molten rock are rising beneath eastern Africa, according to a new study.  The pulsing plume of hot mantle beneath Ethiopia, driven by plate tectonics, is slowly pulling the region apart and forming a new ocean near the Gulf of Aden and the Red Sea, researchers reported June 25 in the journal Nature Geoscience.

"We have found that the evolution of deep mantle upwellings is intimately tied to the motion of the plates above," Derek Keir, an Earth scientist at the University of Southampton and the University of Florence, said in a statement. "This has profound implications for how we interpret surface volcanism, earthquake activity, and the process of continental breakup.

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Amazon's new warehouse robot has a 'sense of touch' that could see it replace human workers

Amazon has announced a new robot with a sense of touch, enabling it to pick up and stow around three-quarters of the items found in its warehouses.

The new robot, called Vulcan, can accurately gauge the pressure required to grab and move warehouse items based on their size, dimensions and density, according to the e-commerce giant.

"Vulcan represents a fundamental leap forward in robotics," Aaron Parness, Amazon's director of applied science, said in a statement. "It's not just seeing the world, it's feeling it, enabling capabilities that were impossible for Amazon robots until now."

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China achieves quantum supremacy

 

T

he latest iteration of Zuchongzhi includes 105 transmon qubits — devices made from metals like tantalum, niobium, and aluminum that have reduced sensitivity to noise. (Image credit: D. Gao et al.



Researchers in China have developed a quantum processing unit (QPU) that is 1 quadrillion (10¹⁵) times faster than the best supercomputers on the planet.


The new prototype 105-qubit chip, dubbed "Zuchongzhi 3.0," which uses superconducting qubits, represents a significant step forward for quantum computing, scientists at the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC) in Hefei said.


It rivals the benchmarking results set by Google's latest Willow QPU in December 2024 that allowed scientists to stake a claim for quantum supremacy — where quantum computers are more capable than the fastest supercomputers — in lab-based benchmarking.

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Why America is losing its 50-year 'war on cancer,'

The United States officially launched its "war on cancer" by signing the National Cancer Act of 1971. Broadly, the intention was to spur research into the biology of cancer to better treat — and potentially cure — the disease. 

However, the nation has now been embroiled in this "war" for over 50 years, and we are nowhere closer to victory, argues Nafis Hasan, a cancer scientist and associate faculty member at the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research.


In a new book called Metastasis: The Rise of the Cancer-Industrial Complex and the Horizons of Care (Common Notions, 2025), Hasan writes that cancer research has hyperfocused on finding treatments for individuals at the expense of driving down cancer rates overall. 

For example, in the passage below, he describes how a fixation on "somatic mutation theory" — which states that mutations in specific genes are the primary drivers of cancer — ignores the dangers of environmental carcinogens and the benefits of public health efforts in curbing cancer incidence and mortality.    READ MORE...

China's New Solar Array

Chinese scientists have announced a plan to build an enormous, 0.6 mile (1 kilometer) wide solar power station in space that will beam continuous energy back to Earth via microwaves.


The project, which will see its components lofted to a geostationary orbit above Earth using super-heavy rockets, has been dubbed "another Three Gorges Dam project above the Earth."


The Three Gorges Dam, located in the middle of the Yangtze river in central China, is the world's largest hydropower project and generates 100 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity each year. According to one NASA scientist, the dam is so large that, if completely filled, the mass of the water contained within would lengthen Earth's days by 0.06 microseconds.     READ MORE...

BLACKBIRD - A Flying Taxi

A new type of flying car could soon be ferrying passengers through the skies using a novel propulsion technology, engineers say.

On Nov. 5, CycloTech, an Austrian company that builds flying car components, unveiled blueprints for its new "BlackBird" demonstrator aircraft — a flying car that uses a custom-made alternative to propellers.

Dubbed the "CycloRotor," this all-electric propulsion system is based on the principle of the Voith Schneider propeller (VSP) — which is frequently used on tug boats and ferries, CycloTech chief technology officer Tahsin Kart said in a promotional video. 

It's a circular rotor with small propeller blades inside, which spin around and can be used for both propulsion and steering.   READ MORE...

Galaxies in the Universe

An image from the Hubble Space Telescope showing hundreds of faraway galaxies. (Image credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, J. Diego (Instituto de Física de Cantabria, Spain), J. D’Silva (U. Western Australia), A. Koekemoer (STScI), J. Summers & R. Windhorst (ASU), and H. Yan (U. Missouri))



The Milky Way is just a speck in a universe filled with an untold number of galaxies. But if we had to take an educated guess, how many galaxies are in the universe?


That sounds like a simple question, but it's anything but. The first problem is that even with our most powerful telescopes, we can see only a tiny fraction of the universe.


"The observable universe is only that part of the universe from which the light has had time to reach us," astrophysicist Kai Noeske, now outreach officer at the European Space Agency, told Live Science.     
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Time as a Mirage

Time may not be a fundamental element of the universe but rather an illusion emerging from quantum entanglement, a new study suggests.


Time is a thorny problem for physicists; its inconsistent behavior between our best theories of the universe contributes to a deadlock preventing researchers from finding a "theory of everything," or a framework to explain all of the physics in the universe.


But in the new study, researchers suggest they may have found a clue to solving that problem: by making time a consequence of quantum entanglement, the weird connection between two far-apart particles. The team published their findings May 10 in the journal Physical Review A.                            READ MORE...

X-Shaped Structures in Space

This visualization shows C-shaped and reverse-C-shaped plasma bubbles appearing close together in the ionosphere on Oct. 12, 2020, and Dec. 26, 2021, as observed by NASA’s GOLD mission (Image credit: NASA’s Scientific Visualization Studio)




A NASA satellite has spotted unexpected X- and C-shaped structures in Earth’s ionosphere, the layer of electrified gas in the planet’s atmosphere that allows radio signals to travel over long distances.


The ionosphere is an electrified region of Earth's atmosphere that exists because radiation from the sun strikes the atmosphere. Its density increases during the day as its molecules become electrically charged. That's because sunlight causes electrons to break off of atoms and molecules, creating plasma that enables radio signals to travel over long distances. The ionosphere’s density then falls at night — and that's where GOLD comes in.


NASA's Global-scale Observations of the Limb and Disk (GOLD) mission is a geostationary satellite that has been measuring densities and temperatures in Earth's ionosphere since its launch in October 2018. From its geostationary orbit above the western hemisphere, GOLD was recently studying two dense crests of particles in the ionosphere, located north and south of the equator. As night falls, low-density bubbles appear within these crests that can interfere with radio and GPS signals. However, it's not just the wax and wane of sunshine that affects the ionosphere — the atmospheric layer is also sensitive to solar storms and huge volcanic eruptions, after which the crests can merge to form an X shape.               READ MORE...

ANTS Perform Life Saving Operations

 

Florida carpenter ants perform amuptations on nestmates when their legs are injured. 

(Image credit: Bart Zijlstra)



Ants in Florida perform life-saving surgery on their peers, scientists have discovered. They are only the second animal in the world known to do this — along with humans.


The researchers found that Florida carpenter ants (Camponotus floridanus) identify limb wounds on their nestmates, then treat them with either cleaning or amputation.


The team published its findings Tuesday (July 2) in the journal Current Biology.            READ MORE...

Asteroid Larger than Giza Pyramid

The potentially hazardous asteroid 2024 MK will sail between Earth and the moon on Saturday. (Image credit: JUAN GARTNER via Getty Images)



A skyscraper-size asteroid discovered two weeks ago will zoom between Earth and the moon on Saturday (June 29). At its closest approach, the space rock will pass within roughly 184,000 miles (295,000 kilometers) of our planet — about three-quarters the average distance between Earth and the moon.


The asteroid, named 2024 MK, is estimated to measure about 480 feet (146 meters) across, which is greater than the height of a 40-story building or the Great Pyramid of Giza.


During its closest approach, it will be traveling at roughly 21,000 mph (34,000 km/h), according to NASA. Astronomers in South Africa discovered the asteroid on June 16.        READ MORE...

The Early Universe at Cosmic Dawn

The Cosmic Gems is one of the most highly magnified objects in space, thanks to a phenomenon called gravitational lensing. (Image credit: ESA/Webb, NASA & CSA, L. Bradley (STScI), A. Adamo (Stockholm University) and the Cosmic Spring collaboration)





Astronomers using the James Webb Space Telescope have observed five extremely dense proto-globular clusters along a hair-thin arc of glittering stars. The discovery could help them understand how the earliest galaxies formed.

The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has discovered what could be the earliest star clusters in the universe.  JWST spotted the five proto-globular clusters — swarms of millions of stars bound together by gravity — inside the Cosmic Gems arc, a galaxy that formed just 460 million years after the Big Bang.


The Cosmic Gems arc gets its name from its appearance: When seen from our solar system, the star-studded galaxy looks like a hair-thin crescent due to the powerful gravitational influence of a foreground galaxy, which magnifies and distorts the distant galaxy's appearance.     READ MORE...

A Force More Powerful than Gravity

"Today, the Earth's liquid core is still a terpsichorean frenzy of electric currents, which generate a magnetic field." (Image credit: Shutterstock)






The image of an atom, with electrons swarming around a central nucleus bulging with protons and neutrons, is as iconic in our perception of science as the DNA helix or the rings of Saturn. But however much we scratch the surface of these scientific fundamentals, we can go even deeper, focusing that microscope further and discovering even more forces that govern our world.


In his new book "CHARGE: Why Does Gravity Rule?", theoretical physicist Frank Close explores the fundamental forces that govern our world, posing questions along the way that seek to explain how the delicate balance of positive and negative charges paved the way for gravity to shape our universe.


In this except, he explains how magnetism, the most tangible fundamental forces, was discovered, where it comes from and how it got its name.        READ MORE...

Mistreating Artificial Intelligence

How can we truly know if AI is sentient? We do not yet fully understand the nature of human consciousness, so we cannot discount the possibility that today's AI is indeed sentient — and that we are mistreating it to potentially grave consequences.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is becoming increasingly ubiquitous and is improving at an unprecedented pace.

Now we are edging closer to achieving artificial general intelligence (AGI) — where AI is smarter than humans across multiple disciplines and can reason generally — which scientists and experts predict could happen as soon as the next few years. We may already be seeing early signs of progress, too, with Claude 3 Opus stunning researchers with its apparent self-awareness.

But there are risks in embracing any new technology, especially one that we do not fully understand. While AI could be a powerful personal assistant, for example, it could also represent a threat to our livelihoods and even our lives.     READ MORE...

2,000 Year Old Carving

Brazilian archaeologists have discovered a vast number of 2,000-year-old rock carvings that depict human footprints, celestial-body-like figures, and representations of animals, such as deer and wild pigs.


The discovery was made during three expeditions between 2022 and 2023 in Jalapão State Park, located in the state of Tocantins. Researchers with Brazil's National Institute of Historic and Artistic Heritage (IPHAN) identified 16 precolonial archaeological sites, all located on rocky cliffs close to each other.

"This proximity suggests a possible connection between the sites and clarifies settlement patterns of the ancient communities that inhabited the region," Rômulo Macêdo, the archaeologist who led the work, told Live Science via Whatsapp.     READ MORE...

Humans Wearing Clothes

Clothes don't survive the way artifacts made of stone, bone and other hard materials do, so scientists have to get creative to answer this question.


As early humans evolved from ape-like ancestors, they came down from the trees, began to walk upright and lost their fur. But without fur, our ancestors would have been exposed to the elements. They would have needed clothing for protection.


So when did humans start wearing clothes?


This is a tricky question, because clothes don't survive the way artifacts made of stone, bone and other hard materials do. Instead, scientists have to get creative. The evidence used to answer this question comes from a few main sources, including bones bearing evidence of skinning, sewing needles and awls, and lice.  READ MORE...