Cells bumping against one another use electricity to identify which of their neighbors has the least energy to expel them. The King's College London study in partnership with the Francis Crick Institute provides insight into diseases including cancer and stroke, where cellular energy levels can be disrupted, preventing the maintenance of healthy cell numbers.

Epithelial cells, which line all organs in the body, turnover rapidly to maintain a tightly packed protective layer. They undergo a process called extrusion to eliminate excess or damaged cells, essential for balancing cell division and cell death.
Extrusion is a fundamental process, common in living organisms from sea sponge to humans, that drives most epithelial cell death. When it goes wrong and the balance of healthy cells is disrupted, it can lead to disease.

Earlier work by the group led by Professor Jody Rosenblatt at King's College London discovered that extrusion is mechanical—when too many epithelial cells accumulate, crowding triggers some to be physically squeezed out, causing them to die.

The scientists were unsure if the crowded cells selected to extrude were randomly selected, or some were specifically targeted. This latest discovery, published in Nature, reveals that crowding selectively targets the weakest, energy-poor cells for death.

Epithelial cells spend a remarkable amount of energy establishing and maintaining an electrically charged surface or membrane. While this electrical potential is well known in nerve cells, its role in other cell types has been largely overlooked.

Crispr gene-editing technology has demonstrated its revolutionary potential in recent years: It has been used to treat rare diseases, to adapt crops to withstand the extremes of climate change, or even to change the color of a spider’s web. But the greatest hope is that this technology will help find a cure for a global disease, such as diabetes. A new study points in that direction.

For the first time, researchers succeeded in implanting Crispr-edited pancreatic cells in a man with type 1 diabetes, an autoimmune disease where the immune system attacks insulin-producing cells in the pancreas. Without insulin, the body is then unable to regulate blood sugar. If steps aren’t taken to manage glucose levels by other means (typically, by injecting insulin), this can lead to damage to the nerves and organs—particularly the heart, kidneys, and eyes. Roughly 9.5 million people worldwide have type 1 diabetes.

In this experiment, edited cells produced insulin for months after being implanted, without the need for the recipient to take any immunosuppressive drugs to stop their body attacking the cells. The Crispr technology allowed the researchers to endow the genetically modified cells with camouflage to evade detection.

Researchers have developed a tiny device that extinguishes one of the biggest heat sources in quantum computers, cutting their running costs and potentially bringing these machines closer to commercial reality.

Most quantum computers operate at temperatures close to absolute zero (459.67 degrees Fahrenheit, or minus 273.15 degrees Celsius) using specialized cooling equipment to maintain the delicate quantum states of qubits — the core processing units of quantum systems.

Cryogenic amplifiers are also used in quantum computers to boost the extremely weak signals qubits emit at these ultra-low temperatures. This makes it possible to accurately measure their quantum states — which is needed in order to understand what the quantum computer is actually doing.

The challenge with existing amplifiers used to measure qubit behaviour — or any electronics used in quantum computers, for that matter — is that they generate heat. This means the quantum systems require additional cooling systems that add bulk and cost, both of which present major barriers to making quantum systems practical and scalable.

Now, Qubic, a Canadian startup, has devised a cryogenic traveling-wave parametric amplifier (TWPA) made from unspecified "quantum materials" that enables an amplifier to operate with virtually zero heat loss, representatives from the company said in a statement.

They added that this device reduced thermal output by a factor of 10,000 — down to practically zero.

Developed over more than a decade at the University of the Sunshine Coast (UniSC) as part of a global collaborative effort, the vaccine is designed to protect the tree huggers from chlamydia, a bacterial infection that’s been devastating their populations for decades. Chlamydia spreads rapidly among wild populations, causing painful urinary tract infections, infertility, blindness, and even death. But now, a breakthrough single-dose vaccine could turn the tide for the species.

A new book brings NASA's earliest, and most harrowing spaceflights back to life.

60 years after Gemini, newly processed images reveal incredible details
https://arstechnica.com/space/2025/09/60-years-after-gemini-newly-processed-images-reveal-incredible-details/

#PPOD: Saturn in Infrared 🪐

Saturn viewed at infrared wavelengths, as imaged by NASA's Cassini spacecraft in 2014. The hexagon at the top represents a giant jet stream, approximately 29,000 to 30,000 kilometers wide, with sides approximately 14,500 kilometers long – longer than Earth's diameter. This massive storm spans 75 to 300 kilometers high and is a long-lived atmospheric feature centered around Saturn's north pole.

Credit: NASA NASAJPL Caltech spacescienceins #CICLOPS; Processing: Maksim Kakitsev

📡Discovery of Protoplanetary Disk Caught in Explosion Driven by Stellar Jet. 🤯
This finding suggests that the disk, which serves as a seedbed for planets, is exposed to a harsher environment than previously thought.

Looking like a cosmic double-bladed lightsaber, Webb captured enormous jets of gas 8 light-years across erupting from a massive baby star. This rare sighting is helping us better understand how massive stars form.

https://science.nasa.gov/missions/webb/nasas-webb-observes-immense-stellar-jet-on-outskirts-of-our-milky-way/

What IS a "potential biosignature" anyway? For a complete review and deep dive into the recent announcement, check out this special edition of the Mars Report: 

https://science.nasa.gov/mars/the-mars-report/2025-september-special-edition/

Magnetic fields that originated during the earliest moments of the Universe may have been billions of times weaker than the pull of a household fridge magnet, with strengths on the scale of the magnetism produced by neurons in the human brain. Despite being so faint, measurable evidence of these fields can still be detected in the cosmic web, the vast network of structures linking galaxies across the Universe.

This conclusion comes from a study involving about 250,000 computer simulations carried out by researchers at SISSA (the International School for Advanced Studies in Trieste) in collaboration with teams from the Universities of Hertfordshire, Cambridge, Nottingham, Stanford, and Potsdam.

Vitamin D supplements may help safeguard the protective caps on our chromosomes that influence the pace of aging, raising hopes that the “sunshine vitamin” could support healthier longevity, according to a recent study.

Researchers reported that taking 2,000 IU (international units, a standard vitamin measurement) of vitamin D each day helped preserve telomeres, the small structures at the ends of chromosomes that act like the plastic tips of shoelaces, shielding DNA from damage during cell division.

Each of our 46 chromosomes ends with a telomere, which gradually shortens every time a cell divides. Once telomeres become critically short, cells lose the ability to divide and ultimately die.

Shortened telomeres have been associated with several major age-related conditions, including cancer, heart disease, and osteoarthritis. Factors such as smoking, chronic stress, and depression appear to accelerate this process, while inflammatory processes in the body also contribute to telomere loss.

Saturn’s largest moon, Titan, is a complex environment. It hosts rivers and lakes of liquid methane, fields of icy boulders, extensive sand dunes, and, beneath its frozen crust, a vast subsurface ocean. This unique combination makes Titan one of the most intriguing subjects in astrobiology.

A new study led by ETH Zurich fellow Dr. Antonin Affholder examines whether that subsurface ocean could support life. His findings, discussed in a recent SETI Live with SETI Institute communications specialist Beth Johnson, suggest that if life exists there, it may persist only in extremely small amounts, making detection a formidable challenge.

Learn more: https://www.seti.org/news/life-in-titans-ocean-the-microscopic-possibility-of-biomass-on-saturns-moon/

When cells are injured, they can "vomit" their insides out to help them heal faster, according to a new study. While effective, the process could also be implicated in diseases like cancer.

The discovery was made while scientists were investigating a recently discovered cellular process called paligenosis, where mature cells respond to injury by reverting to a younger-seeming progenitor state, similar to a stem cell.

The researchers found that rather than cleaning house slowly, injured cells could quickly jettison waste in a process the team called "cathartocytosis," which may help them achieve a stem cell-like state sooner.

"After an injury, the cell's job is to repair that injury. But the cell's mature cellular machinery for doing its normal job gets in the way," says first author Jeffrey W. Brown, gastroenterologist at Washington University in St. Louis.

"So, this cellular cleanse is a quick way of getting rid of that machinery so it can rapidly become a small, primitive cell capable of proliferating and repairing the injury. We identified this process in the gastrointestinal tract, but we suspect it is relevant in other tissues as well."

This year's budget expires at the end of this month, and Congress must act before October 1 to avert a government shutdown. If Congress passes a budget before then, it will most likely be in the form of a continuing resolution, an extension of this year's funding levels into the first few weeks or months of fiscal year 2026.

The White House's budget request for fiscal year 2026 calls for a 25 percent cut to NASA's overall budget, and a nearly 50 percent reduction in funding for the agency's Science Mission Directorate. These cuts would cut off money for at least 41 missions, including 19 already in space and many more far along in development.

Normally, a president's budget request isn't the final say on matters. Lawmakers in the House and Senate have written their own budget bills in the last several months. There are differences between each appropriations bill, but they broadly reject most of the Trump administration's proposed cuts.

Still, this hasn't quelled the anxieties of anyone with a professional or layman's interest in space science. The 19 active robotic missions chosen for cancellation are operating beyond their original design lifetime. However, in many cases, they are in pursuit of scientific data that no other mission has a chance of collecting for decades or longer.

A “tragic capitulation”
Some of the mission names are recognizable to anyone with a passing interest in NASA's work. They include the agency's two Orbiting Carbon Observatory missions monitoring data signatures related to climate change, the Chandra X-ray Observatory, which survived a budget scare last year, and two of NASA's three active satellites orbiting Mars.

And there's New Horizons, a spacecraft that made front-page headlines in 2015 when it beamed home the first up-close pictures of Pluto. Another mission on the chopping block is Juno, the world's only spacecraft currently at Jupiter.
Both spacecraft have more to offer, according to the scientists leading the missions.

“New Horizons is perfectly healthy," said Alan Stern, the mission's principal investigator at Southwest Research Institute (SWRI). "Everything on the spacecraft is working. All the spacecraft subsystems are performing perfectly, as close to perfectly as one could ever hope. And all the instruments are, too. The spacecraft has the fuel and power to run into the late 2040s or maybe 2050."

New Horizons is a decade and more than 2.5 billion miles (4.1 billion kilometers) beyond Pluto. The probe flew by a frozen object named Arrokoth on New Year's Day 2019, returning images of the most distant world ever explored by a spacecraft. Since then, the mission has continued its speedy departure from the Solar System and could become the third spacecraft to return data from interstellar space.

In a groundbreaking experiment, engineers at the University of Pennsylvania successfully extended quantum networking beyond the laboratory by transmitting signals over commercial fiber-optic cables using the same Internet Protocol (IP) that drives today’s web. Published in Science, the study demonstrates that delicate quantum signals can travel on the same infrastructure that carries routine online traffic. The tests were carried out on Verizon’s campus fiber-optic network.

At the center of the effort is the Penn team’s compact “Q-chip,” designed to coordinate quantum and classical information while operating in full compatibility with modern internet protocols. This innovation could serve as a foundation for a future “quantum internet,” a network that researchers expect may be as transformative as the emergence of the web itself.

Quantum communication depends on entangled particles, which are so strongly connected that altering one instantly changes the other. Leveraging this phenomenon could allow quantum computers to interconnect and share resources, enabling breakthroughs such as more efficient artificial intelligence and the development of novel drugs and materials beyond the capabilities of current supercomputers.

Dark energy—the term used to describe whatever is causing the universe to expand at an increasing rate—is one of the universe's greatest mysteries. The most widely accepted theory currently suggests that dark energy is constant, and the energy of empty space drives cosmic acceleration.

However, last year, findings from the Dark Energy Survey and Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument sparked excitement within the cosmology community by hinting that dark energy may actually be evolving.

"This would be our first indication that dark energy is not the cosmological constant introduced by Einstein over 100 years ago but a new, dynamical phenomenon," said Josh Frieman, University of Chicago Professor Emeritus of Astronomy and Astrophysics.

In a new paper published in Physical Review D, Frieman and Anowar Shajib, a NASA Hubble Fellowship Program Einstein Fellow in Astronomy and Astrophysics at UChicago, combine current data from a multitude of probes and find that dynamical models of evolving dark energy can better explain the data than the cosmological constant. If so, their models find, there may be an undiscovered particle out there which is many orders of magnitude smaller than an electron.

University of Chicago spoke with Shajib and Frieman about the new models described in their paper, the implications of these results, and what's next.

On Sept. 7 2025, the skies darkened as Earth's shadow consumed the moon. Skywatchers in many parts of the world saw the moon turn blood red due to a total lunar eclipse.

For amateur astronomers Michael Jäger and Gerald Rhemann in Namibia, the eclipse was not only a sight to behold, but it also gave them an unprecedented opportunity: the chance to capture the interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS under some of the darkest skies on Earth.

Using the eclipse's natural dimming of the moon, the duo was able to take some deep images of the comet, revealing something surprising: the comet glowed green.

Mummifying the dead is a funerary rite that has been practiced for thousands of years in many locations across the world. A new discovery reveals that we may have been underestimating exactly how widespread the practice has been. Bones that show signs of deliberate mummification have been found across Southeast Asia and southern China, with ages dating back to the pre-Neolithic period up to 12,000 years ago.

That's several thousands of years older than the cultures best known for mummification, the Chinchorro people of Chile, who were mummifying their dead 7,000 years ago, and the ancient Egyptians, who were practicing the craft 5,600 years ago.

The reason we might have missed it? The technique used by the earlier Asian cultures is quite different from the more well-known mummification practices. According to a team led by archaeologist Hsiao-chun Hung of the Australian National University, the individuals in their study were slowly smoked over an open fire for long stretches of time.

Early scientific theories—such as those explaining basic phenomena like gravity, burning, and the movement of molecules in water—centered on presumed inherent properties rather than external factors, thereby misleading famous philosophers and scientists, from Aristotle to Scottish botanist Robert Brown, in their theorizing.

A new study by a team of psychology researchers has now found that this tendency is in fact common in the history of science. Moreover, through a series of experiments and surveys, the paper's authors conclude these misfires were likely driven by cognitive constraints, among scientists and non-scientists alike, that have acted as a bottleneck to discovery and shaped the trajectory of scientific theories over millennia.

The study, which appears in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, was conducted by researchers at the University of Edinburgh and New York University.

"Early scientific theories across multiple fields share a common pattern, in that they focus too much on built‑in features and too little on interactions with surroundings," explains Zachary Horne, a lecturer in psychology at the University of Edinburgh and the paper's lead author. "This bias appears throughout the history of science, and its 'fingerprints' can even be seen among scientists today."