Researchers have discovered a key molecular process that may contribute to chronic inflammation as we age. If this process can be accurately targeted, it could unlock ways to stay healthier in our later years.

The discovery centers on the unique strands of DNA contained within our mitochondria, the power stations of our cells. By banishing their 'mtDNA' into the surrounding cytoplasm, mitochondria can cause inflammation. Yet just how or why this happens has never been well understood.

In this study, researchers led by a team from the Max Planck Institute for Biology of Ageing in Germany analyzed tissue samples from humans and test animals, using mice genetically engineered to be models of aging and disease.

They found that when mtDNA can't find enough DNA building blocks (deoxyribonucleotides) for replication, it picks up RNA building blocks (ribonucleotides) instead. This mistake in construction causes instability in the mtDNA, which leads to it being ejected from the organelle.

"Our findings explain on a molecular level how metabolic disturbances can lead to inflammation in senescent cells and in aged tissue and open up new strategies for possible interventions," says molecular biologist Thomas Langer, from the Max Planck Institute for Biology of Ageing.

Human papillomavirus (HPV) is responsible for about 70% of head and neck cancers in the United States, making it the most common type of cancer linked to the virus. Rates of these cancers continue to rise each year. Unlike HPV-related cervical cancers, which have established screening options, there is currently no test to detect HPV-associated head and neck cancers.

As a result, most cases are diagnosed only after tumors have already expanded to billions of cells, causing symptoms and often spreading to nearby lymph nodes. Developing screening tools that can identify these cancers much earlier would allow patients to begin treatment sooner and improve outcomes.

Incoming cuteness alert—did you know baby octopuses can change color and texture from the moment they’re born?

Scientists from the University of Bath, working with colleagues at the Universities of Oxford and Bristol, have created a new molecule that stops a key protein from clumping together in the brain. This protein, called alpha-synuclein, is linked to Parkinson’s disease and certain forms of dementia. The research team has already shown that the molecule is effective in an animal model of Parkinson’s, and they believe it could eventually lead to a treatment that slows how the disease progresses.

Alpha-synuclein is a protein found mainly in brain cells (neurons), where it helps control the release of chemical messengers such as dopamine, which allow neurons to communicate with each other.

In people with Parkinson’s disease, alpha-synuclein begins to stick together, forming harmful clusters that damage and kill nerve cells. This process triggers the movement-related symptoms of the disease, including tremors, stiffness, and difficulty controlling motion. Although current medications can ease these symptoms, there is still no cure for Parkinson’s.

Stabilizing the Protein’s Natural State
Normally, alpha-synuclein’s natural or “native state” is like a flexible strand, but when active it shapes itself into a helix, which is critical for its function in binding and transporting parcels of dopamine.

The team engineered a peptide fragment that locks alpha-synuclein into its healthy shape, blocking its conversion into the toxic clumps that cause nerve cell death.

Laboratory tests showed the peptide is stable, penetrates brain-like cells, and restores movement while reducing protein deposits in a worm model of Parkinson’s.

This breakthrough, published in the journal JACS Au, demonstrates the potential of rational peptide design to transform large, unstable proteins into compact drug-like molecules.

The findings mark a significant step towards developing new peptide-based treatments for currently untreatable neurodegenerative conditions.

Professor Jody Mason, from the Department of Life Sciences at the University of Bath, said: “Our work shows that it is possible to rationally design small peptides that not only prevent harmful protein aggregation but also function inside living systems.

“This opens an exciting path towards new therapies for Parkinson’s and related diseases, where treatment options remain extremely limited.”

Researchers at Penn Medicine have uncovered how psilocybin, the main psychoactive ingredient in certain “magic mushrooms,” influences key brain circuits, offering potential new approaches for treating chronic pain and related mental health conditions.

Chronic pain affects more than 1.5 billion people globally and often intertwines with anxiety and depression, creating a feedback loop that worsens both physical and emotional suffering. The new research from the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, published in Nature Neuroscience, sheds light on how this cycle might be broken.

“As an anesthesiologist, I frequently care for people undergoing surgery who suffer from both chronic pain and depression. In many cases, they’re not sure which condition came first, but often, one makes the other worse,” said Joseph Cichon, MD, PhD, an assistant professor of Anesthesiology and Critical Care at Penn and senior author of the study. “This new study offers hope. These findings open the door to developing new, non-opioid, non-addictive therapies as psilocybin and related psychedelics are not considered addictive.”

Targeting the Brain’s Pain and Mood Hub
In experiments using mice with chronic nerve injury and inflammatory pain, scientists discovered that a single psilocybin dose eased both pain and depression-like behaviors caused by that pain, with the effects lasting for nearly two weeks. Psilocybin achieves this by subtly stimulating serotonin receptors (5-HT2A and 5-HT1A) in the brain. “Unlike other drugs that fully turn these signals on or off, psilocybin acts more like a dimmer

Scientists have released new images showing, in incredible detail, antibiotics defeating disease-causing bacteria by piercing the microbes' membranes and infiltrating their innards.

The antibiotics, called polymyxins, were observed forcing the armored membranes around Escherichia coli bacterial cells to grow bumps and bulges. The bacteria then shed their outer membranes, leaving space for the antibiotic to enter the cells.

"It was incredible seeing the effect of the antibiotic at the bacterial surface in real-time," study co-author Carolina Borrelli, a doctoral student studying biophysics and microbiology at University College London (UCL), said in a statement.

New research has uncovered a species of hook-toothed lizard that lived about 167 million years ago and has a confusing set of features seen in snakes and geckos—two very distant relatives. One of the oldest relatively complete fossil lizards yet discovered, the Jurassic specimen is described in a study, published on October 1 in the journal Nature, from a multinational collaboration between the American Museum of Natural History and scientists in the United Kingdom, including University College London and the National Museums Scotland, France, and South Africa.

The species was given the Gaelic name Breugnathair elgolensis meaning “false snake of Elgol,” referencing the area in Scotland’s Isle of Skye where it was discovered. Breugnathair had snake-like jaws and hook-like, curved teeth similar to those of modern-day pythons, paired with the short body and fully-formed limbs of a lizard.

A trio of researchers has won the 2025 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for discovering how the immune system is prevented from attacking our own bodies.

Mary E. Brunkow of the Institute for Systems Biology in Seattle, Fred Ramsdell of Sonoma Biotherapeutics in San Francisco, and Shimon Sakaguchi of Osaka University in Japan were awarded the prize "for their discoveries concerning peripheral immune tolerance." The Nobel Assembly at Karolinska Institutet announced the winners at a ceremony in Stockholm, Sweden, on Monday (Oct. 6).

The three scientists' research, honored with the 116th medicine prize, provides insights into keeping the immune system under control to fight microbes and avoid autoimmune diseases.

"Their discoveries have been decisive for our understanding of how the immune system functions and why we do not all develop serious autoimmune diseases," Olle Kämpe, chair of the Nobel Committee, said in a statement.

Fragments of DNA left by viruses that infected our distant ancestors may be 'firestarters' for new human life, new research finds.

"Our results illustrate how recently emerged… genes can confer developmentally essential functions in humans," Stanford University biologist Raquel Fueyo and colleagues write in their paper.

Fueyo and her team used a ball of stem cells induced to mimic a blastocyst, the phase of embryonic development about five days after fertilization. This 3D model, or blastoid, replicates the developmental stage just before the embryo implants into the uterus's lining.

When the researchers disabled a group of remnant virus genes known as LTR5Hs, the embryonic model either turned into a disorganized clump of cells or died. Without the LTR5Hs, the middle layer (epiblast) of the three-tissue-layered blastoid did not form properly.

Up to 9 percent of our DNA is composed of genetic material from ancient viral invaders. These endogenous retrovirus remnants infiltrated the genetic material of our ancestors' reproductive cells millions of years ago and are now permanently integrated into our genetic blueprints.

NASA's spinning spacecraft studying the satellites of the solar system's largest celestial body (aside from the sun), may already be switched off, but the space agency won't say.

The Juno probe launched in 2011 and entered orbit around Jupiter in 2016, beginning what was originally planned as a 20-month mission. Nearly a decade later, the spacecraft has delivered unprecedented research of the Jovian system, observing the gas giant, its many moons and faint ring system long past its intended lifespan.

NASA has extended Juno's mission multiple times, most recently in 2021, guaranteeing operations through Sept. 30, 2025. That date has now passed, and with the U.S. government shut down, there is no word yet on whether Juno will come out alive on the other side.

Japanese researchers have discovered a way to overcome long-standing thermodynamic limits, such as the Carnot efficiency, by using quantum states that do not undergo thermalization. Their innovative method employs a non-thermal Tomonaga-Luttinger liquid to transform waste heat into electrical energy with greater efficiency than conventional systems. This advancement could lead to more energy-efficient electronics and future progress in quantum computing.

Energy harvesters are devices that collect power from surrounding environmental sources, offering a means to improve the efficiency of modern electronics and industrial operations. Waste heat is produced continuously by everyday technologies, including computers, smartphones, and factory machinery, as well as by large-scale systems like power plants. Energy-harvesting techniques make it possible to reclaim this otherwise lost heat and convert it into usable electricity, reducing dependence on traditional energy supplies.

Traditional energy-harvesting technologies, however, remain limited by the fundamental principles of thermodynamics. Systems that operate under thermal equilibrium face strict boundaries on how much heat can be turned into electrical power. The ratio between generated electricity and the heat drawn from a waste source is defined by the Carnot efficiency. Additional constraints, such as the Curzon-Ahlborn efficiency (which represents the efficiency achievable at maximum power output), have further restricted how much practical energy can be recovered from waste heat.

Now, a research team led by Professor Toshimasa Fujisawa from the Department of Physics at Institute of Science Tokyo (Science Tokyo), Japan, in collaboration with Senior Distinguished Researcher Koji Muraki from NTT Basic Research Laboratories, Japan, has found a way to bypass this barrier. In their paper published in Communications Physics on September 30, 2025, the team introduced a novel energy-harvesting technique that uses unique quantum states to achieve efficiencies that go beyond the conventional thermodynamic limits.

An amateur astronomer looking through data from NASA's Perseverance rover may have spotted interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS as it passed overhead.

On October 3, Comet 3I/ATLAS had its closest approach to Mars, passing by it at a distance of around 29 million kilometers (18 million miles). NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA) both planned to observe the sky during this timeframe using space robots such as Mars Express and the ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter, and we'll find out soon enough if they observed it from Mars' orbit. And possibly, as the case may be, by the Perseverance rover on the Red Planet's surface.

Here's where it gets a little murky. As the US space agency explains on its website, "NASA Operating Status: NASA is currently CLOSED due to a lapse in Government funding". While NASA is unable to post information on any data that may have been captured by its robots, Perseverance continues to send its raw images, which are available to the public to view. Looking through those images, some believe they have identified the interstellar object. While one has been picked up by the press and the Internet alike, this one is unlikely to be an image of 3I/ATLAS. However, another that has gone unnoticed by most media may be worthy of some further attention.

For the first time, scientists have managed to directly observe and measure the protein clusters thought to spark the onset of Parkinson’s disease, representing a major leap forward in understanding this rapidly growing neurological disorder.

These microscopic structures, known as alpha-synuclein oligomers, have long been suspected of initiating the disease within the brain. However, until now, researchers had been unable to detect them directly in human brain tissue.

A team from the University of Cambridge, UCL, the Francis Crick Institute, and Polytechnique Montréal has now developed an advanced imaging method that enables them to visualize, count, and compare these elusive clusters. One of the researchers described the breakthrough as being “like being able to see stars in broad daylight.”

The findings, published in Nature Biomedical Engineering, could reveal new details about how Parkinson’s spreads through the brain and aid in the development of early diagnostic tools and future treatments.

Currently, around 166,000 people in the UK live with Parkinson’s disease, and that number continues to grow. Globally, the total is expected to reach 25 million by 2050. While existing medications can ease symptoms such as tremors and muscle stiffness, there are still no treatments capable of slowing or stopping the progression of the disease itself.

It rains on the Sun, and scientists at the University of Hawaiʻi Institute for Astronomy (IfA) have finally uncovered the reason why.

Unlike the water droplets that fall on Earth, solar rain occurs within the Sun’s corona, a region of extremely hot plasma that extends above its surface. This phenomenon involves cooler, denser clumps of plasma that condense high in the corona and then descend back toward the Sun. For years, researchers struggled to understand how this process could happen so rapidly during solar flares.

New explanation
Now, that long-standing mystery has been solved by Luke Benavitz, a first-year graduate student at IfA, and astronomer Jeffrey Reep. Their findings, published in the Astrophysical Journal, provide an essential update to solar models that have puzzled scientists for decades.

“At present, models assume that the distribution of various elements in the corona is constant throughout space and time, which clearly isn’t the case,” said Benavitz. “It’s exciting to see that when we allow elements like iron to change with time, the models finally match what we actually observe on the Sun. It makes the physics come alive in a way that feels real.”

Why it matters
The new finding means solar scientists can better model how the Sun behaves during flares, insights that could one day help predict space weather that affects our daily lives.

Earlier models required heating over hours or days to explain coronal rain; however, solar flares can happen in just minutes. The IfA team’s work shows that shifting elemental abundances can explain how rain can quickly form.

“This discovery matters because it helps us understand how the Sun really works,” said Reep. “We can’t directly see the heating process, so we use cooling as a proxy. But if our models haven’t treated abundances properly, the cooling time has likely been overestimated. We might need to go back to the drawing board on coronal heating, so there’s a lot of new and exciting work to be done.”

For millions of years, a fragment of ice and dust drifted between the stars—like a sealed bottle cast into the cosmic ocean. This summer, that bottle finally washed ashore in our solar system and was designated 3I/ATLAS, only the third known interstellar comet. When Auburn University scientists pointed NASA's Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory toward it, they made a remarkable find: the first detection of hydroxyl (OH) gas from this object, a chemical fingerprint of water.

Swift's space-based telescope could spot the faint ultraviolet glow that ground observatories can't see—because, high above Earth's atmosphere, it captures light that never reaches Earth's surface.

Detecting water—through its ultraviolet by-product, hydroxyl—is a major breakthrough for understanding how interstellar comets evolve. In solar-system comets, water is the yardstick by which scientists measure their overall activity and track how sunlight drives the release of other gases. It's the chemical benchmark that anchors every comparison of volatile ices in a comet's nucleus.

Finding the same signal in an interstellar object means that, for the first time, astronomers can begin to place 3I/ATLAS on the same scale used to study native solar-system comets—a step toward comparing the chemistry of planetary systems across the galaxy.

What makes 3I/ATLAS remarkable is where this water activity occurs. The Swift observations detected OH when the comet was nearly three times farther from the sun than Earth—well beyond the region where water ice on a comet's surface can easily sublimate—and measured a water-loss rate of about 40 kilograms per second—roughly the output of a fire hose running at full blast.

At those distances, most solar-system comets remain quiet. The strong ultraviolet signal from ATLAS suggests that something else is at work: perhaps sunlight is heating small icy grains released from the nucleus, allowing them to vaporize and feed the surrounding cloud of gas. Such extended sources of water have been seen only in a handful of distant comets and point to complex, layered ices that preserve clues to how these objects formed.

Africa's Great Green Wall project began as an ambitious plan to build a 15-kilometer-wide band of trees across the north of Africa. The African Union launched the project in 2007 with plans for the trees to extend for 6,000 kilometers through 11 countries in the Sahel, restoring 100 million hectares of land from Senegal to Djibouti and Ethiopia. Its main aim was to prevent the Sahara Desert from advancing. But the Great Green Wall's also been billed as a solution to climate change, poverty, and even extremism.

Senegal has been one of the most active countries implementing the Great Green Wall initiative, despite being among the smallest. It has targeted 817,500 hectares of land for restoration. Environmental researchers Annah Lake Zhu and Amadou Ndiaye were part of a team who looked at satellite images of some of Senegal's section of the wall and found that only one out of 36 planted areas analyzed was more green than it would have been naturally. The project is not an actual wall of trees but rather a mosaic of rehabilitated land. But increased greenery should still be visible from satellite imagery. They also found that financial pledges were often left unmet, money for the wall didn't make it to ground level and new trees had low survival rates.

Two spacecraft on Mars have captured new images of the interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS in the closest view that the European Space Agency (ESA) will get of the mysterious object, according to an ESA statement.

The comet, which came from an unknown star system far beyond our own, is currently taking a months-long tour of the inner solar system. It made its closest approach to Mars Friday (Oct. 3) ahead of a close encounter with the sun on Oct. 30. During its recent flyby of the Red Planet, the comet came within view of ESA and NASA's fleet of robotic explorers, including ESA's ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter (TGO) and Mars Express orbiter.

Soaring 18.6 million miles (30 million kilometers) overhead, the comet proved too dim for Mars Express to capture. However, the ExoMars TGO satellite succeeded in snapping a series of images, which ESA combined into an animated GIF. The animation shows the comet — visible as a fuzzy, bright dot — descending toward the center of the frame as it zooms away from Mars at an estimated 130,000 mph (210,000 km/h).

Scientists have recently developed a powerful new approach to fighting cancer using specially engineered immune cells called CAR-NK (natural killer) cells. These cells function much like CAR-T cells, which can be customized to seek out and destroy cancer, but rely on a different type of immune cell as their foundation.

Researchers at MIT and Harvard Medical School have now designed an improved version of CAR-NK cells that are far less likely to be attacked by a patient’s own immune system, a major obstacle in current cell-based therapies.

This breakthrough could also open the door to “off-the-shelf” CAR-NK treatments that doctors can administer immediately after diagnosis, eliminating the long preparation period required for most personalized cancer immunotherapies. Conventional CAR-NK and CAR-T cell production often takes several weeks.

Safer, Stronger Cancer Killers
“This enables us to do one-step engineering of CAR-NK cells that can avoid rejection by host T cells and other immune cells. And, they kill cancer cells better and they’re safer,” says Jianzhu Chen, an MIT professor of biology, a member of the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research, and one of the senior authors of the study.

When tested in mice with human-like immune systems, the newly engineered cells successfully eliminated most cancer cells while avoiding detection and destruction by the host immune system.

The Hawaiian honeycreeper digs for bugs, using its lower beak like a pickaxe to chip into wood.

The European Space Agency’s (ESA) Mars Express and ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter are excellent spacecraft that have provided insights into the Red Planet time and time again. They are also capable of doing things beyond their standard job. They recently looked at interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS. They were also used to measure the winds on the surface of Mars, something that neither orbiter was designed to do.

The incredible results were possible thanks to an extensive catalog of dust devils, tornadoes of dust that have been seen by several rovers and orbiters in recent years. The combined data of the two ESA orbiters culminated in a large catalog of events, 1,039 in total, providing a new understanding of wind speed on Mars. The work showed that dust devils and winds can reach speeds of up to 160 kilometers (100 miles) per hour. They are much faster than previously assumed.

Using cutting-edge simulations, scientists at Goethe University Frankfurt revealed that not just magnetic fields, but a process called magnetic reconnection, helps extract energy from a spinning black hole to launch jets of matter stretching thousands of light-years. These immense cosmic beams, moving at nearly light speed, scatter energy and matter across galaxies, shaping their evolution.

From a “Nebula Without Stars” to a Giant Galaxy
For nearly 200 years, astronomers were uncertain about the true nature of the bright object in the constellation Virgo that Charles Messier recorded in 1784 as “87: Nebula without stars.” What appeared to be a fuzzy patch of light was later revealed to be an enormous galaxy. When a mysterious jet of light was spotted coming from its center in 1918, scientists had no idea what could be producing it.

At the core of this massive galaxy, now known as M87, lies the supermassive black hole M87*, containing about six and a half billion times the mass of the Sun. This black hole spins rapidly, and its rotation powers a stream of charged particles that shoots out at nearly the speed of light, stretching some 5,000 light-years into space. Similar jets are seen around other rotating black holes, helping to scatter energy and matter throughout the universe and shape the growth of galaxies.

Cracking the Code of Black Hole Power
A research team from Goethe University Frankfurt, led by Prof. Luciano Rezzolla, has developed a new computational tool called the Frankfurt particle-in-cell code for black hole spacetimes (FPIC). This simulation code precisely models how a spinning black hole transforms its rotational energy into a powerful jet. The researchers discovered that, in addition to the well-known Blandford–Znajek mechanism, long thought to explain how black holes extract rotational energy through magnetic fields, another key process also plays a role: magnetic reconnection. In this phenomenon, magnetic field lines snap and reconnect, converting magnetic energy into heat, radiation, and bursts of plasma.

Using the FPIC code, the team simulated the behavior of countless charged particles and extreme electromagnetic fields influenced by the intense gravity surrounding the black hole. Dr. Claudio Meringolo, the main developer of the code, explained, “Simulating such processes is crucial for understanding the complex dynamics of relativistic plasmas in curved spacetimes near compact objects, which are governed by the interplay of extreme gravitational and magnetic fields.”

Running these simulations required extraordinary computing resources, totaling millions of CPU hours on Frankfurt’s “Goethe” supercomputer and Stuttgart’s “Hawk.” Such immense processing power was needed to solve Maxwell’s equations and the equations of motion for electrons and positrons within the framework of Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity.