People recalling a familiar image use different brain mechanisms to focus on a component than those who are viewing the situation live, a new study indicates. The reasons why the brain has evolved a different process for this task are not known, but might hold the key to understanding why some people have this capacity and others do not.

A few years ago, many frequent Internet users were astonished to discover that some people have no “mind’s eye”, the capacity to visualize things that they cannot see at the time, also known as aphantasia. A smaller group were at least as amazed to learn that other people can, and that references to such capacities were not merely metaphorical. 

Possibly influenced by these exchanges, research into the working of the mind’s eye, where it exists, has picked up, for example finding that psychedelics may switch it on. The most recent example investigated how the brain responds when challenged to focus on part of a remembered map, in contrast to a scene laid out before it, revealing crucial differences.

Some think it's a no brainer: Scattering microscopic particles of sulfur into Earth's atmosphere would reduce the amount of sunlight that reaches the ground, thereby cooling the planet. Indeed, this cooling might temporarily offset the progressing climate change — but a new study claims this type of intervention is likely to have several more unwanted side effects than previously thought.

The concept of geoengineering, or human-induced alteration of the planet's climate, by stratospheric sulfur injections (SAI) is backed by nature's own phenomena. The 1991 eruption of the Philippine stratovolcano Mount Pinatubo injected nearly 20 million tons of sulfur dioxide in the stratosphere, the layer of Earth's atmosphere between altitudes of 7.6 and 31 miles (12 and 50 kilometers). The presence of the sulfur particles in the atmosphere led to a global mean temperature drop of about 1 degree Fahrenheit (0.5 degree Celsius), according to the U.S. Geological Survey.

But that cooling, measurable for two years after the eruption, also disrupted the Indian monsoon system, causing a drought across South Asia, according to the new research paper. Plus, although the sulfur aerosol cooled Earth's surface, it warmed the stratosphere, speeding up ozone destruction.

"There are a range of things that might happen if you try to do this — and we're arguing that the range of possible outcomes is a lot wider than anybody has appreciated until now," Faye McNeill, an atmospheric chemist and aerosol scientist at Columbia’s Climate School and Columbia Engineering and one of the authors of the paper said in a statement.

Researchers are using sophisticated computer models to understand the effects of geoengineering interventions. But McNeill and her colleagues warn that no simulation is perfect and that, in the real world, surprises would be inevitable.

The impact of physical activity continues long after the workout ends.

A new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences by researchers from Virginia Tech, the University of Aberdeen, and Shenzhen University found that being active increases the total amount of energy the body uses each day without prompting it to cut back elsewhere.

While the health advantages of regular exercise are well established, scientists know less about how physical activity influences the body’s overall “energy budget,” meaning how energy is distributed among different biological processes.

For years, researchers have debated whether this energy budget works like a fixed income, where energy for movement is taken from other functions, or like a flexible system that expands to support more activity. The study aimed to identify which of these models best reflects how the human body manages energy at varying levels of physical activity.

To do this, researchers evaluated the total energy expenditure, or the total calories burned in a day, in participants across a wide spectrum of physical activity.

Biologists have long been fascinated by the ability of salamanders to regrow entire limbs. Now Harvard researchers have solved part of the mystery of how they accomplish this feat—by activating stem cells throughout the body, not just at the injury site.

In a paper published in the journal Cell, researchers documented how this body-wide response in axolotl salamanders is triggered by the sympathetic nervous system—the iconic "fight or flight" network. The study raises the possibility that these mechanisms might one day be manipulated to regenerate human limbs and organs.

"We've shown the importance of the adrenaline stress signaling hormone in getting cells ready for regeneration," said Duygu Payzin-Dogru, lead author of the new study and a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Stem Cell and Regenerative Biology (SCRB).

"Because adrenaline exists in humans, this tells us we can co-opt some of the things we found in the axolotl to perhaps improve regenerative outcomes in humans. We have some of the same components and just have to figure out the right way to implement them."

The new study culminates several years of research by the lab of Jessica Whited, associate professor in SCRB, who studies limb regeneration in axolotls, a species native to Mexico. Axolotls are often examined as model organisms of limb regeneration because they are among the fastest-breeding species of salamanders.

Some invertebrates such as planarian flatworms can regrow entire bodies from small bits of tissue. But salamanders are the only vertebrates that can regenerate full limbs.

Announcing ISS in Real Time, a new multimedia project where you can play back every day of the past 25 years aboard the International Space Station.
issinrealtime.org

Even as a brilliant, naked-eye comet slices through Earth's sky (cheers, Comet Lemmon!), the most famous object in the solar system right now is hidden on the far side of the sun: the interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS.

This alien visitor, which most astronomers believe to be a comet originating from an unknown star system far beyond our own, is only the third interstellar object ever detected in our solar system. It is the largest, fastest-moving, and quite likely the oldest interstellar object ever seen.

Though it was just confirmed by NASA in early July, the freewheeling ball of ice and dust is already nearing the halfway point on its tour of our solar system. This Wednesday (Oct. 29), 3I/ATLAS will reach perihelion — its closest point to the sun — before beginning its months-long departure from our cosmic neighborhood.

As 3I/ATLAS reaches perihelion this week — coming within 1.4 astronomical units, or 130 million miles (210 million kilometers) of the sun, according to NASA — it may start releasing gas in overdrive. When the comet becomes visible to telescopes again in early November, it may look both bigger and brighter than how it appeared two months ago. Instruments on the ground, in orbit and even on their way to Jupiter will snap to attention, making 3I/ATLAS an even bigger space celebrity as it zooms away from our solar system forever.

For the first time ever, we’ve been able to prove that some dinosaurs had hooves, thanks to two remarkably well-preserved mummified dinosaurs retrieved from Wyoming’s Badlands. The specimens are the duck-billed dinosaurs Edmontosaurus annectens that, thanks to a "fluke preservation event" are near-perfect 66 million years later.

Known as “clay templating,” that process essentially encased the dinosaurs shortly after burial with a mask of clay no thicker than 1/100th of an inch, or about 0.3 millimeters. “This is a mask, a template, a clay layer so thin you could blow it away,” said senior author Paul Sereno, PhD, Professor of Organismal Biology and Anatomy at UChicago in a statement. “It was attracted to the outside of the carcass in a fluke event of preservation.”

Using hospital and micro-CT scans, thin sections, X-ray spectroscopy, clay analyses, and examination of the discovery site, a team of scientists were able to figure out how that “fluke event” played out. After death, the dinosaurs were briefly baked under the Sun before a flash flood submerged their carcasses.

A thin biofilm then covered their fleshy surface and electrostatically pulled clay out of the wet sediment, forming a wafer-thin layer that would preserve them in three dimensions. The result is two unprecedented specimens that have already provided a glut of dinosaur firsts.

They say we know more about the surface of the Moon than we do about the bottom of the ocean, which is what made it so incredibly exciting when scientists decided to do what the rest of us are too chicken to, dive down to the seabed to get a look at what’s lurking there. The Japan “Ring Of Fire” Expedition explored some of the deepest parts of the ocean and documented nearly 30,000 organisms.

Want to see some of them? Of course you do: Watch video

Diving deep
The crewed submersibles dove down to the hadal zone between 6,939 to 9,775 meters (22,700 to 32,000 feet) below the sea in three Japanese subduction trenches called the Japan, Ryukyu, and Izu-Ogasawara trenches. It marked an unprecedented exploration of the ocean’s deepest zone that enabled them to observe some seriously weird deep-sea creatures in their natural habitats.

“This work represents one of the most detailed in-situ surveys of biodiversity and habitats in the hadal zone to date,” said Research Fellow at the Minderoo-UWA Deep-Sea Research Centre and study lead author Dr Denise Swanborn to IFLScience. “Historically, most of our knowledge came from stationary landers or trawl samples, which make it difficult to understand how organisms live in their natural habitats and what local influences determine where we find certain organisms.”

The Sentinel-2 satellite captured this image of Melissa's eye at peak intensity. 10m pixel resolution - one of the best satellite images ever captured of a hurricane of this intensity.

This satellite imagery of Melissa approaching Jamaica is jaw-dropping and sobering.

satlib.cira.colostate.edu/event/hurrican…

For many of us, climate change feels like a distant threat—damage that will happen in the future somewhere far away to people we know little about. A new Stanford University-led study reveals how virtual reality can close that distance, enabling users to explore faraway places, develop a sense of attachment to those places, and care more about how a warming world is wreaking havoc on people's lives.

The findings, published this week in Scientific Reports, show that VR experiences significantly reduce people's indifference to climate change-driven damages in faraway places compared to viewing static images. The findings demonstrate promise for bridging partisan gaps on the issue, and inspiring people to take constructive action, such as supporting pro-environment organizations and policies.

"Virtual reality can make faraway climate impacts feel immediate and personally relevant," said study lead author Monique Santoso, a Ph.D. student in communication at the Stanford School of Humanities and Sciences. "By helping people form emotional attachments to distant places, VR fosters constructive emotions that motivate engagement rather than paralyzing fear."

From indifference to action
The new study involved 163 Stanford students who were randomly assigned to experience one of nine U.S. locations, such as New York City, Des Moines, Miami, and Massachusetts' North Shore, either through VR or static images. Participants listened to a news story about climate change-driven flooding in that location while virtually flying through a realistic 3D version of it.

For more than a century, scientists have observed rhythmic waves of synchronized neuronal activity in the brain. Now, for the first time, researchers at Yale University have pinpointed where a specific type of this activity—known as gamma waves—originates and have linked it directly to behavior.

Through the development of a highly precise new method for measuring brain activity, the team overcame long-standing technical barriers that had prevented a clear understanding of how these oscillations contribute to information processing and behavioral control.

The COVID-19 mRNA-based vaccines that saved 2.5 million lives globally during the pandemic could help spark the immune system to fight cancer. This is the surprising takeaway of a new study that we and our colleagues published in the journal Nature.

While developing mRNA vaccines for patients with brain tumors in 2016, our team, led by pediatric oncologist Elias Sayour, discovered that mRNA can train immune systems to kill tumors — even if the mRNA is not related to cancer.

Based on this finding, we hypothesized that mRNA vaccines designed to target the SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes COVID-19 might also have antitumor effects.

So we looked at clinical outcomes for more than 1,000 late-stage melanoma and lung cancer patients treated with a type of immunotherapy called immune checkpoint inhibitors. This treatment is a common approach doctors use to train the immune system to kill cancer. It does this by blocking a protein that tumor cells make to turn off immune cells, enabling the immune system to continue killing cancer.

Remarkably, patients who received either the Pfizer or Moderna mRNA-based COVID-19 vaccine within 100 days of starting immunotherapy were more than twice as likely to be alive after three years compared with those who didn't receive either vaccine. Surprisingly, patients with tumors that don't typically respond well to immunotherapy also saw very strong benefits, with nearly fivefold improvement in three-year overall survival. This link between improved survival and receiving a COVID-19 mRNA vaccine remained strong even after we controlled for factors like disease severity and co-occurring conditions.

To understand the underlying mechanism, we turned to animal models. We found that COVID-19 mRNA vaccines act like an alarm, triggering the body's immune system to recognize and kill tumor cells and overcome the cancer's ability to turn off immune cells. When combined, vaccines and immune checkpoint inhibitors coordinate to unleash the full power of the immune system to kill cancer cells.

Fungal networks may be a promising alternative to tiny metal devices used in processing and storing digital memories and other computer data, according to a new study.

Mushrooms have long been recognized for their extreme resilience and unique properties. Their innate abilities make them perfect specimens for bioelectronics, an emerging field that, for next-gen computing, could help develop exciting new materials.

As one example, researchers from The Ohio State University recently discovered that common edible fungi, such as shiitake mushrooms, can be grown and trained to act as organic memristors, a type of data processor that can remember past electrical states.

Their findings showed that these shiitake-based devices not only demonstrated similar reproducible memory effects to semiconductor-based chips but could also be used to create other types of low-cost, environmentally friendly, brain-inspired computing components.

"Being able to develop microchips that mimic actual neural activity means you don't need a lot of power for standby or when the machine isn't being used," said John LaRocco, lead author of the study and a research scientist in psychiatry at Ohio State's College of Medicine. "That's something that can be a huge potential computational and economic advantage."

Fungal electronics aren't a new concept, but they have become ideal candidates for developing sustainable computing systems, said LaRocco. This is because they minimize electrical waste by being biodegradable and cheaper to fabricate than conventional memristors and semiconductors, which often require costly rare-earth minerals and high amounts of energy from data centers.

"Mycelium as a computing substrate has been explored before in less intuitive setups, but our work tries to push one of these memristive systems to its limits," he said.

SpaceX's next mission to the moon, and the next launch of its triple-booster Falcon Heavy rocket, has slipped to no earlier than July 2026.

Astrobotic's Griffin-1 lunar lander, carrying NASA and commercial payloads that include rovers from Astrobotic and Astrolab, will wait just a little longer before its planned excursion to the moon. The mission had previously targeted a launch at the end of 2025, but will apparently miss that deadline, according to an Astrobotic update posted on Oct. 24.

The mission will mark Astrobotic’s second attempt at a lunar landing after its Peregrine Mission One in January 2024 failed to reach the moon after experiencing a propellant leak shortly after launch. Griffin is undergoing payload integration and software testing at the Pennsylvania company's facility, where propulsion testing and avionics validations are currently underway.

Scientists have found that even before symptoms appear, these metabolic weaknesses can set the stage for conditions such as depression, bipolar disorder, and schizophrenia. The findings open the door to treatments that repair cellular function rather than simply adjusting neurotransmitters, marking a potential turning point in the prevention and management of psychiatric disorders worldwide.

A Global Vision for Psychiatric Discovery
In a recent Genomic Press interview featured in Genomic Psychiatry, Dr. Bruce M. Cohen discusses groundbreaking discoveries that are transforming how psychiatry understands and treats complex brain disorders. As the Robertson-Steele Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and Director of the Program for Neuropsychiatric Research at McLean Hospital, Dr. Cohen reflects on nearly fifty years of research and places his work within a growing body of evidence that is redefining approaches to mental health care worldwide.

Mitochondrial Mysteries Transform Treatment Paradigms
The interview details how Dr. Cohen’s team has identified fundamental disruptions in cellular energy metabolism that appear to underlie major psychiatric conditions. These discoveries offer major promise for developing targeted treatments that could be applied across diverse populations. His studies demonstrate that brain cells derived from people with schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and Alzheimer’s disease show intrinsic metabolic dysfunctions that may be corrected before illness symptoms develop.

This metabolic perspective represents a fundamental shift from the neurotransmitter-based theories that have dominated psychiatry for decades. Dr. Cohen emphasizes that the brain depends more than any other organ on precise energy generation and cell-to-cell communication. His findings suggest that stabilizing these essential processes could help prevent or reduce psychiatric symptoms in at-risk individuals around the world.

Dr. Cohen’s multidisciplinary research strategy integrates genomics, brain imaging, and cellular modeling to create a comprehensive view of mental illness. This unified framework is giving scientists new tools to better understand the biology of mood, psychotic, and cognitive disorders that affect people across cultures and continents.