Octopuses and other cephalopods are masters of camouflage, thanks largely to color-changing skin that can help them seemingly vanish into the background. Now, researchers report a big step towards being able to recreate their superpower.

A team led by UC San Diego was able to mass-produce a key pigment, xanthommatin, that occurs in the psychedelic skin of many cephalopods. Until now, xanthommatin has proven impractical to collect from animals or make in a lab.

The researchers technically didn't make the pigment. They bioengineered bacteria to make it, coaxing microbes to not only produce this rare substance, but to do so with unprecedented efficiency, yielding up to 1,000 times more xanthommatin than previous methods.

Easier access to xanthommatin could aid efforts to study cephalopod camouflage, potentially shedding new light on this wonder of nature – and offering clues to help us mimic it.

Beyond boosting humanity's quest for octopus powers, the new study also has implications for our growing grasp of microbial manufacturing. If bacteria can be similarly persuaded to produce other chemicals, it could lead to major upgrades from current industrial practices.

"We've developed a new technique that has sped up our capabilities to make a material, in this case xanthommatin, in a bacterium for the first time," says senior author Bradley Moore, a marine chemist with Scripps Oceanography and the University of California San Diego.

"This natural pigment is what gives an octopus or a squid its ability to camouflage – a fantastic superpower – and our achievement to advance production of this material is just the tip of the iceberg," Moore says.

You might think trees have been around for a long time, but sharks have been here even longer!

See how sharks have survived and thrived through all five of Earth’s mass extinction events in this week’s Surprising Science.

Researchers have designed a groundbreaking drug molecule capable of precisely eliminating TERRA, an RNA molecule that some cancer cells rely on to survive. Using a sophisticated method known as “RIBOTAC” technology, the new compound seeks out TERRA within cells and destroys it while leaving normal molecules untouched.

This advancement could open the door to a new generation of RNA-based cancer therapies that address the genetic causes of the disease rather than only managing its symptoms.

A team at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem has created this innovative molecule to specifically target and break down an RNA component connected to cancer development. The study, published in Advanced Sciences, was led by Dr. Raphael I. Benhamou, Elias Khaskia, and Dipak Dahatonde from the university’s Faculty of Medicine. Their research centers on TERRA, a molecule that helps maintain the protective ends of chromosomes, structures that safeguard DNA and support cellular stability.

When TERRA malfunctions, it can interfere with the normal process of cell aging and division. In some cancers, particularly aggressive types affecting the brain and bones, cancer cells exploit TERRA to continue growing and avoiding death.

“We’ve created a tool that acts like a guided missile for bad RNA,” said Dr. Benhamou. “It can find TERRA inside cancer cells and make it disappear — without harming healthy parts of the cell.”

How the RIBOTAC Works
The team built a small molecule using a technology called RIBOTAC, short for Ribonuclease-Targeting Chimera. This molecule can recognize a unique shape that TERRA folds into — known as a G-quadruplex — and then call in a natural cell enzyme, RNase L, to cut the RNA apart.

This is the first time scientists have been able to destroy TERRA so precisely. The molecule only targets TERRA and leaves other, similar RNAs untouched.

When tested in cancer cell lines, including HeLa and U2OS cells (which represent a hard-to-treat type of cancer), the treatment reduced TERRA levels and slowed cancer growth.

The discovery could lead to a new kind of medicine that fights cancer by going after RNA molecules — not just proteins, which most drugs target today.

“This is a new way of thinking about medicine,” said Benhamou. “Instead of focusing only on proteins, we’re now learning how to target the RNA that controls them. That could open the door to treating diseases we once thought were impossible to reach.”

You won't find visits to the dentist at the top of most people's lists of fun activities, but check-ups could be made easier by a gel that repairs and replaces damaged tooth enamel.

This is the work of an international team led by researchers at the University of Nottingham in the UK, and it has the potential to fill a gap in our extremely limited regenerative capabilities: We can't naturally regrow tooth enamel once it has decayed away, but replacing this protective covering on damaged teeth could help prevent tooth decay.

Like some previous attempts to regrow enamel, this new gel mimics how tooth enamel gets laid down in the first place. The new solution can fill in cracks in teeth, and be applied on top of bare, exposed dentine (the bone-like bulk of a tooth, below the enamel).

"When our material is applied to demineralized or eroded enamel, or exposed dentine, the material promotes the growth of crystals in an integrated and organized manner, recovering the architecture of our natural healthy enamel," says pharmaceutical scientist Abshar Hasan of the University of Nottingham in the UK.

When enamel grows for the first time, it does so via a scaffold made by natural proteins called amelogenin. Here, the researchers attempted to replicate that scaffolding using proteins called elastin-like recombinamers or ELRs.

There's an optimal strategy for winning multiple rounds of rock, paper, scissors: be as random and unpredictable as possible. Don't pay attention to what happened in the last round.

However, that's easier said than done.

To find out how brains make decisions in a competitive setting, we asked people to play 15,000 games of rock, paper, scissors while recording their brain activity.

Our results, now published in Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, found that those who were influenced by previous rounds really did tend to lose more often.

We also showed that people struggle to be truly random, and we can discern various biases and behaviors from their brain activity when they make decisions during a competition.

This balanced heat flow suggests its underground ocean could stay liquid for geological ages, supporting conditions for life. Scientists even used temperature data to estimate ice thickness, preparing the way for future missions to probe its mysterious depths.

Heat From Both Poles – A Game Changer
A study released today (November 7) in Science Advances, led by scientists from Oxford University, the Southwest Research Institute, and the Planetary Science Institute in Tucson, Arizona, has revealed the first clear evidence of strong heat flow at Enceladus’ north pole. This discovery overturns earlier beliefs that heat loss occurred only in the moon’s active south pole. The results show that Enceladus gives off far more heat than expected from a frozen, inactive world, reinforcing the idea that it has the energy needed to sustain life.

Enceladus is an exceptionally dynamic moon with a global, salty ocean beneath its icy surface. Scientists believe this subsurface ocean is the source of the moon’s heat. Because it contains liquid water, warmth, and essential chemicals (such as phosphorus and complex hydrocarbons), this hidden sea is considered one of the most promising environments in our solar system for life beyond Earth.

However, for life to persist, Enceladus’ ocean must stay stable, maintaining a balance between heat gained and heat lost. This equilibrium depends on tidal heating: Saturn’s immense gravity flexes the moon during each orbit, producing internal friction and heat. If the tidal energy weakens, the ocean could gradually freeze. If it becomes too strong, increased activity might disrupt the delicate conditions that allow the ocean to exist.

Finding a fingerprint on the casing of a fired bullet was once a nearly impossible task. But scientists have at last achieved a breakthrough.

Researchers at Maynooth University in Ireland have now shown they can recover human fingerprints from super-heated bullet cases.

Even better, the prints appear at the "highest level of detail", including pores and ridges.

The details could be sufficient to identify a shooter, although in experiments, the bullets weren't actually shot from a gun; they were heated in a furnace.

"The Holy Grail in forensic investigation has always been retrieving prints from fired ammunition casings," claims chemist Eithne Dempsey.

"Traditionally, the intense heat of firing destroys any biological residue. However, our technique has been able to reveal fingerprint ridges that would otherwise remain imperceptible."

Beauty standards have always evolved, but in today's social media age, they shift at lightning speed. From "clean girl" minimalism to the "quiet luxury" aesthetic, each new ideal promises perfection few can reach – fueling comparison and self-doubt.

It isn't just social media trends that fuel these feelings of inadequacy. Our brain also plays a role.

Neuroscience shows us the brain is hardwired to respond to beauty. Seeing an attractive face activates the brain's reward and social circuits – releasing the feel-good hormone dopamine. This hormone is also released when we happen to live up to a specific beauty standard, making this feel biologically gratifying.

But this wiring also makes us vulnerable. Over time, the brain adapts to these ideals, treating them as the new normal.

Our brains' natural ability to change (plasticity), once an evolutionary advantage, is now exploited by a digital world that continually reshapes how we see ourselves.

Understanding this science offers hope, however. If our perceptions can be trained, they can also be retrained – allowing us to reclaim control over what beauty means.

It’s almost become expected that many space telescopes and probes can have “extended missions”. Both Voyagers are still sending data back 40+ years after their 5-year primary mission ended. But figuring out what to do with those spacecraft after their primary mission takes some negotiation. One such craft that will reach its end-of-mission in 2030 is Euclid, which is currently on a mission to map the “dark universe” of dark energy and dark matter. According to a new paper from Luigi “Rolly” Bedin of the Astronomical Institute of Padova, which is available in pre-print form on arXiv, for its second act we could turn Euclid into the most powerful astrometric telescope ever made.

Currently calculations give Euclid an extended life of about 8 years, thanks to the additional fuel the craft has on board. That would more than double the 6-year original mission, which is already well underway. With that additional time, Dr. Bedin suggests Euclid do something completely outlandish - do the exact same thing that it did for the first six-year mission.

Why on Earth would we use Euclid to do the same thing that it had just spent most of its lifetime completing? Because getting a second data point would allow us to see what moved in those six years - an astronomical value called “proper motion”. This is a calculation of how closer objects (such as stars in the Milky Way) move against a background of further objects (like distant galaxies) over time. But the key is that, in order to calculate proper motion, you need a very long time between data points to ensure the motion is significant enough to be calculated. According to Dr. Bedin, about 6 years should do the trick for Euclid.

n a striking new view from space, the European Space Agency's Solar Orbiter has given scientists their first close-up glimpse of the sun's magnetic field near its south pole — and it is behaving in surprising ways.

The image above, a composite of eight days of observations taken in March when the spacecraft had its first clear view of the region, shows bright arcs sweeping around the pole — glowing traces left by magnetic structures drifting toward the sun's edge at unexpectedly high speeds. The findings reveal the sun's magnetic field is migrating toward its poles much faster than scientists predicted.

"To understand the sun's magnetic cycle, we still lack knowledge of what happens at the sun's poles," Sami Solanki, a director at the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research in Germany who co-authored the paper, said in a statement. "Solar Orbiter can now provide this missing piece of the puzzle."

For the first time ever, scientists have monitored the effects of microdosing with LSD at home as a treatment for major depressive disorder. Over the course of eight weeks, 19 people took regular tiny amounts of the psychedelic drug, resulting in a pronounced reduction in symptom severity that persisted for up to six months.

Over the past decade or so, numerous studies have highlighted the potential of psychedelic compounds like psilocybin to combat depression, though the exact mechanisms behind this effect are still being investigated. Recent years have also seen an explosion of interest in psychedelic microdosing, which involves taking tiny, “sub-perceptual” doses of mind-altering substances in the hopes of boosting creativity, improving mood, and even treating mental health disorders.

However, very little proper research into the safety or efficacy of microdosing has been conducted, and there’s a great deal of uncertainty over whether or not the practice has any benefits.

To provide some solid data, the authors of the new study gave LSD to a group of patients in New Zealand, and instructed them to take minuscule doses at home twice a week. “This is the first trial to investigate the effects of repeated microdoses of a psychedelic in a naturalistic setting as a treatment for depression,” they write in their paper.

“Patients in this trial experienced a pronounced, long-lasting reduction in depressive symptoms evident from two weeks after the commencement of microdosing until at least the end of the regimen. The reduction of symptoms continued at four weeks of treatment, which stabilised and lasted up to six months after the end of treatment,” explain the researchers.

Prior to starting treatment, participants had an average depression score of 23.7 on the Montgomery-Åsberg Depression Rating Scale (MADRS) – a clinically-verified measure of the severity of depressive symptoms. After eight weeks of microdosing, this had dropped to 9.59, representing a 59.52 percent reduction, while nine of the 19 patients were classified as in remission.

The authors also confirm that no major adverse events were reported during the trial, illustrating the safety of microdosing with LSD – although one participant did leave the study after experiencing anxiety. This research is also the first to assess the effects of repeated psychedelic doses on the function of the heart’s valves, with no issues observed.

Scientists have developed an entirely new kind of microchip that uses microwaves instead of conventional digital circuitry to perform operations.

The processor, which can perform faster than conventional CPUs, is the world's first fully functional microwave neural network (MNN) that can fit on a chip, scientists reported in a study published Aug. 14 in the journal Nature Electronics.

High-bandwidth applications, such as radar imaging, demand high-speed processing. Microwaves that operate in the analog spectrum can meet the processing needs of these applications, which is why scientists have pursued this new approach to computing.

A new discovery suggests gravitational fields can enable matter to become quantum entangled — and that's even if the concept of quantum gravity does not exist. The idea comes from two London-based physicists who are challenging the way we think about quantum fields and how classical gravity operates.

The search for quantum gravity is the next big step in physics, as researchers seek to unify the physics of the very small with that of the very large. Quantum mechanics explains the former while general relativity theory — which famously describes how gravity works — explains the latter. Both quantum physics and the theory of general relativity were products of the first quarter of the 20th century, but 100 years later, scientists are still none the wiser as to how the two can be unified. As it stands, the theories contradict one another.

More evidence has emerged to support the natural origin of comet 3I/Atlas. After several weeks of conspiracy theories, social media debates, and speculation on popular podcasts such as Joe Rogan's, this interstellar object is still a comet. The most recent confirmation came from an observatory in South Africa that detected the first radio signal from 3I/Atlas.

But how? A radio signal? That would have to confirm the object is technlogical in nature, wouldn't it? The thing is, this isn't a radio signal like a transmission emitted by a spacecraft. It's instead a radio frequency pattern detected by MeerKAT, a radio telescope composed of 64 antennas—each with a diameter of 13.5 meters—operated by the South African Radio Astronomy Observatory. And what did it detect? "OH absorption was detected on the 1665 MHz and 1667 MHz lines," according to the researchers.

What MeerKAT specifically detected were lines of radio absorption by hydroxyl radicals, that is, OH molecules, a pattern that would be consistent with typical comet activity. The lines appear as absorption because 3I/Atlas was very close to the sun and the observing geometry favors absorption over emission. This is the phenomenon explained in WIRED a few days ago when the controversy about non-gravitational acceleration arose: When comets reach their closest point to the sun, they sublimate ice into space and receive a greater amount of radiation. This also causes them to alter their trajectory.

The hydroxyl radical (OH) can absorb or emit radiation at specific frequencies (such as the 1665 and 1667 MHz lines) due to transitions in its energy levels. These OH spectral lines have been detected in nebulae, comets, and star-forming regions. OH helps astronomers map the star- and water-born regions of the universe because it can "glow" brightly at radio frequencies under certain conditions.

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If there is, or ever has been, life on Mars, the chances are it would exist in caves protected from the severe dust storms, extreme temperatures, and high radiation present on its surface. One place to focus our attention could be eight possible cave sites (called skylights) recently discovered by Chenyu Ding at Shenzhen University in China, and colleagues.

Cave discovery
In a paper published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, the team presents the first evidence of a new type of cave on the red planet, formed by water dissolving rock. Most Martian caves discovered so far have been lava tubes, but the study authors argue that they have identified the first documented karstic caves on Mars.

"These skylights are interpreted as the first known potential karstic caves on Mars, representing collapse entrances formed through the dissolution of water-soluble lithologies—defining a new cave-forming class distinct from all previously reported volcanic and tectonic skylights," wrote the researchers.

On Earth, karstic caves are typically formed when water dissolves soluble rock such as limestone or gypsum, creating and enlarging underground cracks and fractures that grow large enough to become caves. The paper proposes a similar process on Mars, where ancient Martian water may have dissolved carbonate- and sulfate-rich rocks on the crust.

The caves are located in the Hebrus Valles, a northwestern region, and are eight pits that were mapped by previous Mars missions. They are deep and predominantly circular depressions, not impact craters, which typically have raised rims and ejected debris around them.

You might’ve heard we’re trying to talk to whales. It sounds crazy, but it’s not so far-fetched, as in recent years we’ve been getting closer and closer to cracking the code of their remarkably complex communications.

Now, a groundbreaking discovery has been made through eavesdropping on the conversations of sperm whales (Physeter macrocephalus). It turns out they use single and double vowel sounds in their vocalizations, sort of like how we might say “did” or “died”. Combining vowels like that is called a diphthong, and the existence of a comparative feature in whale communications has the potential to upend what we thought we knew about non-human intelligence.

"This discovery opens an entirely new chapter in our understanding of sperm whale communication,” said David Gruber, Founder and President of Project CETI, in a statement emailed to IFLScience. “By integrating linguistics and non-human communication, we are now aware that sperm whales have vowel- and diphthong-like structures in their voices, and that they evolved an entirely independent way of producing vowels.”

Studying "animal language"
Studying animal communications is very difficult for a human as, despite our best scientific efforts, we can’t help but approach it with the biases of Homo sapiens communication. A key moment for Project CETI – the organization that’s leading the charge in decoding whale vocalizations – was finding a way to move these biases to one side.

One such bias centers around timing, as our speech is created through vocal folds that vibrate much faster than the phonic lips used by cetaceans. So, if we’re going to get to grips with their "language" (we don't yet know if animals have language, FYI), we need to slow things down a bit.

Sperm whale vocalizations
Once that difference in timing was accounted for, the CETI scientists noticed something amazing: there were patterns so clear within sperm whale vocalizations that they could be transcribed using human letters (perhaps Dory’s attempt at speaking Whale wasn’t so ridiculous after all). These vowel-like sounds were clicks accented through modulation of their frequency with “a” and “i” sounds.

Those sounds could also be combined to create a diphthong-like vocal feature. That they were doing this in a structured and repeatable way suggests that these nuanced adjustments to their codas are crucial to getting their point across.

Thanks to the European Space Agency (ESA) spacecraft XMM-Newton, astronomers have seen a powerful explosion of plasma erupting from a distant star for the first time. We have seen (and felt) plenty of these coronal mass ejections (CMEs) from the sun, but even though we have long thought other stars expel such powerful outflows of superheated gas and magnetic field, astronomers had never before spotted them in any convincing way.

This first extra-solar CME, which erupted from a red dwarf star, wasn't any run-of-the-mill stellar blast either. This CME was dense enough and carried enough energy to strip away the atmosphere of any closely orbiting planet, with the ejected material traveling at 5.4 million miles per hour (2,400 kilometers per second). That speed, around 3,500 times as fast as a Lockheed Martin F-16 jet fighter, is something that is only observed in around 1 in 2,000 CMEs from our sun.

The atmosphere-stripping potential of this outburst means the observation of this CME could help astronomers better refine which extrasolar planets, or exoplanets, orbiting distant stars are capable of supporting life.