The team demonstrated that this magnetic component significantly contributes to the Faraday Effect, even accounting for up to 70% of the rotation in the infrared range. By proving that light can magnetically torque materials, the findings open unexpected pathways for advanced optical and magnetic technologies.

After more than a decade of design, construction, and international collaboration, JUNO has become the world's first next-generation, large-scale, high-precision neutrino detector to begin operation.

Early data show that the detector's key performance indicators fully meet or surpass design expectations, confirming that JUNO is ready to deliver frontier measurements in neutrino physics.

A detailed paper describing the detector performance has been submitted to Chinese Physics C and was posted on the arXiv preprint server. At a press conference, Prof. Wen Liangjian, physics analysis coordinator of the JUNO Collaboration, presented the experiment's first physics results.

Using data collected between August 26 and November 2, 2025—just 59 days of effective data after the start of operation—JUNO has already measured the so-called solar neutrino oscillation parameters, known as θ12 and Δm221, with a factor of 1.6 better precision than all previous experiments combined.

These parameters, originally determined using solar neutrinos, can also be precisely measured by reactor antineutrinos. Earlier results from the two approaches showed a mild 1.5-sigma discrepancy, sometimes called the solar neutrino tension, hinting at possible new physics.

The new JUNO measurement confirmed this difference, which can be proved or disproved by the JUNO experiment only using both solar and reactor neutrinos.

"Achieving such precision within only two months of operation shows that JUNO is performing exactly as designed," said Yifang Wang, JUNO project manager and spokesperson.

"With this level of accuracy, JUNO will soon determine the neutrino mass ordering, test the three-flavor oscillation framework, and search for new physics beyond it."

JUNO is a major international collaboration led by the Institute of High Energy Physics (IHEP) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. The project involves more than 700 scientists from 74 institutions across 17 countries and regions.

Check out our GITAI robot in action, autonomously assembling a 5-meter tower for future lunar and Martian habitats!

Building the future, one block at a time. 🏗️ 🌕 Open positions ➡ grnh.se/g9o3tnbr8us

“First light” for NASA’s ESCAPADE mission! 🚀 📸

These images, taken on Nov. 21, 2025, are ESCAPADE’s “first light,” or first images taken from space. Just about a week after launch, one of the two Mars-bound spacecraft took these images as part of the commissioning process, which checks that all the spacecraft’s instruments are functioning as expected.

The images, captured by the spacecraft's onboard VISIONS cameras, were taken about 550,062 miles (885,240 kilometers) from Earth. The view looks along the spacecraft's solar panel and out into space.

The left-side image shows the view from the visible-light sensor, while the right-side image was taken with the infrared sensor, showing which parts of the array are warmer and cooler. At Mars, the visible-light camera will attempt to capture Mars’ auroras, whereas the infrared sensor will capture the changing temperatures on the Martian surface as the Sun rises and sets.

Learn more: go.nasa.gov/4oeAlSc

Lettuce tell you something. 🥬

Growing food in space isn’t easy, and it’s key to NASA’s #Artemis missions, where astronauts will live and work on the Moon.

Data from NASA’s Open Science Data Repository show that lettuce grown aboard the Space Station contained up to 31% less calcium and 25% less magnesium than Earth lettuce, vital nutrients for bone and muscle health.

These insights help NASA scientists understand how to keep future Artemis astronauts strong and healthy on longer missions, while exploring ways to bioengineer crops that are more nutritious for space.

More: go.nasa.gov/3XbRIIx

Scientists suspect that repeated nightly drops in oxygen put long-term strain on neurons, potentially contributing to neurodegeneration. The results highlight how something as simple as improving sleep quality may offer powerful protection against conditions once thought largely inevitable with age.

Sleep Apnea Linked to Higher Parkinson’s Risk
New findings indicate that individuals who leave obstructive sleep apnea untreated face a greater likelihood of developing Parkinson’s disease. Improving sleep quality through the use of continuous positive airway pressure, or CPAP, can meaningfully lower this risk.

The work, published today (November 24) in JAMA Neurology, analyzed electronic health records from more than 11 million U.S. military veterans who received care through the Department of Veterans Affairs between 1999 and 2022.

Scientists from Oregon Health & Science University and the Portland VA Health Care System led the investigation.

Parkinson’s is a progressive neurological disorder that affects roughly 1 million people in the United States, and the odds of developing it gradually increase with age, particularly after 60.

Age-Related Rise in Parkinson’s Cases
The new research points to a long-term elevation in Parkinson’s risk among people whose sleep apnea goes untreated.

After accounting for factors such as obesity, age, and high blood pressure, investigators still identified a clear association between untreated sleep apnea and Parkinson’s. In this large population of veterans with sleep apnea, those who did not use CPAP had nearly twice the likelihood of developing Parkinson’s compared with individuals who used the therapy.

Tuesday [was] the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women and the beginning of 16 days of activism against gender-based violence. It's a global call to action by the United Nations to prevent and eliminate all forms of violence against women and girls.

This year's theme—"End digital violence against all women and girls"—aims to draw attention to the rapid rise of hate directed at women online. Sadly, this problem is all too common in today's political world.

Why do we need attention drawn to this issue in politics?

Technology-facilitated gender-based violence is a serious and growing threat to women and girls. It's defined by the UN as:

"Any act that is committed, assisted, aggravated, or amplified by the use of information communication technologies or other digital tools that results in or is likely to result in physical, sexual, psychological, social, political, or economic harm, or other infringements of rights and freedoms."

It includes hate speech, violent threats, cyber-harassment, doxxing, image and video-based abuse, astroturfing, gendered disinformation and defamation.

Silencing prominent women
Marginalized women and women with public-facing roles—especially politicians, journalists and activists—often bear the brunt of attacks, with the intent to silence and push them out of the public arena.

While popular assumptions about online misogynists view them as "bearded white dudes in a basement" ranting about women on their computers anonymously, some political leaders are also unfortunately spreading misogyny openly online.

What motivates leaders to spread gendered hate online?

Politicians who are most likely to use misogynistic rhetoric are those who seek to uphold a "masculinist strongman ideal," according to research by British scholar Nitasha Kaul. She explains how public figures like Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin and Narendra Modi have all used misogyny to assert their power.

By positioning women (and men who do not conform to dominant masculine norms) as inferior, strongmen are signaling their dominance to their followers and to other "strong" men.

When it's directed at women in the public eye, political misogyny serves to suppress the voices of political opponents and people with differing views, posing threats to freedom of expression and fundamental human rights.

American public policy scholar Suzanne Dovi explains how political misogyny unfolds through an evolving process, and includes three stages...

This month NASA celebrates an incredible milestone - 25 years of continuous human presence aboard the Space Station!

During this time, astronauts have shared their unique experiences of life in microgravity, inspiring us all. Learn more: nasa.gov/international-…

It's not every day that biologists announce an entirely new branch of life, and this one has been hiding under their noses for years.

It was discovered hiding in a lab sample of marine ciliates scientists had been tending to since collecting them from Croatian waters in 2011. But it wasn't until the ciliates suddenly died that this new, tiny creature, which scientists have named Solarion arienae, came into view.

"This organism allows us to look into a very ancient chapter of cellular evolution that we previously could reconstruct only indirectly," say protistologists Ivan Čepička and Marek Valt, from Charles University in the Czech Republic, lead authors of the study.

"The cells of Solarion are tiny and only slightly motile, and we overlooked them in the ciliate culture for several years… Given that we missed Solarion even in our long-term laboratory culture, it would probably go unnoticed in natural samples," the research team writes.

The microorganism's fascinating, sun-like form is rivaled only by what lies within.

The single-celled eukaryote has a membrane-bound nucleus full of DNA, just like each of our own cells, and, also like our cells, it has mitochondria – 'the powerhouse of the cell', where fat and carbohydrate molecules are converted into chemical energy.

The team demonstrated that Solarion does not fall within any of our existing categories for eukaryotes, and so this lonely little sun is sharing a newly-defined phylum with another bizarre protist, Meteora sporadica, which is further nested within a newly-established kingdom shared only with the distantly-related protists Provora and Hemimastigophora.

But its mitochondria are distinctly different from any others scientists have seen before. They still contain the genetic breadcrumbs of what may once have been an entirely separate being.

Mitochondria, scientists think, were once an organism all of their own, an ancient bacterium. But at some point in the evolutionary history of life on Earth, they took up residence inside the single-celled body of another organism.

We know this because of the remaining genetic code stored inside all mitochondria, which all come from the same ancient phylum.

Over time, these two parts became so inextricably linked that the line between self and other dissolved entirely. Inside most of your cells, there are still mitochondria, complete with their own set of (much abbreviated) DNA, without which you would not survive.

In most eukaryotes – animals, plants, fungi, seaweeds, and a plethora of single-celled friends – the mitochondria contain scant evidence of their primordial independence. But Solarion still carries within its microscopic body a genetic memento from that long-forgotten time: the gene secA, which was once part of the proto-mitochondria's molecular toolkit, involved in getting proteins across its membrane when it lived independently.

For the first time, this annual climate summit was held in Amazonia, a place at the frontline of climate change. The pivot from the two previous conferences in petrostates Azerbaijan and UAE to a base in the world's largest tropical forest (albeit in one of the world's largest oil-producing countries) was jarring.

As Amazonian researchers, and past and present residents of the city, we saw the potential for COP30 to move discussions further forward than its predecessors in two key ways.

First, and in contrast to many previous gatherings that have sidelined them—or suppressed them altogether—Indigenous and marginalized voices were impossible to ignore at COP30. They have helped shape media narratives and discourse in the blue zone, the venue that hosted events in hundreds of dedicated spaces for national and organizational bodies.

The Belém gathering saw the largest Indigenous participation in Cop history, with around 900 registered representatives. The Cúpula dos Povos, a parallel event hosted at the Universidade Federal do Pará, gave many more Indigenous peoples and local communities a platform to argue against the status quo of relative inaction.

Hosting COP30 in Belém broke down the physical travel barriers for many potential attendees from Indigenous peoples and local communities. The summit organizers went beyond the normal attempts at tokenism in engaging them in discussions.

The region's extensive river networks allowed many Indigenous peoples and local communities from across Amazonia to reach Belém by boat. They held a symbolic "people's flotilla" with over 500 people in 200 vessels, sailing to demand their voices be heard in calling for climate justice and an end to mining and large infrastructure projects affecting their territories.

Meanwhile, the disruptive influence of some Indigenous protesters and their allies in breaching security lines and temporarily obstructing access to the blue zone hopefully focused minds inside, in addition to garnering global headlines.

The second reason to be hopeful about COP30 was that the realities of climate and land use change are jarringly obvious in Amazonia. Belém's oppressive heat and humidity were evident even within the main blue zone arenas. Many delegates were visibly uncomfortable.

This catalyzed an official complaint from UN climate chief Simon Stiell about the climate conditions in the Cop venue, asking for "a clear delivery plan on how temperatures will be brought down within the next 24 hours." The parallels to the goals of the wider negotiation process were hard to miss.

The city's local climate became a protagonist in its own right. A huge thunderstorm during one afternoon flooded many roads and brought down trees across the city, causing power outages.

A recent study has shown that Belém is now experiencing more and more days of high "wet bulb" temperatures (which determine the comfort level of the atmosphere). Such temperatures can lead to deadly heat stress. Continued warming could make many parts of the tropics unlivable.

Although scientific research about consciousness has enjoyed a boom in the past two decades, one central question remains unanswered: What is the function of consciousness? Why did it evolve at all?

The answers to these questions are crucial to understanding why some species (such as our own) became conscious while others (such as oak trees) did not. Furthermore, observing the brains of birds shows that evolution can achieve similar functional solutions to realize consciousness despite different structures.

The working groups led by Professors Albert Newen and Onur Güntürkün at Ruhr University Bochum, Germany, report their findings in a current special issue of the journal Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences from November 13, 2025.

Purposes of pleasure and pain?
Our conscious experience makes up our lives, often through positive pleasure: I feel the warm sun on my skin, I hear the singing of birds, I enjoy the moment. Yet we also often experience pain: I feel my knee hurt from falling on the stairs, I suffer from always being pessimistic. Why have we, as living creatures, even developed a perception that can involve positive experiences as well as pain and even unbearable suffering?

Albert Newen and Carlos Montemayor categorize three types of consciousness, each with different functions: basic arousal, general alertness, and a reflexive (self-)consciousness.

"Evolutionarily, basic arousal developed first, with the base function of putting the body in a state of ALARM in life-threatening situations so that the organism can stay alive," explains Newen. "Pain is an extremely efficient means for perceiving damage to the body and to indicate the associated threat to its continued life. This often triggers a survival response, such as fleeing or freezing."

A second step in evolution is the development of general alertness. This allows us to focus on one item in a simultaneous flow of different information. When we see smoke while someone is speaking to us, we can only focus on the smoke and search for its source.

"This makes it possible to learn about new correlations: first the simple, causal correlation that smoke comes from fire and shows where a fire is located. But targeted alertness also lets us identify complex, scientific correlations," says Carlos Montemayor.

Humans and some animals then develop a reflexive (self-)consciousness. In its complex form, it means that we are able to reflect on ourselves as well as our past and future. We can form an image of ourselves and incorporate it into our actions and plans.

"Reflexive consciousness, in its simple forms, developed parallel to the two basic forms of consciousness," explains Newen. "In such cases, conscious experience focuses not on perceiving the environment, but rather on the conscious registration of aspects of oneself."

This includes the state of one's own body, as well as one's perception, sensations, thoughts, and actions. To use one simple example, recognizing oneself in the mirror is a form of reflexive consciousness.

Children develop this skill at 18 months, and some animals have been shown to do this as well, such as chimpanzees, dolphins, and magpies. Reflexive conscious experiences—as its core function—makes it possible for us to better integrate into society and coordinate with others.

In the early 1930s, Swiss astronomer Fritz Zwicky observed galaxies in space moving faster than their mass should allow, prompting him to infer the presence of some invisible scaffolding—dark matter—holding the galaxies together. Nearly 100 years later, NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope may have provided direct evidence of dark matter, allowing the invisible matter to be "seen" for the very first time.

The elusive nature of dark matter
Dark matter has remained largely a mystery since it was proposed so many years ago. Up to this point, scientists have only been able to indirectly observe dark matter through its effects on observable matter, such as its ability to generate enough gravitational force to hold galaxies together.

The reason dark matter can't be observed directly is that the particles that make up dark matter don't interact with electromagnetic force—meaning dark matter doesn't absorb, reflect or emit light.

Breakthrough observations from Fermi telescope
Using the latest data from the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope, Professor Tomonori Totani from the Department of Astronomy at the University of Tokyo believes he has finally detected the specific gamma rays predicted by the annihilation of theoretical dark matter particles.

Totani's study is published in the journal Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics.

"We detected gamma rays with a photon energy of 20 gigaelectronvolts (or 20 billion electronvolts, an extremely large amount of energy) extending in a halolike structure toward the center of the Milky Way galaxy. The gamma-ray emission component closely matches the shape expected from the dark matter halo," said Totani.

The observed energy spectrum, or range of gamma-ray emission intensities, matches the emission predicted from the annihilation of hypothetical WIMPs, with a mass approximately 500 times that of a proton. The frequency of WIMP annihilation estimated from the measured gamma-ray intensity also falls within the range of theoretical predictions.

Importantly, these gamma-ray measurements are not easily explained by other, more common astronomical phenomena or gamma-ray emissions. Therefore, Totani considers these data a strong indication of gamma-ray emission from dark matter, which has been sought for many years.

"If this is correct, to the extent of my knowledge, it would mark the first time humanity has 'seen' dark matter. And it turns out that dark matter is a new particle not included in the current standard model of particle physics. This signifies a major development in astronomy and physics," said Totani.

Next steps and scientific verification
While Totani is confident that his gamma-ray measurements are detecting dark matter particles, his results must be verified through independent analysis by other researchers. Even with this confirmation, scientists will want additional proof that the halolike radiation is indeed the result of dark matter annihilation rather than originating from some other astronomical phenomena.

Additional proof of WIMP collisions in other locations that harbor a high concentration of dark matter would bolster these initial results. Detecting the same energy gamma-ray emissions from dwarf galaxies within the Milky Way halo, for example, would support Totani's analysis.

"This may be achieved once more data are accumulated, and if so, it would provide even stronger evidence that the gamma rays originate from dark matter," said Totani.

Cryopreservation, the process of preserving biological tissues by cooling them to subzero temperatures, might sound like something out of science fiction. However, scientists have been developing this technology for nearly a century.

For most of that time, progress was limited—until 2023, when researchers at the University of Minnesota successfully transplanted a cryopreserved kidney into another rat. This achievement demonstrated the potential for using cryopreserved organs in future human transplants.

Preventing cracking in frozen organs
Cryopreserving larger organs poses a significant obstacle because the tissues are prone to cracking during rapid cooling. Avoiding these fractures is critical for maintaining organ integrity in human preservation and transplantation. A research team from the J. Mike Walker ’66 Department of Mechanical Engineering at Texas A&M University, led by Dr. Matthew Powell-Palm, has published a paper detailing a new cryopreservation technique that may prevent cracking in organs.

To preserve organs outside the body for longer periods, scientists use a process called vitrification. This method freezes tissue in a specialized solution, keeping it in a glass-like state that prevents damage from ice crystal formation. By modifying the composition of the vitrification solution, researchers can analyze how different properties influence the likelihood of cracking in an organ.

“In this study, we investigated different glass transition temperatures, which we believe play a dominant role in cracking,” said Powell-Palm, an assistant professor of mechanical engineering. “We learned that higher glass transition temperatures reduce the likelihood of cracking.”

Designing better biocompatible cryosolutions
Equipped with the knowledge that higher transition temperatures are less likely to cause cracks than lower temperatures, researchers can focus on creating aqueous vitrification solutions with higher glass transition temperatures to help avoid cracking.

“Cracking is only one part of the problem,” Powell-Palm said. “The solutions need to be biocompatible with the tissue as well.”

If you've never looked at a dog and wondered if there's "room for a second head on there", congratulations on not being Soviet scientist Vladimir Demikhov, a pioneer of organ transplantation who might be better remembered for his groundbreaking work in heart and lung transplants were it not for the "two-headed dog" experiments.

⭐️ This is Goal 5: Inspire Europe.

Decisions made during #CM25 will advance our Strategy 2040, which focuses on five goals to show how important space is for European citizens.

We aim to inspire future generations by making space accessible for everyone through education, cooperation, and missions that unite and innovate.

Find out more esa.int/About_Us/Minis…

Appearing first as a dot on the horizon, the remote Nini oil field on Europe's rugged North Sea slowly comes into view from a helicopter.

Used to extract fossil fuels, the field is now getting a second lease on life as a means of permanently storing planet-warming carbon dioxide beneath the seabed.

In a process that almost reverses oil extraction, chemical giant INEOS plans to inject liquefied CO2 deep down into depleted oil reservoirs, 1,800 meters (5,900 feet) beneath the seabed.

The Associated Press made a rare visit to the Siri platform, close to the unmanned Nini field, the final stage in INEOS' carbon capture and storage efforts, named Greensand Future.

When the project begins commercial operations next year, Greensand is expected to become the European Union's first fully-operational offshore CO2 storage site.

Environmentalists say carbon capture and storage, also known as CCS, has a role to play in dealing with climate change but should not be used as an excuse by industries to avoid cutting emissions.