Sadly, bits and pieces of plastic are turning up all over, including in the snow on Mount Everest! Researchers found plastic in snow scooped from a spot 8,440 meters (27,690 feet) high, near Everest's summit.

Members of the US House of Representatives voted (232-197) to impeach President Donald Trump for the second time in four years. Trump was charged with "incitement of insurrection" against the United States government on January 6, 2021. Read about the reason and what might happen next.

Joe Biden has won the 2020 election and will become the next US President, replacing Donald Trump.

On January 20th, 2021, Joseph Robinette Biden Jr. became America's 46th President just moments after Kamala D. Harris took her oath of office and became the first woman vice president.

On December 14, the first Americans got a vaccine designed to protect them from COVID-19. Health-care workers were put at the head of the line to get these shots. So were older adults living in care facilities. What about kids under age 16? They won't be getting the shots. At least not yet. However, plenty of doctors are anxious to see that change.

A cougar chases after a cub. The ending is amazing.

It sounds unbelievable, but scientists from Harvard University believe our entire universe may have been created in a lab by an advanced civilization with an immense knowledge of physics and how to control it.

This is a kit that lets you interface electronics with real roaches. Don't watch if you are easily grossed out. Gross to watch, but kind of cool at the same time. I don't like how they are treating the bugs.

Northern elephant seals are the true masters of the power nap.



These marine mammals swim at sea for months between brief breaks on shore. During those sea voyages, the seals snooze less than 20 minutes at a time. On average, they get a total of just two hours of shut-eye per day.



This extreme sleep schedule rivals African elephants for the least sleep seen among mammals.



Researchers shared the discovery in the April 21 Science.



Its important to map these extremes of [sleep behavior] across the animal kingdom, says Jessica Kendall-Bar. She studies marine mammals at the University of California, San Diego. Learning how much or how little sleep different animals get could help reveal why animals, including people, sleep at all.





Knowing how seals catch their zzzs also could guide efforts to protect places where they sleep.





Tracking seal sleep



Northern elephant seals (Mirounga angustirostris) spend most of the year in the Pacific Ocean. At sea, those animals hunt around the clock for fish, squid and other food.



The elephant seals, in turn, are hunted by sharks and killer whales. The seals are most vulnerable to such predators at the sea surface. So they come up for air only a couple minutes at a time between 10- to 30-minute dives.



People had known that these seals dive almost all the time when theyre out in the ocean. But it wasnt known if and how they sleep, notes Niels Rattenborg. He wasnt involved in the new study, but he has studied animal sleep. He works in Seewiesen, Germany, at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Intelligence.



Explainer: How to read brain activity



Kendall-Bars team wanted to find out if northern elephant seals really do sleep while diving. To do this, the researchers outfitted two northern elephant seals with special caps. Those caps recorded the animals brain waves, revealing when they were asleep. Motion sensors were also strapped onto the seals.



By looking at both brain-wave readings and motion data, the researchers could see how seals moved while asleep.



Kendall-Bars team took their two seals from Ao Nuevo State Park. Thats on the coast of California, north of Santa Cruz. The researchers then released the seals at another beach, one about 60 kilometers (37 miles) south of Ao Nuevo. To swim home, the seals had to cross the deep Monterey Canyon. The waters here are similar to those in the deep Pacific, where the seals swim during their months-long trips at sea.





Matching the seals brain-wave readings to their diving motions on this journey showed how northern elephant seals get their sleep on long voyages.



Deep-sea snoozes



The data revealed that when a northern elephant seal wants to sleep at sea, it first dives 60 to 100 meters (200 to 360 feet) below the surface. Then, it relaxes into a glide. As the seal nods off, it keeps holding itself upright for several minutes.



But then, the seal slips into a stage of rest known as REM sleep. During this sleep stage, the animals body becomes paralyzed. A slumbering seal now flips upside-down and drifts in a gentle spiral toward the seafloor.



A northern elephant seal can descend hundreds of meters (yards) deep during one of these naps. Thats far below the waters where sharks and killer whales normally prowl. When a seal wakes after a five- to 10-minute nap, it swims back to the surface. The whole routine takes about 20 minutes.



Explainer: Tagging through history



Now that Kendall-Bars team knew how seals moved during sleep, they could pick out naps in motion data from other seals who hadnt been outfitted with the special caps.



The researchers looked for naptime dive motions in tracking data on 334 other northern elephant seals. Those seals had been outfitted with tracking tags from 2004 to 2019. The seals movements revealed that while at sea these creatures conk out, on average, only around two hours per day.



But northern elephant seals arent short on sleep all the time. They snooze nearly 11 hours per day when they come on land to mate and molt. On the beach, they can catch up on sleep without worrying about getting eaten.



What the seals are doing [at the beach] might be something like what we do when we sleep in on the weekend, Rattenborg says.



Northern elephant seal naps are no joke. While on land, these animals can conk out for a solid 11 hours per day. But at sea, the seals catch only brief bits of sleep.Photo by Jessica Kendall-Bar, NMFS 23188



Extreme animal sleep



Northern elephant seals arent the only animals that sleep very little, at times, and then a whole lot. Rattenborgs group has found a similar sleep pattern in great frigate birds. They fly over the ocean. They can sleep while theyre flying, Rattenborg says. So on those trips, they sleep less than an hour a day for up to a week at a time, he says. Once back on land, they sleep over 12 hours a day.



Curiously, the sleep habits of northern elephant seals seem quite different from those of other marine mammals. When studied in the lab, many marine mammals sleep with just half their brain at a time. That half-awake state allows dolphins, fur seals and sea lions to constantly watch for predators. They literally sleep with one eye open.



Its pretty cool that elephant seals get by without one-sided sleep, Kendall-Bar says. Theyre shutting off both halves of their brain completely and leaving themselves vulnerable. Diving far below predators is what allows the seals to rest easy.



It seems the key to their enjoying such deep sleep is sleeping deep in the sea.

Neil makes a really good point about GMO (genetically modified foods) and how we have always had them. Just doing the natural section in a lab makes no difference. What do you think? You can answer in the comments section.

New technology is being used in a building in Mexico City that transforms pollutants into harmless chemicals. These buildings eat smog!

Incredible Felix Baumgartner jump from outer space.

Low power. Your device will power down unless plugged into a power outlet.



How many of us have gotten such a warning from one of our digital devices? Looks like its time to plug it in and recharge the batteries with electricity.



But what is electricity?



Electricity is the term we use to describe the energy of charged particles. Electricity might be stored, like in a battery. When you connect a battery to a light bulb, electricity flows. This happens because electrical charges (electrons) are free to carry energy from the battery through the bulb. Sometimes electricity is described as the flow of electrons between neighboring atoms.





Several terms help us describe electricity and its potential to do work.



Current refers to the flow of electric charges. That is, how much charge is moving per second. When people talk about electricity, theyre usually referring to electric current.



Currents are measured in units known as amperes, or amps, for short. A single ampere of current is about 6 quintillion electrons per second. (Thats the number 6 followed by 18 zeroes.) For many devices, its common to see currents that are only thousandths of an amp, or milliamps.





Voltage offers a gauge of how much electrical energy is available to power devices. Voltage could be stored in a battery or capacitor. You may have seen a 1.5-volt label on AA and AAA batteries. In the United States, every regular electrical outlet supplies 120 volts. Large appliances like refrigerators and some air conditioners are powered by a special outlet. That outlet supplies 220 volts.



Current and voltage are related. To understand how, imagine water flowing downhill in a river. Voltage is like the height of the hill. Current is like the moving water. A tall hill could cause more water to flow. In the same way, a bigger voltage can yield a bigger electrical current.



But the height of a hill isnt the only thing that affects how the water flows. A wide riverbank would allow lots of water to flow. But if the river is narrow, the path is restricted. Not as much water can get through. And if the river gets clogged with fallen trees, the water might even stop flowing. Just like many factors affect the waters ability to flow, there are several ways that the flow of electric current can be helped or resisted.



Resistance describes how easily current can flow. A bigger voltage can lead to a bigger current, but more resistance lowers that current. Resistance varies from material to material. It also depends on the condition of a material. For instance, dry skin has a high resistance. Electricity does not easily pass across it. Getting skin wet, however, drops the resistance to almost zero.



Its important to realize that any amount of resistance may be overwhelmed by too much current trying to pass through it. As an example, electricity will not flow through wood if you simply hold the electrode of a small battery against the trunk of a tree. But a powerful bolt of lightning packs enough energy to split the tree in half.



In this simple circuit, you can see how the circuit is a loop. When the orange copper switch is open (as shown), the loop is not complete and electricity will not flow. When it is closed, electricity can flow from the battery through the circuit to turn on the light bulb.haryigit/iStock/Getty Images Plus



Circuits describe the paths that electrical currents take. Think of a circuit as a loop. In order for electricity to flow, this loop must remain closed. That means it has no gaps. When you connect a light bulb to a battery, the electricity flows from one end of the battery, through a wire, to the light bulb. Then it flows back to the battery through another wire. The circuit will continue to light the bulb as long as the loop is closed. Cut the wire and theres no longer a circuit because the path is broken.



Conductors and insulators are types of materials that respond differently to electricity. Conductors have very low resistance, so they can easily transmit a current. Most metals are very good conductors. So is saltwater. (This is why its dangerous to go swimming during a lightning storm! The chemicals in a swimming pool and the salts on our bodies make the water an especially good conductor of electricity.)



Insulators, in contrast, strongly resist the flow of electricity through them. Most plastics are insulators. Thats why electrical cords are jacketed in a layer of plastic. Electricity will flow through the copper (metal) wire inside a power cord, but the plastic coating outside makes the cord safe for us to handle.



Electricity flows through the copper wires bundled inside a power cord. The plastic coating jackets the wires so that we can safely touch the cord.Jose A. Bernat Bacete/Moment/Getty Images Plus



Semiconductors are materials that are in between conductors and insulators. In semiconductors, the flow of electricity can be precisely controlled. That makes these materials useful for directing electrical current, like tiny traffic guards, inside electronics. Computer chips depend on the ability of semiconductors to interact in complex circuits. The most common semiconductor material is the element silicon. (Not to be confused with the silicone found in flexible ice cube trays and baking tools!)



Transformers, as their name suggests, are devices that transform electrical voltage. They can be found in the box-shaped plugs at the end of device chargers. Most of these transformers convert a wall outlets 120 volts into a much, much lower level. Why? Household outlets are primed to run high-power appliances such as lamps, toasters, vacuum cleaners or space heaters. But that voltage is far more than smartphones and computers can handle. So the transformer in a charge cord steps down the electricity to a safe level that can run your device without frying it. Each device has its own specific needs for how much voltage it can handle. Thats why its important to use the right charging cable for each electronic device.



Electricity can safely power our homes and our devices when used properly. Keep in mind, however, that even common household electricity can cause severe injury or death. Always tell an adult about any broken plugs or cracked electrical wires. Dont overload circuits by plugging in too many devices at once. Never use electricity near water. And make sure that a devices power is turned off when changing its batteries. Finally, follow all of the safety warnings that come with electrical devices. Its better to be safe than to risk injury or fire.

The residents ofNew Orleans can't seem to catcha break from natural disasters. Just over a year after being battered by Hurricane Ida,the beautiful city has been hit by a powerful tornado. The twister, which boasted wind speeds of 160 mph,made landfallshortly before 8:00pm local time on March 22, 2022.

It felt like magic. Joshua Vermillion was describing the first time he used artificial intelligence, or AI, to make an image.





Vermillion is an architect and designer who teaches at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. He creates artwork of otherworldly spaces. Before he started using AI to do this, Vermillion would make maybe 10 pieces in a year. Last year, though, he made around 150 works. I can just simply tell the computer what I want in plain English, he says. What a time to be alive!



Many other artists, though, arent so thrilled about AI-generated art. Katria Raden is an independent illustrator and author based in Belgrade, Serbia and Berlin, Germany. People used to hire her regularly to create art for marketing materials or to illustrate childrens books. Last year, almost no one reached out about these types of jobs. The rise of AI may help explain this. At times I think its a bad dream, she says. I feel scared and angry, but also pretty sad.




View this post on Instagram A post shared by Katria Raden (@katriaraden)
Katria Raden creates digital illustrations in her studio. When people create art, she says, our inspiration is colored through our personal lives, our emotions. She feels a sense of community and connection when she views human art. In contrast, bot art seems empty and meaningless to her.



Using AI to create an image is quick and easy. Popular image generators include Dall-E 3, Midjourney and Stable Diffusion. They are cheap or even free to use. They also pose threats to some artists jobs.



But the problems go deeper than that. To train an AI model to produce images, developers need to show it a huge number of example images. Such a library of examples is called a data set. OpenAI, the creator of Dall-E 3, has kept its training data secret. But the company Stability.AI, which makes Stable Diffusion, shared its data set. It contains 2.3 billion images tagged with text. Midjourney reportedly used this same training data.



These images were scraped from the internet. Data scraping automatically pulls files from webpages. Often, no one asks permission or checks what these files contain. Thousands of artists names and works have been found in the data set. Illegal or harmful images and peoples personal photos are also among those data.



Raden doesnt like the way AI image generators were trained or how theyre being used. It’s cheating and it’s basically fraud, she says. Many artists agree with her. Their rallying cry on social media is create, dont scrape.



Vermillion sees their point. But for him, the rise of AI tools has been mostly positive. At design workshops he runs, he always asks people how they use AI in their work. He recalls one participant saying, Sometimes I just need a creative partner that doesnt think like I do. AI, he feels, can play that role.



AI image generators are getting more powerful. Some can now produce video. And theyre easier than ever for more people to access. In the past, new forms of technology have led to new types of art. Can AI boost human creativity and storytelling? Or might it exploit and overshadow both?



Catching copycats



AI image generators are supposed to produce brand-new pictures that dont belong to anybody. Yet they can mimic or even reproduce images from their training data. In 2022, one of the most popular prompts on Stable Diffusion was a name: Greg Rutkowski. Hes a Polish artist who paints dramatic fantasy scenes, often with wizards and dragons. Stable Diffusion allowed people to make new images in his style.



Let’s learn about artificial intelligence



In the United States, copyright laws protect creators ownership of creative works, including art, books, movies and popular characters. Using or copying someone elses creative work without their permission isnt allowed. So Rutkowski and a group of artists filed a lawsuit claiming that AI companies violated their copyright. Many similar lawsuits are ongoing as well.



Reid Southen is an artist based in Detroit, Mich. He works on concept art for major movies, including The Hunger Games and Blue Beetle. His job is to design sets and illustrate key moments in a movie. Then the rest of the team works toward capturing that image on film.



Southen isnt involved in any lawsuit. But, he says, I do know that my work is in the [training] data set. And if youve ever uploaded a photo online, he says, there’s a good chance that your image may have ended up in one of these models or data sets.



That bothers him a lot.




One ‘videogame hedgehog,’ please



In experiments with Dall-E 3 (left) and Midjourney (right), the prompt videogame hedgehog led these bots to generate images of a very familiar character Sonic! Instead of inventing a new hedgehog character, the bots copied one theyd seen in their training data.





Gary Marcus and Reid Southen/Dall-E 3





Gary Marcus and Reid Southen/Midjourney






Once, many years ago, Southen says, he took a trip to the Comic-Con convention with friends. We had our car broken into and all our stuff stolen, he says. They had to drive more than two hours back home on a cold night with a broken window. Whats happening now with AI image generators feels similar to him. Its someone taking your stuff, he says. It feels wrong, and theres nothing you can really do about it.



Southen may feel powerless, but hes making his voice heard. He partnered with AI expert Gary Marcus to run some experiments in Midjourney and Dall-E 3.



They got these AI models to spit out copies of screenshots and characters from existing movies and video games. They used short, vague prompts. The single word screencap led to a variety of copyrighted content, says Southen. You get Spider-Man Elsa from Frozen video games, too. The pair described their findings in IEEE Spectrum in January 2024.



The goal of their work was to point out that AI image generators will easily reproduce copyrighted content. The user doesnt even have to ask directly for it.



How many of these characters do you recognize? Midjourney made these copyrighted characters in response to a one-word prompt, screencap. This prompt doesnt work the same way anymore. The company likely fixed the issue in response to this type of testing. Gary Marcus and Reid Southen/Midjourney



Rewriting laws



Midjourneys terms of service say that users may not use the tool to violate copyright. To Southen, putting this responsibility on users doesnt seem fair. His research shows that users may accidentally get copycat content without knowing.



As it stands, breaking this rule can get a users Midjourney account shut down. This penalty happened to Southen three times while generating screenshots for his research. Each time, he paid for a new account so he could continue testing.



AI image generators tend to exaggerate stereotypes



Southen says Midjourneys data set must contain the images it manages to copy. They don’t have permission to use that data. This is the same thing that angers Raden and many other artists. Before feeding her work to an AI model, Raden says, they should be required to ask me.



People are generally allowed to use others copyrighted work without asking if they arent directly making money from it. They can use it for inspiration, research or analysis. For example, art students often copy other painters in their classes. And search engines like Google display links to copyrighted material in their results.



J. Vermillion/Midjourney
Joshua Vermillion created this odd creature with Midjourney. Art, he believes, always requires a human touch and critical thinking. When people use AI to generate images, they should consider context, cultural awareness, ethics and empathy, he says.




AI companies have argued that training AI technology on copyrighted images is a similar type of use. They dont think they should have to ask permission or pay copyright owners. If the courts decide that they do, I think we will see a slowdown in training AI in the U.S., said Amir Ghavi, implying that such a change could hinder innovation and progress. Ghavi was speaking at a May 2024 conference at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge. Hes a lawyer who represents Stability.AI and many other AI companies.



Image-generating AI did not exist when copyright laws were written. So governments and courts will have to decide whos right and whos wrong here. Japans legal system has (for now) sided with the AI companies. In the United States, those legal battles are ongoing.



Its not just AI-generated images on trial. AI-generated articles, books, videos, voices and more are triggering controversy, too. During the summer of 2023, Hollywood screenwriters went on strike. They managed to get their industry to agree to a set of rules limiting how AI may be used in the creative-writing process.




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Do you have a science question? We can help!



Submit your question here, and we might answer it an upcoming issue of Science News Explores




Cloaks and poison



Until new laws and rules get written, some people are taking matters into their own hands to protect human-made artwork from AI copycats.



See all the entries from our Artificial Intelligence story collection



Ben Y. Zhao led a team of computer scientists who worked closely with artists to develop a tool called Glaze. It can protect individual artists against people who want to train a model to mimic them, says Zhao. He is a professor at the University of Chicago in Illinois. Artists feed their original images through the tool and get back glazed copies to post online.



Glaze is like a disguise that fools AI models. It confuses them when they try to train, explains Shawn Shan. Hes a PhD student who worked on the tool in Zhaos lab.



When image-generating AI is training, it sorts pictures into a many-dimensional map. Thats called a feature space. This map groups pictures with similar elements or styles closer together. The AI model later uses this map as a guide to generate new images.




Glaze



Glaze is like a disguise that artists can apply to digital images before posting them online. The image looks the same to people. But AI models see it as a different style. So the AI model cant learn to mimic the actual style. University of Chicago




Glaze tricks an AI model into placing an image in the wrong place on the map. It alters the pixels of an image so it looks almost exactly the same to a human. But to an AI model, it seems to have an entirely different style.



Glaze is free for artists. In its first year, says Zhao, it was downloaded 2.3 million times.



Glaze helps artists defend their unique styles. But it doesn’t do much to solve the bigger problem, he says. It doesnt stop AI companies from grabbing files without regard for ownership or copyright. So the team made another tool, called Nightshade.



Zhao describes it as a poison pill.




That pic is poison



Nightshade is like a poison pill, says Ben Y. Zhao. It mixes up an AI model. For example, it might make the model think that pictures of cars are actually cows. Once a model has consumed 100 or more poisoned car images (see results above), it draws cows when people ask for cars.University of Chicago




Nightshade doesnt just misplace things on an AI models feature map. It scrambles the map itself. For example, Nightshade alters images of cars to make them all seem (to an AI model) like one very specific cow. They still look like cars to people.



Once a model has seen enough of this, says Zhao, they will be convinced that a car really does have four legs and a tail and a big white head with a nose. Nightshade also makes dogs seem like cats, hats seem like cakes and so on. It mixes up styles as well as objects.



Zhao, Shan and their team discovered that adding just 100 poisoned images of a concept to a set of 10,000 normal examples can mess up the AI models training. And things got really wild when they poisoned hundreds of different concepts at once. In one test, they poisoned 250 different concepts with 100 altered images each.




Generating gibberish



When Nightshade poisons lots of different concepts at once, an AI model breaks down. In this example, the concepts of person, painting and seashell werent poisoned. Yet an AI model that had consumed 250 or more poisoned images of other things could no longer draw them. University of Chicago




This breaks down the structure of the AI model, Zhao says. Afterwards, even if you ask for a concept that wasnt poisoned, all you get is random gibberish, he says.



Raden already uses Glaze and is excited about Nightshade, which came out in February 2024. In the future, she says, I will use it on all of my pieces for sure.



Imagining a future for AI in art



Raden hopes that Nightshade will teach AI companies to ask permission before grabbing images. What if they take in poisoned data and their tool breaks? Serves them right, she says.



Katria Raden protected this and all her other digital images with Glaze. She plans to use Nightshade, too. Artists like her are having a tough time right now. But she believes human art eventually will win out over images generated using AI. We as humanity will get through this, she says. K. Raden


Zhao sees no value in AI generators of any kind. The only real impact he sees is that quality work has become harder to find. On the internet, in e-book stores, on sound streams, anywhere that there is content, it is now being filled with trash, he says. Why? Because it is so cheap to produce trash.



Southen worries that art will suffer from a loss of human talent. It just scares me, he says. If things keep going this way, brand-new artists who might have a lot of really awesome or important things to say are just not going to do it.



To him, the best way to fix the situation is to start over. Scrap the data set, he says. Kill the models.



But not everyone feels this way about AIs place in creative work. Some feel that creators will adjust and grow with AI just as they have with other new tech in the past. When photography was invented, some sketch artists and portrait painters lost work. But the new medium also led to new types of art. Vermillion notes that cameras freed up artists to try new forms of expression.



Southen doesnt buy this argument. Photographers didn’t steal from artists to make the technology work, he explains.



Vermilion accepts that there are serious issues with image-generation AI that need to be worked out. Hes glad artists are making their voices heard. We need to enter the fray, use the tools, experiment with them and be critical of them, he says.



Joshua Vermillion worked with Harpers Bazaar on a photo shoot that placed real models and clothing into AI-generated scenes.Joshua Vermillion/Mirko Tabaevi/Luka Ukropina/Ana Ostoji/Maja Mihajlovi



But in his experience, AI is already making possible new types of creative work. Vermillion worked with Harpers BAZAAR magazine to do a shoot with real models and clothing but AI-generated landscapes and settings. He says they needed to involve more people than usual in the project, not fewer. Everything I’ve worked on has not displaced any human labor, he says.



Vermillion is also excited about AIs potential to help build a metaverse of virtual-reality experiences. Hes experimenting with AI tools to fill in hidden parts of his flat images and turn them into spaces in virtual reality.





Which of these AI-generated places would you most want to visit? Architect Joshua Vermillion created these using Midjourney. Hes working on ways to turn such images into virtual-reality experiences.















J. Vermillion/Midjourney









J. Vermillion/Midjourney









J. Vermillion/Midjourney









J. Vermillion/Midjourney









J. Vermillion/Midjourney










He also appreciates that AI can stoke his imagination. I want to be surprised by the results, he says.



Many other artists are finding interesting ways to incorporate AI into their work. Sondra Perry, an artist based in New Jersey, uses AI-generated images and video. Agnieszka Pilat, a Polish-American artist based in San Francisco, Calif., works with robots to create art. She sees them as collaborators.



Artist Agnieszka Pilat (pictured) says that using AI to mimic human art got very boring already. She thinks this phase will pass. In the future, though, she imagines that robots might become artists. Her installation piece Heterobota, at the National Gallery of Victoria in Australia, involves robots that draw.A. Pilat


AI can help artists be more productive or make new types of art. It also opens up the world of visual expression to people who dont have art skills or who cant afford to hire artists. Are these benefits worth all the downsides? Thats up to us as a society to decide.



Some are already finding better ways to build AI models. The company Adobe released an AI tool called Firefly in 2023. Adobe made sure they had permission to use all the images in the data set they used for training. Firefly also applies labels to generated images noting that they are made by AI.



Explains Jingwan (Cynthia) Lu, a researcher at Adobe, the company realized it needed to create responsible AI. She spoke in May at the MIT conference.



To Raden, art is a way to connect with other humans and to share experiences. When she finds out an image was AI-generated, it feels similar to finding out an athlete cheated. I do not want to enjoy generated content, she says. I want art.

Athletes Peyton Manning and Serena Williams led their colleagues with endorsements of food and beverages that are unhealthful.

On January 13, 2021, the US House of Representatives voted to impeach former president Donald Trump for the second time. However, the verdict did not result in Mr. Trump'sconviction or removal from office. It will also not prevent the former US leaderfrom runningfor publicoffice again.Those measures canonly be takenif theUS Senate, which began its trial onFebruary 9, 2021,also votes in favor of the impeachment.Here is how we got here and what to expectnext.

Nuclear clocks could be the GOAT: Greatest of all timepieces. If physicists can build them, nuclear clocks would be a brand-new type. These clocks would keep time based on the physics of atoms hearts.



Some scientists believe the first of these could debut in a few years.



At the center of each atom is a nucleus. Thats where protons and neutrons are found. Clocks based on atomic nuclei could be 10 times as precise as todays most exact clocks.



Better clocks could improve technologies such as GPS navigation. But its not just about timekeeping, physicist Peter Thirolf said June 3. Nuclear clocks could allow new tests of fundamental ideas in physics. Thirolf works at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitt Mnchen in Germany. He spoke at an online meeting of the American Physical Society.





Currently, the most precise clocks are atomic clocks. They arent based on the nucleus. They tally time using the energy jumps of electrons. Electrons in atoms can carry only certain amounts of energy, in specific energy levels. To bump electrons in an atom from one energy level to another, the clocks atoms must be hit with a laser. And the lasers light must be just right.



Explainer: How lasers make optical molasses



Light is made up of electromagnetic waves. Frequency is the rate at which those waves pass by. Only light of a certain frequency will make the electrons jump. That frequency serves as a highly precise timekeeper. Imagine using the rate at which waves wash up on a beach to keep track of time. But in this case, theyre light waves.



Protons and neutrons within an atoms nucleus also occupy energy levels. Nuclear clocks would rely on jumps of those particles instead of electrons.



Adriana Plffy is a theoretical physicist. She works at Friedrich-Alexander-Universitt Erlangen-Nrnberg in Germany. An atoms nucleus isnt as affected by stray electric or magnetic fields as the atoms electrons are. She says that suggests nuclear clocks would be more stable and more accurate.



But theres a problem. Typical lasers cant access nuclear-energy levels. For most nuclei, that would require higher energy light than normal lasers can achieve.





How excited



Luckily, theres one lone exception. A freak-of-nature thing, Marianna Safronova said in a June 2 talk at the meeting. She is a theoretical physicist at the University of Delaware in Newark.



The exception is thorium. Thorium is a metallic chemical element. There is a variety of the element known as thorium-229. It has a pair of nuclear energy levels that are close together. The energy levels are so close, in fact, that a laser might be able to set off the jump.



Scientists recently pinpointed how much energy a thorium-229 nucleus needs to make the jump. This is a crucial step toward building a thorium nuclear clock.



Thirolf and his colleagues estimated the energy by measuring electrons that the nucleus emitted when it jumped between levels. The team described its findings in Nature two years ago.Another team took a different approach. It measured the energy of other jumps the thorium nucleus can make and subtracted them. Those researchers reported their findings in Physical Review Letters last year.



Both teams agree that thorium-229s nucleus takes about 8 electron volts to jump energy levels. This energy corresponds to the edge of lasers power. That suggests lasers might be able to prompt a jump.



Detectors (shown in this false-color image made by a scanning electron microscope) measured the light emitted when thorium-229 atoms jumped between energy levels. Those measurements allowed physicists to estimate the energy of the jump needed to make a nuclear clock.Matthus Krantz



Making the jump



Physicists now are aiming to trigger that jump with lasers.



Chuankun Zhang is a physicist at JILA, a research institute in Boulder, Colo. At the meeting, Zhang reported efforts to use a frequency comb. A frequency comb is a laser with an array of light frequencies. The comb will hopefully let Zhangs team spur the nucleus to jump. It also could let the team better measure the energy needed to make the jump. If its a success, Zhang said, we can directly build a nuclear-based optical clock from that.



Thirolfs team also is working with frequency combs. His team aims to create a working nuclear clock within the next five years.



Meanwhile, Plffy is looking into using whats called an electronic bridge. Rather than using a laser to hit an atoms nucleus directly, the laser would first excite the atoms electrons. Those excited electrons would then transfer energy to the nucleus. Plffy presented this idea at the meeting.



Test of time



Nuclear clocks could let researchers devise new tests of fundamental constants of nature. A fundamental constant is a number that never changes. At least we think it doesnt ever change. Tests with nuclear clocks would help scientists figure out if the numbers are in fact constant, or if they vary over time.



Nuclear clocks could also test a foundation of Einsteins gravity theory the equivalence principle. It states that two different objects in a vacuum should fall at the same rate.



This new type of clock might even aid in the search for dark matter. Dark matter is invisible. Its made of particles that scientists have yet to detect. Physicists think these particles account for most of the universes matter. If dark matter were to interact with a nuclear clock, the interaction could tweak the clocks ticking.

Scientists may have just found the longest gravitational waves yet.



Gravitational waves are ripples in the fabric of spacetime. Kicked up by massive objects, they roll through the universe like water waves on the surface of the ocean. The newfound gravitational waves are light-years long. That means it would take years for light to travel the distance of a single ripple.



Explainer: What are gravitational waves?



Whats more, these waves wash through the universe nonstop. They constantly jostle Earth and the rest of our galaxy.





Pairs of huge supermassive black holes are thought to trigger these waves. Those black-hole behemoths sit at the centers of galaxies. Scientists think that when two galaxies collide, their black holes pair up and orbit each other. This action could churn up those gravitational waves in spacetime.



Indeed, across the universe, galaxies often mingle and merge. As they do, scientists had suspected their supermassive black holes would orbit each other. In the process, these black holes would give off gravitational waves. In fact, they should pump out waves nonstop for millions of years. Many supermassive-black-hole pairs in the many merging galaxies across the cosmos would send out their spacetime ripples at once. This, scientists thought, should create a constant mishmash of very long gravitational waves.



Explainer: What are black holes?



On June 28, researchers shared the first clear evidence of such a background of gravitational waves. Those data came from several teams around the world.



Scientists must confirm that the newly spotted waves are real and that they do come from pairs of huge black holes. But if so, its miraculous, says Meg Urry. Shes an astrophysicist at Yale University. Thats in New Haven, Conn.



Confirming the new findings would offer the first proof that the biggest black holes in the cosmos can spiral into each other and merge. Its extremely interesting, Urry says. The reason? We have essentially no handle on what the most massive black holes are doing.



Catching a new kind of wave



Since 2015, scientists have spotted lots of gravitational waves. Some have come from smashups between neutron stars. Others have come from colliding black holes. But the black holes in those collisions were small, by cosmic standards. Most were less than 100 times the mass of our sun. Their smashups created blips of gravitational waves that detectors on Earth felt for mere fractions of a second.



Those supermassive black holes thought to cause the newfound gravitational waves are entirely different beasts. Each can have the mass of millions or billions of suns.



The Earth is just randomly bumping around on this sea of gravitational waves, says Maura McLaughlin. Shes an astrophysicist at West Virginia University in Morgantown.





Compared to the gravitational waves seen before, this is a very different sort of thing, says Daniel Holz. This astrophysicist works at the University of Chicago, in Illinois. He and others have used the LIGO detector to spot gravitational-wave blips from small black-hole smashups.



To find waves from supermassive black holes required a whole new technique.





Peering at pulsars



For this new research, scientists looked to objects called pulsars. Theyre spinning remnants of exploded stars. Like celestial lighthouses, pulsars emit beams of radio waves as they spin. Their beams sweep past Earth at regular intervals. Those flashing beams of radio waves are picked up, like the precise ticks of a clock, by telescopes on Earth.



Gravitational waves can stretch and squeeze the space between a pulsar and Earth. In that way, such ripples in spacetime could cause a pulsars ticks to reach Earth early or late. Scientists have now used this effect to search for the gravitational waves from supermassive black holes as they roll through space.



A project called NANOGrav has watched dozens of pulsars for 15 years. (NANOGrav is short for North American Nanohertz Observatory for Gravitational Waves.) The NANOGrav team now thinks it finally has evidence of gravitational waves from pairs of supermassive black holes. The team just shared its findings in Astrophysical Journal Letters.



Scientists searched for gravitational waves by watching dozens of spinning stars called pulsars. Here, each pulsar is shown as a blue dot against a gray illustration of our Milky Way galaxy. The yellow star (near center) shows where Earth sits in the Milky Way.NANOGrav


Its really invigorating stuff, says Michael Keith. Hes an astrophysicist at the University of Manchester in England. Hes also a member of the European Pulsar Timing Array, or EPTA.



The EPTA team spent an even longer time staring at pulsars about 25 years. We were starting to think maybe the signal is just so weak, well never ever find it, Keith says. But like NANOGrav, EPTA has now seen evidence for gravitational waves altering pulsar signals.



EPTAs results have been accepted in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics. The European group teamed up with researchers from the Indian Pulsar Timing Array to do the work. Teams from Australia and China have now shared evidence for gravitational waves from pairs of supermassive black holes, too.



Astronomers used a variety of radio telescopes to view pulsars in their hunt for gravitational waves. One of those telescopes was the Effelsberg radio telescope (shown) in Germany.Tacken, MPIfR


Its not over yet



Some scientists had thought that supermassive black holes in merging galaxies would never draw close enough to merge. In that case, they wouldnt give off gravitational waves like the ones scientists think they have now observed.



Its actually been a sore spot for our field for many years, Chiara Mingarelli says. Mingarelli is an astrophysicist on the NANOGrav team. Shes based at Yale University.



But if the new gravitational-wave signal is real, it seems to be stronger than expected. That suggests that supermassive black holes spiraling into each other are common. This, in turn, hints that mergers between such black holes also are common.



But none of the teams sharing new data say they have for sure detected gravitational waves from huge black-hole pairs. They just say theyve found strong evidence for this. Thats because each of their observations comes with some uncertainty. In the future, the separate teams plan to join forces. Combining their data may help confirm the detection.



Still, even if the waves are real, its possible they dont come from pairs of monster black holes. Such huge black holes appear to be the simplest explanation. Still, researchers cant rule out a more exotic one. For example, the ripples might have arisen from the fast expansion of the universe just after the Big Bang.



Learning more about supermassive black holes is key to understanding the galaxies that host them. So whatever the source of the potential new gravitational waves, their future study is bound to have ripple effects.

In 2022, an underwater volcano in the South Pacific island nation of Tonga made history. It spewed a plume of ash and water high enough to touch space. It also launched a tsunami as tall as the Statue of Liberty. Now, scientists find that it triggered lightning at the highest altitudes ever seen.



The eruption plume sparked lightning flashes that began 20 to 30 kilometers (about 12 to 19 miles) above sea level. Thats all the way up in the stratosphere even higher than most airplanes fly.





Researchers shared these findings on June 28. The work appeared in Geophysical Research Letters.



Lets learn about lightning



Lightning is most often born inside storm clouds. But lightning can also form inside a volcanos eruption plume. That plume is made of tiny bits of ash, gas and dust. When these tiny bits bump into each other, they make static electricity. Once enough static electricity builds up, lightning zips through the plume.



Alexa Van Eaton led a team that looked at how high the Tonga eruptions lightning was. Shes a volcano scientist at the U.S. Geological Surveys Cascades Volcano Observatory. Thats in Vancouver, Wash.



To estimate the lightnings height, Van Eatons team looked at a few different types of data. One was radio waves created by the lightning. They also examined satellite images of the eruption plume and infrared light from the flashes.



These data revealed the lightning started more than 20 kilometers (12 miles) above sea level. Lightning doesnt typically start that high. Air pressure at that height is usually too low to form lightning leaders. These are the channels of hot plasma that make up the lightning in thunderstorms.



Explainer: The volcano basics



The rising eruption plume may have increased the air pressure over the volcano, says Van Eaton. That might have been enough to create lightning leaders at strangely high altitudes.



In those eruption data, were seeing stuff that weve never seen before, says Jeff Lapierre. Hes a coauthor on the study. Hes also the principal lightning scientist at the Advanced Environmental Monitoring. Its a company based in Germantown, Md.



This eruption has completely changed the way we think of how natural events can change the atmosphere, Lapierre says. Its also changed the environment where we thought lightning could exist.

This is an incredible computer simulation of what actually happens in our body inside all of our 70 trillion cells based on the latest biology research. Simply amazing.

This person built a cooking making computer to test recipes for the most perfect cookie in the world.

A student has invented a stain-free shirt that repels just about any things thrown on it. I could really use one of these during lunch!

First improvement in bikes I've seen in a long while.

Watch this 20 year old guy, do a reverse- haircut. This seems intriguing huh?? I know you want to watch this, so just click!!

Last year saw brutal, record-breaking heat scorch much of the globe. Forecasts show that above-average temps are likely to hit most of the United States this summer, too. But one thing will be different in 2024: An online tool will be available that maps and rates the heats risk to health. It displays those risks using a convenient five-color scale.



Anyone in the United States can enter their zip code. Up will pop the current heat risk. It also will show air-quality levels and a seven-day, heat-risk forecast for your area, notes Mandy Cohen. So, you can plan your day and you can plan your week with your health in mind. Cohen directs the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, Ga. She unveiled this new HeatRisk tool at a news conference on April 22. 



Explainer: How heat kills



Extreme heat kills more than 1,200 people in the United States each year, CDC estimates. Thats more than hurricanes, floods and tornadoes combined, says Rick Spinrad. He heads the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). Heat-related illnesses are even more widespread. Last year alone, they led to almost 120,000 emergency room visits. Too-warm nights also make it hard to sleep, upping the risk of accidents, poor work performance and more.





The HeatRisk maps are based on temperature forecasts from NOAAs National Weather Service. They also include heat and health data from the CDC. As a package, they show where rising temperatures are likely to pose a threat to our health.



The maps rate risk on a scale that goes from pale green (for no risk) to deep magenta (for extreme risk). Those rankings are based on several factors. These include how unusual temps are for the time of year and how long an excess heat spell may already be. They also account for whether nights will offer a cool reprieve from the heat and whether conditions will likely be hot enough to impair health.



Users can zoom into the color-coded map and find local heat forecasts for the week. Another part of the site provides tips on how to spot signs of heat-related illness and how to stay safe. Theres even a Spanish-language version.



When it comes to heat, its never too early to prepare, Spinrad said.



As they prepare for another scorching summer, federal weather and health officials have released an online tool that forecasts the health impacts of that heat on people in the United States. It allows users to find the threats posed by heat in their local area. NOAA

Earths largest ecosystem is getting cooked. Every day for the last 13 months, average temps over most of the seas surface have been the highest for that date in recorded history.



Thats according to data gleaned by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA. Last year, scientists described the early stages of this as the first time Earths oceans became hot-tub hot.



And we’re currently outpacing last year, notes Robert West. Hes a meteorologist in Miami, Fla. He works for NOAA. And its not over, West adds. We’re continuing to set records, even now.



An El Nio has helped heat the seas. This climate event periodically develops when warmth spreads across surface waters in the tropical Pacific. El Nios emerge every few years. The latest started in late spring of 2023.



But natural climate cycles cant explain all the warming. Heat is being stored within the seas top 2 kilometers (1.3 miles). This stored heat has been growing for decades, notes Hosmay Lopez. Hes a NOAA oceanographer who works in Miami. And, he adds, the rate of warming in that upper ocean has been speeding up.



Why? Since 1971, the ocean has absorbed more than 90 percent of the excess heat that greenhouse gases have trapped in Earths atmosphere. Were talking about more than 380 zettajoules of heat. Thats a lot. Its about 1.5 million times as much energy as was released two years ago during the Hunga Tonga-Hunga Haapai volcanic eruption. Its also some 25 billion times as much energy as was released by the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima, Japan, in 1945.



Sending all that heat into the ocean has lots of impacts. Here are a few.




Soaring sea temps



Since the middle of March 2023, the average sea surface temperature outside the polar oceans (at latitudes from 60 N to 60 S) has broken the daily record every single day. NOAA collected those data from satellites, ships and buoys in the sea. Each temp was warmer than records set on that day, a year earlier.







A hyperactive Atlantic hurricane season?



Hurricanes feed on water vapor and heat coming off the ocean. Right now, the Atlantic is very hot. So expect a very active hurricane season.



On April 4, researchers at Colorado State University in Fort Collins released their 2024 outlook. The biggest hurricanes get names. The outlook forecasts 23 named storms for this upcoming season. Five will likely rank as at least a Category 3, it said. Such storms have minimum sustained winds of 179 to 208 kilometers per hour (111 to 129 miles per hour). It also put the chance of a major hurricane hitting the United States at 62 percent.



Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania issued their own outlook three weeks later. It predicts some 33 named storms for this season.



Most hurricanes form in a stretch of the Atlantic between the Caribbean Sea and West Africa. Sea-surface temps in this co-called main development region, or MDR, have been super high. Right now, theyre more than 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) above normal, NOAA data show.



Since 1981, there have been only 10 months for which the MDRs surface has been that warm, West says. Eight of those months not yet including April 2024 have occurred in the last year.



Explainer: El Nio and La Nia



La Nia is the counterpart to an El Nio. It develops where surface waters become relatively cool across much of the tropical Pacific. The likely emergence of a La Nia contributes to the new hurricane forecasts. Why? Winds over the Atlantic tend to tear apart developing hurricanes. These winds weaken during a La Nia. That makes hurricanes more likely to occur.



As of April 11, NOAA reported an 80 percent chance that La Nia will emerge by August to October. Thats peak hurricane season. 



It only takes one hurricane making landfall to make it an active season, the Colorado State report says.




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Corals are bleaching globally



Sweltering seas can imperil the worlds corals. These living structures support roughly one-fourth of all known marine species.



When stressed by heat, corals expel the vibrantly colored algae that live in their tissues. These photosynthetic houseguests normally provide them with food. But their departure lays bare the corals white skeletons. These are known as bleaching events. And they can be fatal to corals.



Since early 2023, coral bleaching has gone global. In fact, on April 15, NOAA announced that conditions formally qualify as a global coral bleaching event. Its only the fourth such event since mass bleaching was first observed in the 1980s.



This boulder star coral sits in the Caribbean waters off St. Croix in the U.S. Virgin Islands. It bleached white last year (middle panel) in response to 2023s extreme ocean heating. By March of this year, however, its photosynthetic algae had returned, allowing the coral to survive.NOAA



From February 2023 to April 2024, significant coral bleaching has been documented in both the Northern and Southern hemispheres of each major ocean basin,” noted Derek Manzello. Hes a NOAA coral-reef ecologist who works in College Park, Md.



How many corals die in this event is something we wont know until months or years after its over, says marine ecologist Carly Kenkel. She works at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. I can say that this is the worst bleaching that weve ever seen for the Caribbean. And its certainly looking like that for the Great Barrier Reef [off Australia] as well.



Antarctic sea ice reaches new lows



The Southern Ocean has absorbed almost as much heat from human-caused climate change as the Atlantic, Pacific and Indian Oceans combined. Thats partly because strong winds circulate over the Southern Ocean. They continuously draw cold, heat-sapping waters to its surface. The result of absorbing all that heat: Over the last year, Antarctic sea ice has fared poorly.



In a typical February, Antarctic sea ice dwindles to a yearly minimum. It had been bottoming out around 3 million square kilometers (1.2 million square miles). Thats according to the National Snow and Ice Data Center. Its in Boulder, Colo. This past February, that ice retreated even more to just 2 million square kilometers. That was a tie for the second-lowest annual minimum on record. Just five months before, the yearly maximum ice cover for the year there reached a new record low some 17 million square kilometers (6.6 million square miles).



Ocean warming and changes in air currents probably drove these lows, says Monica Ionita. It was too warm above the ice and too warm below, says this climatologist. She works at the Alfred Wegner Institute Helmholtz Center for Polar and Marine Research. Its in Bremerhaven, Germany.




Sea ice retreat



Antarctic sea ice coverage fluctuates by season, typically reaching its lowest extent in summer (February or March) and highest at the end of winter (in September). This past February saw the sea ice reach its second-lowest minimum, tying February 2022s record. Last Septembers maximum was a new record low.







Antarctic sea ice had been more or less stable since the 1980s. Around 2015, that all changed.



Suddenly, surface temps in the Southern Ocean began climbing. And now there have been three Antarctic summers during which sea ice hit record lows. Some researchers worry that these low Antarctic sea ice levels are a new normal.



And why do we care? As that ice melts, the extra water has to go somewhere. And that somewhere is eventually onto land, where it can swamp coastal communities across the globe.



The data would seem to indicate that a permanent shrinking in Antarctic sea ice is underway, Ionita says. But to be sure, it would help to have more than 40 years of satellite data on this.





On the other end of the planet, Arctic sea ice had been falling steadily. It had been dropping some 12 percent each decade. But in recent years, this sea ice has not set new record lows. That may be because the Arctic has already settled into its own new norm, Ionita speculates.



If a similar transition is underway in Antarctica, she notes, a decline in sea ice might temporarily stabilize there, too. Well have to see.



For now, scientists dont know when sea-surface temperatures will stop breaking records.



A La Nia might help cool the seas surface, Lopez says. However, the seas kept breaking temperature records during the La Nia that stretched from 2020 to 2023. What that shows, West says, is that even if Pacific waters near the equator cool, it doesn’t necessarily mean that you stop breaking records everywhere.

Ancient peoples fashioned many tools from bones. These included awls, needles and fish hooks. Two turkey leg bones with sharpened ends point to a more colorful use. Native Americans used them to make tattoos some 3,620 to 5,520 years ago. Thats the conclusion of a new study.



The sharpened turkey bones turned up at a dig site in Tennessee called Fernvale. Excavations in 1985 uncovered the bones in a mans burial pit.



These pigment-stained bones are the worlds oldest known tattooing tools, says Aaron Deter-Wolf. Hes an archaeologist with the Tennessee Division of Archaeology in Nashville. The find suggests that Native American tattoo traditions in eastern North America extend back at least 1,000 years earlier than previously thought.



The oldest known tattoos belong to tzi the Iceman. He lived around 5,250 years ago in Europe. But researchers have yet to find any of the tools used to make his tattoos.





Deter-Wolf was part of a team that studied the bones under a microscope. Tools used to create skin designs are tough to find and recognize, he says. But two turkey-leg bones showed distinctive damage on and near their tips. The pattern looks like the wear previously seen on experimental bone tattooing tools, Deter-Wolfs team says.



In that research, Christian Gates St-Pierre made tattooing tools out of deer bones. An anthropologist, he works at the University of Montreal in Quebec, Canada. Gates St-Pierre used his bone tools to tattoo lines in fresh slabs of pig skin. First, he coated the tips in a homemade ink of soot, water and wax. Then he made a series of punctures in the skin. Experimental tattooing left ink remnants several millimeters from the tools tips. The Fernvale tools showed the same pattern, only theirs are red and black pigment residues.



Other artifacts found in the same Fernvale grave suggest they may have been part of a tattoo kit. Two turkey wing bones display microscopic wear and pigment residues. Those likely resulted from applying pigment during tattooing, the scientists say. The grave also contained pigment-stained seashells. These may have held liquids into which tattooers dipped their tools.



Deter-Wolfs team described its new research in the June Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports.

They say that going to space changes you. The idea is that people get a new perspective from seeing our world from above. Its called the Overview Effect. But a new project offers clues to how spaceflight also changes our bodies. This Space Omics and Medical Atlas or SOMA has measured a broad range of effects.



Researchers have studied spaceflights effects on health since the dawn of the Space Age. Theyve looked into the effects of weightlessness, space radiation and other out-of-this-world conditions as people have rocketed into low-Earth orbit and sometimes spent months there.



Well-known problems include bone loss and an increased risk of cancer. But there have been signs of vision impairment and drops in certain types of brain tissue. It may weaken immunity and change the switches that turn on genes.



Whats not always been as clear is what might be changing at a molecular level. SOMA hoped to find out.




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The project’s new data come from short stays, such as travel into orbit via Axiom missions (Ax-1 and -2) and SpaceXs Inspiration4. Additional data came from some missions by NASA and the Japanese Space Agency.



SOMAs initial findings appear as a series of 30 papers. They came out June 11 in various Nature journals. And already, they make up the largest published database on aerospace medicine and space biology.



Professional astronauts working for government space agencies must undergo rigorous tests to screen for potential health problems. The same is not true for private space travelers. And thats why SOMAs data are so important. A major shift is underway in human spaceflight: the rise of commercial space tourism.



Astronaut Mark Kelly gives himself a flu shot in 2015 while taking part in NASAs Twins Study. While Mark remained on the ground, his twin Scott spent a year in space. By comparing how the health of each twin changed over that year, researchers investigated the impact of space travel on the body.NASA



Space lengthens DNA caps



Perhaps the most well-known long-term biomedical NASA study involved identical twins. Scott and Mark Kelly both trained as astronauts. Scott spent 340 days on the International Space Station. Afterward, researchers looked at how that affected his physiology, gene expression, immune system and mental reasoning. To better understand any changes, they compared these features to those in Mark, the twin who stayed on the ground.



One fascinating finding: Space travel lengthened Scott Kellys telomeres. These are short bits of repeating nucleic acids. Found at the ends of our DNA, they act sort of like the cap on a shoelace. They protect our strands of DNA. As cells divide, telomeres shorten. Its a change generally linked with aging.



So did Scotts stay in space make his body seem younger? No. In fact, the telomere change may increase his risk of cancer. 



Certain cancers protect telomere lengths or cause telomere elongation, explains Eliah Overbey. At the University of Austin in Texas, she studies the health effects of spaceflight. That’s part of why these cancers are tricky, she says. They’ll divide, divide, divide but their telomeres aren’t getting any shorter. Fortunately for Scott Kelly, once back on Earth, his telomeres shrank back to their preflight size.



Still, this experiment was limited by its tiny sample size: two men. NASA didn’t repeat these sorts of studies on their future crews, Overbey notes.



Mission commander Jared Isaacman, a tech entrepreneur, works alongside medical officer Hayley Arceneaux on Inspiration4, a private space mission. The two performed science experiments during their three days in space.Inspiration4/SpaceX



What SOMA found



Through SOMA, Overbey and her colleagues have now collected many types of molecular data. That includes telomere length. Other examples are immune responses and the bodys ability to repair DNA and manage stress.



Even a few days in space can trigger genetic changes, SOMAs data show. In fact, short-term changes differed little from ones seen during longer missions. 



As with Scott Kelly, telomeres of the Inspiration4 crew got longer during their jaunt. Even though they were only up there for three days, we were actually still able to see what was a pretty dramatic effect, Overbey says. Once they got back on the ground, though, their DNA-cap lengths went back to normal.



Many other molecular changes also followed patterns similar to those in the Twins Study. They seemed to shift during spaceflight regardless of its length. Then they largely went back to baseline once the travelers were back on Earth.



What do such data mean for an astronauts health? That isnt clear, especially when thinking about the long timescales of a Mars mission or a stay at a moon base. And the total number people going to space is still small. After all, each new private mission carries only a crew of four.



Still, Overbey and her team intend SOMA to become a hub for health data on commercial and government crewed missions.





In an April 24 TED Talk, this Brown University student extols the wonders and promise of space tourism, from the first trip (which cost $20 million) to her vision for lowering that cost within 10 years to $100,000. Thats a bit more than twice as much as todays most expensive plane ticket.



Few health guidelines for space tourists



An increase in space tourism poses many ethical issues. To get into orbit, professional astronauts must undergo a lot of training and be in tip-top health. The U.S. government has no health requirements for space tourists.



Twenty years ago, Congress passed a temporary ban on new human-safety rules for commercial space travel. It didnt want to interfere too much as the private space industry was starting to develop. That ban was set to expire in 2012. Instead, it has been extended most recently to January 2025. And some bills, if passed, would push this date back for up to six more years.



This means that the Federal Aviation Administration, or FAA, which oversees launch licenses, cant make private astronauts undergo health tests before strapping into a rocket seat.



If you want to climb Mount Everest, you need to submit a health certificate, notes Dana Tulodziecki. That’s more than you currently officially need to do to go to space, says this philosopher. She works at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Ind.



The FAA suggests that private astronauts consult with their doctor before signing up to travel. Preferably, that doctor should be trained in spaceflight issues. But no one can ensure that happens. And even if a doctor said a tourist wasnt healthy enough to rocket off, that person could simply keep asking around until they found a doctor who gave them an okay.



These are obviously really complicated issues, Tulodziecki says. She thinks that before the ban ends, lawmakers should consider what laws might be needed to ensure the safety of tourists who want to buy a ticket to space.



This isnt an issue of theoretical risks that might play out one day in the distant future. Its already happening, she says of space tourism. So, its really something urgent.

LOS ANGELES, Calif.  Rice is a global dietary staple. Almost half the world eats it regularly  sometimes every day. But climate change has been making it harder to grow that grain. So Nandini Rastogi, 18, has just showed one way to make the plant more resilient to climate stress: She altered its DNA.



A rising senior, Nandini is homeschooled in Monroe Township, N.J. She showcased her work last month, here, at the Regeneron International Science and Engineering Fair (ISEF). This competition is a program of the Society for Science (which also publishes this magazine).



Stress including extreme hot and dry climates trigger certain biological processes in rice plants. These turn on physical changes in the plant that help it survive. In a drought, for instance, a plant may elongate its roots in search of more water. It might also close the tiny holes in its leaves to hold onto what water it does have.



Most of the time, those growth-promoting processes are turned off. Nandini decided to get rid of the genes that stopped these from turning on. That left the growth processes active, even when the plant wasnt stressed. The teen tweaked rice cells using a gene-editing tool called CRISPR. It works like a molecular scissors.



Nandini Rastogi used the gene scissors known as CRISPR to unleash a biological cascade of events in rice. Activating this cascade should make these plants better able to withstand dry and salty growing conditions ones expected in a steadily warming climate. Society for Science/Chris Ayers Photography



Stressing out rice



Nandini started by growing almost 600 rice seedlings at a local lab for grade-school students. Its called Yard Sciences.



The teen grew the plants in a mix of water and nutrients until they were 5 centimeters (about 2 inches) tall. Then she transferred some of the seedlings to a new mixture. It contained acids that would definitely trigger the plants stress response. Other seedlings received one of two chemicals to simulate a drought (polyethylene glycol or mannitol). Both dehydrate plants. Another rice group received salty water. Still another was grown at an extreme temperature a chilly 4 Celsius (39 Fahrenheit). Nandini grew one last group of seedlings without any of these stressors.



Nandini looked at whether certain genes were active. She began this at the start of the trial and looked again 12 hours, 24 hours and 48 hours later. Genes regulate when certain processes turn on in cells. Those, in turn, lead to a lot of changes in plants. These include ones that can make them better able to withstand tough growing conditions.



Explainer: How CRISPR works



Three genes became highly active in all experimental groups except the cold-stress condition. This could be because extreme cold and extreme hot could actually have their own separate pathways, Nandini says.



The teen then used CRISPR to cut out these three gatekeeping genes. Because of strict government regulations, she says, Im not actually allowed to perform gene edits on live plants. So she instead edited the genes of cells that she had removed from the rice plants.




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Searching for signs of resiliency



Nandini worked with around 450,000 plant cells. She viewed the cells with a special microscope. This let her confirm that the CRISPR scissors had gotten inside treated ones.



Every CRISPR scissors contained a protein. It glowed green when viewed through the microscope. The cells chloroplasts which convert sunlight into plant food appeared red. The two colors overlapped in the microscope images. This showed that the CRISPR tool had gone where it was supposed to. 



Then to see if it had snipped out the target genes, Nandini looked for signs of what should happen if the gatekeeping genes were not there: for a certain pathway to start up. That pathway would activate certain proteins or change other parts of the cells. These components are the ones that actually then go and make the rice more stress tolerant, Nandini explains.



And some of these downstream components did, indeed, become active.



That tells us that if we were to perform the edits on the live plant, there would be an increase in stress tolerance, Nandini says. Hopefully, this would allow the rice to grow better under tough conditions. She walks through the specific details of her work in a video at this site.



The teen is now seeking approval to experiment on living rice plants. In the future, she hopes to expand her work to other important crops, such as corn. Shed also like to test more stress factors and biological pathways.  



Nandini was among nearly 2,000 high school finalists, this year, who competed from almost 70 countries, regions and territories. Regeneron ISEF, which doled out more than $9 million in prizes at the event, has been run by Society for Science since it created the annual event in 1950.

No cell phones allowed here. The National Radio Quiet Zone, established in 1958 to protect the National Radio Astronomy Observatory at Green Bank, West Virginia, from harmful interference.

A runaway zebra threw a Tennessee community into chaos in early June. Less than a day after arriving as a new pet, the zebra broke free, triggering a weeklong search. The elusive animal, soon nicknamed Ed, was finally captured and returned to his owners on June 8, 2025.

I have a new question for you guys today. These “Would You Rather” questions will make you think about your choices. Try to answer as many as you can and post them in the comments. If you have your own “Would You Rather” question, you can add it in the comments for others to answer!

Every student, like you, has dreams and goals you want to achieve before you graduate.  Think about it for a moment: what is one thing you want to accomplish before you finish school? Do you want to read 100 books by the end of the school year? Or maybe learn coding to create your own […]

Did you know that some people have high IQs? IQ stands for Intelligence Quotient, and its a number that shows how smart someone is compared to others. For example, famous people like Albert Einstein and Stephen Hawking had exceptionally high IQs. Albert Einsteins IQ is thought to be between 160 and 180, while Stephen Hawkings […]

With its strong flavor and the dose of caffeine it offers, coffee is one of the most popular beverages. With denizens of all seven continents enjoying the drink regularly, it is easy to forget that coffee comes from a plant that needs very particular conditions to grow. With climate change affecting the global coffee supply, the decrease in supply is causing prices to increase. Let's find out more. The Coffee Belt Tightens Coffee beans are actually the seeds of the coffee plant. These evergreens can only grow in the Coffee Belt, a limited region around the equator that covers parts of Central...

Columbus, Ohio Bananas grow best in full sun. To protect their sensitive skins from damaging ultraviolet rays, banana peels produce a natural sunscreen. A teen has now peeled back the secrets of this natural sunblock. What shes found could lead to more eco-friendly sunscreens for all of us.



Taylor Maguire investigated how banana peels might lead to more eco-friendly sunscreens.T. Maguire



“My mom always raised me to pay attention to the ingredients in my cosmetics,” says Taylor Maguire, 15. She prefers “organic products over synthetic ones.” That led this sophomore at Garden City High School in New York to ask: “What’s in my sunscreen?



These products protect our skin against blistering solar rays. But their use comes at a price. Some of sunscreen’s chemicals may cause cancer, Taylor notes. And when these chemicals wash into our environment, they can hurt animals. For example, some mineral sunscreens interfere with the ability of freshwater animals to navigate. High enough exposures, she says, can kill some organisms.



So, Taylor looked for alternatives to mineral-based sunscreens. 



Bananas can naturally filter out much of the sun’s more damaging rays. Could their natural sunblock replace mineral sunscreens? Taylor investigated. And what she found out won her a spot here in May at the 2025 Regeneron International Science and Engineering Fair, or ISEF.



Extracting the goods



Bananas tend to grow in a “UV-intense environment,” Taylor says. UV short for ultraviolet is a band of light wavelengths. This high-energy light is invisible to the human eye. But it causes most of the sun’s damage to our skin. For a sunscreen to work, it must protect against certain UV rays.



Taylor had reasoned that bananas “must have their own mechanism.” After all, they grow near the equator. That’s where UV exposures are strongest.



Plants typically make flavonoids pigments that come in a rainbow of colors as a defense against the suns UV. Taylor wondered if banana flavonoids might work to protect our skin from UV, too.



She wasn’t sure exactly which bananas flavonoids to use. Taylor heated, froze and blended the outer layer of a banana peel. “That’s the part that’s exposed to the sunlight,” she explains. Any UV-filtering chemicals likely lie there.



Breaking open the cells released many of their chemicals. From this soup she made two extracts. One of these contained only components that would dissolve in water. That was her aqueous extract. The other contained only chemicals that wouldnt dissolve in water. That was her nonpolar extract. Nonpolar chemicals dissolve in oil rather than water.





Putting banana extracts to the test



A sunscreen must absorb UV light before it reaches your skin. And the more it absorbs, the better. To test how well each extract could do that, Taylor turned to a light-measuring tool. Called a spectrophotometer, it measures how much of any color of light a liquid absorbs.



The tool confirmed that both of her banana extracts absorbed UV light. But the nonpolar one went a step further. It absorbed the full range of UV wavelengths and especially the most damaging ones. They belong to a part of the UV spectrum called UV-A.



Would banana-based sunscreens also be safe for the environment? After all, Taylor says, typical drug-store sunscreens can harm aquatic life. To find out, she recruited planarians (Girardia tigrina) as her guinea pigs. Planarians are a type of flatworm that live in water. They’re often used in drug-safety studies, Taylor explains. A chemical that harms these worms might also pose a risk to other aquatic animals.



Taylor created two banana-extract solutions one nonpolar and one aqueous. She also created mineral-sunscreen solutions for comparison. Spectrophotometry allowed her to test wavelengths of light absorbed by each sample. She also used a microscope to observe planarians’ locomotion or movement when exposed to UV light.T. Maguire



The plan was to put planarians into dishes with different extracts and expose them to strong UV light for 10 minutes. If the worms movement slowed or stopped, she took that to mean the light damaged them. Her five test solutions included her two extracts, a drugstore sunscreen solution, plain water and glycerol.



Why glycerol? The nonpolar extract and sunscreen solution both contained this thick liquid. Taylor tested glycerol by itself to check if it caused problems on its own.



And it did. The nonpolar banana, the glycerol and the mineral sunscreen [appeared] fatal to the worms, she found. They stopped moving.



That was surprising, Taylor says. Glycerol is actually an ingredient found in a lot of sunscreens, she says. Its not known to hurt people. But shes pretty sure it killed her planarians.



Taylor used these peels to create her banana extracts.T. Maguire



In a later test, Taylor would notice that glycerol damaged planarians’ skin even with no UV exposure. Glycerol is used in many products. Taylors work now suggests it might pose risks to aquatic life.



But planarians survived just fine in the aqueous extract. And these outperformed the water-only group the only other ones left alive, the teen says.



Taylor confirmed this later when she stained those same planarians. She used a special dye. It stains damaged tissue so that it glows under her microscopes UV light. Basically, the more glow, the more damage there is.



The three glycerol-exposed groups exhibited the most damage. The aqueous extract group showed the least. Where damage did show up, Taylor says, it looked spotty. That probably means a worm “was not fully coated.”



The next step is figuring out exactly what chemical provided the aqueous extracts UV protection. Identifying that, she says, could allow for a new class of eco-friendly, banana-based sunscreens.



Regeneron ISEF is a program created and run by the Society of Science (which also publishes this magazine). Taylor was among 1,657 students from 62 nations or territories competing at the 75th annual ISEF. They shared in nearly $9 million in prizes.

Today, the effects of human-induced climate change and rising sea levels are widely accepted phenomena. However, that was not always the case. We look at three scientists who sparked the conversation about these environmental issues. Though they sadly passed away in 2024, these pioneers each expanded the field of climate science, leaving a legacy that continues to shape knowledge today. Dr. Warren Washingtons Barriers in Science In the early 1960s, atmospheric scientists observed the repercussions of climate change, but the research behind it was foundational. This concerned Warren...

Hi ho, friends! In my last post, I said you guys are called Munchkins, but I decided you can choose! I do not know how to make a poll (someone please teach me in the comments), so you will choose either Munchkins or Puggy Army in the comments, and whichever has the most votes by […]

Chimpanzees are well known for their intelligence, especially in using tools to hunt and gather food. Now, new research on chimps at Gombe Stream National Park in Tanzania, Africa, suggests these clever primates are not just tool users they may also be natural engineers.