Tiny gas jets generate solar wind

Minuscule bursts of superheated gas could form the origin of the solar wind — the stream of charged particles coming from the Sun’s surface. Pictures snapped by the European Space Agency’s Solar Orbiter spacecraft show short-lived ‘picoflares’ that appear to expel material into space. The gas jets are probably powered by disturbances in the magnetic field of the million-degree solar plasma. They were observed inside a coronal hole, a temporary gap in the Sun’s magnetic field. A multitude of these small flares could add up to be a substantial source of solar wind.

Device lets people talk using thoughts

Brain–computer interfaces have enabled two people with paralysis to communicate with unprecedented accuracy and speed. Brain-reading implants were combined with deep-learning algorithms to recognise patterns in brain activity and translate them into text or words spoken by a synthetic voice. The devices decode up to 78 words per minute — slower than the 160 words per minute of natural conversations, but faster than any previous attempts. Both studies’ participants can still engage their facial muscles, and their speech-related brain regions are intact, but this won’t always be the case.

How a Colour-Changing Hogfish Knows whether Its Skin Is White, Brown or Polka-Dotted

How do colour-changing animals know what colour they are? Hogfish (Lachnolaimus maximus) could shed light on the answer: scientists found that some of their skin cells contain a light-sensing protein that might help them to detect when they shift between white, reddish-brown and mottled. The cells sit directly below chromatophores — cells in which pigments can be moved around to create colours or patterns.

Impurity quashes superconductivity claim

LK-99, reportedly the first-ever room-temperature superconductor, is not one after all. Dozens of replication efforts have shown that impurities in the material were responsible for properties that were similar to those exhibited by superconductors — a sharp drop in electrical resistivity and levitation over a magnet.

Neuroscientists Re-create Pink Floyd Song from Listeners’ Brain Activity

Scientists can eavesdrop on the music people are listening to by analysing their brain waves. Artificial intelligence helped to reconstruct audio from brain activity patterns that were recorded in 29 people who already had electrode implants because they had epilepsy. The reconstructed version of the song that the participants were listening to — Pink Floyd’s 1979 song ‘Another Brick in the Wall, Part 1’ — sounds distorted and the lyrics are garbled, but it’s discernible if you know what to listen for. The results could help to create better ‘speech prosthetics’, which translate brain waves into speech.

How to image the brain without slicing

An innovative microscope allows scientists to peek at the brain’s long-range neuronal circuitry without having to reconstruct it from individual brain slices. The technique removes lipids to make the tissue transparent before it is embedded in a material that expands when water is added. At the heart of the method is a type of lens that is usually used to identify pixel-sized defects in flat-panel displays. The prototype microscope’s resolution is comparable to that of high-resolution imaging using standard confocal microscopy. It’s also fast: it can image an entire mouse brain in less than a day.

Dreams of new physics fade with latest muon magnetism result

The most precise measurement of an elementary particle’s magnetism suggests that the ‘standard model’ of physics could be right after all. A discrepancy between predicted and measured values of the magnetic moment of the muon — a heavier cousin of the electron — was seen as a possible signal of undiscovered subatomic particles. Physicists at the Muon g – 2 experiment at Fermilab have now doubled the precision of the previous best measurement, to an estimated error of just 201 parts per billion. And an alternative theoretical prediction is in agreement with this result, suggesting there might not be any discrepancy to explain.

The Mystery Genes That Are Keeping You Alive

Researchers have catalogued the human ‘unknome’, the one-fifth of human genes whose purpose remains mysterious. Many of them could have important functions. Out of 260 of these mystery genes, at least 60 seem to be essential to life. In experiments with fruit flies, which share many genes with humans, removing any one of these essential mystery genes caused the insects to die. Other genes seem to have important roles in reproduction, growth, movement and stress resilience.

Soil is home to more than half of all life

About 59% of all species on Earth live in soil, estimate researchers who reviewed global biodiversity data. This would make the ground the planet’s single most biodiverse habitat. The figure doubles an earlier estimate and could be even higher because so little is known about soil, the researchers suggest. It is home to 99% of Enchytraeidae worms, 90% of fungi, 86% of plants and more than 50% of bacteria — but only 3% of mammals live in it.

Why Insect Memories May Not Survive Metamorphosis

Fruit flies are unlikely to remember their larval life. Researchers imaged fruit flies’ brains during metamorphosis and found that the connections between neurons in a region that is essential for learning and memory are dramatically rewired. Some neurons die off; others leave the region and become integrated elsewhere. This overhaul is reflected in a similarly profound shift in behaviour, from crawling larvae to flying adults.

JWST spies more black holes than astronomers predicted

Over the past year, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has outstripped astronomers’ expectations in terms of the number of black holes it has observed. JWST captured roughly ten times as many faint black holes — which hail from a time when the Universe was about 1 billion to 1.5 billion years old — as expected. The discovery could help scientists to probe questions about how black holes formed in the early Universe, and how they grow into cosmic vacuums that devour everything around them.

Rippling Waves of Plasma May Cause Massive Stars to ‘Twinkle’

The turbulent cores of massive stars could cause fluctuations in their brightness. Unlike the twinkling of stars seen from Earth, this isn’t caused by atmospheric disturbances. Researchers hypothesise that gravity waves are behind the subtle changes in how some massive stars shine. Gravity waves (not to be confused with gravitational waves) are created when huge waves of plasma bubble out of the star’s core and crash into its perimeter.

Ancient whale could be heaviest animal ever

The blue whale (Balaenoptera musculus) is no longer indisputably the heaviest animal to have ever lived. Fossilised vertebrae, ribs and part of a pelvis from a Perucetus colossus, dating from 38 million years ago, suggest that it was a whale of a whale, even though it is thought to have looked more like a manatee. Most blue whales weigh around 100–150 tonnes; the researchers’ best guess is that P. colossus weighed around 180 tonnes.

First images from 'dark universe' telescope

Euclid, Europe's space telescope launched on 1 July, has returned its first sample images. In a patch of the sky that is one-quarter of the width and height of the full moon as seen from Earth, Euclid’s instruments have revealed countless stars and galaxies. Over the next six years, the telescope will build a 3D map of the cosmos that will include the element of time to show how galaxies evolved as the Universe matured. Scientists hope this will help them to gain clues about the nature of dark matter and dark energy.

Seeing with neutrinos: how astronomers are mapping the cosmos without light

A vast telescope buried beneath Antarctica, called IceCube, has captured the first neutrino map of our Galaxy. Neutrinos are the most abundant subatomic particles in the Universe, but they are difficult to detect because their interactions with matter are weak — they can travel through the entire Earth unimpeded. The nascent field of neutrino astronomy is now turning the particles into a tool to peer into places where light doesn’t reach, such as the dense mælstroms of matter swirling around supermassive black holes. Ultimately, neutrinos could help to unveil the mysterious source of high-energy cosmic rays.

AI search of Neanderthal proteins resurrects ‘extinct’ antibiotics

Artificial intelligence (AI) has helped scientists to resurrect Neanderthal peptides — protein subunits that could be an untapped resource of new antibiotics. An algorithm was trained to recognise sites on human proteins where they are cut into peptides. When the algorithm and other tools were applied to publicly available protein sequences of Neanderthals and Denisovans, it found several peptides that halted the growth of certain bacteria in mice.