Pseudomonas aeruginosa—an environmental bacteria that can cause devastating multidrug-resistant infections, particularly in people with underlying lung conditions—evolved rapidly and then spread globally over the last 200 years, probably driven by changes in human behavior, a new study has found.

People with conditions such as COPD (smoking-related lung damage), cystic fibrosis (CF), and non-CF bronchiectasis are particularly susceptible.

By mapping the data, the team was able to create phylogenetic trees—"family trees"—that show how the bacteria from the samples are related to each other. Remarkably, they found that almost seven in ten infections are caused by just 21 genetic clones, or "branches" of the family tree that have rapidly evolved (by acquiring new genes from neighboring bacteria) and then spread globally over the last 200 years.

This spread occurred most likely as a result of people beginning to live in densely-populated areas, where air pollution made our lungs more susceptible to infection and where there were more opportunities for infections to spread.

Getting to Proxima Centauri b will take a lot of new technologies, but there are increasingly exciting reasons to do so. Both public and private efforts have started seriously looking at ways to make it happen, but so far, there has been one significant roadblock to the journey—propulsion.

To solve that problem, Christopher Limbach, now a professor at the University of Michigan, is working on a novel type of beamed propulsion that utilizes both a particle beam and a laser to overcome that technology's biggest weakness.

According to their calculations, a 5g probe like the one that the Breakthrough Initiatives project is working on could be pushed up to 10% of the speed of light, allowing it to reach Proxima b in 43 years.

Alternatively, they also calculated that a much larger probe of around 1kg could reach the system in around 57 years. That would allow for a much more exciting payload, even if the probe would zoom through the Proxima Centauri system at a significant fraction of the speed of light.

If you want to live on Mars, watch your head; it's raining space rocks. Researchers studying seismic data from NASA's Mars Insight mission estimate that 280 to 360 meteorites strike the surface of Mars, making a new crataer. This new estimate is about five times larger than predicted by previous estimates that used orbital imagery. On average, an 8-meter crater is created once a day, and a 30-meter crater is created about once a month.

During about three years of recording time, InSight and SEIS detected 70 VF events. 59 of them had good distance estimates, and according to the researchers, a handful of them were “higher quality B VF events,” meaning their signal-to-noise ratios are strong. “Although a non-impact origin cannot be definitively excluded for each VF event, we show that the VF class as a whole is plausibly caused by meteorite impacts,” the authors explain in their paper.

This led to a new estimate of Mars’s impact frequencies. The researchers say that between 280 and 360 meteoroids about the size of basketballs strike Mars each year and excavate craters greater than 8 meters (26 ft) in diameter. That’s almost one every day at the upper end. “This rate was about five times higher than the number estimated from orbital imagery alone. Aligned with orbital imagery, our findings demonstrate that seismology is an excellent tool for measuring impact rates,” Zenhäusern said in a press release.

Impact rates on different bodies in the Solar System are one way of understanding the age of their surfaces. Earth’s surface is young because the planet is so geologically active. Earth is also much easier to study in greater detail, for obvious reasons. But for bodies like the Moon and Mars, impact rates can tell us the ages of various surfaces, leading to a more thorough understanding of their history.

Orbital images and models based on preserved lunar craters have been the main tools used by planetary scientists to infer impact rates. The data from the Moon was used to extrapolate Mars’ impact rate. But there are problems with that method. Mars has more powerful gravity and is closer to the source of most meteors, the asteroid belt.

That means more meteoroids strike Mars than the Moon, and that had to be calculated somehow. Conversely, Mars has widespread dust storms that can obscure craters in orbital images, while the lunar surface is largely static. Mars also has different types of surface regions. In some regions, craters stand out; in others, they don’t. Trying to accurately account for that many differences when extrapolating impact rates from the Moon to Mars is challenging.

This work shows that seismometers can be a more reliable way to understand impact rates.

The remarkable Hermit's Castle, on the shore at Achmelvich near Lochinver in Sutherland.

This concrete folly was built in 1950 and, so the story goes, used for just one weekend before being abandoned.

Hermit's Castle can be described in many ways. It's been called Europe's smallest castle: though, despite the name, calling it a "castle" is stretching a point a little. A possibly more accurate description is that it is a remarkable concrete folly built in a Brutalist style that blends in a very surprising way into its rocky shoreside setting. What adds to its attraction is the slight air of mystery that surrounds it. The bare facts behind its presence in this location are fairly clear (though not universally agreed upon), but the important question about why it came to be built here seems to have gone unanswered.

Understanding how gold forms is crucial for knowing where to find it and how to extract it sustainably.

The deposit, now on land due to plate tectonic processes, originally formed in a submarine oceanic island arc about 183 million years ago. After analyzing the samples at McGill and the University of Alberta, they found seawater had mixed with ore fluids in the Earth's crust to form gold.

Clues from soured milk

The findings build on the McGill team's 2021 discovery that gold nanoparticles combine to form high-grade gold deposits, in a process akin to the way proteins clump together to form curds when milk sours.

Fossils of the earliest known hominins indicate that they walked upright on two legs but still spent a lot of time in trees. They don’t appear to have made stone tools and probably subsisted on a diet similar to that of chimpanzees and bonobos, our closest living relatives—which is to say mostly fruits, nuts, seeds, roots, flowers and leaves, along with insects and the occasional small mammal.

For the entire first half of our known history, hominins seem to have maintained this plant-based diet—they left no material trace of meat eating. It’s not until nearly three million years after our lineage got its start that there’s any evidence that they exploited large animals for food.

The oldest possible evidence of meat eating by hominins comes from Dikika, Ethiopia. There researchers found fragments of bone from goat- and cow-size mammals bearing marks suggestive of butchery that occurred at least 3.39 million years ago.

The butcher, in this case, was probably Australopithecus afarensis, the small-brained, small-bodied hominin species to which the famous Lucy fossil belongs—the only hominin species known from this time and place. Although no tools were discovered, based on the pattern of damage to the bones, the researchers concluded that A. afarensis used sharp-edged stones to strip flesh from the bones and struck the bones with blunt stones to access the marrow inside.

Although there are no known significant asteroid impact threats for the foreseeable future, hypothetical exercises provide valuable insights by exploring the risks, response options, and opportunities for collaboration posed by varying scenarios, from minor regional damage with little warning to potential global catastrophes predicted years or even decades in the future.

To help ensure humanity will have the time needed to evaluate and respond to a potentially hazardous asteroid or comet, NASA continues the development of its NEO Surveyor (Near-Earth Object Surveyor), an infrared space telescope designed specifically to expedite our ability to discover and characterize most of the potentially hazardous near-Earth objects many years before they could become an impact threat. The agency’s NEO Surveyor’s proposed launch date is set for June 2028.

Genetic and fragmented palaeoanthropological data suggest that Denisovans were once widely distributed across eastern Eurasia

Using zooarchaeology by mass spectrometry, we identify a new hominin rib specimen that dates to approximately 48–32 thousand years ago (layer 3). Shotgun proteomic analysis taxonomically assigns this specimen to the Denisovan lineage, extending their presence at Baishiya Karst Cave well into the Late Pleistocene.

The chaîne opératoire of carcass processing indicates that animal taxa were exploited for their meat, marrow and hides, while bone was also used as raw material for the production of tools. Our results shed light on the behaviour of Denisovans and their adaptations to the diverse and fluctuating environments of the late Middle and Late Pleistocene of eastern Eurasia.

Previous dating research indicated that the Indonesian island of Sulawesi is host to some of the oldest known rock art1,2,3. That work was based on solution uranium-series (U-series) analysis of calcite deposits overlying rock art in the limestone caves of Maros-Pangkep, South Sulawesi.

Here we use a novel application of this approach—laser-ablation U-series imaging—to re-date some of the earliest cave art in this karst area and to determine the age of stylistically similar motifs at other Maros-Pangkep sites.

Painted at least 51,200 years ago, this narrative composition, which depicts human-like figures interacting with a pig, is now the earliest known surviving example of representational art, and visual storytelling, in the world.

Our findings show that figurative portrayals of anthropomorphic figures and animals have a deeper origin in the history of modern human (Homo sapiens) image-making than recognized to date, as does their representation in composed scenes.

The ultimate blood substitute? The U.S. military is betting $46 million on it

Is mimicking the cells that carry hemoglobin the key to a blood substitute?

In 19th century New York City, Theodore Gaillard Thomas enjoyed an unusual level of fame for a gynecologist. The reason, oddly enough, was milk. Between 1873 and 1880, the daring idea of transfusing milk into the body as a substitute for blood was being tested across the United States. Thomas was the most outspoken advocate of the practice.

At the time, severe bleeding was often a death sentence. Blood transfusion was practiced, but it was something of a crapshoot. Medical science was still 3 decades removed from discovering blood types. Patients who received mismatched blood suffered discolored urine, itching, and a sometimes-fatal complication: hemolytic shock, wherein their own immune systems attacked the transfused cells.

Doctors in the U.S. were looking for something less risky to stabilize a hemorrhaging patient.

It was not to be: Saline solutions, still used today, were introduced the next decade as a much less dangerous, if imperfect, stopgap measure for emergency bleeding.

The need for blood substitutes, however, survives. And last year in a downtown Baltimore laboratory, a white rabbit embodied the latest hope.

The bunny huddled in a black metal cage, a catheter going straight into its carotid artery. Days before, a portion of its blood had been siphoned out and replaced with an experimental blood substitute called ErythroMer. It is decidedly not milk. Developed by Allan Doctor, a bespectacled 61-year-old physician-researcher at the University of Maryland (UMD) School of Medicine, and colleagues, ErythroMer is made from “recycled” human hemoglobin—the protein in red blood cells that carries oxygen from the lungs to the rest of the body—wrapped in a membrane to mimic a tiny cell. In the rabbit, the transfusion appeared to be working. The animal’s heart rate and blood pressure, displayed on a small monitor nearby, looked just fine

Silicosis is not a new occupational lung disease. For instance, it’s been reported since ancient times in stonemasons and miners who breathed in silica dust. In Australia, we’ve seen it for decades in construction and demolition workers.

However, until the past ten years or so, case numbers were low, both in Australia and internationally. That was until the introduction of engineered stone, a particularly potent source of silica dust. Some engineered stone contains 90% or more silica.

This led to an unprecedented re-emergence of the disease. An estimated one in four engineered stone workers has already developed silicosis as a result of their exposure. Many more will continue to be affected in the future.

While this ban is an incredible step forward and a win for public health, engineered stone is only part of the problem. We still see significant silica exposure in other industries, including construction, mining and tunnelling.

Ross Coulthart | Morning in America

Saving lives through surgery is no longer exclusive to humans. In a study published July 2 in the journal Current Biology, scientists detail how Florida carpenter ants, a common, brown species native to its namesake, selectively treat the wounded limbs of fellow nestmates—either by wound cleaning or amputation.

When experimentally testing the effectiveness of these "treatments," not only did they aid in recovery, but the research team found the ants' choice of care catered to the type of injury presented to them.

When we're talking about amputation behavior, this is literally the only case in which a sophisticated and systematic amputation of an individual by another member of its species occurs in the animal Kingdom.

Wondering what’s in your water? Now you can find out.

The Watershed Pollution Map reveals a huge range of potential pollution sources that can harm rivers, lakes, groundwater, coasts and more.

It shows: river, lake and groundwater health | bathing water health | damaged and protected waters | sewage dumping | chemical pollution | urban and road pollution | substances being discharged into waters | years of Environment Agency sampling results | intensive pig and chicken farms | intensity of cattle farming | landfills, waste sites and contaminated land | big industrial sites | political constituencies for 2024 and 2019 | flood risk | economic deprivation

Click on the zoom + – to find your area. Click the little eye icon beside each layer to show/hide data and scroll down the menu to view more datasets.

Parapsychology continues to exist as a research area marginally recognised as legitimate, on the fringes of the academic world. In the UK, the first Chair of Parapsychology has been founded at Edinburgh on the money left by the late Arthur Koestler, but we should remember that a Chair in Phrenology was once established at Glasgow University.

In parapsychology there are, and have always been, those who are dedicated to faking. In one sense one must respect them more than those who merely capitalise on their dedicated dishonesty. In the latter category there are those who have not to my knowledge ever published any fraudulent results, because they have never claimed any ‘positive’ results at all. Instead they have pursued the more comfortable course of retaining their formal integrity whilst celebrating the outrageous miracles of those like Eusapia Palladino who may have done their cheating for them.

These respectable, and some might say cunning, celebrants of other people’s cheating are not saints and martyrs; they have determined on a course wherein they have their cake and eat it. No one can accuse them of being cheats and liars: at worst they can be publicly accused of being naive, trusting souls, but perhaps their naivete is more apparent than real. But the saints of parapsychology have sacrificed much so that others may exploit their sacrifice. They have laid upon the altar their own personal integrity.

“It looked like nothing I’d ever seen before,” Ryan O’Shea told Newsday reporter Joye Brown. “It looked like it died angry… I kept thinking, ‘Boy, I hope its mother isn’t around.’” He was referring, of course, to the Montauk Monster, a house cat-sized… something that washed up on the shore of Ditch Plains, a popular Long Island surfing beach, in July of 2008. Most people who encountered the story—i.e., just about everyone—agreed it was an animal, though some floated the idea that it could be a marketing stunt for the Cartoon Network’s Cryptids Are Real. What no one could agree on was what kind of animal. Or even if it hit the beach dead or alive.

In the same Newsday piece, one Ryan Kelso reported seeing it up and about, roaming the dunes. “It looked about the size of an average fox, gray in color, eyes like a mole, hairless and was breathing quite heavily,” he told Brown.

Cue the conspiracy theorists. Montauk, they say, is a magnet for monsters thanks to both the top-secret Montauk Project, with its psychically-generated Bigfoot, and the village’s proximity to Plum Island, the one-time home of the Plum Island Animal Disease Center. There, the credulous maintain, government researchers not only invented Lyme disease and accidentally released it into Connecticut but also created hundreds of mutant hybrids as part of a cross-species breeding program.

Some of these creatures naturally escaped their cages and swam for the mainland, coming ashore in Montauk (as with 2008’s Montauk Monster and the lesser-known 2020 Montauk Globster) or possibly much further down the coast. There have been, some will recall, several East River Monsters along with the monster of Wolfe’s Pond Park in Prince’s Bay on Staten Island.

With the help of scientific models and up-to-date information, this poster attempts to artistically visualize together over 1100 known exoplanets of all the different types we have discovered so far, arranged by the amount of heat they receive from their stars, comparing their relative sizes and providing a window to how they might look like.

"Data for both exoplanet infographics was gathered from three public exoplanet databases, The Extrasolar Planet Encyclopaedia, NASA Exoplanet Archive and ExoKyoto,” Vargic explained. The colours of the gas giant exoplanets are based on the Sudarsky Scale. It takes into account the various chemicals and temperatures of planetary atmospheres. Vargic also used existing exoplanet illustrations as a source.

Such disingenuous behavior around cancer is not uncommon, nor are such claims unique.

Across TikTok, videos on cancer-curing diets garner billions of views.

For Amazon and other online retailers, cancer diet books are top sellers.

Online and off, snake-oil peddlers hawk miracle cancer cures not backed by any science, from alternative therapy to herbal remedies. For patients and loved ones, promises that something simple might cure or prevent cancer are understandably appealing. But far from being anticancer talismans, these purported treatments often come laden with insidious harm.

The notion that a particular diet, for example, can cause, or cure, cancer is ubiquitous but mistaken. Some foods are known carcinogens, such as alcohol and processed meat, with heavy consumption of the latter increasing absolute risk for colorectal cancer over a lifetime by approximately 1 percent. But there are no miracle diets that cure cancer, nor any particular diet responsible for it either.

A pair of hormones work in tandem to activate or suppress mosquitoes’ cravings for blood.

The findings reveal a possible mechanism for what drives mosquitoes’ attraction to people and other animals, which has remained a mystery until now. The discovery could provide new pesticide targets for preventing mosquito reproduction and disease transmission

The females of most mosquito species — including Aedes aegypti, the carrier of the viruses that cause dengue fever, yellow fever and zika — feed on animal blood for the development of their eggs. But once they’ve eaten a blood meal, their appetite for blood shuts down until after they lay their eggs.

We are closer than ever to finding aliens according to astrophysicist Adam Frank. He isn’t alone in his optimism. Over the last two decades, the tools used to search for extraterrestrials have been advancing mightily. Where we were once only monitoring with radio telescopes, we are now actively looking for bio and technosignatures on exoplanets. Find out why scientists think new technology may be a game changer in the hunt for life off Earth.