Science & TechnologyS


Rose

How a humble weed became a superstar of biology

Rachel Ehrenberg
Knowable Magazine
Sun, 23 Nov 2025 21:52 UTC
Arabidopsis thaliana mustard family biology research genetics
© Shaw NielsenMajor discoveries in biology have come from studies of simple, easy-to-work-with organisms, including bacteria, yeast, fruit flies and zebra fish. Arabidopsis, a weed in the mustard family, joined the celebrity ranks as one of these “model organisms” in the 1980s.
Arabidopsis thaliana was always an unlikely candidate for the limelight. But 25 years ago, the diminutive thale cress launched the botanical world into the molecular era.

In November of 1956, after weeks of protests and calls for free elections in Hungary, Soviet tanks rolled into Budapest to crush the uprising. Well over a hundred thousand people fled the country seeking asylum. Among them was a young geneticist named George Rédei, who headed for the Austrian border with a small vial of seeds tucked in his pocket.

The seeds belonged to a spindly weed in the mustard family called Arabidopsis thaliana. Today, that weed is widely regarded as a botanical superstar. Arabidopsis has been the focus of some 100,000 research papers. Its seeds have flown around the Moon; it is the go-to plant for experiments on the International Space Station. And when the scientific community decided which plant should be the first to have its genome sequenced, Arabidopsis emerged as the winner. This year marks the 25th anniversary of when the world got its first glimpse at that genome, launching the much-studied plant toward even greater fame and scientific value.
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Volcano

This volcano that 'slept' for 100,000 years was never truly quiet

ETH Zurich
PHYS.ORG
Sun, 26 Apr 2026 00:59 UTC
volcanic eruption
© UnknownThe youngest eruption of the Methana volcano (brown) flowing into the sea
For more than 100,000 years, the Methana volcano in Greece appeared dormant. No lava, no explosions, no ash clouds. It appeared extinct, like many other volcanoes today. An international research team led by ETH Zurich has reconstructed a detailed, long-term history of the Methana volcano. Their work is published in the journal Science Advances, and their conclusion is striking: While Methana appeared silent at the surface, enormous amounts of magma were steadily accumulating deep within its magma chambers.

Crystals as witnesses of the past

To uncover the volcano's hidden activity, researchers focused on tiny minerals called zircon. These crystals form inside magma reservoirs in the Earth's crust, as the magma is cooling, and act like natural time capsules, preserving information about when and under what conditions they grew.

Olivier Bachmann, senior author and professor of Volcanology and Magmatic Petrology, ETH Zurich, explains:
"We can think of zircon crystals as tiny flight recorders. By dating more than 1,250 of them across 700,000 years of volcanic history, we've reconstructed the volcano's inner life with a precision and statistical power that simply wasn't possible a decade ago. What we learned is that volcanoes can 'breathe' underground for millennia without ever breaking the surface."
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Bug

Harvard built It. DARPA paid for it. Nobody governs it.

Tracy Beanz & Michelle Edwards
The Highwire
Thu, 23 Apr 2026 00:00 UTC
xenobots
Scientists at Harvard's Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering have created something that did not exist six weeks ago: a tiny living robot with a functional nervous system that it built itself. No plug. No battery. No remote control. The little creature swims, explores its environment, and responds to drugs the way a nervous system is supposed to respond — because it has one. They call it a neurobot. To understand what that means, a bit of context is necessary, because this creature has been decades in the making.

It started in 2020, when the same Wyss Institute team created xenobots — tiny spherical structures assembled from the embryonic skin cells of Xenopus laevis, the African clawed frog, a species that has been a laboratory workhorse for decades. Cut a small piece of tissue from a frog embryo, drop it in a dish, and something strange happens. The cells don't die. They heal themselves into a sphere, sprout hair-like projections called cilia across their surface, and start moving through water — with no scaffold, no genetic manipulation, and no instructions from anyone. Just cells doing what cells apparently do when removed from the body they were meant to build and then are left alone.
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Mars

Curiosity's curious find: NASA rover photographs surprising number of giant 'dragon scales' littered across Mars

Harry Baker
Live Science
Sat, 25 Apr 2026 16:47 UTC
mars curiosity rover dragon scale rock formations
© NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS/Kevin M. GillDozens of polygon-covered rocks, which look suspiciously like clumps of fossilized "scales" from a monstrously large reptile, surround the surface of Mars near Antofagasta in the Gale crater.
A section of Mars is covered in a surprising number of features that look like clumps of giant, fossilized reptile scales, new photos reveal. But don't be alarmed ‪ — ‬ the strange structures did not originate from monstrous aliens. Instead, they may have ties to ancient water.

NASA's Curiosity rover snapped the photos of the peculiar rocks as it was driving toward Antofagasta — a relatively young, 33-foot-wide (10 meters) impact crater located on the slopes of Mount Sharp (also called Aeolis Mons), which stands in the larger Gale crater, near Mars' equator.

A pair of black-and-white photos of the "scales" was released by NASA April 14, while a close-up color image of the rocks was shared online the next day by Kevin M. Gill, a software and spaceflight engineer at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) who specializes in image processing. (The pics were captured April 7 and April 13, respectively — also called Sol 4859 and Sol 4865 in Martian time.)
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Marijuana

Largest ever US study finds teen cannabis use linked to slower cognitive development


UC San Diego
Mon, 20 Apr 2026 21:56 UTC
marijuana pot roll joint brain study cognition
Across a range of skills — including memory, attention, language and processing speed — teens who used cannabis showed restricted growth over time compared to those who did not.
Study of more than 11,000 teens finds cannabis use tied to slower gains in memory, focus and thinking speed as well as worse memory over time during key years of brain development

Researchers from University of California San Diego School of Medicine have found that teenagers who begin using cannabis show slower gains in thinking and memory skills as they grow. The study, published on April 20, 2026 in Neuropsychopharmacology, analyzed data from more than 11,000 participants in the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) Study, the largest long-term study of brain development in U.S. youth.

"Adolescence is a critical time for brain development, and what we're seeing is that teens who start using cannabis aren't improving at the same rate as their peers," said Natasha Wade, PhD, assistant professor of psychiatry at UC San Diego School of Medicine and lead author of the study. "These differences may seem small at first, but they can add up in ways that affect learning, memory and everyday functioning."

Comment: What's available today is far stronger than your grandpa's pot. Cannabis affects more than just brain function:

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Mars

A giant 'shadow' has been creeping across Mars for 50 years — and scientists aren't sure why

Harry Baker
Source
Mon, 20 Apr 2026 14:56 UTC
Mars' Utopia Planitia
© ESA/DLR/FU BerlinA section of Mars' Utopia Planitia covered with dark volcanic materials is slowly expanding across the Red Planet's surface. And experts are not sure why.
A massive dark patch lurking within a giant Martian crater has been creeping across the Red Planet's surface since the feature was first spotted 50 years ago, new photos reveal — and scientists are unsure exactly why this is happening.

The shadowy structure is a patch of ground covered with ash and volcanic rocks, such as olivine and pyroxene, from ancient eruptions that occurred millions of years ago, before Mars was considered geologically dead. It is located in Utopia Planitia, a roughly 2,000-mile-wide (3,300 kilometers) plain in Mars' northern hemisphere.

NASA's Viking probes first photographed the blackened ground in 1976, shortly after arriving at the Red Planet. Since then, several photos have shown that this feature is expanding across the surrounding landscape; these include new images from the European Space Agency's (ESA) Mars Express orbiter, which were captured in 2024 and released April 15.
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Rose

New study reveals plants can detect the sound of rain


Bioengineer.com
Wed, 22 Apr 2026 20:16 UTC
rain fall seedlings
© ApisitWilajiit/Istock
The gentle patter of rain cascading against a window often brings a sense of calm and tranquility. Yet, for a seed nestled just beneath a falling raindrop, this soothing soundtrack takes on a very different significance. According to groundbreaking research conducted by engineers at MIT, the sound of rain may actually awaken dormant seeds, stimulating them to germinate more rapidly. This revelation challenges our previous notions about how seeds interact with their environment, uncovering an acoustic dimension to plant biology previously overlooked.

In a series of meticulously controlled laboratory experiments, the MIT team observed rice seeds submerged in shallow water — an environment that closely mimics their natural aquatic or waterlogged field conditions. They found that when exposed to the sounds generated by falling water droplets, these seeds transitioned from dormancy to active germination faster than their silent, unexposed counterparts. This acceleration in germination suggests that seeds are capable of sensing and responding to the acoustic vibrations produced by rain.
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HAL9000

Anthropic's 'Too Dangerous To Release' AI Model Was Accessed By Discord Group On Day One

Tyler Durden
ZeroHedge
Wed, 22 Apr 2026 15:21 UTC
Anthropic logo
Anthropic's 'Mythos' model is extraordinarily dangerous. The company itself warned that it could autonomously identify and exploit zero-day vulnerabilities in every major operating system, every major web browser, and every critical software library on Earth. And because of this offensive cybersecurity power, Anthropic refused to release Mythos publicly - and instead tightly restricted access through 'Project Glasswing' to roughly 50 carefully vetted organizations - 12 named launch partners plus more than 40 additional critical software and government entities, including the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA).

Yet within hours of the limited rollout announcement on April 7, 2026, a small group of unauthorized users in a private Discord server had already broken in.

The breach, reported by Bloomberg on Tuesday, reveals how fragile the safeguards around frontier AI models can be. According to the report, the group gained access using a surprisingly low-tech combination: legitimate credentials from a third-party contractor involved in Anthropic's evaluations, plus clever internet sleuthing to guess the hidden API endpoint by reverse-engineering Anthropic's internal naming conventions (patterns inferred from an earlier Mercor data leak).
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Brain

Researchers probe how melatonin promotes sleep

Lori Dajose
CalTech
Mon, 20 Apr 2026 21:12 UTC
zebrafish sleep research melatonin
© Blinkwinkel/AlamyZebrafish, like the adult seen here, seem to experience sleep cycles that are similar to REM sleep in humans
Melatonin is a naturally produced molecule that has long been suspected to play a role in healthy sleep, but it has been unclear how it does so. Now, Caltech researchers have discovered a mechanism through which melatonin promotes sleep, using zebrafish models in the laboratory.

The research was conducted in the lab of Professor of Biology David Prober and is described in a paper appearing in Current Biology on April 20.

Sleep is a vital and evolutionarily ancient behavioral state, yet there are still many open scientific questions about how sleep is regulated by the body, and there are few effective therapies for sleep disorders.

To understand the mechanisms by which sleep is regulated, the Prober lab is using an unusual lab animal: zebrafish. There are several advantages for using zebrafish as a sleep model, including that their brains are simpler than ours but still similar. They also follow a diurnal pattern of sleep — meaning, they sleep at night and are awake during the day, similar to humans, as opposed to nocturnal lab animals like mice.
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Galaxy

The universe is expanding 'too fast', nothing we know can explain it

Steve Watson
ZeroHedge
Sat, 18 Apr 2026 12:50 UTC
man and sky light
New ultra-precise measurements have confirmed the cosmos is expanding faster than models based on the early universe predict, while a separate study has dramatically shortened estimates of how long the universe itself will last.

Astronomers have long observed a mismatch in the universe's expansion rate depending on how it is measured. Local observations of nearby galaxies point to a faster rate, while data from the early universe, such as the cosmic microwave background, suggest a slower pace. This longstanding puzzle is known as the Hubble tension.

A major international collaboration, the H0 Distance Network (H0DN), has now produced one of the most accurate local measurements yet. The team combined decades of independent distance measurements — including observations of red giant stars, Type Ia supernovae, and different galaxy types — into a unified "Local Distance Network."

Their result: the Hubble constant stands at 73.50 ± 0.81 kilometers per second per megaparsec, with precision just over 1 percent.
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