Researchers have discovered a new superhighway network to travel through the Solar System much faster than was previously possible. Such routes can drive comets and asteroids near Jupiter to Neptune's distance in under a decade and to 100 astronomical units in less than a century. They could be used to send spacecraft to the far reaches of our planetary system relatively fast, and to monitor and understand near-Earth objects that might collide with our planet.

In their paper, published in the Nov. 25 issue of Science Advances, the researchers observed the dynamical structure of these routes, forming a connected series of arches inside what's known as space manifolds that extend from the asteroid belt to Uranus and beyond. This newly discovered "celestial autobahn," or celestial highway, acts over several decades, as opposed to the hundreds of thousands or millions of years that usually characterize Solar System dynamics.

The most conspicuous arch structures are linked to Jupiter and the strong gravitational forces it exerts. The population of Jupiter-family comets (comets having orbital periods of 20 years) as well as small-size solar system bodies known as Centaurs, are controlled by such manifolds on unprecedented time scales. Some of these bodies will end up colliding with Jupiter or being ejected from the Solar System.

The last million years of Earth history have been characterized by frequent "glacial-interglacial cycles," large swings in climate that are linked to the growing and shrinking of massive, continent-spanning ice sheets. These cycles are triggered by subtle oscillations in Earth's orbit and rotation, but the orbital oscillations are too subtle to explain the large changes in climate.

"The cause of the ice ages is one of the great unsolved problems in the geosciences," said Daniel Sigman, the Dusenbury Professor of Geological and Geophysical Sciences. "Explaining this dominant climate phenomenon will improve our ability to predict future climate change."

In the 1970s, scientists discovered that the concentration of the atmospheric greenhouse gas carbon dioxide (CO₂) was about 30% lower during the ice ages. That prompted theories that the decrease in atmospheric CO₂ levels is a key ingredient in the glacial cycles, but the causes of the CO₂ change remained unknown. Some data suggested that, during ice ages, CO₂ was trapped in the deep ocean, but the reason for this was debated.

Marine researchers searching for a rare type of whale off the coast of Mexico have instead discovered a new species. The crew were able to record the never before seen animal in its natural habitat.

Beaker whales tend to stick to remote areas to avoid detection from predators

Researchers who were looking for a rare whale instead came across what they believe to be a new species of beaked whale, the National Oceanic and Atmosphere Administration (NOAA) reported on Wednesday.

The researchers didn't realize at first what they had found when they encountered a group of whales on November 17, just off the remote Mexican San Benito islands.

A publisher admitted it is urgently re-investigating research, following revelations that the PCR test it extols is defective, giving too many false-positives. The news comes as a new group plans a legal challenge over the checks.

Last week I reported on an astonishing review conducted by a group of senior scientists on a paper on which most Covid testing is based. It comprehensively debunked the science behind the Corman-Drosten paper, which described a protocol for using the polymerase chain reaction (PCR) technique to detect Covid, finding 10 fatal flaws, including major failings in the operating procedure and potential conflicts of interest among its authors.

The team behind the review demanded that Eurosurveillance, the journal that published the original research, retract it at once, as in their view it clearly failed to meet proper standards. This is of vital importance because the Corman-Drosten paper laid the path for mass PCR testing as the main source of data on the coronavirus. Almost all case numbers, infection rates and even deaths attributed to Covid are based on PCR tests (and all the attendant lockdowns and restrictions on people), and a huge amount of them use the method set out in the Corman-Drosten paper.

But now, the organisation Retraction Watch have reported that Eurosurveillance is considering retracting the paper. In a statement, Eurosurveillance said that they were "seeking further expert advice and discussing the current correspondence in detail. We will, according to our existing procedures, evaluate the claims and make a decision as soon as we have investigated in full.'' So no retraction yet, but it would not be surprising if one came soon.

A new survey of the sky in the X-ray spectrum has captured hitherto unseen, but incredibly large, structures hiding in plain sight in the Milky Way and beyond.

The structures in question are giant bubbles composed of X-rays, emanating from the galactic center and extending beyond, both above and below, the galactic plane.

They are so big that they dwarf the Fermi bubbles of gamma radiation humanity has already observed.

The findings were made by a team of astrophysicists led by Peter Predehl of the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics in Germany.

Elon Musk's ambitious Starship project seems to have suffered a setback when the SN8 prototype underwent a rapid unscheduled disassembly event while attempting to land after a high-altitude suborbital flight test in Texas.

The Starship serial number 8 (SN8) took off from the SpaceX site in Cameron County on Wednesday evening. At first everything went well, with the vehicle launching successfully, reaching the apogee and flipping over to begin its descent... only to end in a fiery crash as it just missed the landing pad.

You may not own a Virtual Reality (VR) headset, but someone you know probably does. VR is growing rapidly and it's going to change our world. Gaming, entertainment, education, and healthcare are just a few of the areas that will benefit from VR technology. However, its use in one less commonly discussed industry could put more at risk than we realize. VR sex platforms raise profound questions, forcing us to confront VR's potential to affect our minds for better and for worse.

VR affects us in powerful ways for three main reasons. Firstly, computer-generated visuals have become so convincing that it can be difficult to decipher whether you're looking at a real-world video recording or a computer-generated virtual creation [1]. Moreover, modern VR headsets have advanced to provide a consistent first-person view. Even while turning your head quickly, you rarely lose the illusion of a first-person perspective.

Secondly, the synchronization of other sensory forms like sound, smell, and most importantly, touch, with convincing visuals, amplifies the experience. In one groundbreaking experiment, the synchronized stroking of a rubber hand positioned parallel in space with a participant's real, hidden hand created the sensation that the rubber hand replaced their real hand [2], an insight that has since been expanded in countless ways in VR [3]. When sensory streams are paired, the brain knits them together, enhancing the illusion of the virtual experience.

Finally, VR translates your own movements to control analogous movements in virtual worlds. When you reach out in a virtual world using the motor pattern you use in everyday life, see a virtual arm extend from your body to touch a virtual object, and feel that object, you experience an embodiment illusion [4]. When the visual, tactile, and motor information are delivered and received close enough in time, your brain is fooled. The body you see is no longer a virtual body, but your body.

Last spring, a report from the world's largest neutrino telescope — a sprawling grid of detectors woven into Antarctica's ice — coincided with a blaze of hyperbolic headlines. They teased the possibility of an anti-universe where, from our point of view, time runs backward and the Big Bang represents an end, not a beginning. While it's too soon to start searching for our reverse-aging, other-handed doppelgängers, physicists are still wrestling with strange signals coming in from space that, to date, have defied easy explanation.

The signals were flagged by a NASA-funded collection of horn radio antennas held aloft over Antarctica by a giant balloon. The device, called the Antarctic Impulsive Transient Antenna (ANITA), picks up radio signals produced when high-energy particles coming from deep space encounter our atmosphere. Some waves skim the Earth before they hit ANITA, and others bounce off the ice. ANITA can tell the difference. During its first float in 2006 and again in 2014, the device picked up anomalous signals that resembled the kind that skim the Earth — but strangely, they seemed to be coming from the surface.

"That means they had to pass through a huge chunk of the Earth," says physicist Stephanie Wissel of Penn State, who works on the ANITA experiment.

At the heart of this mystery are neutrinos: ghostly, high-energy particles that can stream through almost any material unscathed but can produce the telltale radio pulses that ANITA catches. To further investigate the unusual signals, physicists turned to IceCube, a neutrino telescope made up of long strings of detectors buried near the South Pole. A neutrino passing through the ice may produce other particles that emit tiny flashes of light that IceCube's sensors can detect.

Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) scientists developed the world's first mobile genome sequence analyzer, a new iPhone app called iGenomics. By pairing an iPhone with a handheld DNA sequencer, users can create a mobile genetics laboratory, reminiscent of the "tricorder" featured in Star Trek. The iGenomics app runs entirely on the iOS device, reducing the need for laptops or large equipment in the field, which is useful for pandemic and ecology workers. Aspyn Palatnick programmed iGenomics in CSHL Adjunct Associate Professor Michael Schatz's laboratory, over a period of eight years, starting when he was a 14-year-old high school intern.

The iPhone app was developed to complement the tiny DNA sequencing devices being made by Oxford Nanopore. Palatnick, now a software engineer at Facebook, was already experienced at building iPhone apps when joining the Schatz laboratory. He and Schatz realized that:

As the sequencers continued to get even smaller, there were no technologies available to let you study that DNA on a mobile device. Most of the studying of DNA: aligning, analyzing, is done on large server clusters or high-end laptops.

Schatz recognized that scientists studying pandemics were "flying in suitcases full of Nanopores and laptops and other servers to do that analysis in the remote fields." iGenomics helps by making genome studies more portable, accessible, and affordable.

Researchers at Karolinska Institutet have succeeded in mapping the neuron types comprising the enteric nervous system in the intestine of mice. The study, which is published today in the scientific journal Nature Neuroscience, also describes how the different neurons form during fetal development, a process that follows different principles to brain neurons.

Our approximately seven-metre long gastrointestinal (GI) tract has its own functionally distinct neurons. Since this enteric nervous system (ENS) operates autonomously, it is sometimes referred to as the "second" or "abdominal" brain.

While the ENS controls muscle movement (peristalsis) in the gut and its fluid balance and blood flow, it also communicates with the immune system and microbiome. It therefore has a systemic affect on the body and is thought to be involved in a wide range of diseases. Some 30 percent of the population are estimated to live with permanent gastrointestinal complications.

Using single-cell sequencing, a method that enables scientists to functionally categorise and classify individual cells by determining which genes are active in them, researchers from Karolinska Institutet have now mapped the neurons that make up the mouse ENS.