Science & TechnologyS


Comet 2

Bright comet surprises astronomers


SpaceWeather.com
Fri, 12 Sep 2025 22:05 UTC
A bright comet has emerged from behind the sun, surprising astronomers. Introducing, Comet SWAN25B;

CometSwan25B
© SpaceFlux
"The comet is magnitude 7.5, bright enough to see with backyard telescopes," reports Ernesto Guido. "This is our confirmation image taken just a couple hours ago via the Spaceflux network."

The comet is named after the SWAN camera onboard the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO). Amateur astronomer Vladimir Bezugly noticed the comet in online images. SWAN is a special camera that maps hydrogen in the solar wind, which suggests this comet may be rich in the element.

Comment: For more information, see:

Why didn't Comet ISON melt in the Sun? How NASA and Official Science got it all wrong (again)

Earth Changes and the Human-Cosmic Connection

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Microscope 2

Ancient DNA from Mexico's mammoths reveals several unexpected and unexplained genetic mysteries

Jeanne Timmons
Live Science
Fri, 12 Sep 2025 18:21 UTC
columbian mammoth tooth genetic mystery
© Gerardo Peña, INAHA mammoth tooth unearthed in Mexico during construction of the Felipe Ángeles International Airport in Santa Lucía.
Columbian mammoths in Mexico are genetically different from those in the U.S. and Canada, surprise DNA study reveals.

For the first time in tropical latitudes, scientists have sequenced ancient DNA from the only mammoth endemic to North and Central America: the Columbian mammoth. The research revealed unexpected — and as yet unexplained — genetic differences that made these animals distinct from their northern counterparts.

Columbian mammoths (Mammuthus columbi) were approximately 13 feet (4 meters) tall and towered over their woolly mammoth (Mammuthus primigenius) relatives, with whom they co-existed and even interbred. Their fossils have been discovered in Canada, the U.S., Mexico and Central America. But information regarding how they evolved in the Americas remains unclear.

Construction beginning in 2019 of the Felipe Ángeles International Airport in Santa Lucía, Mexico, uncovered a vast wealth of Pleistocene (2.6 million to 11,700 years ago) fossils, including more than 100 Columbian mammoths.
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Arrow Down

Fake Science growing faster than real science: Dodgy papers doubling every 18 months

Jo Nova
joannenova.com.au
Tue, 09 Sep 2025 16:53 UTC
Fake Science
© joannenova.com.au
This is where the worship of "expert" peer review science gets us — a science crime syndicate

Once science stopped being about winning arguments and became just the-number-of-papers-someone-published, it became an empty shell. And once billions of dollars, depended on sacred 'experts', it was doomed.

Long gone are the days when papers were hardly ever retracted and pal review was "the big problem? Now, fake papers and fake editors are so rife they are their own specialist industry. Networks of brokers connect paper-mills up with authors and publishers and place batches of papers in journals with 'friendly editors'. When Richardson et al analyzed PLOS ONE, they found 33 editors who seemed to have an extraordinarily high rate of retractions. One in particular had approved 79 papers of which, 49 had already been retracted.

Given the vital importance of peer review and science to the UN, the Labor Party and the Greens, the question is will they immediately launch an inquiry and set up a Royal Commission... or do nothing at all, and mention it to no one. Shh!

If an entire modern economy depended on getting science right, there would be constant monitoring and reporting studies like this. Instead some scandalous and systemic failure of science is reported every few years and all the people who "follow the science" don't give a toss.

And this is just the tip of the iceberg -the study acknowledged that many fake papers had not even been discovered yet. And this paper doesn't even mention the replication crisis where only half of all papers can even be replicated. Or worse, that the papers that were harder to replicate were more likely to be cited.

Wait til they find out thousands of real papers are worthless because they rely on broken climate models that got the core assumptions wrong decades ago. And that's not just the papers pretending to predict the climate, but tens of thousands of other papers calculating the floods that won't happen, or the birds that won't be extinct, or the cost of building seawalls we won't need, and of building planes that won't fly on recycled canola oil. A whole generation of scientists spinning their wheels...
Retractions
© joannenova.com.au(A) Retractions are increasingly published in batches. The ∼2010 spike in the number of large-batch retractions is almost entirely attributable to a large swath of conference proceedings articles retracted by IEEE. For the first time since this spike, the majority of 2023 retractions were reported in batches larger than 10 articles.
Scientific fraud has become an 'industry,' alarming analysis finds
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Cassiopaea

The universe's first magnetic fields were 'comparable' to the human brain — and still linger within...

Harry Baker
Live Science
Fri, 05 Sep 2025 17:44 UTC
brain cosmos web cosmic structure comparison
© F. Vazza/D. Wittor/J. West)The cosmic web, which permeates through the known universe, may contain traces of the first magnetic fields created after the Big Bang. Using computer simulations, researchers now believe they can predict the strengths of these primordial fields.
New computer simulations suggest the first magnetic fields that emerged after the Big Bang were much weaker than expected — containing the equivalent magnetic energy of a human brain.

The universe's first magnetic fields may have been much weaker than we first imagined — and were roughly equivalent to the strength of the magnetic activity within the human brain, according to a new study.

Researchers used hundreds of thousands of computer simulations to examine the remnants of these ancient magnetic fields, which still reside within the "cosmic web" billions of years later.

Magnetism is a natural force generated by the movements of electrical charges and has existed since the early days after the Big Bang, when the infant universe was full of jostling electrically charged particles. Experts have long suspected that the initial magnetic fields created by these particles, known as primordial magnetic fields, were much weaker than those created by complex cosmic objects that exist today, such as stars, black holes and planets.

Comment: They really ought to be looking in the direction of the Electric Universe theory. Wallace Thornhill and Dave Talbott provide elegant explanations:

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Sun

Solar flares over 6 times hotter than previously thought

Anthony Watts
Watts Up with That
Mon, 08 Sep 2025 17:07 UTC
From the University of St Andrews via Eurekalert. I found this interesting, because it is just another example of how "settled science" really isn't settled at all. - Anthony
Solar Flare
© Watts Up with That
New research from the University of St Andrews has proposed that particles in solar flares are 6.5 times hotter than previously thought and provided an unexpected solution to a 50-year-old mystery about our nearest star.

Solar flares are sudden and huge releases of energy in the Sun's outer atmosphere that heat parts of it to greater than 10 million degrees. These dramatic events greatly increase the solar X-rays and radiation reaching Earth and are hazardous to spacecraft and astronauts, as well as affecting our planet's upper atmosphere.

The research, published today in Astrophysical Journal Letters, looked at evidence of how flares heat solar plasma to greater than 10 million degrees. This solar plasma is made up of ions and electrons. The new research argues that solar flare ions, positively charged particles that make up half of the plasma, can reach over 60 million degrees.

Looking at data from other research areas, the team, led by Dr Alexander Russell, Senior Lecturer in Solar Theory from the School of Mathematics and Statistics, realised that solar flares are very likely to heat the ions more strongly than the electrons.
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Better Earth

No evidence exists that climate change has caused an acceleration in global sea levels, a new study has claimed

Anthony Blair
NY Post
Thu, 04 Sep 2025 18:05 UTC
sea level
© Getty Images
Global sea levels have not continued to rise at the rates predicted by many scientists — and there is no evidence that climate change has contributed to any such acceleration, a new first-of-its-kind study has claimed.

The research found that the average sea level rise in 2020 was only around 1.5mm per year, or 6 inches per century, according to the paper's authors, Dutch engineering consultant Hessel Voortman and independent researcher Rob de Vos.

"This is significantly lower than the 3 to 4 mm/year often reported by climate scientists in scientific literature and the media," Voortman told independent journalist Michael Shellenberger.

Voortman was shocked that no researcher before had performed an analysis of real-world local data.
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Battery

Have MIT scientists just cracked the code on EV battery recycling?

Grace Snelling
Fast Company
Fri, 05 Sep 2025 19:08 UTC
electric car battery recycling MIT
© courtesy of the researchers/MIT News, leonello/iStock/Getty Images Plus
Researchers just discovered a new way to build an EV battery that makes it easy to break apart at the end of its lifespan.

This year, global EV sales are expected to jump almost 25% compared with 2024. As the demand for electric vehicles soars, there's a looming concern for industry experts: figuring out the best way to repurpose the several-hundred-pound batteries that power these vehicles.

According to a 2023 study by McKinsey, the global supply of EV batteries for recycling is steadily increasing and is expected to hit a whopping 7,850 kilotons in 2035. That same year, McKinsey projects that EV battery recycling will be a $7.2 billion industry in the U.S. Currently, though, experts are still trying to find the best way to actually scale the recycling process. The prevailing strategy is a technique that essentially involves shredding EV batteries into a superfine powder — a process that has proved costly, complicated, and inefficient.

Now, researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have published a study showing a new way to potentially bypass the shredding step altogether. According to Yukio Cho, lead author on the study and a Stanford energy postdoctoral fellow, the team has developed a new way to build a battery that makes it much easier to separate its component parts, leaving them ready for recycling.
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Info

Meet 2025 PN7, Earth's newfound quasi-moon

David L. Chandler
Sky & Telescope
Tue, 02 Sep 2025 15:13 UTC
Just discovered, it's been orbiting the Sun alongside Earth for decades, and will continue to do so for decades more.

Our home planet just got a new companion — or at least, a newfound one.

We know the Earth only has one true Moon. But we've also known for a while that our planet is currently accompanied by seven other small asteroids that seem to circle around us, even though they don't really orbit Earth as a true moon would. These objects, known as quasi-moons, tend only to inhabit Earth-accompanying orbits for short periods — years or decades, sometimes centuries.

2025 PN7
© NASA / JPL-CaltechEarth's orbit around the Sun (in blue) contrasts with that of one of its seven quasi-moons, 469219 Kamo'oalewa (shown in yellow and labeled with its provisional designation 2016 HO3). Now, the discovery of 2025 PN7 might have upped the number of Earth's quasi-companions to eight. These objects orbit the Sun but in a way that makes them appear to accompany Earth. The large yellow circle traces Kamo'oalewa's orbit around the Sun; over many orbits, though, the object also traces the series of loops around Earth shown to the right.
Now, it turns out, there's a new quasi-moon in town. Just discovered on August 29th by the Pan-STARRS observatory on Haleakala, Hawai'i, asteroid 2025 PN7 was quickly confirmed by other observatories. Earlier images of the object extend back to 2014. It now appears to have been on a quasi-moon orbit for about 60 years, and it will remain so for about 60 more. Eventually, though, it will revert to a horseshoe orbit, one that brings it periodically close to Earth only to back away again, never completing a full circle around our planet.

Alan Harris (Space Science Institute), in a posting on the Minor Planets Mailing List (MPML), writes that its velocity relative to Earth of 3.4 km/s (7,600 mph) is higher than would be expected from lunar ejecta. He adds that it's "most likely just an asteroid that has trickled into a near-Earth orbit from the inner main belt."

At some point in the future, gravitational interactions may eject it from Earth's vicinity altogether. "Some future close encounter with Earth could put it on an orbit that intersects either (or both) Mars or Venus," Harris writes.
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Blue Planet

New space-based animated map illustrates the complexity of Earth's seasonal cycles

Drew Terasaki Hart
The Conversation
Sat, 30 Aug 2025 17:55 UTC
animation earth seasons space based satellites
© Terasaki Hart et al. / NatureScreencapture from an animation illustrating Earth's changing seasons
The annual clock of the seasons - winter, spring, summer, autumn - is often taken as a given. But our new study in Nature, using a new approach for observing seasonal growth cycles from satellites, shows that this notion is far too simple.

We present an unprecedented and intimate portrait of the seasonal cycles of Earth's land-based ecosystems. This reveals "hotspots" of seasonal asynchrony around the world - regions where the timing of seasonal cycles can be out of sync between nearby locations.

We then show these differences in timing can have surprising ecological, evolutionary, and even economic consequences.
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Satellite

NASA announces Voyager I's stunning new discovery at the outer limits of our solar system

Alejandro Cerezo Ortigosa
Ahead of the Herd
Mon, 07 Jul 2025 00:00 UTC
Voyager 1
© NASAVoyager 1’s stunning new discovery at the outer limits of our solar system
Voyager 1 has journeyed further than any human-made object, revealing a fiery barrier at the very edge of our solar system that challenges everything we thought we knew about space.

Voyager 1, launched in 1977, has been journeying through space for over four decades, now more than 14.9 billion miles away from Earth. Recently, this legendary probe made headlines once again by crossing an invisible border that separates our solar system from the vast expanse of interstellar space. What it discovered there has left scientists astounded — a "wall of fire" where temperatures soar to an unimaginable 54,000 degrees Fahrenheit.

A new frontier: exploring the edge of the solar system

Since its launch, Voyager 1 has sent back breathtaking images of Jupiter, Saturn, and their moons. But its most daring journey began when it left the familiar territory of the planets behind and headed toward what is known as the heliopause. This is the vast boundary where the sun's influence fades and the realm of interstellar space begins.

At this boundary point, the pressure of the solar wind — the stream of charged particles flowing from the sun — meets the pressure of particles drifting through space beyond our solar system. Voyager's instruments detected a surprising rise in both temperature and particle density at this location, a phenomenon scientists now call the "wall of fire."
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