Mathematicians delight in the beauty of math that so many of us don't see. But nature is a wonderful realm in which to observe beauty born out of mathematical relationships.

The natural world provides seemingly endless patterns underpinned by numbers - if we can recognize them.

Luckily for us, a motley team of researchers has just uncovered another striking connection between math and nature; between one of the purest forms of mathematics, number theory, and the mechanisms governing the evolution of life on molecular scales, genetics.

A pair of astrophysicists, one with Kindai University, the other the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan, both in Japan, have found possible evidence of an Earth-like planet residing in the Kuiper Belt. In their paper published in The Astronomical Journal, Patryk Sofia Lykawka and Takashi Ito describe properties of the Kuiper Belt that they believe are consistent with the existence of a planet not much bigger than Earth.

Over the past decade, several studies have led credence to theories regarding the possible existence of a planet in the far outer edges of the solar system, which has come to be known theoretically as Planet Nine. In this new effort, the researchers suggest it is possible that there is a planet much closer — in the Kuiper Belt.

The human population may have lingered at about 1,300 for more than 100,000 years, and that population bottleneck could have fueled the divergence between modern humans, Neanderthals and Denisovans.

Humans might have almost gone extinct nearly 1 million years ago, with the world population hovering at only about 1,300 for more than 100,000 years, a new study finds.

This close call with extinction may have played a major role in the evolution of modern humans and their closest known extinct relatives, the thick-browed Neanderthals and the mysterious Denisovans, researchers added.

Previous research suggested that modern humans originated about 300,000 years ago in Africa. With so few fossils from around that time, much remains uncertain about how the human lineage evolved before modern humans emerged.

Shocking details of corruption and suppression in the world of peer-reviewed climate science have come to light with a recent leak of emails. They show how a determined group of activist scientists and journalists combined to secure the retraction of a paper that said a climate emergency was not supported by the available data. Science writer and economist Dr. Roger Pielke Jr. has published the startling emails and concludes:

"Shenanigans continue in climate science, with influential scientists teaming up with journalists to corrupt peer review."

The offending paper was published in January 2022 in a Springer Nature journal and at first attracted little attention. But on September 14th the Daily Sceptic covered its main conclusions and as a result it went viral on social media with around 9,000 Twitter retweets. The story was then covered by both the Australian and Sky News Australia. The Guardian activist Graham Readfearn, along with state-owned Agence France-Presse (AFP), then launched counterattacks. AFP 'Herald of the Anthropocene' Marlowe Hood said the data were "grossly manipulated" and "fundamentally flawed".

After nearly a year of lobbying, Springer Nature has retracted the popular article. In the light of concerns, the Editor-in-Chief is said to no longer have confidence in the results and conclusion reported in the paper. The authors were invited to submit an addendum but this was "not considered suitable for publication". The leaked emails show that the addendum was sent for review to four people, and only one objected to publication.

What is shocking about this censorship is that the paper was produced by four distinguished scientists, including three professors of physics, and was heavily based on data used by the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

Group of 30 physicists say spacecraft powered by an 'Alcubierre warp drive,' would 'benefit' from a classic flying saucer shape, similar to the 2006 Chicago O'Hare UFO

An international think-tank of physicists believes a famous UFO sighting in Chicago may hold clues about 'faster than light' space travel.

At about 4:14 PM on November 7, 2006, a ramp employee at Chicago's O'Hare International Airport spotted a metallic, saucer-shaped craft hovering in the sky.

The sighting, which lasted for five minutes and was witnessed by at least 12 United Airlines staffers, made international headlines thanks to a tape of Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) radio communications released via the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).

Although the FAA attributed the incident to a 'hole-punch cloud' and astronomer Mark Hammergren, then with Chicago's Adler Planetarium, agreed, the case has remained unresolved — and tantalizing to UFO researchers ever since.

This gas giant regularly absorbs hits from comets and asteroids, protecting inner solar system worlds.
Jupiter just got smacked by a small celestial body, according to amateur astronomers.

The impact occurred at 1:45 a.m. Japan Standard Time on Aug. 29 (1645 GMT on Aug. 28). An account affiliated with the Organized Autotelescopes for Serendipitous Event Survey (OASES) project and Planetary Observation Camera for Optical Transient Surveys (PONCOTS) system posted about the event on X, formerly known as Twitter, alerting of a flash observed in Jupiter's atmosphere. The post also called on observers to check their own footage.

MASA Planetary Log later shared footage showing a brief burst of light coming from Jupiter that was associated with an apparent comet or asteroid impact. Another independent observation was made by a Chinese amateur astronomer in the city of Zhengzhou, Henan province, showing a flash in the same spot on Jupiter's dense, turbulent atmosphere.

The neutron-rich oxygen isotopes oxygen-27 and oxygen-28 exist as very short-lived resonances, report scientists from Tokyo Tech based on the first observation of their decay into oxygen-24 and three and four neutrons, respectively. Notably, the oxygen-28 nucleus is found not to be "doubly magic" as expected in the standard shell-model picture. This study provides valuable insights into the nuclear structure.

The study of physical systems under extreme conditions offers valuable insights into their organization and structure. In nuclear physics, neutron-rich isotopes, especially the light ones with neutron-to-proton ratio significantly different from that of stable nuclei, provide stringent tests of modern nuclear structure theories. These isotopes exist as very short-lived resonances, decaying through spontaneous neutron emission.

Now, in a new study published in available in Nature, an international collaboration of researchers led by Yosuke Kondo, an Assistant Professor at the Department of Physics at Tokyo Institute of Technology, reports the first observation of two such isotopes — oxygen-28 (28O) and oxygen-27 (27O) — through their decay into oxygen-24 with four and three neutrons, respectively. The nucleus 28O, which consists of 8 protons and 20 neutrons (N), is of significant interest as it is expected to be one of the few 'doubly magic' nuclei in the standard shell-model picture of nuclear structure.

Alex Filippenko is the kind of guy who brings a telescope to a party. True to form, at a soiree on May 18 this year, he wowed his hosts with images of star clusters and colorful galaxies — including the dramatic spiral Pinwheel Galaxy — and snapped telescopic photos of each.

Only late the next afternoon did he learn that a bright supernova had just been discovered in the Pinwheel Galaxy. Lo and behold, he'd also captured it, at 11 p.m. the night before — 11 and a half hours before the explosion's discovery on May 19 by amateur astronomer Koichi Itagaki in Japan.

Filippenko, a professor of astronomy at the University of California, Berkeley, graduate student Sergiy Vasylyev and postdoctoral fellow Yi Yang threw out their planned observations at the UC's Lick Observatory on Mount Hamilton a few hours later to focus on the exploding star, which had been dubbed SN 2023ixf. They and hundreds of other astronomers were eager to observe the nearest supernova since 2014, a mere 21 million light years from Earth.

These observations were the earliest-ever measurements of polarized light from a supernova, showing more clearly the evolving shape of a stellar explosion. The polarization of light from distant sources like supernovae provides the best information on the geometry of the object emitting the light, even for events that cannot be spatially resolved.

"Some stars prior to exploding go through undulations — fitful behavior that gently ejects some of the material — so that when the supernova explodes, either the shock wave or the ultraviolet radiation causes the stuff to glow," Filippenko said. "The cool thing about the spectropolarimetry is that we get some indication of the shape and extent of the circumstellar material."

The spectropolarimetry data told a story in line with current scenarios for the final years of a red supergiant star about 10 to 20 times more massive than our sun: Energy from the explosion lit up clouds of gas that the star shed over the previous few years; the ejecta then punched through this gas, initially perpendicular to the bulk of the circumstellar material; and finally, the ejecta engulfed the surrounding gas and evolved into a rapidly expanding, but symmetric, cloud of debris.

Experiments promote a curious flipside of decaying monopoles: a reality where particle physics is quite literally turned on its head.
The field of quantum physics is rife with paths leading to tantalising new areas of study, but one rabbit hole offers a unique vantage point into a world where particles behave differently — through the proverbial looking glass.

Dubbed the 'Alice ring' after Lewis Carroll's world-renowned stories on Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, the appearance of this object verifies a decades-old theory on how monopoles decay. Specifically, that they decay into a ring-like vortex, where any other monopoles passing through its centre are flipped into their opposite magnetic charges.

Published in Nature Communications on August 29, these findings mark the latest discovery in a string of work that has spanned the collaborative careers of Aalto University Professor Mikko Möttönen and Amherst College Professor David Hall.

'This was the first time our collaboration was able to create Alice rings in nature, which was a monumental achievement,' Möttönen said.

'This fundamental research opens new doors into understanding how these structures and their analogues in particle physics function in the universe,' Hall added.

The long-standing relationship, titled the Monopole Collaboration, initially proved the existence of a quantum analogue of the magnetic monopole in 2014, isolated quantum monopoles in 2015, and eventually observed one decay into the other in 2017.

Monopoles remain an elusive concept in the arena of quantum physics. As the name suggests, monopoles are the solitary counterpart of dipoles, which carry a positive charge at their north pole and a negative charge at the south. In contrast, a monopole carries only either a positive or negative charge.

While the concept sounds simple, realising a true monopole has proven to be a career-defining task. Here's how the Monopole Collaboration has done it: they manipulated a gas of rubidium atoms prepared in a nonmagnetic state near absolute zero temperature. Under these extreme conditions, they were then able to create a monopole by steering a zero point of a three-dimensional magnetic field into the quantum gas.

When organisms pass their genes on to future generations, they include more than the code spelled out in DNA. Some also pass along chemical markers that instruct cells how to use that code. The passage of these markers to future generations is known as epigenetic inheritance. It's particularly common in plants. So, significant findings here may have implications for agriculture, food supplies, and the environment.

Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) Professors and HHMI Investigators Rob Martienssen and Leemor Joshua-Tor have been researching how plants pass along the markers that keep transposons inactive. Transposons are also known as jumping genes. When switched on, they can move around and disrupt other genes. To silence them and protect the genome, cells add regulatory marks to specific DNA sites. This process is called methylation.

Martienssen and Joshua-Tor have now shown how protein DDM1 makes way for the enzyme that places these marks on new DNA strands. Plant cells need DDM1 because their DNA is tightly packaged. To keep their genomes compact and orderly, cells wrap their DNA around packing proteins called histones. "But that blocks access to the DNA for all sorts of important enzymes," Martienssen explains. Before methylation can occur, "you have to remove or slide the histones out of the way."