ole_timer shares a report from the New York Times: James D. Watson, who entered the pantheon of science at age 25 when he joined in the discovery of the structure of DNA, one of the most momentous breakthroughs in the history of science, died on Thursday in East Northport, N.Y., on Long Island. He was 97. His death, in a hospice, was confirmed on Friday by his son Duncan, who said Dr. Watson was transferred to the hospice from a hospital this week after being treated there for an infection.

Dr. Watson's role in decoding DNA, the genetic blueprint for life, would have been enough to establish him as one of the most important scientists of the 20th century. But he cemented that fame by leading the ambitious Human Genome Project and writing perhaps the most celebrated memoir in science.

China has delayed the return of its Shenzhou-20 crewed spacecraft after it was suspected to have been struck by space debris while docked at the Tiangong space station. "The Shenzhou-20 crewed spacecraft is suspected of being struck by a small piece of space debris, and impact analysis and risk assessment are underway," the China Manned Space Engineering Office (CMSEO) statement Nov. 5 read. "To ensure the safety and health of the astronauts and the complete success of the mission, it has been decided that the Shenzhou-20 return mission, originally scheduled for Nov. 5, will be postponed." SpaceNews reports: CMSEO did not specify the location of the suspected strike, the extent of any damage, or the data that indicated an impact. No potential dates were noted for a return to Earth. The Shenzhou-20 spacecraft launched April 24, carrying three astronauts -- commander Chen Dong and crewmates Chen Zhongrui and Wang Jie -- to the Tiangong space station. The spacecraft docked at the radial port of Tiangong's Tianhe core module. The crew have completed their six-month-long mission in orbit, and had handed over control of the space station to the newly-arrived Shenzhou-21 crew Nov. 4.

Checks on the Shenzhou-20 spacecraft could include telemetry and leak tests, verifying guidance and propulsion systems, and screening for impacts in accelerometer and acoustic sensor data. A key concern would be potential damage to the spacecraft's thermal protection system or parachute deployment structures, both critical for safe atmospheric reentry and landing. Tiangong features a 10-meter-long robotic arm, capable of crawling, and a smaller, more precise arm. These could be employed to position cameras and provide closeup imagery of a potential impact. Crews may be able to conduct an extravehicular activity (EVA) to assess the situation. Tiangong crews have recently added debris shields during a number of EVAs; the same procedures, tools, and arm support can be adapted for a Shenzhou inspection.

A new study challenges the Nobel-winning theory that the universe's expansion is accelerating, suggesting instead that it may be slowing down as dark energy weakens -- potentially leading to a future "big crunch" where the cosmos collapses back in on itself. "Our study shows that the universe has already entered a phase of decelerated expansion at the present epoch and that dark energy evolves with time much more rapidly than previously thought," said Prof Young-Wook Lee, of Yonsei University in South Korea, who led the work. "If these results are confirmed, it would mark a major paradigm shift in cosmology since the discovery of dark energy 27 years ago." The Guardian reports: The latest work focuses on the reliability of observations of distant supernovae (exploding stars) that led to the discovery of dark energy, work that was awarded the 2011 Nobel prize in physics. [...] By estimating the ages of 300 host galaxies using a different method, the team concluded that there are simply variations in the properties of stars in the early universe that mean they produce, on average, fainter supernovae. Correcting for this systematic bias still results in an expanding universe, but suggests that the expansion has slowed down and that dark energy is waning, the analysis concluded. If dark energy keeps decreasing to the point where it becomes negative, the universe is theoretically predicted to end in a big crunch. The findings are published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from MIT Technology Review: The US- and UK-based company Quantinuum today unveiled Helios, its third-generation quantum computer, which includes expanded computing power and error correction capability. Like all other existing quantum computers, Helios is not powerful enough to execute the industry's dream money-making algorithms, such as those that would be useful for materials discovery or financial modeling. But Quantinuum's machines, which use individual ions as qubits, could be easier to scale up than quantum computers that use superconducting circuits as qubits, such as Google's and IBM's. "Helios is an important proof point in our road map about how we'll scale to larger physical systems," says Jennifer Strabley, vice president at Quantinuum, which formed in 2021 from the merger of Honeywell Quantum Solutions and Cambridge Quantum. Honeywell remains Quantinuum's majority owner.

Located at Quantinuum's facility in Colorado, Helios comprises a myriad of components, including mirrors, lasers, and optical fiber. Its core is a thumbnail-size chip containing the barium ions that serve as the qubits, which perform the actual computing. Helios computes with 98 barium ions at a time; its predecessor, H2, used 56 ytterbium qubits. The barium ions are an upgrade, as they have proven easier to control than ytterbium. These components all sit within a chamber that is cooled to about 15 Kelvin (-432.67 ), on top of an optical table. Users can access the computer by logging in remotely over the cloud. [...] Helios is noteworthy for its qubits' precision, says Rajibul Islam, a physicist at the University of Waterloo in Canada, who is not affiliated with Quantinuum. The computer's qubit error rates are low to begin with, which means it doesn't need to devote as much of its hardware to error correction. Quantinuum had pairs of qubits interact in an operation known as entanglement and found that they behaved as expected 99.921% of the time. "To the best of my knowledge, no other platform is at this level," says Islam.

[...] Besides increasing the number of qubits on its chip, another notable achievement for Quantinuum is that it demonstrated error correction "on the fly," says David Hayes, the company's director of computational theory and design, That's a new capability for its machines. Nvidia GPUs were used to identify errors in the qubits in parallel. Hayes thinks that GPUs are more effective for error correction than chips known as FPGAs, also used in the industry. Quantinuum has used its computers to investigate the basic physics of magnetism and superconductivity. Earlier this year, it reported simulating a magnet on H2, Quantinuum's predecessor, with the claim that it "rivals the best classical approaches in expanding our understanding of magnetism." Along with announcing the introduction of Helios, the company has used the machine to simulate the behavior of electrons in a high-temperature superconductor. Quantinuum is expanding its Helios line with a new system in Minnesota. It's also started developing its fourth-generation quantum computer, Sol, set for 2027 with 192 qubits. Then, a fifth-generation system, Apollo, is expected in 2029 with thousands of qubits and full fault tolerance.

President Trump has re-nominated tech billionaire and private astronaut Jared Isaacman to lead NASA, reversing his earlier withdrawal over concerns about Isaacman's political affiliations. CBS News reports: Mr. Trump nominated Isaacman to the Senate-confirmed post last year, but announced in late May he had decided to withdraw Isaacman after a "thorough review" of his "prior associations." Weeks after the withdrawal, the president went further in expressing his concerns about Isaacman's credentials. At the time, Mr. Trump acknowledged that he thought Isaacman "was very good," but had been "surprised to learn" that Isaacman was a "blue-blooded Democrat, who had never contributed to a Republican before." [...]

Mr. Trump made no mention of his previous decision to nominate and then withdraw Isaacman in his Tuesday evening announcement of the re-nomination on his Truth Social platform. "This evening, I am pleased to nominate Jared Isaacman, an accomplished business leader, philanthropist, pilot, and astronaut, as Administrator of NASA," Trump posted. "Jared's passion for Space, astronaut experience, and dedication to pushing the boundaries of exploration, unlocking the mysteries of the universe, and advancing the new Space economy, make him ideally suited to lead NASA into a bold new Era."

Longtime Slashdot reader dbialac shares a report from EL PAIS: For decades, the progress of electronics has followed a simple rule: smaller is better. Since the 1960s, each new generation of chips has packed more transistors into less space, fulfilling the famous Moore's Law. Formulated by Intel co-founder Gordon Moore in 1965, this law predicted that the number of transistors in an integrated circuit approximately doubles each year. But this race to the minuscule is reaching its physical limits. Now, an international team of scientists is proposing a solution as obvious as it is revolutionary: if we can't keep reducing the size of chips, let's build them up.

Xiaohang Li, a researcher at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) in Saudi Arabia, and his team have designed a chip with 41 vertical layers of semiconductors and insulating materials, approximately ten times higher than any previously manufactured chip. The work, recently published in the journal Nature Electronics, not only represents a technical milestone but also opens the door to a new generation of flexible, efficient, and sustainable electronic devices. "Having six or more layers of transistors stacked vertically allows us to increase circuit density without making the devices smaller laterally," Li explains. "With six layers, we can integrate 600% more logic functions in the same area than with a single layer, achieving higher performance and lower power consumption."

Google's new "Project Suncatcher" aims to launch Tensor Processing Units (TPUs) into space, creating a solar-powered, satellite-based AI network capable of scaling machine learning beyond Earth's limits. Google says a "solar panel can be up to 8 times more productive than on earth" for near-continuous power using a "dawn-dusk sun-synchronous low earth orbit" that reduces the need for batteries and other power generation. 9to5Google reports: These satellites would connect via free-space optical links, with large-scale ML workloads "distributing tasks across numerous accelerators with high-bandwidth, low-latency connections." To match data centers on Earth, the connection between satellites would have to be tens of terabits per second, and they'd have to fly in "very close formation (kilometers or less)."

Google has already conducted radiation testing on TPUs (Trillium, v6e), with "promising" results: "While the High Bandwidth Memory (HBM) subsystems were the most sensitive component, they only began showing irregularities after a cumulative dose of 2 krad(Si) -- nearly three times the expected (shielded) five year mission dose of 750 rad(Si). No hard failures were attributable to TID up to the maximum tested dose of 15 krad(Si) on a single chip, indicating that Trillium TPUs are surprisingly radiation-hard for space applications."

Finally, Google believes that launch costs will "fall to less than $200/kg by the mid-2030s." At that point, the "cost of launching and operating a space-based data center could become roughly comparable to the reported energy costs of an equivalent terrestrial data center on a per-kilowatt/year basis."

"A nearby galaxy once thought to be dominated by dark matter seems to have a surprise supermassive black hole at its centre," reports New Scientist.

Yet scientists "are convinced dark matter is out there," writes Space.com. "The quest to detect it arguably remains both one of the most frustrating and most exhilarating challenges in modern physics."

And now they report that the century-old mystery of dark matter — the invisible glue thought to hold galaxies together — "just got a modern clue." Scientists say they may be one step closer to confirming the existence of this elusive material, thanks to new simulations suggesting that a faint glow at the center of the Milky Way could be dark matter's long-sought signature. "It's very hard to actually prove, but it does seem likely," Moorits Muru of the Leibniz Institute for Astrophysics Potsdam in Germany, who led the new study, told Space.com...

The findings, show that dark matter near the Milky Way's center might not form a perfect sphere as scientists long thought. Instead, it appears flattened, almost egg-shaped, and that shape closely mirrors the pattern of mysterious gamma rays observed by NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope... Using powerful supercomputers, [the researchers] recreated how the Milky Way formed, including billions of years of violent collisions and mergers with smaller galaxies. Those violent events, the researchers found, left deep "fingerprints" on the way dark matter is distributed in the galactic core.... matching the pattern of gamma-ray emission Fermi has observed, the new study reports...

If the excess truly arises from dark matter collisions, it would mark the first indirect evidence that weakly interacting massive particles [WIMPs], a leading dark matter candidate, really exist...
"We have run dozens of direct detection experiments around the globe hunting for WIMPS," notes Phys.org, in an article titled "The Empty Search for Dark Matter." We have run dozens of direct detection experiments around the globe hunting for WIMPS — dark matter particles in this particular mass range. And they're not all the same kind of experiments. There are also the scintillators, which use a giant vat of liquefied noble gas, like several tons of xenon. They wait for a dark matter particle to strike the xenon and cause it to scintillate, which is a fancy science word for "sparkle." We see the sparkle; we detect dark matter...

They're just one example of a broader class of dark matter candidates, with delightful names like Q-balls, WIMPzillas, and sterile neutrinos. We've tuned our different experiments to capture different mass ranges or interaction strengths to cover as much of that wide dark matter spectrum as possible. We've even tried to manufacture various kinds of dark matter in our particle collider experiments.

And we've found nothing.

An anonymous reader shared this report from CNN: [C]iting delays in Starship's development and competitive pressure from China, NASA asked SpaceX and Blue Origin — which holds a separate lunar lander contract with the space agency — to submit plans to expedite development of their respective spacecraft by October 29. Both companies have responded. But the space agency is also asking the broader commercial space industry to detail how they might get the job done more quickly, hinting that NASA leadership is prepared to sideline its current partners. CNN spoke with half a dozen companies about how they plan to respond to NASA's call to action, which the agency will formally issue once the government shutdown ends, according to a source familiar with the matter.
One possibility is Lockheed Martin... Notably, as a legacy NASA contractor, the company built the $20.4 billion Orion spacecraft that astronauts will ride when they take off from Earth... Now, Lockheed says it can piece together a two-stage lunar lander that uses spare parts harvested from Orion. The company would make use of Space Shuttle-era OMS-E engines — which are also used on Orion — to serve as the propulsion for an "ascent stage" of the lunar lander, providing the thrust for the vehicle to lift off the moon after a mission is completed. But the vehicle also needs a descent stage to get down to the lunar surface in the first place...

Other commercial space companies contacted by CNN — including Firefly Aerospace and Northrop Grumman — said simply that they were "ready to support" NASA in its endeavor to find a faster way to complete the Artemis III mission. They did not confirm whether they would formally respond to the space agency's anticipated request for companies to submit proposals.
The more important goal, argue some experts, is to pave the way for a permanent lunar base where astronauts can live and work... [P]erhaps the true winner will be the country that is able to build lasting infrastructure, experts say. "It makes great press fodder to frame this as competition," said one space policy source, who was among several that spoke to CNN on the condition of anonymity to discuss controversial issues. "But this is about the long game and the sustainability."

An anonymous reader shared this report from NPR: It's known as the "Dueling Dinosaurs" fossil: A triceratops and a tyrannosaur, skeletons entangled, locked in apparent combat right up until the moment of their mutual demise... That discovery in 2006 now appears to have overturned decades of dinosaur dogma about Tyrannosaurus rex, the fearsome giant long thought to be the sole top predator stalking the late Cretaceous. In a paper in the journal Nature, paleontologists Lindsay Zanno and James Napoli conclude that some of the bones from that specimen belong not to a teenage T. rex, but to a fully grown individual of a different tyrannosaur species — Nanotyrannus lancensis....

One of the first of those red flags in the new specimen was the arm bones. They looked completely different than T. rex's puny appendages... "These are powerful arms with large claws, large hands. They were using them for prey capture." Contrast that with T. rex, "an animal that's a mouth on legs." There were additional clues. The animal had fewer tail vertebrae and more teeth than T. rex. Zanno and Napoli considered other lines of evidence. They created 3D models of numerous purported T. rexes against which they compared their specimen. They looked at the growth stages of the cranial nerves and sinuses of close living relatives of dinosaurs, features that were visible in the fossilized skeleton.

"But maybe the most important and damning thing that we did was we were able to figure out that our animal is not a juvenile at all," she says. This conclusion was based on slicing through the fossil's limb bones to examine the growth rings. That work demonstrated that this animal was mature and done growing when it died around the age of 20. "That means it's half the size and a tenth of the mass of a full grown Tyrannosaurus rex," says Zanno... In addition, while making models of all those other alleged T. rex skeletons, Zanno says they identified another new species of tyrannosaur, one they're calling Nanotyrannus lethaeus...

"It tells us that these end-Cretaceous ecosystems right before the asteroid hit were flourishing," says Zanno. "They had an abundance of different predators. And refutes this idea that dinosaurs were in decline before the asteroid struck."

"Traditionally, exploring the interior of atomic nuclei requires enormous particle accelerators that stretch for kilometers and propel beams of electrons at extremely high speeds," writes SciTechDaily.

But MIT physicists have unveiled a groundbreaking alternative that "used the atom's own electrons as probes to momentarily enter the nucleus..." In research published in Science, a team of MIT physicists achieved exceptionally precise measurements of the energy of electrons orbiting a radium atom that had been chemically bonded with a fluoride atom to form radium monofluoride. By studying these molecules, the researchers created a kind of miniature particle collider. Within this environment, the electrons surrounding the radium atom were confined closely enough to occasionally slip into the nucleus before returning to their usual orbits... When those electrons returned to their outer paths, they retained the altered energy, effectively carrying a "message" from within the nucleus that could be decoded to reveal its internal arrangement...

[The researchers] trapped and cooled the molecules and sent them through a system of vacuum chambers, into which they also sent lasers, which interacted with the molecules. In this way, the researchers were able to precisely measure the energies of electrons inside each molecule. When the researchers analyzed their measurements, they noticed that the electrons carried slightly different energies than expected if they had remained outside the nucleus. The difference was incredibly small, only about one millionth of the energy of the laser photon used to excite the molecules, but it was clear evidence that the electrons had entered the radium nucleus and interacted with its protons and neutrons...

The researchers plan to use this new technique to create a detailed map of how forces are distributed inside the nucleus... to chart the nucleus with greater precision and search for possible violations of fundamental symmetries in nature.
"It is thought that additional sources of fundamental symmetry violation are required to explain the almost complete absence of antimatter in our universe," the article points out. "Such violations could be seen within the nuclei of certain atoms such as radium...

"Unlike most atomic nuclei, which are spherical in shape, the radium atom's nucleus has a more asymmetrical configuration, similar to a pear. Scientists predict that this pear shape could significantly enhance their ability to sense the violation of fundamental symmetries, to the extent that they may be potentially observable."

A top United States regulator plans to unveil a faster approach to approving custom gene-editing treatments, a move designed to unleash a wave of industry investment that will yield cures for patients with rare diseases. From a report: Vinay Prasad, who oversees gene therapies at the Food and Drug Administration, said scientific advances, like Crispr, have forced the agency to relax some of its strict rules. As an example, he cited the case of 10-month-old KJ Muldoon, who this year became the first person in history to have his genes custom edited to cure an inherited disease.

"Regulation has to evolve as fast as science evolves," Prasad said in an interview with Bloomberg News. The agency is "going to be extremely flexible and work very fast with the scientists who want to bring these therapies to kids who need it." Prasad plans to publish a paper in early November outlining the FDA's new approach. He predicted it will spark interest in developing treatments for conditions that may affect only a handful of people.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Guardian: Australian scientists have developed roof coatings that can passively cool surfaces up to 6C below ambient temperature, as well as extract water from the atmosphere, which they say could reduce indoor temperatures during extreme heat events. One coating made from a porous film, which can be painted on to existing roofs, works by reflecting 96% of incoming solar radiation, rather than absorbing the sun's energy. It also has a high thermal emittance, meaning it effectively dissipates heat to outer space when the sky is clear. Its properties are known as passive radiative cooling. [...]

In a study, published in the journal Advanced Functional Materials, the researchers tested a prototype for six months on the roof of the Sydney Nanoscience Hub, pairing the cool paint with a UV-resistant topcoat that encouraged dew droplets to roll down into a receptacle. As much as 390 milliliters per sq meter per day could be collected for about a third of the year, the scientists found. Based on that water capture rate, an average Australian roof -- about 200 sq meters -- could provide up to 70 liters on days favorable for collecting dew, they estimate. [...]

In well-insulated buildings, a 6C decrease in roof temperature "might result in a smaller fraction of that cooling being reflected in the top level of the house," [said the study's lead author, Prof Chiara Neto of the University of Sydney], but greater temperature reductions would be expected in most Australian houses, "where insulation is quite poor." She said the coating could also help reduce the urban heat island effect, in which hard surfaces absorb more heat than natural surfaces, resulting in urban centers being 1C to 13C warmer than rural areas. The researchers found that the prototype coating was comprised of poly(vinylidene fluoride-co-hexafluoropropene), which is used in the building industry but was "not a scalable technology going forward" due to its environmental issues. However, they are now commercializing a water-based paint with similar performance that is affordable and environmentally safer, costing about the same as standard premium paints.

alternative_right shares a report from Phys.org: It is known in the scientific community that if you have a self-sustained oscillation, such as an arteriole, and you add an external stimulus at a similar but not identical frequency, you can lock the two, meaning you can shift the frequency of the oscillator to that of the external stimulus. In fact, it has been shown that if you connect two clocks, they will eventually synchronize their ticking. Distinguished Professor of Physics and Neurobiology David Kleinfeld found that if he applied an external stimulus to a neuron, the entire vasculature would lock at the same frequency. However, if he stimulated two sets of neurons at two different frequencies, something unexpected happened: some arterioles would lock at one frequency and others would lock at another frequency, forming a staircase effect.

Searching for an explanation, Kleinfeld enlisted the help of his colleague, Professor of Physics Massimo Vergassola, who specializes in understanding the physics of living systems, and then recruited Ecole Normale Superieure graduate student Marie Sellier-Prono and Senior Researcher at the Institute for Complex Systems Massimo Cencini. Together, the researchers found they could use a classical model of coupled oscillators with an intestinal twist. The gut oscillates naturally due to peristalsis -- the contracting and relaxing of muscles in the digestive tract -- and provided a simplified model over the complex network of blood vessels in the brain. The intestine is unidirectional, meaning frequencies shift in one direction in a gradient from higher to lower. This is what enables food to move in one direction from the beginning of the small intestine to the end of the large intestine.

"Coupled oscillators talk to each other and each section of the intestine is an oscillator that talks to the other sections near it," stated Vergassola. "Normally, coupled oscillators are studied in a homogeneous setting, meaning all the oscillators are at more or less similar frequencies. In our case, the oscillators were more varied, just as in the intestine and the brain." In studying the coupled oscillators in the gut, past researchers observed that there is indeed a staircase effect where similar frequencies lock onto those around it, allowing for the rhythmic movement of food through the digestive tract. But the height of the rises or breaks, the length of the stair runs or frequencies, and the conditions under which the staircase phenomenon occurred -- essential features of biological systems -- was something which had not been determined until now. The findings have been published in the journal Physical Review Letters.

schwit1 shares a report from Behind the Black: SpaceX is going to land this spaceship manned on the Moon, whether or not NASA's SLS and Orion are ready. And even if those expensive, cumbersome, and poorly designed boondoggles are ready for those first two Artemis landings, SpaceX is likely to quickly outmatch them with numerous other private missions to the Moon, outside of NASA. It has the funds to do it, and it knows it has the customers willing to buy the flights. The news comes from a detailed update SpaceX released today on the Starship lunar lander. Here's the section where SpaceX "made it clear that it sees Starship and Superheavy as its own space effort, irrelevant of NASA": "To return Americans to the Moon, SpaceX aligned Starship development along two paths: development of the core Starship system and supporting infrastructure, including production facilities, test facilities, and launch sites -- which SpaceX is self-funding representing over 90% of system costs -- and development of the HLS-specific Starship configuration, which leverages and modifies the core vehicle capability to support NASA's requirements for landing crew on and returning them from the Moon. SpaceX is working under a fixed-price contract with NASA, ensuring that the company is only paid after the successful completion of progress milestones, and American taxpayers are not on the hook for increased SpaceX costs. SpaceX provides significant insight to NASA at every stage of the development process along both paths, including access to flight data from missions not funded under the HLS contract.

Both pathways are necessary and made possible by SpaceX's substantial self-investments to enable the high-rate production, launch, and test of Starship for missions to the Moon and other purposes. Starship will bring the United States back to the Moon before any other nation and it will enable sustainable lunar operations by being fully and rapidly reusable, cost-effective, and capable of high frequency lunar missions with more than 100 tons of cargo capacity."

alternative_right shares a report from Phys.org: Today's cutting-edge theory -- quantum gravity -- suggests that even space and time aren't fundamental. They emerge from something deeper: pure information. This information exists in what physicists call a Platonic realm -- a mathematical foundation more real than the physical universe we experience. It's from this realm that space and time themselves emerge. "The fundamental laws of physics cannot be contained within space and time, because they generate them. It has long been hoped, however, that a truly fundamental theory of everything could eventually describe all physical phenomena through computations grounded in these laws. Yet we have demonstrated that this is not possible. A complete and consistent description of reality requires something deeper -- a form of understanding known as non-algorithmic understanding." "We have demonstrated that it is impossible to describe all aspects of physical reality using a computational theory of quantum gravity," says Dr. Faizal. "Therefore, no physically complete and consistent theory of everything can be derived from computation alone. Rather, it requires a non-algorithmic understanding, which is more fundamental than the computational laws of quantum gravity and therefore more fundamental than spacetime itself."

"Drawing on mathematical theorems related to incompleteness and indefinability, we demonstrate that a fully consistent and complete description of reality cannot be achieved through computation alone," explains Dr. Mir Faizal, Adjunct Professor with UBC Okanagan's Irving K. Barber Faculty of Science. "It requires non-algorithmic understanding, which by definition is beyond algorithmic computation and therefore cannot be simulated. Hence, this universe cannot be a simulation."

The findings have been published in the Journal of Holography Applications in Physics.

Gallup: After peaking at a record high of 39.9% in 2022, the U.S. adult obesity rate has gradually declined to 37.0% in 2025. This is a statistically meaningful decrease representing an estimated 7.6 million fewer obese adults compared with three years ago. Meanwhile, diagnoses of diabetes -- a lifetime disease that can be managed but not cured -- have now reached an all-time high of 13.8%. Both metrics are part of the ongoing Gallup National Health and Well-Being Index.

[...] Over the past year, more Americans have turned to Type 2 antidiabetic GLP-1 drugs such as semaglutide (brand names Ozempic and Wegovy) for weight loss purposes. The percentage of adults who report taking this class of medicine specifically for weight loss has increased to 12.4%, compared with 5.8% in February 2024 when Gallup first measured it. Usage among women (15.2%) continues to outpace men (9.7%), but both groups have more than doubled their use in the past year. These results dovetail with increased awareness of the drugs used for weight loss, which has risen from 80% to 89% nationally in the same period.

sciencehabit shares a report from Science.org: From enabling life as we know it to greasing the geological machinery of plate tectonics, water can have a huge influence on a planet's behavior. But how do planets get their water? An infant world might be bombarded by icy comets and waterlogged asteroids, for instance, or it could form far enough from its host star that water can precipitate as ice. However, certain exoplanets pose a puzzle to astronomers: alien worlds that closely orbit their scorching home stars yet somehow appear to hold significant amounts of water.

A new series of laboratory experiments, published today in Nature, has revealed a deceptively straightforward solution to this enigma: These planets make their own water. Using diamond anvils and pulsed lasers, researchers managed to re-create the intense temperatures and pressures present at the boundary between these planets' hydrogen atmospheres and molten rocky cores. Water emerged as the minerals cooked within the hydrogen soup. Because this kind of geologic cauldron could theoretically boil and bubble for billions of years, the mechanism could even give hellishly hot planets bodies of water -- implying that ocean worlds, and the potentially habitable ones among them, may be more common than scientists already thought. "They can basically be their own water engines," says Quentin Williams, an experimental geochemist at the University of California Santa Cruz who was not involved with the new work.

China is accelerating its biotech ambitions by pushing the limits of animal testing and gene editing (source paywalled; alternative source) while Western countries tighten ethical restrictions. "Editing the genes of large animals such as pigs, monkeys and dogs faces scant regulation in China," reports Bloomberg. "Meanwhile, regulators in the US and Europe demand layers of ethical reviews, rendering similar research involving large animals almost impossible." From the report: Backing the work of China's scientists is not only permissiveness but state money. In 2023 alone, the Chinese government funneled an estimated $3 billion into biotech. Its sales of cell and gene therapies are projected to reach $2 billion by 2033 from $300 million last year. On the Chinese researchers' side are government-supported breeding and research centers for gene-edited animals and a public largely in approval of pushing the boundaries of animal testing.

The country should become "a global scientific and technology power," Xi said, declaring biotechnology and gene editing a strategic priority. For decades, the country's pharmaceutical companies specialized in generics, reproducing drugs already pioneered elsewhere. Delving head first into gene editing research may be key to China's plan to develop innovative drugs as well as reduce its dependence on foreign pharmaceutical companies.

The result is a country that now dominates headlines with stories of large, genetically modified animals being produced for science -- and the catalog is startling. Its scientists have created monkeys with schizophrenia, autism and sleep disorders. They were the first to clone primates. They've engineered dogs with metabolic and neurological diseases, and even cloned a gene-edited beagle with a blood-clotting disorder.

A cyclist who received severe third-degree burns to his head after being struck by a drunk driver has been fitted with a printed 3D face. The Guardian: Dave Richards, 75, was given a 3D prosthetic by the NHS that fits the space on his face and mimics his hair colour, eye colour and skin. [...] While recovering, he was referred to reconstructive prosthetics, which has opened the Bristol 3D medical centre, the first of its kind in the UK to have 3D scanning, design and printing in a single NHS location. Richards, from Devon, said surgeons tried to save his eye but "they were worried any infection could spread from my eye down the optic nerve to the brain so the eye was removed."

[...] He called the process of getting a 3D-printed face "not the most pleasant." He added: "In the early days of my recovery, I felt very vulnerable, and would not expose myself to social situations. It took me a long time to feel comfortable about my image, how I thought people looked at me and what they thought of me -- but I have come a long way in that respect."