JAXA is leading an international mission to reach Mars’ Phobos moon and bring soil back to Earth. If successful, it could unlock new clues about the history of the solar system.

Terms like "dynamic pricing" and "surveillance pricing" are stirring up anger and anxiety on social media.

The Japanese space agency JAXA is preparing for a mission that treats a small, jagged moon as a cosmic archive. Scheduled for launch on October 18, 2026, from the Tanegashima Space Center via an H3 rocket, the Martian Moons eXploration (MMX) spacecraft aims to land on Phobos, collect at least 10 grams of regolith, and return it to Earth. The Origin Puzzle Phobos is more than a satellite; it is a piece of evidence in a debate over how the inner Solar System was seeded. Scientists are weighing two distinct possibilities: Phobos may be a remnant of a giant impact that struck Mars early in its history, or it could be a captured asteroid from the outer reaches of the system. If Phobos is a captured wanderer, its composition may reveal how water, organic compounds, and volatile elements were transported to the rocky planets where life eventually emerged. Navigating a Gravitational Well The technical challenge of MMX lies in the physics of the Martian system. Unlike a standalone asteroid, Phobos orbits Mars at a distance of approximately 6,000 kilometers. This places the spacecraft deep within the planet's gravitational well, creating a complex environment where the weak gravity of the moon competes with the massive pull of Mars. While JAXA draws on the success of the Hayabusa-2 mission, which returned 5.4 grams of material from an asteroid in 2020, the MMX mission requires a higher degree of precision to navigate these gravitational perturbations and eventually escape Mars' orbit for the trip home.

To detect the gravitational roar of colliding black holes, the LIGO observatories must maintain a laser beam's journey across four kilometers of vacuum with near-perfect precision. However, the pursuit of greater sensitivity has created a practical engineering paradox: the advanced mirrors designed for the Advanced LIGO+ (A#) upgrade use AlGaAs/GaAs coatings that are highly efficient at reflecting the primary beam but aggressively absorb green light at 532 nanometers. This specific wavelength is critical for the Arm Length Stabilization (ALS) system; without it, the mirrors would absorb the control signal, heating up and introducing thermal noise that would destabilize the entire instrument. The Spectral Detour Researchers at the Australian National University (ANU) resolved this conflict not by modifying the mirror coatings, but by changing the light used to monitor them. They implemented a bypass strategy using an auxiliary laser operating at 1596 nanometers in the near-infrared spectrum-a wavelength that passes through the AlGaAs/GaAs coatings without significant absorption. The system operates through a precise frequency conversion process. The auxiliary 1596 nm beam is converted to its third harmonic, while the main scientific laser (1064 nm) is converted to its second. By establishing a stable frequency offset between these two sources, the team created a mechanism to hand over control from the auxiliary laser to the main laser. This allows the system to lock the arm length using a non-absorptive signal before transitioning to the primary beam, ensuring the mirror remains cool and still.

Neanderthals left plenty of traces in the western Pyrenees, the mountain range that separates Spain from France. Stone tools, butchered animal bones, the leftovers of their camps. What nobody had ever found in Navarre, the region of northern Spain whose capital is Pamplona, was a single bone of the people themselves. On Monday that changed, […]

On the black lava shores of Wolf and Darwin Islands in the Galapagos, a scene unfolds that looks like something out of a horror film: a mob of small birds with swollen throats and red-stained beaks swarming a large, stationary seabird. But for the Nazca booby, this is a routine part of life. And for the landbirds attacking it, the swarm is not a pack of killers, but a specialized adaptation to an environment where freshwater is scarce. At the center of this interaction is the vampire finch (Geospiza septentrionalis), a species whose diet includes a surprising proportion of vertebrate blood. The common image of the vampire finch is that of a parasitic leech, a bird that has traded the safety of seeds and insects for the high-risk, high-reward strategy of drinking blood. Yet the reality, as documented by zoologist Daniel Baldassarre and his colleagues during fieldwork on the remote, rocky islands, is more nuanced. These birds are generalist opportunists. Their diet is a mosaic of seeds, insects, and broken seabird eggs. Blood is a component, not the entirety, of their nutritional intake. The observation that challenges the easy explanation is not that they drink blood, but why this behavior persists in a stable equilibrium with a host that could easily kill them. "It is not a slaughter," Baldassarre notes, describing the interactions observed on the islands. "It is a transaction. The booby tolerates the bite because the cost of driving the finch away is higher than the cost of the wound." The Price of Water To understand why a land-dwiving bird would evolve a taste for blood, one must look at the harsh constraints of the Galapagos. The islands are arid. For landbirds, freshwater is a limiting factor that dictates where they can nest and how long they can survive during dry seasons. Seeds and insects provide calories, but they do not provide sufficient hydration in the heat. Blood, conversely, is a nutrient-dense source of moisture and protein. By incorporating blood into their diet, vampire finches unlock a resource that is otherwise inaccessible to them, allowing them to persist in a niche where other seed-eaters might dehydrate. This physiological shift required more than just a behavioral change. The processing of vertebrate blood involves specific enzymatic and microbial adaptations to handle the high iron content and complex proteins. Research into the gut microbiome of vampire finches reveals a distinct microbial community compared to other Galapagos finches that do not consume blood. This microbial difference is not incidental; it is a functional adaptation that aids in the digestion and absorption of nutrients from blood. The evolutionary pressure to exploit this resource was strong enough to drive the species away from its relatives, leading to its recent formal recognition as a distinct species, separated from the population of sharp-beaked land finches that do not exhibit this behavior.

The ancient site near Valencia is one of the oldest sacred places in the world

© Courtesy of Trinidad Martínez i Rubio. Arquivolta Patrimoni i Societat.

Portugal has submitted a proposal to China for an agreement on the mutual recognition of academic qualifications, which Beijing has agreed to consider, the Minister for Education, Science and Innovation,

The post Government proposes mutual recognition of university degrees with China appeared first on Portugal Resident.

Remains offer first physical evidence of distinctive breed in region and clues about animals’ diets and treatment

© Miłosz Giersz

WIRED was the first magazine to cover Theranos and its enticing billionaire founder. There were warning signs even then.

A US expedition to track down what was believed to be Amelia Earhart’s plane from the South Pacific has concluded

© Archaeological Legacy Institute

As silicon spin qubits scale from single units to small arrays, a subtle electromagnetic interference begins to erode their precision. When five quantum bits operate simultaneously, the accuracy of their operations drops. This is not a software bug or a defect in the hardware design, but an inevitable consequence of the physics governing their control. Researchers at the RIKEN Center for Emergent Matter Science, working with collaborators, have demonstrated a calibration protocol that preserves high fidelity during this parallel operation, addressing a critical bottleneck for scaling quantum processors on silicon substrates. The Intrinsic Cost of Parallel Control In silicon spin qubits, information is stored in the electron spin trapped within the semiconductor matrix. To manipulate these quantum states, researchers use microwave pulses. The challenge emerges when multiple qubits are controlled via a single, shared microwave line. The electromagnetic signals induce an effect known as the AC Stark shift, which alters the effective energy levels of the qubit and displaces the phase of its quantum state. These unintended phase shifts interfere with the control logic, reducing the fidelity of the quantum gates. For a non-specialist, this is the measurable distinction: the same physical signal that drives one qubit correctly creates a predictable, yet harmful, phase error in its neighbors when they are active simultaneously. Scaling Calibration Without Exponential Complexity Traditionally, correcting these errors would require recalibrating the system for every possible combination of active qubits, a process that becomes computationally and experimentally unmanageable as the number of qubits grows. The RIKEN team developed a method based on pairwise calibration. Instead of testing every group configuration, they analyze and compensate for the errors arising between individual pairs of qubits. They then extrapolate this data to predict and correct the behavior of the entire group. This approach drastically reduces the complexity of the calibration procedure, making it feasible for scalable systems.

Research review finds people living in most polluted areas suffer 70 per cent higher odds of glaucoma

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While drinks may be prepared by human hands, an artificial intelligence system is in full control of an experimental café in the Swedish capital, Stockholm, the Associated Press reported in late July. San Francisco-based startup Andon Labs has placed an AI-powered agent named “Mona” at the helm of a café in Stockholm. The system, built […]

Discovery may potentially lead to future treatments for Alzheimer’s disease

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Antibody patterns in the blood may help doctors identify people at risk so they can be treated earlier, research shows

Patterns of antibodies in people’s blood could predict the onset of inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) a decade before diagnosis, according to research that raises hopes for catching the condition early.

Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis, the two main forms of IBD, are typically treated only after symptoms appear, when the gut has already been damaged. But scientists found that the immune system sends warning signals up to a decade before diagnosis, paving the way for potentially earlier detection and even prevention.

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© Photograph: Teodor Lazarev/Alamy

© Photograph: Teodor Lazarev/Alamy

© Photograph: Teodor Lazarev/Alamy

For several decades, the Arctic sea ice melt season exhibited a relentless expansion, stretching nearly 40 days longer by 2010 than it had been in 1979. But around 2010, this steady trend hit a wall. The season stopped growing in duration, shifting instead into a pattern of significant annual fluctuations. Analysis of satellite data from 1979 to 2023 by researchers from NASA and other institutions reveals that this extension was not driven by an earlier spring. Instead, the delay occurred in the autumn. The mechanism was a feedback loop of energy: as white ice disappeared, it exposed dark ocean water. While ice reflects solar radiation, the dark water absorbs it, trapping heat deep into the autumn and preventing the ocean from refreezing. The Shift in Dynamics The stabilization observed since 2010 suggests a change in Arctic cloud patterns. Increased cloud cover has begun to shield the ocean surface, blocking a portion of the sunlight that previously fueled the warming of the water. This shielding effect slowed the heating process, halting the further extension of the melt season.

In the three weeks since a health worker’s death in Siberia, officials have stonewalled the WHO – setting a worrying precedent for future pandemics

Is there a plague outbreak in Russia? If the answer were a clear yes, there shouldn’t be much reason to worry. With swift medical intervention, plague is treatable. But in the nearly three weeks since a worker at a Siberian plague research unit died of a mysterious respiratory illness, state officials have been consistently tight-lipped about what happened and whether there were any further cases.

It is this uncertainty that has the World Health Organization (WHO) and international community worried: partly because there is a – very small – risk of an outbreak, and partly because it is yet another warning that the international coordination we rely on to prevent pandemics is fraying along with the rest of international politics, and could easily fail to protect us in the future.

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© Photograph: Smirnov Vladimir/Anadolu/Getty Images

© Photograph: Smirnov Vladimir/Anadolu/Getty Images

© Photograph: Smirnov Vladimir/Anadolu/Getty Images

Companies love making grand diversity promises, but actuary Peter Crowley uses basic maths to expose eyebrow-raising targets that were never realistic in the first place.

The post Why I Developed Diversity Maths appeared first on The Daily Sceptic.

Amid a wave of backlash, some industry-friendly groups are employing creative and time-tested strategies to woo the youth.