Orderly Trips and a Very Old Tortoise · Morning Gist
Sunday, October 115 stories · 15 min
Orderly Trips and a Very Old Tortoise
Brains on psilocybin look more organized than expected, and telescopes and astronaut cameras learn new things from tiny galaxies, lunar flashes and dead stars.
Picked from 66 new articles across 10 sources · arrow keys for other days
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In 62 first-time users, psilocybin brain activity sorted cleanly by setting, and that sorting tracked how meaningful the trip felt. story 1 ↓
Webb traced the most distant fast radio burst to a young galaxy 1,000 times lighter than expected, pointing away from neutron-star mergers. story 2 ↓
Five meteorite flashes in Artemis II crew photos put a moon base's damaging-strike risk at about 1 in 10,000 per decade. story 3 ↓
Old Hubble data show a white dwarf swallowing niobium at 1,000+ times solar levels, hinting a planet formed from the dead star's debris. story 4 ↓
Jonathan the tortoise, 194, carries 287 unique aging-linked variants and unusually orderly mitochondrial gene tags. Intriguing, but it's one animal. story 5 ↓
Florida's dengue surge this year includes the state's first dengue death in nearly a century. Experts blame an unlucky mix of factors.
1/5Ars Technica Science·
Jacek Krywko
· Oct 10
Psilocybin brains look chaotic on average but organized moment to moment
Monash University researchers scanned 62 people on and off psilocybin as they rested, meditated, listened to music and watched clouds. Tracked moment by moment, brain activity on the drug sorted more clearly by setting, not less.
Why it matters · It challenges the decade-old idea that psychedelics simply scramble the brain, and suggests the setting of a psychedelic session could shape outcomes in measurable ways.
Know this first
Context from the editor, not the article · 28 sec
1 · Brain networks
The brain has stable groups of regions that tend to work together: visual, attention, and the default mode network, which is active during daydreaming and thinking about yourself. Brain scans can measure how closely regions' activity rises and falls together.
2 · The 'chaos' view
For about ten years the dominant account has been that psychedelics loosen these networks. Regions within a network sync up less, separate networks talk to each other more, and EEG signals become noisier and more complex.
3 · Set and setting
Psychedelic researchers have long said that mindset and surroundings shape a trip. In therapy trials, the room, the music and the guidance are carefully managed, mostly on the assumption that they affect mood.
2/5NASA· Oct 8
Webb finds the most distant fast radio burst came from a tiny galaxy
A South African radio telescope caught a millisecond radio flash. The James Webb Space Telescope then found its faint dwarf host galaxy at redshift 2.148, a record. The galaxy's youth favors magnetars as the source.
Why it matters · Nobody knows what makes fast radio bursts, and a host galaxy is one of the few clues to a source too small and brief to see directly.
Know this first
Context from the editor, not the article · 31 sec
1 · What fast radio bursts are
Fast radio bursts (FRBs) are radio flashes lasting about a millisecond that come from other galaxies. The first was found in 2007. Most are seen once and never repeat, so their sources are very hard to pin down.
2 · How radio hints at distance
Free electrons in space slow longer radio wavelengths slightly more than shorter ones. The more gas a burst passes through, the more its colors arrive spread out in time. That spread gives a rough distance estimate, but it isn't a measurement.
3 · Redshift as a clock
As the universe expands, it stretches light from distant objects toward redder wavelengths. A galaxy's spectrum shows exactly how much its light has been stretched, which fixes both its distance and how far back in cosmic time we are seeing it.
3/5Scientific American· Oct 8
Artemis II crew saw five meteorite flashes on the moon's farside
NASA has released preliminary science from the Artemis II astronauts' photos of the moon. They show five small meteorite impacts, no drifting dust and colorful volcanic terrain. Together these suggest a lunar base faces modest hazards.
Why it matters · It shows how astronauts with ordinary cameras can measure real hazards, such as small meteorite impacts, that will decide where and how people live on the moon.
Know this first
Context from the editor, not the article · 31 sec
1 · What Artemis II was
Artemis II was NASA's first crewed lunar flight since Apollo. In April 2026 four astronauts in the Orion capsule looped around the moon without landing. It was a test flight for later landings and a planned base near the south pole.
2 · The farside
The moon always keeps the same face toward Earth, so its farside can't be seen from the ground. The Soviet probe Luna 3 photographed it first, in 1959. Very few humans have ever seen it directly.
3 · Spotting impacts by flashes
The moon has no air, so meteoroids hit the surface at full speed. A small part of each impact's energy becomes a short flash of light. On the moon's night side, telescopes or cameras can catch these flashes and count them.
4/5Universe Today· Bruce Dorminey· Oct 11
Rare niobium hints a planet formed from a dead star's debris
A University of Warwick team reanalysed old Hubble data and found unusually high niobium on a white dwarf. They argue it is eating a giant planet that formed after the star died, from material the star threw off.
Why it matters · If it holds up, planet formation isn't limited to a star's birth. Heavy-element "fingerprints" would also give astronomers a new way to search for such planets.
Know this first
Context from the editor, not the article · 29 sec
1 · What a white dwarf is
When a Sun-like star runs out of fuel, it swells into a red giant and sheds its outer layers. What remains is a white dwarf: a hot, Earth-sized core that no longer fuses anything and slowly cools.
2 · Polluted white dwarfs
A white dwarf's strong gravity pulls heavy elements below its surface quickly. Any metals seen in its atmosphere must therefore be arriving now, usually from planetary material it is eating. Their mix acts like a chemical sample of that material.
3 · Where heavy elements come from
Ordinary fusion in a star's core builds elements only up to about iron. Heavier ones, like niobium, mostly form in other ways, including the slow neutron-capture 's-process' that runs late in a Sun-like star's life.
5/5Live Science· Lauren Schneider · Oct 7
Genome of 194-year-old Jonathan the tortoise points to well-kept mitochondrial genes
Researchers sequenced DNA from Jonathan, a 194-year-old giant tortoise. Unlike most of his genome, the switches on his mitochondrial genes still carry orderly chemical tags. It's one animal, though, and nobody has shown this causes his long life.
Why it matters · Extremely long-lived animals are natural experiments in aging. This study shows what one animal can reveal, and how far a sample of one falls short of proof.
Know this first
Context from the editor, not the article · 25 sec
1 · Who Jonathan is
Jonathan is an Aldabra giant tortoise living on St. Helena in the south Atlantic. He is the oldest known living land animal, about a century beyond his species' expected lifespan.
2 · Genes versus epigenetics
The genome is the DNA sequence itself. Epigenetic marks are chemical tags on DNA that change how strongly genes are switched on. The best known is DNA methylation, where small methyl groups attach to the DNA.
3 · Methylation as an aging clock
Methylation patterns drift in predictable ways as organisms age, so researchers use them as 'clocks' that estimate biological age. These clocks are now common in human aging research.
A Nature study led by Devon Stoliker at Monash University finds that brains on 1, the psychedelic in "magic" mushrooms, look chaotic on average but organized moment to moment. The more organized the activity, the more meaningful people said the experience was.
The old view
For about a decade, the standard account has been that psychedelics loosen the brain's networks, the stable groups of regions that handle vision, attention or the sense of self. Regions talk to everything at once and 2 signals (electrical recordings from the scalp) get noisier. Stoliker argues that chaos alone never explained why people come away with insight or lasting positive change.
The experiment
The team scanned 62 people who had never taken a psychedelic, once sober and once after 19 mg of psilocybin. Each session had four settings: rest, guided meditation, 11 minutes of music, and a video of drifting clouds. The study used no cognitive tasks, because tasks can pull people out of the trip. Half ranked the session among the most meaningful experiences of their lives.
Standard analysis reproduced the familiar disorder. Connections within networks weakened and connections between them strengthened. In the visual network, the usual difference between eyes-open and eyes-closed activity shrank by 85 percent. On EEG, 3 waves, a rhythm linked to filtering out visual input, fell by nearly half.
Finding the order
Standard imaging averages twice: over time, collapsing a scan of hundreds of snapshots into one number, and over people. Both steps can erase brief, individual structure. Instead, the team fed moment-by-moment activity from 332 brain regions into 4, a machine-learning tool that compresses data while keeping events in order. The result was one path per person through a 3D space.
On psilocybin, those paths split into four clear clusters, one for each setting. Sober, they overlapped more. A classifier could tell from a single moment which setting someone was in. Its accuracy scaled with how profound the trip felt and with next-day improvements in feelings of connection, peace and creativity.
Two networks drove this, each accounting for over 20 percent of the effect. One was the 5, tied to the sense of self. The other was the visual network. They became less distinct from each other, which the team links to people feeling "embedded" in the world.
Caveats
All participants were healthy, not patients. Identical self-ratings can hide very different experiences. The findings are correlations. Stoliker argues that setting and music could become therapy variables to tune deliberately, but how to tune them, and for whom, is still unknown.
A study published in Nature by Devon Stoliker and colleagues at Monash University in Australia finds that brains on 1, the psychedelic compound in "magic" mushrooms, look disordered when you analyze them the usual way. Track the same data moment by moment, person by person, and the activity turns out to be more organized than in the sober brain. How strongly it was organized matched how meaningful participants said their experience was.
The problem with "chaos"
For about a decade, the standard account has been that psychedelics break down the brain's networks: the stable patterns of communication that handle vision, attention or the sense of self. "Think of the networks of the brain as highways," Stoliker says. "Under psychedelics, these highways break down into many different directions." 2 (electroencephalography, which records electrical activity through the scalp) shows noisier, more complex signals.
Stoliker argues that chaos alone "never really explained why an individual would have a meaningful experience, why they might have insight," or why those experiences might lead to lasting psychological change. Random noise doesn't obviously produce insight. His team set out to test whether the apparent disorder really is random.
The experiment: no tasks, four settings
The study, called PsiConnect, recruited 62 people who had never taken a psychedelic. Each went through the same four-part sequence twice, once sober and once after 19 milligrams of psilocybin:
eight minutes lying at rest
a guided meditation
an 11-minute curated music playlist
six minutes of an eyes-open video of clouds moving across a sky
Participants did the sequence inside an MRI scanner about 80 minutes after dosing and again on EEG about 150 minutes after. Functional MRI tracks blood-oxygen changes as a proxy for neural activity.
The team deliberately left out the cognitive tasks most brain studies use. Stoliker says they wanted "3": a picture of an authentic, uninterrupted trip like one in a therapy session. He notes there is evidence that asking someone to do a task mid-trip pulls them out of the state, which researchers sometimes call "grounding."
The sessions were intense. Half of the participants ranked theirs among the most meaningful experiences of their lives, and 24 placed it in their personal top five.
First pass: the familiar picture
Using standard measures, the team reproduced the chaos finding and added some detail:
Shifted influence.4 measures how much each patch of cortex influences the rest. With eyes closed, sensory regions lost influence and associative regions gained it. Associative regions handle meaning, memory and belief. Stoliker suggests, and stresses that this is a hypothesis, that faculties that construct reality, imagination and the sense of self came to dominate sensory input. That could explain vivid, personally relevant imagery.
Second pass: stop averaging
Standard imaging analysis averages twice. First over time: an eight-minute scan is a few hundred whole-brain snapshots, and the usual method boils them down to one number for how well two regions tracked each other over the whole scan. Order that appears briefly and then dissolves gets washed out. Then over people: each participant's numbers go into a group average, on the assumption that individual differences are noise. In a study about individual experiences, Stoliker wanted to avoid that.
Instead, the team fed moment-by-moment activity from 332 brain regions into 6, a machine-learning tool that compresses high-dimensional data into a few dimensions while keeping events in order. For each person it produced a trajectory: a path through a three-dimensional space with one point per moment of the scan.
As an analogy: averaging is like summarizing a dancer's whole performance by their average position on stage, which might be dead center even if they spent every minute in a distinct, deliberate spot. Tracing the path shows the choreography.
On psilocybin, the trajectories separated into four clear clusters: rest, meditation, music and the clouds video. Sober, activity was less distinct by context. A classifier could look at a single moment of drug-state activity and tell which setting the person was in. Its accuracy scaled with how profound participants rated their experience.
Which networks matter
To find the networks driving the effect, the team swapped one network's psilocybin activity for its sober version at a time and measured how much the classifier got worse. The 7 and the visual network each accounted for over 20 percent of the effect. Stoliker describes the default mode network as the "narrative self" (daydreaming, mind-wandering, thinking about yourself) and the visual system as the outward-facing end of the same spectrum.
On psilocybin these two became less distinct from each other. The team links this to what participants reported: self and world feeling less separate, a state Stoliker calls "embeddedness." He argues this "highlights the idea that the brain may be responsible for constructing both" the internal and the external world.
From brain to behavior
The day after, participants rated shifts in connection to themselves, to others and to nature, along with peace, acceptance and creativity, on a scale from –100 to 100. Most reported positive changes. The classifier's ability to tell the four settings apart tracked the size of those changes.
Stoliker's argument for therapy follows from this. If context physically shapes how the brain organizes itself, rather than just setting a mood, then the room, the playlist and the instructions become clinical variables that could be tuned on purpose.
Caveats
All participants were healthy. None had the depression or other conditions that psychedelic therapies target.
Two people with identical "embeddedness" scores may have had very different experiences, the researchers acknowledge.
No one yet knows how to tune music or visuals, or for whom. Stoliker suggests it may need to vary by individual or diagnosis.
The links between brain organization and experience are correlations. The article doesn't say whether the sober session used a placebo or blinding, or in what order sessions ran. Both matter when interpreting drug-versus-sober comparisons.
Next-day ratings are short-term. The article reports no long-term follow-up.
The main result is about method as much as psychedelics: the standard averaging steps may have been hiding structure all along.
Remember
Averaging brain scans over time and across people can hide brief, individual patterns that only show up moment to moment.
On psilocybin, the self-focused and visual networks became less distinct, which may explain the feeling of being one with the world.
Setting may physically shape how the brain organizes itself on psychedelics, but this was tested only in healthy volunteers.
Webb NIRCam image: the faint dwarf host galaxy at the burst's position, marked by a cross.1 / 2
Astronomers have confirmed the most distant fast radio burst seen so far, and it came from a much smaller galaxy than anyone expected. A team led by Manisha Caleb of the University of Sydney used the James Webb Space Telescope to measure its host galaxy at 1 2.148. That means the burst left about 3 billion years after the big bang. The peer-reviewed study appeared in Science.
A flash with no source
2 (FRBs) are radio flashes from other galaxies that last about a millisecond. Most never repeat, and no one has confirmed what causes them. Since the source itself can't be seen, the host galaxy is one of the best clues available.
This burst, FRB 20240304B, was detected on March 4, 2024, by 3, a project that searches 4, an array of radio dishes in South Africa, for brief signals. The radio signal arrived strongly spread out in time, low frequencies after high ones. That spreading builds up as radio waves pass through gas in space, so it suggested a very distant source. MeerKAT pinned down the position precisely, but the largest ground-based telescopes saw no galaxy there.
Webb finds the host
Webb's NIRCam (Near-Infrared Camera) spotted a faint galaxy at that position. Its 5 (Near-Infrared Spectrograph) then split the galaxy's light into a spectrum. How far known spectral lines had shifted toward red gave the redshift, 2.148. Nearly all known FRBs are from billions of years later in cosmic history.
The galaxy was about 1,000 times less massive than the team expected. Most FRB hosts are large galaxies still forming stars, but this one is a dwarf that is forming stars quickly. Most of its stars may have formed within just 30 million years.
Why its age matters
There are two leading explanations for FRBs:
Neutron-star mergers. Two neutron stars take billions of years to spiral together and collide, so their bursts should come from older galaxies.
6. These are young, highly magnetized neutron stars left behind by supernovae, and they could produce bursts through events like starquakes. They appear soon after star formation begins, so they fit young galaxies.
A host this young favors magnetars. "It's very unlikely that this FRB was produced by a merger," Caleb said.
The burst also carried traces of the gas it passed through on the way to Earth. The team picked out a previously unknown galaxy cluster about 3.5 billion light-years away and the nearby Virgo Cluster.
Caveats
The finding rests on one burst. It argues against a merger for this event, but it doesn't prove all FRBs come from magnetars, and the bursts may have more than one cause. The team expects MeerKAT to find several bursts a year beyond redshift 1, with Webb measuring their host galaxies.
The James Webb Space Telescope has confirmed the most distant fast radio burst found so far. The burst is called FRB 20240304B, and the galaxy it came from turned out to be quite different from what astronomers expected. A team led by Manisha Caleb of the University of Sydney measured the host galaxy's 1 at 2.148. That means the burst left its source about 3 billion years after the big bang. The host is a small dwarf galaxy forming stars fast. The team argues this makes it very unlikely the burst came from two neutron stars merging. The study is peer-reviewed and appeared in the journal Science.
The problem: a flash with no return address
2 (FRBs) are bursts of radio emission that last about a millisecond and come from far beyond our galaxy. They were first noticed in 2007, and there are still no confirmed sources. Most fire once and never again, so astronomers can't wait for a repeat and study it more closely. The source is far too small and brief to see directly. What astronomers can study is the neighborhood: what kind of galaxy hosts the burst, how old its stars are, and how fast it makes new ones. Different theories of where FRBs come from predict different neighborhoods.
The radio signal carries a rough distance hint. Space is filled with thin ionized gas, and its free electrons delay longer radio wavelengths a little more than shorter ones. A burst that has crossed more gas arrives with its frequencies spread out in time. Astronomers call this spread the 3. FRB 20240304B was strongly dispersed, which suggested it was extremely far away. But dispersion is only an estimate, because the amount of gas along any one line of sight varies. Confirming the distance requires the host galaxy's redshift.
How the team found the galaxy
The burst was detected on March 4, 2024, which is where its name comes from. The detection came from 4, a project that searches for brief radio signals in data from 5, an array of radio dishes in South Africa. MeerKAT pinned the burst's position down very precisely. That matters, because a vague position on the sky could match dozens of faint galaxies.
The world's largest ground-based telescopes then looked at that position and saw nothing. The host was too faint, and its light was too stretched into the infrared, for them to detect. So the team turned to Webb, which was built to see faint infrared light.
It took two steps:
Imaging. Webb's NIRCam (Near-Infrared Camera) found a galaxy at the burst's position.
Spectroscopy. Webb's 6 (Near-Infrared Spectrograph) split the galaxy's light into a spectrum. Atoms produce bright lines at known wavelengths. Comparing where those lines show up with where they would be at rest shows how much the light has been stretched. Here the stretch gives a redshift of 2.148: every wavelength arrives about 3.15 times longer than it started.
At that redshift we are seeing the galaxy about 3 billion years after the big bang. The great majority of known FRBs come from billions of years later in cosmic history.
A galaxy that didn't fit
Most FRB hosts found so far are massive galaxies still forming stars. This one is about 1,000 times less massive than the team expected. "We thought it would be a big, nicely formed galaxy with lots of stars, and instead it was a little dwarf galaxy, although it was actively forming stars," Caleb said. Co-author Ben Stappers of the University of Manchester said the host "sticks out in the whole galaxy sample that we have."
The galaxy existed during "7," the era when the universe as a whole was forming stars fastest. Going by its current rate of star formation, most of its stars may have formed within just 30 million years. In cosmic terms that is extremely young.
Why a young host matters
The team frames the result as a test between two leading ideas:
Neutron-star mergers. Two neutron stars orbit each other and slowly spiral inward as they lose energy. That process is expected to take billions of years. If mergers made FRBs, the bursts should tend to appear in older galaxies with mature populations of stars.
8. A magnetar is a young neutron star with an extremely strong magnetic field, left behind when a massive star explodes as a supernova. It could produce bursts through events such as starquakes, sudden cracks in its crust. Massive stars live only a few million years, so magnetars, and the bursts they might make, should appear soon after a galaxy starts forming stars.
A galaxy whose stars mostly formed in about 30 million years hasn't had billions of years for neutron-star pairs to spiral together. "Our work suggests that it's very unlikely that this FRB was produced by a merger," Caleb said. Separate evidence already supports the magnetar idea: in 2020 a known magnetar in our own galaxy gave off an FRB-like radio burst.
The burst as a probe of space
The burst also tells astronomers something about the space it crossed. As it traveled, it picked up the imprint of the gas along its path. Co-author J. Xavier Prochaska of UC Santa Cruz compared it to "a cosmic flashlight." This lets astronomers trace the "cosmic web," the thin gas that sits between galaxies and is otherwise nearly invisible.
The team found two structures in the signal. One is a galaxy cluster no one knew about, at redshift 0.3, about 3.5 billion light-years away. The other is the Virgo Cluster, about 54 million light-years from Earth. The article doesn't explain how the cluster's imprint was picked out from the signal.
Caveats and what comes next
This conclusion rests on a single burst and a single host. One young host makes a merger unlikely for this burst. It doesn't show that all FRBs come from magnetars. The bursts may have more than one cause, and the fact that this host is so unusual compared with the rest could itself be a clue. The article also doesn't give the uncertainties on the galaxy's mass or star-formation history, and the 30-million-year figure is worded as "may," not as a firm result.
To settle it, astronomers need more distant bursts. The team estimates MeerKAT can find and pin down several FRBs a year beyond redshift 1.0, meaning more than halfway back to the big bang. Newer radio telescopes should push that number higher. The method stays the same: radio telescopes find and locate the bursts, and Webb measures the faint galaxies they come from.
Remember
Webb measured the host's redshift directly, confirming a distance that radio data could only estimate.
The host's youth points away from neutron-star mergers for this burst, but it is only one event.
FRBs also work as probes of space: this one revealed an unknown galaxy cluster along its path.
A photo from the Artemis II mission, whose crew used handheld cameras to collect 814 gigabytes of lunar data.
NASA has presented its first science results from Artemis II, the April 2026 flight that took four astronauts around the moon. 1, the crew capsule, carried almost no science instruments. The astronauts had digital cameras and iPhones, and between April 1 and 10 they collected 814 gigabytes of lunar data. NASA calls the findings preliminary. They come from a press conference, not a peer-reviewed paper, and the raw material, including audio, video and hand-annotated images, is now in a public online archive.
Five flashes in the dark
The crew spent just under seven hours passing the moon. For part of that time they could see the 2, the hemisphere that never faces Earth, while some of it was in darkness. Within roughly an hour they saw five flashes of light, each in a different place. Each one was a small 3 hitting the surface.
The scientists worked backward from how bright and how brief each flash was. They estimate each object weighed about 8.5 grams, roughly as much as two dice. That sounds harmless, but these objects travel at tens of kilometers per second, fast enough to kill an astronaut or wreck a rover.
The crew's path avoided the yearly meteor streams. NASA therefore treats the count as the ordinary background rate of impacts. From that rate, it puts the chance of a strike like this hitting a future moon base at about one in 10,000 per decade. "We're probably safe going forward," said team member Jen Heldmann.
Dust, color and cracks
No dust haze. Apollo astronauts sometimes reported glowing hazes of dust lifted above the surface. Lunar dust is a serious problem because it wears through suits, wires and other hardware. The Artemis II crew saw none, which suggests the hazes come and go rather than hang there permanently.
Color. The photos show greens, yellows, grays and browns across the surface. NASA's analysis links each shade to a different kind of ancient volcanic deposit.
Wrinkle ridges. In 4, a huge plain of old lava, the crew photographed curving ridges. These are thought to form when the weight of the lava presses the crust down until it cracks and shortens. Faults like these are worth mapping because they could produce moonquakes.
How much this matters
Scientific American's reporter calls the findings useful but says nothing in them is especially revelatory. The real answers will need missions on the surface. NASA has picked three such payloads for upcoming landings: one to monitor micrometeoroids at the south pole, one to search for 5 that could hold underground habitats, and one to study how water ice changes the stability of lunar soil.
NASA has released the first science results from Artemis II. In April 2026 that mission took four astronauts around the moon, the first crew to travel that far since Apollo more than 50 years earlier. The mission's main job was engineering: testing the 1 capsule and its systems before crews land, and eventually before a small base goes up near the lunar south pole. Orion carried very little science equipment. The crew did have digital cameras and iPhones, and between April 1 and 10 they collected 814 gigabytes of lunar data.
NASA presented the results at a press conference on October 7 and called them preliminary. They have not yet appeared in peer-reviewed papers. Along with the findings, NASA posted a large online archive containing more than eight hours of crew audio, video of the reentry, hand-annotated photographs and more. Marie Henderson, the mission's deputy lunar science lead, said the results will shape how future Artemis missions are designed.
The hazard nobody can see from Earth
The most useful result concerns small 2. The moon has no atmosphere to slow or burn up incoming rock, so it is hit constantly. Big impacts happen. In spring 2024 a 15-meter object hit with the energy of an atomic bomb and dug a pit 222 meters long. Most impactors, though, range from bullet-sized to football-sized. Those are what matter for a base, because they are common and a direct hit from one could kill an astronaut or disable a rover.
Measuring how often they arrive is hard. Telescopes on Earth can watch for impact flashes, but only on the night portion of the nearside, the hemisphere that always faces us. The 3 has always been out of view.
Artemis II's flyby lasted just under seven hours, and part of the farside the crew saw was in full darkness. Against that black background they spotted five flashes of light in different places, all within roughly an hour.
From a flash to a mass to a risk
An impact flash shows up when a small part of the meteoroid's energy of motion turns into light. A brighter flash means more energy. A flash's brightness and duration, combined with an assumed typical impact speed, let scientists estimate the impactor's mass. The article does not give the team's exact method, but the result was about 8.5 grams per object, roughly the mass of two dice.
Speed is what makes such a small object dangerous. An illustrative calculation, not from the article: 8.5 grams at 20 km/s carries about 1.7 megajoules. That is roughly the energy of 0.4 kilograms of TNT, packed into something the size of a pebble. Heldmann, a member of the lunar science team and deputy project scientist for Artemis IV, compared these impactors to space bullets.
To turn the count into a risk, the timing matters. The crew flew outside any of the big yearly 4, the ones that produce meteor showers on Earth. So NASA treats the five flashes as the normal background rate rather than a burst. Scaling that rate to the size of a base and to a ten-year period gives NASA's estimate of about one chance in 10,000 per decade that a similar object hits an outpost. "We're probably safe going forward," Heldmann said.
The number deserves caution. It rests on five events seen over about an hour by people with handheld cameras. Small samples like this carry wide statistical uncertainty. That is presumably part of why NASA has chosen a dedicated micrometeoroid monitor as one of its next surface payloads.
Dust that wasn't there
The crew also looked for lofted dust. Lunar dust is made of sharp, microscopic grains that are corrosive, abrasive and clingy, and it wears through wiring, spacesuits and seals. Meteorite impacts and rocket exhaust easily throw it into the air. Apollo astronauts in the 1960s and 1970s sometimes reported sunlit hazes of dust drifting above the surface. The Artemis II crew saw none. That suggests the hazes are transient rather than permanent. Dust on the ground remains a major long-term hazard, but a constant floating haze looks less likely.
A more colorful moon
The photos show that the moon is not uniformly gray. It is patched with greens, yellows, grays and browns. NASA's analysis confirms that these shades correspond to different kinds of ancient volcanic activity, from glassy lava flows to rubbly 5 deposits, which are fragments thrown out by explosive eruptions. Maps of these deposits help planners choose landing sites with interesting geology and possibly useful resources.
The team also hoped to spot tectonic features, especially faults that could slip and cause long-lasting moonquakes strong enough to topple structures. Over 6, the "Ocean of Storms," a huge basin filled with ancient lava, the crew photographed a series of arching ridges. These 7 are thought to form when the weight of erupted lava bears down on the crust until it breaks and contracts. "The fact that they were able to see that from orbit was pretty phenomenal," said Debra Needham of the science operations team.
A modest haul, by the reporter's own account
Scientific American's reporter is blunt. Despite the press conference, nothing in the report is especially revelatory. Its real value is practical: first measurements of hazards that matter for a base, plus a reminder that real answers need closer study on the surface. In late September NASA chose three payloads for upcoming landings that follow from this work:
a monitor for micrometeoroid impacts and other environmental hazards at the south pole;
a search for 8, hollow tunnels left by ancient lava flows that could shelter underground habitats;
a study of how water ice collects in lunar soil and changes its stability.
NASA timed the release on purpose. On October 7, 1959, the Soviet probe Luna 3 sent back the first images of the farside, which were grainy, colorless and showed a heavily cratered surface. Artemis II's color photos stand in sharp contrast. Kelsey Young, the mission's lunar science lead, credits them with uniting the world around the flight.
Several questions remain open. How firm is a risk estimate built on five flashes? Do the Apollo dust hazes depend on time of day or location? And which of the volcanic deposits seen from orbit will be worth landing on?
Remember
Scientists can estimate a meteoroid's mass from how bright and brief its impact flash is, even from handheld cameras.
The 1-in-10,000-per-decade risk figure rests on just five flashes, so it is a rough first estimate.
Not seeing Apollo-style dust hazes suggests floating dust comes and goes, though dust on the ground is still a serious hazard.
Artist's concept of the proposed giant planet orbiting HS 0209+0832. It is an illustration, not an observation.
A University of Warwick-led team, writing in the peer-reviewed journal Nature Astronomy, reports a candidate for the first known "second-generation" planet. That means a planet formed from debris thrown off by a dying star, not from the disc around a newborn one. The planet hasn't been seen directly. It is inferred from the chemistry of the star it orbits.
The star and the clue
The host is HS 0209+0832, a 1 (the hot, dense leftover core of a Sun-like star) about 270 light years away. White dwarf gravity drags heavy elements below the surface quickly. Metals visible in the atmosphere therefore mean the star is currently swallowing material, typically from a nearby planet or asteroid.
Reanalysing 25-year-old Hubble Space Telescope data, the team found zinc, copper, aluminium, silicon and titanium. The striking result was 2, a rare metal, at more than 1,000 times the Sun's level. Using archives from two more NASA missions, 3 (Far Ultraviolet Spectroscopic Explorer) and 4 (Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite), they also report a Jupiter-like planet on a 4.4-day orbit. The article doesn't explain how that period was measured.
Why niobium matters
Ordinary fusion in a star's core builds elements only up to iron. Co-author Nicholas Stone of the University of Wisconsin–Madison says heavier elements form only in conditions that appear briefly in dying stars. Niobium's main route here is the 5, or slow neutron capture: nuclei absorb neutrons one at a time and step up to heavier elements. That enriched material is then expelled into space as the star sheds its outer layers.
A planet born with the star should carry roughly normal amounts of niobium. A planet that condensed from the dying star's ejecta would carry far more. The team argues the best explanation for HS 0209+0832's niobium is that it is eating such a planet.
What follows, and the caveats
Lead author Jamie Williams says niobium can now serve as a fingerprint for these planets, and more Hubble observations of hot white dwarfs could find others. He adds that there aren't yet enough statistics to say how common they are. The team suggests rocky 6 could form the same way.
Because white dwarfs stay at a steady temperature for tens of billions of years, Williams says a rocky planet about 2.7 million km from one could stay temperate far longer than Earth. He doubts life would start easily there, though, since such a planet probably wouldn't receive Earth-like molecules. For now this is one system and one inference. It is a strong candidate, not a confirmed planet.
The finding
A team led by the University of Warwick reports what may be the first known "second-generation" planet. The term means a planet that formed after its star died, from material the dying star cast off, rather than from the disc of gas and dust around a newborn star. The host is HS 0209+0832, a 1 (the dense, burnt-out core of a Sun-like star) about 270 light years away in the constellation Cetus. The work appears in the peer-reviewed journal Nature Astronomy. The planet itself has not been seen directly. Its existence is inferred from the star's chemistry, so it is best treated as a strong candidate rather than a confirmed object.
Reading a planet in a star's atmosphere
White dwarfs make unusually useful chemical laboratories. Their gravity is so strong that heavy elements sink out of the visible atmosphere quickly. So when astronomers see metals on a white dwarf, the star is almost certainly swallowing material right now, usually from a planet or asteroid that has strayed too close. Measuring which elements are present amounts to analysing what the star is eating.
The team went back to Hubble Space Telescope data about 25 years old. They also used archives from 2 (the Far Ultraviolet Spectroscopic Explorer, a NASA satellite retired in 2007) and from 3 (the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, which watches stars for periodic changes in brightness). In HS 0209+0832's atmosphere they found zinc, copper, aluminium, silicon and titanium. What stood out was 4, a rare metal, at more than 1,000 times the Sun's abundance relative to other elements.
The researchers also report that the suspected planet circles the white dwarf every 4.4 days, which is a very tight orbit. The article doesn't explain how the period was measured or how much each data set contributed. It describes the object as a Jupiter-like giant.
Why niobium points to a star's death
The argument depends on where niobium comes from. Co-author Nicholas Stone, a theorist at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, notes that elements heavier than iron aren't made by ordinary fusion in stellar cores. They form only under conditions that appear briefly inside dying stars. For niobium in this system, the main route is the 5, or slow neutron capture. In this process an atomic nucleus absorbs a neutron, sometimes decays into the next element up, absorbs another, and so on, climbing step by step past iron.
In a Sun-like star this happens late in life, and the products are then thrown out into space with the star's outer layers. Stone calls niobium "a signpost" of that expulsion.
The team's reasoning goes like this. Planets that form from a star's birth cloud should have roughly ordinary, Sun-like proportions of niobium. A planet built from s-process-enriched debris ejected as the star died would carry far more. When that planet's material falls onto the white dwarf, the excess shows up in the spectrum. The team says the most likely explanation for 1,000-times-solar niobium is a giant planet that condensed out of a new disc formed during the star's death. The article does not say which other explanations were considered or how firmly they were ruled out.
What it would mean
According to the article, astrophysicists have argued for decades over whether planets can form from a stellar remnant's leftovers. If this interpretation holds, it would be the first observed case. It would also show that close-in planets around white dwarfs can form after the 6, the long hydrogen-burning stage of a star's life. Lead author Jamie Williams, a Warwick doctoral candidate, says niobium can now serve as a signature of accretion from 7. He suggests that observing more hot white dwarfs with Hubble could turn up more candidates. He is careful on numbers: there aren't enough statistics to estimate how common such planets are. But because HS 0209+0832 started as a Sun-like star, he thinks the process could happen around many stars. The team also suggests rocky second-generation planets could form the same way, though no rocky planet has been found here.
The habitability question
The detected object is a giant, so the habitability discussion is about hypothetical rocky planets. Williams points out that a white dwarf's temperature stays fairly stable for up to tens of billions of years. A rocky planet in the right place could therefore stay temperate far longer than Earth will. "The right place" is very close: an average distance of about 2.7 million km. That is under 2% of the Earth–Sun distance and only about seven times the Earth–Moon distance. The star would also look much fainter than the Sun, especially in visible light.
Williams is cautious about life. The white dwarf could warm such a planet, he says, but life would probably struggle to get started because the planet likely wouldn't receive the same molecules Earth did.
Our own Sun will follow this path: red giant, then white dwarf, with its own s-process enrichment that could in principle seed a later generation of planets. Earth will probably not survive to see it. It will either be engulfed by the expanding Sun or scorched.
What remains open
Inference, not imaging. The planet is deduced from atmospheric chemistry plus an orbital period. Independent confirmation, such as a direct measurement of its mass, isn't described.
One system. A single example can't show how common second-generation planets are, as Williams himself says.
How the planet formed. The article doesn't explain how a giant planet assembles from ejected material in a star's final phase, or how it ends up on a 4.4-day orbit.
"First" claims. The article calls this both a "potential" detection and the first time such formation "has happened." The cautious version is the accurate one for now.
Remember
Metals on a white dwarf's surface sink fast, so they reveal what the star is eating right now.
Niobium at 1,000 times solar levels points to material made in a dying star's s-process.
The planet is inferred from chemistry and an orbital period; one system can't show how common such planets are.
Jonathan on St. Helena. His cheek-tissue DNA was compared with that of other giant tortoises.
Jonathan, an Aldabra giant tortoise on the south Atlantic island of St. Helena, is 194. That's about a century past his species' expected lifespan, which makes him the oldest known living land animal. A study published October 7 in the peer-reviewed journal Science Advances looked at his DNA. In the genes that run his 1, the cell's energy producers, it found unusually orderly chemical tags.
Getting the DNA
Island authorities wouldn't allow a blood draw because they feared infection. Jonathan's vet sent cheek swabs instead, but those turned out to contain mostly DNA from bacteria in his mouth. A second round of cheek scrapes, which collect actual tissue, worked. The DNA was fragmented, so the team filled the gaps using a 2, an already-assembled template from a 36-year-old Aldabra tortoise named Tank.
What they found
Compared with Tank and Lonesome George, a Galápagos tortoise who died in 2012 aged over 100, Jonathan carried 287 unique variants in genes linked to aging. These include genes for DNA repair and for 3, the protective caps on chromosome ends that shorten with age. With only three animals compared, though, "unique" is a weak filter.
The more distinctive result involves 4, where small chemical tags (methyl groups) sit on DNA and help control how strongly genes are switched on. These patterns get more random with age, which researchers call "5." Older tortoises showed more disorder, and so did most of Jonathan's genome.
The exception was a set of mitochondrial genes. At their 6, the stretches of DNA that turn genes on, Jonathan's tags were more organized. The researchers suggest this keeps those genes working steadily. Mitochondria supply the energy cells use to function and repair themselves. "Keeping the entropy low in these mitochondrial genes... is likely to be a contributor to longevity," said co-author Stephen Clark of the Kallel Foundation, a nonprofit studying drug targets for human longevity.
Caveats
The study shows a link, not a cause. It rests on one animal and one type of tissue. Vincent Lynch, a University at Buffalo biologist who wasn't involved, notes that a full picture would need DNA from many organs, which is only possible after Jonathan dies. He also questions whether "entropy" is a good way to describe methylation, which can be unpredictable. Still, he considers the flagged genes useful leads. Nobody yet knows whether other long-lived tortoises share the pattern. "Maybe Jonathan is just really good at being old," Lynch said.
Jonathan, an Aldabra giant tortoise on the south Atlantic island of St. Helena, is 194 years old. He is the oldest known living land animal and has outlived his species' expected lifespan by roughly a century. A study published October 7 in the peer-reviewed journal Science Advances reads his DNA for clues. Its main finding: the genes that run his 1, the cell's energy producers, carry unusually orderly chemical tags at the stretches of DNA that switch them on. The authors suggest this may help explain his long life. They also say they can't prove it.
Getting a usable sample
The work began almost ten years ago. Stephen Clark, a co-author and chief scientist at the Kallel Foundation (a Nashville nonprofit looking for drug targets to extend human lifespan), asked Jonathan's vet, Joe Hollins, to collect samples. Island authorities would not allow a blood draw because they feared infection. "I didn't want to be the doctor that killed Jonathan," Clark told Live Science.
Hollins sent cheek swabs instead. When the team sequenced them, their computers kept crashing. The reason turned out to be that the DNA came mostly from bacteria living in Jonathan's mouth, not from his own cells. Clark "had to go back and beg" for another try. The vet then sent cheek scrapes, taken with a slightly different tool that collects tissue rather than surface material. This time the DNA was Jonathan's.
Cheek tissue gives more fragmented DNA than blood. To fill the gaps, the researchers used a 2 from Tank, a 36-year-old Aldabra tortoise. A reference genome is an already-assembled genome from the same species that works like a template for placing short, broken pieces of sequence. They also compared Jonathan with Lonesome George, a Galápagos tortoise (Chelonoidis abingdoni) believed to be over 100 when he died in 2012.
What the gene sequence showed
Compared with Tank and Lonesome George, Jonathan carried 287 unique variants in genes already linked to aging-related pathways. These include genes for DNA repair and for maintaining 3, the protective caps on chromosome ends that tend to shorten with age. Greer Dolby, a biologist at the University of Alabama at Birmingham who was not involved, noted that the same pathways matter in human aging. She called it a "broader signature of aging" across species.
One caution here: comparing one animal with two others can't tell you which variants matter. A variant can be "unique" to Jonathan simply because only three tortoises were compared.
The methylation finding
The more distinctive result is epigenetic. In 4, small chemical tags called methyl groups attach to DNA and help control how strongly genes are expressed. Methylation patterns change with age in fairly regular ways, which is why scientists use them as "clocks" of biological age.
The team compared methylation across Jonathan's genome with that of young and old Aldabra tortoises. Older tortoises had more disordered patterns, which reflects random changes that build up over time. Researchers call this "5." As an analogy (ours, not the study's), picture a set of light switches that starts out in a clean, consistent pattern. Over decades, individual switches get flipped at random, and the pattern becomes noisy. Cells reading those switches then get less consistent instructions.
Across most genes, Jonathan's methylation was more disordered than the young tortoises', as you would expect for an old animal. But in one group of genes tied to mitochondrial function, the pattern was more organized. This held specifically at their 6, the regulatory regions that turn genes on. The article doesn't say exactly which group or measure that "more organized" is relative to. The researchers propose that keeping these switches orderly keeps the genes' activity steady over time.
Why mitochondria? They make the energy cells need to work, repair themselves and limit further DNA damage. Researchers have long linked mitochondrial function to longevity, and mitochondrial dysfunction to disease. "Keeping the entropy low in these mitochondrial genes, or keeping pristine mitochondria, is likely to be a contributor to longevity," Clark said.
The limits
The authors did not run any test that could show cause and effect. The study only shows that orderly mitochondrial methylation and extreme age occur together in one animal. Clark argues that a blood sample would give a fuller view of the genome.
Vincent Lynch, a biologist at the University at Buffalo who was not involved, goes further. He says Jonathan's full genetic profile can't be known until after his death, when DNA can be taken from many tissues. Mutations build up differently in different organs, and that partly explains why organs vary in their age-related diseases. "We would ideally like to know what those mutations are in those specific tissues," he said. Lynch also questions whether "entropy" is a good way to describe age-related methylation, since methylation can be unpredictable. Still, he agrees the flagged genes are useful leads.
What's still open
The big unknown is whether this is a species-wide mechanism or one individual's quirk. The next step would be to check whether long-lived Aldabra tortoises as a group share orderly mitochondrial promoters, and then whether other long-lived animals do too. As Lynch put it: "Maybe Jonathan is just really good at being old."
Remember
The first cheek swabs gave mostly mouth-bacteria DNA, showing how hard it is to sample a protected animal.
Most of Jonathan's methylation looks old, but his mitochondrial gene promoters stay unusually orderly.
With one animal and one tissue, the study can't separate a longevity mechanism from individual quirk.
Lower modularity. Connections within networks weakened and connections between networks strengthened. 5, a measure of how cleanly regions stay sorted into specialist teams, dropped in all four settings.
Inside and outside blur. Sober, an eyes-closed brain looks very different from one watching a video. On psilocybin, the gap between eyes-open and eyes-closed connectivity in the visual network shrank by 85 percent. The EEG sessions independently backed this up: alpha-band activity, a rhythm that normally marks the brain filtering out visual input, fell by nearly half.
