A polar bear lounges in a field of pink flowers. An arctic fox skips gingerly as the thaw of spring moves in. And a baby chimpanzee sips a bottle.

The 2024 Nature Photography Contest showcases the complicated beauty and inspiring resiliency of our planet. Photographer Christopher Paetkau took home top honors (and a €1000 prize) for his captivating photo “Polar Bear Amid Fireweed Blooms” (seen below), taken in Manitoba, Canada.

“With its colors, composition, and underlying message, Christopher Paetkau’s photograph represents the very essence of nature and photography. It serves as a reminder of the countless reasons why we must cherish and protect our planet,” The Nature Photography Contest shared in a press release.

Photographer Thomas Vijayan nabbed the title Photographer of the Year. Vijayan’s portfolio of work…

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The finding comes from looking at living human hippocampus tissue. This part of the brain plays a key role in learning and memory. The analyzed tissue revealed fairly few cell-to-cell links between the vast number of nerve cells in the hippocampus. But signals sent through those sparse links proved extremely reliable and precise.

Cellular neuroscientist Peter Jonas led the new research. He works at the Institute of Science and Technology Austria in Klosterneuburg. His team shared its findings January 23 in Cell.

Peeking into the memory center

The brains of all mammals have two hippocampi. One’s in the brain’s left hemisphere. The other is in the right.

Each hippocampus contains a smaller region known as the CA3 area. In humans, some 1.7 million nerve cells — called pyramidal cells — reside there.

But much of what we know about these cells has come from studies in mice. And those animals have only about 110,000 pyramidal cells in each CA3 area.

Past research hinted that animals with more nerve cells in their hippocampi may have fewer links — or synapses — between those cells, Jonas notes. His team wanted to see if this was true.

So they examined the brain tissue taken from eight patients. All had undergone brain surgery to treat epilepsy and agreed to donate the removed tissue for study.

Sparse but strong links

Recordings of electrical activity from pyramidal cells helped the researchers estimate how many cell connections there were in the CA3 area. It came to about 10 synapses for every 800 cell pairs. That’s only about a third as many per cell pair as had been found in the CA3 tissue of mice.

Even though human pyramidal cells had fairly few links, those cells sent steady and strong signals to each other. Mouse pyramidal cells did not.

Math models backed up what the scientists observed in human brain tissue. Having a lot of nerve cells…

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If you’re scheduled for surgery, here’s an interesting study you should know about: Researchers have found that the risk of death from surgery can depend on the time of week it’s scheduled, identifying the worst day for an operation.

The study published in JAMA Network highlights an important trend known as the “weekend effect,” in relation to surgeries. Researchers found that patients undergoing planned surgeries on Friday, just before the weekend, face a significantly higher risk of death, complications, and readmission compared to those scheduled after the weekend.

“Hospitals and health care systems have variations in operational structure and organization during the transition from weekdays to weekends. The weekend effect refers to the potential for worse patient outcomes during the weekends, compared with weekdays. In surgery, this concept may also apply to those undergoing surgery immediately before the weekend, who receive postoperative care during the weekend,” the researchers wrote.

The findings were based on an analysis of large-scale data from 429,691 adult patients in Ontario, Canada, who underwent one of 25 common surgical procedures between 2007 and 2019, with a one-year follow-up.

Of the 429,691 patients studied, nearly 46.5% had surgery before the weekend and researchers noted that they were more likely to experience negative outcomes, including complications, readmissions, and death compared to the pre-weekend group.

The risk of mortality increased by 9% at 30 days, 10% at 90 days, and a striking 12% at one year for patients who underwent surgery just before the weekend.

The study suggests that negative outcomes may be linked to differences in hospital staffing and fewer specialists available on weekends, which could impact post-surgery care. To improve outcomes, researchers recommend future studies focusing on ensuring high-quality care for all patients, regardless of when their surgery is scheduled.

However, interestingly, the…

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WASHINGTON — SpaceX’s Starship vehicle suffered its second consecutive test flight failure March 6, tumbling in space before breakup and reentering over the Caribbean.

The Starship/Super Heavy vehicle lifted off on the Flight 8 test flight at 6:30 p.m. Eastern from the company’s Starbase test site in South Texas. The countdown appeared to go smoothly other than a hold at the T-40 second mark that lasted only a few seconds.

The vehicle’s initial phases of flight went as planned. That included the ascent of the vehicle through stage separation and the return of the Super Heavy booster, which was caught back at the launch tower for the third time in four missions dating back to October 2024.

However, just after eight minutes into the flight, four of the six Raptor engines in the Starship upper stage shut down in quick succession. The vehicle immediately began to tumble but continued to relay video, showing the Earth spinning in and out of view.

Several minutes later, observers in parts of the Caribbean, from the Dominican Republic to the Bahamas, and as far north as Florida’s Space Coast, reported seeing the vehicle explode and debris falling. It was uncertain how much debris would reach the ground and where.

That breakup was similar to the Flight 7 mission Jan. 16, when contact with Starship was lost about eight and a half minutes after liftoff. Debris fell in the Caribbean, with some found in the Turks and Caicos Islands.

The company announced Feb. 24 that it concluded the vehicle suffered a “harmonic response several times stronger in flight than had been seen during testing” that stressed propellant lines. That caused leaks that created fires in the aft “attic” section of the vehicle, causing all but one of the six engines there to perform controlled shutdowns.

SpaceX said it made changes to hardware in the vehicle and operations to prevent similar damage from happening again. It also added vents and a gaseous nitrogen purge system to reduce…

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The mass of the supermassive black hole in the center of the Large Magellanic Cloud, a small satellite galaxy of the Milky Way, is about 600,000 solar masses.

“The halo of our Milky Way Galaxy contains a small number of stars that are traveling faster than the local escape velocity on trajectories that will carry them into intergalactic space,” said Dr. Jesse Han from the Harvard & Smithsonian’s Center for Astrophysics and colleagues.

“One mechanism for producing such hypervelocity stars is the Hills mechanism: when a close binary star strays near a supermassive black hole, one star can be captured, while the other is ejected at velocities that can reach over 1,000 km per second.”

In their new study, the astronomers traced the paths with ultra-fine precision of 21 hypervelocity stars in the Milky Way’s outer halo.

They confidently classified 16 of these stars and found that 7 of them were consistent with originating from the center of the Milky Way.

However, the other 9 stars were consistent with originating from the center of the Large Magellanic Cloud, which is located around 160,000 light-years away from us.

“It is astounding to realize that we have another supermassive black hole just down the block, cosmically speaking,” Dr. Han said.

“Black holes are so stealthy that this one has been practically under our noses this whole time.”

The researchers found the Large Magellanic Cloud’s black hole by using data from ESA’s Gaia mission.

They also used an improved understanding of the dwarf galaxy’s orbit around the Milky Way recently obtained by other astronomers.

“We knew that these hypervelocity stars had existed for a while, but Gaia has given us the data we need to figure out where they actually come from,” said Dr. Kareem El-Badry, an astronomer at Caltech.

“By combining these data with our new theoretical models for how these stars travel, we made this remarkable discovery.”

“The only explanation we can come up with…

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WASHINGTON — AI tech startup Danti is expanding its Earth data search engine to a wider government audience after a year of refinement with defense and intelligence agencies, the company announced March 6.

The Atlanta-based firm’s technology allows users to search satellite imagery and other geospatial data using natural language queries, delivering near real-time responses by synthesizing multiple information sources into actionable insights.

“We provide the software infrastructure that’s connecting the dots for a lot of these organizations,” said Jesse Kallman, Danti’s founder and chief executive. 

Founded in 2023, Danti initially collaborated with the U.S. Space Force and the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency (NGA) to develop the system with input from expert analysts. The company has now expanded operations to include the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and other government entities.

The search engine incorporates satellite imagery licensed to the government through various contracts, fusing this visual data with information from diverse sources including drone footage, news reports, social media, shipping records, and global event data.

“Danti aids our mission to rapidly understand the massive volume of information, both in archive and newly generated, across commercial and open data sources,” said Maj. Zach He, of the U.S. Space Force’s tactical surveillance and reconnaissance tracking program. 

Keith Masback, an investor in Danti and a former senior official at NGA, said the company’s search engine differs from conventional geospatial tools by contextualizing information. Unlike traditional intelligence platforms that require analysts to sift through raw data manually, Danti’s AI automates the process by cross-referencing imagery with other intelligence inputs. 

Masback recalled that intelligence analysts had long envisioned a tool that could…

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I’m standing in the woods, in light rain, looking for some prickly branches to run through. This isn’t my typical weekend activity, but I’m currently emboldened by the impressively burly new Yeti backpack I’m testing. Born from the company’s acquisition of tactical gear maker Mystery Ranch in 2024, the new Ranchero backpack (available in both 22-liter and 27-liter models) offers super-heavy-duty build quality and a clever zipper design that allows for easy access to gear while on the trail. Yes, it comes with the typical Yeti price tag, but it’s also built with the company’s trademark zeal for making ultra-burly gear that’s still somehow aesthetically pleasing.

The verdict: This heavy-duty backpack is great for hiking and travel if you don’t mind the weight and the price tag. The clever zipper design provides quick access to gear that’s much better than digging through a top-loading bag. I also really like the way it looks.

The build

The first thing everyone notices about this bag is the zipper setup. There are actually three zippers on the face of the bag that intersect to form a Y shape. By pulling down the vertical zipper…

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Despite all the industry hype and genuine advances, generative AI models are still prone to odd, inexplicable, and downright worrisome quirks. There’s also a growing body of research suggesting that the overall performance of many large language models (LLMs) may degrade over time. According to recent evidence, the industry’s newer reasoning models may already possess the ability to manipulate and circumvent their human programmers’ goals. Some AI will even attempt to cheat their way out of losing in games of chess. This poor sportsmanship is documented in a preprint study from Palisade Research, an organization focused on risk assessments of emerging AI systems.

While supercomputers—most famously IBM’s Deep Blue—have long surpassed the world’s best human chess players, generative AI still lags behind due to their underlying programming parameters. Technically speaking, none of the current generative AI models are computationally capable of beating dedicated chess engines. These AI don’t “know” this, however, and will continue chipping away at possible solutions—apparently with problematic results.

To learn more, the team from Palisade Research tasked OpenAI’s o1-preview model, DeepSeek R1, and multiple other similar programs with playing games of chess against Stockfish, one of the world’s most advanced chess engines. In order to understand the generative AI’s reasoning during each match, the team also provided a “scratchpad,” allowing the AI to convey its thought processes through text. They then watched and recorded hundreds of chess matches between generative AI and Stockfish.

The results were somewhat troubling. While earlier models like OpenAI’s GPT-4o and Anthropic’s Claude Sonnet 3.5 only attempted to “hack” games after researchers nudged them along with additional prompts, more advanced editions required no such help. OpenAI’s o1-preview, for example, tried to cheat 37 percent of the time, while…

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Atmospheric gravity waves play a crucial role in driving latitudinal air currents on the Red Planet, particularly at high altitudes, according to a new study by University of Tokyo planetary researchers.

“On Earth, large-scale atmospheric waves caused by the planet’s rotation, known as Rossby waves, are the primary influence on the way air circulates in the stratosphere, or the lower part of the middle atmosphere,” said University of Tokyo’s Professor Kaoru Sato, co-author on the study.

“But our study shows that on Mars, gravity waves have a dominant effect at the mid and high latitudes of the middle atmosphere.”

“Rossby waves are large-scale atmospheric waves, or resolved waves, whereas gravity waves are unresolved waves, meaning they are too fine to be directly measured or modeled and must be estimated by more indirect means.”

“Not to be confused with gravitational waves from massive stellar bodies, gravity waves are an atmospheric phenomenon when a packet of air rises and falls due to variations in buoyancy. That oscillating motion is what gives rise to gravity waves.”

Due to the small-scale nature of them and the limitations of observational data, planetary researchers have previously found it challenging to quantify their significance in the Martian atmosphere.

So Professor Sato and her colleagues turned to the Ensemble Mars Atmosphere Reanalysis System (EMARS) dataset, produced by a range of space-based observations over many years, to analyze seasonal variations up there.

“We found something interesting, that gravity waves facilitate the rapid vertical transfer of angular momentum, significantly influencing the meridional, or north-south, in the middle atmosphere circulations on Mars,” said study’s first author Anzu Asumi, a graduate student at the University of Tokyo.

“It’s interesting because it more closely resembles the behavior seen in Earth’s mesosphere rather than in our stratosphere.”

“This suggests existing…

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