Scientists Finally Discover How Venus Flytraps Snap Shut So Fast

15 June 2026, By M. Starr

https://www.sciencealert.com/scientists-finally-discover-how-venus-flytraps-snap-shut-so-fast

Venus flytraps can act fast enough to catch flies. 

(marcouliana/iStock/Getty Images Plus)

To succeed in a hunt, a predator often needs to be faster than its prey.

Plants are not known for their speed.

Even so, one plant has evolved a snappy survival strategy that lets it feast on insects and arachnids that, by most measures, should be safe from its clutches.

We're talking, of course, about the famous Venus flytrap (Dionaea muscipula) – a plant that lures prey into a leafy trap, then snaps shut around the unfortunate victim, holding it fast while the plant digests at its leisure.

Scientists have long puzzled over the mechanism that allows this plant to move faster than plants should be able to.

Now, a team of researchers led by physicist Jeongeun Ryu of the French National Center of Scientific Research (CNRS) say they have identified the trigger.

To activate its jaws, the plant rapidly softens the cell walls in the trap's outer skin.

That change lets the outer surface expand more easily than the inner surface, bending the leaf until it reaches a tipping point and snaps shut.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O7eQKSf0LmY

"This represents the fastest modulation of wall mechanics reported in plants," the researchers write.

"Our finding reveals a mode of plant motility based on dynamic tuning of material properties, suggesting principles for muscle-free, bioinspired actuation."

Many plants can achieve relatively timely and precise movement. One of the more famous examples is seen in Mimosa pudica, or touch-me-not, whose symmetrical leaflets fold shut when touched, a delicate maneuver thought to help the plant evade predation or minimize damage from passers-by.

For a lot of plants, these movements are powered by the flow of fluid – simple hydraulics that change internal pressure and thus the shape of the plant.

Previously, scientists had supposed that the mechanism behind the flytrap's movements was similarly hydraulic, but that posed a problem.

The traditional hydraulic idea was that the trap closes because water moves from one side of the leaf to the other, causing one side to expand more than the other and bend the trap shut.

The 'traps' of a Venus flytrap are the tips of its leaves.

 (Paul Starosta/Stone/Getty Images)



The researchers identified two main flaws with this model.

The first is that water moves relatively slowly through plant tissue. The researchers measured how quickly water moves through a Venus flytrap and estimated that transporting water across the thickness of the trap would take between 30 and 150 seconds.

That's far too slow for the speed at which a flytrap needs to operate in order to grab its prey.

Sure enough, the movements that initiate closure occur on a timescale of about a second, much faster than water could move through the trap.

The other problem is that a water-driven mechanism should produce a delayed wave of motion across the trap as water gradually diffuses through the tissue. But the researchers found no sign of such a pattern.

Well, the next question naturally is: If not hydraulics, then what is it?

In their new study, the researchers described the two-stage process of a snap.

The first is the active bending phase, in which the trap begins to bend inward toward a critical tipping point. The second is the snap-closure itself, which takes just 0.2 seconds.

How the trap snapped under different experimental conditions. 

(Ryu et al., Science, 2026)

To isolate what kicks off the active phase, the researchers devised two tests. In the first, traps were cut into thin strips to hinder the snapping mechanism. Under this condition, the traps were still able to bend, but much more slowly.

In the second test, traps were clamped open and equipped with a force sensor to measure the force required to maintain separation between the two lobes. This produced a similar result, revealing a gradual bending motion that precedes the rapid snap-buckling stage.

The final piece of the puzzle was observing what the plant is actually doing during that active bending phase. The researchers used a tiny probe to measure the stiff, cellulosic walls of the cells inside and outside the trap before and after closure.

Cell walls on the inner surface barely changed – but those on the outer surface softened, losing about 40 percent of their rigidity.

A diagram illustrating the stages of the Venus flytrap trap closure.

 (A. Fisher/Science)

So, here's how it works.

Before triggering, turgor pressure – the force inside a cell that pushes the cell membrane against the cell wall – is evenly distributed across the inner and outer walls of the trap.

When a crawling critter triggers the trap by touching one of the sensitive filaments inside it twice in quick succession, the outer wall softens.

That allows the outer surface to expand more readily than the inner surface, creating a mismatch that bends the leaf.

In a relatively short space of time, this bending passes the snap-instability threshold, and the lobes slam shut, allowing the plant to respond quickly enough to a trigger to snap up a lovely dinner.

Here's the wild bit, though.

That cell-wall softening is essentially how plants grow. Venus flytraps essentially dialed up a tool they already had in their genetic kit so they could take a more proactive approach to securing nutrients.

"These fine-tuned adaptations that allow plants to have the upper hand when interacting with animals raise another question – how can they arise from a trial-and-error evolutionary process?" writes bioengineer Jacques Dumais of the Adolfo Ibáñez University in Chile in a related editorial.

We now know how the Venus flytrap works its magic, but it hasn't lost its allure, not while those bigger evolutionary questions remain to be answered.

The Life of Earth

https://chuckincardinal.blogspot.com/

Scientists Mapped Every Neuron in a Fruit Fly and the Brain Wasn’t Running the Show

By Harvard Medical School, June 14, 2026

https://scitechdaily.com/scientists-mapped-every-neuron-in-a-fruit-fly-and-the-brain-wasnt-running-the-show/

The connectome maps how neurons in the fruit fly brain connect to those in its body via its spinal cord equivalent.

 Credit: Tyler Sloan

Scientists have created the first complete brain-to-body wiring map of a fruit fly, revealing that complex behavior may arise from distributed neural teamwork rather than a central controller.

A large international research team led by labs at Harvard Medical School and Princeton University has reached a major neuroscience milestone: a complete wiring diagram of every connection between neurons in the central nervous system of an adult fruit fly.

The achievement gives scientists a new way to study how the brain and body work together to produce complex behaviors, including walking and flying. It also opens the door to deeper questions about the basic rules that govern nervous systems.

“We can see all of the neurons and their connections as a complete unit for the first time and ask, ‘What do we learn from that?’” said study co-senior author Rachel Wilson, the Joseph B. Martin Professor of Basic Research in the Field of Neurobiology in the Blavatnik Institute at HMS.

First Complete Fruit Fly Nervous System Map

The detailed map of neural connections, called a connectome, adds the fruit fly’s version of a spinal cord, known as the nerve cord, to an earlier connectome of the fly brain.

“It is really important to have a central nervous system connectome that is as complete as possible so we can link up the brain and body and start thinking about behavior holistically,” said study co-senior author Wei-Chung Allen Lee, associate professor of neurobiology at HMS and HMS professor of neurology at Boston Children’s Hospital.

When the researchers analyzed the connectome, they found that many fruit fly behaviors are not directed by a single command center in the brain. Instead, they are often controlled by local neural circuits in the body parts involved in the action.

The full connectome is freely available online, giving scientists around the world a new resource for advancing neuroscience research. The study was published on June 8 in Nature and received support in part from U.S. federal funding, including the BRAIN Initiative (Brain Research Through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies), the National Institutes of Health, and the National Science Foundation.

Why Fruit Flies Matter in Neuroscience

One of neuroscience’s major unanswered questions is how neurons in the brain and body connect and cooperate to create behavior. The fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster is a powerful model for studying that problem.

Fruit flies are easy to breed and care for in the laboratory. Their nervous systems are relatively simple, with about 160,000 neurons, yet they can perform complex behaviors such as navigation, social interaction, learning, and responses to sensory cues. They also offer what Lee calls an incredibly sophisticated genetic toolkit, allowing researchers to access, control, and record activity from single neurons or groups of neurons.

In 2024, the FlyWire Consortium, led by Mala Murthy and Sebastian Seung at Princeton, who are also co-authors of the new study, published a complete connectome of a fruit fly brain. At the same time, Lee and his colleagues were building a connectome of the fruit fly nerve cord, which controls the legs, wings, and other appendages while also processing sensory information.

“The brain and nerve cord connectomes are each useful on their own, but until you can bridge the two, it’s hard to understand how information moves between the brain and the body,” said co-first author Helen Yang, a research fellow in neurobiology in the Wilson Lab.

Co-first author Alexander Bates, also a research fellow in neurobiology in the Wilson Lab, noted that although most of the neurons are in the brain, the neurons in the nerve cord are “some of the most useful” because they are tied to functions such as sensation and movement and are easier to interpret.

Linking the Brain and Body

Murthy, the Karol and Marnie Marcin ’96 Professor of Neuroscience at Princeton and director of the Princeton Neuroscience Institute (PNI), said the FlyWire team was eager to shift its focus to the brain and neural cord, or BANC, dataset imaged in the Lee Lab.

“The new connectome represents a major advance for the field, with the ability to understand how circuits in the brain receive feedback from and control the actions of the body,” she said.

“For the first time, we can follow information flow from sensation to action across an entire nervous system,” added co-author Arie Matsliah of the PNI.

Building a 3D Connectome

To create the connectome, the researchers prepared thousands of thin serial sections from a single fruit fly. They imaged those sections with electron microscopy, generating millions of images that captured neurons and their connections. AI tools were then used to line up the images and assemble them into a unified 3D map.

The finished connectome shows, at the synapse level, how each neuron connects with other neurons in the brain and nerve cord. Although it does not cover the fly’s entire body, the researchers used identifiable neurons and previous scientific literature to link central nervous system neurons to many appendages and sensory organs. In doing so, they effectively “embodied” the connectome.

Lee said researchers can now use the connectome to generate new hypotheses that can be tested in the lab. He compares the resource to using the detailed information in Google Maps to plan a route.

“The connectome has shown us that most of our hypotheses are too simple. Now, we can develop more complex hypotheses and move forward with experiments to test them,” Lee said.

A Surprise in Motor Control

The authors have already used the connectome to investigate motor control, including how a fruit fly moves its legs and other body parts.

A long-standing idea in neuroscience is that the brain acts as a centralized controller, making decisions about which actions an animal will take.

That was not what the team found.

Instead, the researchers discovered that motor control in the fruit fly is largely organized locally. For instance, the movement of one leg is mainly controlled by the neural circuits associated with that leg. Those local circuits then communicate with circuits for other legs to produce coordinated movements such as walking.

The same pattern appeared in circuits for the wings, mouth, and other body parts. The researchers also found that motor circuits connect with other kinds of circuits, including those in the visual and endocrine systems, which supply additional information that helps shape behavior.

“Our findings suggest that control for actions is highly distributed in local modules that link up and work together in different ways,” Bates said.

What Comes Next

The researchers expect the connectome to support many future studies. Yang compares it to the Human Genome Project, another major open resource that has enabled a wide range of scientific advances.

In the near future, the team plans to expand the connectome by adding more information, including details about neuropeptides, the small protein-like molecules that neurons use to communicate.

The connectome could also help reveal core principles of how nervous systems work across species, including in humans. Bates said many discoveries in fruit flies have carried over from invertebrates to mammals, including findings related to navigation, olfaction, and memory.

Another goal is “to bring full-connectome mapping to much more complex organisms,” said Matsliah. He said advances in AI, computation, and open collaborative science are making that kind of work increasingly possible.

One major question is whether the distributed control of neural circuits seen in fruit flies is also found in other animals. Lee is now studying that question in mice.

“I would be shocked if this is unique to the fly,” Yang said. “We don’t have this level of resolution in other animals, but we know that they have a lot of these local circuits.”

Fruit Fly Connectome and AI

The work may also have implications for artificial intelligence. The connectome offers concrete biological data that could help guide the design of artificial agents that move through virtual worlds, which are increasingly used to study intelligence and improve AI training.

“One thing that always amazes me is that this tiny little fly does a hell of a lot; even our best AI agents and robots can’t do everything that a fly does,” Yang said. “There may be lessons for AI in how the nervous system is organized.”

The Life of Earth

https://chuckincardinal.blogspot.com/

What Is Alexithymia? The Hidden Experience of Millions Explained

14 June 2026, By M. Starr

https://www.sciencealert.com/what-is-alexithymia-the-hidden-experience-of-millions-explained

(AegeanBlue/Canva)

Imagine feeling a knot in your stomach, or your heart racing, and being unable to tell whether you are feeling anger, anxiety, or excitement.

For millions of people around the globe, this is a daily experience.

It's called alexithymia, a word derived from ancient Greek that means "no words for emotions".

Contrary to some simplifications, it does not mean an inability to feel emotions. Rather, it describes a struggle to identify and understand one's own emotional states.

That might sound like a minor inconvenience. But emotions do much more than tell us how we feel.

They help us interpret our experiences, communicate with other people, navigate relationships, and make decisions. When emotional signals are difficult to recognize, the effects can ripple through many areas of life.

The term alexithymia was coined by psychotherapists in the 1970s to describe a pattern of difficulties.

This typically includes struggling to identify one's emotions and to describe them to others; getting confused between emotional states and physical sensations; and a tendency towards fact-focused external thinking rather than emotional introspection.

People with reduced interoception can't easily tell if they are hungry, thirsty, tired, aroused, or in pain.

 (Ron Lach/Pexels/Canva)



It's difficult to know how many people live with alexithymia, since people may not know that they have it, but according to current estimates, it may affect around 5 to 10 percent of the general population.

But what does alexithymia actually feel like?

One of the most common features of alexithymia is an inability to distinguish an emotional state from a physical one. That knot in the stomach may just register as nausea, the racing heart as exertion. You know that something is happening, but its emotional root is out of reach.

Another common feature is what psychologists call externally oriented thinking. People with alexithymia often focus on the observable details of a situation – what happened, what was said, what needs to be done.

The implications of this extend beyond the moment, however.

Emotions are one of the ways humans communicate with each other. They help us explain our needs, build connections, and understand how other people are feeling.

When a person struggles to identify and describe their own emotions, this can become much more difficult. Others may interpret the emotional reserve demonstrated by people with alexithymia as disinterest or detachment, even when they care deeply.

Alexithymia describes difficulties in identifying, distinguishing, and expressing emotions.

 (LittleCityLifestylePhotography/Canva)



Research has linked alexithymia to a range of interpersonal difficulties, including problems with emotional intimacy and relationship satisfaction.

Someone may know they are upset with a partner without being able to explain why, for example, or care deeply about a friend while struggling to express that feeling.

In addition, people with alexithymia often struggle to regulate their emotions, which can contribute to maladaptive coping strategies.

Research has linked alexithymia to behaviors such as social withdrawal, emotional suppression, and avoidance, all of which can further complicate relationships and communication.

The effects may also extend to decision-making.

Our emotions provide information that helps us assess risks and navigate uncertainty. Several studies have linked alexithymia to differences in decision-making, particularly in situations where there is no obvious right answer and emotional cues help guide choices.

If a person cannot easily tell whether a feeling is fear, excitement, apprehension, or intuition, they may lose one of the signals many people unconsciously rely on when weighing difficult decisions.

Alexithymia is not classified as a mental health disorder in its own right. However, it does appear more frequently in people with a number of conditions.

Perhaps its best-known association is with autism. Around 50 percent of people with autism are estimated to also have alexithymia.

However, it has also been linked to conditions such as post-traumatic stress disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder, schizophrenia, anxiety and depression, premenstrual dysphoric disorder, and a range of chronic illnesses, such as cancer.

Not everyone with these conditions has alexithymia, and many people with alexithymia have none of them. Nevertheless, the overlap has led researchers to investigate whether difficulties identifying emotions may contribute to some of the challenges experienced across these very different conditions.

The overlap can also make alexithymia difficult to spot. Patients may seek treatment for a condition without realizing that failing to recognize their emotions may be part of the puzzle.

While alexithymia can be challenging, it doesn't have to be set in stone.

The knot in the stomach, the racing heart, the tension in the shoulders – all may be carrying information. The task is learning how to read it.

Tools such as improving emotional literacy, meditation, and various types of therapy can help people living with alexithymia to connect with their emotions and learn to interpret what their body is trying to tell them.

The Life of Earth

https://chuckincardinal.blogspot.com/

Chuck's photo corner to June 14, 2026 😎🌸🍓🌞

A great end of spring week, Sun rain, and the end of having to water potted seedlings, as they are almost all in the ground now. The colours, sounds, and smells of spring are in such contrast, to the experience of winter. Life abounds.

Chamomile ready to start harvesting.

chives seem happy enough

wild phlox behind some iris in the barn yard island

ready for rain

my garden nemesis

peonys opened this week

The port owned by the township, not that it makes my township taxes any less.

The Federal gov. keeps giving the port money for infrastructure as well, mainly for grain.

The port has moved a couple of boat loads of steel pipe this year so far. The first load was larger pipes.

potentilla

the current shrub

back yard iris

this current doesn't produce edible berries, I think it is the vulgaris current.

these guys nested on the front porch last year in one of my hanging baskets (golden pothos plant)

a shrub variety of euonymus, I believe.

a later flowering well behaved lilac (French lilac I think)

she just keeps after me , lol

out the front door

Rachelle's drive home after a birthday supper with her brother and 4 generations of family at the table

Thurso ferry

The sunsets June 13, 2026

Enjoy the day

https://chuckincardinal.blogspot.com/

Earth's Core May Be Wrapped in an Ancient, Unexpected Structure

12 June 2026, By D. Nield

https://www.sciencealert.com/earths-core-may-be-wrapped-in-an-ancient-unexpected-structure

A representation of the underground imaging used in the study. 

(Edward Garnero and Mingming Li/Arizona State University)

The highest-resolution map yet of the underlying geology beneath Earth's Southern Hemisphere revealed something we had never known before: an ancient ocean floor that may wrap around the core.

This thin yet dense layer lies at a depth of about 2,900 kilometers (1,800 miles) below the surface, according to a study published in 2023.

That depth is where the molten, metallic outer core meets the rocky mantle above it. This is the core-mantle boundary.

"Seismic investigations, such as ours, provide the highest resolution imaging of the interior structure of our planet," said geologist Samantha Hansen from the University of Alabama when the results were announced.

"We are finding that this structure is vastly more complicated than once thought."

Researchers lower seismic equipment into place at one of the stations as part of research into the Transantarctic Mountains. 

(Lindsey Kenyon)




Understanding exactly what's beneath our feet – in as much detail as possible – is vital for studying everything from volcanic eruptions to the variations in Earth's magnetic field, which protects us from the solar radiation in space.

Hansen and her colleagues used 15 monitoring stations buried in Antarctic ice to map seismic waves from earthquakes over three years.

The way those waves move and bounce reveals the composition of the material inside Earth.

Because the sound waves move more slowly in these areas, they're called ultralow velocity zones (ULVZs).

Rock movements in the mantle. 

(Hansen et al., Science Advances, 2023)

"Analyzing [thousands] of seismic recordings from Antarctica, our high-definition imaging method found thin anomalous zones of material at the core-mantle boundary everywhere we probed," said geophysicist Edward Garnero from Arizona State University.

"The material's thickness varies from a few kilometers to [tens] of kilometers. This suggests we are seeing mountains on the core, in some places up to five times taller than Mt. Everest."

According to the researchers, these ULVZs are most likely oceanic crust that has been buried for millions of years.

Seismic waves from earthquakes in the southern hemisphere were used to sample the ULVZ structure along the Earth's core-mantle boundary. 

(Edward Garnero and Mingming Li/Arizona State University)



The sunken crust isn't near recognized subduction zones on the surface – zones where shifting tectonic plates push the rock down into Earth's interior.

But simulations reported in the study show how convection currents could have moved the ancient ocean floor to its current resting place.

It's tricky to make assumptions about rock types and movement based on seismic wave movement, and the researchers aren't ruling out other options.

However, the ocean floor hypothesis seems the most likely explanation for these ULVZs right now.

There's also the suggestion that this ancient ocean crust could be wrapped around the entire core. Though, as it's so thin, it's hard to know for sure. Future seismic surveys should be able to add further to the overall picture.

One way the discovery can help geologists is by figuring out how heat from the hotter, denser core escapes into the mantle.

The differences in composition between these two layers are greater than those between the solid-surface rock and the air above it in the part we live on.

"Our research provides important connections between shallow and deep Earth structure and the overall processes driving our planet," said Hansen.

The Life of Earth

https://chuckincardinal.blogspot.com/

Scientists Uncover What Kept Humanity’s First Campfires Burning 780,000 Years Ago

By The Hebrew U. of Jerusalem, June 13, 2026

https://scitechdaily.com/scientists-uncover-what-kept-humanitys-first-campfires-burning-780000-years-ago/

A general view of the excavation of Gesher Benot Ya’aqov Acheulian Site. 

Credit: GBV Expedition

Rare charcoal fragments from an ancient lakeshore campsite are offering new clues about fire use, resource management, and the environmental knowledge of some of humanity’s earliest fire users.

Long before cities, farms, or written language existed, some of humanity’s ancestors had already discovered a resource that would transform the course of human evolution: fire. But controlling fire was only part of the challenge. Keeping it burning required a reliable supply of fuel, and new research suggests that access to firewood may have helped determine where people lived nearly 800,000 years ago.

At the prehistoric site of Gesher Benot Ya’aqov (GBY) in northern Israel, scientists have uncovered rare clues preserved in ancient charcoal fragments. The findings reveal not only what fueled some of the world’s earliest known campfires, but also how these early humans organized their lives around a lakeshore environment rich in food, water, raw materials, and fuel.

The study, published in Quaternary Science Reviews, analyzed one of the oldest and most extensive charcoal collections ever recovered from a prehistoric site. The international research team, which included scientists from Israel, Spain, and Germany, found evidence that the inhabitants of GBY used the landscape in surprisingly practical ways, taking advantage of natural resources that made long-term occupation possible.

A Lakeshore That Had Everything

Around 780,000 years ago, the area looked very different from today. GBY sat on the edge of ancient Lake Hula, a freshwater ecosystem surrounded by wetlands, woodland, and abundant wildlife. For hunter-gatherers, it would have been an exceptionally attractive place to live.

Archaeologists have identified more than 20 occupation layers at the site, showing that generations of Acheulian hominins repeatedly returned to the same location over thousands of years. Excavations led by Prof. Naama Goren-Inbar of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem have uncovered stone tools, plant foods, fish remains, and the bones of large animals, providing one of the most detailed records of early human life anywhere in the world.

One of the site’s most remarkable discoveries is the remains of a straight-tusked elephant, an animal that could weigh several times more than a modern African elephant. The arrangement of the bones suggests it was butchered at the site, offering a rare glimpse into large-game hunting and processing during the Lower Paleolithic.

Traverse section of a charcoal fragment of ash observed under an ESEM microscope.

 Credit: M. MoncusilPHES

The Hidden Story Inside Ancient Charcoal

While elephant bones and stone tools tend to attract attention, researchers turned their focus to something far less dramatic: charcoal.

Charcoal rarely survives for hundreds of thousands of years, making the GBY collection extraordinary. Because wood reflects the plants growing in the surrounding environment, each fragment serves as a tiny record of the ancient landscape.

The team examined 266 charcoal pieces under a microscope, identifying the species from which they originated. The results revealed a surprisingly diverse environment containing ash, willow, grapevine, oleander, olive, oak, pistachio, and pomegranate.

The pomegranate finding represents the earliest known evidence of the fruit tree in the Levant, extending the documented history of pomegranate in the region by hundreds of thousands of years.

Perhaps even more surprising was the diversity of the charcoal itself. The burned wood represented a wider range of plant species than other botanical remains found at the site, including seeds and fruits.

Why Firewood May Have Shaped Human Settlement

The study challenges the idea that these early humans carefully selected particular tree species for fuel. Instead, the evidence points to a simpler and highly effective strategy.

Much of the wood appears to have come from driftwood naturally deposited along the lake’s edge. Branches and logs carried by water would have accumulated on the shoreline, creating an easily accessible source of fuel that required little effort to collect.

Researchers suggest that the constant availability of firewood may have been one reason why groups repeatedly returned to GBY. The site offered a rare combination of resources concentrated in a single location, reducing the energy needed to meet daily needs.

More Than Warmth and Light

The study also sheds light on how fire was used. Researchers found that concentrations of charcoal overlapped with clusters of fish remains, especially the teeth of large carp. This association provides strong evidence that fish were being cooked at the site nearly 800,000 years ago using controlled fire.

The results support the idea that the GBY hominins possessed advanced cognitive abilities. They could manage fire, organize activities around it, and incorporate it into complex food-gathering and food-processing strategies. At the same time, while activities such as hunting and tool production likely required significant planning, collecting firewood appears to have been a simpler task driven mainly by what was readily available.

Taken together, the evidence portrays a highly capable community that repeatedly returned to a resource-rich location that met many of its needs.

The charcoal assemblage from GBY offers a rare opportunity to explore the connections between fire use, environmental conditions, and hominin behavior. The findings refine scientists’ understanding of early fire use and highlight the important role local resources played in shaping settlement and survival strategies during the Middle Pleistocene.

The birth of modern Man

https://chuckincardinal.blogspot.com/

Astronomers Find Strongest Evidence Yet for Magnetic Fields on Alien Worlds

By ESO, June 12, 2026

https://scitechdaily.com/astronomers-find-strongest-evidence-yet-for-magnetic-fields-on-alien-worlds/

This illustration shows magnetic activity in an exoplanet. The planet is a gas giant like Jupiter, but it’s very close to its host star and tidally locked: one side always faces the star and is scorching hot, whereas the other side is extremely cold. This steep temperature difference creates fast winds that blow from the day side to the night side. The planet’s magnetic field, shown here with blue lines, can slow these winds down.

 Credit: ESO/M. Kornmesser, L. Calçada

Astronomers studying the atmospheres of several intensely heated exoplanets uncovered an unexpected pattern that may reveal a hidden property of these distant worlds.

Astronomers have uncovered the clearest evidence so far that some planets beyond our Solar System possess magnetic fields. By measuring atmospheric winds on seven extremely hot gas giants, researchers found signs that magnetism is shaping conditions on these distant worlds.

The study used observations from the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (ESO’s VLT) and the Gemini North telescope. The results suggest that magnetic fields are controlling the planets’ powerful winds, providing the first reliable measurements of magnetic field strength on exoplanets.

“This breakthrough opens a completely new window on exoplanet research. It’s the first time we can compare the magnetic environments of other worlds — a key step toward ultimately understanding which planets can stay alive, keep their water, and perhaps even, one day, host life as we know it,” says Julia Seidel, an astronomer at the Laboratoire Lagrange, Observatoire de la Côte d’Azur, France and lead author of the study published today in Nature Astronomy.

A Long-Sought Exoplanet Measurement

Magnetic fields play an important role in shaping planetary environments. On Earth, the magnetic field interacts with the atmosphere and helps protect the planet from harmful charged particles. Other planets in our Solar System, including Jupiter and Saturn, also have magnetic fields.

Despite years of research, scientists had not been able to directly determine the strength of magnetic fields on exoplanets. That challenge has remained unsolved for about 15 years.

Interestingly, the researchers were not originally searching for magnetic fields. Their goal was to study winds in the atmospheres of seven giant planets orbiting different stars. These worlds resemble Jupiter but orbit much closer to their stars and are tidally locked, meaning one side constantly faces the star.

Like the Moon always showing the same face to Earth, these planets have permanent day and night sides. One hemisphere is intensely heated while the other remains much colder. The extreme temperature contrast creates unusual weather patterns and exceptionally powerful winds.

Extreme Winds Reveal an Unexpected Pattern

The team measured winds ranging from about 7,200 km/h (4,475 mph) to more than 25,000 km/h (15,535 mph). By comparison, Jupiter’s fastest known winds reach roughly 1,500 km/h (930 mph).

“In the beginning we set out to check if the atmospheric winds behaved the same way for all hot planets,” explains Seidel, who was previously an astronomer at ESO in Chile.

The researchers analyzed data from the ESPRESSO instrument on ESO’s VLT in Chile’s Atacama Desert and a similar instrument on the Gemini North telescope in Hawaiʻi, USA. (The VLT is an ESO telescope while Gemini North is one half of the International Gemini Observatory, partly funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) and operated by NSF NOIRLab.)

As they compared wind speeds with planetary temperatures, an unexpected trend appeared. Instead of moving faster, winds slowed down as temperatures increased.

“This is totally counterintuitive because, all things being equal, hot planets have more energy to accelerate the winds! Something must happen that slows down the wind speeds for hotter objects,” says study co-author Vivien Parmentier, a professor at the Laboratoire Lagrange.

Magnetic Fields as a Planetary Brake

The researchers concluded that the most likely explanation is the presence of global magnetic fields. These fields can interact with charged particles in a planet’s atmosphere, reducing their motion and effectively slowing atmospheric circulation.

Using this effect, the team estimated the magnetic field strength of each planet. The results indicate magnetic fields comparable to those found on giant planets in our own Solar System, with strengths roughly four times greater than Saturn’s or about half that of Jupiter’s.

The findings also suggest that magnetic fields could influence much more than atmospheric winds.

“Here on Earth, we know the beauty of the northern and southern lights, where particles from the Sun hit our magnetic field and are guided toward the poles, colliding with gases in the atmosphere to produce colorful displays of green, pink, and purple,” explains study co-author Bibiana Prinoth, a former PhD student at Lund University, Sweden, now an astronomer at ESO in Garching, Germany.

On these exoplanets, auroras powered by magnetic activity could be even more spectacular.

Looking ahead, scientists are eager to use ESO’s Extremely Large Telescope to study both giant and Earth-sized exoplanets in greater detail. The observatory may even be able to identify atmospheric gases linked to auroral activity on distant worlds.

Prinoth says: “I like to imagine that some of these worlds have a sky filled not only with stars, but with vast curtains of colorful light dancing across a planet that’s half in perpetual day and half in endless night.”

The Life of Earth

https://chuckincardinal.blogspot.com/

Why Evolution Stalled for Millions of Years Before Suddenly Exploding

By U. of Cambridge, June 13, 2026

https://scitechdaily.com/why-evolution-stalled-for-millions-of-years-before-suddenly-exploding/

Artist’s impression of an Ediacaran animal community. 

Credit: Hugo Salais

A new study suggests evolution stayed stuck for millions of years until sexual reproduction helped unleash a burst of biodiversity.

New research suggests that the earliest animals on Earth may have unintentionally slowed the pace of evolution for millions of years. Scientists have found that their reliance on asexual reproduction limited competition and reduced the pressure to adapt, keeping biodiversity low until sexual reproduction emerged and helped drive a surge in evolutionary change.

Researchers from the University of Cambridge analyzed fossils from some of the oldest known animals, dating back roughly 574 million years. Their findings, published in Nature Ecology and Evolution, offer a possible explanation for a long-standing mystery: why animal life first appeared on Earth but then remained relatively unchanged for millions of years before experiencing a dramatic increase in diversity.

Fossils of Fractofusus, an animal from the Ediacaran period. 

Credit: Emily Mitchell



The Strange World of Earth’s First Animals

The Ediacaran period, which lasted from about 635 million to 539 million years ago, marked a major turning point in the history of life. After billions of years dominated by microscopic organisms, larger and more complex forms of life began to appear.

Among these early creatures was Fractofusus, an organism that could reach up to 2 meters in height, although many Ediacaran animals were much smaller. Despite being considered animals, they looked more like plants or ferns than anything living today. Scientists have found no evidence that they possessed mouths, internal organs, or the ability to move. Instead, researchers believe they absorbed nutrients directly from the surrounding seawater.

These unusual organisms vanished from the fossil record at the start of the Cambrian period around 540 million years ago, making it difficult for scientists to connect them to any modern group of animals.

Dr. Emily Mitchell at Mistaken Point, Newfoundland, Canada.

 Credit: Emily Mitchell



How Cloning Limited Biodiversity

Previous studies showed that many Ediacaran animals reproduced asexually. Rather than producing offspring through sex, they spread by sending out stolons, or runners, much like modern strawberry plants. In the nutrient-rich oceans of the time, this strategy worked remarkably well.

“Life was pretty nice during the Ediacaran, so the need for sex was rather limited,” said lead author Dr. Emily Mitchell from Cambridge’s Department of Zoology. “There was relatively little competition, so there was no real pressure to change anything.”

To investigate why evolution appeared to slow during this period, Mitchell and co-author Professor Andrea Manica examined fossil communities from Mistaken Point in Newfoundland, one of the world’s most important Ediacaran fossil sites.

The team combined laser scanning, spatial analysis, and artificial intelligence to study how these ancient communities were organized. They first demonstrated that stolon-based reproduction reduced competition among neighboring organisms. The researchers then created computer simulations to explore how early animal ecosystems might have developed under different reproductive strategies.

Thousands of simulations were run, while a simple neural network identified which scenarios most closely matched patterns found in the fossil record. Using a method called Approximate Bayesian Computation, the researchers worked backward from real fossil data to estimate how far organisms spread and how intensely they competed for resources.

Their results showed that limited dispersal caused by asexual reproduction could explain both the low number of species present in early animal communities and the long period of evolutionary stagnation.

Stress and Competition Changed the Course of Evolution

Competition and environmental pressures have long been powerful forces shaping evolution. However, the runner-based reproduction used by many Ediacaran animals reduced the need for direct competition.

“If you’re connected to your neighbor by these runners, then you’re sharing nutrients, and you don’t need to compete with them,” said Manica.

Over time, conditions began to change. As life expanded from deeper waters into shallower marine environments, organisms encountered new challenges. Tides, storms, temperature fluctuations, and changing nutrient levels created a much less stable world.

These harsher conditions increased competition and placed greater stress on early animals.

“If you’re suddenly in an environment where you’re essentially getting killed a couple of times per year, then that changes everything,” said Mitchell. “Stress essentially leads to sexual reproduction, and when that happens, we can see a massive increase in dispersal distances as animals attempt to colonize new areas due to an increase in competition.”

According to the researchers, this shift toward sexual reproduction allowed animals to spread farther, occupy new habitats, and compete more effectively. Those changes were accompanied by a sharp increase in biodiversity, creating what scientists describe as a second wave of Ediacaran evolution.

The Road to the Cambrian Explosion

As early animals adapted to new environments and adopted new reproductive strategies, diversification accelerated. This evolutionary momentum continued into the Cambrian period, when the emergence of mobile animals drove even more rapid change.

The study suggests that sexual reproduction may have been one of the key innovations that helped transform life on Earth from relatively simple communities into the diverse animal ecosystems that followed.

The Life of Earth

https://chuckincardinal.blogspot.com/