Mulberry Shows Surprising Effects on Gut Bacteria and Metabolism

By Wroclaw Medical U., Sept. 11, 2026

https://scitechdaily.com/mulberry-shows-surprising-effects-on-gut-bacteria-and-metabolism/

Mulberry compounds may reshape gut microbial activity in ways linked to metabolism and intestinal health, but their effects appear to depend strongly on how the plant is processed. 

Credit: Shutterstock

Mulberry’s potential benefits may begin with gut microbes, but the way it is prepared could make all the difference.

Researchers are examining whether bioactive compounds in mulberry can alter the gut microbiota in ways that influence glucose regulation, fat metabolism, and intestinal health.

A review involving scientists from Wroclaw Medical University found encouraging evidence from laboratory and animal studies, although research in humans remains limited.
Why Mulberry Preparations Differ

The gut microbiota helps digest food, maintain the intestinal environment, and produce substances that can affect the rest of the body. Anna Prescha, PhD, DSc, a professor in the Department of Dietetics and Bromatology at Wroclaw Medical University, says mulberry is especially interesting because it contains polyphenols and polysaccharides that may interact with these microorganisms.

Most research has examined white mulberry (Morus alba), but black mulberry (Morus nigra), particularly its fruit, has also shown potential. Mulberry leaves contain polyphenols, polysaccharides, and 1-deoxynojirimycin (DNJ), which is known to influence carbohydrate metabolism. Black mulberry fruit supplies abundant anthocyanins and other phenolic compounds, as well as polysaccharides.

The final product depends heavily on how the plant material is handled. Drying, fermentation, and extraction can change both the quantity and balance of its active compounds. Two preparations made from the same leaves or fruit may therefore have different compositions and produce different biological responses.

Gut Bacteria Turn Mulberry Into Metabolites

Studies reviewed by the researchers suggest that preparations made from mulberry leaves and fruit can alter the abundance and activity of certain gut bacteria. Some experiments reported increases in beneficial microbes and greater production of acetate, propionate, and butyrate.

These short-chain fatty acids are created when gut bacteria ferment dietary material. They help support the intestinal lining and contribute to the chemical communication connecting the gut with metabolism elsewhere in the body. Several studies linked mulberry-related microbial changes with improvements in measures of glucose and lipid metabolism.

The effects, however, varied considerably among preparations. Polysaccharides extracted from black mulberry fruit differed in structure and in how effectively gut microbes used them. Fractions obtained through water extraction and treatment with pectate lyase displayed the greatest prebiotic potential.

Structure Shapes the Microbial Response

Leaf polysaccharides showed the same sensitivity to chemical structure. Features such as molecular weight and monosaccharide composition appeared to influence which bacteria could consume them and which short-chain fatty acids those microbes produced. This helps explain why simply listing the compounds in a product may not be enough to predict its effects.

Infographic highlighting how mulberry species, plant parts, and preparation methods can influence their chemical composition and potential effects on the gut microbiota. 

Credit: Wroclaw Medical University

Some of the strongest results came from mixtures rather than isolated components. In mice fed a high-fat diet, a white mulberry fruit fraction containing both polyphenols and polysaccharides produced more favorable changes in the gut microbiota than either fraction given separately. The combined treatment also improved some indicators of metabolic syndrome and intestinal health.

Researchers then transferred microbiota from mice treated with the combined fraction into other animals. The recipient mice also experienced improvements in certain metabolic disturbances, strengthening the possibility that the altered microbial community helped transmit some of the treatment’s effects.

Finding the Right Mulberry Formula

The findings suggest that mulberry’s biological activity may emerge from interactions among multiple compounds rather than from one dominant ingredient. Prescha emphasizes that researchers must consider the species, plant part, chemical proportions, and processing method when trying to produce a specific effect. A universal mulberry supplement is therefore less realistic than carefully designed preparations intended for particular purposes.

The review began with the Nutri-Sfera Student Research Group in the Department of Dietetics and Bromatology at Wroclaw Medical University. The topic was proposed by two students who have since graduated: Marta Miszczak from the Dietetics program and Karolina Kłosowska-Buryło from the Pharmacy program. Their involvement brought nutritional and pharmaceutical perspectives together, allowing the team to examine mulberry as both a complex plant material and a possible influence on the microbiota and metabolism.

Human Evidence Is Still Missing

Despite the encouraging results, most evidence comes from animal models and in vitro experiments. Human studies directly measuring how mulberry preparations affect the gut microbiota remain scarce. Comparisons are also difficult because relatively few studies provide a detailed chemical analysis of the products they test.

Prescha cautions that researchers cannot yet assume the relationships observed among mulberry, gut microbes, and metabolism will work the same way in people. Changes found in mice or laboratory cultures may not translate into meaningful human health benefits.

Clinical trials will need to test standardized preparations whose chemical composition has been thoroughly documented. These studies could determine which mulberry products alter the human gut microbiota, how large and consistent those changes are, and whether they lead to measurable improvements in metabolic or intestinal health.

The Life of Earth

https://chuckincardinal.blogspot.com/

Experiment Tested Out-of-Body Experiences. Two Reported Seeing Things Scientists Can't Explain.

12 Sept. 2026, By M. Starr

https://www.sciencealert.com/experiment-tested-out-of-body-experiences-two-reported-seeing-things-scientists-cant-explain

(Lindy Pfaff/Cavan Images/Getty Images)

There are people who say they can leave their own bodies.

Not "I was beside myself!" or "I jumped out of my skin!" but literally peeling their consciousness from their flesh and bones to observe the world from entirely different places.

You've probably heard of it – the out-of-body experience, a strange phenomenon steeped in spiritual and esoteric traditions, oft-reported but never scientifically verified.

But it raises some interesting questions – not least of which is: how can you see when you've left your eyes asleep in another room?

And what exactly is it that you are seeing, anyway?

These are questions that researchers have been trying to answer experimentally for decades.

Now, a team led by neuroscientist Marina Weiler of the University of Virginia has put the phenomenon to the test again – with a carefully blinded experiment, 21 experienced out-of-body practitioners, and a hidden image waiting in another room.

Not a single participant succeeded at the task they were given.

But two of them reported seeing something else that should have been impossible – and the researchers can't quite explain it.

"I hope this study encourages researchers to think creatively about how we test these experiences," Weiler says.

"The unexpected findings give us a potentially useful new direction, but they also need to be tested prospectively and under rigorous conditions before we can know what they mean."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mD7NzrBgXwM

Scientists have tried to test claims of perception during out-of-body experiences for decades, and the phenomenon lends itself to a deceptively simple experimental protocol: conceal something from a person's physical senses and ask them to describe it.

One particularly famous – and hotly debated – 1968 study involved a subject known only as Miss Z, who – supposedly – correctly recited a randomly generated five-digit number that had been hidden from view.

Subsequent attempts to demonstrate the same kind of extrasensory perception have also produced mixed, contested, and often inconclusive results.

Weiler and her colleagues did not want to leave anything up for interpretation – and the study they designed could more accurately be described as an out-of-body obstacle course spread across three rooms.

The first room was where each participant was placed while attempting to demonstrate their abilities. They were hooked up to an EEG machine to record their brain activity, but otherwise were free to make themselves comfortable, whether on a bed or armchair, with their preferred lighting and temperature conditions.

The researchers occupied the second room, with the door closed.

Finally, the third room contained the target: a laptop displaying one randomly selected image from a pool of 100 objects – with the screen turned toward a wall to prevent any inadvertent glimpses.

Not even the researchers knew which image was displayed – one of them would initiate the randomization program, turn the laptop toward the wall, and leave before the image appeared. It remained unknown to everyone involved until the analysis phase months later.

At that point, the participant remained in the room for 60 to 90 minutes, to show they could see an image on a computer screen facing a wall in a closed room 7 meters (23 feet) down a hallway.

After all that, just 13 of the 21 participants reported impressions they believed were related to the hidden target.

And only 8 of those 13 said they had actually experienced an out-of-body experience.

An illustration titled Leaving the Body, dated 1965 and associated with the writings of Lobsang Rampa.

 (Unknown author/Wikimedia Commons, CC0)



The other five described something more like an internal "mental screen" or "inner vision", seeing clues to the target without feeling as though they had left their bodies.

The researchers asked the participants to describe their impressions of the target – for example, if the object was an apple, you might expect someone who perceived it to report something red and round.

To remove subjective human judgment from the equation, the researchers then used AI to compare each participant's description against descriptions of all 100 possible target images, ranking them according to how closely they matched.

The real target should have ranked unusually highly if the participant had accurately perceived it; instead, the correct images ranked anywhere from 16th to 92nd, with the results overall no better than guessing.

As a control, when the same system was given accurate descriptions of the images, it had little trouble picking out the correct targets.

So, whatever the participants thought they had perceived, there's no evidence that it was the object displayed on the laptop.

Case closed; we can all go home, right? Well. Not quite.

Because here's where it gets a little… spooky. Although none of the participants showed evidence of accurately perceiving the target in Room 3, the experiment involved another room.

Two of the participants reported impressions of what the researchers were doing in Room 2.

Participant 7 described one researcher sitting to the left, focused on a computer screen, while the other sat farther back in a corner, reading a book – a configuration that hadn't occurred during previous sessions.

And that's exactly where they were during 7's attempt.

Participant 13 separately reported seeing one researcher on the right, taking notes, and the other on the left at the computer.

Again, the description matched what the researchers were actually doing during that participant's session – and again, their positions were different from their usual arrangement.

Which is actually pretty weird.

But weird isn't proof. These observations were spontaneous, rather than part of the experiment's predetermined targets, and weren't subjected to statistical analysis. The researchers therefore describe them as anecdotal – interesting, but inconclusive.

Intriguingly, the researchers note that something similar happened during an experiment with famed out-of-body practitioner Robert Monroe in the 1960s.

Monroe failed to perceive the hidden target, but reported seeing a technician with an unfamiliar man outside the room where he expected to find her. The man was indeed there – he was the technician's husband, whom Monroe had not previously met.

The original researcher, psychologist Charles Tart, nevertheless considered the evidence weak, noting that Monroe could have heard the visitor during a break.

Still, it raises the interesting possibility that the targets used in out-of-body-experience studies may be part of the problem. Perhaps a static screen or list of numbers simply isn't salient enough to attract attention during the experience.

"I hope these findings encourage us to think more deeply about what they might mean for our understanding of consciousness and, ultimately, the nature of reality," Weiler says.

"At its deepest level, this research is not only asking whether out-of-body experiences are real. It is asking what we mean by 'real' in the first place, and whether our current understanding of reality is broad enough to account for everything human consciousness can experience."

The Life of Earth

https://chuckincardinal.blogspot.com/

Scientists Buried 2,000 Pairs of Underwear. What Happened Next Revealed a Hidden World

By U. of Zurich, Sept. 11, 2026

https://scitechdaily.com/scientists-buried-2000-pairs-of-underwear-what-happened-next-revealed-a-hidden-world/

After being buried in the ground for two months and broken down by soil organisms, a new pair of cotton underwear (left) shows clear signs of decomposition (right). 

Credit: Nicolas Zonvi

By burying thousands of pairs of cotton underwear across Switzerland, scientists uncovered striking differences in biological activity from one type of land to another.

The results showed that gardens had especially active soils, while lawns were much quieter underground.

Soil supports the global food system while also storing water, carbon, and essential nutrients. It is also one of the planet’s richest habitats. Scientists estimate that more than half of Earth’s biodiversity lives below the surface. But as biodiversity declines worldwide, soil health is also deteriorating, creating risks for agriculture, food security, and the stability of entire ecosystems.

In 2021, researchers at the University of Zurich (UZH) and Agroscope, the Swiss federal center of excellence for agricultural research, launched a citizen science project called Proof by Underpants (Beweisstück Unterhose). The goal was to make the hidden world beneath our feet more visible while gathering scientific data at a large scale.

Using the same standardized method, 1,000 volunteers buried more than 2,000 pairs of cotton underwear and 12,000 tea bags at roughly 1,000 locations across Switzerland. After two months, participants dug them back up, photographed them, and sent them to a laboratory along with soil samples for additional analysis.

Decomposition Reveals Soil Activity

The findings, which produced a map of biological activity in Swiss soils, have now been published in Plants, People, Planet. Researchers found that the underwear broke down at very different rates depending on where it had been buried.

That variation offered a useful measure of biological activity. Where soil organisms were more active, they decomposed the cotton more quickly.

Private gardens had the fastest rates of decomposition. These soils also contained the highest amounts of organic matter, creating favorable conditions for earthworms, fungi, bacteria, and other organisms that live underground. Lawns showed the lowest biological activity, while meadows and agricultural fields generally fell between the two extremes.

Slightly or heavily decomposed? The more active the soil organisms, the faster the cotton material decomposes. 

Credit: Priska Koller, Agroscope



Land Use Strongly Shapes Soil Health

“Our results show that how soil is managed can significantly affect both soil life and soil quality,” says co-study leader Marcel van der Heijden, UZH professor of agroecology. “Healthy, biologically active soil is crucial for fertility, nutrient cycling and many other ecosystem services.”

Practices that can support soil life include keeping the ground permanently covered, adding compost, using more diverse crop rotations and reducing the use of mineral fertilizers and pesticides.

Among all the factors examined, land use had the strongest influence on how quickly the underwear decomposed. Whether a location was a garden, meadow, cultivated field, or lawn explained the differences better than most of the soil properties the researchers measured. Chemical characteristics, including nutrient levels, also had an important effect.

Faster Breakdown Can Also Signal Excess Nutrients

Rapid decomposition was often associated with fertile soil and a strong supply of nutrients, which can be especially valuable in agriculture. But faster decomposition is not always desirable.

“However, maximum decomposition is not desirable in every ecosystem,” says co-project leader Franz Bender, head of the agroecological assessments team at Agroscope.

“In near-natural habitats such as forests, very high nutrient levels can indicate disruptions to the natural balance of nutrients. In gardens, too, rapid decomposition of the underwear may point to an oversupply of nutrients,” says Bender.

In those situations, reducing fertilizer use may be worth considering. Temperature and moisture also strongly influence soil organisms. When soils become too cold or too dry, biological activity drops sharply.

An “Underwear Index” for Soil Health

The study suggests that burying cotton underwear could provide a simple and meaningful way to highlight differences in soil fertility and biological activity.

Researchers therefore propose an “underwear index” as an easy way to visualize what is happening underground and help the public better understand why protecting healthy soils matters.

Citizen Scientists Make Large-Scale Research Possible

The “Proof by Underpants” project also highlights the value of citizen science. A study covering around 1,000 locations would have been difficult to carry out without the participation of volunteers.

The resulting data span every region of Switzerland and make up one of the country’s most comprehensive datasets on soil life. The scale of public involvement is also reflected in the study’s authorship, with around 240 citizen scientists listed as co-authors.

In return, participants received individualized feedback from the researchers, including soil analysis results, assessment tools, and recommendations for more sustainable soil management.

The Life of Earth

https://chuckincardinal.blogspot.com/

There's Enough Rare Earth Metal in US Coal Waste to Cut China Out of The Supply Chain, Study Finds

04 Sept. 2026, By I. Farkas

https://www.sciencealert.com/the-us-could-have-a-100-billion-stash-of-rare-earth-elements-hiding-in-coal-waste

(RHJ/iStock/Getty Images Plus)

The world runs on metals.

Our modern technologies, industries, and infrastructure would not be possible without 17 invaluable metals known as rare earth elements (REEs), which are used in computers, planes, cars, and more.

Unfaithful to their name, REEs aren't that rare, but expensive and difficult to extract in useful forms.

But as scientists are discovering, piles of discarded waste material left over from spent fossil fuels contain vast quantities of REEs that could be a homegrown source of these metals.

REEs are unevenly distributed across Earth, with Chinese mines producing around 70 percent of REEs and accounting for about 90 percent of global heavy rare earth processing, creating a monopoly.

REEs are vital for the clean energy transition, needed in solar panels, batteries, and wind turbine motors, as well as for medical and defense technologies – one F-35 fighter jet contains around 400 kilograms (900 pounds) of REEs, for example.

A microscopic view of a typical rock rich in REEs. 

(University of Cambridge)

Many countries see acquiring an independent REE supply chain as integral to national security, technological sustainability, economic stability, and energy independence. It would also help bring about a more circular materials economy.

Fortunately, there appear to be lots of REEs just 'sitting around', locked away in spent fossil fuel waste.

In fact, a 2024 study led by geoscientists at the University of Texas at Austin calculated that coal ash from coal-fired power stations in the US may contain nearly US$100 billion in feasibly extractable REEs.

Currently, imports from China comprise about 70 percent of the US' REE supply. The US has only one major operational REE mine in California, which produces 16 percent of the global rare earth supply, and it lacks national processing capabilities.

Production of rare earth oxides, which are REEs mixed with oxygen, per country since 1985.

  (Agrawal & Ragauskas, J. Environ. Manage., 2025)

Intriguingly, the chalky coal ash is a potential powerhouse: a byproduct of burning coal, itself made possible only by hundreds of millions of years of extreme heat and pressure squeezing long-dead ancient plants within Earth.

Once most of coal's mass and combustible elements have been burned off, the REE concentration in the resulting ash is up to 10 times higher than in unburned coal, offering an already-unearthed source of critical materials.

The estimated 11 million US tons of REEs in accessible coal ash is almost eight times the amount that the US has in domestic reserves.

So a global race is on to develop practical extraction methods.

At Monash University in Australia, engineers are using environmentally benign acids to remove REEs from coal ash, reporting 90 percent recovery of all 17 elements in pilot demonstrations.

"The significance of this work lies in its dual impact: reducing environmental waste while securing domestic supply of critical minerals," explains Monash chemical engineer Sankar Bhattacharya.

This work is also versatile. The Monash researchers say their method, if scaled and commercialized, could be used on other common waste streams, including electronic waste as well as tailings, the material left over after valuable metals have been removed from mined ore.

"We don't have to dig up new mines. We can use something that's already processed and just sitting in landfill," Bennet Thomas, a sustainable resource recovery engineer at Monash, told AAP, adding that increased REE self-reliance can therefore address a "national risk".

Coal ash operations in a landfill in Shrewsbury, Massachusetts. (Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection)



A paper published in 2025 in the Journal of Environmental Management similarly highlights the untapped potential of coal ash.

Engineers Ruchi Agrawal and Arthur Ragauskas calculated that globally, coal ash could yield more than 300,000 US tons (272,000 metric tons) of REEs each year, "far exceeding global demand".

Yet conventional extraction methods have many drawbacks, including low yields and toxic post-processing waste.

Researchers at Northeastern University are working on the problem, boosting yields from conventional extraction methods three-fold by pretreating coal tailings.

Scientists are exploring other options, too.

These include 'green' leaching solutions using various substances like acids; electrochemical extraction methods; and nature-based solutions like microbe-made metabolites that precipitate the REEs from waste in an eco-friendly fashion.

Additionally, phytomining could use "hyperaccumulator plants" that collect REEs in their tissues, putting these natural wonders to work for us – because other than sequestering carbon, producing oxygen, cleaning the air, cooling cities, beautifying our world, and providing food and building materials, what have plants done for us lately?

A graphical summary of a phytomining process. 

(Agrawal & Ragauskas, J. Environ. Manage., 2025)

However, each method has its pros and cons, primarily related to environmental sustainability, resource requirements, scalability, and complexity.

Extraction will need to hit a sweet spot to yield high-quality REEs in a cost-effective, energy-efficient way.

Time will tell if any of these methods will be successful at scale.

The Life of Earth

https://chuckincardinal.blogspot.com/

One of Earth’s Driest Deserts Just Turned White

By K. Hansen, NASA Earth Observatory, Sept. 11, 2026

https://scitechdaily.com/one-of-earths-driest-deserts-just-turned-white/

Back-to-back winter storms brought a rare burst of snow to Chile’s Atacama Desert in August 2026, turning parts of one of the driest regions on Earth dramatically white.

In August 2026, a series of powerful winter storms transformed parts of northern Chile’s Atacama Desert, covering the famously dry landscape in an unusual layer of snow.

Snow is not unheard of in the Atacama. Significant falls occurred in 2025 and, before that, in 2011. But one of the August 2026 storms stood out because of its remarkable reach. Snow spread westward from the Andes across the desert and came close to the Pacific coast.

Atacama Desert captured by satellite on August 6, 2026.

NASA Satellites Capture a Snow-Covered Desert

The OLI (Operational Land Imager) aboard the NASA USGS Landsat 8 and Landsat 9 satellites captured images of the region on August 6 (above) and August 14 (below), before and after a stretch of severe winter weather.

The images provide a detailed look at the Chajnantor plateau within the Altiplano-Puna volcanic complex. The high plateau is home to the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), one of the most powerful radio telescopes on Earth.

When heavy snow and strong winds arrived, ALMA temporarily suspended operations. Its antennas were placed in a protective survival mode designed to help the observatory withstand severe conditions.

Atacama Desert captured by satellite on August 14, 2026.

Snow Spreads Toward the Pacific

The weather became even more extraordinary later in the month.

A second storm covered a much larger area with fresh snow. An image taken on August 19 by MODIS (Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer) aboard NASA’s Terra satellite shows the extent of the snowfall.

Snow stretched west from the Andes, crossed the hyper-arid heart of the Atacama, and reached areas close to the Pacific coast south of the Chilean port city of Antofagasta. Several other major astronomical observatories are located in this coastal region, and some also suspended operations during the storm.

A blanket of snow spans a vast area of northern Chile, from the Andes to near the Pacific coast, captured in this image on August 19, 2026, by the MODIS (Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer) on NASA’s Terra satellite. 

Credit: NASA Earth Observatory/Lauren Dauphin



An Unusual Atmospheric Setup

Winter precipitation in northern Chile is often associated with cutoff lows, low-pressure systems that become separated from the main jet stream and can occasionally drift into the region.

A cutoff low was responsible for the significant snowfall seen in 2025, according to René Garreaud, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Chile.

The late August 2026 storm also developed from a cutoff low, but its origins were especially unusual. The system broke away from an exceptionally large trough, an elongated region of relatively low atmospheric pressure. That trough extended across a huge portion of the Southern Hemisphere, reaching from the southern tip of South America into the subtropics.

Combined with plentiful moisture near the coast, the atmospheric disturbance produced precipitation across an unusually broad area. Rain and snow extended offshore, along the coastline, through the heart of the Atacama, and over the Andes.

The resulting precipitation reached levels “rarely seen in the otherwise extremely arid region,” Garreaud said.

Nearly a Year’s Rain Many Times Over

Not all of the precipitation arrived as snow.

In Taltal, a coastal city in northern Chile, nearly 40 millimeters (1.6 inches) of rain fell over just three days. According to Garreaud, that amount was roughly 10 times the city’s average annual rainfall.

“We see these kinds of events only a few times, if any, per decade.”

For a landscape defined by extreme dryness, such a sudden influx of water can quickly become dangerous.

The heavy precipitation triggered destructive mudflows and flash flooding across parts of northern Chile. The National Disaster Prevention and Response Service (SENAPRED) reported that thousands of people were affected and hundreds of homes suffered major damage.

El Niño Sets the Stage

The storms arrived during an unusually wet winter in north central Chile, with a strengthening El Niño providing the broader climate backdrop, Garreaud noted.

August was not the first month to bring damaging weather. A major storm in July also caused significant impacts across Chile’s Norte Chico region.

El Niño can alter the large-scale atmospheric patterns that normally help keep northern Chile exceptionally dry. During El Niño, the subtropical Pacific high, which usually suppresses storms and rainfall in the region, tends to weaken. At the same time, a blocking high often develops over the South Pacific near the southern tip of South America.

Together, those changes can shift the Southern Hemisphere storm track closer to the equator, making it easier for powerful weather systems to reach normally arid parts of Chile.

In August 2026, that unusual setup helped bring widespread snow, intense rain, flooding, and mudflows to a region better known as one of the driest places on Earth.

The Life of Earth

https://chuckincardinal.blogspot.com/

4.6-Billion-Year-Old Meteorite Reveals a Surprisingly Strong Primordial Magnetic Field

By J. Chu, Massachusetts Inst. of Tech., Sept. 10, 2026

https://scitechdaily.com/4-6-billion-year-old-meteorite-reveals-a-surprisingly-strong-primordial-magnetic-field/

Artist’s illustration of the infant solar system, showing dust, rock, and gas surrounding the young Sun as magnetic fields thread through the protoplanetary disk. 

Credit: Hernán Cañellas

Ancient meteorite minerals reveal a surprisingly strong magnetic field from the solar system’s first 200,000 years.

About 4.6 billion years ago, before the Sun and planets existed in their familiar forms, the solar system was a vast cloud of gas and dust. Within a few million years, this “solar nebula” collapsed and flattened into a disk, setting the stage for matter to gather into the Sun and the planets that orbit it.

Gravity has long been considered the main force behind this transformation. New evidence from some of the oldest known meteorite material, however, suggests that magnetism was also involved.

MIT researchers detected traces of ancient magnetic fields in microscopic grains preserved inside a meteorite found in Antarctica in 2008. The grains, known as calcium-aluminum-rich inclusions, or CAIs, formed during the solar system’s first 200,000 years and are the oldest known material from this period.

The measurements indicate that a magnetic field was already present during the solar nebula stage. The researchers estimate that it was stronger than Earth’s magnetic field today and likely helped move primordial material inward as the early Sun was forming.

“This transition, from a spherical cloud to a protoplanetary disk, is one of the most significant events in all of solar system history,” says Benjamin Weiss, the Robert R. Shrock Professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences at MIT. “It has long been theorized that gravity caused this, but our measurements show magnetism likely played a role.”Weiss and his colleagues report the findings in a paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Magnetism may have shaped the earliest solar system

Magnetic fields can arise when electrically charged matter moves. In the infant solar system, the collapsing cloud of gas and dust may have generated a plasma filled with charged particles. As those particles moved through the forming disk, they could have created and sustained a magnetic field.

If such a field existed, Weiss and his colleagues reasoned, it should have influenced material throughout the disk. As that material condensed, tiny magnetic minerals could have recorded the strength of the surrounding field and preserved that information for billions of years. If those minerals later reached Earth, their “remanent magnetization” could provide evidence of the ancient field and its possible role in shaping the solar system.

Illustration of primitive rocky material and meteorite inclusions forming near the young Sun, preserving clues to the magnetic environment of the earliest solar system.

 Credit: Hernán Cañellas

The researchers had already found signs of magnetism dating to about 2 million years after solar system formation began. By then, scientists think the Sun had formed, and the planets were beginning to assemble, suggesting that magnetic fields were involved during the early stages of planet formation.

“Nowadays people don’t debate whether magnetism is present when planets are forming. But the debate is around the very early solar system, before planets are forming, when there’s just a disk,” says Borlina, who led the new study as an MIT graduate student and is now an assistant professor at Purdue University. “That’s where the debate still resides, and that’s where we’re operating now.”

An unusually pristine meteorite preserved the record

The new work pushed the search farther back, asking whether a magnetic field was already present while the Sun itself was still coming together. The researchers examined DOM 08006, a meteorite discovered in 2008 in the Dominion Range along the East Antarctic Ice Sheet that has since been studied extensively.

DOM 08006 is among the most primitive meteorites ever found. It contains mineral grains dating to the earliest stages of solar system development, possibly from before the Sun had fully formed, and it has preserved much of its original mineral composition.

“Other meteorites went through many different processes over this 4.5 billion-year history,” Weiss says. “They were formed in the solar nebula, then added to bodies with water, then got destroyed, moved to the asteroid belt, and then landed here. But somehow, DOM has experienced less alteration than any other meteorite.”

That unusually pristine history made the meteorite a promising place to search for a magnetic record from the solar system’s infancy. CAIs embedded within DOM could potentially have retained traces of any magnetic field that surrounded them when they formed.

“We know they are the oldest things we have of the early solar system,” Borlina says. “But CAI’s are very complex and are not all the same, even within a 1-millimeter piece of the meteorite. So we have to carefully identify what types they are.”

The researchers separated tiny grains from pieces of the meteorite and identified several CAIs containing naturally magnetic minerals, including iron. They then subjected those grains to a series of measurements designed to detect any magnetism that remained.

The ancient field exceeded Earth’s today

The tests revealed traces of an ancient magnetic field preserved inside the grains. From those signals, the researchers estimate that the early solar system contained a field measuring roughly 150 to 600 microteslas, about three to 12 times stronger than Earth’s magnetic field today.

“We think these kinds of magnetic fields were helping to move gas from the protoplanetary disk, in toward this central star, the Sun,” Borlina says. “Gravity is also playing a role. But we are now showing that, if you want to fully understand how the Sun and planets formed, you should include magnetic fields in the ingredients that make them.”

The Life of Earth

https://chuckincardinal.blogspot.com/

Scientists Create a New Form of Ice at More Than 2,000 °C

09 Sept. 2026, By M. Starr

https://www.sciencealert.com/scientists-create-a-new-form-of-ice-at-more-than-2000-c

(jhorrocks/E+/Getty Images) 

Water is one of the most commonplace, essential substances in the human world. 

We literally can't function without its properties as a near-universal solvent. It falls from the sky. We bathe in it, drink it, and immerse ourselves in it for fun. 

But if just considered as a liquid, water is extremely weird, behaving in ways completely at odds with other liquids. It becomes less dense when it freezes. Its surface tension is bizarrely high. So is its boiling point. And, based on its molecular weight, it should be a gas at room temperature.

 And that's all at normal, ambient Earth conditions. 

Tweak the pressure and the temperature a few notches, and water's outlandish behavior gets even more out of hand. Scientists have now demonstrated one of the weirdest forms of ice yet – under preposterous pressures up to 2.3 million atmospheres, and tremendous temperatures up to 2,630 kelvins (2,357 degrees Celsius, or 4,274 degrees Fahrenheit).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0hbwUuHI5co

At those temperatures, you'd normally expect water to emphatically be a gas – even partially sundered into its constituent oxygen and hydrogen atoms. But something interesting happens at the astronomical pressures found deep inside planets.

When water transitions from a liquid to a gas, or vapor, it expands. Under crushing pressures of millions of atmospheres, this expansion is stymied. Instead, water can remain extraordinarily dense, taking on exotic forms unlike any ice we encounter at Earth's surface.

One of these is superionic ice – a deeply odd state of matter that's neither entirely solid nor entirely liquid. Its oxygen atoms remain fixed in a rigid crystal lattice, as they would in a solid. But the hydrogen nuclei are mobile, diffusing through that lattice more like particles in a liquid.

At slightly different sets of conditions, the arrangement of the oxygen atoms shifts into different configurations known as phases. There are some twenty-something known phases of water ice, a few of which become superionic under extreme conditions. Scientists are always looking for more.

And it's not just weirdness for weirdness's sake. Superionic ice is thought to exist deep inside Uranus and Neptune, where its unusual properties may play a role in generating the planets' equally unusual magnetic fields.

The oxygen-hydrogen do-si-do of superionic ice. (Goran tek-en/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0)



In their new experiments, a team led by physicist Alexis Forestier of the French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission subjected tiny samples of water to the sorts of extreme conditions expected in the interiors of ice giant planets.

They squeezed the samples between the tips of diamonds to pressures as high as 230 gigapascals, while using lasers to heat them to thousands of degrees. That's 2.3 million times Earth's atmospheric pressure at sea level – the pressure at the center of Earth, for context, is around 360 gigapascals.

Then, using an extremely narrow beam of synchrotron X-rays, they probed for changes in the crystal structure of the ice.

What emerged was a configuration predicted theoretically but never unambiguously observed in experiments: hexagonal close-packed, or hcp, ice. As the hcp crystal was heated, its expansion also showed a signature of superionic behavior, suggesting it entered the superionic state at around 1,700 kelvins.

The name refers to the arrangement of the oxygen atoms. Imagine you're packing identical balls in layers; there are a number of different ways those layers can be stacked while packing the balls as tightly as possible.

One previously identified form of superionic ice has a face-centered cubic, or fcc, structure. In the newly identified hcp ice, the layers are stacked in a different sequence. The researchers found evidence that one can transform into the other as the layers shift position.

This transformation seems to occur as conditions grow more extreme.

The conditions under which the researchers observed the new hcp ice phase (filled triangles and filled circles) show its emergence at extreme pressures and temperatures. (Forestier et al., Phys. Rev. Lett., 2026)

At 155 gigapascals and 2,000 kelvins, the signal observed from the X-ray probe was a mix of fcc and hcp.

Dialing up to 197 gigapascals and 2,250 kelvins, the hcp signature became stronger relative to fcc.

By the final set of conditions – 219 gigapascals and 2,630 kelvins – the fcc signature had almost vanished, and hcp clearly dominated.

Intriguingly, this may not have been the first time the researchers had produced hcp ice.

Looking back at data from an earlier experiment, they realized that a previously unidentified X-ray diffraction peak observed above 130 gigapascals was likely the signature of hcp ice – they just hadn't recognized it at the time.

Their results suggest that, at pressures above around 200 gigapascals, hcp may become the more stable arrangement of superionic ice.

It seems like a relatively small change – literally on the atomic scale – but the difference could mean big things for the Solar System.

If hcp ice conducts electricity differently from fcc ice, its presence deep inside Uranus and Neptune could change models of how material and electrical charge move through their interiors – processes thought to be involved in generating the planets' strange, messy, lopsided magnetic fields.

We don't actually know about the properties of hcp ice yet, though. The stuff has only just been discovered. The researchers invite further theoretical work to tease apart those properties – especially its mechanical plasticity and electrical conductivity.

Further experiments will also be needed to pin down exactly where, across the extremes of pressure and temperature, hcp ice is stable relative to its fcc counterpart.

Water is really weird, and superionic ice is even weirder. Scientists have only just scratched the surface of what this strange molecule can do; in a way, it feels fitting that we need to rely on it to stay alive.

Stay frosty, water. Or hot. You do you.

The Life of Earth

https://chuckincardinal.blogspot.com/

Your Body Keeps Producing Cannabis-Like Chemicals Throughout a Marathon

09 Sept. 2026, By E. Öz

https://www.sciencealert.com/your-body-keeps-producing-cannabis-like-chemicals-throughout-a-marathon

(RUN 4 FFWPU/Pexels/Canva)

Running a marathon is hard. Luckily, your body has its own chemical support system to help it cope.

As the kilometers pass, the body produces more natural messengers called endocannabinoids. These help regulate pain, stress, mood, energy use, and recovery.

Endocannabinoids are a normal and useful part of the body. Their rise may help it adapt to physical strain, but more is not automatically better.

Despite their name, endocannabinoids are not cannabis, and the body is not producing a drug.

The brain is packed with cannabinoid receptors – and if you think of them as locks, endocannabinoids are the body's keys.

Cannabis compounds, including THC, can fit some of the same locks, which is why these natural chemicals are sometimes described as "cannabis-like."

Endocannabinoids may contribute to the famous "runner's high": the happiness, calm, reduced anxiety, and dulled pain some people experience during long runs.

This feeling was once credited to endorphins. But they do not readily cross the barrier between the blood and brain, leading researchers to rethink the familiar explanation.

Most human studies have tracked exercise-related endocannabinoids for less than an hour. In a new BMC Medicine study, researchers investigated what happens when people run for several hours or longer.

Researchers collected blood samples from ultramarathon runners completing distances of up to 230 kilometers. (Courtesy of Katrin Ringe and Michael Siebers (Marathonstudie and TTdR3))



First author and psychiatrist Michael Siebers of the University of Duisburg-Essen in Germany and colleagues conducted two field studies with experienced endurance runners.

In the first, 19 participants completed a marathon around Lake Baldeney in Essen, Germany. On another day, the same people walked for exactly as long as they had run.

Blood was collected before the marathon, during two brief stops mid-marathon, again at the finish, and finally after 45 minutes of rest. Participants rated their happiness, anxiety, and pain.

The researchers tracked a number of different endocannabinoids in the runners' bodies, including two well-known ones that seem to be related to the runner's high: anandamide and 2-AG.

Anandamide takes its name from ananda, the Sanskrit word for bliss – and it lived up to that name. As the participants ran, the amount in their blood steadily increased. From 14 kilometers (8.7 miles) onward, levels were significantly higher than during the matched walk and remained elevated 45 minutes after the finish.

The second messenger, 2-AG, is thought to have broader roles in immune regulation, inflammation, energy use, and tissue recovery. It behaved differently, rising near the end of the marathon and remaining elevated during recovery.

"Anandamide and 2-AG are produced and degraded through different biochemical pathways, so it is not surprising that they followed different time courses," Siebers told ScienceAlert.

Previous research has linked anandamide more consistently with mood and features of the runner's high. The later rise in 2-AG may instead reflect the body's efforts to manage inflammation, energy demands, and recovery.

However, Siebers cautioned that this remains a hypothesis. The two messengers have overlapping functions, and scientists cannot yet give each one a separate job.

The runners' feelings changed too. Compared with walking, marathon running was associated with greater happiness and lower anxiety. Pain, however, increased significantly after 28 kilometers of running.

Participants provided repeated blood samples during the endurance-running study. (Courtesy of Katrin Ringe and Michael Siebers (Marathonstudie and TTdR3))



The second field study involved 36 experienced athletes running 100, 160, or an astonishing 230 kilometers in the TorTour de Ruhr ultramarathon. Blood samples were taken before and after.

Levels of both anandamide and 2-AG increased after all three distances. Surprisingly, longer did not necessarily mean more: levels of some endocannabinoids were higher after the standard marathon than after the ultramarathons.

Exercise intensity may matter more than duration alone. Ultramarathon runners usually move more slowly to conserve energy, while extreme fatigue, pain, and depleted energy stores may change the body's chemical response.

There was another puzzle. Although the ultramarathoners' endocannabinoid levels rose and their anxiety fell, their happiness did not increase significantly. Only 12 of the 36 reported a runner's high during the race.

"The runner's high is a difficult phenomenon to capture scientifically," Siebers said. "It is transient and highly individual – rather like trying to capture fog in a jar."

Because happiness was measured only before and after the ultramarathons, brief periods of runner's high may have been missed. Extreme fatigue and pain may also have drowned out any feeling of bliss.

"Elevated endocannabinoid levels alone are not sufficient to produce a runner's high," Siebers explained.

The study cannot prove that these chemicals caused the psychological changes, because they were measured in the blood rather than directly in the brain. A previous study in mice offered stronger evidence that cannabinoid receptors help reduce anxiety and pain after running, but the same causal link has not been demonstrated in humans.

The groups were also small, and factors such as sleep, food, and stress were not fully controlled.

Still, the findings provide an unusually detailed look at the chemical journey inside the body during real-world endurance running.

These natural messengers may provide happiness, calm, pain relief, or simply help the body endure the next kilometer. But their effects appear far more complicated than a simple runner's high.

The Life of Earth

https://chuckincardinal.blogspot.com/

Belly Fat, Not Age, May Be The Bigger Driver of Low Testosterone

10 Sept. 2026, By C. Cassella

https://www.sciencealert.com/belly-fat-not-age-may-be-the-bigger-driver-of-low-testosterone

(kali9/E+/Getty Images)

Aging may not impact your testosterone levels as much as you might think.

From the age of about 35, studies suggest that circulating levels of this sex hormone in men usually begin to decline.

But it's only very gradual.

There's another overlooked factor that could have a bigger impact: where fat is stored in the body.

According to a new analysis, published in the Journal of the Endocrine Society, visceral fat, or deep fat in the abdomen, may be the more precise metabolic determinant of testosterone suppression.

This specific type of fatty tissue can wrap around vital organs like the liver, stomach, and intestines, and it has many receptors for testosterone, making it especially sensitive to this circulating hormone.

In a review of health data from nearly 5,000 men in the US, aged 20 to 59, the presence of visceral fat was strongly associated with testosterone suppression.

In fact, in this age bracket, it seemed to influence testosterone concentrations significantly more than chronological aging.

After accounting for fat distribution, age showed only modest associations within the study's age range.

The two review authors, research physiologists Karl Friedl and Adam Potter, of the US Army Research Institute of Environmental Medicine, conclude that deep belly fat should be the "primary adiposity correlate of low testosterone in US men".

Visceral adipose tissue area and total testosterone in US men aged 20–59 years, adjusted for age and body mass index (BMI). (Friedl & Potter, Journal of the Endocrine Society, 2026)



Previous research has similarly found that among middle-aged men, fat-related measures exert a greater influence on testosterone levels than age.

For instance, a 2007 study of 1,667 men found that gaining 4 to 5 body mass index (BMI) points was linked to a decline in testosterone, and this was comparable to roughly 10 years of aging.

Such results also broadly align with research from 2013, which tracked 1,382 men over the course of five years.

The study authors concluded that age-related declines in T levels are "not inevitable", but instead are explained by smoking behavior and health status, particularly obesity and depression.

But using BMI to measure obesity also has its flaws.

Today, BMI and waist circumference remain the most common measures of excess body weight, but they aren't necessarily the best measures of cardiometabolic health.

While obesity is largely consistent with lower testosterone levels, men with similar BMIs and waist circumferences can still demonstrate substantially different levels of this hormone.

It's possible, for instance, that a young man with a BMI in a healthy weight range has a high percentage of hidden visceral fat, and this may be impacting his testosterone levels.

By contrast, an older, muscular man with lower visceral fat could be deemed to have a higher risk of testosterone issues just because of his age and BMI score.

In cases like these, visceral fat levels may be the more important consideration.

It's unclear why testosterone production is so closely linked to visceral fat, but researchers have a few ideas.

Deep fat in the abdomen can promote insulin resistance, and this, in turn, may cause a downstream impact on how certain cells in the testes convert cholesterol to testosterone.

Visceral fat can also stimulate inflammatory pathways that could disrupt the body's hormone signaling pathway, increasing the conversion of testosterone to estradiol.

"Current guidelines appropriately recognize obesity as a risk factor for low testosterone, but our findings suggest that adipose distribution, particularly visceral adiposity, may provide additional information beyond total body mass alone," explain Friedl and Potter.

This means that interventions that reduce visceral fat, including drugs like Ozempic or Wegovy, may address the issues of low testosterone more directly than testosterone replacement therapy alone.

"These observations underscore the importance of characterizing the underlying adiposity phenotype and considering reversible metabolic contributors before initiating testosterone therapy," the study authors conclude.

The Life of Earth

https://chuckincardinal.blogspot.com/

Scientists Are Making Concrete With Human Poop – And It Gets 42% Stronger

09 Sept. 2026, By M, Starr
https://www.sciencealert.com/scientists-are-making-concrete-with-human-poop-and-it-gets-42-stronger

Could the concrete of the future contain a little bit of poop?

 (Lighthouse Films/Getty Images)

Concrete is, quite literally, the foundation of the modern world.

Almost every construction project in the world uses the material in some form. There's just one problem, and that's a big one: Making one of its central ingredients – cement – is horrendously bad for the environment.

The act of heating and processing limestone to make cement is one of the world's foremost sources of carbon dioxide emissions – so, understandably, scientists have been looking for ways to mitigate this problem.

And researchers led by civil engineer Raghuvesh Tiwari of Manipal University Jaipur in India may have just hit upon an ingenious solution that takes care of two environmental birds with one stone.

By mixing in biochar made from the human poop slurry processed at fecal sludge treatment plants, their concrete "yields significant improvements in concrete properties," they write in a paper accepted for publication in Scientific Reports.

Fecal-sludge biochar before (left) and after grinding and sieving for use in concrete. 

(Tiwari et al., Sci. Rep., 2026)



Concrete owes its extraordinary usefulness to a combination of properties. It's malleable when wet, and can be poured into almost any shape, yet cures into a material strong enough to support enormous loads and durable enough to last for decades (or millennia).

It's usually made from a few things in specific quantities: sand, gravel, water, and the cement itself – which is primarily made using limestone.

Unfortunately, that ingredient mix is finicky – altering the balance, or substituting some of the cement for something else, can produce concrete that is not as strong or durable as the real McCoy. It's not going to be very useful as a building material if it literally cracks under pressure.

One increasingly promising cement substitute is biochar, a carbon-rich material made by heating organic matter in an oxygen-poor environment.

The beauty of biochar is that it can be made from many kinds of organic matter.

And humans produce quite a large amount of organic matter – up to around 400 grams of poop per person per day, which isn't much on an individual level, but when you get several million people doing it, it's kind of astonishing that our sewers are as effective as they are.

Anyway, all those daily tons of poop have to go somewhere, which is where the dots start to connect.

In India, fecal sludge treatment plants have been established to safely manage human waste, which can be processed into biochar through pyrolysis – so the researchers figured, if sawdust, wood, rice husk, and other biochars are effective at making concrete, ¿por qué no los poop?

To put it to the test, Tiwari and his colleagues obtained fecal-sludge biochar from a treatment plant in Warangal, India.

To make the biochar, fecal sludge is dried, then heated in a low-oxygen environment at temperatures between 350 and 450 degrees Celsius (662 to 842 Fahrenheit) to produce biochar. The biochar is then ground and sieved into a fine powder.

The researchers used this powder to replace varying amounts of cement – 5, 10, and 15 percent – in conventional concrete, then subjected the resulting poopcrete to a battery of tests to see how well it held up.

The biochar concrete specimens being prepared and tested for compressive strength.

 (Tiwari et al., Sci. Rep., 2026)

And, incredibly, a little bit of poop made the concrete better.

The researchers measured the shrinkage, compressive strength, flexural strength, water absorption, and porosity of their different mixes, and this is where it got really interesting.

Overall, the strongest concrete was generally produced when 5 percent of the cement was replaced with poop biochar.

But the poopcrete had another interesting trick: It continued to gain substantial strength as it cured. The researchers report that after 91 days, the 5 percent mix had recorded average increases of 20 percent in compressive strength and 36 percent in flexural strength.

At 10 percent cement replacement, those increases were even larger: 21 percent for compressive strength and a whopping 42 percent for flexural strength.

Compressive strength of concrete containing different proportions of fecal-sludge biochar after 28, 56, and 91 days of curing.

 (Tiwari et al., Sci. Rep., 2026)

The poopcrete didn't appear to pay for its strength in some of the other properties the team tested.

At 5 percent, it generally absorbed less water and had lower porosity than conventional concrete, while its drying shrinkage was also lower. At 10 percent, its performance remained broadly comparable to ordinary concrete.

But there is – isn't there always? – such a thing as too much poop.

At 15 percent cement replacement, the concrete still grew stronger as it cured, but its overall strength lagged behind the 5- and 10-percent versions.

So why does adding a little poop make concrete stronger?

The researchers think several effects work together. For one, poop biochar is highly porous, riddled with tiny cavities that can soak up water and gradually release it as the concrete cures.

This effectively turns the biochar particles into tiny internal reservoirs, keeping water available for the chemical reactions that harden and strengthen the cement.

Under the microscope, the structure of concrete changes as increasing amounts of cement are replaced with biochar. From top left: 0, 5, 10, and 15 percent biochar. (Tiwari et al., Sci. Rep., 2026)

But the poop isn't just sitting there holding water.

The biochar is rich in silica, which can react with compounds produced as cement cures to form more of the calcium silicates that help give concrete its strength.

In other words, it's pozzolanic – the same broad class of chemical reactions famously exploited in ancient Roman concrete, just with, well, human feces instead of the volcanic material the Romans used.

Finally, the fine biochar particles can fill gaps in the concrete and improve the way its ingredients pack and bond together.

The researchers could actually see the result under a microscope. Concrete containing 5 percent biochar had a denser, more tightly bonded structure than conventional concrete.

But at 15 percent, that structure began to deteriorate, with more pores, cracks, and poorly bonded regions appearing.

Now, we're not going to run out and start building skyscrapers out of poopcrete tomorrow. The researchers note that more work is needed to assess how it performs under real-world conditions, such as freeze-thaw cycles, salinity, and extreme temperatures.

There's also the matter of heavy metal accumulation, which is a known problem with sewage sludge. Locking potentially harmful heavy metals up in concrete could be a bonus, but it's not known how well they will stay locked up, or whether they will leach out over time.

The study also did not assess the impact of this method on carbon emissions.

However, replacing even a fraction of concrete's cement with a material made from a waste stream humans produce in inexhaustible quantities could potentially tackle two problems at once.

And if there's one thing we can rely on humans to produce in consistently large quantities, it's definitely poop.

The Life of Earth

https://chuckincardinal.blogspot.com/