Satellite image of the explosion high in Earth’s atmosphere.
(CSU/CIRA and NOAA)
A meteor crashing toward Earth exploded over the northeastern United States on Saturday, NASA said, setting off booms that echoed over the region with a blast equivalent to 300 tons of TNT.
The fireball broke up over northeastern Massachusetts and southeastern New Hampshire at 2:06 pm (18:06 GMT), the US space agency's deputy news chief Jennifer Dooren told AFP in a statement.
"This fireball was not associated with any currently active meteor shower, but it was a natural object and not a re-entry of space debris or a satellite," she said.
"The energy released at breakup is estimated to be equivalent to about 300 tons of TNT, which accounts for the loud booms."
The meteor was traveling at 75,000 mph (more than 120,000 kph) at an altitude of 40 miles when it broke apart, Dooren said.
Area residents were alarmed by the unexpected loud booms, with social media users reporting they were so powerful that houses were shaking.
In 2013, a fireball streaked above Chelyabinsk, Russia.
The tail of a meteor that streaked across the sky above Chelyabinsk, Russia, in 2013.
(Alex Alishevskikh/Wikimedia Commons)
The house-sized space rock blew apart 14 miles above the ground, releasing a blast equivalent to 440,000 tons of TNT, NASA said.
The explosion blew out windows over 200 square miles (518 square kilometers), injuring more than 1,600 people, mostly due to broken glass.
Two individuals of Thecacera sesama sp. nov. feeding on a bryozoan.
Credit: Ho-Yeung Chan et al., 2026
A sesame-seed-sized sea slug discovered in Taiwan is revealing a hidden world of tiny ocean life.
A newly identified species of sea slug, so small that it is barely larger than a sesame seed, has been discovered in the coastal waters of Keelung, Taiwan. The tiny marine animal, named Thecacera sesama, features a translucent body decorated with distinctive black and yellow markings.
Researchers from National Taiwan Ocean University, the National Museum of Natural Science, and National Taipei University of Education chose the name after the creature’s resemblance to a sesame seed. According to the team, “Taiwanese divers call it ‘sesame’ in Chinese, and it is also small like a sesame seed, hence the name.”
Measuring less than three millimeters long, the nudibranch was first encountered in 2019 by lead author Ho-Yeung Chan during a recreational dive.
Thecacera sesama sp. nov. Details of appearance and morphological features, hand-drawn on a tablet by Chen-Lu Lee.
Credit: Chen-Lu Lee A Chance Discovery Leads to a New Species
The discovery began unexpectedly while Chan was still an undergraduate student.
“During a recreational dive in the summer during the undergraduate study of HY Chan in 2019, he accidentally discovered Thecacera sesama sp. nov. in northern Taiwan waters,” the researchers explained.
At the time, Chan did not realize he had found a species unknown to science. The significance of the sighting only became clear after he sought advice online. According to the team, he “never realized Thecacera sesama was a new species until he consulted the sea slug expert ‘Hsini Lin teacher’ on Facebook.”
Living specimens of Thecacera sesama sp. nov.
Credit: Ho-Yeung Chan et al., 2026
Challenges of Studying Tiny Marine Life
Recording and studying the species was far from easy. The coastline around Keelung presents difficult conditions for marine research throughout much of the year. Taiwan regularly experiences typhoons during the summer months, while strong winter monsoons generate large waves. Water temperatures can also fall below 16 degrees Celsius. As a result, researchers have only a limited window of roughly four months each year when diving conditions are suitable for studying nudibranchs.
Because of these restrictions, spotting an animal as small as T. sesama often comes down to luck.
A Life Centered on Bryozoans
Researchers observed that the tiny sea slug spends its life engaged in four primary activities: feeding, searching, mating, and laying eggs.
All of these behaviors take place on bryozoans, small aquatic invertebrates commonly known as “moss animals.” Interestingly, the particular bryozoan species used by T. sesama may itself represent a species that has not yet been formally described by science.
Living specimens of bryozoan with Thecacera species.
Credit: Ho-Yeung Chan et al., 2026
Why Nudibranch Discoveries Matter
Although small, nudibranchs play an important role in marine ecosystems.
“Nudibranchs are one of the key players in the marine food web,” the researchers noted. “They are extremely colorful and can be spotted on coral reef ecosystems. However, many nudibranchs are very small in size and are extremely difficult to spot underwater with the naked eye.”
The team believes the discovery of Thecacera sesama may be only the beginning. Given the tiny size of many marine organisms, Taiwan’s waters likely contain numerous species that have yet to be discovered, documented, and studied.
The research describing Thecacera sesama was published in the open access journal ZooKeys on May 11, 2026.
The polar research vessel RV Kronprins Haakon in Fram Strait, Arctic Ocean.
Credit: Lawrence Hislop/Norwegian Polar Institute
Scientists say melting sea ice may have pushed the Arctic Ocean past a tipping point, triggering changes that could reshape marine life for decades.
Scientists have identified what appears to be a major and potentially irreversible change in the Arctic Ocean. According to a new study, climate-driven sea ice loss has altered the region’s chemistry in a way that is disrupting the marine food web and could have long-lasting consequences for ecosystems across the North Atlantic.
Researchers found that levels of nitrate, a nutrient essential for the growth of microscopic plankton, have been steadily declining in Arctic waters. Because plankton form the foundation of the Arctic food chain, the loss of this key nutrient could affect everything from fish and seabirds to marine mammals.
The study also suggests the changes may reduce the Arctic Ocean’s ability to absorb carbon from the atmosphere. Plankton play an important role in removing carbon dioxide through photosynthesis, meaning lower plankton productivity could weaken this natural carbon storage system. Two Decades of Arctic Ocean Data Reveal a Shift
While scientists have observed changes in Arctic wildlife populations in recent years, the underlying causes have remained difficult to pinpoint due to limited long-term data on ocean chemistry.
To investigate, researchers from the University of Edinburgh analyzed more than 20 years of measurements collected from the Fram Strait, the primary passage where Arctic waters flow into the Atlantic Ocean.
Their findings showed a clear turning point beginning around 2009. From that period onward, nitrate concentrations in water leaving the Arctic declined consistently. The timing closely matched a dramatic reduction in Arctic sea ice that also accelerated around the same time. How Melting Sea Ice Is Removing Nitrate
The team concluded that widespread sea ice loss exposed vast shallow regions of the Arctic Ocean to sunlight. This increased a natural process known as benthic denitrification, which converts nitrate into nitrogen gas and removes it from seawater.
These shallow continental shelf areas cover nearly half of the Arctic Ocean. As more sunlight reaches these regions, nitrate removal accelerates, leaving less of the nutrient available to support plankton growth.
For many years, scientists expected shrinking sea ice to boost plankton production because greater sunlight exposure would encourage photosynthesis. However, the new findings indicate that nutrient availability is now becoming the limiting factor.
Impacts on the Arctic Food Chain
According to the researchers, the Arctic Ocean appears to be shifting toward conditions that favor smaller plankton species. Because these organisms provide less food for larger animals, the change could reduce the amount of energy moving through the food web.
The result could affect a wide range of Arctic species, with consequences extending beyond the polar region. Scientists say further study is needed to determine how changes in Arctic waters may influence marine ecosystems elsewhere, including the North Atlantic and commercially important fisheries.
Because the nutrient decline is linked to ongoing sea ice loss, researchers believe the Arctic Ocean is unlikely to return to its previous state.
Marta Santos-García, a PhD student in the University of Edinburgh’s School of GeoSciences, who co-led the study, said: “For years, sea-ice loss in the Arctic Ocean was expected to increase phytoplankton growth because more sunlight could reach surface waters. Our findings suggest that this relationship has changed: the Arctic Ocean appears to have shifted from a system mainly limited by light to one increasingly limited by nitrate availability, with far-reaching consequences for marine ecosystems, food chains and the role of the Arctic in the Earth’s climate.”
Professor Raja Ganeshram, of the University of Edinburgh’s School of GeoSciences, who has led the study over the last two decades, said: “The changes we report suggest that the Arctic Ocean ecosystem passed a tipping point around 2009. How this change cascades through the food chain needs to closely monitored as this has profound implications for us, including on commercial fishing in the North Atlantic Ocean.”
The research also included scientists from the Norwegian Polar Institute, Scottish Association for Marine Science, Technical University of Denmark, and Alfred-Wegener-Institut in Germany.
It's been another cooler than average week for this time of year. At least no frost but close to it. The big thing has been the wind, and the second full moon in May. As per usual the full moon brought clear cool nights.
Spirea in front of the house almost at it's fullest
the smell all these flowers put out is quite noticeable, for most.
The wild phlox has opened up this week.
liloc
Jane philips bearded iris
Korean honey suckle
The yellow bearded iris have started, I have lots about they will be prime time this week
spring weather
The local farmers have started.
out the office window.
out the office window a different direction
looking south east from the front porch
another variety of spirea
forget me nots still going strong, could be their last week
Photographed in ultraviolet light and rendered in false color, this view reveals the complexities of the clouds that coat Venus.
Credit: JAXA/ISIS/DARTS/Damia Bouic
Models suggest that impact-ejected material from Earth could reach Venus’ clouds and potentially survive there briefly.
Panspermia is the idea that life, or the ingredients needed for life, can move through space on asteroids, comets, and other objects. If life’s building blocks appear on one planet, a powerful impact could blast material from its surface into space and send it toward another world.
For decades, researchers have discussed whether this kind of exchange might have happened between Earth and Mars (in both directions). More recently, debate over possible microbial life in the thick clouds of Venus has renewed interest in whether material could also move among Venus, Earth, and Mars.
A recent study presented at the 2026 Lunar and Planetary Science Conference (LPSC) examined that possibility in detail. The work was carried out by a team from The Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (JHUAPL) and Sandia National Laboratories. Using the “Venus Life Equation” (VLE), a framework developed by Noam Izenberg et al. in 2021, the researchers modeled whether material launched from Earth could allow life to survive in Venus’ clouds for at least a few days per century.
A framework weighs Venus life
Like the Drake Equation, the VLE estimates the chance of life by separating the question into several factors that are multiplied together. In mathematical form, the VLE is written as follows: ### L = O x R x C
Where L is the likelihood of Extant Life (0 to 1, where 0 is no chance and 1 is certainty), O is origination (the chance life began and established itself on Venus), R is Robustness (the potential for a biosphere to exist and withstand changes), and C is Continuity (The chance that habitable conditions persisted until today). Using this framework, the team first considered how any organic material, regardless of its origin, must survive the journey through space.
Space travel tests survival
Along with the shock and trauma caused by an impact, there’s also the heat generated in the process, as well as the extreme temperatures, radiation, and vacuum of space. However, computer modeling and studies of meteorites recovered on Earth have shown that organic material can survive ejection and interplanetary transfer. Upon arriving at Venus, any organic material will also need to be dispersed in or above the clouds if it is to survive.
Some layers of Venus’ clouds support surprisingly hospitable temperatures and pressures. Researchers have proposed that microbes could survive within those clouds.
Credit: ESA
With this in mind, the team’s computations focused on how fireball meteorites (bolides) would fare in Venus’ atmosphere, taking into account its ablation, explosion, and fragmentation into pieces that can float in the clouds. They used the “pancake model” for this, a popular semi-analytic method that describes a bolide’s fragmentation as it passes through an atmosphere.
Once the bolide explodes in the atmosphere (an “airburst”), aerodynamic drag spreads the fragments horizontally, forming a “pancake” of dispersed material (which the team refers to as “cells”). Earth material could seed clouds
Using the pancake model and prior studies to obtain values for the first two parameters, the team calculated the total number of bolides delivered from Earth or Mars to the clouds of Venus. From this, they found that hundreds of billions of cells may have been transferred from Earth to the clouds of Venus, while hundreds of billions could remain potentially viable. However, the best estimate their model produced was that about 100 cells dispersed in Venus’ clouds per Earth year, while 20 billion cells could have been transferred from Earth over the past 1 billion years.
While the team acknowledges that their model doesn’t capture every detail of bolide-atmosphere interactions, and that each parameter of the VLE is subject to profound uncertainties (just like the Drake Equation), it does demonstrate that panspermia between Earth and Venus is possible. Ergo, if a future astrobiology mission finds life in the clouds of Venus, there is a chance that it originated from Earth.
1925 portrait of Maria Branyas. Credit: Wikimedia Commons
A remarkable new study of the world’s oldest verified living person reveals a surprising picture of extreme longevity.
Maria Branyas lived through two world wars, the 1918 flu pandemic, the Spanish Civil War, and COVID-19. When she died in 2024 at age 117 years and 168 days, she was the oldest verified living person in the world. Now, scientists have examined her biology in unusual detail, and the results suggest that extreme aging and poor health are not always inseparable.
A team led by Dr. Manel Esteller, head of the Cancer Epigenetics Group at the Josep Carreras Leukemia Research Institute, has published the final peer-reviewed results from what researchers describe as the most comprehensive study ever performed on a supercentenarian. Using minimally invasive samples from blood, saliva, urine, and stool, the team analyzed Branyas’s genome, proteome, epigenome, metabolome, transcriptome, and microbiome.
The study, published in Cell Reports Medicine, was coordinated by Esteller and led by Eloy Santos. Its key finding is not that Branyas avoided aging. Instead, her biology showed two opposing patterns at once. As Esteller put it, she displayed a “fascinating duality: the simultaneous presence of signals of extreme aging and of healthy longevity.” Clear Signs of Advanced Aging
The signs of advanced age were unmistakable. Branyas had very short telomeres (the protective caps at the ends of chromosomes), an immune system with pro-inflammatory features, an aged population of B lymphocytes, and clonal hematopoiesis, an age-related condition in which blood stem cells acquire mutations. These changes are often associated with higher risks of leukemia, myelodysplastic syndromes, cardiovascular disease, and other serious conditions.
Maria Branyas, the longest-lived person ever recorded, together with Dr Manel Esteller, from the Josep Carreras Leukaemia Research Institute
Credit: Josep Carreras Leukaemia Research Institute
Yet Branyas did not develop cancer, dementia, or major cardiovascular disease. That contrast may be the study’s most important message: aging and disease can sometimes be separated at the molecular level. Protective Biological Features
Alongside the markers of aging, Branyas exhibited several traits associated with resilience and healthy longevity.
The researchers found rare genetic variants linked to immune fitness, brain health, heart protection, and mitochondrial function. Her blood profile suggested unusually efficient lipid metabolism, with very low VLDL cholesterol and triglycerides and high HDL cholesterol, often called “good” cholesterol. She also had exceptionally low inflammation, a key factor because chronic inflammation is widely viewed as a driver of age-related disease.
Branyas’s gut microbiome also stood out.
Branyas had high levels of beneficial Bifidobacterium, bacteria associated with anti-inflammatory effects and healthy metabolism. This is notable because these bacteria usually decline with age, although they have also been found at higher levels in some centenarians and supercentenarians. The researchers noted that Branyas ate about three yogurts per day during the last 20 years of her life, a habit that may have helped support her gut microbiome, although the study cannot prove cause and effect.
Younger Than Expected at the Molecular Level
Perhaps the most surprising result came from her epigenome, the chemical layer that helps regulate gene activity. Epigenetic clocks use DNA methylation patterns to estimate biological age, which can differ from chronological age. Across multiple tissues and several clock methods, Branyas’s biological age appeared younger than her actual age. One analysis found a gap of more than 23 years.
As the authors write, the findings suggest that one reason she reached such an extreme age was that her cells “felt” or “behaved” as younger cells.
Youthful and age-related traits identified in Maria Branyas. Credit: Santos-Pujol et al.,
Cell Reports, 2025
The researchers caution that one person’s biology cannot provide a universal formula for living past 110. Extreme longevity likely depends on a rare mix of genetics, lifestyle, environment, and chance.
Still, Branyas provides an unusually clear example of a body that carried the marks of extreme aging while avoiding many of aging’s most damaging consequences. The authors conclude: “These findings provide a fresh look at human aging biology, suggesting biomarkers for healthy aging, and potential strategies to increase life expectancy.”
Researchers have identified a previously overlooked structure underlying human language, revealing patterns that extend beyond traditional measures of emotion.
Credit: Shutterstock
A new study challenges the widely accepted idea that word meanings are organized around emotion. After analyzing billions of words, scientists found that language may be shaped by something more basic: the need for safety.
Researchers at the University of Vermont have found a new way to understand language, challenging a major assumption in psychology, linguistics, and artificial intelligence that has guided research for more than 70 years.
Their study, published in Science Advances, presents “ousiometrics,” a quantitative approach to studying essential meaning. The work suggests that language is not organized mainly around emotion, but around a deeper pattern shaped by power, danger, and order.
The central finding is striking: across language, humans consistently lean toward safety.
A Hidden Bias in Language
For decades, many researchers have described meaning through three emotional dimensions: valence (positive vs. negative), arousal (excited vs. calm), and dominance (controlling vs. submissive), a model known as the VAD framework. The approach grew from influential work in the 1950s by Charles Osgood and others, and it has been widely used in psychology, linguistics, and artificial intelligence systems that analyze sentiment.
The new analysis, based on billions of uses of more than 20,000 words across varied real-world texts, shows that this long-used framework has major weaknesses. With support from the US National Science Foundation, Google, MassMutual, and other funders, the researchers used modern computational methods to identify a different set of basic meaning dimensions. They found that the VAD dimensions are not truly independent and can hide a more fundamental structure in language.
The researchers argue that meaning is better captured by three independent dimensions: power (weak vs. powerful), danger (safe vs. dangerous), and structure (ordered vs. chaotic).
University of Vermont researchers developed an “ousiometer,” a tool for measuring meaning in large texts, and identified three key dimensions of meaning: power, danger, and structure. Using Les Misérables as an example, they showed how a story’s language shifts across these dimensions over time, demonstrating the tool’s ability to map meaning in large-scale texts.
Credit: University of Vermont
This matters now because language technologies are increasingly shaping how people communicate, from large language models to automated content moderation. Understanding the structure of meaning has become more urgent. The new framework explains more than 90% of the variation in meaning, compared with about 72% for the traditional VAD model.
When the researchers studied word use across books, news, social media, and spoken language, one pattern appeared again and again. Language strongly favors words linked with safety over words linked with danger.
This safety bias offers a new interpretation of the Pollyanna principle, a long-known idea in linguistics that language tends to skew positive. The new work suggests that the pattern is not simply about positive emotion. Instead, it reflects a deeper bias toward safety. “The Pollyanna principle’s positivity bias,” the study concludes, “is, in fact, a one-dimensional projection of an underlying safety bias.”
“This is a big observation that comes out of this work,” said Peter Dodds, director of the UVM’s Complex Systems Institute and senior author of the study. “Expressions of safety are crucial to all language.”
Beyond Positivity: Language as a Survival System
The findings carry broad implications. If language is tilted toward safety, then communication may have been shaped by evolutionary pressures connected to survival. Words do more than express emotions. They help people judge risk, identify threats, and coordinate behavior when the world is uncertain.
This view helps explain why people so often communicate whether something feels safe or dangerous. Across cultures and situations, humans regularly signal the risk level of places, actions, people, and events. The study suggests that this safety dimension is not secondary to emotion. It may be one of the foundations of meaning.
From this perspective, positivity in language is not only about happiness, approval, or optimism. It can also signal predictability and safety in a shared environment. Julia Zimmerman, a postdoctoral researcher in UVM’s Computational Story Lab and study coauthor, says the framework points to a basic feature of human experience. “Power, danger, and structure,” she said, “are relevant to every person that’s ever lived.”
Linguists have also long noted that language favors expressions of goodness and low aggression. “We now understand,” the team writes, that these are “shadows of an underlying linguistic safety bias.” Rethinking Meaning Across Disciplines
The results challenge assumptions in several fields.
For artificial intelligence, the implications are direct. Many natural language processing systems depend on sentiment analysis shaped by frameworks similar to VAD. If those models do not capture the deeper structure of meaning, AI systems may be misreading human language in systematic ways. Adding power, danger, and structure to these systems could make them more accurate and easier to interpret, especially in tasks involving risk, trust, and decisions.
For linguistics, the study changes how researchers might think about the basic organization of meaning. Instead of treating emotional tone as the main structure behind words, the work points to survival-related distinctions, including what is powerful, what is dangerous, and what is orderly.
For psychology, the findings raise questions about decades of research built around the VAD model. If the core dimensions of meaning are different from what many researchers assumed, then some interpretations of emotion, perception, and behavior may need to be reconsidered.
For neurobiology, the results connect with what is already known about the brain’s strong sensitivity to threat and safety. A safety bias in language may reflect biological priorities in symbolic communication, helping link neural processes with the way humans use words.
A New Scientific Framework: Ousiometrics
To identify these patterns, the researchers built new tools for measuring meaning at large scale. One key tool is the “ousiometer,” an instrument designed to quickly measure the essential meaning of large bodies of text and produce an average meaning score. (The word “ouisa” comes from Ancient Greek and is a root for the English word “essence.”) Building on the team’s earlier “hedonometer” (a happiness meter), the new tool can detect broad meaning patterns in texts ranging from Jane Austen novels and Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories to the New York Times, Wikipedia, talk radio transcripts, and Twitter.
One example in the study follows the “ousiometric trajectory” of an English translation of Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables. Like a multicolored protein, the book’s tangled path winds its way over a grid defined by four opposing pairs: dangerous and safe, weak and powerful, gentle and aggressive, and bad and good. This approach condenses the essential meaning of different sections of the novel as the story unfolds.
The study also makes an important distinction between words as categories, known as “types,” and words as they are actually used, known as “tokens.” (For example, as a category, “apple” is a type, and every time the word “apple” is used in a sentence is a token.) Earlier work often treated words as if they mattered equally, no matter how often they appeared.
By accounting for frequency of use, the 10 scientist team, led by Peter Dodds and Chris Danforth, professors in UVM’s College of Engineering and Mathematical Sciences, along with colleagues from the Santa Fe Institute, the Complexity Science Hub in Austria, Howard Hughes Medical Center, University of California, Berkeley, University of Adelaide, and MassMutual Data Science, was able to uncover patterns that appear only in real language use, including the safety bias.
Why This Matters Now
If language consistently leans toward safety, the finding may affect how researchers understand the spread of information, the building of narratives, and the way people interpret the world. It could matter for political discourse, mental health communication, and the design of AI systems that respond to human language.
More broadly, the study suggests a shift in how meaning should be understood. Meaning is not only a matter of emotion or sentiment. It is also rooted in the need to navigate risks, relationships, and social order. By revealing a deeper geometry of meaning, the team offers a new way to see language, not only as a system of symbols, but as a record of what humans need to survive in a social and dangerous world.
A composite, false-coloured image of the human vocal tract showing the lip and tongue position during the production of different vowels.
Credit: David Ostry
Scientists have discovered that the brain’s sensory systems play a much larger role in speech learning than previously believed.
New research suggests that learning to speak a new language, or recovering speech after injury, relies more heavily on the brain’s sensory systems than on regions responsible for controlling movement. The findings, from researchers at McGill University and the Yale School of Medicine, could influence future theories of speech learning and help improve speech recognition and brain-speech technologies.
Scientists have long believed that learning and remembering the movements involved in speaking depended mainly on motor regions of the brain that control the face and mouth. The new study challenges that view, pointing instead to the importance of auditory and somatosensory regions that process sound and physical sensation.
“Sensorimotor neuroscience has traditionally focused on frontal motor areas as the principal drivers of movement. This study changes that understanding by showing that human speech learning is extensively sensory in nature,” said David Ostry, Professor of Psychology at McGill University.
The findings may also guide the development of technologies designed to restore speech after conditions such as stroke by incorporating sensory processing to improve performance and usability.
Retention tested through brain stimulation
To investigate how sensory brain regions contribute to learning and retaining speech movements, researchers altered participants’ speech in real time and played the modified sounds back through headphones. This forced participants to adapt their speech patterns, triggering speech motor learning.
The team then used transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), a noninvasive brain stimulation method, to temporarily disrupt activity in three areas linked to speech: the auditory cortex, the somatosensory cortex, and the motor cortex. Researchers tested participants again 24 hours later to measure retention.
The scientists predicted that interfering with a brain region essential for speech learning would weaken retention, while disrupting a less important region would have little effect.
The results showed that disrupting either the auditory or somatosensory cortex significantly reduced participants’ ability to retain newly learned speech movements. Disrupting the motor cortex, however, had no measurable effect.
“Our study challenges the assumption that new speech memories are solely reliant on changes in motor areas of the brain. Instead, it underscores the importance of changes in auditory and somatosensory brain areas in shaping how we learn to speak,” said study co-author Nishant Rao, Associate Research Scientist at Yale University.
The role of brain plasticity
The research is part of a larger effort to understand how plasticity in the brain’s sensory systems supports movement learning and memory. It builds on earlier studies of upper limb movement showing that disrupting the sensory cortex can interfere with learning and retaining new motions.
Future studies will focus on identifying the brain circuits involved in learning and testing sensory-based therapies for movement disorders, especially stroke rehabilitation.
As effective as fasting can be for weight loss, it's often thought that depriving the body of sustenance might have a negative impact on brainpower.
But is an impact on cognitive performance really an inevitable part of the fasting experience?
According to a huge, recently published review, it's not always the case.
Based on an analysis of 63 scientific articles representing 71 independent studies, and covering a total of 3,484 participants, the review found that there was no meaningful difference in cognitive performance between people who were fasting and people who were having regular meals.
It's a comprehensive counter to the idea that moderate, short-term restrictions on eating will deplete mental reserves in healthy people, an idea found everywhere from snack adverts ("you're not you when you're hungry") to the mantra that breakfast is the most important meal of the day.
On average, the data from the studies (each represented by a blue dot) showed similar test scores between people fasting and not fasting – a straight line along 0 would be identical scores. Positive values indicate higher performance by satiated participants, relative to fasted participants, and negative values imply higher performance of fasted participants.
(Bamberg & Moreau, Psychol. Bull., 2026)
The researchers behind the analysis – psychologist Christoph Bamberg from Paris Lodron University in Austria, and cognitive neuroscientist David Moreau from the University of Auckland in New Zealand – don't want people who could benefit from fasting to be put off by worrying that it'll lead to foggy thinking.
"For most healthy adults, the findings offer reassurance," Moreau explained in a commentary for The Conversation.
"You can explore intermittent fasting or other fasting protocols without worrying that your mental sharpness will vanish."
To dig through all of this data, the researchers used a Bayesian statistics approach, a way of coming up with a probability distribution rather than a black-and-white, yes-or-no answer.
In this case, they were investigating whether or not fasting affected cognitive performance. The approach is particularly useful in weighing up lots of different statistical sources.
Cognitive skills assessed in the studies included memory recall, decision-making, and response speed and accuracy. When these assessments were taken as a whole, short-term fasting (with a median duration of 12 hours) didn't significantly change the scoring.
There were some nuances though.
Fasting might not impact your cognitive performance after all.
(Kateryna Kon/Science Photo Library/Getty Images)
The researchers found modest cognitive performance reductions in fasting intervals over 12 hours, and "noticeable declines" in children and teenagers (though kids only made up a small portion of the participants).
That suggests that young and developing brains might be more at risk from going without food for extended periods, and that for kids and teens, three regular meals a day matters a lot.
Interestingly, food-related tasks testing cognitive performance are where impacts showed up the most. It's possible that very specific brain circuits do start to flag during fasting, though further studies will be required to know for sure.
"Performance deficits were often evident only in tasks involving food-related stimuli, such as looking at pictures of food or processing food-related words," Moreau said.
"In contrast, performance on tasks using neutral content was largely unaffected."
"Hunger might selectively divert cognitive resources or cause distraction only in food-relevant contexts, but general cognitive functioning remains largely stable."
The researchers also found that individuals who were fasting tended to do worse in cognitive tests when they were carried out later in the day – perhaps hinting that going without food acts as a sort of amplifier to the natural dips in concentration that can come with our built-in circadian rhythms.
As well as helping some people to manage their weight, fasting has also been associated with other health benefits in scientific studies, including improvements in cardiovascular health and reductions in inflammation levels.
Scientists think that fasting does cause some significant changes in the way the body operates, including the way it switches from tapping energy stores made up of glycogen to using body fat more generally – specifically in the form of packets called ketone bodies.
With all of that in mind, Moreau concludes that "fasting is best seen as a personal tool rather than a universal prescription".
There's no one-size-fits-all approach, and fasting is best done in consultation with a medical professional.
"The primary takeaway is a message of reassurance: Cognitive performance remains stable during short-term fasting, suggesting that most healthy adults need not worry about temporary fasting affecting their mental sharpness or ability to perform daily tasks," Moreau said.
Mosquito repellents are key to protect ourselves from mosquito bites and the pathogens they might carry. The most widely used active ingredient in insect repellents is N,N-diethyl-meta-toluamide, commonly known as DEET.
Highly effective, long-lasting (approximately five hours) and cheap to make, DEET is a gold-standard insect repellent.
But even though it was developed more than 80 years ago, there are important gaps in our understanding of how DEET actually works.
A new paper in the Journal of Experimental Biology led by Claudio Lazzari from the University of Tours, France, now shows mosquitoes can be conditioned to be attracted to DEET.
This provides an important piece of the puzzle in our understanding of how DEET works, and hints that this important mozzie repellent could have a vulnerability.
A vital tool that's not fully understood
Insect repellents are a major method of protection against mosquito-borne diseases including malaria, dengue, chikungunya, Ross River virus, Japanese encephalitis virus and more.
Many of these diseases are expanding on a global scale due to travel, urbanisation and climate change.
Female mosquitoes transmit parasites and viruses when they feed on vertebrate blood, which they need to provide proteins for egg development.
To find their next blood meal, mosquitoes are strongly attracted to odours and physical cues emitted by warm-blooded "hosts", including humans.
These include carbon dioxide we exhale, lactic acid in our sweat, and a complex combination of other chemicals that varies between people.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=38gVZgE39K8&t=51s
Mosquitoes detect all these with sensory organs located in their antennae, proboscis (the pointy mouth part they use to suck blood) and the maxillary palps that flank it.
DEET has been in widespread commercial use since the 1950s, but there's a lot of scientific debate over how exactly it works as a mozzie repellent. Is it blocking the odour of the host, is it toxic to the mosquito, or something else?
In 2008, groundbreaking research showed DEET blocks the response of sensory neurons to host odours in mosquitoes and vinegar flies. This means DEET is likely "confusing" the mosquito rather than repelling it.
Applying insect repellent is one way to protect against mosquito-borne diseases.
(Jaromir/Moment/Getty Images)
A couple of years later, scientists found a small portion of mosquitoes exposed to DEET are insensitive to it, and it's a heritable trait.
This means mosquitoes do have a physiological response to DEET. But there are also signs some of the mozzie reactions are behavioural.
In one study, mosquitoes exposed to DEET were less sensitive to it if exposed again within three hours. This hints they can temporarily get used to the chemical.
What did the new study find?
The new study shows it's possible to condition mosquitoes to bite more if they're repeatedly exposed to DEET during a blood meal.
Not only does this tell us more about how it repels mosquitoes, but it raises the prospect mosquitoes may actually be attracted towards DEET in some cases.
First, the researchers developed a behavioural test. They kept mosquitoes in tiny cages and moved a food target (a warm bag of blood) towards them, recording proboscis movements when they sensed the target. This was the "biting attempt response".
To test things further, the team ran a classical conditioning experiment. Mosquitoes were run through one of five "training programs" exposing them to various combinations of an unconditioned stimulus (heat), a conditioned stimulus (short exposure to DEET in a plume of air) and a reward (a short opportunity to feed on blood).
Here's where it gets surprising. The mosquitoes whose training program included a squirt of DEET while they were already feeding on blood, afterwards had a significantly higher biting response when exposed to DEET again.
Mosquitoes follow chemical cues to find their next blood meal. (Rapha Wilde/Unsplash)
If the mosquitoes were exposed to DEET before being offered the blood bag, none of them tried to bite it.
Then, one of the researchers boldly offered her hands up for testing.
One of the hands was treated with DEET. About 50% of the mosquitoes who went through the DEET-blood meal training program tried to bite the hand coated in DEET.
By contrast, 100% of untrained mozzies avoided the hand covered in DEET and went for the clean one instead.
What does all this mean?
It's well established mosquitoes can learn and retain information. What they learn about hosts and their environment can in turn have an impact on disease transmission.
This study indicates DEET doesn't just affect mosquitoes physiologically. There's a cognitive response as well, which could be an important part of how it works.
The authors raise the possibility – if the concentration of DEET is not high enough to repel mosquitoes but they still sense it during a blood meal, would these mosquitoes then be more likely to bite people who smell of DEET?
It's important to note the study happened in highly controlled lab conditions, and the training program the mozzies underwent may not reflect everyday scenarios.
Future studies should try and come up with test conditions that better represent real-world situations to see if these results hold up.
At a time when mosquito-borne diseases are on the rise, DEET still provides highly effective protection.
What this study contributes is an improved understanding of how DEET works – and how we might improve insect repellents in the future.
Leon Hugo, Adjunct Associate Professor, Mosquito Control Laboratory, QIMR Berghofer Medical Research Institute.
A blue Moon isn't actually blue, but it is fun to experience.
(gchapel/iStock/Getty Images Plus)
Who needs trainspotting when there are so many different moods of the full Moon to see?
And the full Moon that will grace Earth's skies on May 30 and 31 is one you will not want to miss.
It's referred to as a blue micromoon, and it results from a rare concatenation of circumstances that won't recur until 2053, depending on how you define a micromoon.
Not only is it a blue Moon – the rare appearance of a second full Moon in a calendar month, which occurs once every few years or so – it's also going to be near apogee, the farthest point in the Moon's slightly elliptical orbit with Earth.
The Flower Moon is the Farmer's Almanac name given to the full Moon that shines in May. These designations don't usually apply to a blue Moon, but there's no reason you can't secretly attribute it some Flower Moon vibes.
Two images of the Moon, with a micromoon overlaying a supermoon, demonstrating the apparent size difference between the two.
(NASA)
At a distance of 406,135 kilometers (252,360 miles), this moon will be the most distant full micromoon of the three taking place in 2026 – which means it will be the smallest full Moon we see this year, or indeed until 2028.
The next blue micromoon won't be seen until at least July 2053.
Micromoons and their more attention-hogging counterparts, supermoons, are a natural aspect of the slightly oval shape of the Moon's orbit. Because it's not a perfect circle, there's a point in each orbit at which it is closest to Earth, known as perigee, and a point at which it is farthest, known as apogee.
The Moon's average distance from Earth is about 384,400 kilometers, but perigee and apogee distances vary because the Moon's orbital path wobbles about a bit, mostly as a result of gravitational tugging from the Sun and the long-term changing relationship between Earth and Moon.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=arvOgLpfucE&t=1s
In addition, the lunar orbit precesses – the oval doesn't follow the exact same path every time. This means the timing of the perigees and apogees is slightly out of sync with the lunar cycle, so we only see two or three full micromoons and three or four full supermoons a year.
Just to make it even trickier, there is no official definition for a supermoon or a micromoon, and whether or not we get a full one depends on whose metrics you apply.
Time and Date sets a strict micromoon cutoff at 405,000 kilometers from Earth's center, but astrophysicist and eclipse specialist Fred Espenak of Astropixels defines it as "within 90 percent of its greatest distance to Earth in a given orbit" – a more forgiving definition that accounts for changing apogee and perigee distances.
A blue Moon is much more standardized.
It's not a Moon that literally appears to be the color blue, but a phenomenon that occurs because the lunar month, also known as the synodic month, and the calendar month are slightly out of sync. A synodic month is 29.53 days. A calendar month is usually 30 or 31 days.
This means that the full Moon's position in the calendar month shifts slightly from each month to the next – and, once every two or three years, it falls early enough in the month that the next full Moon is at the end of the same month.
Technically, a full Moon is what is known as a syzygy, a fun Scrabble word that refers to the straight-line alignment of three or more astronomical bodies – in this case, Earth, the Moon, and the Sun.
Because of this alignment, the full Moon will be on the opposite side of the sky from the Sun, so you can look for the blue Flower micromoon at the eastern horizon opposite sunset, wherever you are in the world.
Looking at the Moon is something fun you can do, for free. You can even make a game of it. This time, you get to tick off the double whammy of a blue micromoon.
