Nautilus Magazine

01/10/2026

A scientist studying biological clocks in rats noticed something strange happening at the moment of death—and it pulled her into one of science’s most unsettled questions: what actually happens as life ends.

This story follows how unexpected spikes in brain chemistry and activity near death are forcing researchers to rethink long-held assumptions about consciousness, irreversibility, and where the line between life and death is drawn.

As new tools let scientists observe dying brains more closely, we must ask whether our medical and legal definitions of death still match what biology appears to be doing.

Link in comments.

01/10/2026

“Cadavers are often in a state of reversibility for hours, if not days, postmortem.”

The line between life and death has never been clear—and modern technology blurs it further

01/10/2026

Photographs taken from before terrorists destroyed the site are helping researchers digitally resurrect the ancient city of Palmyra, as it would’ve looked in the second century A.D. to counter its destruction by ISIS.

Photographs taken from before terrorists destroyed the site are helping researchers digitally resurrect it.

01/10/2026

“They are an independent, non-biased way to record fishing activities,” says Carlos Zavalaga, a seabird ecologist at Peru’s Scientific University of the South, who leads a project that uses kitted-out Peruvian bo***es to monitor the country’s anchovy fisheries. “They just go and feed.”

Illegal fishing is too big a problem for humans to handle alone.

01/10/2026

Dolphins, whales, and other beloved marine mammals face myriad harms from human activities. Strains from climate change, pollution, and commercial fishing can prompt health issues, including injuries and disturbed endocrine systems, which can risk a broader population’s survival. Due in large part to people, marine mammal communities are at high risk in nearly half of coastal waters around the globe.

Typically, researchers only notice these issues when significant numbers of animals die at once or when a population has shrunk to such a level that conservation measures can’t meaningfully help. But it’s tricky to monitor marine mammals because they’re usually submerged and on the move. Checking their vital signs like body temperature and breathing rates in the wild often involves hands-on techniques, such as re**al probes and heart tests called electrocardiograms, which can stress animals out, deliver unreliable measurements, and tend to be expensive.

The good news: Drones can offer a non-invasive alternative. By attaching thermal cameras to drones, researchers can check an animal’s temperature and breathing rates, which can both point to illness or injury. Such cameras have previously been tested on both land– and sea-dwelling animals, but few studies have checked whether these measurements match up with ones taken directly.

Seeking to beef up this field of research, a team of scientists based in Australia flew drones with thermal cameras at various heights and measured the temperatures of 14 adult bottlenose dolphins’ blowholes, bodies, and dorsal fins, along with breathing rates—these are tracked by observing changes in temperature as air moves in and out of the blowhole during each breath. To gauge this technique’s accuracy, they compared the camera data with measurements taken near the dolphins with handheld infrared thermometers and directly with a re**al probe.

Over two seasons, the scientists captured more than 30,000 images of the dolphins with a variety of drone heights and angles, along with a mix of shots where the animals’ upper bodies were in and out of the water. They found that a drone height of around 32 feet worked best, for example, and that overall this monitoring method aligned with measurements taken in close range. They reported their results in the Journal of Thermal Biology.

The dolphin discovery does come with some caveats: For instance, these dolphins were under human care at Sea World in Australia. It’s possible that dolphins in the wild will react negatively to drones buzzing above them, as has been found in past studies, but reactions seem to vary depending on the context. In future work, drone monitoring could be tailored to specific populations, the authors noted in the paper.

“As coastal ecosystems face growing pressure, tools such as thermal drones that allow researchers to monitor wildlife efficiently, repeatedly, and non-invasively will become increasingly important,” study authors Charlie White and Guido J. Parra of Flinders University wrote for The Conversation.

01/10/2026

Dolphins, whales, and other beloved marine mammals face myriad harms from human activities. Strains from climate change, pollution, and commercial fishing can prompt health issues, including injuries and disturbed endocrine systems, which can risk a broader population’s survival. Due in large part to people, marine mammal communities are at high risk in nearly half of coastal waters around the globe.

Typically, researchers only notice these issues when significant numbers of animals die at once or when a population has shrunk to such a level that conservation measures can’t meaningfully help. But it’s tricky to monitor marine mammals because they’re usually submerged and on the move. Checking their vital signs like body temperature and breathing rates in the wild often involves hands-on techniques, such as re**al probes and heart tests called electrocardiograms, which can stress animals out, deliver unreliable measurements, and tend to be expensive.

The good news: Drones can offer a non-invasive alternative.

The Trick to Studying Dolphins Without Stressing Them Out: Cameras attached to drones appear to be as reliable as hands-on monitoring methods.

01/10/2026

There are planets out there wandering through space, ejected from their solar systems with no orbit to call home. Known as “rogue planets,” these cosmic nomads are thought to be fairly common, but without an accurate measure of their mass, there’s no way to know if they’re actually planets or something else. Now, according to new research published in Science, astronomers have managed to weigh a rogue planet for the first time.

The only way to detect planets is when they transit in front of a star, bending its light with their gravity in a microlens effect that produces a flicker to those observing it through a telescope. Unfortunately, a transit by itself doesn’t provide enough information to determine the mass of the flicker-causing culprit.

The solution? Adding another telescope stationed far, far away from the first.

An international team of astronomers led by D**g Subo of Peking University in Beijing witnessed a microlensing event from a series of ground-based telescopes that just happened to be captured by the Gaia spacecraft, located more than 930,000 miles from Earth. Comparing data from ground- and space-based telescopes allowed the team to determine the mass of the transiting object, similar to how human depth perception functions using two eyes.

“We are able to use the same principle to extract the distance information of this rogue planet candidate, finding the mass and distance separately,” D**g explained in a statement. “The difference is that the spacing between the eyes of we humans is a few centimeters, whereas Gaia is about 1.5 million kilometers away from Earth.”

The team determined the rogue planet’s mass clocked in at roughly the same as Saturn’s, placing it firmly in the “planet” category. “We know for sure it’s a planet,” D**g said.

Now that this novel method of detecting bona fide rogue planets has borne cosmic fruit, the next step is to use it to find more—and there could be plenty out there. Or as D**g put it, “Our discovery offers further evidence that the galaxy may be teeming with rogue planets that were likely ejected from their original homes.”

01/10/2026

“The galaxy may be teeming with rogue planets”

Rogue Planet Weighed for the First Time: “The galaxy may be teeming with rogue planets.”

01/10/2026

On this day nearly three decades ago, our view of our cosmic neighborhood changed forever...

01/10/2026

On this day nearly three decades ago, our view of our cosmic neighborhood changed forever...

When We Learned Our Universe Is Speeding Up: Violent star blasts pointed to a huge cosmological surprise.

01/10/2026

Getting started is the hardest part, as the old chestnut goes. Even when we really want to do something, we may delay taking that first step, especially if some part of it seems like drudgery. We may circle the task instead, doing everything but it: tidying our sock drawer, gazing out the window, baking a cake. Mustering motivation can feel like a herculean effort.

But why does this happen when we ultimately anticipate pleasure and reward?

To better understand how the impetus to get going on something new works in the brain, a team of scientists from Kyoto University recently turned to macaques, a genus of gregarious monkeys widespread across Asia. Macaques aren’t humans, of course, but they’re genetically close relatives with whom we shared a common ancestor tens of millions of years ago. The team of scientists published their results in the journal Current Biology.

The scientists placed two male macaques in dark soundproof booths facing a screen, where a little dot would appear. If the monkey focused on the dot long enough, he was given the option to choose between a large sip of water and an unpleasant puff of air to the face, or a tiny sip of water, no puff. In the second round, both choices gave the monkey a drink, just of different amounts. Splitting the tasks in this way allowed the researchers to separate the motivation to start from the appeal of the reward.

While the monkeys were completing their tasks, the scientists tracked their eye movements and pupils with an infrared tracker and monitored their brain activity with small electrodes implanted directly in the brain tissue. They zoomed in on a specific circuit involved in motivation in the basal ganglia, which helps to control muscle movement—the pathway from the ventral striatum, which is crucial for reward, decision making, and goal-directed behavior, to the ventral palladium, often involved in addiction and natural drives such as hunger and s*x. Then the scientists selectively muffled this circuit using a designer drug, and repeated the experiment.

In the first part of the experiment, when the task included the possibility that the monkeys would get an annoying puff of air in the face, they were much more likely to bail out early. But when they didn’t bail, they chose bigger rewards and avoided the annoying puffs of air. After the circuit was muffled, motivation to start returned. Their reaction times were also faster, even when they got the punishing blast of air to the face.

The scientists recorded single neurons in separate sessions and found a pattern of push-pull as well. The ventral striatum neurons were more active during the task that included the puff of punishing air, and reacted quickly to that punishment, while the ventral palladium neurons were less responsive when the punishment was included and change was more sluggish.

The scientists propose that unpleasant conditions ramp up activity in the ventral striatum, which inhibits activity in the ventral palladium, making it more difficult to initiate the next attempt. If you suppress this circuit, however, the ventral palladium is less inhibited, so the motivation to get started improves. In other words, the ventral striatum acts as a kind of warning signal that can clamp down the go prompt coming from the ventral palladium.

The reason this check to initiation is in place, they suggest, is that it prevents us from engaging in excessively risky behavior. The study had a few limitations: the sample, for instance, included just two macaques. Also, the designer drug manipulations and the neuron recordings didn’t happen at the same time, so while the mechanism they propose is suggested, it’s not proven.

The authors say the findings could inform our understanding of clinical psychiatric conditions such as depression and schizophrenia, which often come with flattened motivation. People with such conditions may still recognize rewards and value them but have trouble getting started on tasks, especially if these tasks come with stress, discomfort, or other perceived costs. The circuit the scientists identified could become a target for interventions aimed at getting these patients out of a rut and into action.

Motivation, the findings suggest, isn’t always about wanting something badly enough. Wanting and doing aren’t the same thing when significant stress is part of the equation. When the calculation goes awry, even pleasure can fail to move us.

01/10/2026

Sustainability concerns in conventional meat production have motivated a search for ways to cultivate lab-grown meat. Livestock ranching is environmentally destructive, and also deals in whole animals, of which only parts are consumed, not to mention the deplorable conditions animals may face on factory farms. Cultivated meat, where animal flesh is grown free of a living animal, promises meat-lovers a good burger or chicken patty with a lower environmental footprint and reduced risk of zoonotic diseases.

One of the main challenges in producing cultivated meat has been containing costs while creating something biodegradable with a meat-like texture. Lab-made meat is basically animal cells grown on a supportive scaffold to mimic the connective tissues in traditional meat. A new paper describes a pioneering method for making natural cellular scaffolds for cultivated meat.

“While it’s relatively easy to grow animal cells for mass food production, you need to be able to grow them on something cheap, edible, and that preferably provides a structure that resembles real meat,” explained senior author and regenerative medicine professor Richard Day in a statement.

Day and his graduate students at the University College London grew a cellulose structure from repurposed brewer’s spent yeast retrieved from the United Kingdom’s Big Smoke Brewing Company. The yeast was used to culture a bacterium—Komagataeibacter xylinus—that’s known for its cellulose production (cellulose is made by plants, but also certain genera of bacteria). The researchers tested the properties of the bacterial cellulose vis-à-vis their similarity to meat.

The scaffold proved worthy for your next lab-cultured burger. The cellulose grown on brewing waste was similar in its texture, structure, and thermal properties to meat products. Furthermore, when animal fibroblasts (meat cells) were introduced to the scaffold, they attached well and started to proliferate.

“In this study we collected a relatively small amount of raw material from one craft brewery that would otherwise have gone to waste. But huge volumes of brewing waste are generated each year that could have a valuable use,” said first author and Ph.D. student Christian Harrison.

Still, the study authors contend that there is more research to do before the bacterial cellulose becomes the medium of choice for cultivated meat. For example, they plan to explore how different meat cell types, different bacterial yeast cultures, and variance between brewers’ yeast batches will affect the final product.

Hey, we’ll drink to that.