Interstellar Comet, ‘Trojan Horse’ Cancer Cure & AI’s Hidden Carbon Cost

Interstellar Comet, ‘Trojan Horse’ Cancer Cure & AI’s Hidden Carbon Cost – Science Highlights (Aug 18–19, 2025)

by Marcin Frąckiewicz
in Health, Science, Technology
on 19 August 2025

Space & Astronomy

Hubble Snaps Rare Interstellar Comet: NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope captured the sharpest-ever view of interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS, a cosmic visitor racing through our solar system at ~130,000 mph scitechdaily.com. The teardrop-shaped dust cocoon around its icy nucleus was revealed as the comet barrels along a hyperbolic path after drifting for eons in interstellar space scitechdaily.com. “This latest interstellar tourist is one of a previously undetected population… We’ve crossed a threshold,” said UCLA astronomer David Jewitt, noting how new sky surveys enable such discoveries scitechdaily.com.
Cosmic ‘Eye of Sauron’ Solves Neutrino Mystery: After 15 years of observations, astronomers zoomed in on the blazar PKS 1424+240, whose plasma jet pointed at Earth resembles the fiery “Eye of Sauron.” The Very Long Baseline Array image unveiled nearly perfect toroidal magnetic rings threading the jet – a coiled-spring structure that accelerates particles to extreme energies scitechdaily.com. This discovery finally explains how the blazar, despite its apparently slow jet, spews high-energy neutrinos and gamma rays toward Earth scitechdaily.com scitechdaily.com. “We have never seen anything quite like it — a near-perfect toroidal magnetic field with a jet pointing straight at us,” said Yuri Kovalev, lead author of the study scitechdaily.com, hailing the result as a milestone in multimessenger astronomy.
SpaceX Marks 100th Falcon 9 Launch of 2025: SpaceX’s workhorse rocket hit a major century mark on Aug. 18 with its 100th Falcon 9 flight of the year, lofting 24 new Starlink internet satellites from California space.com. This brings the Starlink constellation to over 8,100 active satellites in orbit, extending global broadband coverage space.com. The mission’s Falcon 9 booster (on its 9th flight) stuck another landing at sea, exemplifying SpaceX’s rapid launch cadence and reuse ethos. The company has now flown 103 missions in 2025 (including Starship tests), far outpacing any competitor space.com.

Health & Medicine

Parkinson’s Breakthrough via Mount Everest Air: In a striking mice experiment, researchers found that low-oxygen environments – akin to breathing at Mt. Everest base camp – prevented and even reversed Parkinson’s symptoms scitechdaily.com. Mice placed in air with only 11% oxygen (vs 21% normal) showed no neuron loss or movement problems despite toxic protein buildup, whereas normal-air mice developed severe disease scitechdaily.com scitechdaily.com. “The fact that we actually saw some reversal of neurological damage is really exciting,” said co-senior author Vamsi Mootha of Broad Institute, noting it suggests a window where sick neurons are “dysfunctional but not yet dead” and can be restored if treated early scitechdaily.com. The team cautions people not to self-induce hypoxia, but hopes to develop drugs that mimic this protective low-oxygen effect scitechdaily.com scitechdaily.com.
Trojan Horse Bacteria Ferry Viruses to Tumors: Bioengineers have unveiled an ingenious cancer therapy that hitches viruses inside bacteria to infect tumors from within. In a Columbia University study, a tumor-seeking Salmonella bacterium was loaded with an oncolytic (cancer-killing) RNA virus and sent into solid tumors discovermagazine.com discovermagazine.com. The bacteria act as Trojan horse couriers: upon reaching the tumor, they burst and release the virus to attack cancer cells – all while evading the host immune system’s virus defenses discovermagazine.com. “We programmed the bacteria to act as a Trojan horse by shuttling the viral RNA into tumors and then lyse themselves directly inside cancer cells to release the viral genome,” explained co-author Zakary Singer discovermagazine.com. The method, demonstrated in mice, is called CAPSID and built with safety switches so the virus replicates only alongside the bacteria discovermagazine.com discovermagazine.com. Scientists are already moving this bacteria-virus combo toward clinical trials, calling it a major step toward multi-organism therapies that could outsmart cancer’s defenses discovermagazine.com discovermagazine.com.
No-Cut LASIK? Electrified Vision Correction in Minutes: Scientists are developing a surgery-free alternative to LASIK that reshapes the cornea using gentle electric pulses instead of lasers sciencedaily.com. In new animal tests, a team from Occidental College and UC Irvine used a platinum “contact lens” electrode to mold the curvature of rabbit corneas in about one minute – correcting nearsightedness without any incision sciencedaily.com sciencedaily.com. The process, called electromechanical reshaping (EMR), briefly softens the cornea’s collagen by altering pH, then “locks” it into a new shape once normal pH is restored sciencedaily.com sciencedaily.com. Early results showed the treated eyes achieved the intended focus power and the corneal cells remained viable sciencedaily.com. While still in very early stages (and not yet tested on live animals), the approach could one day offer a safer, far cheaper, and even potentially reversible vision correction procedure. “There’s a long road between what we’ve done and the clinic,” lead researcher Michael Hill noted, “but if we get there, this technique is widely applicable, vastly cheaper and potentially even reversible” sciencedaily.com.

Biology & Ecology

Herbivores Aren’t Just “Grass Eaters” After All: A new DNA study of Yellowstone’s large herbivores reveals that these animals’ diets are far more varied and overlapping than traditional labels suggest scitechdaily.com scitechdaily.com. Researchers tracked species like bison, elk, pronghorn, deer, and bighorn sheep over seasons and found individuals often switch between “grazing” on grasses and “browsing” shrubs/trees depending on food availability scitechdaily.com scitechdaily.com. Classic categories (grazer vs. browser) oversimplify reality – one bison might munch wildflowers while another eats evergreens in winter. Maintaining plant diversity, therefore, is critical to sustaining diverse wildlife: the study showed many herbivores converge on the same nutritious plants seasonally scitechdaily.com scitechdaily.com. “This challenges biologists to consider whether we’re finding patterns that reinforce our perceptions of what animals should eat rather than what they are actually doing,” said ecologist Tyler Kartzinel scitechdaily.com. He noted dietary flexibility helps so many large mammals coexist, and it’s “a compelling case that in Yellowstone, we’re putting animals into boxes” unnecessarily scitechdaily.com scitechdaily.com. The takeaway: “Dietary diversity is normal,” even within a species, so conservation should “tell the story of the browsing bison” and protect a rich variety of plants to support these adaptable eaters scitechdaily.com scitechdaily.com.

Physics

Gold Won’t Melt Even at 19,000 K – Breaking a 40-Year Theory: An experiment at SLAC’s X-ray laser facility superheated a tiny gold sample to 19,000 K (over 33,000°F), more than 14 times gold’s normal melting point – yet the gold stayed solid sciencedaily.com sciencedaily.com. By blasting the foil with an ultrafast laser and probing it with X-rays, scientists directly measured atomic temperatures in this extreme state for the first time sciencedaily.com sciencedaily.com. The rapid heating (in trillionths of a second) prevented the gold lattice from disintegrating, thus defying the expected “entropy catastrophe” that should cause an overheated solid to explosively melt sciencedaily.com. This surprising result overturns a longstanding theory that there’s a strict speed/temperature limit to melting – a finding that could improve our understanding of planetary cores and fusion plasmas. “We were surprised to find a much higher temperature in these superheated solids than we initially expected, which disproves a long-standing theory from the 1980s,” said physicist Tom White sciencedaily.com. In science, that’s often how breakthroughs happen: “This wasn’t our original goal, but that’s what science is about – discovering new things you didn’t know existed” sciencedaily.com sciencedaily.com.
Quantum Levitation Achieved at Room Temperature: In a world-first, ETH Zurich researchers observed quantum zero-point motion in a object at room temperature – without any cryogenic cooling sciencedaily.com sciencedaily.com. They levitated a tiny tower of three nanoscale glass spheres using laser optical tweezers and damped 92% of its thermal vibrations, until almost nothing but quantum fluctuations remained sciencedaily.com sciencedaily.com. Achieving such “quantum ground state” purity (92%) normally requires freezing systems near absolute zero, but this experiment kept the particle cluster stably hovering and near-motionless in ordinary conditions sciencedaily.com sciencedaily.com. “Beforehand, we didn’t expect to achieve such a high level of quantum purity,” said first-author Lorenzo Dania, as classical noise was virtually eliminated sciencedaily.com sciencedaily.com. The advance opens the door to quantum sensors and devices that work at ambient temperatures. By controlling a relatively large quantum object (hundreds of millions of atoms) in this way, future applications from ultra-precise force detectors to tests of gravity’s effect on quantum systems become possible – without the need for costly refrigeration sciencedaily.com sciencedaily.com.

Chemistry

Century-Old Photochemistry Rule Overturned: Chemists have discovered that a molecule’s microenvironment can drastically change how it reacts to light – challenging a fundamental century-old assumption in photochemistry scitechdaily.com scitechdaily.com. Classic theory held that the wavelength a molecule absorbs most strongly is the one that best drives its photo-reactions. But new experiments led by Queensland University of Technology show that the surroundings of a molecule (solvent, nearby molecules, etc.) can alter excited-state behavior, making lower-energy light more effective in some cases scitechdaily.com scitechdaily.com. The team observed a “red-edge effect” where molecules became more reactive under red-shifted light if their local environment extended the lifetime of the excited state scitechdaily.com scitechdaily.com. This means chemists could tune reactions not just by light wavelength, but by engineering the molecular environment. “The implications are enormous,” said QUT’s Prof. Christopher Barner-Kowollik – by controlling microenvironments, “we can tune how light affects molecules, allowing for more precision in photochemical drug delivery, polymer engineering, and light harvesting” scitechdaily.com. From medicine to manufacturing, this insight could lead to next-gen light-driven technologies that operate with greater finesse than ever before.

Climate Science

Greenland Glacial Melt Fuels Ocean Blooms: As Greenland’s ice sheet melts, it may inadvertently be fertilizing the ocean. A NASA-backed study finds that summer meltwater runoff from Greenland’s Jakobshavn Glacier turbocharges phytoplankton growth in coastal waters by dredging up deep nutrients sciencedaily.com sciencedaily.com. Massive volumes of cold freshwater (over 300,000 gallons per second at peak) plunge into the fjords, and the buoyant plumes drag up nitrate, iron, and other nutrients from the depths to the sunlit surface sciencedaily.com sciencedaily.com. Simulation of one hotspot showed this nutrient uplift could boost summertime plankton blooms by 15–40% in that region sciencedaily.com. Since phytoplankton are the base of the Arctic food web (feeding fish and whales) and also take up CO₂, the findings add a surprising twist to climate impacts. It suggests ice loss might temporarily spur productivity in some Arctic waters sciencedaily.com sciencedaily.com – though the long-term effects on ecosystems and carbon uptake remain complex. The researchers plan to extend their modeling around all of Greenland, noting there are ~250 other coastal glaciers that could similarly influence marine life sciencedaily.com sciencedaily.com. However, any “bump” in carbon absorbed by plankton could be offset by the fact that melt-altered waters hold less dissolved CO₂ sciencedaily.com, highlighting the nuanced trade-offs of climate change’s domino effects.
CRISPR Sheds Light on Methane’s Mysterious Rise: Climate scientists may have pinpointed a hidden factor behind the recent surge in atmospheric methane, thanks to a novel experiment merging microbiology and geochemistry. Researchers at UC Berkeley used CRISPR gene editing to dial down a key enzyme in methanogenic microbes (microbes that produce methane) and discovered that the enzyme’s activity significantly alters the isotopic “fingerprint” of the methane those microbes emit sciencedaily.com sciencedaily.com. Why does this matter? Scientists track methane sources (wetlands, cows, fossil fuels, etc.) partly by the carbon-13 to carbon-12 ratio in the gas. The study found that a microbe’s metabolic state can change that ratio, meaning methane’s isotopic signature isn’t as fixed as assumed – it depends not just on what the microbes eat but how they’re operating in their environment sciencedaily.com sciencedaily.com. This could resolve some of the “extra” methane rise that wasn’t aligning with known sources. “It is well understood that methane levels are rising, but there is a lot of disagreement on the underlying cause,” noted co-author Dipti Nayak. By fusing molecular biology with isotope tracking, “this study…provide[s] better constraints on how the biology of methanogens controls the isotopic composition of methane” sciencedaily.com. In short, the findings may refine climate models by improving source attribution of methane – critical for crafting strategies to rein in this potent greenhouse gas.

Technology & AI

AI-Written Emails Erode Trust, Study Finds: Polished emails drafted by AI might look professional, but they can backfire in workplace relationships. A new survey of 1,100 professionals found that when managers heavily use AI tools (like ChatGPT or Gemini) to write upbeat staff emails, employees often perceive those messages as insincere or lazy, damaging trust scitechdaily.com scitechdaily.com. Light AI help (grammar or wordsmithing) was fine, but high levels of AI assistance crossed a “trust threshold.” In scenarios where a supervisor’s email was largely AI-composed, only about 40–52% of employees found the manager sincere, compared to 83% if minimal AI was used scitechdaily.com scitechdaily.com. “Managers who use AI for routine communication tasks put their trustworthiness at risk when using medium- to high-levels of AI assistance,” warned University of Florida researcher Anthony Coman scitechdaily.com. Employees can often detect the AI’s tone: what reads as efficient to the sender feels impersonal to the recipient. The study suggests managers reserve AI for simple, factual notices – but write personal or motivational messages in their own voice to avoid a robotic vibe scitechdaily.com. In short, authenticity matters: too much ChatGPT in your congrats message might get you an eyeroll instead of appreciation.
The Hidden Carbon Cost of “Smart” AI: Asking a sophisticated AI a single question can emit up to 50× more CO₂ than a simpler model – without necessarily giving a better answer, German researchers revealed scitechdaily.com scitechdaily.com. They compared “reasoning” AI models (which internally generate long, step-by-step solutions) against more concise ones. For the same query, a reasoning-enabled large language model might churn out ~544 “thinking” tokens (internal word fragments) versus ~38 tokens for a straightforward model, translating to orders of magnitude more energy use and carbon emissions scitechdaily.com scitechdaily.com. “We found that reasoning-enabled models produced up to 50 times more CO₂ emissions than concise response models,” said Maximilian Dauner, lead author of the Frontiers in Communication study scitechdaily.com. Paradoxically, all that extra computation didn’t always improve accuracy beyond a certain point scitechdaily.com scitechdaily.com. The most accurate model in the test (Cogito-70B) was a heavy reasoning AI that hit ~85% accuracy but emitted 3× more CO₂ than similar-sized models giving brief answers scitechdaily.com. The research highlights a new accuracy-vs-energy tradeoff in AI design scitechdaily.com. It urges users and developers to be mindful: choosing an efficiently sized model or asking for concise output can dramatically cut the carbon footprint of our AI interactions scitechdaily.com scitechdaily.com. As Dauner noted, if people knew the true CO₂ cost of each query, they might use these AI tools “more selectively and thoughtfully” – reserving the big guns only for tasks that truly need them scitechdaily.com scitechdaily.com.

Environmental Science

Green Hydrogen vs. Wildlife in Chile: Chile’s ambitious plan to build vast wind and solar farms for green hydrogen production is ringing alarm bells for conservationists. In a letter to Science, experts estimated that the proposed wind turbines in southern Chile could kill 1,740–5,220 birds per year, including endangered species – and warned this is likely an underestimate news.mongabay.com. “This obviously concerns us because [the wind farms] are not only in migration routes, but also in critical breeding sites for many species,” said Heraldo Norambuena, an ecologist and lead author of the letter news.mongabay.com news.mongabay.com. Iconic migratory birds like the red knot (which flies 15,000 km from the Arctic to Patagonia each year) and the Magellanic plover could be at risk if wind projects proceed unaltered news.mongabay.com. Norambuena cautions that without careful planning “just a few wind turbines are enough to devastate a population” of a vulnerable species news.mongabay.com. This exemplifies a broader issue: even renewable energy infrastructure isn’t impact-free. In Chile’s arid north, biologists also note that green hydrogen facilities would consume scarce water and disrupt unique desert ecosystems news.mongabay.com news.mongabay.com. The Chilean government, backed by foreign investment, is eager to become a top hydrogen exporter, but scientists urge balancing climate solutions with biodiversity. Unchecked, the push for “clean” energy could carry a steep ecological price – essentially trading one environmental crisis for another, if crucial habitats are sacrificed in the rush to curb carbon emissions news.mongabay.com news.mongabay.com.