What is happening in Israel

 

What is happening in Israel? In the USA president Trump has said that the USA will be celebrate Sabbath once and Uganda is sending troops to combat the troops of Iran.  

300-year-old experiment could become world's best dark matter detector

 

Image courtesy of ESA/Euclid/Euclid Consortium/NASA, image processing by M. Schirmer (MPIA, Heidelberg)

Joel Kontinen

 Is dark matter real? Some scientist are saying that it is not and others are no so sure of it.  Many scientists believe that the universe was created by Big Bang.

In 1773, British scientist Henry Cavendish set up a simple experiment aimed at uncovering the nature of electromagnetism. It involved measuring the electric potential at the surface of two nested metal shells to discern how charged particles affect each other within them.

Now, Peter Graham at Stanford University in California and his colleagues say that reviving Cavendish’s experiment could help reveal an even more mysterious feature of our cosmos – the particles that make up dark matter. Dark matter makes up more of our universe than ordinary matter.

A centuries-old experiment could help accelerate the search for new and exotic particles, including those that make up dark matter.

Source:

Karmela Padavic-Callaghan 2026 300-year-old experiment could become world's best dark matter detector | New Scientist 4 May 

 

Scientists identify 10,000 'impossible' exoplanet candidates, potentially tripling the number of known alien worlds

 

Image courtesy of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center

Joel Kontinen

How many exoplanets are there? A new survey put the number at over 10,000.  But how many of them harbour life is difficult question, as only the creator can create life-giving minerals and other elements to a planet.

Since the first alien planet was spotted in 1995, the number of exoplanet discoveries has slowly risen in line with new technologies, such as the James Webb Space Telescope, which are better equipped to spot these weird alien worlds. In September 2025, astronomers revealed that the number of confirmed exoplanets had surpassed 6,000, and nearly 300 have been added to the list since then, according to NASA.

But in a new study uploaded April 20 to the preprint server arXiv, researchers report that they've uncovered an astonishing 11,554 exoplanet candidates at once. If all of them can be confirmed, it would bring the total number of exoplanets to nearly 18,000, which is almost triple the current total.

Using a machine learning algorithm, the team analyzed the light curves of precisely 83,717,159 stars captured by NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), a car-sized space telescope that has been circling Earth since 2018. By looking for subtle dips in the stars' brightness, astronomers can tell when a planet has likely passed in front of, or transited, its home star.

This revealed more than 11,000 exoplanet candidates, of which 10,052 had never been seen before. Around 87% of the candidates were spotted transiting twice or more, allowing the researchers to calculate the planets' orbital periods, which range from 0.5 to 27 days, according to StellarCatalog.com.

Using one of the 21-foot (6.5 meters) Magellan telescopes in Chile's Atacama Desert, the team identified a "hot Jupiter" exoplanet, dubbed TIC 183374187 b, that orbits a star around 3,950 light-years from Earth — right where the algorithm predicted.

TESS was specifically designed to detect transiting objects, and it has already discovered 882 confirmed exoplanets — roughly 14% of the current total — so it may seem strange that no one has seen most of the new candidates until now.

Most researchers prioritize analyzing the light curves of the brightest stars in the TESS dataset, because transit events for these stars are much more noticeable and easier to confirm. But there are many more faint stars that end up being captured in the telescope's wide-field photos.

Source:

 Harry Baker 2026 Scientists identify 10,000 'impossible' exoplanet candidates, potentially tripling the number of known alien worlds | Live Science 2 May

 

 

 

 

 

 

Tiny frozen world unexpectedly appears to have an atmosphere

 

Image courtesy of NAOJ/Ko Arimatsu.

Joel Kontinen

A tiny The object, located in the Kuiper Belt of distant frozen bodies at the edge of the solar system, is formally named (612533) 2002 XV93, after the date of its discovery nearly a quarter of a century ago. It has a diameter of less than 500 kilometres.

he object also belongs to a class of objects known as plutinos because they are in the same stable orbit as Pluto, completing three revolutions around the sun for every two made by Neptune.

It seems that this object, though it is small,  has an atmosphere,   

On 10 January 2024, 2002 XV93 passed in front of a distant star, causing what is called an occultation. Ko Arimatsu at Kyoto University and his colleagues observed this event from three locations in Japan.

The team saw the star gradually fade and recover over about 1.5 seconds near the edge of the shadow.

“These gradual changes are best explained if the star’s light was bent by a very thin atmosphere around 2002 XV93,” says Arimatsu.

The team estimates a surface pressure of about 100 to 200 nanobars, roughly 5 million to 10 million times thinner than Earth’s atmosphere and about 50 to 100 times thinner than Pluto’s tenuous atmosphere.

“You could not breathe it, feel wind from it, or see anything like Earth’s sky,” says Arimatsu. “But it is not negligible scientifically because even such a thin atmosphere can measurably bend starlight, and it tells us that volatile gases are present or being supplied around a very small icy body.”

The team couldn’t determine the composition of the atmosphere directly from the data. Arimatsu suggests methane, nitrogen and carbon monoxide are the most plausible candidates because they are among the few substances volatile enough to become gases at the very low temperatures of the outer solar system.

“This discovery challenges our conventional view of small worlds in the outer solar system,” says Arimatsu. “Until now, clearly detectable atmospheres in the solar system were essentially associated with planets, dwarf planets and some large satellites. 2002 XV93 appears to be one of the smallest solar system bodies yet with a clearly detected atmosphere.”

Souurse:

James Woodford 2026 Tiny frozen world unexpectedly appears to have an atmosphere | New Scientist 4 May

 

Human heads have changed shape a lot in the past 100 years

 

Image courtesy of Zeresenay Alemseged

Joel Kontinen

Since the early 20th century, people’s skulls have got rounder and their jaws have got wider, probably because of changes in health, diet and environment.

In the past 100 years, the heads of Japanese people have got rounder, with narrower cheekbones, wider upper jaws and slimmer, more prominent noses.

While changes outside Japan may vary, the overall trend is probably common across the globe, says Shiori Usui at the National Research Institute of Police Science in Chiba, Japan.

Humans are the only primate that has a chin. This is not according to Darwinian evolution but according to creation.  

Source:

Christa Lesté-Lasserre 2026 Human heads have changed shape a lot in the past 100 years | New Scientist 30 April 

 

100-year-old assumption about the universe may soon be overturned

 

Image courtesy of NASA, ESA, IPAC/Caltech, STScI, Arizona State University.

Joel Kontinen

Some scientists may be in for a surprise.   A recent survey has said that the universe in surprising lumpy.  

Assumptions that physicists have made about the universe for over a century may be about to be overturned. Evidence is emerging that it is far lumpier than we had thought – a finding that could solve some of today’s most puzzling cosmological mysteries.

When modelling the universe, cosmologists can’t describe every single galaxy, so they make simplifications. Typically, they assume that the universe on the largest scales is homogeneous and isotropic, meaning that it is roughly the same no matter where you look.

Our universe may look surprising lumpy, but that is the way God made it,   For example, our solar system is very different from other solar systems.

 Source:

Matt von Hippel 2026 100-year-old assumption about the universe may soon be overturned | New Scientist 27 April 

 

Scorpions reinforce their claws and stingers with metals

 

Image courtesy of Erwin Niemand/Shutterstock

Joel Kontinen

Some animals use metals to strengthen their body parts- just like the teeth in Komodo dragons (Varanus komodoensis), for instance, and the scorpions also use metals such as iron, zinc and manganese, and also copper, nickel, silicon, chlorine, titanium and bromine.

Sam Campbell at the University of Queensland, Australia, and his colleagues examined the claws and stingers of 18 species of scorpion from around the world to determine the extent and composition of their metal reinforcements.

The metals are largely found within the tips of the stingers and along the cutting edge of the claws, as well as in their mouth and teeth and in their tarsal claws, making their weapons “like a steel-toe-capped boot”, Campbell says. The rest of the animal’s exoskeleton is still hard, but much softer in comparison.

Scorpions all fluoresce light green or blue under ultraviolet light. But metal-enriched parts of the body don’t glow when exposed to UV, the team found.

It isn’t yet known how the scorpions obtain the metals that they incorporate into their exoskeletons, though their prey is the most likely source.

The team also found that different scorpion species had more metal in different parts of their bodies, and this is related to their behaviour. “What we identified was that when zinc was high in the claws, it would be low in the stinger, and vice versa,” says Campbell. “Because scorpions use their weapons so differently, it is possible that metal enrichment has adapted to provide beneficial biomechanical properties in the weapons where it is most needed by the scorpion.”

Metal enrichment in animal tissues appears to be more common than once thought, says Aaron LeBlanc at King’s College London. “A growing number of studies are pointing this out in vertebrate teeth as well,” he says. “The next logical step after discovering these features is to try to understand how they have evolved across major lineages, and this study is a pioneering one for that reason.”

Source:

 James Woodford 2026 Scorpions reinforce their claws and stingers with metals | New Scientist29 April