On Jan. 26, 2026, the Submillimeter Array (SMA) on Maunakea crossed an important threshold for time-domain astronomy. For the first time, scientists from the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian (CfA) demonstrated a new rapid-response capability at millimeter and submillimeter wavelengths, zooming in on a gamma-ray burst (GRB) within minutes of its discovery and capturing the earliest observations of such an event ever made at these frequencies. The successful demonstration is published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.
GRBs are the brightest explosions in the universe—brief but staggeringly immense flashes produced by jets launched in the collapse of massive stars or the merger of compact objects like neutron stars. Their initial burst is followed by a glow that X-ray and optical telescopes have long been able to chase within seconds or minutes of the event, but millimeter-wave telescopes have historically lagged behind in observing it.
That changed in January of this year, when the SMA rapidly responded to an automated alert from NASA’s Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory, which detected a flash of gamma rays. The sequence played out almost entirely without human intervention. Within 90 seconds, the on-duty operator had been alerted. Within four minutes, the telescope was moving to start observations.
Astronomers have revealed new details about how young stars shape their galactic surroundings in a new study. Researchers analyzed about 18,000 star-forming regions in nearby spiral galaxies using data from powerful instruments like the James Webb Space Telescope, Hubble Space Telescope and the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array, whose observations were made as part of the PHANGS survey—a collaboration aimed at better understanding galactic evolution.
They found that in normal galaxies, pressure from ionized gas drives the expansion of young star-forming regions. However, whether these zones continue to grow or remain stagnant depends strongly on their surrounding environment, said Debosmita Pathak, lead author of the study and a graduate student in astronomy at The Ohio State University.
“When young massive stars are born, they’re very energetic and pump out a ton of photons into their surroundings,” said Pathak. “In that process, they disrupt their local environments and start to drive interstellar material out of the area.”
Within their planetary systems, stars are continuously shaping their orbiting planets through gravity, radiation and magnetic forces. So far, this relationship has appeared to be a one-way street.
But through new research published in Science, an international research team has found compelling evidence that the dynamic can run in reverse: A giant exoplanet orbiting very close to its star appears to be leaving a measurable magnetic imprint on the star itself.
The International Space Station is now home to an even more capable quantum laboratory, where NASA cools atoms to nearly absolute zero to study one of the strangest states of matter known.
James Webb uncovered exotic salt clouds surrounding the famous “Pink Planet,” solving a long-standing mystery about one of the coldest known alien worlds.
A new study has revealed an unexpected link between solar storms and the flux of high-energy cosmic rays arriving at Earth. The findings, made using one of the world’s largest cosmic ray detectors, could open up a new way to probe the magnetic structures inside solar storms—and potentially improve our ability to forecast their effects on Earth. The research has been published in Physical Review Letters.
Earth’s magnetic field is constantly being bombarded by energetic charged particles, originating from two very different sources. While some of these particles are cosmic rays, which come toward Earth from all directions across the galaxy, the rest originate from solar storms: violent outbursts from the sun that hurl vast clouds of magnetized plasma into space.
So far, the effects of these two phenomena have often been treated as independent. Although scientists have long known that solar storms can reduce the number of lower-energy cosmic rays reaching Earth by trapping them in the storm’s twisted magnetic fields, higher-energy cosmic rays were thought to be too energetic to be affected. At these energies, the particles were expected to punch straight through the magnetic structures without being deflected.
Protein–protein interactions (PPIs) underpin biological function, yet proteome-scale interaction prediction remains bottlenecked by the quadratic computational complexity of all-vs.-all pairwise comparisons. Here, we present FlashPPI, a contrastive learning framework, grounded in residue-level interactions, that enables linear-time prediction of physical protein interfaces across a microbial proteome. By leveraging a genomic language model that captures cross-protein coevolutionary signals from metagenomic sequences, FlashPPI aligns interacting partners in a shared latent space. We demonstrate a four-fold performance increase over existing sequence-based methods, while reducing proteome-wide screening time from days to minutes. Crucially, FlashPPI achieves comparable screening performance to state-of-the-art structure-folding models at a fraction of the computational cost. Finally, we integrate FlashPPI into an interactive web platform that combines predicted networks with functional annotations and genomic context, making proteome-wide network analysis rapid and accessible for microbial discovery.
From cosmic rays to solar storms, space travel is a radiation gauntlet… but water may be the simplest, smartest solution. Discover how future starships might turn their life-support systems into life-saving armor.
Get Nebula using my link for 50% off an annual subscription: https://go.nebula.tv/isaacarthur. Watch my exclusive video Nearby Supernovae: https://nebula.tv/videos/isaacarthur–… out Gods & Monsters: https://nebula.tv/curiousarchive/gods… 🛒 SFIA Merchandise: https://isaac-arthur-shop.fourthwall… 🌐 Visit our Website: http://www.isaacarthur.net ❤️ Support us on Patreon: / isaacarthur ⭐ Support us on Subscribestar: https://www.subscribestar.com/isaac-a… 👥 Facebook Group: / 1,583,992,725,237,264 📣 Reddit Community: / isaacarthur 🐦 Follow on Twitter / X: / isaac_a_arthur 💬 SFIA Discord Server: / discord Credits: Fishbowl Starships Water As Shielding Episode 721; June 1, 2025; Nebula Exclusive Written, Produced, & Narrated by: Isaac Arthur Graphics: Bryan Versteeg, Jeremy Jozwik, Udo Schroeter Select imagery/video supplied by Getty Images Music Courtesy of Epidemic Sound http://epidemicsound.com/creator Taras Harkavyi, “Alpha and…” Chris Zabriskie, “Unfoldment, Revealment”, “A New Day in a New Sector” “Oxygen Garden”, “Wonder Cycle” Stellardrone, “Red Giant”, “Billions and Billions” Chapters: 0:00 Intro 1:45 The Threat — Radiation In Space 2:36 Galactic Cosmic Rays (GCRs) 3:44 Solar Particle Events (SPEs) 4:16 Van Allen Belt Radiation 5:19 Radiation’s Impact on Humans and Equipment 8:18 Radiation Shielding Basics 9:18 Water as a Radiation Shield 11:19 Effectiveness of Water 15:42 Difficulties Using Water 17:29 Beyond Water: Alternative Radiation Shielding Methods 17:59 Metallic Shielding 18:58 Regolith & Asteroid-Based Shielding 20:27 Hydrogen-Rich Polymers 21:22 Graphene, CNTs, and BNNTs 23:54 Active Shielding: Magnetic & Plasma Barriers 24:49 Fusion Fuel Shielding 25:27 Hybrid Shielding Approaches 28:16 God & Monsters 29:26 The Future of Radiation Shielding 30:00 Smart & Self-Healing Shielding 31:29 Artificial Magnetospheres 33:22 Biological Adaptation 35:35 Radiation-Resistant AI & Robotics 37:45 The Future of Space Radiation Protection 38:55 The Future of Water-Based Shielding. Check out Gods \& Monsters: https://nebula.tv/curiousarchive/gods…
🛒 SFIA Merchandise: https://isaac-arthur-shop.fourthwall… 🌐 Visit our Website: http://www.isaacarthur.net. ❤️ Support us on Patreon: / isaacarthur. ⭐ Support us on Subscribestar: https://www.subscribestar.com/isaac-a… 👥 Facebook Group: / 1583992725237264 📣 Reddit Community: / isaacarthur. 🐦 Follow on Twitter / X: / isaac_a_arthur. 💬 SFIA Discord Server: / discord. Credits: Fishbowl Starships Water As Shielding. Episode 721; June 1, 2025; Nebula Exclusive. Written, Produced, \& Narrated by: Isaac Arthur. Graphics: Bryan Versteeg, Jeremy Jozwik, Udo Schroeter. Select imagery/video supplied by Getty Images. Music Courtesy of Epidemic Sound http://epidemicsound.com/creator. Taras Harkavyi, \
Fourteen years ago, Cory Doctorow told me the #Singularity is a progressive apocalypse.
I have not stopped thinking about that phrase since.
We like to imagine the future as one clean break. A line crossed. A god booted up in a server farm. Cory saw something stranger. The end of the world, sold to us as the perfection of the world. Rapture for the people who swapped faith for code.
His sharpest point was about stories. Good #ScienceFiction does not predict the future. It predicts the present. The genre is not a telescope. It is a mirror.
Re-listening in 2026, the reflection is uncomfortable.
The surveillance he warned about is now infrastructure. The platforms he distrusted now mediate almost everything we do. We still treat the internet as a glorified video-on-demand service, and we still pour everything we are onto it anyway.
