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North Atlantic spring storms have grown more common since 1940, analysis reveals

Storm Dave, which swept across northern Europe over the Easter weekend, is an example of what new research from the University of Gothenburg has revealed. Spring storms forming over the North Atlantic have become more common than they were 80 years ago, and this is due to climate change.

In the Northern Hemisphere, storm seasons follow a seasonal cycle. Storms are weakest and least frequent in summer and most intense in winter. As a result of global warming, storm patterns and their course have changed, and several studies have indicated that winter storms appear to be occurring more frequently and with even greater intensity.

Saturn-sized exoplanet with Earth-like temperature reveals methane-rich atmosphere

A planet that is about the size of Saturn, but with a temperature more like Earth’s, has an atmosphere rich in methane, according to a new study using NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST).

Unlike the gas giant planets—Jupiter and Saturn—in Earth’s solar system, which are distant from the sun and therefore extremely cold, and so-called “hot Jupiters”—giant planets beyond the solar system that are scorching hot due to their proximity to the stars they orbit—the planet is one of only a handful of known temperate, giant planets and the first to have its atmosphere analyzed.

The new details about the composition of the planet’s atmosphere will inform models of planetary formation and evolution and could improve astronomers’ understanding of how Earth’s atmosphere works, according to the research team.

New semiconductor building blocks make power converters smaller, more affordable

Researchers at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory incorporated gallium nitride semiconductors to create a high-efficiency power converter that is more compact, affordable, and efficient.

A power converter is a type of device that manages semiconductor switching and transforms current or voltage, so electricity flows smoothly and safely among equipment, power sources, and users.

Silicon semiconductors are the fundamental building blocks of conventional converters. Manufacturer ROHM Semiconductor provided the ORNL research team with gallium nitride semiconductors that enable switching 10 to 20 times faster than silicon while losing less energy in the process.

Glowing Blue Spider Among the Dozens of New Species Discovered in One Area on Research Expedition

A recent expedition to Central Africa has uncovered dozens of new species.

In February, a team of 16 specialists from Africa and around the world visited the Lisima plateau in eastern Angola and conducted a biodiversity survey, through which they discovered dozens of species unknown to science, according to The Wilderness Project, which led the survey.

The organization dedicated to studying and protecting Africa’s freshwater wilderness announced the findings from the remote scientific expedition in the area — seen as one of Africa’s last great biodiversity blank spots — in a news release obtained by PEOPLE on Wednesday, June 3.

How cells fight infection from the inside: Newly identified ADX pathway may broaden understanding of immunity

When thinking of the immune system, most people imagine white blood cells putting up a fight against invading germs in the bloodstream. But now, in research published in Molecular Cell, scientists detail a separate but equally important route by which our bodies fight infection—directly inside already infected cells.

In the report, the authors define a previously undescribed method of germ resistance they coin “antibody-directed xenophagy” (ADX), where cells can digest bacteria and viruses that cross the cell membrane, including Salmonella and adenoviruses.

“People have talked about viral xenophagy before as a sort of concept, but if you look in literature, there aren’t any good examples where people have shown this operating to potently block infection,” says Leo James of the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology.

Activity-dependent protein synthesis in neurons requires microglial-metabolic coupling

During learning, the brain requires an exceptional amount of glucose to be imported into specific neural circuits, where it is used to form new memory-related proteins. Adler et al. discover that microglia, the resident immune cells of the brain, are critical for this process via a mechanism called microglial-metabolic coupling.

New IronWorm malware hits 36 packages in npm supply-chain attack

A new supply-chain attack has infected 36 packages on the Node Package Manager (npm) index with infostealer malware called IronWorm.

The malware targets 86 environment variables (key-value pairs) and 20 credential files that may contain OpenAI, AWS, Anthropic, and npm credentials, vault configuration files, SSH keys, and Exodus cryptocurrency wallet files.

According to researchers at supply-chain and devops company JFrog, IronWorm is written in Rust, hides behind an eBPF kernel rootkit, and communicates with the operator over the Tor network.

JWST ‘weighs’ dormant black hole 10 billion light-years away

The most distant, nearly invisible dormant black hole has been detected and “weighed” by an international team of astronomers that includes researchers from UCL. The study, published in Science, identified a dormant black hole at the heart of a galaxy known as MRG-M0138 located over 10 billion light years away. It is the most distant dormant black hole yet detected, 15 times farther away than the previous record.

The black hole’s mass is about 6 billion times that of the sun, and is being observed at a time when the universe was only about 3 billion years old, about a quarter of its current age, offering unprecedented details into black holes in the early universe.

To find this, the team used data from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope to track the motion of stars orbiting around the otherwise invisible black hole to measure its mass. Though the technique—known as stellar dynamics —has been used to measure dormant black holes in galaxies much closer to Earth, this is the first time it has been used to weigh one located such a great (cosmological) distance away.

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