Discovery marks the first detection of variable water clouds outside of the solar system

A planet with a striped pattern consisting of purple and tan bands, set against a backdrop of stars in the distant universe
Artist’s concept of a brown dwarf. Brown dwarfs begin their lives like stars but they never accumulate enough mass to fuse atoms steadily at their cores and ignite with starlight.
NASA/JPL-Caltech

A Jupiter-sized world just 7.5 light-years away is cloudy, chemically complex and, it turns out, more like home than anyone expected. Using the James Webb Space Telescope, Brittany Miles, assistant astronomer at the University of Arizona’s Steward Observatory, led a team that spent 11 hours staring at WISE 0855, the coldest known brown dwarf, collecting a spectrum of its light every 15 minutes.

The result is the most detailed time-series portrait ever taken of this frigid world—and the first direct confirmation that water clouds on another body are changing thickness over time, just like we...

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Rogue lipids: How routine cellular stress can fuel chronic inflammation

Credit: Unsplash/CC0 Public Domain

Oxidized lipids—fats structurally altered by enzymes, oxygen or free radicals—are double-edged swords that can both quell and ignite systemic inflammation, according to a new comprehensive review aimed at sharpening the overall understanding of an intricate class of highly reactive molecules.

Dr. Marco Di Gioia and Dr. Ivan Zanoni, two medical investigators from the divisions of immunology and gastroenterology at Harvard Medical School, explored this complex molecular universe by focusing on a class of compounds called oxidized phospholipids—oxPLs.

In their article published in Science Immunology, they explored why sharp differences in oxPL activity can have favorable or unfavorable biological outcomes...

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New wireless system could power medical implants as they stretch

Variation-tolerant wearable-to-implant WPT system.

Over the past few decades, electronics engineers have developed increasingly sophisticated implantable medical devices. Reliably powering some of these devices, however, can be challenging, particularly when they are based on stretchable materials that move along with the body.

Researchers at the Institute for Basic Science (IBS), Seoul National University and other institutions in South Korea recently developed a new wireless power system that could provide energy to soft implantable devices, even when they are stretching or moving. The new system, introduced in a paper published in Nature Electronics, was initially used to develop a cardiac pacemaker, a medical device that uses electrical pulses to control heartbeats.

“This wor...

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Largest 2D map of the universe helps scientists discover new gravitational lenses

Gravitational lensing infographic
This infographic shows how the gravitational lensing effect works: when a very massive foreground galaxy bends spacetime, acting as a cosmic magnifying glass that enlarges and distorts the image of a more distant galaxy behind it.
Credit: International Gemini Observatory/NOIRLab/NSF/AURA/ALMA (ESO/NAOJ/NRAO)/R. Proctor

Using data from the DESI Legacy Imaging Surveys, with help from artificial intelligence, an international team of scientists has discovered 70 new gravitational lenses—rare cosmic alignments that act as natural magnifying glasses. The new lenses further expand one of the largest collections of confirmed lenses to date and will allow scientists to study dark matter, galaxy evolution and the structure of the universe.

In August 2026, the DESI Legacy Imaging Surveys tea...

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