Empty space, it turns out, is not optically empty. After more than 140 hours watching the magnetar 1E 1547-5408, NASA's IXPE telescope found X-rays leaving the star polarized in exactly the way quantum theory predicted back in the 1930s: in a magnetic field trillions of times stronger than Earth's, the vacuum itself behaves like a crystal and bends light. It is the first direct look at an effect physicists have argued about for 90 years and could never make in a laboratory.
Why this made the cut
a 90-year-old prediction finally caught in the act
People on different continents, with no contact and no shared folklore, have reported the same thing after eating a particular mushroom: crowds of tiny humans going about their business in the room. Researchers have now pinned these Lilliputian hallucinations to a specific fungus rather than to cultural suggestion, which means the little people are coming from chemistry, not from stories.
US researchers used AI to design 16 viruses that have never existed in nature, then built them and confirmed they work — bacteriophages, in this case, which infect bacteria and not us. It is the first time generative models have produced functioning genomes from scratch, which opens a door to designer therapies and, unavoidably, to designer pathogens.
An unfamiliar call in the canopy led researchers to a monkey nobody had catalogued, confirmed by a partial photograph and then by DNA. The species was found deep in Congo's forests and may already be close to extinction — described and endangered in the same breath.
A South Korean lunar orbiter has returned before-and-after photographs of the spot where a stray SpaceX rocket stage slammed into the Moon on Wednesday, showing a fresh scar that was not there days earlier. It is the first time anyone has imaged a human-made impact site on another world this quickly after the fact.