The most interesting things that happened in the last 12 hours, on Earth and off it.
Meanwhile, at Lagrange point 1…
The Sun's surface sits at around 6,000°C; the thin corona above it runs to millions of degrees, and nobody has fully explained why. India's Aditya-L1 mission has now returned measurements that pin down where the energy heating that outer atmosphere is coming from, narrowing one of the oldest open questions in astrophysics.
Meanwhile, on the drawing board…
When an Earth-sized planet crosses its star, the atmosphere leaves its fingerprint in a sliver of starlight — oxygen, ozone, water vapour — but the chance comes around only once a planetary year. A proposed array of 900 modest telescopes working as one would gather enough light to read that spectrum in a single transit, instead of waiting decades for repeats.
Meanwhile, over Europe at cruising altitude…
A fan blade snapped inside a Ryanair engine and the debris punched through a cabin window, partly pulling a passenger out through the hole before he was hauled back. Investigators note that crews had logged four suspected bird strikes on that same engine over the previous year.
Meanwhile, in a white dwarf binary…
Certain binary stars pulse with radio bursts on a slow, clockwork beat, and the explanation turns out to be borrowed from our own solar system: the same electrical circuit that links Jupiter to its moon Io. In these pairs, a dead white dwarf and a small red star are magnetically wired together, and the current lights up the radio sky.
Meanwhile, across a straw-coloured Britain…
Europe's lawns and pastures have gone straw-coloured, and the drought has turned whole landscapes into blueprints: buried Roman walls and ancient ditches hold just enough moisture to keep green outlines of themselves alive above ground. The grass isn't dead, only dormant, and much of it will come back with rain.
Meanwhile, in the hominin fossil record…
Four million years of hominin diet, read from teeth and chemistry, suggests the growing human brain ran partly on sugar — honey, fruit and other natural glucose — not just on meat. The energy arrived before cooking made starchy roots digestible, which shifts the timeline of what fuelled our expensive organ.
Meanwhile, in Ecuador's cloud forests…
An abundant, widespread Ecuadorian frog has been hiding as another species for more than a century, and the giveaway sat in a drawer in London. Researchers compared 19th-century specimens at the Natural History Museum with living animals and split off Pristimantis milpe as new.
Meanwhile, inside a Martian meteorite…
A Martian meteorite that looks bone dry turns out to contain hydrogen-rich patches big enough to see, revealed by scanning the rock with neutrons and X-rays. They are chemical scars from water working on rock early in the planet's history, preserved in a stone that later lost its water entirely.
Meanwhile, on Pacific and Caribbean reefs…
Nobody knows how many sharks a healthy coral reef should have, because almost every reef on Earth has been fished. A reconstruction of pre-human reef life in one country's two coastlines puts the Pacific side at roughly twenty times today's shark numbers — a yardstick for what recovery would even look like.
Meanwhile, on Britain's osprey nesting grounds…
Osprey recovery depends on a minority of birds that refuse to nest near other ospreys. These "pioneering pairs" strike out alone into empty territory, and the speed of a population's spread hangs on how many antisocial individuals it happens to contain.