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Universe Today

CERN adds a new particle to subatomic menagerie

Artist's graphical conception of Xi-cc-plus particle
An artist’s impression shows the newly discovered subatomic particle, with two charm quarks and one down quark. (Credit: CERN)

The Large Hadron Collider’s subatomic discoveries didn’t stop with the Higgs boson: This week, scientists at Europe’s CERN research center announced that the collider’s LHCb experiment has detected a doubly charmed particle that’s like a proton, but four times as weighty.

The particle is known as the Ξcc⁺, or “Xi-cc-plus.” It flashes in and out of existence in less than the blink of an eye, but just knowing that it exists — and knowing how massive it is — could give physicists a more solid sense of how matter is put together.

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GeekWire

How AI can help scientists head off water woes

Screenshot showing interactive map generated in response to AI query: "Show me the drought condition in North America for August 2012"
A screenshot shows how Hydrology Copilot can turn a simple query into an interactive, color-coded map. (Microsoft Infographic)

Microsoft and NASA say they’re applying artificial intelligence to a challenge that has become increasingly urgent: how to cope with flooding and other disasters driven by extreme weather.

The result of their efforts is Hydrology Copilot, a set of AI agents aimed at making hydrological data easier to access and analyze. The platform is built on the foundation that was established for NASA Earth Copilot, a cloud-based AI tool that can sift through petabytes of Earth science data.

Hydrology is the scientific study of Earth’s water cycle, which encompasses precipitation, runoff, evaporation and the movement of water through rivers, lakes and soil. It’s not just an academic exercise: Hydrologic insights are put to use in fields ranging from agriculture to forestry to urban development.

“NASA has long produced advanced hydrology and land-surface datasets, powering breakthroughs in drought early-warning systems, environmental planning and environmental research,” Juan Carlos López, a senior solution specialist at Microsoft who focuses on space and AI, wrote in a blog post. “Yet despite their value, these datasets and the specialized tools required to navigate and interpret them remain difficult to access for many who could benefit most.”

That’s where Hydrology Copilot comes in: Powered by Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service and Microsoft Foundry, the platform lets researchers query NASA’s data using straightforward questions — for example, “Which regions may be facing elevated flood risk?”

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GeekWire

Scientists revise view of Titan — and hold out hope for life

Cassini photo of Titan with Saturn in background
An image from NASA’s Cassini spacecraft shows Titan in front of Saturn and its rings. (Credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech / SSI)

A fresh analysis of tidal perturbations on Titan challenges a long-held hypothesis: that the cloud-shrouded Saturnian moon harbors an ocean of liquid water beneath its surface ice. But the scientists behind the analysis don’t rule out the possibility that smaller pockets of subsurface water could nevertheless provide a home for extraterrestrial life.

“The search for extraterrestrial environments is fundamentally a search for habitats where liquid water coexists with sustained sources of energy (chemical, sunlight, etc.) over geological time scales. Our new results do not preclude the existence of such environments within Titan, but rather, further support their plausibility,” University of Washington planetary scientist Baptiste Journaux, a co-author of the study published in Nature, told me in an email.

Journaux acknowledged that the results don’t match up with conventional wisdom. He said they represent a “true paradigm shift” in how scientists think Titan is put together.

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GeekWire

Scientists simulate the brain on a supercomputer

Visuaization of mouse cortex
This color-coded representation of a mouse cortex simulates the activity of brain cells. (Video via Allen Institute)

Creating a virtual brain may sound like a science-fiction nightmare, but for neuroscientists in Japan and at Seattle’s Allen Institute, it’s a big step toward a long-held dream.

They say their mouse-cortex simulation, run on one of the world’s fastest supercomputers, could eventually open the way to understanding the mechanisms behind maladies such as Alzheimer’s disease and epilepsy — and perhaps unraveling the mysteries of consciousness.

“This shows the door is open,” Allen Institute investigator Anton Arkhipov said today in a news release. “It’s a technical milestone giving us confidence that much larger models are not only possible, but achievable with precision and scale.”

Arkhipov and his colleagues describe the project in a research paper being presented this week in St. Louis during the SC25 conference on high-performance computing. The simulation models the activity of a whole mouse cortex, encompassing nearly 10 million neurons connected by 26 billion synapses.

To create the simulation, researchers fed data from the Allen Cell Types Database and the Allen Connectivity Atlas into Supercomputer Fugaku, a computing cluster developed by Fujitsu and Japan’s RIKEN Center for Computational Science. Fugaku is capable of executing more than 400 quadrillion operations per second, or 400 petaflops.

The massive data set was translated into a 3-D model using the Allen Institute’s Brain Modeling ToolKit. A simulation program called Neulite brought the data to life as virtual neurons that interact with each other like living brain cells.

Scientists ran the program in different scenarios, including an experiment that used the full-scale Fugaku configuration to model the entire mouse cortex.

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GeekWire

Scientists enlist AI to map regions of the brain in detail

Illustration: Color-coded cutaway view of mouse brain
An AI-produced rendering shows a map of mouse brain regions, overlaid with network motifs. (UCSF Illustration)

Scientists say an artificial intelligence program that they compare to ChatGPT has helped them create one of the most detailed maps of the mouse brain to date, with 1,300 regions and subregions marked on the map.

Some of those subregions have never been charted before — and the researchers say there’s more to come. “I think there are already indications that we can go beyond what we see now,” said Bosiljka Tasic, director of molecular genetics at Seattle’s Allen Institute for Brain Science.

The mapping effort, led by researchers at the University of California at San Francisco and the Allen Institute, is detailed in a study published today in the journal Nature Communications.

“Our model is built on the same powerful technology as AI tools like ChatGPT,” senior author Reza Abbasi-Asl, a neuroscientist at UCSF, said in a news release. “Both are built on a ‘transformer’ network which excels at understanding context.”

That context could be important for treating neurological ailments, Tasic told me. “Location is everything in the brain,” she said. “Defining the geography of the brain, and then defining all these regions and their functions, not only leads to better understanding, but also better ability to treat.”

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GeekWire

Scientists study the brain cells that show us illusions

Jerome Lecoq points to diagram on computer screen
Neuroscientist Jerome Lecoq points to a diagram that was used to study how the brain interprets illusions. (Allen Institute Photo / Erik Dinnel)

Our brains are wired to fill in perceptual gaps in what we see, whether it’s a lion hiding in the trees or the shapes hidden in an optical illusion — but how does that wiring work? Neuroscientists are zeroing in on how special kinds of brain cells help us see things that aren’t actually there.

Researchers from Seattle’s Allen Institute for Brain Science and the University of California at Berkeley traced the role played by the cells, known as IC-encoder neurons, in a study published today by the journal Nature Neuroscience.

“The goal of this project was to understand the neural basis of pattern completion, or filling in when you are dealt ambiguous or missing data in your vision,” said senior study author Hillel Adesnik, a neuroscientist at Berkeley.

Such research could help scientists understand how our brains create a complete picture of the world around us from the data that our senses provide. It could also eventually reveal how hallucinations arise, or point the way to better computer vision systems.

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AI tool is built to boost the hunt for gravitational waves

Illustration: Mirrors and lasers in foreground, colliding black holes and gravitational waves in background
An illustration hints at how LIGO uses mirrors and laser beams to detect black hole collisions. (Google DeepMind Illustration)

The Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory, or LIGO, has already won its researchers a Nobel Prize — and now artificial intelligence is poised to take LIGO’s search for cosmic collisions to the next level.

Google DeepMind and the LIGO team say they’ve developed an AI tool called Deep Loop Shaping that has been shown to enhance the observatory’s ability to track gravitational waves — faint ripples in the fabric of spacetime that are thrown off by smash-ups involving black holes and massive neutron stars.

The researchers describe the technique in a proof-of-concept study published today by the journal Science. They hope to make Deep Loop Shaping part of routine operations at LIGO’s detectors in Louisiana and on the Hanford nuclear site in Washington state.

“Deep Loop Shaping is revolutionary, because it is able to reduce the noise level in the most unstable and most difficult feedback loop at LIGO,” lead author Jonas Buchli, a research scientist at Google DeepMind, told reporters.

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Cosmic Books

‘Star Trek: Lower Decks’ doubles up on Hugo Awards

Triptych featuring Timothee Chalamet in "Dune, Part Two," a Hugo Award trophy and characters from "Star Trek: Lower Decks"
"Dune: Part Two" (starring Timothee Chalamet, at left) and "Star Trek: Lower Decks" were among Hugo Award winners at Seattle Worldcon 2025. (Credits: Legendary Pictures / Warner Bros. for "Dune: Part Two"; Alan Boyle for Hugo Award photo; CBS Studios for "Star Trek: Lower Decks")

“Star Trek: Lower Decks,” the animated Trek spinoff that focuses on Starfleet’s lower ranks, scored a double win tonight when this year’s Hugo Awards were handed out at the world’s premier convention for science-fiction authors and fans.

One of the episodes of the Paramount+ streaming series, titled “The New Next Generation,” won the Hugo for best short-form dramatic presentation at Seattle Worldcon 2025. And a choose-your-adventure graphic novel — titled “Star Trek: Lower Decks – Warp Your Own Way” — took the prize for best graphic story or comic.

Series creator Mike McMahan accepted the award for the video episode in a video clip that was aired during the ceremony.

“I love being recognized by a community who have recommended so many good and weird books to me over the years,” he said. “I congratulate all the winners, but also all of those who support and work and represent, because it’s also in that direction that advancement and liberty and democracy will proceed.”

The writer for the graphic novel, Ryan North, thanked McMahan in turn for letting the team do a choose-your-adventure book. “Weird books are great,” North said. “That’s what I love about reading. The weirder the better.”

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GeekWire

Worldcon celebrates science fiction’s past and future

Illustration showing futuristic cartoon characters with Seattle Worldcon 2025 sign
Seattle Worldcon 2025 strikes a retro-futuristic theme. (Characters by Matt Youngmark / Logo by Rob Carlos)

Thousands of science fiction and fantasy fans will be going back to the future this week when Seattle plays host to Worldcon, the world’s premier sci-fi convention, for the first time since the Space Needle opened its doors.

“The Pacific Northwest is a great community of makers and doers and learners, and people really deeply engaged in speculative fiction and all that genre has to offer,” Kathy Bond, the chair of Seattle Worldcon 2025, told me. “We want to share that with the rest of our world community.”

Registered Worldcon members selected the site of the annual convention under the auspices of the World Science Fiction Society — a tradition that started with the first convention in New York City in 1939. Seattle’s organizers have been preparing for this week since 2017, when they sent in their initial bid to host Worldcon.

Bond, a volunteer who works as an attorney at her day job, became involved after attending her first Worldcon in 2015 in Spokane. “From there, I got it into my head that we could totally do this in Seattle,” Bond said.

The path hasn’t always been smooth: This spring, a controversy arose over the revelation that generative AI was used to glean information about prospective speakers. Bond issued an apology, and the organizers reworked the process for vetting Worldcon’s panelists — but the episode led some writers and fans to create a one-day alternative convention called ConCurrent Seattle, set for Aug. 14.

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Fiction Science Club

Fiction outweighs fact in ‘Jurassic World’ dinosaur tale

Scarlett Johansson with film clapperboard in foreground
Scarlett Johansson gets ready to film a scene for "Jurassic World Rebirth." (Jasin Boland / Universal Pictures - © Universal Studios)

Nathan Myhrvold, a Seattle tech titan who also studies titanosaurs and other denizens of the dinosaur era, realizes that “Jurassic World Rebirth” is science fiction, not a documentary — nevertheless, he has a few bones to pick with the filmmakers.

“There are some lines that it would be silly to cross, but they did anyway,” says Myhrvold, who was Microsoft’s first chief technology officer back in the 1990s and is currently the CEO of Bellevue, Wash.-based Intellectual Ventures.

Paleontology is one of Myhrvold’s many interests, and he’s a co-author of more than a dozen peer-reviewed papers on the subject. He was inspired to get into dinosaur research almost 30 years ago, when he visited a “Jurassic Park” movie set at the invitation of director Steven Spielberg. That visit led to connections with leading paleontologists.

“At that point in my life, I was interested in dinosaurs, but I’d never been professionally or seriously, in a scientific sense, into dinosaurs,” Myhrvold recalls. “So, the movie was a little bit instrumental in me, just as a way of meeting a bunch of those people.”

On the latest episode of the Fiction Science podcast, Myhrvold and University of Maryland paleontologist Thomas Holtz discuss how much scientists — and filmmakers — have learned about dinosaurs over the past three decades. And they also critique “Jurassic World Rebirth,” the latest offering in a multibillion-dollar movie franchise that was born back in 1993.

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