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NASA’s AWE Completes Mission to Study Earth’s Effect on Space Weather
On May 21, ground controllers powered down NASA’s AWE (Atmospheric Waves Experiment) instrument, bringing the data collection phase of the mission to a
As an aspiring science communicator, I learned a lot from an “eco artist”
Artist Xavier Cortada, in front row, fourth from right, was joined by students – including the author of the essay below, Sophia Bolivar, to his right – as well as faculty and staff as he brought...
Coral reefs may be more connected - and more resilient
Coral reefs may be more connected than scientists thought, with coral larvae drifting vast distances to spread genetic diversity.
One mystery of the Great Pyramid’s longevity has finally been solved
Differences in how the pyramid and surrounding soil vibrate, along with design choices, have protected the structure from earthquakes.
The Great Pyramid of Giza is surprisingly earthquake-proof
Seismologists found yet another benefit to ancient Egyptian engineering.
AI & Science: What Is the Future of Discovery?
Continued progress in artificial intelligence, its expanding usefulness in science, and its contributions to landmark advances suggest that we may have entered a new era of AI for science.The breakthroughs so far—such as predicting the structure of practically every known protein, with profound implications for our understanding of biology, health, and the treatment of disease—are notable not only for what was achieved but also how it was achieved and what that suggests for scientific progress. This special double issue of Dædalus poses the question: What is the future of scientific discovery in this new age of AI? Thirty-three scientists responded. Bringing perspectives from life sciences and medicine, cognitive science and neuroscience, the physical and earth sciences, chemistry and materials science, computer science, mathematics and the social sciences—they draw on their work at the frontier of AI and science. The authors write with an eye to the future, not just the present. They explore what is being achieved and what possibilities lie ahead; examine AI’s limitations and efforts to move forward; and investigate the larger implications of AI-assisted science—on how science is done, the role of the scientist, and the scientific method, as well as the challenges and complexities involved.The authors together exemplify a long-standing bidirectional relationship: AI advancing science, while science advances AI. Where that relationship will take us—a golden age of discovery? New scientist-machine collaborations? Autonomous labs? Discoveries without human understanding?—is a future we are only beginning to imagine, and one we must also shape if the beneficial possibilities are to be realized.Image: UMAP sculptures visualizing three Dædalus volumes on artificial intelligence. © 2026 by Refik Anadol.
Lunar launch
When Artemis II launched in April, sending astronauts around the moon for the first time in more than 50 years, the mission broke records — and will help scientists understand undiscovered secrets, including the history of Earth and our solar system.As lunar science lead for NASA’s Artemis II mission, Kelsey Young, ’12 MS and ’14 PhD in geological sciences, led the team that developed the lunar science plan and trained the crew to study the moon.
Scientists uncover vast energy source underground—why this breakthrough changes everything - Futura-Sciences
The Unexpected Rise of White Hydrogen For a long time, it was believed that hydrogen (H2) does not naturally exist on Earth. However, traces of natural hydrogen started appearing here and there—some even detected in France as early as the beginning of the 20th century. Starting in the 1970s, researchers...
American Bison Survived Extinction. Can They Survive Politics?
Trump’s latest public lands fight targets creatures central to Indigenous culture and American ecology and history.
Notes on The Matchmaking System
ARC Raiders is a multiplayer extraction adventure, set in a lethal future earth, ravaged by a mysterious mechanized threat known as ARC.
A new Middle-earth open world game is coming from Kingdom Come developers
Warhorse is heading into Tolkien territory for a new Lord Of The Rings-adjacent game. Read more at Empire.
Scientists found a fat-burning switch that affects bone strength
Scientists have discovered a previously unknown mechanism that helps burn fat and could strengthen bones through new treatments.
As an aspiring science communicator, I learned a lot from an “eco artist”
Globally renowned, Xavier Cortada creates artwork to generate awareness about climate challenges. He inspired students during a campus visit, among them one who hopes to advocate for the environment.
Preschoolers learn more science when food is part of the lesson
A new study found that preschool children learned science and vocabulary better through gardening and food activities.
Meet the new Trader: Nomadic Envoys
ARC Raiders is a multiplayer extraction adventure, set in a lethal future earth, ravaged by a mysterious mechanized threat known as ARC.
Scientists Simulated 30 Million Different Routes To The Moon From Earth And Found The Most Efficient One Yet
Astronauts have been taking short routes to the Moon, but there’s a more efficient way.
WATCH: A Spacecraft Is Launching to Study How Earth Survives Solar Storms
The first-ever X-ray observations of our planet's magnetic field.
Patch Notes 1.29.0
ARC Raiders is a multiplayer extraction adventure, set in a lethal future earth, ravaged by a mysterious mechanized threat known as ARC.
Scientists found stardust trapped in Antarctic ice. What could it tell us about our solar system?
"This dust can penetrate the shielding of the solar system and end up on Earth."
New MatterChat Model Helps AI to ‘See’ the Language of Science
From writing emails to generating computer code, much of the artificial intelligence prevalent in our daily lives has succeeded by mastering one domain: text. However, this leaves a major blind spot in the physical sciences, where models depend on the high-resolution, three-dimensional data of the physical world, like the intricate lattice of atoms in a crystal. Delivering on the promise of using AI for science requires teaching these data-driven text models to seamlessly “talk to” physics-based models. Now, a new AI framework from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), called MatterChat, solves this problem by creating a specialized “bridge.” It connects the conversational power of a Large Language Model (LLM) with a physics-based AI that models “interatomic potentials”: the complex physical forces between atoms. The resulting system already significantly outperforms general-purpose AI tools like GPT-4 at predicting material properties, and the team hopes it can accelerate scientific discovery by serving as a robust research partner that provides grounded insights and generates step-by-step instructions for synthesizing novel materials. A paper describing this work was recently published in Nature Machine Intelligence. “Traditional simulations can provide the physical rigor required for materials science, yet their computational cost remains prohibitive for high-throughput screening. Conversely, while LLMs excel at rapid knowledge synthesis, they inherently lack the ‘structural vision’ to interpret materials directly from their underlying atomic coordinates,” said Yingheng Tang, a postdoctoral researcher in Berkeley Lab’s Applied Math and Computational Research Division (AMCR) and lead author on the paper. “MatterChat was built to solve this dilemma, empowering LLMs with a structural ‘vision’ that allows researchers to leverage their full potential for solving complex, real-world materials challenges.” Empowering language models to solve complex challenges in materials science To build MatterChat, the Berkeley Lab team drew inspiration from technologies like Vision Question Answering (VQA) and Text-to-Image (T2I) generation. In these tasks, AI must translate high-level text concepts into visual images, or vice versa. Doing so requires developers to build tools that “bridge” two fundamentally different forms of data. The researchers adapted this concept to the physical sciences. With MatterChat, they created a “bridge model” that successfully connects an LLM’s general knowledge with the deep understanding of the atomic-scale world encoded in scientific interatomic potentials. Until now, researchers using LLMs to solve materials problems usually had to feed them raw data files as if they were just strings of text. It’s like asking an AI to understand a complex 3D engine based only on a parts list: the LLM can read the names, but it can’t “see” how the atoms fit together in space. MatterChat solves this by training a specialized AI bridge model, pre-trained on millions of crystal structures and an LLM, to align the LLM’s representation of the world with the interatomic potential’s representation of the world. The bridge model can translate physical insights into a format the LLM can actually understand. By giving the LLM these “scientific eyes”— a scientific “inductive bias” in the terminology of AI — the Berkeley Lab team has transformed it into a robust research tool capable of providing grounded scientific insights into complex materials challenges, such as predicting thermal stability or analyzing electronic band gaps. “We think of atoms as living in a physical space, but from a machine learning perspective, they are just vectors living in some very non-trivially structured manifold in a high-dimensional Euclidean space; and, of course, the same is true for the sentences and paragraphs that we use to express our ideas about those atoms,” said co-author Michael Mahoney, Berkeley Lab’s Scientific Data Division (SDD) AI Initiative Research Lead. “The bridge model basically gets those two structures to ‘talk with’ each other.” As a proof-of-concept of this general approach, the team trained their bridge model on a dataset curated by pairing nearly 143,000 stable atomic structures from the Materials Project with their corresponding physical properties. This training data was automatically assembled using the Materials Project’s API and deliberately enriched with properties fundamental to microelectronics design — like formation energy and bandgap — allowing MatterChat to learn the complex patterns connecting a material’s atomic blueprint to its functional performance. To validate their model, the researchers benchmarked MatterChat against a suite of other AI systems, from general-purpose LLMs to other specialized scientific AI methods. The results show that MatterChat consistently outperformed its competitors across a range of tasks. The model was more accurate in classifying material types and demonstrated superior precision in predicting numerical properties. For example, it excelled at predicting a material’s bandgap, a property critical for designing new electronics from high-capacity energy storage to next-generation computer chips. “Our design is significantly more efficient because we don’t have to build a massive AI model from the ground up,” said co-author Zhi (Jackie) Yao, a research scientist in Berkeley Lab’s AMCR. “Instead, we take two powerful, pre-trained models — a structural encoder for materials physics and an open-source LLM — and use them off-the-shelf. The only component we actually train is the lightweight ‘bridge model’ that translates between them. It’s the difference between building an entire car factory and simply designing a smart adapter that connects a world-class engine to a world-class navigation system. This approach is not only computationally efficient, but also makes the system modular, so we can easily upgrade components or adapt the bridge for other scientific domains in the future.” Crucially, this modular design highlights exactly how institutions like Berkeley Lab and the Department of Energy are carving out a highly valuable niche in the booming AI landscape. Rather than competing with Silicon Valley tech giants to build ever-larger language models from scratch, the lab is focusing on the specialized connective tissue that makes commercial AI useful for hardcore science. Because the bridge model approach underlying MatterChat is forward-compatible, it is perfectly positioned to leverage these parallel tracks of innovation. As Mahoney pointed out, “We expect that industry will continue to develop improved LLMs, and we expect domain scientists and facilities will continue to generate new data. An important part of scientific machine learning is not simply to solve problems on today’s data, but instead to develop general methods that will be forward-compatible with orders of magnitude more data, whether from scientific domains or from LLMs.” According to Yao, the MatterChat project, which was initially developed and enhanced with funding from a Berkeley Lab Laboratory Directed Research & Development (LDRD) Program, will now expand its capabilities. In a collaboration with Fermilab, MatterChat is already contributing to a U.S. Department of Energy Genesis Mission project — called Accelerating eXtreme Environment Specs-to-Silicon (AXESS) — that aims to speed up the development of next-generation, high-speed, radiation-hardened detectors for challenging particle physics experiments by using advanced 3D integrated circuits (chiplets) and AI-driven data analysis. In addition to the LDRD support, the team also credits supercomputing resources at the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC), located at Berkeley Lab, with MatterChat’s success. “We are incredibly grateful to NERSC; this research simply would not have happened without access to the Perlmutter supercomputer through their AI for Science program,” said Tang. Wenbin Xu, a NERSC postdoctoral fellow at the time, was also a major co-author of the work, as was Benjamin Erichson, a research scientist in Berkeley Lab’s SDD, highlighting the benefits of AMCR-SDD collaboration on AI for science. ### Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) is committed to groundbreaking research focused on discovery science and solutions for abundant and reliable energy supplies. The lab’s expertise spans materials, chemistry, physics, biology, earth and environmental science, mathematics, and computing. Researchers from around the world rely on the lab’s world-class scientific facilities for their own pioneering research. Founded in 1931 on the belief that the biggest problems are best addressed by teams, Berkeley Lab and its scientists have been recognized with 17 Nobel Prizes. Berkeley Lab is a multiprogram national laboratory managed by the University of California for the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science. DOE’s Office of Science is the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States, and is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, please visit energy.gov/science.
Scientists discovered nature’s own “brakes” deep beneath the Pacific Ocean that may have prevented massive megaquakes
For decades, a strange patch of the Pacific Ocean has quietly puzzled earthquake scientists around the world. Deep beneath the seafloor, near the coast of Ecuador, a massive underwater fault has been producing almost identical earthquakes every five to six years.
Rare earth breakthrough in China’s icy northeast
A new type of deposit in Heilongjiang and Jilin promises easier, cheaper mining than in southern clay-rich areas, say scientists.
How the US Is Reshaping Europe’s Climate Ambitions
The EU-US climate relationship has evolved from a shared mission into a volatile cycle of leadership, retreat, and deep-seated friction.
Why We Can’t Cut Earth Science to Fund the Next Earthrise Shot
We love space, but not as an abstraction. For my twin sons, it is a tradition. Their birthday themes have evolved from “Two the Moon” for their second birthday, featured on NASA.gov, to “From Space to the Farm,” with the boys in those iconic orange astronaut suits, standing in a cornfield. In the ye...
Stunning 150-million-year-old stegosaur skull rewrites dinosaur evolution
A spectacular dinosaur discovery in Spain is giving scientists a rare new look inside the world of stegosaurs. Paleontologists uncovered the best-preserved stegosaur skull ever found in Europe, belonging to the iconic plated dinosaur Dacentrurus armatus, which roamed Earth around 150 million years ago. Because stegosaur skulls are extremely fragile and almost never survive intact, the fossil is helping researchers uncover previously unknown details about how these armored giants evolved.
Newly discovered, blue-whale-size asteroid will fly super close to Earth Monday — and you can watch it live
Newly spotted asteroid 2026 JH2, which could be up to 115 feet wide, will fly past Earth closer than some satellites on Monday (May 18). The close approach will be visible to stargazers and can be viewed via livestream.
Scientists discover hidden “brakes” that stop massive earthquakes
A mysterious underwater fault near Ecuador has been producing nearly identical magnitude 6 earthquakes every five to six years, baffling scientists for decades. Researchers now believe the fault contains hidden “brake zones” where seawater and unusual rock structures work together to stop quakes from becoming even larger. The discovery came from ultra-detailed seafloor recordings that captured how the fault behaves before and after major earthquakes.
Helio and You: Seasons on Earth, Mars, and Beyond
Earth has four seasons - spring, summer, fall, and winter. Other planets can experience seasons, too, but they might be wildly different from the ones that we are used to. Find out about how seasons work and what role the Sun plays in causing them.
Scientists Discover Signs Africa May Be Splitting Apart Beneath Zambia
Unusual helium signatures detected in Zambian hot springs may signal that a hidden tectonic rift is actively developing beneath southwestern Africa.
Picturing Earth in a New Light
A recent analysis revealed where artificial light at night has intensified, as well as where it has diminished.
Scientists identify ‘ghost’ of a long-extinct relative in humans today
Scientists retrieved proteins from six teeth unearthed in China that reveal a potential link between Homo erectus and later human species, including Homo sapiens.
NASA Knows: The Ozone Hole
This is the story of the hole in Earth's protective ozone layer: what it is, how it formed, and the decades-long effort to repair it.
Giant “stealth” magma surge triggered thousands of earthquakes beneath Atlantic island
Deep beneath Portugal’s São Jorge Island, a massive surge of magma silently pushed upward from more than 20 kilometers underground in 2022, triggering thousands of earthquakes and briefly raising fears of a volcanic eruption. Scientists discovered that the molten rock climbed astonishingly fast — enough to fill 32,000 Olympic swimming pools — before stalling just 1.6 kilometers below the surface in what researchers call a “failed eruption.”
Letters: Fatherhood is missing link in La.’s family health crisis
As a father of twins, one in heaven and one here on earth, this thought weighs on me often. After losing my daughter, I made a decision in my son’s
Scientists discover the strange way CO2 cools part of Earth’s atmosphere
Scientists have finally cracked the mystery behind one of climate change’s strangest fingerprints: while Earth’s surface heats up, the upper atmosphere is rapidly cooling. Researchers at Columbia University discovered that carbon dioxide acts very differently high above the planet, where it actually helps radiate heat into space instead of trapping it. The team found that certain infrared wavelengths fall into a “Goldilocks zone” that becomes increasingly effective as CO2 levels rise, accelerating cooling in the stratosphere.
ASU graduate proves the best science happens outside
Victoria Concepcion didn't come to Arizona State University just to earn a degree. She came tracking a Mars rover.Concepcion, from Rancho Santa Margarita, California, is graduating this May from the School of Earth and Space Exploration with a Master of Science in geological science. She started with a clear goal: to work with the Curiosity rover's DAN instrument. Along the way, she discovered even more rewarding experiences.
Studying Pneumonia in Space for Heart Health on Earth
Expedition 74 astronauts aboard the International Space Station are uncovering how bacteria that causes pneumonia can lead to long-term damage in the heart.
How China Could Wield Its Control of Rare Earths Against Trump
A central question hanging over the summit this week is whether China will agree to extend a temporary postponement of even tougher rare-earth export controls.
"Project Saluki": A new Xbox Game Pass tier has been unearthed, alongside a curious "Positron" potential disc-to-digital program — and it could be huge
The newest Xbox Game Pass tiers appear to be specifically targeting the lucrative Chinese market, and is Microsoft also working on a disc-to-digital program?
Almost half of everything orbiting Earth is space junk
Abandoned rocket parts, dead satellites, and more circle the planet.
Scientists use AI to interpret the sun's acoustic heartbeat
A new AI-based approach that can "hear" inside the sun could give vital signs of the solar disturbances that have significant effects in near-Earth space and on human activities. The solar cycle is an ...
Why Your Life Is Now on Subscriptions
As companies look to build cash flow and loyalty, everything from heated car seats to earthworm deliveries can become a recurring charge on your credit card.
'A political earthquake' hits Connecticut with Bronin beating Larson
In the end, Bronin picked up a dozen West Hartford votes and beat Larson 214-204.
New tectonic plate boundary could be forming in Zambia, scientists say
Isotope analysis of gas from geothermal springs in Zambia could show that a new continental rift is forming, scientists say. Unexpectedly high helium isotope ratios indicate that a weakness in Earth's ...
Scientists learn how mosquitoes are able to track and bite humans
Researchers found that infrared radiation from a source at roughly the temperature of human skin doubles mosquitoes’ host-seeking behavior.
NASA’s C-20A Flights Advance Understanding of Earthquake Dynamics
NASA’s C-20A aircraft completed a series of flights on April 29 over Central California to contribute new data to improve the accuracy of the region’s
New method sharpens the search for alien biology
New UCR research shows that the search for life beyond Earth could benefit from a statistical approach that prioritizes patterns rather than searching for individual chemical or molecular traces.
Where scientists watch the forest breathe, findings uproot how people think about forest-atmosphere interactions
Photosynthesis is the oldest carbon-capture technology on Earth. For eons, plants have pulled carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and locked carbon—the building block of life on our planet—into their bodies ...
Live Science crossword puzzle #42: First American to orbit Earth
Test your knowledge on all things science with our weekly, free crossword puzzle!
Letters to the Editor: Hope for Earth, the DMV and national politics
The following are letters published in the Star-Observer's print edition this past week.
Scientists discover Earth has a hidden eighth continent
For centuries, humanity believed Earth had only seven continents, but scientists now say a massive hidden landmass nearly 1.9 million square miles wide has been quietly sitting beneath the South Pacif...
Scientists discover the hidden physics behind how words spread
Scientists discovered that language change follows hidden statistical patterns similar to the physics of magnets and soap bubbles.
Scientists have unraveled the details of how plants clone themselves
Scientists found the genetic switch - the GEMMIFER gene - behind asexual reproduction, or cloning, in plants.
AI may be making science faster but less original
While AI boosts speed and productivity, it may also reduce intellectual diversity and shift science toward machine-friendly questions.
How China May Have Sought to Recruit a House Aide to Spy on the U.S.
A staff member on the House China Committee was promised $10,000 for U.S. policy insights, on issues like Venezuela and rare-earth minerals.
MOMENT OF SCIENCE: The change of rotating comets
Outside of Earth, the Universe is vast and ever-changing. Recently, there was a big discovery in our celestial backyard.
The Material Science Behind A Spacecraft's Impact Armor
Aerospace engineers have to consider numerous factors when designing a spacecraft, but one that comes up more and more often is the need to design against Micro-Meteoroids and Orbital Debris (MMOD). While most designers understand the threat, designing structural solutions capable of withstanding the hypervelocity impacts these undercontrolled pieces of material can cause can take a significant bite out of a mission’s mass budget. A new paper from Binkal Kumar Sharma of the University of Bremen and Harshitha Baskar, an independent researcher, provides a detailed review of cutting-edge options for defending against those deadly particles.
White Earth Nation leadership sets priorities for tribe: Land stewardship, tribal health services
White Earth Nation leadership addressed tribal members at an annual State of the Nation Thursday, setting out priorities for the upcoming year.
Nature’s giant vacuum cleaner: Scientists reveal how the Sun is secretly cleaning Earth’s space junk
Science News: As Earth’s orbit becomes increasingly crowded with decommissioned satellites and fragments from the 1960s, however, researchers have identified a natu.
The farthest probe from Earth faces its most dangerous mission yet - Futura-Sciences
From Sci-Fi to Reality: The Launch of Voyager 1 Back in 1977, the world was grooving to new hits, and in cinemas, moviegoers were captivated by laser swords and beeping robots in a galaxy far, far away. Meanwhile, far from the silver screen, NASA was embarking on its own space...
How Anthropic’s Mythos has rewritten Firefox’s approach to cybersecurity
Security researchers at Mozilla say Anthropic's Mythos has unearthed a wealth of high-severity bugs in Firefox.
The National Academy of Sciences Elects Two Berkeley Lab Researchers
Two Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) scientists have been elected to the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) in recognition of their distinguished and continuing achievements in original research. They are part of a cohort of 120 new members and 25 international members. The National Academy of Sciences is a private, nonprofit institution that was established under a congressional charter signed by President Abraham Lincoln in 1863. It recognizes achievement in science by election to membership, and — alongside the National Academy of Engineering and the National Academy of Medicine — provides science, engineering, and health policy advice to the federal government and other organizations. The 2026 electees bring the total number of active members to 2,705 with 557 international members. Gary Karpen is a biologist senior faculty scientist in Berkeley Lab’s Biological Systems and Engineering Division and a Professor of Cell and Developmental Physiology in the Department of Molecular and Cell Biology at UC Berkeley. Karpen studies how the structure, organization, and maintenance of genetic material impact inheritance and cell function. His lab focuses on chromatin — a packaged form of DNA strands wrapped around proteins that comprises our chromosomes — with a particular emphasis on centromeres, rarely expressed sequences called heterochromatin, DNA repair, and regulatory RNAs. His research reveals insights into fundamental aspects of nuclear organization and genome regulation that are shared across the tree of life, broadening our understanding of cancer and other diseases, birth defects, and aging. Kam-Biu Luk is a Professor Emeritus of physics at UC Berkeley and a retired senior faculty scientist in Berkeley Lab’s Physics Division. He is an experimental particle physicist whose research has focused on neutrinos: nearly massless, electrically neutral elementary particles that can pass through matter virtually undetected. Neutrinos are created during radioactive decay processes, including the fusion process occurring in stars and the fission process that powers nuclear reactors. Luk initiated and co-led the Daya Bay Reactor Neutrino Experiment, a project based in China with more than 200 international collaborators. In 2012, the Daya Bay experiment discovered a new form of a phenomenon called “neutrino oscillation” in which neutrinos change from one type to another. For this discovery, Luk and his collaborator Yifan Wang received the 2014 American Physical Society Division of Particles and Fields W.K.H. Panofsky Prize for outstanding work in experimental particle physics, and he was also the co-recipient of the 2016 Breakthrough Prize. Luk is currently participating in the Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment (DUNE) hosted by Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, which will investigate any potential difference in behavior between neutrinos and antineutrinos that may shed light on the evolution of the universe, especially why antimatter is absent in the present universe. ### Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) is committed to groundbreaking research focused on discovery science and solutions for abundant and reliable energy supplies. The lab’s expertise spans materials, chemistry, physics, biology, earth and environmental science, mathematics, and computing. Researchers from around the world rely on the lab’s world-class scientific facilities for their own pioneering research. Founded in 1931 on the belief that the biggest problems are best addressed by teams, Berkeley Lab and its scientists have been recognized with 17 Nobel Prizes. Berkeley Lab is a multiprogram national laboratory managed by the University of California for the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science. DOE’s Office of Science is the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States, and is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, please visit energy.gov/science.
Science diplomacy lessons from a North Korean volcano
Mount Paektu, a mythic, active volcano on the border between North Korea and China, is almost the epitome of a scientific challenge that crosses political lines. In 946 CE, it erupted in one of the five biggest volcanic events of the past 10,000 years, kicking up huge quantities of ash and sending destructive mud flows down river channels for hundreds of kilometres. Should this happen again, the entire region, including easternmost Russia, South Korea and even Japan could be hit. “It’s definitely got the potential to be big,” said James Hammond, a professor of geophysics at Birkbeck, University of London. An eruption on the scale of 946 would have “huge regional impact.” For the past 15 years, Hammond has helped lead a groundbreaking collaboration with North Korean scientists to study the volcano, navigating scientific sanctions, tough export controls on scientific equipment and a long, pandemic-enforced exodus from the country. Although he seems more at home on far-flung research expeditions – before speaking to Science|Business, Hammond was camping out on a Greenland ice sheet – he has also advised the European Commission on its changing science diplomacy strategy. His long experience with North Korea has made Hammond sceptical of blanket bans on science collaboration, no matter the country.This is a live question in Europe, where in the wake of Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, institutional ties with Russian universities were almost entirely severed, although some scientists fear this could undermine our understanding of climate change’s impact on the Arctic. Here, Hammond tells the story of the Mount Paektu mission and the policy lessons he takes from it. Ominous rumblingsThe genesis of Hammond’s collaboration came in 2002, when Mount Paektu began to rumble ominously. Earthquake activity picked up and the volcano began to emit unusual gases. North Korean scientists took notice. “People felt we need to know more about this volcano,” said Hammond. In 2011, North Korean vulcanologists put out a request for international expertise to help them learn more. At the time, Hammond and his collaborator, Clive Oppenheimer, were working on a vulcanology project in another sanctioned country, Eritrea, and so decided to answer the call. Within a month, they had flown into Pyongyang. “It was pretty incredible,” recalls Hammond (left). “We were made to feel like honoured guests, and invited to official celebrations.” The scientific opportunity was huge. Paektu is unusually positioned, a thousand kilometres from where tectonic plates rub against each other in the Pacific. “It was an incredibly interesting volcano, but not much research had been done, at least not in the international community,” he said. “There was so much we felt we could do. And we had these partners that were super keen to engage.”The mission received an unusual visitor in the form of volcano-obsessed filmmaker Werner Herzog, who accompanied Hammond and Oppenheimer while directing his 2016 film Into the Inferno about volcanos across the world. Four days into the trip, the German director delivered a long speech about reunification to his North Korean hosts, recalls Hammond. “He got to the heart of the Koreans and how they felt, and how they thought, in a way that I'm not sure I ever will,” he said. UN sanctionsHowever, Hammond realised he’d been “naïve” about how difficult it would be to collaborate with North Korea, which was sanctioned far more heavily than Eritrea. “We didn’t fully appreciate the all-encompassing nature of restrictions,” he said. In 2016, as tensions escalated over Pyongyang’s nuclear tests, a United Nations resolution banned all joint scientific work with North Korea. However, the UN sanctions did allow countries to request carve outs, and the UK successfully requested an exemption for Hammond’s work. Related articlesEU pushes for joint science diplomacy, but care needed to avoid gridlock, experts sayRussia severs its last ties with German scienceAnchor Greenlanders in Arctic climate research, experts tell EU ahead of policy updateExport controls have also delayed Hammond’s work. In one case, it took 18 months to get approval from the UK government to take seismometers, which measure earthquakes, to North Korea. “It was frustrating,” he said. “But they didn’t just say no.” However, one instrument, called an induction coil, used to measure how the earth conducts electricity, was blocked entirely because it can in theory be used to detect submarines. Karaoke bondingSince the collaboration started in 2011, Hammond has visited the country around 15 times, although the pandemic closed off North Korea for more than five years. A trip last November was Hammond’s first since the outbreak. Despite this lengthy interlude, Hammond has deep bonds in the country. The North Korean scientists Hammond works with are somewhat isolated, as they struggle to access the latest research papers and travel to international conferences. That said, they are “excellent geophysicists” and are “very well trained in the field,” he said. Over karaoke and chats about their families, “we’ve made friendships, for sure,” he said. The authorities have to sign-off things like the placement of seismometers, for example, but Hammond said these requests have been approved. “Everything that we've asked for within a scientific context has been delivered.”Scientific backchannels? These kind of personal links between scientists across political lines are one purported benefit of science diplomacy. During the Cold War, some historians argue, scientific contact between the US and Soviet Union laid a groundwork of trust for other cooperation, such as on arms control. Hammond agrees that backchannel contacts to North Korean geophysicists are hardly likely to defuse a military crisis on the Korean peninsula, but the simple fact of the scientific collaboration makes contacts between diplomats that little bit easier. “It creates opportunities to understand each other a little bit better,” he said. “When maybe you have those more difficult discussions as diplomats, it's coming from a slightly better place.” Cutting tiesDrawing lessons from the Mount Paektu mission for today’s links with Russian science isn’t simple. The analogy is far from exact, Hammond said, “because one is essentially a Cold War, versus a pretty hot war in the case of Russia.” But Hammond’s broader argument is that the challenges we face, such as climate change, pandemics, biodiversity loss, pollution and so on, have globalised in an unprecedented way, making blanket shutdowns in collaboration with any country unwise.He’s somewhat critical of the UN scientific sanctions imposed on North Korea in 2016, even though they did allow for exceptions. “I think a blanket halt to some of these things, when we face big global challenges [. . .] that’s quite a risky thing to do,” he said.Institutional endorsement?European academics are still by and large free to work individually with Russian counterparts. However, official, institutional partnerships have largely ended. Shortly following the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Russian university rectors wrote a public letter endorsing the war, meaning European universities fear official collaboration could also be seen as a kind of endorsement. Hammond acknowledges there is a risk of legitimising regimes, and state-controlled universities, through scientific cooperation. “That’s the trade off you have to make,” he said. Strategic projectsWith Russia, instead of giving a green light to restart all Arctic science, a middle ground might be firing up a few carefully selected “strategic” projects, said Hammond. After all, European countries are still collaborating with Russia on the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor, an experimental nuclear fusion plant in the south of France. However, even if Europe did try to revive Arctic science with Russia, there’s no guarantee Russian scientists would play ball. A series of high-profile arrests of physicists in Russia accused of sharing their findings with the outside world has made collaboration fraught. Even before the invasion of 2022, “the Russian regime made it increasingly difficult, and this sort of discouraged people,” Dag Rune Olsen, rector of the Arctic University of Norway, told Science|Business last year.
Ensuring Fair Play
ARC Raiders is a multiplayer extraction adventure, set in a lethal future earth, ravaged by a mysterious mechanized threat known as ARC.
One of Earth's most important ocean currents is weakening, scientists confirm
One of Earth’s most important ocean currents is weakening, raising concerns about future impacts on climate across Europe and North America.
Space junk falls back to Earth faster as sunspot numbers climb
A new study links the sun's 11-year cycle to accelerated orbital loss, with debris falling faster once sunspot numbers near their cycle peak.
How Ancient Centipede Ancestors Conquered the Earth
A long-neglected fossil seems to show the evolutionary leap that let the ancestors of today’s many-legged arthropods crawl forth from the seas.
NASA Research Shows Early Life Relied on Rare Metal
NASA-funded scientists have discovered that life on Earth over 3 billion years ago relied on the metal molybdenum, which was incredibly scarce in the
NASA’s Next-Gen Near-Earth Asteroid Space Telescope Takes Shape
The Near-Earth Object (NEO) Surveyor — NASA’s first infrared space telescope purposely designed to discover potentially hazardous asteroids and comets — is
Webb space telescope reveals a scorching “super-Earth” that looks like Mercury
A scorching, airless world just 48 light-years away is offering scientists a rare glimpse into the geology of distant planets. Using the James Webb Space Telescope, researchers studied LHS 3844 b—a tidally locked “super-Earth” with a permanent dayside hot enough to melt metal—and discovered it’s a dark, barren rock with no atmosphere.
Patch Notes 1.27.0
ARC Raiders is a multiplayer extraction adventure, set in a lethal future earth, ravaged by a mysterious mechanized threat known as ARC.
Scientists discover a universal law across every form of life on Earth, severely challenging evolution theory
Study reveals a Universal Thermal Performance Curve, UTPC, predicting how all life responds to heat, challenging evolution theory.
LAGEOS: An Earth Science Mission Built for Enduring Precision
On May 4, 1976, a spacecraft resembling a disco ball entered orbit almost 3,700 miles (6,000 kilometers) above Earth. This shiny, two‑foot‑wide
Science Just Found a Hidden State of Water. It Clashes with Physical Limits.
A new study could explain why water is arguably the weirdest liquid on Earth.
Japan Wants to Build a Giant Solar Ring Around the Moon That Will Beam Limitless Energy to Earth
A Japanese construction firm drew up plans for a 6,800-mile solar belt around the Moon that would beam continuous power to Earth without fuel or emissions.
The World’s Most Unbelievable Science Fiction Novel
If years ago you’d pitched a novel where Donald Trump got elected president of the United States twice and hastened
An 8-year-old boy's backyard discovery literally changed science forever
One summer day, 8-year-old Hugo Deans spotted a cluster of tiny, BB-sized spheres (galls) near an ant nest in his backyard.
All Life on Earth Comes From One Single Ancestor. And It's So Much Older Than We Thought.
All Life on Earth Comes From One Single Ancestor. And It's So Much Older Than We Thought.
All life on Earth can be traced back to a Last Universal Common Ancestor, or LUCA—and it likely lived on Earth only 400 million years after its formation.
NOLA.com's Live from Jazz Fest: Final festival bites, the importance of a Trombone shorty set
Will you pick Trombone Shorty, Tedeschi Trucks Band or Earth, Wind & Fire? Keith Spera previews the closing sets. Today's live show is presented by Explore Louisiana and New Orleans and Company.
The 5 most top-secret places governments and scientists have locked away | BBC Science Focus Magazine
From sites housing deadly materials to the locations of precious artefacts, here's the science behind some of Earth's most restricted areas
Yellowstone's volcano may be fueled in a very different way than we thought
Yellowstone eruptions may be driven by shifts in Earth's crust, rather than a deep well of magma, study finds.
Yellowstone's volcano may be fueled in a very different way than we thought
Yellowstone eruptions may be driven by shifts in Earth's crust, rather than a deep well of magma, study finds.
Area 51 just had 17 earthquakes in a single day
Aliens? Nuclear tests? Don't count on it.
The Good Earth Farm wins $25K small business contest
Expansion Capital Group has awarded a $25,000 prize to The Good Earth Farm in Lennox as part of a small business contest.
NASA’s STORIE Mission to Tell Tale of Earth’s Ring Current
NASA is preparing to launch a mission designed to provide a unique, inside-out view of the ring current. Called STORIE (Storm Time O+ Ring current
"He Is Proof Of God On Earth": Mojtaba Khamenei's Aide Amid Health Concerns
Ayatollah Mohsen Qomi said that despite his injuries, Iranian officials were now focused on preserving the Supreme Leader's life.
Mauro named interim dean of the Penn State College of Earth and Mineral Sciences
John Mauro, department head and professor of materials science and engineering at Penn State, has been named interim John Leone Dean in the College of Earth and Mineral Sciences, effective July 1.
Trump Fires All 22 Board Members of National Science Foundation
The 22 members of the National Science Foundation board were informed in an email that they had been "terminated, effective immediately."
Mount Etna is like no other volcano on Earth, representing 'a new type of volcanism,' new research reveals
Mount Etna's strange lava has long perplexed scientists, but new research reveals that the volcano formed in a bizarre way — making it unlike any other known volcano on Earth.
In the wake of $100 GTA 6 rumours, Take-Two still won't give an actual price, but says "our job is to charge way, way, way less of the value"
Take-Two head Strauss Zelnick has spoken more about GTA 6's upcoming release, and pricing "the most spectacular piece of entertainment on Earth".
Earth is splitting open beneath the Pacific Northwest, scientists say
For the first time, scientists have watched a subduction zone literally fall apart beneath the ocean floor. Using advanced seismic imaging, they found the Juan de Fuca plate splitting into fragments as it sinks beneath North America. Rather than collapsing all at once, the plate is tearing piece by piece, like a train slowly derailing. The finding helps explain ancient plate fragments and could refine how scientists understand earthquake behavior.
Biosphere 2 poised to become a launchpad for landscape terraformation science
"From Early Earth to Mars" explores how life can transform planets in an effort to make Mars habitable while keeping Earth livable. At Biosphere 2, the LEO Survey's massive hillslopes allow researchers to monitor how bare rock gradually evolves into biologically active terrain in real time and virtually via a digital twin model.
Scientists just found a chilling way life may have begun
New experiments suggest that freezing and thawing on early Earth may have helped primitive cell-like structures grow and evolve. Tiny lipid bubbles behaved very differently depending on their membrane makeup—some fused into larger compartments and captured DNA more efficiently. These fusion events could have mixed key molecules, setting the stage for more complex chemistry.
Take-Two CEO Addresses Grand Theft Auto 6 Price, and the Possibility for More L.A. Noire
Strauss Zelnick doesn't have anything definitive on GTA 6's price tag yet, but it is being carefully considered and says Rockstar is focused on "making the most spectacular piece of entertainment on Earth."
50-foot ancient snake discovered in India may be one of the largest ever
A massive prehistoric snake discovered in India may rank among the largest ever to slither across Earth. Named Vasuki indicus, this ancient giant lived around 47 million years ago and is estimated to have stretched an astonishing 11 to 15 meters long—rivaling the legendary Titanoboa. Fossilized vertebrae unearthed from a lignite mine in Gujarat reveal a thick-bodied, powerful snake likely built for slow, stealthy ambush attacks, similar to modern anacondas.
April 30 Vallejo/Vacaville Arts-Entertainment Source: Faces and Places
Over 12 years, Earth Day Cleanup volunteers have been responsible for collecting 65,241 pounds of trash and 2,631 pounds of recyclable beverage containers, making a major impact in caring for our planet.