Tag: science

Scientists just made the first time crystal you can see

Imagine a clock that doesn’t have electricity, but its hands and gears spin on their own for all eternity.

In a new study, physicists at the University of Colorado Boulder have used liquid crystals, the same materials that are in your phone display, to create such a clock — or, at least, as close as humans can get to that idea. The team’s advancement is a new example of a “time crystal.” That’s the name for a curious phase of matter in which the pieces, such as atoms or other particles, exist in constant motion.

The researchers aren’t the first to make a time crystal, but their creation is the first that humans can actually see, which could open a host of technological applications.

“They can be observed directly under a microscope and even, under special conditions, by the naked eye,” said Hanqing Zhao, lead author of the study and a graduate student in the Department of Physics at CU Boulder.

He and Ivan Smalyukh, professor of physics and fellow with the Renewable and Sustainable Energy Institute (RASEI), published their findings Sept. 4 in the journal Nature Materials.

In the study, the researchers designed glass cells filled with liquid crystals — in this case, rod-shaped molecules that behave a little like a solid and a little like a liquid. Under special circumstances, if you shine a light on them, the liquid crystals will begin to swirl and move, following patterns that repeat over time.

Under a microscope, these liquid crystal samples resemble psychedelic tiger stripes, and they can keep moving for hours — similar to that eternally spinning clock.

“Everything is born out of nothing,” Smalyukh said. “All you do is shine a light, and this whole world of time crystals emerges.”

Zhao and Smalyukh are members of the Colorado satellite of the International Institute for Sustainability with Knotted Chiral Meta Matter (WPI-SKCM2) with headquarters at Hiroshima University in Japan, an international institute with missions to create artificial forms of matter and contribute to sustainability.

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Enough Is Enough: What a CDC Resignation Letter Reveals

When Demetre Daskalakis resigned as Director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases at CDC, his letter to leadership carried a tone of finality and moral conviction. “Enough is enough,” he declared, explaining that Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.’s leadership had made it impossible for him to continue. The letter has been praised as principled, but when read closely it is less a defense of science than a portrait of the very rhetorical habits that drove the public away from CDC in the first place: appeals to authority, catastrophic predictions, ad hominem attacks, and factual distortions.

Consider his charge that he can no longer serve in an environment that “treats CDC as a tool to generate policies and materials that do not reflect scientific reality and are designed to hurt rather than to improve the public’s health.” 

This is a false dichotomy. It frames the choice as binary: either one accepts CDC’s “scientific reality,” or one is accused of designing policies to harm. Yet the last five years have shown what most Americans already know: what CDC has called “science” has often been neither transparent nor replicable, but political judgment dressed in a white coat. 

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Astronomers uncover a hidden world on the solar system’s edge

A small team led by Sihao Cheng, Martin A. and Helen Chooljian Member in the Institute for Advanced Study’s School of Natural Sciences, has discovered an extraordinary trans-Neptunian object (TNO), named 2017 OF201, at the edge of our solar system.

The TNO is potentially large enough to qualify as a dwarf planet, the same category as the much more well-known Pluto. The new object is one of the most distant visible objects in our solar system and, significantly, suggests that the empty section of space thought to exist beyond Neptune in the Kuiper Belt is not, in fact, empty at all.

Cheng made the discovery alongside colleagues Jiaxuan Li and Eritas Yang from Princeton University, using advanced computational methods to identify the object’s distinctive trajectory pattern on the sky. The new object was officially announced by the International Astronomical Union’s Minor Planet Center and in an arXiv pre-print.

Trans-Neptunian objects are minor planets that orbit the Sun at a greater average distance than the orbit of Neptune. The new TNO is special for two reasons: its extreme orbit and its large size.

“The object’s aphelion — the farthest point on the orbit from the Sun — is more than 1600 times that of the Earth’s orbit,” explains Cheng. “Meanwhile, its perihelion — the closest point on its orbit to the Sun — is 44.5 times that of the Earth’s orbit, similar to Pluto’s orbit.”

This extreme orbit, which takes the object approximately 25,000 years to complete, suggests a complex history of gravitational interactions. “It must have experienced close encounters with a giant planet, causing it to be ejected to a wide orbit,” says Yang. “There may have been more than one step in its migration. It’s possible that this object was first ejected to the Oort cloud, the most distant region in our solar system, which is home to many comets, and then sent back,” Cheng adds.

“Many extreme TNOs have orbits that appear to cluster in specific orientations, but 2017 OF201 deviates from this,” says Li. This clustering has been interpreted as indirect evidence for the existence of another planet in the solar system, Planet X or Planet Nine, which could be gravitationally shepherding these objects into their observed patterns. The existence of 2017 OF201 as an outlier to such clustering could potentially challenge this hypothesis.

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Sanctuary Rescuing 47 Beagles from Chinese Testing Lab

In a daring and costly mission dubbed Operation Freedom Fetchers, Wyoming’s Kindness Ranch Animal Sanctuary has begun the process of rescuing 47 beagles from a research facility in China — dogs believed to be connected to American-owned or funded experiments.

The first group of ten beagles touched down in Los Angeles on August 25, after a grueling flight from Shanghai, a night at a Centers for Disease Control quarantine facility, and a 20-hour van ride to the sanctuary in Hartville, Wyoming.

For sanctuary director John Ramer, the moment was bittersweet.

“This isn’t just about ten dogs. It’s about exposing the secrecy and cruelty of billion-dollar institutions that profit off the suffering of man’s best friend,” he said in a Facebook post.

Ramer first learned of the beagles in May, when a contact at the group White Coat Waste alerted him to their plight and connected him with others involved in the rescue attempt. After securing video proof and documentation, Kindness Ranch agreed to take on the challenging and costly rescue.

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Scientists Fear “Mirror Life” Synthetically Produced in the Lab Could Create a Dangerous New Form of Biology

Scientists are warning that creating “mirror life,” a radical new concept in synthetic biology, could potentially have dangerous repercussions if such organisms escaped the lab, where they may cause irreversible damage to humans and the world around us.

The concerns were detailed in a recent report that warned that mirror cells—artificially constructed living systems assembled from reversed molecular building blocks—might pose “unprecedented and irreversible harm” if they were ever created.

The concept, initially born out of an ambitious laboratory challenge, now has scientists and ethicists warning that the pursuit of such creations could represent one of the most dangerous frontiers in biology, which experts say should prompt global restrictions before further experiments are conducted.

What Is Mirror Life?

When it comes to life on Earth, all organisms share a fundamental and rather peculiar property: what scientists call chirality, or “handedness.”

DNA and proteins are assembled from molecules that fit together in a consistent orientation, much like right and left-handed gloves. With this in mind, a “mirror” cell would essentially flip these orientations, with its DNA and proteins becoming versions of our own, albeit reversed as though being viewed in a mirror.

In theory, a mirror cell would function much like a normal one, in that it grows, reproduces, and essentially thrives in the same ways our cells would do. However, since its molecular structure would be functionally alien to the biology of other living things on our planet, scientists warn that there could be grave consequences if it were ever created.

“The first mirror bacterium would likely be a fragile microbe exhibiting metabolic defects, which would limit its growth and durability outside the laboratory,” the authors of the recent report write. “Once created, however, mirror bacteria could be readily engineered to become more robust by using standard techniques to deliver mirror versions of existing bacterial genes.”

“This could confer new capabilities or even transform them into 1 Summary mirrored versions of robust existing bacteria,” the report states.

Why Scientists Are Concerned

At the outset, the premise for creating mirror life seemed promising. Since our immune systems wouldn’t recognize these cells, one might assume that they could one day be used for medical applications such as medicines that wouldn’t trigger harmful immune responses.

However, it is this same quality that experts are now warning could make them so dangerous.

Imagine, for instance, a mirror bacterium that was essentially invisible to our immune systems. Such an organism could feasibly infect the human body, where it could grow undetected, allowing it to spread rapidly throughout the body without it recognizing anything was amiss.

Going beyond the worrying possibility of such “stealth infections,” mirror life could also have devastating implications for our environment. If ever freed into the wild, mirror bacteria would be able to thrive with no natural predators, which may allow them to outcompete ordinary microbial organisms, eventually leading to their infestation of ecosystems where their proliferation could advance unchecked.

Overall, mirror life would represent a global invasive threat, and if they were to begin adapting to the environment, they could potentially infect not only humans but also plants and animals throughout ecosystems worldwide.

“It therefore appears plausible,” the report states, “even likely, that sufficiently robust mirror bacteria could spread through the environment unchecked by natural biological controls and act as dangerous opportunistic pathogens in an unprecedentedly wide range of other multicellular organisms, including humans.”

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RFK Jr. vs. “The Science”: The Untold Story of Corporate Capture

The “scientist” on the left pushed COVID shots for babies, pregnant women, and backed mandates. RFK Jr. vs. “The Science”

The man on the right is trying to Make America Healthy Again.

The CDC has a corruption problem, and it’s been this way for decades.

And it all traces back to one quiet change that took place in 1983.

This information comes from the work of medical researcher A Midwestern Doctor. For all the sources and details, read the full report below.

Unmasking CDC Corruption: RFK’s Battle to Reform Public Health

RFK Jr. wants to Make America Healthy Again.

But don’t think his confirmation as HHS Secretary flipped a switch. What some people fail to realize is that he wasn’t suddenly given the power to do what he wants.

For one thing, the bureaucrats under him didn’t suddenly embrace MAHA.

In fact, the opposite happened.

And no agency has fought harder against reform than the CDC.

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8,000 years of human activities have caused wild animals to shrink and domestic animals to grow

Humans have caused wild animals to shrink and domestic animals to grow, according to a new study out of the University of Montpellier in southern France. Researchers studied tens of thousands of animal bones from Mediterranean France covering the last 8,000 years to see how the size of both types of animals has changed over time.

Scientists already know that human choices, such as selective breeding, influence the size of domestic animals, and that environmental factors also impact the size of both. However, little is known about how these two forces have influenced the size of wild and domestic animals over such a prolonged period. This latest research, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences , fills a major gap in our knowledge.

The scientists analyzed more than 225,000 bones from 311 archaeological sites in Mediterranean France. They took thousands of measurements of things like the length, width, and depth of bones and teeth from wild animals, such as foxes, rabbits and deer, as well as domestic ones, including goats, cattle, pigs, sheep and chickens.

But the researchers didn’t just focus on the bones. They also collected data on the climate, the types of plants growing in the area, the number of people living there and what they used the land for. And then, with some sophisticated statistical modeling, they were able to track key trends and drivers behind the change in animal size.

The research team’s findings reveal that for around 7,000 years, wild and domestic animals evolved along similar paths, growing and shrinking together in sync with their shared environment and human activity. However, all that changed around 1,000 years ago. Their body sizes began to diverge dramatically, especially during the Middle Ages.

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Taxpayer Dollars from NIH Used to Create ‘Transgender Monkeys’ to Inject with mRNA Vaccines

White Coat Waste Project (WCW), a watchdog group dedicated to ending taxpayer-funded animal experiments, has discovered that millions in taxpayer dollars from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the State of Florida are being spent on bizarre experiments to create “transgender” monkeys by pumping male rhesus macaques full of estrogen and then injecting them with mRNA vaccines.

The research, published in Cell Reports earlier this month, says that the experiments are aimed at modeling feminizing hormone therapy (FHT) as used by transgender biological males transitioning to “female.”

According to the paper, “To investigate the immune effects of estrogen within a male biological system, we administered exogenous E2 [estrogen] to male RMs [rhesus monkeys], modeling FHT [feminizing hormone therapy] as prescribed to TGW [transgender women].” Twelve young male monkeys were divided into groups and implanted with slow-release pellets containing either estrogen or a placebo.

The results were grotesque.

“FHT [feminizing hormone therapy] induces physical changes in TGW [transgender women], such as breast development, fat and muscle redistribution, and reduction in facial hair. To determine whether exogenous E2 [estrogen] therapy triggered similar female characteristics in male RMs [rhesus monkeys], we evaluated body alterations in the E2-treated animals. We found that male RMs [rhesus monkeys] treated with E2 [estrogen], but not placebo, developed significantly enlarged nipples similar to those of non-pregnant non-lactating female macaques.”

The estrogen-treated males developed “significantly enlarged nipples similar to those of non-pregnant non-lactating female macaques.” Additionally, “skin in the [estrogen]-treated macaques’ hips and thighs also became increasingly reddish and vascularized in a manifestation that resembled sex skin.” To further disrupt their systems, the researchers “artificially disrupted immune homeostasis through LNP/mRNA vaccinations,” injecting the animals with mRNA-based vaccines.

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New AI tool flags more than 1,000 questionable science journals… but can it be trusted?

  • The open-access journal boom has fueled predatory publishers exploiting researchers with fees while skipping real peer review.
  • An AI tool trained on 14,500 journals flagged over 1,000 suspicious publications but has a 24% false positive rate.
  • Fake science is surging, with a 2025 study warning that paper mills are doubling fraudulent research output every 1.5 years.
  • Predatory journals threaten public trust, distorting medical guidelines and policy decisions while wasting taxpayer funds.
  • AI detection tools could be misused to censor legitimate but controversial research, raising concerns over truth control.

The explosion of open-access journals has democratized scientific research, but it has also given rise to a shadow industry of predatory publishers that exploit authors with publishing fees while offering little to no legitimate peer review. Now, researchers have developed an AI tool to detect these shady journals—but its 24% false positive rate means human experts are still essential.

Who’s behind it? A team of computational scientists, led by Daniel Acuña of the University of Colorado Boulder, trained an AI model on more than 14,500 journals—12,869 high-quality ones and 2,536 that had been removed from the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) for violating ethical guidelines. The AI then analyzed nearly 94,000 open-access journals, flagging more than 1,000 previously unknown suspect publications.

The problem with predatory journals

The open-access model was supposed to make research freely available to everyone, breaking down paywalls that restrict knowledge. But as the system grew, so did the number of journals that prioritize profit over scientific integrity. These “questionable” journals often promise rapid publication with little to no peer review, charging authors hefty fees while producing low-quality—or even fraudulent—research.

A 2025 study in PNAS found that the number of fake papers churned out by “paper mills” is doubling every 1.5 years, threatening to flood academia with junk science. “If these trends are not stopped, science is going to be destroyed,” warned Luís A. Nunes Amaral, a data scientist at Northwestern University.

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EU science grants are funding Israeli military tech, data shows

The EU has given Israeli technology start-ups run by ex-IDF soldiers nearly half a billion euros in research grants since the start of the Gaza genocide. Some of the founders of these tech start-ups have served as reservists in Gaza, and in at least one instance the technology has been deployed to aid the genocide.

This article was originally published by ¡Do Not Panic!

The Horizon Europe program, described by the EU as ‘a scientific research initiative to develop a sustainable and livable society in Europe,’ has awarded around 475 million euros to 348 Israeli start-ups and research projects since October 2023, many of which are run by former IDF soldiers and intelligence officers.

In 2024, the EU awarded grants of €220m to 179 companies and initiatives run by Israelis. The scale of this funding, coming in a year when the world’s pre-eminent genocide experts all declared Israel was committing a genocide, a year in which entire cities were wiped out and tens of thousands of civilians murdered, is staggering.

In the same year Israel was also the third largest recipient, behind France and Germany, of ‘accelerator’ grants, a separate component of the Horizon program intended to support small and medium-sized companies working to improve life in Europe.

In 2025, the year in which Israel announced its full-scale ethnic cleansing plans and scholars estimated that 434,000 Palestinians in Gaza had been murdered by Israel, EU funding for Israeli tech initiatives still topped 110 million euros.

And this summer, with Gaza being driven officially into famine by Israel’s deliberate starvation campaign and as the Knesset was voting through a final solution, the EU was still dolling out tens of millions to companies run by ex-IDF personnel.

Horizon funding is critical to Israeli science and the Israeli economy. Since the inception of the programme in 1996, the EU has given Israeli companies, some of which have been directly spun out from the Israeli military, €3.4 billion euros. Israel is by far the largest non-EU recipient of Horizon, and its researchers are given an extremely generous, even curious amount of money for a program designed to support European researchers and European society. The president of Israel’s Academy of Sciences and Humanities said in May that cutting Israel off from EU research and innovation funds would be “almost a death sentence for Israeli science.”

Israel’s participation in the Horizon program has drawn attention in the past. Campaigners have argued the program is breaking its purely civilian mandate by giving money to Israeli institutions linked to the security state, and have demanded Israel is cut from the program. Under pressure with the genocide of Gaza moving into its final stages, the European Commission recently proposed a limited, partial ban on Israeli access to Horizon. It’s unclear though if the tepid move will garner enough votes from member states to pass. While Israel’s participation in Horizon has been the subject of controversy, the individuals behind these EU-funded initiatives, many of whom have a significant military background, have not previously been named. I’ve also found clear evidence that the program, which is mandated to support exclusively civilian applications, has funded military technology deployed during the genocide of Gaza.

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