T-cell acute lymphoblastic leukemia (T-ALL) and T-cell acute lymphoblastic lymphoma (T-LBL) are aggressive hematological malignancies that arise from abnormal activation of oncogenes and/or inactivation of tumor-suppressor genes, followed by a differentiation arrest and uncontrolled clonal expansion of immature thymocytes ¹. Proviral integration site for Moloney-murine leukemia 1 (PIM1) is a known JAK-STAT target gene that recently emerged as a therapeutic target for the treatment of T-ALL and T-LBL². However, recent work suggested that activation of JAK-STAT signaling in T-ALL could also be achieved through non–cell-autonomous mechanisms, such as stimulation by interleukin 7 (IL7) ³ This cell-extrinsic mechanism of JAK-STAT pathway activation suggests that the fraction of T-ALL and T-LBL patients that might benefit from in vivo PIM-inhibitor therapy could be more substantial than originally anticipated. Notably, previous research has shown that glucocorticoids, one of the core components of T-ALL/T-LBL induction therapy, can directly induce Il7r expression (the receptor of the interleukin 7) in murine and human T cells ⁴. Therefore, glucocorticoids could potentially drive therapy-induced and non–cell-autonomous activation of the JAK-STAT pathway, eventually leading to downstream PIM1 activation. Based on this, the authors of the present study hypothesized that T-ALL/T-LBL cells that evade induction therapy may also be characterized by elevated PIM1 expression ⁵.

Previous studies have shown that a subset of T-ALL patients can activate JAK-STAT signaling in response to exogenous IL7. However, the specific genetic characteristics of T-ALL/T-LBL patients exhibiting this IL7 responsiveness remain largely unknown. To investigate this, the authors analyzed pSTAT5 levels following IL7 stimulation in a set of genetically well-characterized PDX samples derived from 7 pediatric T-ALL and 4 T-LBL patient cases. From these 11 PDX samples, 4 T-ALL and 2 T-LBL cases showed IL7-induced pSTAT5 induction, which was not the case for the remaining 5 T-ALL/T-LBL samples. Notably, IL7-responsive T-ALL/T-LBL samples were predominantly characterized by higher CD127 expression compared to non-responders. As expected, IL7 stimulation resulted in PIM1 upregulation in responsive T-ALL/T-LBL patient samples, suggesting that CD127+ T-ALL/T-LBLs might also benefit from PIM inhibition.

To explore this, the authors conducted in vivo testing of PIM inhibitors using a T-ALL xenograft model known to upregulate PIM1 expression upon IL7 stimulation. They observed that both PIM inhibitors were able to reduce the leukemic burden. PIM1 overexpression in T-ALL/T-LBL can be caused by genomic translocations involving T-cell receptor β (TCRβ) or activating mutations targeting the IL7R/JAK/STAT signaling pathway. However, as previously shown, PIM1 can also become activated through stimulation by exogenous IL7 in CD127+ T-ALL/T-LBL. To determine whether these distinct mechanisms of PIM1 activation are mutually exclusive, the authors stimulated leukemic cells that already express high levels of PIM1 due to a JAK1 mutation. Upon stimulation, these cells exhibited clear pSTAT5 induction accompanied by a significant upregulation of PIM1. Similarly, IL7 stimulation of leukemic cells also led to pSTAT5 activation and concurrent PIM1 upregulation.

As already mentioned, glucocorticoids are core components of T-ALL treatment ⁶ which bind to the glucocorticoid receptor (NR3C1) inducing apoptosis in lymphoid cancers. Interestingly, previous research showed that glucocorticoids are able to bind an enhancer of the IL7RA locus, thereby upregulating IL7RA expression in thymocytes ⁷. Given this, the authors evaluated IL7RA expression in their panel of 11 T-ALL/T-LBL PDX samples upon dexamethasone (a common glucocorticoid used in T-ALL treatment) treatment. The analysis confirmed that glucocorticoids can induce IL7RA expression in most leukemic samples. Finally, they wanted to determine whether glucocorticoid-induced IL7RA activation would also result in JAK-STAT pathway activation with concomitant upregulation of PIM1. Indeed, dexamethasone treatment of PDX samples in combination with IL7 was able to cause a significant upregulation of PIM1 expression along the JAK-STAT axis in most T-ALL/T-LBL PDX samples. To determine whether this mechanism of glucocorticoid-induced PIM1 activation would also take place when leukemic cells are exposed to induction therapy in an in vivo IL7-producing microenvironment, authors performed additional T-ALL/T-LBL xenograft experiments in which they treated mice for 1 week with a chemotherapeutic cocktail or vehicle control. After 1 week, both control and chemotherapy-treated mice were euthanized and leukemic cells were isolated from the bone marrow.

Notably, quantitative RT-qPCR revealed a significant upregulation of PIM1 expression in residual leukemic blasts as compared with controls in four of the analyzed samples. This result confirmed that the induction chemotherapy can trigger in vivo JAK-STAT pathway activation in human T-ALL and T-LBL. In agreement with previous results showing that the in vivo combination therapy of a PIM inhibitor with glucocorticoids significantly prolonged animal survival using a PDX model of a T-LBL case ⁸, the authors decided to include PDX cells from T-LBL patient sample demonstrating a dual activation of both cytokine and therapy-induced PIM1. Therefore, the previously published synergistic effects of this combination therapy were probably mediated by a combination of both cell-intrinsic and cell-extrinsic effects, which ultimately resulted in robust in vivo PIM1 activation.

To further investigate, the authors assessed the combined effect of the PIM inhibitor PIM447 and dexamethasone on PDX cells derived from both IL7-responsive and non-responsive T-ALL/T-LBL samples, in the presence of exogenous IL7. Interestingly, synergism was observed in the IL7-responder group, whereas no beneficial effect was seen in IL7 non-responders. Next, they evaluated this combination therapy in vivo using and observed a significant improvement in survival for the PIM447/dexamethasone combination as compared with both monotherapy treatments. Finally, they assessed the combination of PIM447 with chemotherapy in vivo using another sample that lacked cell-intrinsic genetic abnormalities targeting PIM1 or the IL7R pathway, but had the ability to activate PIM1 upon IL7 stimulation and induction chemotherapy. Notably, this analysis also revealed a significant improvement in survival in the PIM447/VXL combination group as compared with monotherapy.

Altogether, their study shows that cytokine- and therapy-induced PIM1 activation can be therapeutically targeted by the pan-PIM inhibitor PIM447 in human T-ALL/T-LBL. In addition, their work suggests that IL7 responsiveness in CD127+ T-ALL/T-LBL could serve as a valuable biomarker to identify patients that might benefit from PIM inhibition during induction chemotherapy.

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Testing quantum superpositions of time

According to quantum theory, the flow of time itself may exist in a genuine quantum superposition, ticking faster and slower at the same time. Now, a new study ¹ shows that this striking possibility may soon be tested in the laboratory. In this work, a team led by Assistant Professor of theoretical physics Igor Pikovski at Stevens Institute of Technology, in collaboration with experimental groups of Christian Sanner at Colorado State University and Dietrich Leibfried at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), explores quantum aspects of the flow of time and how they can be accessed with atomic clocks.

Their results suggest that the same quantum technologies being developed for next-generation clocks and quantum computers may soon probe something far more fundamental: When a clock’s motion obeys quantum mechanics, its movement can exist in superposition, and with it the recorded passage of time itself. This is analogous to Schrödinger’s famous thought experiment, where the counterintuitive nature of quantum superposition is illustrated by a cat being both alive and dead; here it is the passage of time itself that is in superposition, like a cat that is both young and old at once.

“Time plays very different roles in quantum theory and in relativity,” says Pikovski. “What we show is that bringing these two concepts together can reveal hidden quantum signatures of time-flow that can no longer be described by classical physics.”

Relativity, clocks and the twin paradox

In relativity theory, every clock experiences its own flow of time, which in turn depends on velocity and position. For example, a clock moving at 10 m/s for 57 million years would lag behind another clock at rest by just one second. This has been observed and confirmed with ultraprecise clocks, such as aluminum-ion clocks at NIST.

The effect is often illustrated as the “twin paradox”: two identical twins will age differently if one of them takes a high-speed roundtrip. Yet there is a more counterintuitive version: the “quantum twin paradox.” Can a single clock experience two different times in a quantum superposition, and become both younger and older simultaneously?

According to quantum theory, as outlined by Pikovski and collaborators over a decade ago, that should happen. So far, such subtle effects have been beyond experimental reach; however, the team’s new theoretical study shows that atomic clocks are now up to the task.

How cutting-edge ion clocks work

The authors of the paper investigated the interplay of relativistic time and quantum effects in atomic clocks, such as those developed at NIST and at Colorado State University where scientists trap single ions (such as aluminum or ytterbium), cooling them to near absolute zero temperature and manipulate their quantum states with laser pulses. The results of their study show that by combining the rapidly improving clock technology with quantum information techniques developed for trapped-ion quantum computing, unique and yet undetected quantum features of time can be observed.

“Atomic clocks are now so sensitive, they can detect tiny differences in time caused by just the thermal vibrations at minuscule temperatures,” says Gabriel Sorci, a Ph.D. candidate at Stevens Institute of Technology and co-author of the paper. “But even at the absolute zero temperature, the ground state, the ticking rate will still be affected by just the quantum fluctuations alone.”

Squeezed motion and superposed ticking

The team went one step further. Rather than just cooling the atoms, they show that one can instead manipulate the vacuum itself, creating so-called squeezed states in which the position and velocity of the clock exhibit subtle quantum behavior.

The result is a new manifestation of relativistic time in the quantum regime, where superpositions and entanglement of time arise: a single clock can measure how it ticks both faster and slower simultaneously, and entangle with the squeezed motion. The team now aims to demonstrate the effects in the laboratory.

“We have the technology to generate the required squeezing and a path to reach the clock precision needed in ion clocks to observe such effects for the first time,” says Sanner of Colorado State.

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Recent seismic imaging off Vancouver Island has revealed something extraordinary: a tear in the subducting oceanic plate beneath the Cascadia Subduction Zone.

The finding briefly raised the public’s hopes that Cascadia might be “shutting down,” potentially lowering earthquake risk in North America’s Pacific Northwest.

A subduction zone is a boundary where tectonic plates collide, forcing a heavier plate to dive, or subduct, below a lighter one. Recent research suggests that part of the Cascadia Subduction Zone, just off the coast of Vancouver Island, may be slowing down due to a newly identified tear in the subducting plate.

It’s an eye-catching idea: a major plate boundary winding down, perhaps even reducing earthquake risk, would be a comforting thought for millions of people living with seismic hazards in the Pacific Northwest, particularly given the challenges of predicting earthquakes.

But while the discovery is real, the interpretation that the subduction zone is winding down gets ahead of the science.

What the new research actually shows is far more complex — and more interesting. But before we can understand what this tear means, we need to go back to plate tectonic theory.

Understanding the science

Plate tectonic theory, first formalized in the 1960s and 1970s, revolutionized our understanding of the planet.

In this framework, which was built on the earlier concept of continental drift, there are two types of crust: the lighter continental crust and heavier oceanic crust. Oceanic crust forms at large underwater mountain chains that transect the oceans, known as mid-ocean ridges.

After millions of years of cooling and becoming denser, the oceanic crust sinks back into the Earth at subduction zones. Traditionally, this cycle has been framed as relatively straightforward, but recent work continues to reveal exceptions and complexities.

Continental interiors are not the stable, rigid places they were once thought to be. Microcontinents, small pieces of the Earth’s outer shell, continue to be identified, and even the simple distinction between oceanic and continental crust is being challenged through the discovery of hybrid and transitional type crusts.

A new example of this ongoing refinement of plate tectonic theory comes from the Cascadia Subduction Zone, a major piece of North America’s western plate boundary.

What researchers recently discovered

The oceanic plate beneath North America is not a single, intact slab. Instead, it appears to be fragmenting and tearing apart. This is not something that plays out over human timescales — it unfolds over millions of years. Still, it challenges long-held assumptions about how the Cascadia Subduction Zone works.

For decades, the subduction zone was treated as a relatively continuous plate boundary. Mounting evidence now shows that it is segmented and divided into smaller, structurally complex parts.

The new seismic imaging off Vancouver Island’s Pacific shore sharpens this picture, revealing that fragmentation is not only present but ongoing. The plate boundary is more complex than a classic textbook image of one plate smoothly sliding beneath another.

A tear in the subducting plate does not mean the plate boundary stops functioning. Instead, it means a tectonic reorganization is underway. And this is not only expected, but inevitable. Subduction will likely continue on either side of the tear and deformation may become more distributed across the region.

In other words, rather than of a single, coherent system, we may end up with multiple smaller pieces interacting with one another. This evolution may make the system more dynamic and its future behaviour harder to predict.

What this could mean for earthquakes

The recent finding has important implications for seismic hazards in the region, which continue to be a major concern. Large earthquakes in the Cascadia Subduction Zone are determined by how strain accumulates and is released along the boundary between the plates and associated faults.

Studies show that parts of this boundary remain strongly locked, meaning that strain is still building and could be released in future large earthquakes. A tear in the plate may influence where ruptures start and stop, or how far they propagate, but it does not remove the underlying seismic hazard.

If anything, increased structural complexity can make behaviour harder to predict. Segmentation may limit the size of some earthquakes, but it could also concentrate deformation in unexpected ways.

Smaller plates and microplates can rotate, interact and transfer stress across a region. These are processes geoscientists are still working to understand in the Pacific Northwest and elsewhere.

Over millions of years, this evolution will reshape the entire plate boundary, perhaps transforming it into a more diffuse system of smaller interacting plates. But for people living in the Pacific Northwest, this long-term trajectory does not change the near-term reality.

Cascadia remains an active subduction zone capable of producing large earthquakes. Rather than signalling the end of Cascadia, this discovery highlights just how dynamic and complex it really is — and how much more there is to learn.

 

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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An obstructed atomic phase

In a crystal, at the atomic scale, atoms sit in a repeating lattice, like the repeating tiles of a floor. In most introductory models, electrons associated with a given band are imagined as being centered on the atoms themselves. Their “home base,” so to speak, coincides with the positions of the nuclei. But quantum mechanics allows something subtler. The electronic charge can instead be centered in the empty spaces between atoms, while still respecting the symmetry of the crystal and remaining tightly localized. This is the essence of what physicists call an obstructed atomic phase. It is “atomic” because the electrons remain localized, but “obstructed” because their centers cannot be smoothly moved back onto the atoms without changing the quantum structure of the band.

A new methodology

For years, this idea was theoretically elegant but experimentally frustrating. The challenge was not proving that such bands could exist, but actually measuring where the electronic weight lives in a real material. The breakthrough here ¹ came from combining scanning tunnelling microscopy with first-principles electronic structure calculations. Scanning tunnelling microscopy can measure how electronic states are distributed across a surface with atomic resolution, effectively turning the crystal into a quantum landscape map. By carefully analyzing these real-space spectroscopic images, the researchers reconstructed how different atomic orbitals in the material are correlated with one another. This allowed them to infer the true spatial center of the electronic band that crosses the Fermi level, the energy frontier most relevant for electrical behavior.

In the spaces

What they found is conceptually beautiful. In monolayer niobium diselenide, the relevant electronic band behaves as if its charge center sits not on a niobium or selenium atom, but on an empty symmetry point inside the unit cell. In other words, the most natural description of the electrons places them in the spaces defined by the crystal, rather than on the atoms that build it. This may sound almost philosophical, but it has real physical meaning. The geometry of where electrons are centered shapes how they respond to defects, edges, strain, and even how they may participate in more exotic collective states.

It is as if the electrons have quietly claimed the open spaces of the crystal as their true home.

The broader significance goes beyond one compound. Niobium diselenide belongs to the family of transition metal dichalcogenides, layered materials that have become central to modern quantum materials research because they can host superconductivity, charge ordering, and unusual topological effects. By showing that one of their electronic bands has this obstructed structure, the work opens a new route for understanding how real-space geometry influences electronic phases in two dimensions. The same method should also apply to many other layered compounds where topology is encoded not in edge currents or magnetic responses, but in the quiet geometry of localized electrons.

A band can be localized, compact, and seemingly simple, yet still hide a subtle internal geometry that changes how we classify the material. What makes this advance so exciting is not only that it verifies a beautiful theoretical concept, but that it gives experimentalists a practical way to visualize this hidden electronic geometry directly in real space.

Author: César Tomé López is a science writer and the editor of Mapping Ignorance

Disclaimer: Parts of this article may have been copied verbatim or almost verbatim from the referenced research paper/s.

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In recent years, residents of Spain, France and the UK have looked up to see an eerie sight: deep orange sunrises and skies thick with a yellowish haze. These hazy skies often deposit “blood rain”, rust-colored precipitation that leaves a fine grit on cars and windows.

These events are caused by dust plumes from the Sahara desert that travel thousands of kilometres across the Mediterranean. As climate change alters the world’s largest desert, Europe is finding itself increasingly downwind of a shifting environmental crisis.

The Sahara accounts for more than half of the world’s total dust emissions. Under hot, dry and windy conditions, particles are lifted several kilometres into the atmosphere and transported across continents.

While most travels west toward the Americas, some moves north towards Europe, particularly between February and June. Recent plumes – such as the intense “Calima” that sometimes blankets Spain – have reached as far as the North Sea and Scandinavia.

The relationship between a warming planet and dust is complex.

On one hand, rising temperatures dry out soils and accelerate desertification, making it far easier for wind to dislodge fine particles. Under extreme warming scenarios, the amount of Saharan dust lifted into the atmosphere could rise by 40% to 60% by the end of the century.

However, the “dustiness” of the future also depends on wind patterns. Certain Saharan sand and dust storms have actually become rarer and less intense over the past two decades. Partly, this is due to an increase in vegetation in the Sahel region at the southern border of the Sahara. But it’s also down to a weakening of surface winds in general, and changes in certain large-scale climate patterns.

Health risks and economic consequences

For Europe, the impact is not just aesthetic. Saharan dust can substantially degrade air quality, pushing levels of invisible particulate matter beyond health guidelines. These fine particles, known as PM10, can penetrate deep into the lungs, triggering asthma and cardiovascular issues. In Spain and Italy, modelling studies suggest Saharan dust may account for up to 44% of deaths linked to PM10 pollution.

Dust also carries other costs. When it settles on snow in the Alps it darkens the surface and makes it less able to reflect sunlight, accelerating melting. It can reduce the efficiency of solar panels and disrupt aviation and road traffic by lowering visibility.

What to do about dust from Sahara

Responding to this growing cross-border problem means acting both at the source and in affected areas.

In the Sahara and its margins, preventing the disruption of intact soils is critical. Overgrazing, river damming and land abandonment can all increase dust emissions. To stabilise the ground, measures include restoring vegetation, maintaining river flows and protecting the fragile “biocrust” of bacteria, moss and other organisms that bind the top few millimetres of desert soils and form a natural shield against wind erosion.

In Europe, the focus is on being prepared. Early warning systems now provide predictions up to 15 days in advance, allowing health authorities to issue alerts for vulnerable people to stay indoors. Simple measures, from improved building ventilation to creating more urban green spaces, can also reduce exposure.

In decades to come, the Saharan “dust belt” will remain a visible indicator of our planet’s health. But technology and forecasting alone will not be enough to solve the problem.

Dust does not respect borders, so managing it will require stronger international cooperation – and binding agreements – on everything from managing river basins to stop lake beds from drying out, to public health responses across Europe. Whether orange skies remain a curiosity or become a regular feature of European life, governments throughout Europe and Africa must take this shared risk seriously.

 

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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By comparing ancient burial practices with genetic information gleaned from the remains, researchers show that it’s not uncommon for people who aren’t related by blood to be treated as members of the same family—which means that ancient DNA doesn’t tell the whole story of how families and societies worked.

“Even in prehistory, kinship was more than just blood relations,” says Sabina Cveček, an archaeologist and Marie Skłodowska-Curie Global Fellow at the Field Museum in Chicago.

“Many communities around the world have a concept of family that goes beyond this biological setting. So no matter how hard we push with ancient DNA research, we’ll never know the whole story if we don’t take diversity and cultural anthropological perspectives into account.”

Cveček is one of the lead authors of a special issue of the Cambridge Archaeological Journal ¹ dedicated to how archaeologists, anthropologists, and geneticists determine the relationships between ancient people, and how genetic research plays a role in our understanding of these societies.

This special issue, which Cveček edited with Maanasa Raghavan (University of Chicago) and Penny Bickle (University of York), includes research about the relationship between family and genetic relatedness around the world, over the course of thousands of years.

Rethinking kinship beyond genetics

Cveček, Raghavan, and Bickle emphasized in their introductory piece that kinship cannot be reduced to genetic relatedness, and that recent archaeogenetic work—while powerful—has tended to privilege biological descent and linear pedigrees.

“The piece intervenes by showing that this is only one ‘code’ of relatedness. Instead, ancient kinship research is in need of new approaches by closely considering ethics of sampling human remains, interdisciplinary training, collaborative research design, and new interpretations that consider multiple ways of becoming kin,” says Cveček.

The team reviewed decades’ worth of previous archaeological and genetic studies from sites in Europe and western Asia. For instance, at a site called Çatalhöyük in what’s now Türkiye (sometimes called Turkey), burials were often found below the house floors of ancient houses from 8,000 years ago.

“Archaeologists initially assumed that people buried within the same house would be genetically related,” says Cveček. “But now, it is possible to map those people through ancient DNA analysis on genetic pedigrees, and geneticists often found people buried within the same house who are not at all genetically related, indicating social proximity rather than exclusively blood relations made kin at the site.”

DNA degrades over time, but traces of DNA can remain inside human bones, including small bones such as petrous bone in the inner ear. In the past few decades, scientists have been able to extract DNA from these ancient bones and sequence it.

The resulting genetic sequences are generally patchy, so “geneticists need to do a lot of computational analysis and statistics with genetic signatures from those broken pieces of ancient DNA to actually reconstruct biological relatedness of the past,” says Cveček.

What ancient families can teach today

These findings suggest that in these ancient communities, the concept of family wasn’t only dictated by blood. Since the same is true of many families today, that may not seem like an Earth-shattering discovery. But it could be a critical piece of information for researchers attempting to reconstruct how ancient cultures built and passed down their family ties. DNA doesn’t always tell the whole story.

“One of the aims of this paper is to debunk the Western perceptions of family kinship, which often seems to be based on blood. We cannot have just one proxy for understanding family or kinship around the world,” says Cveček.

This broader concept of family goes beyond archaeological and anthropological research—we run into it every day when we handle health insurance, housing, childcare, and education.

“The old saying, that it takes a village to raise a child, is true,” says Cveček. “We all invest time and labor to build a world that looks after people beyond our biological dependents.” Caring for people who aren’t blood-related to us is part of what makes us human.

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Levels of complexity

To grasp this idea, we must first understand that life itself is characterized by the need to “draw consequences.” This is not a metaphorical claim but a biological fact. Living beings, unlike inanimate objects, face the fundamental challenge of performing actions that are appropriate to their circumstances. A plant turns toward light because light means energy. A bacterium moves away from toxin because toxin means death. In these simplest cases, the drawing of consequences is built into the organism’s structure through natural selection. The plant does not “decide” to seek light; it simply does so, and this ability has been honed over millions of years because it worked for successful reproduction.

This basic imperative unfolds on increasingly complex levels. With the development of nervous systems in the animal kingdom, we encounter a second level of complexity: the creation of internal representations. An animal can build a mental model of its environment, remember past experiences, learn from consequences, and adapt its behavior accordingly. A squirrel that remembers where it buried nuts is drawing consequences from past experience. A chimpanzee that uses a stick to fish for termites is drawing consequences about the relationship between tools and outcomes. These are forms of intelligence that go far beyond mere reflex.

The human leap to a third level of complexity is perhaps the most significant in the history of life on Earth. We developed the capacity to create external representations of our internal representations—symbols, signs, and language that allow us to make our thoughts public, to share them with others, to examine them collectively, and to preserve them across time. An animal cannot tell another animal what she is thinking or what happened yesterday. A human can do both, and this difference has transformed everything.

Language as the fundamental inferential prosthesis

Language, from this perspective, is best understood as the fundamental inferential prosthesis. It is a system superimposed upon our biological cognitive capabilities that has astronomically multiplied our ability to draw consequences from information. Consider what language enables. First, it allows for logical reasoning. Because language has structure—grammar, syntax, rules of inference—we can move from premises to conclusions in ways that are publicly examinable and correctable. We can say “if A then B, and A is true, therefore B” and know that this inference holds for anyone who understands the terms.

Second, language enables the accumulation and transmission of knowledge across generations. The information acquired by one individual through years of experience can be passed to another who has never had that experience. A child born today can learn about the dangers of poisonous plants without ever being poisoned, about the movements of stars without ever staying up all night to watch them, about the structure of atoms without ever seeing one. This cumulative cultural evolution is possible only because language allows information to exist outside individual minds.

Third, language enables collective deliberation. We can reason together, debate competing claims, pool our cognitive resources, and arrive at conclusions that no individual could reach alone. A scientific community, a jury, a legislature—these are all institutions made possible by language, institutions that multiply our inferential capacities beyond anything a solitary mind could achieve.

This understanding of language as a prosthesis directly challenges romantic views of language, including Heidegger’s influential conception. For Heidegger, language is the “house of Being”—the sacred space where reality reveals itself authentically, particularly in poetry and mystical discourse. The language of science, technology, and everyday communication is, for him, a degenerate form that conceals rather than reveals. From the perspective of inferential prostheses, however, this distinction collapses. Poetic language is not more authentic than scientific language; it is simply a different technological tool, suited for different purposes. A poem reveals certain aspects of experience that a chemistry textbook cannot, but a chemistry textbook reveals aspects of reality that a poem cannot. Neither has “ontological primacy”; both are sophisticated, artificial creations built upon the fundamental prosthesis of language.

Technology as an inferential prosthesis

But language is not our only inferential prosthesis. The concept can be extended to all technology. A prosthesis, in the medical sense, is an artificial device that replaces or enhances a missing or damaged body part. An inferential prosthesis, by extension, is any tool or technique that enhances our ability to draw consequences and act effectively. The simplest example is a stick used by a chimpanzee to fish for ants. The stick extends the reach of the chimp’s actions—it can reach ants that would otherwise be inaccessible. But it also provides information: the chimp learns about the relationship between stick length and success, about the behavior of ants, about the properties of different kinds of sticks.

All technology can be understood through this lens. A hammer multiplies the force of your arm and allows you to drive nails that your fist could not. But it also shapes your understanding of materials—you learn what can be hammered and what cannot, what requires a heavier hammer and what requires a lighter one. A computer multiplies your ability to perform calculations, store information, and communicate with others. But it also transforms how you think about problems, what you consider possible, and how you approach intellectual challenges.

This dual aspect of technology—amplifying both our capacity to act and our capacity to know—suggests a useful distinction. We might call “material techniques” those technologies where the primary function is to amplify our ability to do things: hammers, plows, factories, transportation systems. We might call “informational techniques” those whose primary function is to amplify our ability to know things: writing, mathematics, computers, scientific instruments. This is a distinction of emphasis, not a rigid dichotomy. Every material technology provides cognitive shortcuts for its use—a well-designed hammer suggests how to be held, a well-designed interface guides its user. Every informational technology ultimately has material effects—a mathematical equation can lead to a bridge, a scientific discovery can lead to a new medicine.

No going back

The crucial insight of the inferential prosthesis perspective is that there is no going back to a pre-technological state of nature. Language itself, our most fundamental prosthesis, has made us what we are. The choice is not between technology and authenticity, as Heidegger seemed to suggest, but between different ways of designing, using, and relating to our technological extensions. The task is to become conscious of the ways our prostheses shape us, to ask what consequences they enable and what consequences they foreclose, and to wield them with the wisdom that such profound responsibility demands. We are, and always have been, prosthetic creatures. The question is not whether to use prostheses but how to use them well.

References

Zamora Bonilla, Jesús, 2017, Sacando consecuencias, Tecnos.

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Neutrinoless

The mystery begins with the neutrino, one of the strangest particles in physics. Neutrinos are everywhere, streaming through your body by the trillions every second, yet they barely interact with anything. One of the biggest open questions in the field is whether the neutrino is its own antiparticle. If it is, a very rare kind of radioactive decay, called neutrinoless double beta decay, should exist. In ordinary double beta decay, two neutrons inside a nucleus transform simultaneously and release two electrons together with two neutrinos. In the neutrinoless version, the neutrinos would somehow cancel each other out internally, leaving only the two electrons. Detecting this would show that a fundamental conservation law of particle physics can be broken, and it might help explain why the universe ended up filled with matter rather than equal parts matter and antimatter.

NEXT-100

NEXT-100 is built ¹ to search for exactly this process in a specific form of xenon gas known as xenon-136. The detector holds about 70.5 kilograms of this isotope, compressed to high pressure inside a large vessel made from a radiopure titanium-steel alloy. The choice of gas is central to the whole design. When particles pass through pressurized xenon, they leave behind two simultaneous signatures: a flash of ultraviolet light and a trail of freed electrons. NEXT-100 reads both with unusual precision.

The heart of the experiment is a time projection chamber, which you can think of as a three-dimensional camera for invisible particle tracks. When a decay happens in the gas, the xenon atoms briefly light up, producing a first faint flash that marks the precise start time of the event. The freed electrons then drift slowly through the chamber under the influence of an electric field. Near one end of the vessel, they enter a narrow region where the field is strong enough to accelerate them into producing a second, much brighter burst of light, but not so strong that it triggers a chaotic avalanche. This gentle, controlled amplification, known as electroluminescence, is the key innovation of the NEXT program, because it preserves an extremely accurate measurement of the total energy deposited in the gas.

A fixed number…

That energy precision matters enormously. If neutrinoless double beta decay exists in xenon-136, it would always deposit energy at one exact value: about 2.46 million electron volts, a fixed number set by the physics of the nucleus. NEXT-100 is designed to measure energy to better than one percent precision, which allows it to pick out a genuine signal from the much broader fog of ordinary radioactive contamination that would otherwise swamp it.

…and a shape

But energy alone is not enough. The detector also records the shape of the electron tracks, and this is where things get particularly elegant. A true neutrinoless double beta decay produces two electrons that fly apart from the same point, each depositing a distinctive blob of energy at the end of its track. Most background events look quite different, typically resembling a single electron with only one such bright endpoint. By checking both the energy and the track shape simultaneously, the detector acts as a kind of double filter, rejecting far more background than either measurement could alone.

Health checks by radon

The collaboration reports that NEXT-100 has already been operating stably during its commissioning phase, first with argon and then with xenon gas. One particularly striking part of the story is how the team uses naturally occurring radioactive decays from radon, a gas that inevitably seeps into the detector in tiny amounts, as an internal health check. By tracking those decays over time, the physicists can confirm that electrons are drifting cleanly across the entire gas volume without being absorbed, a crucial requirement for the detector to work as intended.

Materials science

Another thread running through the whole project is one that might surprise you: much of particle physics turns out to be materials science. Every component of the detector, from the lead bricks forming the outer shield to the ultra-pure copper blocks lining the inside, from the plastic structural supports to the resistors shaping the electric field, has been selected or tested for extremely low levels of natural radioactivity. Even the red paint on the lead shielding had to be stripped away after it was found to contain too many radioactive contaminants during an earlier phase of the experiment. In this kind of search, a carelessly chosen bolt can generate as much unwanted background as hours of real data.

Something much bigger

What makes this experiment particularly exciting is that it is explicitly designed as a proof of concept for something much bigger. NEXT-100 aims to probe neutrinoless double beta decay half-lives on the order of ten thousand trillion trillion years, a number so large it dwarfs the age of the universe by a factor of about a trillion. If it reaches that sensitivity, and if the technology scales as the team expects, it would strengthen the case for a future ton-scale detector that could decisively test whether neutrinos are truly their own antiparticles.

So this detector is a bridge between engineering and cosmology. By watching a carefully purified volume of xenon gas deep underground, physicists are hunting for an event so rare it may happen less than once in ten thousand trillion trillion years per atom. Yet if they ever see it, the consequences would ripple through our understanding of mass, symmetry, and the cosmic origin of matter itself.

Author: César Tomé López is a science writer and the editor of Mapping Ignorance

Disclaimer: Parts of this article may have been copied verbatim or almost verbatim from the referenced research paper/s.

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Imagine you’re in line at your favourite bakery, deciding whether to have a doughnut or a tart. You weigh them up, the doughnut wins, and you settle on that.

By the time you’re at the front of the line, however, only tarts are left. So, you buy one.

These two decisions feel completely different. One involves deliberation based on our unique and personal preferences, while the other involves simply recognising and picking the only available option.

But our latest research published in the journal Imaging Neuroscience shows our brains actually make these decisions in surprisingly similar ways.

What exactly is a free choice?

When we make free decisions, we recognise multiple options exist, weigh them up, and commit to one based on something internal: our preferences, values and goals.

Forced decisions are different. There’s only one possible outcome, and our job is simply to identify the option and take it.

Because free decisions feel so closely tied to who we are, neuroscientists have long assumed they rely on different processes in the brain compared to forced decisions. Some brain imaging studies support this, showing different patterns of neural activity distributed across the brain.

However, knowing where in the brain free choices happen tells us little about how they are formed – and whether this process is any different from forced decisions.

How does the brain form decisions?

Decades of research have shown that, to make decisions, our brains gradually gather evidence for each option over time.

Think of it like a judge evaluating the facts of a case. Once enough evidence has been accumulated in favour of one party, a verdict is reached. For some types of decisions, this happens very quickly (over hundreds of milliseconds), making it feel like the choice just popped into your head.

By measuring electrical brain activity, researchers have identified a brain signal that reflects this accumulation of evidence during simple decisions – such as judging whether a traffic light is red or green.

Like a loading bar building to 100%, the signal gradually rises to a particular level before a decision is made. Because the action of neurons in the brain is noisy, this decision-making process also occurs in a noisy fashion: rather than climbing steadily towards one option, the signal fluctuates back and forth between the alternatives.

This partly explains why we aren’t always consistent with our choices – even when our preferences are stable, some days we will go for the tart and others, the doughnut.

This signal has been identified for forced decisions with a clear correct answer. But what about choices that are open-ended – shaped not just by what’s in front of us, but by something internal like preferences or personal goals?

Tracing brain signals of decision formation

To answer this question, we recorded people’s brain activity while they chose between sets of coloured balloons. They viewed either two balloons of different colours to freely choose between, or a single balloon they were forced to pick.

They pressed a button the moment they made their choice, and we tracked how brain activity unfolded in the lead-up to that moment.

For both free and forced decisions, the brain activity unfolded in a very similar way. Like a loading bar, it climbed steadily to the same peak level just before a choice was made. When people decided quickly, the signal increased faster. When they took longer, it rose more slowly.

That’s exactly what you would expect if the brain were tracking and weighing up evidence over time, rather than simply reacting to a decision at the last moment.

Does this mean our free choices aren’t really free?

From this finding, one might assume the brain forms free and forced decisions in the same way, suggesting decision-making in the brain may be more automatic than it feels.

This echoes famous experiments by neuroscientist Benjamin Libet in the 1980s. He and colleagues found brain activity begins ramping up before people are even consciously aware of their intention to act – suggesting the brain has already begun deciding before the person consciously realises they’ve made a choice.

But while the process may be automatic, what the brain is accumulating tells a different story. The evidence it weighs up is drawn entirely from who you are – your preferences, your goals, your experiences. Two people may go through the same neural process and land on the same choice, and yet arrive there for completely different reasons.

So rather than asking whether our choices are truly free, perhaps the better question is what it really means for a choice to be yours. And the next time you find yourself in line at the bakery, know that your brain has already been quietly gathering evidence toward your baked good of choice, and that choice happens a little faster than you realise.

 

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Original article.

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As global temperatures rise, the incidence of wildfires is increasing in many regions. This is mainly because higher average temperatures and changing weather conditions are drying out land and vegetation, making them more flammable. The study in Nature Climate Change shows that wildfires can break out closer to the poles than before. In some areas, the fire seasons may also double in length. This is under a medium scenario where the emissions don’t sharply increase or get cut till the end of this century.

“Our research shows that wildfires pose an ever-increasing threat to biodiversity. We find that nearly 84% of species vulnerable to wildfires will face a higher risk by the end of this century,” says Xiaoye Yang, a researcher at the University of Gothenburg and the study’s lead author.

13 climate models

Previous research into how biodiversity is affected by global climate change has mainly focused on gradual changes to habitats. Less attention has been paid to how climate-driven wildfires affect the long-term survival of plants and animals.

The research team, including Chalmers University of Technology, combined 13 climate models with a machine learning-based method to forecast changes in the wildfire burned area and the length of the fire season up to the end of this century. They then assessed how these changes affect the risk to species worldwide, based on a Red List from the IUCN (International Union for Conservation of Nature). The Red List includes 9,592 species whose survival is currently threatened by the increasing occurrence and severity of wildfires.

“Species with small ranges are particularly vulnerable. The most affected species are concentrated in South America, South Asia and Australia, and a large proportion of them are already endangered. An increase in the frequency of wildfires could push some of them closer to extinction,” says Yang.

Even species that have previously been spared from wildfires are facing a new threat, but there is a lack of research to assess how serious that threat is.

Global trends of increasing risk

The researchers calculated the increase in wildfires based on the IPCC’s various global warming scenarios. Under a moderate scenario involving a temperature rise of around 2.7 degrees compared with pre-industrial levels, the study shows that:

• The global area affected by wildfires could increase by around 9.3%
• Fire seasons could be extended by 22.8%
• Almost 84% of species vulnerable to fire will face an increased risk of wildfires

The study highlights significant regional differences. While the risk of wildfires is increasing in many parts of the world, certain regions in Africa may see a reduction in the area affected by fires due to a wetter climate in the future.

Climate action can reduce risk

The researchers also show that measures to limit emissions can significantly reduce the occurrence of wildfires. Compared with a high-emissions scenario, a future with moderate emissions could reduce the increase in species’ vulnerability to wildfires by more than 60%. Regions such as New Zealand, South America and areas near the Arctic would benefit most from reduced emissions.

“Current conservation strategies for vulnerable plants and animals risk underestimating future threats if they do not take into account disturbances such as wildfires,” says Yang.

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DELTA is a 1.5-GeV synchrotron radiation source operated by the TU Dortmund University. This singular university-based facility with emphasis on research and education, offers high degree of flexibility both for user experiments and accelerator physics and technology.

Most of the world’s synchrotrons are designed to provide a continuous supply of radiation to users in a variety of scientific and industrial fields. Even though Bremsstrahlung ¹ is an inherently quantum process, synchrotron radiation of electron beams in a storage ring can be well-described as an electromagnetic wave in the frame of classical electrodynamics. In ordinary electron synchrotrons the radiated power can be calculated using the Larmor formula and its relativistic generalizations describing charged particle radiation under acceleration.

The classical electrodynamics approach for synchrotrons is based on the assumption that radiation is a continuous process, which is well modelled up to very high energies which are not attainable even in the most powerful modern accelerators. However, the discrete nature of radiation includes the recoil of an electron when it emits a photon. Also, the resulting radiation polarization depends on the electron spin. Thus, the statistical properties of photons provide additional information beyond the classical treatment to explain the stochastic emission of quanta by individual electrons.

Single-electron experiments in a storage ring allow us to study in detail the quantum nature of synchrotron light as well as to develop new technology for beam diagnostics in accelerators. To produce a single-electron beam in DELTA, a low single bunch of electron current is first injected in the storage ring and a beam scraper is used to detect and remove the beam halo. Photons emitted by electrons in a dipole magnet or an undulator can be easily detected using a photomultiplier or an avalanche photodiode. At beamline BL 4 in DELTA the single-electron beam is prepared and measured ². The main non-invasive measurement set-up is shown in Figure 1.

The setup was first tested with a moderate single-bunch electron current and a strongly attenuated beam of synchrotron radiation. The scraper is moved close to the electron beam, considering the electron period of 384ns in the ring, to drastically increase the loss rate. In Figure 2 it is shown the radiated photons per second measured in the storage ring by eliminating the last 22 electrons in the injected bunch. Each step marked in red corresponds to the loss of one electron.

The emission of a photon by a single electron at approximately every 100th passage through an undulator is completely different from the classical description. It is remarkable that, unlike typical objects to study quantum mechanical phenomena, an undulator usually extends over several meters. This may allow us to use standard accelerator techniques like radiofrequency and magnetic fields to manipulate non-classical properties.

Note for instance that the recoil gives momentum to the excitation of radial degrees of freedom of an electron when it radiates a photon. Thus, the trajectory of the electron experiments a quantum widening. The electromagnetic radiation by a charged fermion moving in an external magnetic field depends on the spin of the fermion. This effect was first proposed and computed by Sokolov and Ternov, and measurement on a storage ring to develop further QED testing and new quantum diagnostics technology for particle beams are areas of significant current interest.

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STRAWBERRY fields

A new study ¹, charmingly named STRAWBERRY, offers a fresh answer. Instead of defining a halo by drawing an arbitrary boundary around where the matter density becomes “high enough,” the researchers ask a more physical question: which dark matter particles are truly trapped by the halo’s gravity, and which are only passing through? This may sound like a technical distinction, but it changes the way we think about cosmic structure.

Imagine a mountain valley in fog. Some hikers are clearly inside the valley, unable to leave without climbing over the ridge. Others are simply crossing nearby slopes and will soon move on. Previous methods often counted both groups together because they only looked at how crowded the area was. STRAWBERRY instead studies the shape of the gravitational “landscape” itself, identifying the valleys, the ridges between them, and the particles whose energy is too low to escape.

In practice, the team uses what they call the gravitational potential: a map of “gravitational altitude” that assigns a single number to every point in space, telling you how tightly gravity holds a particle there. A particle belongs to a halo if it does not have enough energy to cross the nearest gravitational pass that leads into a deeper neighbouring valley. This makes the halo boundary a true dynamical edge, defined by motion and energy, not by a human-chosen threshold.

Layered haloes

The most important result is conceptually beautiful. Dark matter haloes appear to be made of two distinct layers.

The inner layer is genuinely bound. These particles orbit the halo for long times, settle into a near equilibrium state, and create a structure with a real finite size. In the simulations, this bound core shows a sharp outer cutoff, meaning the halo mass naturally converges instead of fading ambiguously into space forever.

Outside it lies a second population, particles that are not truly captive. Some are falling in for the first time; others have swung around once and are splashing back outward — cosmologists call these the “splashback” population. They still contribute to the familiar extended halo profile, but physically they are part of the surrounding cosmic traffic rather than the stable heart of the halo.

A dark ecosystem

Thus, a dark matter halo is not just a fuzzy blob. It is more like a living ecosystem with a stable core and a constantly changing environment. After all, almost every major prediction in modern cosmology depends on haloes. We use them to estimate galaxy masses, model galaxy clustering, infer how structure grew after the Big Bang, and compare dark matter theories with observations. If we misunderstand what belongs to a halo, we can bias those results.

This work moves us away from bookkeeping definitions and toward a definition rooted in dynamics, energy, and fate. Instead of asking where matter happens to be dense today, it asks what matter is right now energetically bound to the structure. When astronomers compare theoretical haloes to galaxy surveys, they may now be able to separate the long-lived gravitational skeleton from the transient inflow around it. This new framework may therefore sharpen the bridge between simulations and real observations.

Author: César Tomé López is a science writer and the editor of Mapping Ignorance

Disclaimer: Parts of this article may have been copied verbatim or almost verbatim from the referenced research paper/s.

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