Researchers with the ATLAS experiment at CERN's Large Hadron Collider say they have found evidence of the Higgs boson decaying into a virtual photon and a real photon. The pathway is expected in only about one in 10,000 Higgs decays, making it one of the hardest to observe. The result helps physicists test how the Higgs particle interacts with other particles. Teams will collect more data to confirm the finding and sharpen their measurements.
Astronomers report the first radio waves seen coming from an exoplanet, a signal that hints at auroras in another solar system. The detection adds a new tool for studying the magnetic fields of planets beyond our own. In a separate advance, physicists used radioactive lutetium to build what they describe as the most accurate atomic clock ever, keeping time to 19 decimal places. Canada's CHIME telescope also produced a measurement of dark energy after seven years of work, and CERN's ATLAS team found evidence of an extremely rare Higgs boson decay.
A small fossil from Scotland that has been described for nearly 30 years as one of the earliest known reptiles belongs to a much older lineage, according to a study published on 30 September in Nature. Researchers at the American Museum of Natural History, the University of Oxford and the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility rebuilt the specimen, nicknamed Lizzie, in three dimensions. The scans showed internal gills and a fish-like mouth lined with thousands of tiny teeth, identifying it as a derived stem tetrapod rather than an early amniote. The find changes how the fossil can be used as evidence for the move onto land.
NASA and SpaceX are targeting 1 October for the launch of Crew-13 from Cape Canaveral. The Falcon 9 will carry four astronauts in a Dragon capsule that could reach the International Space Station in about seven hours and 50 minutes, which would be the fastest US crewed trip to the outpost on record. Docking is expected around 7 p.m. EDT. The mission was pushed back from September after engineers found an oxidiser leak in Dragon's propulsion system; teams replaced an oxidiser valve and completed readiness reviews.
SpaceX flew Starship's 14th test flight and, for the first time, performed an orbital insertion burn. The upper stage carried 26 Starlink V3 satellites and released them in space. The mission aimed for about six orbits at roughly 275 km before a deorbit burn with a single Raptor engine and a controlled splashdown in the Pacific west of Chile. Reports say the flight hit an engine failure and was cut short. The Super Heavy booster was ditched in the Gulf of Mexico. Earlier flights deliberately flew below orbital velocity.
Researchers have recovered more than 12,000 microscopic fossils from 1.7-billion-year-old rocks in northern Australia. The cells are early eukaryotes, the group that includes all plants, animals and fungi, and they date from long before animals appeared. Chemistry of the surrounding rock shows the eukaryotes thrived only in shallow, oxygenated coastal water; in deeper water where oxygen had not reached, the fossil assemblages contained only simple single-celled bacteria. The fossils range from plain spheres to elaborate forms with jutting appendages, plates and creased surfaces. The find adds evidence that rising oxygen, not just evolutionary invention, gate-kept the spread of complex cells.
Researchers in China developed an in-situ dual-interface treatment that improves the performance and durability of large-area perovskite solar modules. The team used 5-aminovaleric acid hydroiodide (5AVAI) as a bifunctional molecular spacer during slot-die coating. Modules measuring 10 cm by 10 cm reached 22.31% power conversion efficiency, 21.69% certified, and kept 95.6% of their initial efficiency after 2,000 hours of operation at 75°C. Small-area perovskite cells already exceed 27%, but scaling up has cost both efficiency and stability. The approach removes a post-processing step.
Engineers at CERN have begun removing some of the Large Hadron Collider's most important magnets, the start of the hardest phase of the machine's High-Luminosity upgrade. The 27-kilometre ring is offline for the work. The replacement superconducting magnets produce fields about 40 percent stronger, which lets operators squeeze the particle beams into a tighter focus and raise the number of collisions per second. The upgrade is meant to multiply the total data the collider collects over its lifetime, making rare processes measurable. The new magnets are manufactured in series and tested individually before installation, along with upgraded cryogenics and vacuum systems.
A team led by Worcester Polytechnic Institute has won a $3.3 million National Science Foundation award to test whether biological tricks used by diatoms, sea sponges and plants can pull rare earth elements and silica out of coal ash, red mud and mine tailings. One estimate puts 11 million tons of rare earth elements in US coal ash, worth $8.4 billion, or nearly eight times current domestic reserves. The five-year project also aims to turn the leftover silica into useful products, cutting energy use and harsh chemicals. The project brings together biology, geochemistry, materials science, metallurgy, engineering, computational chemistry and artificial intelligence.
Refineries separate crude oil by heating it above 350C and cooling the vapour, a process that consumes roughly 1,100 terawatt-hours a year worldwide, about the output of 130 large nuclear plants. A team led by KAIST with Georgia Tech has shown that a bare, inexpensive polyacrylonitrile membrane can fractionate real crude at room temperature: heavy hydrocarbons settle on the pore walls and narrow them into channels under 2 nanometres, letting naphtha, gasoline and kerosene through while holding the rest back. Simulations put energy savings at 32% as a distillation pre-treatment.