A Stanford Medicine-led study published in Nature Neuroscience on 18 September reports that the human brain forms from two separate populations of progenitor cells rather than one. The forebrain and midbrain come from one group, while the hindbrain develops from a distinct second group. The team traced the same two-origin pattern across 550 million years of evolution, finding it in chickens, zebrafish and acorn worms. Jellyfish, which split from the human line 600 to 700 million years ago, carry two nervous systems at opposite ends of the body. The authors say the finding may help research into neurological disease.
The AnWj antigen was identified in 1972 and named after two patients, Anton and Wj, but nobody could say which gene produced it. Researchers at NHS Blood and Transplant's International Blood Group Reference Laboratory in Bristol, with the University of Bristol and international partners, have now found the answer on the MAL gene. That created MAL, the 47th blood group system, registered as ISBT 047 and ratified in the society's 2026 terminology report alongside ER, CD36 and ATP11C. AnWj-negative people do not carry the full-length Mal protein on their red cells. The practical gain is a genetic test that helps reference laboratories find compatible blood faster for patients who would react to AnWj-positive transfusions.
Researchers at Oak Ridge National Laboratory have developed a one-pot process that converts polyethylene into gasoline- and diesel-like fuels using cheap molten aluminium-based salts that act as both catalyst and solvent. The reaction runs below 200 degrees Celsius and needs no added hydrogen, no extra solvent and no precious-metal catalysts. It produces liquid alkanes, the same class of molecules refineries already handle, which raises the prospect that waste plastic could displace some refinery feedstock instead of being burned or buried. The work was reported on September 21. The open questions are continuous-flow behaviour, tolerance of contaminated plastic feed and long-run energy balance.
NASA awarded SpaceX a 946 million dollar contract modification to fly three more astronaut missions to the International Space Station. The flights, labeled Crew-15, Crew-16 and Crew-17, extend the company's Commercial Crew Transportation Capability agreement to 17 missions and a total value of 5.92 billion dollars, with a performance period running through 2030. SpaceX is flying Crew-12 and expects to launch Crew-13 in early October. Boeing's Starliner has still not flown an operational crew rotation after its 2024 test flight ended with astronauts returning on another vehicle. NASA says the deal keeps access to the station through two commercial partners.
Engineers at the Robotics and AI Institute have built a two-armed robot that trades stiffness for speed, aiming to catch, throw and hand over objects the way people do. AthenaZero is about 1.6 metres tall with 22 actuators across 27 joints, and uses quasi-direct drive motors with the heavy transmission parts moved away from the joints. Reflected inertia is about an order of magnitude lower than a conventional high-stiffness arm, giving an effective hand mass comparable to a human's. The team says dynamic manipulation needs hardware that can be pushed around by the world, not arms that fight contact.
Anak Krakatau erupted for more than 24 hours in early September, sending volcanic ash as high as 50,000 feet into the atmosphere, according to ScienceDaily. The ash cloud shut eight airports, disrupted nearly 3,000 flights and affected air quality as far away as Jakarta. The volcano sits in the Sunda Strait between Java and Sumatra, in the caldera left by the 1883 eruption of Krakatau, one of the deadliest in recorded history. Ash is dangerous to jet engines because the particles melt and stick to turbine blades, which is why authorities close airspace instead of flying through a plume.
A study led by the Southwest Research Institute offers the first evidence that liquid nitrogen has recently flowed on Pluto's surface. Researchers used images from NASA's New Horizons spacecraft to examine dark, narrow features along the northern edge of Sputnik Planitia, the huge nitrogen glacier that forms the western lobe of Pluto's heart-shaped region. The features resemble patterns on Greenland's ice sheet where liquid water darkens snow and ice. The team suggests nitrogen melts near the base of the glacier and rises through cracks. The paper was published in The Planetary Science Journal.
The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope has passed its post-launch systems check while operating in deep space, NASA said this week. The observatory launched on August 30 aboard a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket from Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Roman is an infrared telescope with a field of view far larger than Hubble's, which lets it survey wide patches of sky in single exposures. It will study dark energy and find exoplanets through microlensing. The mission now enters commissioning, a phase expected to last several months as teams calibrate detectors, check pointing stability and test observing modes. NASA had committed to launch no later than May 2027 and moved the date forward after final assembly finished in late 2025, which the agency cites as evidence it can still deliver flagship science missions on schedule and within budget.
The Lasker Foundation announced its 2026 awards, often called America's Nobel prizes. Emmanuel Mignot of Stanford University School of Medicine and Masashi Yanagisawa of the University of Tsukuba share the Albert Lasker Basic Medical Research Award for work that explained how sleep is regulated and what goes wrong in narcolepsy. Kunihiro Hattori, Takehisa Kitazawa and Tomoyuki Igawa of Chugai Pharmaceutical receive the Lasker-DeBakey Clinical Medical Research Award for a new kind of hemophilia treatment. Michael J. Fox receives the Lasker-Bloomberg Public Service Award for building the largest nonprofit funder of Parkinson's research.
An international team led by Cardiff University says the inductive effect, a standard concept in organic chemistry, travels only across a single bond in neutral molecules rather than weakening over three or four bonds as textbooks have taught for almost 100 years. Their new paper in the Journal of Chemical Education pulls together scattered evidence and their own dataset. Two A-level exam boards have already announced reviews of how they teach the topic.