2026-08-14の世界

Scientists in Switzerland have found a surprising hidden talent inside the adult brain: the power to rebuild itself after injury. A team at the University of Zurich, led by Bruno Weber together with co-lead researchers Marina Herwerth and Matthias Wyss, studied the brains of living mice using two-photon microscopy, a technique that let them watch tiny injuries heal in real time over several weeks. Inside each injury, just under 0.5 millimeters wide, the team found a special group of astrocytes, star-shaped support cells that normally help feed and protect neurons. These astrocytes did something nobody expected. They sent the nuclei of newly formed daughter cells sliding along their long, star-shaped arms, all the way across the damaged area, to rebuild the broken cell network piece by piece. Weber said the discovery reveals what he called a previously unknown ability of the adult brain to repair itself. The study, published in Nature Neuroscience, was carried out in mice, so scientists do not yet know for certain whether human brains heal the same way. Even so, researchers hope that learning to switch on this hidden repair system could one day help people recover from brain injuries and certain brain disorders.

A baby lion at a zoo in Pittsburgh just got a name with a very personal story behind it. The female African lion cub, born on April 5 to first-time parents Hondo and Scarlett, made her public debut on August 10, which is also World Lion Day. Zoo staff invited the public to help choose her name and received 1,141 suggestions, raising 5,705 dollars in donations for the zoo's animals along the way. In the end, keepers chose the name Kiazi, a Swahili word meaning potato. The name honors her father Hondo, who came to Pittsburgh from the Idaho Falls Zoo in Idaho, a state famous for growing potatoes. Assistant Curator of Mammals Karen Vacco said keepers loved the name because Kiazi is Hondo's first cub and he is from Idaho. Vacco also said every lion cub birth is vital to the long-term survival of the species, since African lions are considered vulnerable in the wild. Visitors can look for Kiazi exploring the African Savanna habitat, though when she appears depends entirely on her own curious schedule that day.

Engineers in Taiwan have found a clever way to make future computer chips both smaller and more powerful at the same time. A team at National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University, working with TSMC Corporate Research, built an ultra-thin transistor from molybdenum disulfide, a material only one atom layer thick. For years, researchers trying to shrink these atom-thin transistors ran into a frustrating trade-off: making the insulating layer thinner usually made the transistor perform worse. The Taiwanese team solved this by focusing on the interface itself, the tiny boundary where materials meet. They grew a buffer layer of aluminum oxide just 0.42 nanometers thick between the semiconductor and its gate material, keeping the whole stack about one nanometer thick while the transistor still performed well. Wen-Hao Chang, the study's corresponding author, said engineering that atomic boundary let the team reduce a trade-off that had limited two-dimensional transistors for years. Co-author Tsung-En Lee added that once components become only a few atomic layers thick, the interface itself becomes an active part of the device. The research, published in Nature Electronics, could help chipmakers keep building smaller, faster electronics after silicon reaches its physical limits.

A 97-year-old grandmother in England just proved that age does not have to slow anyone down. On August 4, Betty Bromage strapped herself to the top wing of a biplane at RFC Rendcomb Airfield near Cirencester and flew through the sky standing up, breaking her own Guinness World Records title for oldest female wing walker at 97 years and 127 days old. Bromage, a former nurse from Cheltenham, first set the record in 2022 at age 93 and has now completed six wing walks since she turned 87. The flight came almost exactly one year after Bromage suffered a stroke that still affects her speech today. She used the challenge to raise money for the stroke unit at Cheltenham General Hospital, the same ward where staff cared for her after her stroke. Asked why she keeps taking on these daredevil challenges, Bromage said she would simply get bored of life otherwise, adding that since she can no longer drive or see very well, she wants to keep doing the things she still can. Her wing walk shows that a record can be broken more than once, and that courage has no age limit.

Astronomers have found a brand-new kind of object in space, and it looks like nothing anyone has ever seen before. A team led by Rohan Naidu at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology used NASA's James Webb Space Telescope to study a strange point of light from just a few hundred million years after the Big Bang. At first, it looked like an incredibly bright star. But the numbers did not add up: the object shines about 100 billion times brighter than an ordinary star. The team now believes it is something entirely new, a "black hole star." Inside, a black hole about 100,000 times heavier than our sun is feeding on gas so fast that it becomes wrapped in a thick, glowing cocoon of hydrogen roughly the size of our entire solar system. That cocoon, rather than nuclear fusion, is what makes the object shine like a star. Naidu said the object "looks a bit like a star but is 100 billion times brighter." Scientists have spotted many puzzling ultra-bright "little red dots" with Webb since 2022, and this discovery, published in Nature on August 12, may finally help explain what several of them really are.

A tiny fossil found in Argentina is changing what scientists thought they knew about the history of live birth. Researchers led by Dr. Leandro Gaetano at CONICET, Argentina's national science council, studied the 236-million-year-old remains of a young Chiniquodon theotonicus, an ancient relative of modern mammals. This animal belonged to a group called cynodonts, which lived long before true mammals appeared and were long assumed to have laid eggs, just like reptiles. Inside the fossil's bones, the team found something called a neonatal line, a tiny growth ring that forms right after birth and is rarely preserved. It showed that the baby weighed about 1.7 kilograms at birth, compared with 12 kilograms as an adult, a ratio close to that of modern mammals and nothing like an egg-laying animal. Gaetano said the evidence suggests that viviparity, the scientific term for live birth, appeared in the mammal family line at least 90 to 95 million years earlier than scientists had believed. The fossil, cataloged as CRILAR PV109, is one of the few specimens ever found with this kind of growth line preserved. The study, published in Frontiers in Mammal Science on August 13, suggests that live birth may have evolved more than once among ancient cynodonts.

Japan added a new satellite to its home-grown positioning system this week, and the launch marked an important comeback for the country's space program. On August 11, JAXA launched its H3 rocket, flight number 9, from Tanegashima Space Center at 4:23am local time, carrying a satellite called Michibiki-7. About 29 minutes after liftoff, the rocket released the satellite exactly as planned, and Michibiki-7 reached its intended orbit. Michibiki is part of Japan's Quasi-Zenith Satellite System, which works alongside GPS to give smartphones, cars, and other devices more accurate positioning across Japan and the wider Asia-Pacific region. This launch was especially meaningful because it was the first H3 mission carrying an operational satellite since an earlier H3 rocket failed in December. JAXA said the rocket "flew as planned" throughout the flight, showing that engineers had successfully fixed the issues behind the previous failure. With this success, seven of the nine H3 rockets launched so far have completed their missions without problems. The achievement is a reassuring sign for Japan's space industry, which is counting on the H3 rocket to launch future missions at a lower cost than its predecessor.

A doctor from County Donegal just became one of the biggest stars of Irish athletics, and he did it by beating some of Europe's fastest runners. On August 13, 33-year-old Mark English won the men's 800-meter final at the European Athletics Championships in Birmingham, crossing the line in 1 minute 45.26 seconds. Croatia's Marino Bloudek took silver in 1:45.62, and Spain's Mohamed Attaoui claimed bronze in 1:45.71. English had already won bronze medals at this event in 2014 and in 2022, but this was his first gold, making it the sixth European Championships medal of his career. Along the way to the final, he also ran a blistering 1:43.49 in the semifinal, breaking a championship record that had stood for 48 years. "I really wanted that title, like really badly," English said after the race. "We get into the sport to run records and to win races, primarily." English balances his running career with work as a qualified medical doctor, a combination that has made his achievements even more admired back home in Ireland. His victory is being celebrated as a historic moment, since it makes him the first Irish man ever to win an individual title at the European Athletics Championships.

Imagine a shirt that can charge your phone and warn you about dangerous gas at the same time, all through a single thread. Scientists at the Korea Institute of Materials Science, together with Pusan National University and Korea Aerospace University, built a fiber that does exactly that. The team, led by researchers Myungkwan Song and Hee-jung Lee, started with a fiber-shaped solar cell and added a special material called a metal-organic framework, or MOF. They tuned this MOF, called UiO-66, with two different chemical groups so it could grab hydrogen sulfide, a toxic gas with a rotten-egg smell that is common in factories and sewers. The new fiber converts sunlight into electricity with 7.16 percent efficiency, about 29 percent better than earlier versions, and it can also power its own gas sensor without any battery. When hydrogen sulfide is present, the fiber detects it in about nine seconds. Tests showed the fiber kept 80 percent of its performance even after 1,500 bends and 20 washes, tough enough for real clothing. The researchers, whose work appeared in the Chemical Engineering Journal, say the fiber could lead to smart work uniforms that protect factory workers from harmful gases.

A single brain cell might be smarter than an entire computer chip, according to a new study from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Neuroscientists have long treated a neuron like a simple switch that is either on or off. Professor Idan Segev and his team, working at the Edmond and Lily Safra Center for Brain Sciences, wanted to test that idea more precisely. They built a new measuring tool called the Functional Complexity Index, powered by deep learning, and used it to study detailed models of human and rat cortical neurons. The results showed that human neurons process information in a far more complex way than rat neurons do, with some human cells performing computations as rich as an entire multi-layered artificial neural network. Segev said a single human neuron is itself an extraordinarily sophisticated computing device. The team believes this difference in neuron-level computing power, not just the number of neurons a brain has, may help explain human strengths in language, imagination, and math. The findings, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, could also guide engineers who are designing brain-inspired artificial intelligence, since chips built from computationally rich units might process information more efficiently.

For decades, doctors and archaeologists both believed that when an ancient child's bones showed one particular kind of infection, it almost certainly meant the mother had syphilis. A new study from Charles Sturt University in Australia is now challenging that long-standing assumption. Researchers examined skeletal remains of 309 people from 16 archaeological sites across Vietnam, spanning roughly 10,000 to 1,000 years ago. Among them, three young children, two from the Man Bac site in northern Vietnam, showed clear dental and skeletal signs of a disease passed from mother to child before birth. The children's remains were around 3,500 years old. Lead researcher Dr. Melandri Vlok said this kind of congenital infection has usually been treated as strong evidence of venereal syphilis, but her team's evidence points instead to yaws, a related but non-sexually transmitted disease. Yaws still affects more than 150,000 people worldwide today and can cause permanent disability if untreated. Vlok said that if congenital transmission can occur in non-venereal treponematoses, then researchers need to rethink how they interpret skeletal evidence from the past. The study, published in the International Journal of Osteoarchaeology, suggests archaeologists may need new ways to read ancient bones.

Nineteen-year-old Sara Curtis of Italy stunned the swimming world this week by breaking a world record that many thought would stand for years. At the European Aquatics Championships in Paris on August 12, Curtis touched the wall in 26.63 seconds in the semifinals of the women's 50-meter backstroke, breaking Kaylee McKeown's world record of 26.86 seconds, a mark the Australian swimmer had held since October 2023. Curtis, who studies and swims at the University of Virginia in the United States, had already enjoyed a strong week in Paris, winning bronze in the 100-meter freestyle and silver in the 4x100-meter freestyle relay. Her new world record also improved on her own previous best time of 27.07 seconds, set in June at the Sette Colli meet in Rome. "I knew I was capable of doing it but I didn't expect it here, in this race, in this moment," Curtis said afterward. Her swim instantly became one of the standout moments of the championships, showing how much progress a young swimmer can make in just a few months.