Mike Meetz and Sam Wormley team up to provide a lively
discussion with OLLI members about science in the news. A
deep understanding of science is not required to share and
discuss recent Science in the News. Previous Classes.
⓵ Scientists Say the Universe Isn't Slowing Down After All
https://scitechdaily.com/scientists-say-the-universe-isnt-slowing-down-after-all/
Summary
An international team of astrophysicists, including Nobel
Laureates, has reaffirmed that the universe is still
expanding at an accelerating rate, challenging a previous
study suggesting deceleration. The team argues that the
standard explanation involving dark energy remains valid,
countering claims that dark energy might be weakening. Their
findings, published in Monthly Notices of the Royal
Astronomical Society, address errors in age estimates and
mass corrections in the previous study.
⓶ AI Has Solved One of Math's $1 Million Millennium Prize Problems | Quanta Magazine
On the morning of Tuesday, September 8, mathematicians at
OpenAI announced that a group of 10,000 autonomous AI agents
under their direction, running on an advanced model not
available to the public, had found a "singularity" in the
Navier-Stokes equations in three dimensions - thus resolving
one of the six remaining(opens a new tab) Millennium Prize
Problems posed in 2000 by the Clay Mathematics Institute,
each of which carries a $1 million prize. Their result has
been formally checked in the programming language Lean,
giving mathematicians confidence that it is indeed correct.
If the result holds up to further scrutiny, it is, by a
significant margin, the most important mathematical proof to
have been arrived at by an artificial-intelligence model to
date, possibly marking a fundamental turning point in how
mathematicians tackle difficult problems.
This particular difficult problem deals with differential
equations, which express relationships between changing
quantities. They are arguably the single most important
mathematical tool for explaining the world around us. As a
rule, they are easy to write down and hard to solve.
https://www.quantamagazine.org/ai-has-solved-one-of-maths-1-million-millennium-prize-problems-20260908/
⓷ 4.6-Billion-Year-Old Meteorite Reveals a Surprisingly Strong Primordial Magnetic Field
Summary
MIT researchers discovered traces of a strong magnetic field
in microscopic grains from a 4.6-billion-year-old meteorite.
This field, estimated to be 3-12 times stronger than Earth's
current field, likely helped move material inward during the
solar system's formation. The findings suggest magnetism
played a significant role in shaping the early solar system
alongside gravity.
https://scitechdaily.com/4-6-billion-year-old-meteorite-reveals-a-surprisingly-strong-primordial-magnetic-field/
⓸ Future catastrophic weather could be 'far worse' than history suggests
Summary
Scientists at King's College London warn that historical
records of deadly storms and heat waves may underestimate
the scale of future weather disasters. Current risk
assessment tools fail to consider unprecedented events, such
as a devastating heat wave coinciding with a strong
hurricane. The authors propose horizon scans, better
understanding of impact thresholds, and mapping physical
weather limits to preempt and prevent severe impacts.
https://phys.org/news/2026-09-future-catastrophic-weather-worse-history.html
⓹ Asteroid Ryugu's dust reveals nitrogen's slow concentration into complex molecules
Summary
A study of dust from the asteroid Ryugu, returned by Japan's
Hayabusa2 mission, revealed nitrogen-bearing compounds
concentrated around sodium carbonate. This suggests that
asteroids like Ryugu acted as slow-cooking chemical
reactors, gradually concentrating nitrogen over millions of
years before delivering it to forming planets. This process
could have provided the building blocks for life on Earth.
https://phys.org/news/2026-09-asteroid-ryugu-reveals-nitrogen-complex.html
⓺ Newly created viruses are a warning. We still have a window to stop Al-enabled bioweapons - Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists
"Nature is the world's worst bioterrorist" is a common maxim
in the field of biosecurity, a reference to the idea that
naturally emerging pathogens cause far more deaths than any
biological attack a terrorist could carry out. But the trope
may soon be outdated. In an article published Aug. 6 in the
journal Science, scientists demonstrated that trained AI
models can design novel viruses as well as -if not better
than - nature itself.
Their experiment created viruses that infect bacteria, not
humans. Still, much like the multiple AI models that escaped
their test environments to hack other networks this summer,
these newly revealed capabilities give biosecurity experts
like me pause. How do we keep enabling legitimate scientific
progress, while also preventing AI from assisting in the
creation of biological weapons?
As AI capabilities advance, viral bioweapons could become
much easier to design and produce and could cause even more
harm than the weapons used in the past. Consider that almost
all the bioterrorist attacks in our modern era have involved
substances like anthrax or ricin. While they've harmed
dozens of people at a time, the illnesses these attacks
caused weren't transmissible between humans. Designing novel
viruses, on the other hand, could enable biological attacks
that spread, infections that leap from person to person and
that could even spark a pandemic. To prevent this outcome,
we need to build mechanisms for restricting access to the
tools, data, and materials that might allow someone to
misuse emerging capabilities in this way. And we should also
go further by building defenses that can deter nefarious
activity in the first place.
https://thebulletin.org/2026/09/newly-created-viruses-are-a-warning-we-still-have-a-window-to-stop-ai-enabled-bioweapons/
⓻ Wild Experiment Reveals Quantum Objects Do Obey Gravity: ScienceAlert
Summary
Physicists have provided the first direct experimental
evidence that the equivalence principle, a cornerstone of
general relativity, affects quantum objects. Using a Quantum
Galileo Interferometer, researchers manipulated a
Bose-Einstein condensate of rubidium atoms, demonstrating
that the equivalence principle holds true in the quantum
realm. This discovery paves the way for further exploration
of the relationship between quantum mechanics and gravity.
https://www.sciencealert.com/wild-experiment-reveals-quantum-objects-do-obey-gravity.
⓼ Cognition and consciousness arise from analog computations, says new theory - MIT News | Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Summary
A new theory published in The Journal of Neuroscience
suggests that the brain uses traveling waves of rhythmic
neural activity to coordinate neural networks and perform
analog computations. This theory posits that brain waves,
particularly alpha/beta waves, organize neural ensembles and
enable spatiotemporal computing, allowing for efficient
information processing and potentially influencing
consciousness. The theory highlights the importance of wave
dynamics in cognition and suggests that manipulating brain
waves could be a promising avenue for clinical treatments.
https://news.mit.edu/2026/cognition-consciousness-arise-from-analog-computations-says-new-theory-0901
⓽ Is This A Sign of Dark Matter?
The most sensitive dark matter detector ever built has
recorded a single collision that physicists cannot explain.
The collision occurred one day in June 2023. Nearly a mile
beneath South Dakota, inside a tank called LUX-ZEPLIN (LZ)
filled with ten metric tons of liquid xenon, a single xenon
nucleus took a hard hit and recoiled, giving off a faint
flash. Nothing physicists know about should have hit it that
hard.
Dark matter, an invisible substance nobody has ever directly
observed despite decades of searching, accounts for roughly
85 percent of the matter in the universe. We know it is
there from its gravitational pull: galaxies spin as though
far more matter than we can see is tugging on them, clusters
bend light more than their visible mass should, and the same
missing matter is written into the structure of the early
universe.
The event surfaced in old recordings. LZ had already combed
these 220 days of data for the gentle nudges most theories
predict and found nothing, so the team went back through the
same recordings hunting for harder hits, across an energy
range they had never checked. One event turned up. Aaron
Manalaysay, who chairs the collaboration's institutional
board, calls it "an outlier that appears valid in every
way."
The physicists running the LZ Dark Matter Experiment are
careful not to claim that they detected dark matter. (Dark
matter experiments have raised hopes before. In 2020,
XENON1T saw apossible sign of unknown particles, which its
own successor later quashed.) But they are saying that no
known source they have tested can account for a hit like
this one. The odds that ordinary background radioactivity
produced it are roughly 1 in 200.
TL;DR: A detector a mile under South Dakota caught one
particle collision that no known source explains, and it
could be the first direct trace of dark matter. The odds it
came from something ordinary are about 0.5 percent, low but
not concrete proof yet.
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2609.02823
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.02823
WEBPAGES FOR SCINCE IN THE NEWS CLASSES - FALL 2026
Sep. 10, 2026
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Oct. 01, 2026
Oct. 08, 2026
Oct. 15, 2026
Oct. 22, 2026
Oct. 29, 2026
WEBPAGES FOR SCINCE IN THE NEWS CLASSES - FALL 2025
Sep. 18, 2025
Sep. 25, 2025
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WEBPAGES FOR SCINCE IN THE NEWS CLASSES - FALL 2024
Oct. 03, 2024
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Related Material from some recent OLLI cources
http://edu-observatory.org/olli/classes.html
Alan Lightman On Richard Feynman's Amazing Mind, Or How
"Hawking Radiation" Could Well Be "Feynman Radiation" (6+ min)
https://player.vimeo.com/video/104516539
sam.wormley@icloud.com