Paris, France [December 12, 2025] – Novaspace’s 6th Ground Segment Market Prospects report projects a $106 Billion market and a fundamental shift in satellite infrastructure economics. NGSO constellations are reshaping […]

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More molecules and compounds vital to the origin of life have been detected in asteroid samples delivered to Earth by NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission. The discovery strengthens the case that not only did life’s building blocks originate in space, but that the ingredients of RNA, and perhaps RNA itself, were brought to our planet by asteroids.

Two new papers in Nature Geoscience and Nature Astronomy describe the discovery of the sugars ribose and glucose in the 120 g of samples returned from the near-Earth asteroid 101955 Bennu, as well as an unusual carbonaceous “gum” that holds important compounds for life. The findings complement the earlier discovery of amino acids and the nucleobases of RNA and DNA in the Bennu samples.

A third new paper, in Nature Astronomy, addresses the abundance of pre-solar grains, which is dust that originated from before the birth of our Solar System, such as dust from supernovae. Scientists led by Ann Nguyen of NASA’s Johnson Space Center found six times more dust direct from supernova explosions than is found, on average, in meteorites and other sampled asteroids. This could suggest differences in the concentration of different pre-solar dust grains in the disc of gas and dust that formed the Solar System.

Space gum

It’s the discovery of organic materials useful for life that steals the headlines, though. For example, the discovery of the space gum, which is essentially a hodgepodge chain of polymers, represents something never found in space before.

Scott Sandford of NASA’s Ames Research Center, co-lead author of the Nature Astronomy paper describing the gum discovery, tells Physics World: “The material we see in our samples is a bit of a molecular jumble. It’s carbonaceous, but much richer in nitrogen and, to a lesser extent, oxygen, than most of the organic compounds found in extraterrestrial materials.”

Sandford refers to the material as gum because of its pliability, bending and dimpling when pressure is applied, rather like chewing gum. And while much of its chemical functionality is replicated in similar materials on our planet, “I doubt it matches exactly with anything seen on Earth,” he says.

Initially, Sandford found the gum using an infrared microscope, nicknaming the dust grains containing the gum “Lasagna” and “Neapolitan” because the grains are layered. To extract them from the rock in the sample, Sandford went to Zack Gainsforth of the University of California, Berkeley, who specializes in analysing and extracting materials from samples like this.

Platinum scaffolding

Having welded a tungsten needle to the Neapolitan sample in order to lift it, the pair quickly realised that the grain was very delicate.

“When we tried to lift the sample it began to deform,” Gainsforth says. “Scott and I practically jumped out of our chairs and brainstormed what to do. After some discussion, we decided that we should add straps to give it enough mechanical rigidity to survive the lift.”

By straps, Gainsforth is referring to micro-scale platinum scaffolding applied to the grain to reinforce its structure while they cut it away with an ion beam. Platinum is often used as a radiation shield to protect samples from an ion beam, “but how we used it was anything but standard,” says Gainsforth. “Scott and I made an on-the-fly decision to reinforce the samples based on how they were reacting to our machinations.”

With the sample extracted and reinforced, they used the ion beam cutter to shave it down until it was a thousand times thinner than a human hair, at which point it could be studied by electron microscopy and X-ray spectrometry. “It was a joy to watch Zack ‘micro-manipulate’ [the sample],” says Sandford.

The nitrogen in the gum was found to be in nitrogen heterocycles, which are the building blocks of nucleobases in DNA and RNA. This brings us to the other new discovery, reported in Nature Geoscience, of the sugars ribose and glucose in the Bennu samples, by a team led by Yoshihiro Furukawa of Tohoku University in Japan.

The ingredients of RNA

Glucose is the primary source of energy for life, while ribose is a key component of the sugar-phosphate backbone that connects the information-carrying nucleobases in RNA molecules. Furthermore, the discovery of ribose now means that everything required to assemble RNA molecules is present in the Bennu sample.

Notable by its absence, however, was deoxyribose, which is ribose minus one oxygen atom. Deoxyribose in DNA performs the same job as ribose in RNA, and Furukawa believes that its absence supports a popular hypothesis about the origin of life on Earth called RNA world. This describes how the first life could have used RNA instead of DNA to carry genetic information, catalyse biochemical reactions and self-replicate.

Intriguingly, the presence of all RNA’s ingredients on Bennu raises the possibility that RNA could have formed in space before being brought to Earth.

“Formation of RNA from its building blocks requires a dehydration reaction, which we can expect to have occurred both in ancient Bennu and on primordial Earth,” Furukawa tells Physics World.

However, RNA would be very hard to detect because of its expected low abundance in the samples, making identifying it very difficult. So until there’s information to the contrary, “the present finding means that the ingredients of RNA were delivered from space to the Earth,” says Furukawa.

Nevertheless, these discoveries are major milestones in the quest of astrobiologists and space chemists to understand the origin of life on Earth. Thanks to Bennu and the asteroid 162173 Ryugu, from which a sample was returned by the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) mission Hayabusa2, scientists are increasingly confident that the building blocks of life on Earth came from space.

The post Components of RNA among life’s building blocks found in NASA asteroid sample appeared first on Physics World.

Retatrutide, originally developed by Eli Lilly, has found a loyal fan base—even though clinical trials of the drug still haven’t finished.

The “leftover” gamma radiation produced when the beam of an electron accelerator strikes its target is usually discarded. Now, however, physicists have found a new use for it: generating radioactive isotopes for diagnosing and treating cancer. The technique, which piggybacks on an already-running experiment, uses bremsstrahlung from an accelerator facility to trigger nuclear reactions in a layer of zinc foil. The products of these reactions include copper isotopes that are hard to make using conventional techniques, meaning that the technique could reduce their costs and expand access to treatments.

Radioactive nuclides are commonly used to treat cancer, and so-called theranostic pairs are especially promising. These pairs occur when one isotope of an element provides diagnostic imaging while another delivers therapeutic radiation – a combination that enables precision tumour targeting to improve treatment outcomes.

One such pair is ⁶⁴Cu and ⁶⁷Cu: the former emits positrons that can identify tumours in PET scans while the latter produces beta particles that can destroy cancerous cells. They also have a further clinical advantage in that copper binds to antibodies and other biomolecules, allowing the isotopes to be delivered directly into cells. Indeed, these isotopes have already been used to treat cancer in mice, and early clinical studies in humans are underway.

“Wasted” photons might be harnessed

Researchers led by Mamad Eslami of the University of York, UK have now put forward a new way to make both isotopes. Their method exploits the fact that gamma rays generated by the intense electron beams in particle accelerator experiments interact only weakly with matter (relative to electrons or neutrons, at least). This means that many of them pass right through their primary target and into a beam dump. These “wasted” photons still carry enough energy to drive further nuclear reactions, though, and Eslami and colleagues realized that they could be harnessed to produce ⁶⁴Cu and ⁶⁷Cu.

Eslami and colleagues tested their idea at the Mainz Microtron, an electron accelerator at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz in Germany. “We wanted to see whether GeV-scale bremsstrahlung, already available at the electron accelerator, could be used in a truly parasitic configuration,” Eslami says. The real test, he adds, was whether they could produce ⁶⁷Cu alongside the primary experiment, which was using the same electron beam and photon field to study hadron physics, without disturbing it or degrading the beam conditions.

The answer turned out to be “yes”. What’s more, the researchers found that their approach could produce enough ⁶⁷Cu for medical applications in about five days – roughly equal to the time required for a nuclear reactor to produce the equivalent amount of another important medical radionuclide, lutetium-177.

Improving nuclear medicine treatments and reducing costs

“Our results indicate that, under suitable conditions, high-energy electron and photon facilities that were originally built for nuclear or particle physics experiments could also be used to produce ⁶⁷Cu and other useful radionuclides,” Eslami tells Physics World. In practice, however, Eslami adds that this will be only realistic at sites with a strong, well-characterized bremsstrahlung fields. High-power multi-GeV electron facilities such as the planned Electron-Ion Collider at Brookhaven National Laboratory in the US, or a high-repetition laser-plasma electron source, are two possibilities.

Even with this restriction, team member Mikhail Bashkanov is excited about the advantages. “If we could do away with the necessity of using nuclear reactors to produce medical isotopes and solely generate them with high-energy photon beams from laser-plasma accelerators, we could significantly improve nuclear medicine treatments and reduce their costs,” Bashkanov says.

The researchers, who detail their work in Physical Review C, now plan to test their method at other electron accelerators, especially those with higher beam power and GeV-scale beams, to quantify the ⁶⁷Cu yields they can expect to achieve in realistic target and beam-dump configurations. In parallel, Eslami adds, they want to explore parasitic operation at emerging laser-plasma-driven electron sources that are being developed for muon tomography. They would also like to link their irradiation studies to target design, radiochemistry and timing constraints to see whether the method can deliver clinically useful activities of ⁶⁷Cu and other useful isotopes in a reliable and cost-effective way.

The post Leftover gamma rays produce medically important radioisotopes appeared first on Physics World.

China launched new Guowang satellite internet payloads Dec. 11 as preparations advanced for a Long March 12A orbital launch and first stage landing attempt.

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The head of NASA’s astrophysics division offered an upbeat assessment of upcoming missions, a stark contrast to the bleak outlook in the agency’s budget proposal six months ago.

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Two treatments for the sexually transmitted disease are expected to become available soon

But new defense bill drops or weakens some controversial proposals

Gen. Chance Saltzman unveils a taxonomy linking system names to mission areas, echoing legacy traditions across the military

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Troy Meink says Beijing is innovating, not merely reverse-engineering U.S. systems

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Learn how resident orcas collaborate with local dolphins to hunt salmon while offering protection for their smaller cousins in return.

Learn why purrs say more about a cat's identity than its meows, and how domestication forever changed the way cats communicate with their owners.

Learn the untold story of the hammock, and how it was used by both Indigenous cultures and European colonizers.

Learn how the discovery of a young planet orbiting two suns is revealing how worlds form and survive in binary star systems.

Learn more about the creation of fire, and how new artifacts show that fire was used tens of thousands of years earlier than previously believed.

Learn more about how researchers can take evidence from the past to better shape our idea of what Neanderthals looked like.

Paris, France [December 11, 2025] – Released today, Novaspace’s latest FSS Operators: Benchmarks & Performance Review unveils a year of transformation for satellite operators. 2025 is redefining the rules of […]

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At an FDA discussion of testosterone replacement therapy, a top official called for special health centers to address a “men’s health crisis.” Others called to ease men’s access to hormones.

Systematic price monitoring sheds light on economics of online manipulation

Pollinators’ antennae act like thermal cameras to spot self-heating plants

With an infrared eye, NEO Surveyor will target dangerous space rocks glowing in the dark

Other space companies are likely to move toward the public markets now that Elon Musk is openly signaling plans to pursue a SpaceX IPO next year, hoping to ride the wave of momentum behind a potentially record-breaking listing.

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Meet Salwasiren qatarensis, a small, ancient sea cow species whose fossils were found in Qatar, in one of the world’s biggest marine mammal bonebeds.

Torrance, California-based K2 was founded in 2022 to build large satellites with more onboard power and volume.

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