James' World 2

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It appears our solar system is getting more popular with out-of-towners. 

Astronomers may have found a third interstellar object, something that has origins beyond our own solar system.

The first interstellar object was ‘Oumuamua, discovered in 2017. The second was a comet called 2I Borisov.

This new object, named 3I/ATLAS, or C/2025 N1 (ATLAS) by the International Astronomical Union’s Minor Planet Center, was discovered using a survey telescope called the Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System (ATLAS), which serves as an asteroid impact early warning system.

3I/ATLAS is not believed to pose any danger to Earth. 

“We now have observations from over a week or so that indicate that its orbit is pretty clearly interstellar,” said Paul Weigert, a professor at Western University’s department of physics and astronomy in London, Ont. “It’s travelling too fast to be bound to the sun, and so it has presumably come to us from outside our solar system.”

When first discovered, ‘Oumuamua was believed to be an oblong asteroid, but followup observations confirmed that it was a comet, just as 2I Borisov was later. 

Astronomers with new observations have seen some signs of a tail on this new object, meaning it is also likely a comet.

The reason that astronomers believe3I/ATLAS comes from beyond our solar system is due to something called its eccentricity. 

Periodic comets, which orbit the sun repeatedly, tend to have eccentricities between 0.2 and 0.7. Those with numbers greater than one are considered hyperbolic comets and likely originate from the Oort Cloud which surrounds our solar system and contains billions of icy objects. It could also indicate that an object is from beyond our solar system.

Objects with high eccentricities indicate that they come from beyond the solar system. In this case, it’s currently estimated that 3I/ATLAS has an eccentricity of six. As astronomers gather more data over time, this number is likely to change.

So what do we know?

“Right now, it’s beyond the orbit of Mars, so it’s fairly far away,” Weigert said. “It’s almost at Jupiter’s orbit, but it is coming inwards. It won’t get much closer than Mars’ orbit … It’ll be at that closest point in October, so a few months from now, and then it will leave and start heading out of the solar system.”

Good news for Earth.

As for its size, more will be known over time, but right now the indication is that it’s a big one.

“It’s probably about 10 kilometres across,” Weigert said, which would make it the biggest of the three interstellar visitors observed so far. 

So are we sure it’s not an Unidentified Flying Object (UFO) or an Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP), a term used by scientists to describe things observed in the sky that remain unexplained?

“Well, certain as we can be,” Weigert said. “It has not demonstrated any unusual behaviour. It’s just travelling through the solar system in exactly the way we would expect for an interstellar object … There’s no indication that it’s in any way unusual in that sense.”

Bummer for UAP enthusiasts.

Whatever it is, you can be certain that all the major telescopes now have their sights on 3I/ATLAS. It’s also an exciting time as the new Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile has just become operational. Weigert says it’s expected to discover one to 10 of these objects every year.

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An artist’s illustration of the interstellar object ‘Oumuamua, which scientists now suspect is a comet, not an asteroid. (ESA/Hubble, NASA, ESO, M. Kornmesser)

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An “interstellar object” is speeding toward the inner solar system, where Earth is located, astronomers have confirmed.

The object — likely a comet — was first detected in data collected between by the Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System, or ATLAS — an asteroid impact early warning system in Rio Hurtado, Chile, funded by NASA, the space agency announced on Tuesday.

Properties such as a marginal coma and short tail indicate signs of cometary activity, according to the Minor Planet Center.

Numerous telescopes have reported additional observations since the object was first reported, NASA said. Observations from three different ATLAS telescopes around the world — as well as the Zwicky Transient Facility at the Palomar Observatory in San Diego County, California — dating back to June 14 were gathered and provided data that supports the existence of the comet, according to a NASA update released Wednesday.

It appears to be originating from interstellar space, arriving from the direction of the constellation Sagittarius, and is currently about 420 million miles from Earth, according to NASA.

The comet poses no threat to Earth and will remain at a distance of at least 150 million miles, astronomers said. It is estimated to reach its closest approach to the sun around Oct. 30, where it will cross at about 130 million miles away, just inside the orbit of Mars, according to NASA.

The object, dubbed “A11pl3Z” or “3I/ATLAS,” spans approximately 25 miles, Josep Trigo-Rodriguez, as astrophysicist at the Institute of Space Sciences near Barcelona, Spain, told The Associated Press.

It’s traveling at a speed of about 152,000 mph and approaching the inner solar system from the bar of the Milky Way, Live Science reported. Its trajectory suggests it did not originate in this solar system, according to EarthSky.org.

This is only the third time in history that an interstellar object entering the inner solar system has been recorded.

A cigar-shaped interstellar object called “Oumuamua,” the Hawaiian word for “scout,” was detected in 2017. And in 2019, an object named “21/Borisov” — a comet that likely strayed from another star system — was located.

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The so-called moderate Republicans promised they would not slash Medicaid. Conservatives vowed not to explode the national debt. Party leaders insisted that they would not lump a jumble of unrelated policies into a single enormous piece of legislation and rush that bill through Congress before any reasonable person had time to read it.

But President Donald Trump wanted his “big, beautiful bill” enacted in time to sign it with a celebratory flourish on America’s birthday. And so nearly all GOP lawmakers in the House and Senate, setting aside these and many other pledges, principles, and policy demands, did what the president desired.

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Kent Nishimura / Bloomberg / Getty

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Hmmmm…This administration is placing the USA behind the rest of the world in science!

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We tend to think something is either alive or not–unless we’re discussing Schrödinger’s cat. For something to be considered alive, we often think of anything that can reproduce, produce its own energy, and have homeostasis – from humans, to animals, to plants, and even single-celled organisms. However, the challenge comes when trying to define a virus. They don’t grow, or reproduce on their own, nor can make their own energy. But when it infects a host, they can do some pretty population-altering things, as we saw with COVID-19. Now, researchers from Canada and Japan have found something virus-like, but more ‘alive’ (Picture: Getty Images)

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(Picture: Getty Images)

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Within an hour of receiving a COVID-19 vaccination in November 2020, Utah preschool teacher Brianne Dressen felt pins and needles through her arms and legs. In the medical odyssey that followed, she suffered double vision, chronic nausea, brain fog, and profound weakness. Once a rock climber, she became a couch potato.

Although Dressen’s symptoms were rare in that season of hundreds of millions of COVID-19 vaccinations, they were common enough to draw the attention of a National Institutes of Health neuroscientist named Avindra Nath, who examined Dressen and more than 30 other people with a similar syndrome in 2021. He recommended Dressen take steroids and antibodies — treatments that saved her life, she said.

And then, according to emails reviewed by KFF Health News, Nath said he couldn’t help anymore. His clinical study was ending. He directed the patients to seek local help. But, Dressen said, there wasn’t any.

Nath declined to speak to KFF Health News for this article. The FDA searched international vaccine safety databases for small-fiber neuropathy, one of the most common symptoms he mentioned in a write-up of the patients, and found it was less prevalent in vaccinated than in unvaccinated patients, said Peter Marks, who led the FDA division responsible for vaccines until Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. forced him out in May.

While it’s possible that Nath’s patients suffered covid vaccine injuries, Marks said, their symptoms were so varied it was hard to characterize a possible syndrome.

But for Dressen and others convinced the vaccines injured them, their experiences were symptomatic of a well-intentioned but flawed U.S. system for monitoring the rare ill effects of vaccines. The system isn’t well-funded enough to answer questions that people urgently want answered, and that can feed vaccine hesitancy, safety experts say.

Its shortcomings were on particular display during the mass vaccination campaigns of the pandemic, when even rare, serious side effects could affect thousands of people.

Now, some leading vaccine scientists are calling for more resources to research vaccine safety and support people with claims of injury, and asking Kennedy, who has a history as an anti-vaccine activist, to step up.

“Spending money on vaccine safety is not saying vaccines aren’t safe; it’s showing a commitment to continued improvement,” said Y. Tony Yang, a professor of health policy at George Washington University’s Milken Institute School of Public Health.

So far, they’ve been disappointed. While Kennedy gives the public the impression that vaccines are harmful, he hasn’t talked about ways to make them safer. And he’s made the problem worse by cutting programs and dismissing scientists who are most knowledgeable about the problems, according to numerous vaccine experts.

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President Donald Trump’s “Big, Beautiful Bill” passed a key procedural hurdle after a long night of haggling with Republicans but is currently being held up by a marathon speech from House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries.

Jeffries has already spoken for more than four hours, lambasting the opposition for betraying “everyday Americans” by slashing Medicaid and miring the country in debt, calling the bill an “immoral document.”

A floor vote on the bill cannot take place until he yields his time.

Trump’s costly legislative package aims to increase funding for defense and border security at the expense of welfare programs and has divided the GOP, whose narrow 220-212 majority in the House permits only three defections.

Earlier, Trump took to Truth Social to express his frustration, demanding to know: “What are the Republicans waiting for??? What are you trying to prove??? MAGA IS NOT HAPPY, AND IT’S COSTING YOU VOTES!!!”

The House passed an earlier draft in May, but it has since been drastically revised in the Senate, which required a tie-breaking vote from Vice President JD Vance to force through on Tuesday.

Trump has set a loose deadline of July 4 to sign the bill.

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Hakeem

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Creating the conditions of the sun on Earth has been a decades-long, global challenge — but if we crack it, it could mean limitless clean energy. Johanna Wagstaffe visits a Canadian company betting on a bold new approach to get there first.

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Fusion

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Listening to the daily news, with stories of war and conflict, can be disheartening. Unsurprisingly, data suggest that a majority of Americans feel exhausted and hopeless when they think about politics. Some psychologists have argued that Americans suffer from a sort of learned helplessness—the sense that nothing we do will make a difference—from hearing about violence such as mass shootings. We feel the pain of events in the news cycle but see ourselves as powerless to stop them.

In terms of coping with these events, meditation could help in more ways than one. The power of meditation for cultivating personal well-being is hardly a secret. For more than 20 years, neuroscientists have been documenting how mindfulness meditation can help people cultivate calm and improve their mood, among other benefits. Some recent research suggests it can also help people experience deeper psychological transformation, allowing regular practitioners to reach important insights about themselves and their world.

But there’s another consequence of meditation that people do not always anticipate. Despite the ways in which wellness movements have emphasized a highly individualistic way of thinking about meditation and self-care, meditation can also help care for and support others.

When one person takes the time to regularly be still and attend to a specific cue, such as their breath or a mantra, their practice can have spillover benefits for the people around them. It’s an idea that several studies have explored to date and one that dovetails with recent investigations into what scientists call the social ripple effect, or the idea that one person’s behavior, mood, or attitudes can spread throughout a community. It is also a potent reminder of how bringing a spirit of calm and compassion towards oneself may translate into something beneficial to those around us.

Some meditators propose that if enough people had a regular practice, the result would be a world enriched with calm and compassionate people. And there’s science to support that idea. Research demonstrates that people who meditate show increased positivity toward others. For instance, training in meditation is linked to increased sensitivity to and engagement with human suffering and an increased tendency toward altruism. Similarly, meditation interventions aimed at increasing kindness are associated with reduced bias toward numerous “others,” including ethnic out-groups, people experiencing homelessness, and people who face stigma because of their weight.

In one classic study, 20 people received eight weeks of meditation training, and another 19 were put on a wait list for training. Afterward, each participant came to an appointment and had to wait in a crowded room with just one available seat. When a researcher came in, pretending to be another person with an appointment who had a seemingly painful broken foot, the people who had received meditation training were significantly more likely to give up their seat than study participants who had not received this training.

So why might one person’s meditation practice benefit the people around

them? There are many plausible mechanisms. For one, as meditation trains participants to be aware in the present moment, it may promote sensitivity to others’ perspectives and emotions. Another possibility is that we sometimes dismiss others’ pain because it will cause us discomfort, but meditation can help practitioners better cope with negative emotions, making it less painful to engage with and respond to others’ suffering. In line with these ideas, researchers published findings in 2023 that showed that meditation increased people’s concern for the suffering of others—and that, by comparison, people without this practice were more oriented to their own distress.

Meditation may also help people develop strong interpersonal relationships. The practice may leave people in a better mood overall and build up their emotional control, both of which could improve their interactions with others. Last spring, a study that compared 47 physicians who were trained in meditation with 47 who did not have this training found that doctors in the meditation group were less anxious about communicating with their patients and reported having more trust in others. Critically, the meditating participants were also less likely to practice defensive medicine, in which doctors make health care choices based on fear of litigation instead of best practice. The higher-quality social interactions that emerged with meditation training seemed to improve doctor-patient interactions and ultimately the care that doctors provided to their patients.

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Richard Drury/Getty Images

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