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The universe has two kinds of matter. There is invisible dark matter, known only because of its gravitational effects on a grand scale. And there is ordinary matter such as gas, dust, stars, planets, and earthly things like cookie dough and canoes.

Scientists estimate that ordinary matter makes up only about 15% of all matter, but have long struggled to document where all of it is located, with about half unaccounted for. With the help of powerful bursts of radio waves emanating from 69 locations in the cosmos, researchers now have found the “missing” matter.

It was hiding primarily as thinly distributed gas spread out in the vast expanses between galaxies and was detected thanks to the effect the matter has on the radio waves traveling through space, the researchers said. This tenuous gas comprises the intergalactic medium, sort of a fog between galaxies. 

Scientists previously had determined the total amount of ordinary matter using a calculation involving light observed that was left over from the Big Bang event roughly 13.8 billion years ago that initiated the universe. But they could not actually find half of this matter.

“So the question we’ve been grappling with was: Where is it hiding? The answer appears to be: in a diffuse, wispy cosmic web, well away from galaxies,” said Harvard University astronomy professor Liam Connor, lead author of the study published on Monday in the journal Nature Astronomy.

The researchers found that a smaller slice of the missing matter resides in the halos of diffuse material surrounding galaxies, including our Milky Way.

Ordinary matter is composed of baryons, which are the subatomic particles, protons and neutrons needed to build atoms.

“People, planets, and stars are made of baryons. Dark matter, on the other hand, is a mysterious substance that makes up the bulk of the matter in the universe. We do not know what new particle or substance makes up dark matter. We know exactly what the ordinary matter is, we just didn’t know where it was,” Connor said.

So, how did so much ordinary matter end up in the middle of nowhere? Vast amounts of gas are ejected from galaxies when massive stars explode in supernovas or when supermassive black holes inside galaxies “burp,” expelling material after consuming stars or gas.

“If the universe were a more boring place, or the laws of physics were different, you might find that ordinary matter would all fall into galaxies, cool down, form stars, until every proton and neutron were a part of a star. But that’s not what happens,” Connor said.

Thus, these violent physical processes are sloshing ordinary matter around across immense distances and consigning it to the cosmic wilderness. This gas is not in its usual state but rather in the form of plasma, with its electrons and protons separated.

The mechanism used to detect and measure the missing ordinary matter involved phenomena called fast radio bursts, or FRBs – powerful pulses of radio waves emanating from faraway points in the universe. While their exact cause remains mysterious, a leading hypothesis is that they are produced by highly magnetized neutron stars, compact stellar embers left over after a massive star dies in a supernova explosion.

As light in radio wave frequencies travels from the source of the FRBs to Earth, it becomes dispersed into different wavelengths, just as a prism turns sunlight into a rainbow. The degree of this dispersion depends on how much matter is in the light’s path, providing the mechanism for pinpointing and measuring matter where it otherwise would remain unfound.

Scientists used radio waves traveling from 69 FRBs, 39 of which were discovered using a network of 110 telescopes located at Caltech’s Owens Valley Radio Observatory near Bishop, California, called the Deep Synoptic Array. The remaining 30 were discovered using other telescopes.

The FRBs were located at distances up to 9.1 billion light-years from Earth, the farthest of these on record. A light-year is the distance light travels in a year, 5.9 trillion miles (9.5 trillion km).

With all the ordinary matter now accounted for, the researchers were able to determine its distribution. About 76% resides in intergalactic space, about 15% in galaxy halos, and the remaining 9% concentrated within galaxies, primarily as stars or gas.

“We can now move on to even more important mysteries regarding the ordinary matter in the universe,” Connor said. “And beyond that: what is the nature of dark matter and why is it so difficult to measure directly?”

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The brains of people writing an essay with ChatGPT are less engaged than those of people blocked from using any online tools for the task, a study finds. The investigation is part of a broader movement to assess whether artificial intelligence (AI) is making us cognitively lazy.

Computer scientist Nataliya Kosmyna at the MIT Media Lab in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and her colleagues measured brain-wave activity in university students as they wrote essays either using a chatbot or an Internet search tool, or without any Internet at all. Although the main result is unsurprising, some of the study’s findings are more intriguing: for instance, the team saw hints that relying on a chatbot for initial tasks might lead to relatively low levels of brain engagement even when the tool is later taken away.

Echoing some posts about the study on online platforms, Kosmyna is careful to say that the results shouldn’t be overinterpreted. This study cannot and did not show “dumbness in the brain, no stupidity, no brain on vacation,” Kosmyna laughs. It involved only a few dozen participants over a short time and cannot address whether habitual chatbot use reshapes our thinking in the long-term, or how the brain might respond during other AI-assisted tasks. “We don’t have any of these answers in this paper,” Kosmyna says. The work was posted ahead of peer review on the preprint server arXiv on 10 June.

Easy essays

Kosmyna’s team recruited 60 students, aged 18 to 39, from five universities around the city of Boston, Massachusetts. The researchers asked them to spend 20 minutes crafting a short essay answering questions, such as “should we always think before we speak?”, that appear on Scholastic Assessment Tests, or SATs.

The participants were divided into three groups: one used ChatGPT, powered by OpenAI’s large language model GPT-4o, as the sole source of information for their essays; another used Google to search for material (without any AI-assisted answers); and the third was forbidden to go online at all. In the end, 54 participants wrote essays answering three questions while in their assigned group, and then 18 were reassigned to a new group to write a fourth essay, on one of the topics that they had tackled previously.

Each student wore a commercial electrode-covered cap, which collected electroencephalography (EEG) readings as they wrote. These headsets measure tiny voltage changes from brain activity and can show which broad regions of the brain are ‘talking’ to each other.

The students who wrote essays using only their brains showed the strongest, widest-ranging connectivity among brain regions, and had more activity going from the back of their brains to the front, decision-making area. They were also, unsurprisingly, better able to quote from their own essays when questioned by the researchers afterwards.

The Google group, by comparison, had stronger activations in areas known to be involved with visual processing and memory. And the chatbot group displayed the least brain connectivity during the task.

More brain connectivity isn’t necessarily good or bad, Kosmyna says. In general, more brain activity might be a sign that someone is engaging more deeply with a task, or it might be a sign of inefficiency in thinking, or an indication that the person is overwhelmed by ‘cognitive overload’.

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Thai Liang Lim/Getty Images

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Theoretically, it’s illegal for the president to accept or solicit bribes. The plain language of the statute is perfectly clear: It is a crime for a public official to seek or receive “anything of value” in return for “being influenced in the performance of any official act.” The prohibition applies whether the public official seeks or receives the bribe personally or on behalf of “any other person or entity.”

As I said: theoretically. On Tuesday, the media-and-entertainment conglomerate Paramount announced a $16 million payment to President Donald Trump’s future presidential library. The payment settled a lawsuit that Trump had filed against the Paramount-owned broadcaster CBS because he was unhappy with the way the network had edited an election-season interview with then–Vice President Kamala Harris.

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Illustration by The Atlantic. Source: Getty.

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A new FDA-approved device, called a DBS device, claims to use adaptive deep brain stimulation to treat some with Parkinson’s disease.

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CLIMATEWIRE | Temperatures are finally falling in the eastern U.S. as a vicious heat dome begins to subside. But such sweltering early-summer heat will only get more frequent in the years to come.

That’s because this week’s heat wave — which tumbled century-old temperature records in some areas — was clearly influenced by climate change, scientists say. The heat dome is just one consequence of the “stuck” weather patterns that are on the rise as the planet warms.

A recent study, published June 16 in the scientific journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, warns of the rising dangers of such long-lasting weather patterns, which can prompt not just heat waves but also heavy rainfall and floods.

This week, the heat index — or what the temperature actually feels like to human skin — rose well above 100 degrees in many areas. Minneapolis also broke a daily high last set in 1910 when the city hit 96 degrees Saturday, and New York City tied its 1888 record of 96 degrees in Central Park on Monday.

The new study suggests that the phenomenon behind such extreme weather may have a surprising origin: rapid warming, hundreds of miles away, in the icy Arctic.

Researchers from the University of Pennsylvania and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory investigated natural atmospheric patterns known as planetary waves. These wobbly air currents meander up and down as they circle the globe — and when they intensify, they sometimes lead to storms or heat domes stagnating in place for days at a time.

The study looked at the frequency of planet wave “resonance events,” or temporary intensifications. They found that these kinds of stalled atmospheric patterns have tripled over the last 70 years. At the same time, extreme summer weather — like heat waves and floods — have also grown more common.

Climate models have long predicted that these patterns would occur more frequently with climate change. But the new study is the first to demonstrate that it’s already happening, the authors say.

Still, the exact causes of these planetary wave events are an active research topic.

Some research suggests that rapid warming in the Arctic — which is heating up as much as four times faster than the rest of the globe — is altering the atmosphere in ways that shift the jet stream south and affect the planetary waves. Other studies suggest that tropical warming may actually yank the jet stream poleward. And some researchers say planetary waves may be impacted by a tug-of-war between these two influences.

Computer models aren’t always able to fully simulate these physical responses, making it a difficult subject to study. Scientists have been investigating — and debating — the exact physical effects of global warming on atmospheric circulation patterns for years.

But the new study adds to the evidence that Arctic warming plays a role. It shows that periods of warmer temperatures in the high latitudes are associated with increases in planetary wave resonance events. It also demonstrates that the growing global contrast between land temperatures and ocean temperatures — since land is warming faster than water worldwide — has also played a part.

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Ken Casey, the founder and front man of the Celtic punk band Dropkick Murphys, is the physical, attitudinal, and linguistic personification of Boston. Proof of this can be found in the way he pronounces MAGA. To wit: “Magger,” as in, “This Magger guy in the audience was waving his fucking Trump hat in people’s faces, and I could just tell he wanted to enter into discourse with me.” A second proof is that “enter into discourse” is a thing Ben Affleck would say in a movie about South Boston right before punching someone in the face. The third is Casey’s articulation of what I took to be a personal code: “I’m not going to shut up, just out of spite.

”The aforementioned discourse took place at a show in Florida in March. Video of the incident has moved across the internet, and it has provoked at least some Dropkick Murphy fans—white, male, and not particularly predisposed to the Democratic Party in its current form—to abandon the band. Casey accepts this as the price for preserving his soul. “I think everything we’ve been doing for the past 30 years was a kind of warm-up for the moment we’re in,” he told me. The band is most famous for its furious, frenzied anthem “I’m Shipping Up to Boston,” but it is also known, among certain high-information voters and union activists, as a last repository of working-class values. As white men have lurched to the right, the band is on a mission to convince them that they’re being played by a grifter. “Thirty years ago, the Reagan era, everyone was in lockstep with what we were saying,” he said. “Now people say our message is outdated or elite or we’re part of some machine.”

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Justin Kaneps for The Atlantic

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On April 8th, the Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities of Egypt announced the discovery of “The Rise of Aten,” a city in Luxor buried under layers of sand for 3,000 years, dating back to the reign of Amenhotep III. This city, used during the reigns of Amenhotep III, Akhenaten, Tutankhamun, and King Ay, was revealed through mudbrick walls and everyday life objects. Important finds include hieroglyphic inscriptions on wine vessel caps, rings, scarabs, colored pottery vessels, and mud bricks with seals of Amenhotep III. In just seven months of excavations, several neighborhoods have been uncovered, including a bakery with ovens and storage pottery, and an administrative district with larger units and a rare zigzag wall. A workshop for mudbrick production was also discovered, featuring the cartouche of King Amenhotep III (Neb Maat Ra). The city’s streets are lined with houses, some walls reaching up to three meters in height, extending westward to Deir el-Medina. #RiseOfAten #LostGoldenCity #CityDiscoveredLuxor

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Kaylee

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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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