ScienceDaily: Strange Science News

Scientists have developed a qubit platform formed by freezing neon gas into a solid, spraying electrons from a light bulb's filament onto it, and trapping a single electron there. This system shows great promise as an ideal building block for quantum computers.

Astronomers discovered a 'black widow binary' -- a rapidly spinning neutron star circling and slowly consuming a smaller companion star. Named ZTF J1406+1222, the pair has the shortest orbital period yet identified, and is unique in that it appears to host a third star that orbits around the two inner stars every 10,000 years.

In the search for eternal youth, fecal transplants may seem like an unlikely way to reverse the aging process. However, scientists have provided evidence, from research in mice, that transplanting fecal microbiota from young into old mice can reverse hallmarks of aging in the gut, eyes, and brain. In the reverse experiment, microbes from aged mice induced inflammation in the brain of young recipients and depleted a key protein required for normal vision. These findings show that gut microbes play a role in the regulating some of the detrimental effects of ageing and open up the possibility of gut microbe-based therapies to combat decline in later life.

Squid, octopus, and cuttlefish -- even to scientists who study them -- are wonderfully weird creatures. Known as the soft-bodied or coleoid cephalopods, they have the largest nervous system of any invertebrate, complex behaviors such as instantaneous camouflage, arms studded with dexterous suckers, and other evolutionarily unique traits. Now, scientists have dug into the cephalopod genome to understand how these unusual animals came to be. Along the way, they discovered cephalopod genomes are as weird as the animals are. Scientists from the Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL) in Woods Hole, the University of Vienna, the University of Chicago, the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology and the University of California, Berkeley, reported their findings in two new studies in Nature Communications.

A planetary scientist worked with engineers to measure the physical limits for a liquid when salty water is at very high pressure. The results suggest where to look for extraterrestrial life in the ice-covered oceans of Jupiter's moon Europa and Saturn's moon Titan.

As the scientific community searches for worlds orbiting nearby stars that could potentially harbor life, new research suggests that younger rocky exoplanets are more likely to support temperate, Earth-like climates.