There's already 5,000 sensors embedded in Antarctica's ice to look for evidence of neutrinos, reports the Washington Post. But in November scientists drilled six new holes at least a mile and a half deep and installed cables with hundreds more light detectors — an upgrade to the massive 15-year-old IceCube Neutrino Observatory to detect the charged particles produced by lower-energy neutrinos interacting with matter: When they do, the neutrinos produce charged particles that travel through the ice at nearly the speed of light, creating a blue glow called Cherenkov radiation... "Within the first couple years, we should be making much better measurements," [said Erin O'Sullivan, an associate professor of physics at Uppsala University in Sweden and a spokesperson for the project.] "There's hope to expand the detector, by an order of magnitude in volume, so the important thing there is we're not just seeing a few neutrino point sources, but we're starting to be a true telescope. ... That's really the dream." The scientists spent seven years planning the upgrade, according to the article. "To drill holes a mile and a half deep takes about 30 hours, and 18 more hours to return to the surface," the article points out. "Then, the race begins because almost immediately, the hole starts to shrink as the water refreezes." ("If it takes too much time, the principal investigator says, "the instruments don't fit in anymore!")

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Wopinaise quand il s'y met, TheOatMeal est vraiment énorme ! 😂
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The screeching sound that Scotch tape makes when you rip it off a surface -- that fingernails-on-a-chalkboard noise most people try not to think about -- is produced by shock waves from micro-cracks that travel across the peeling tape at supersonic speeds, according to a new paper published in Physical Review E. Researchers led by Sigurdur Thoroddsen of King Abdullah University in Saudi Arabia used simultaneous high-speed imaging and synchronized microphones to capture both the propagating fractures and the sound waves they generate in the surrounding air. The team's earlier work, in 2010, had identified a sequence of transverse cracks racing across the width of the adhesive during peeling, and a 2024 follow-up established a direct correspondence between those cracks and the screeching sound, but neither study pinpointed a mechanism. The new findings show that a partial vacuum forms between the tape and the surface as each crack opens, and because the crack moves faster than air can rush in to fill the void, the vacuum travels along until it reaches the tape's edge and collapses into the stationary air outside, producing a discrete sound pulse.

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A 10-week-old boy named Hugo has become the first baby born in the UK from a womb transplanted from a deceased donor, after his mother Grace Bell -- who was born without a viable womb due to a condition called MRKH syndrome, which affects one in every 5,000 women -- underwent a 10-hour transplant operation at The Churchill Hospital in Oxford in June 2024. Hugo was born just before Christmas 2025, weighing nearly 7lbs, at Queen Charlotte's and Chelsea Hospital in west London, following IVF treatment and embryo transfer at The Lister Fertility Clinic. Bell's transplant is one of three completed so far as part of a UK clinical research trial that plans to carry out 10 such procedures from deceased donors, and Hugo is the first baby born from any of them. Earlier in 2025, a separate effort produced baby Amy, the first UK birth from a living womb donation -- her mother had received her older sister's womb in January 2023. Globally, more than 100 womb transplants have been performed, resulting in over 70 healthy births.

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