Three stories today. The Nobel Prize in medicine went to the three people who worked out how to switch nerve cells on and off with light, a magnetic behaviour being called a third kind of magnetism was confirmed in a very thin material, and instruments were chosen to go and see whether a hole in the Moon's surface opens into a large cave.
Life
The 2026 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine went to the three people who found a light-sensitive protein in algae and put it to work in brain cells.
A brain holds tens of billions of nerve cells passing electrical signals to one another. To learn what a particular cell does you need to switch that cell, and only that cell, on or off. Push in an electrode and you stir up its neighbours too.
Peter Hegemann and Georg Nagel found a protein in swimming algae that opens a gate when light falls on it. When the gate opens, charged particles flow into the cell; that is how the algae swim towards light. Karl Deisseroth worked out how to put the gene for that protein into chosen nerve cells in a mouse. Then those cells alone respond to light, and an optical fibre can switch them on and off in thousandths of a second. That is how researchers began to pin down which circuits in the brain carry memory, fear and movement.
Through the eyes of the AtlasThe Nobel Prize Route maps where world-changing discoveries came from. This prize adds a small pond alga to that map: looking closely at a microbe turned into a tool for looking inside the brain.
A word of cautionThis is a prize for a research tool. Treating human illness with light is still at the trial stage, and it means putting a gene into cells first.
Source · Scientific American
Physics
A magnetic behaviour that sends out no field of its own, yet can still steer the spin of electrons, has been measured in a thin material containing cobalt.
We are taught that magnets come in two kinds. One is the ordinary magnet that sticks to a fridge and throws a field out around it. In the other, the tiny magnets inside line up in opposite directions, so no field reaches the outside. The first kind disturbs its neighbours in a crowded device; the second is hard to work with.
Physicists now speak of a third kind. It sends out no field, yet inside it can push the spin of electrons one way. Researchers at the University of Central Florida measured evidence of this behaviour in a layered material with cobalt tucked into it. The layers are very thin and its properties can be tuned, which makes it a good place to ask what creates the behaviour. Handling signals with the spin of electrons rather than their charge alone could make devices that are faster and use less power.
Through the eyes of the AtlasThe library piece "From Sand to Switch" tells how the semiconductor became the part everything is built from. That switch uses whether electrons are there or not. A century and a half after Faraday tied magnets to electricity, the plan now is to use which way an electron spins as a switch as well.
A word of cautionThe behaviour has been confirmed in the laboratory, no more. Why it arises is still unexplained, and a working device is a long way off.
Source · ScienceDaily (University of Central Florida)
Space
Instruments that can look under the ground beside a large pit on the Moon have been chosen for one of NASA's coming lunar landings.
Long ago lava flowed in many places on the Moon. When the surface of a flow hardens first and the lava inside drains away, an empty tube is left behind. Volcanic country on Earth has such tubes too. Photographs of the Moon show several holes that look like places where the roof of such a tube fell in, but nobody has confirmed that any of them opens into a cave.
A set of instruments led by researchers at the Planetary Science Institute has been chosen to find out. It carries a radar that sends waves into the ground and reads what returns, a seismometer to measure shaking, a gravimeter, and cameras. A lander and a rover will take them to the pit at the Marius Hills and look beneath the surface there. If there is a cave, it could be somewhere people stay: thick rock holds off the particles pouring in from space and the great swing between day and night temperatures.
Through the eyes of the AtlasOn the Cosmic Calendar the Moon is born very early, and as it cooled it kept the traces of its lava exactly as they were. On Earth rain and wind would have rubbed them away. As with the story of the Moon's birth in this column on 13 September, the Moon is the notebook where what the Earth forgot stays written.
A word of cautionNo cave has been confirmed; what has happened is that the instruments to go and look were selected. When they fly has not been decided.
Source · ScienceDaily (Planetary Science Institute)