New map of the cosmic web is the most detailed ever

Using data from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, astronomers have produced the most detailed map of the cosmic web ever made.

The work traces the network of galaxies all the way back to when the universe was one billion years old.

The cosmic web is the universe’s vast, skeleton-like framework—a network of interwoven filaments and sheets of dark matter and gas that surround immense, nearly empty voids. It forms the underlying architecture of the cosmos, linking galaxies and clusters into a single, intricate, and far-reaching structure.

The study in The Astrophysical Journal used the largest James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) survey conducted so far—the COSMOS-Web—to trace how galaxies form a network across 13.7 billion years of cosmic history.

Since its launch in 2021, JWST has transformed astronomy with its extraordinary sensitivity and sharpness. Its infrared instruments pick up faint, distant galaxies that were invisible to earlier observatories, allowing scientists to see further back in time than ever before, and through cosmic dust.

To harness this power, an international team designed COSMOS-Web, the largest General Observer (GO) program selected for JWST. The GO program is the primary way astronomers gain access to the telescope for their research. Covering a contiguous area of the sky about the size of three full Moons, the survey was designed to map the cosmic web.

“JWST has completely changed our view of the universe, and COSMOS-Web was designed from the start to give us the wide, deep view we need to see the cosmic web,” says Hossein Hatamnia, a graduate student at University of California, Riverside and Carnegie Observatories, and lead author of the study.

“For the first time we can study the evolution of galaxies in cluster and filamentary structures across cosmic time, all the way from when the universe was a billion years old up to the nearby universe.”

The nearby universe refers to our cosmic neighborhood within approximately 1 billion light-years. Approximately 5.88 trillion miles, a light-year is the distance light travels in one Earth year, used to measure massive distances in space.

Bahram Mobasher, a distinguished professor of physics and astronomy at UCR and Hatamnia’s advisor, explains that the large-scale structure identified from the JWST cosmic web data is much more informative than earlier maps of the same region of sky taken by the Hubble Space Telescope. A direct side-by-side comparison, he says, shows how much the previous generation of data had been smoothing over structures.

“The jump in depth and resolution is truly significant, and we can now see the cosmic web at a time when the universe was only a few hundred million years old, an era that was essentially out of reach before JWST,” Mobasher says.

“What used to look like a single structure now resolves into many, and details that were smoothed away before, are now clearly visible.”

Hatamnia explains that the improvement comes from two JWST strengths working together.

“The telescope detects many more faint galaxies in the same patch of sky, and the distances to those galaxies are measured far more precisely,” he says. “Each galaxy can therefore be placed into the correct slice of cosmic time, sharpening the map’s resolution.”

In keeping with COSMOS’s long tradition of open science, the team is releasing the large-scale structure maps publicly.

“The pipeline used to build the map, the catalog of 164,000 galaxies and their cosmic density, and a video showing the cosmic web evolving across billions of years, has been released to the public,” Mobasher says.

Mobasher and Hatamnia were joined in the study by scientists in the US, Denmark, Chile, France, Finland, Switzerland, Japan, China, Germany, and Italy.

The study was supported by grants from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program.

Source: UC Riverside

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Air pollution tied to worse outcomes after surgery

New research on Utah’s Wasatch Front—which occasionally experiences the worst air quality in the nation—has found an association between high air pollution and risk of post-surgical complications.

The new study, encompassing nearly 50,000 surgery patients, has linked higher levels of particulate air pollution to a higher risk of a combined measure of post-surgical complications that included sepsis, pneumonia, and surgical wound infection.

“When there was an elevation in PM2.5 air pollution in the week before surgery, even for one day, we saw increased risk of major medical complications and infectious complications,” says first author John Pearson, a former U assistant professor of anesthesiology who performed the research while at University of Utah Health. Pearson is now a clinical associate professor at Stanford Medicine and remains a U research affiliate.

Fine particulate matter, which can become lodged in respiratory issues and undermine a person’s health in a number of ways, is most often associated with the Wasatch Front’s wintertime inversions when polluted air is trapped on the valley floor. When PM2.5 levels were higher than the EPA daily exposure limit in the week before surgery, the risk of post-surgical complications increased from 4.8% to 6.2%.

The results appear in Acta Anaesthesiologica Scandinavica. Faculty from the U’s College of Social and Behavioral Science contributed to this research, which was led by the School of Medicine.

To uncover the relationship between air quality and surgical outcomes, the researchers analyzed post-surgical data from 49,615 non-emergency surgeries in the Wasatch Front. They used a combination of EPA and state-level air quality sensors, as well as satellite data, to estimate PM2.5 levels at each patient’s home address for a week before surgery.

The higher the level of air pollution, the greater the increase in risk. While a concentration of fine particulate air pollution of 35 micrograms per cubic meter is considered unhealthy, the research team found that changes in the level of air pollution above and below this limit also affect risk. Every 10 microgram increase in PM2.5 was associated with an 8% increase in the relative risk of post-surgical complications, resulting in an absolute increase in risk of 1.4% when pollution exceeded EPA daily limits.

The researchers were specifically interested in levels of fine particulate air pollution due to its systemic effects on human health.

“Particles of that size or smaller can get down to the smallest part of the lung,” explained study coauthor Nathan Pace, a U professor of anesthesiology.

“Some of it will cross into the blood and it can end up anywhere in your body: your brain, your heart, your liver, your kidneys.”

This increases overall levels of inflammation, putting stress on the lungs and heart and possibly increasing the risk of infections.

The researchers emphasize that this study used a composite measure of complications that combined many different post-surgical outcomes, which means that more research is needed to determine which specific complications are more likely to arise following high air pollution. Research in larger studies, including multiple hospitals, could also help determine which kinds of surgeries are most affected by air quality, which could help health centers time surgeries to minimize risks.

While this study found an association between air pollution and post-surgical complications, it can’t determine whether the increased risk is directly caused by air pollution or if there’s an unknown third factor that links them both.

“A caveat in any observational study is that there might be a relevant factor that affects both the exposure and the outcome,” Pace says.

While more research is needed to determine which people and surgeries might benefit from additional risk-reducing interventions, the team says that this work provides even more evidence that better air quality benefits human health. For Wasatch Front residents, the flip side of living in a place with elevated air pollution is that local changes to transit and industry can have a major impact on air quality.

For now, standard precautions—like quality home air filters and avoiding outdoor exercise during wildfire smoke or inversion days—are a healthy choice for everyone, whether or not someone will be getting surgery.

Additional coauthors are from the University of Nevada, Reno and Columbia University.

This work was supported by a University of Utah Wilkes Center for Climate Science & Policy seed grant, the National Science Foundation, and the National Institutes of Health, including the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences and the National Cancer Institute. Content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation or the Wilkes Center.

Source: University of Utah

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Listen: How you benefit from connecting with other people

On a new podcast episode, a behavioral scientist explores how your health and happiness benefit from conversations with strangers, family, or friends.

As humans, we have a biological need for connecting with others, but in today’s modern world, we tend to avoid it.

This paradox is something that Professor Nicholas Epley of the University of Chicago Booth School of Business has been fixated on in his research.

In his new book, A Little More Social: How Small Choices Create Unexpected Happiness, Health, and Connection (Penguin Random House, 2026), Epley shows why we consistently underestimate the positive impact of reaching out to others.

From experiments tracking commuters on the train to deep conversations with hedge fund executives, Epley reveals that our beliefs about social interaction are often “precisely backwards” leading us to choose solitude even when engagement would make us happier and healthier:

Source: University of Chicago

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What happens to your brain under anesthesia?

A new study sheds light on what anesthesia does to the brain and how closely it resembles sleep versus a coma.

People often describe anesthesia as something that puts a patient in a “deep sleep.” An anesthesiologist enters the operating room, and part of their mission is to ensure that the patient is completely unaware of what is happening around them until they wake up, often several hours later.

Scientists and doctors have long debated what happens to the brain under anesthetic drugs during a surgical procedure.

A new study by Yale School of Medicine’s anesthesiology and neurology departments in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences uncovers new insights which may change the way we describe being under anesthesia.

The study reveals that being anesthetized may be more than simply being “put to sleep.” It can potentially carry more similarities to being in a coma than we originally thought.

Janna Helfrich is an assistant professor of anesthesiology and the study’s lead author. Her team explored how anesthesia and pain control can be redesigned to limit long-term effects on cognition and behavior after medical procedures like surgery.

The brain plays an important role in keeping patients safe and comfortable during surgery, but it isn’t commonly monitored when one is under anesthesia. Most surgeries today happen without brain monitoring, because there hadn’t traditionally been an efficient way to track that part of the body.

“Surprisingly, we’ve been doing anesthesia for more than 150 years now, but we only recently started to measure the brain,” says Helfrich, when asked what inspired this research.

“Before that, [we measured] blood pressure, heart rate, oxygen levels, maybe we would look into the pupils of our patients. But [measuring] the brain, even today, is not the standard of care. Which, I think is really strange, because that’s actually the effect site of all the drugs the patient is getting, whether it is a painkiller or the anesthetics themselves.”

The researchers studied brain wave recordings from patients sedated with propofol, a common type of anesthetic used in surgeries. They used a method called electroencephalography (EEG), which involves placing electrodes on the scalp. These discs record brain activity while under anesthesia.

The study team then compared these recordings against recorded brain activity from patients in several different states of consciousness, including deep sleep, REM sleep, coma, and normal wakefulness.

“Instead of limiting it to just the front of the head, which is what is normally done, we did a full head EEG, using 20 electrodes,” says Helfrich. “So, we had information from the front, the sides, and from the back of the head.”

The findings from this study challenge the widespread belief that anesthesia is simply a deep sleep. The reality is more complex, as the anesthetized brain can enter several states. Some states resemble sleep, while others are more like a coma. Anesthesia produces a pattern of brain activity that is unlike any other state of consciousness.

Helfrich and her team aim to uncover the nuances of anesthesia and how it affects the brain during surgery.

“The old dichotomy that it’s either sleep or coma is not true. It’s actually both sleep and coma, and can be similar to both states at the same time, depending on where you look,” says Helfrich. “And yet, there is also an element which is just anesthesia uniquely.”

When doctors place someone under deep anesthesia, that patient may have problems after surgery, which is more common in older adults and those with preexisting medical conditions. These can affect cognitive functions and cause memory deficits post-surgery.

This research highlights the need for a carefully tailored anesthesia dose that does not put the patient into a coma-like state. The goal for clinicians is to help the anesthetized patient get as close to a natural, sleep-like state as possible.

Looking ahead, Helfrich and team hope this study will help improve how clinicians monitor the brain and overall health under anesthesia. Future research could help clinicians guide the anesthetized brain toward a sleep-like state, rather than a coma-like one.

“As we know, sleep has a plethora of benefits,” says Helfrich. “It cognitively replenishes you, helps with your immune system, and helps you with metabolism. So, I imagine that there will be a way to tweak anesthesia a bit away from a coma, more in direction of sleep, so we could alleviate some of the side effects.”

The patient’s overall health before, during, and after surgery remains the top priority for every clinician. Monitoring the brain will help anesthesiologists tailor care for each patient and will allow for more sleep-related benefits during surgery.

The research reported in this article was supported by the German Research Foundation, the Medical Faculty of the University of Tübingen, and the Jung Foundation for Research and Science.

Source: Yale

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Volcano helped clean up after it erupted

A violent volcanic eruption in the South Pacific has revealed a surprising natural mechanism that could potentially help slow global warming.

The finding provides entirely new insights into atmospheric chemistry and may inspire new methods to remove methane emissions from the air.

When the submarine volcano Hunga Tonga–Hunga Ha’apai in the South Pacific erupted in January 2022, it was not only one of the most violent volcanic eruptions in modern times. The volcano also did something completely unexpected: it helped clean up some of the methane pollution it released. This phenomenon could potentially be key to how humans can slow global warming.

Using advanced satellite measurements, researchers observed unusually high concentrations of formaldehyde in the massive volcanic plume following the eruption. This was crucial evidence: when methane is destroyed in the atmosphere, formaldehyde forms as a short-lived intermediate.

“When we analyzed the satellite images, we were surprised to see a cloud with a record-high concentration of formaldehyde. We were able to track the cloud for 10 days, all the way to South America. Because formaldehyde only exists for a few hours, this showed that the cloud must have been destroying methane continuously for more than a week,” explains Maarten van Herpen from Acacia Impact Innovation BV, first author of the study.

“It is known that volcanoes emit methane during eruptions, but until now it was not known that volcanic ash is also capable of partially cleaning up this pollution,” he adds.

According to the researchers, everything points to a very special process taking place—one they first discovered in 2023, but in a completely different part of the world.

They found that when dust from the Sahara is blown over the Atlantic Ocean, it mixes with sea salt from sea spray, forming small particles known as iron salt aerosols. When sunlight hits these aerosols, chlorine atoms are produced. These chlorine atoms react with methane and help break it down in the atmosphere. This discovery changed scientific understanding of tropospheric chemistry.

“What is new—and completely surprising—is that the same mechanism appears to occur in a volcanic plume high up in the stratosphere, where the physical conditions are entirely different,” says Professor Matthew Johnson from the chemistry department at the University of Copenhagen, one of the researchers behind both discoveries.

The 2022 eruption hurled enormous amounts of salty seawater into the stratosphere along with volcanic ash. The theory is that when sunlight hit this mixture, highly reactive chlorine was formed, helping to break down the methane released during the eruption. The visible evidence of this methane breakdown was the large amounts of formaldehyde detected in satellite images.

Methane is currently responsible for one third of global warming. Over a 20-year period, methane is about 80 times as potent as CO2. However, methane breaks down relatively quickly in the atmosphere—typically within about 10 years.

This means that if we reduce methane emissions now it could have a noticeable impact on the climate within a decade. For this reason, researchers sometimes refer to methane reduction as an “emergency brake” on climate change—one that may help prevent climate tipping points in the coming decades. However, reducing CO₂ emissions remains essential to stabilize temperatures in the long term.

The researchers behind the new study believe their findings could inform a growing field working on solutions to reduce methane emissions by artificially accelerating its breakdown in the atmosphere—similar to how the volcano effectively cleaned up after itself. Various methods are currently under investigation, but a key challenge is measuring and verifying how much methane is actually removed.

“How do you prove that methane has been removed from the atmosphere? How do you know your method works? It’s very difficult. But here we address that problem by showing that methane breakdown can in fact be observed using satellites,” says Jos de Laat from the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute, senior author of the study.

The research was conducted with the advanced TROPOMI instrument aboard the European Space Agency’s Sentinel-5P satellite, which monitors air pollution and greenhouse gases worldwide on a daily basis.

“Retrieving formaldehyde from TROPOMI in a stratospheric volcanic plume is far outside the instrument’s standard operating conditions—we had to carefully correct the satellite’s sensitivity for the unusual altitude of the signal and account for interference from the exceptionally high sulfur dioxide concentrations. Getting these corrections right was essential to confirm that what we were seeing was real,” says Isabelle De Smedt of the Royal Belgian Institute for Space Aeronomy.

The researchers believe the new findings will inspire engineers in industry:

“It’s an obvious idea for industry to try to replicate this natural phenomenon—but only if it can be proven to be safe and effective. Our satellite method could offer a way to help figure out how humans might slow global warming,” concludes Johnson.

The article appears in Nature Communications.

Additional researchers behind the study are from CSIC, Spain and Utrecht University, Netherlands.

The research was supported by Spark Climate Solutions.

Source: University of Copenhagen

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What your dog training choices say about your ethics

A new study explores how the training methods dog owners use reflect their ethical views on animals.

The findings may give dog owners new insight into why they choose certain training approaches over others.

Whether a dog owner rewards their dog with a treat or corrects it by pulling on the leash is not simply a matter of what they believe to be the most effective training method.

According to the study, owners’ choice of training methods is linked to their ethical stance on how animals should be treated and used.

The results come from a new study conducted by researchers from the University of Copenhagen in collaboration with colleagues from the University of Edinburgh.

Dog owners with an animal welfare-oriented ethical stance are less likely to use punishment-based training methods than those who believe that animals are there for humans to use.

“If you use punishment as part of dog training, you are more likely to view dogs as existing primarily for human purposes. If you use less punishment and rely more on positive training methods, you are more likely to orient yourself towards the idea that animals should have rights, or at least good welfare,” says Peter Sandøe, a professor at the veterinary and animal sciences department at the University of Copenhagen and senior author of the study.

The study is based on responses from 500 dog owners in the United States, who were surveyed about their training practices.

Positive training methods—such as treats, toys, and verbal praise—were widely used among respondents, while punishment-based methods, including verbal reprimands or physical correction, were used less frequently.

The participants were also asked about their views on animals and were categorized based on their responses. Overall, respondents reflected three main types of ethical orientation towards animals: an anthropocentric orientation, an animal welfare-oriented ethics stance, and an animal rights orientation.

The results show that dog owners with an anthropocentric animal‑ethical stance are more likely to use punishment‑based methods than owners who believe that animals are entitled to good welfare or rights. In addition, owners who believe that animals are entitled to good welfare were more likely to use positive methods than owners with an anthropocentric stance.

According to Sandøe, the study indicates that choice of dog training methods does not solely reflect technical knowledge or understanding of learning theory.

“Training is not a neutral activity. It is an activity in which the owner’s view of the animal becomes apparent. The methods people choose also reflect their beliefs about what our moral obligations towards animals are.”

From this perspective, influencing choice of training methods is not merely a technical or professional issue.

“It is not only about learning theory—it is also an ethical discussion. You cannot isolate it as something purely technical or sciency, as some tend to do,” says Sandøe.

Although the study was conducted in the United States, similar patterns may be expected in other countries, explains Sandøe. While the distribution of ethical views may vary across countries, the relationship between ethical orientation and the choice of training methods is likely to be comparable.

At the same time, the findings may encourage reflection among dog owners.

“The study creates room for reflection. Ethics appears to play an important role in why people do what they do when training their dogs,” says Peter Sandøe.

Overall, the study highlights considerable variation in how people relate to animals.

“People have very different views on animals, and dog training is an area that really divides opinions,” concludes Peter Sandøe.

The study is not representative, and the results cannot therefore be used to estimate how widespread different training methods or ethical orientations are in the general population. The study focuses solely on the relationship between training choices and ethical orientation.

The study used a measure of animal ethical orientation developed by researchers at the University of Copenhagen. This measure has also been applied in previous studies examining the relationship between animal ethics views and consumer choices, such as the purchase of pork with or without animal welfare labels.

Additional contributors to the study are from the University of Edinburgh and the University of Copenhagen.

The study appears in the journal Anthrozoös.

Source: University of Copenhagen

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‘Love hormone’ plays a role in group competition

The “love hormone” oxytocin plays a role not only in moments of intimacy but also in competitive situations.

Researchers at the University of Zurich (UZH) have shown that oxytocin levels increase when rivalry or clearly defined groups are involved—particularly in men.

“Previous work showed that receiving oxytocin via a nasal spray can make people more ‘groupish’,” says Charlotte Debras from UZH’s Institute of Evolutionary Medicine, who conducted the study as part of her doctoral research.

“But it wasn’t known whether OT naturally increased during group competition.”

To systematically study competition, the researchers organized soccer tournaments together with the Indigenous Tsimane’ people in the Bolivian Amazon.

“The Tsimane’ lifestyle has an effect on their hormone levels,” says Adrian Jaeggi, also from UZH’s Institute of Evolutionary Medicine, who has been conducting research on site since 2011.

For example, levels of reproductive hormones like testosterone or progesterone are lower when calories are harder to come by. Meanwhile, the kinds of social factors linked to OT are likely especially important in these highly interdependent societies. To test their hypothesis, the researchers measured oxytocin levels in the urine of soccer players before and after the matches.

Oxytocin levels increased most strongly after matches against familiar rivals but less so among teams from different communities. When Tsimane’ played against non-Tsimane’ people, however, the increase was again higher.

“This suggests that oxytocin is sensitive to the salience of the opposition—showing heightened reactivity both toward familiar competitors and toward a clearly defined out-group,” says Jaeggi.

One particularly striking finding of the study was that women’s OT levels did not differ before or after games, unlike men’s. Debras mentions several possible explanations for this.

“Firstly, women start from higher baseline levels, as many of them were breastfeeding, which could make it harder to detect a change.”

It is also possible that soccer may not hold the same significance for women, as they play less often than men. Another explanation is provided by the “male warrior hypothesis,” which proposes that men have evolved to be generally more invested in group competition.

“The most important forms of rivalry for Tsimane’ women may involve relational dynamics, such as managing reputations or jostling for social support, rather than physical competition,” says Debras.

The study does not make it possible to determine whether the increase in OT primarily promotes cohesion within the team or competition with the opposing group. In team sports, both aspects are closely intertwined.

“Cooperation can be a successful way to compete in the game of life, and OT seems to be a key ingredient for this,” says Jaeggi. “OT has been linked to group conflict in many different species, from fish to chimpanzees. Our findings suggest that similar mechanisms are at play in humans.”

The research appears in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

Source: University of Zurich

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