Goodable

Get ready to witness the exciting debut of Olympic breaking today in Paris! Breaking, a dynamic style of street dance originating from the US in the 1970s, will take center stage with its gravity-defying stunts and impressive athleticism. Participants will captivate audiences with their moves set to funky beats and hip-hop music during intense 60-second dance battles.The competition involves groups of four breakers facing off in one-on-one battles until only two advance to the quarterfinals. Judges will evaluate them on technique, execution, musicality and originality using the Trivium judging system. It is based on three overarching and inter-related domains; Physical (body), Artistic (mind), and Interpretive (soul) with each domain containing core qualities.There are four elements to look for: Toprock as an introduction, Footwork showcasing various steps on the ground, Power move highlighting acrobatics and strength and Freeze where breakers hold a static position synced with music beats.Competitors, known as b-boys and b-girls, showcase their skills without following any routine while engaging in energetic battles where each dancer brings something unique to the floor. The DJ controls the music, setting the tone for each battle as an MC keeps up the hype among spectators. This electrifying art form gained popularity after its successful introduction at Buenos Aires Youth Olympics in 2018 leading up to its inclusion at Paris 2024.The breaking action is scheduled over two days at Parc Urbain near Place de La Concorde featuring both men's and women's competitions alongside other urban sports like basketball, skateboarding, and BMX freestyle. Thirty-two talented breakers -16 b-girls and 16 b-boys - are all geared up to impress judges through rounds showcasing technique, vocabulary execution musicality originality across various criteria scoresGerman competitor Jilou says, “We’re going to bring a party to the Olympics because who else comes with a DJ?” Rachael "B-girl Raygun" Gunn, 36, and Jeff 'J-Attack' Dunne, 16, are all set to represent Australia, with 33 total competitors vying for gold. The stage will look like a giant record with a massive boom box backdrop that pays homage to the musical roots of breaking. Here's everything you need to know about the new Olympic Sport.

Olympics Newest Sport, Breaking, Debuts Today - Here's What You Need to Know

Euro News

For a few euros, students in Amsterdam can swap the library for one of Europe’s best-known concert halls, open a laptop under the red plush seats of the Concertgebouw, and study while live classical music plays above them.

The sessions are organised by Entree, the youth association of the Concertgebouw. They are designed to help students concentrate while also bringing younger audiences into the historic venue.

In the main auditorium, rows of students sit with laptops and notebooks as violinist Hyunjin Cho and cellist Efstratia Chaloulakou perform. The point is not for students to stop and watch. At these events, they are there to study, and the music is meant to help rather than interrupt.

The idea has grown out of an initiative first conceived during the COVID-19 pandemic, when Entree looked for ways to support students studying remotely and introduce them to classical music at the same time.

Since then, the sessions have kept drawing students back to the Concertgebouw to prepare for exams or work on dissertations.

Simon Reinink, the general director of the Concertgebouw, said the format is also part of a wider effort to bring younger people into the building.

“Well, it's one of the many ways to welcome younger audiences to the Concertgebouw, and it's such an inspiring place to study with great music in this wonderful, beautiful environment, and it's one of the ways to more or less seduce younger audiences to discover the Concertgebouw and hopefully they will be enthusiastic that it will come back,” he says.

The sessions are cheap by design. Tickets cost €2.50 and include free access to the venue’s Wi-Fi network.

For students who do not usually listen to classical music, the setup can still work.

“It’s actually very calming and helps in concentrating on the work that we have to do, which is something that surprises me because normally I don’t really listen to classical music, so that’s a new experience for me,” says Kyra Mulder, a 21-year-old student of occupational therapy.

Professor Bas Bloem, a neurologist at the Radboud University Medical Centre in Nijmegen, says background music does not affect everyone in the same way. For some people, it can be distracting, but for others, it can support concentration.

“I think the reason why music in the background can be so soothing almost is that it creates a state of flow," he says.

He says that state sits in a balance between skill and challenge.

"Flow is this mysterious balance between your level of skills and being challenged, and you want to be in that sweet spot. You don't want to be overchallenged, you don't want to be underchallenged, and I think music in the background can help you to reach a state of flow, and everybody knows when you reach a state of flow, you can go on endlessly and be enormously productive."

Students attending the sessions say the quiet setting helps them handle more than one thing at once.

Thijmen Broekman, a medical student, says the combination of the hall and the performance makes concentrating easier.

"I don't think it's difficult to multitask here because it's really quiet environment and nice quiet music so that helps me to concentrate and I'm not having any difficulties multitasking," he says.

The study sessions bring together two aims in one format: giving students a place to work and introducing younger audiences to live classical music in the Concertgebouw. The concerts continue in the background while laptops stay open and notebooks fill up.

Tickets for the sessions cost just €2.50, with free access to the venue's Wi-Fi network.

📸 credit: © Jasmijn de Graaff

Amsterdam Students Use Live Classical Music Sessions to Focus During Exams

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Science Daily

Solar panels do a lot of heavy lifting in the push away from fossil fuels, but they still leave a lot of sunlight on the table.

Scientists from Kyushu University in Japan, working with collaborators at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz in Germany, say they have found a way past a long-standing physical limit in solar energy conversion. In research published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society on March 25, the team used a molybdenum-based metal complex known as a "spin-flip" emitter to capture extra energy produced through singlet fission, or SF.

With that approach, they reported energy conversion efficiencies of about 130 percent, above the traditional 100 percent limit.

Solar cells generate electricity when photons from sunlight hit a semiconductor and transfer energy to electrons, setting them in motion and creating an electric current. The process can be compared to a relay, with energy passed from one particle to another.

But some of that sunlight goes to waste. Low-energy infrared photons do not have enough energy to activate electrons. High-energy photons, such as blue light, lose their extra energy as heat. Because of that, solar cells can use only about one-third of the incoming sunlight.

That limit is known as the Shockley-Queisser limit.

"We have two main strategies to break through this limit," says Yoichi Sasaki, Associate Professor at Kyushu University's Faculty of Engineering. "One is to convert lower-energy infrared photons into higher-energy visible photons. The other, what we explore here, is to use SF to generate two excitons from a single exciton photon."

Under normal conditions, each photon produces one spin-singlet exciton after excitation. In singlet fission, that single exciton can split into two lower-energy spin-triplet excitons. The process could effectively double the available energy.

Some materials, including tetracene, can support singlet fission. But collecting those excitons efficiently has been difficult.

"The energy can be easily 'stolen' by a mechanism called Förster resonance energy transfer (FRET) before multiplication occurs," Sasaki explains. "We therefore needed an energy acceptor that selectively captures the multiplied triplet excitons after fission."

To deal with that, the researchers turned to metal complexes, which they said can be precisely engineered. They identified a molybdenum-based "spin-flip" emitter as a working answer.

In that system, an electron changes its spin during absorption or emission of near-infrared light. That lets it capture the triplet energy generated by singlet fission.

The researchers said they carefully adjusted the energy levels to cut losses from FRET and allow efficient extraction of the multiplied excitons.

"We could not have reached this point without the Heinze group from JGU Mainz," Sasaki says.

The collaboration began after Adrian Sauer, a graduate student from the group who was visiting Kyushu University on exchange and is the paper's second author, drew attention to a material long studied there.

When the molybdenum-based system was combined with tetracene-based materials in solution, the team said it successfully harvested energy with quantum yields of about 130 percent.

The researchers said that meant roughly 1.3 molybdenum-based metal complexes were activated for every photon absorbed. In turn, that exceeded the usual limit and showed that more energy carriers were produced than incoming photons.

The work is still at the proof-of-concept stage. The team said it now wants to integrate the materials into solid-state systems to improve energy transfer and move closer to practical solar cell applications.

The findings could also prompt more research that combines singlet fission and metal complexes. According to the researchers, this could have uses in solar energy, LEDs and emerging quantum technologies.

For now, the result is a laboratory demonstration that singlet fission energy can be harvested with a molybdenum-based "spin-flip" emitter, with quantum yields of about 130 percent.

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Scientists Break Solar Efficiency Limit With 130% Energy Breakthrough

ABC11 NC - Localish

A piece of computing history is sitting inside a university classroom in Pennsylvania.

At the University of Pennsylvania's Moore Building in Philadelphia, part of ENIAC remains on display. ENIAC stands for Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer, and it is known as the first programmable, electronic computer. Its construction was finished in 1945.

Historian Paul Shaffer told ABC11, "The University of Pennsylvania is very proud to have started all this and we like to think this was the start of the information age!"

Four of ENIAC's panels and one instrument table are housed in the Moore Building at the University of Pennsylvania. The computer was unveiled in 1946 and originally took up an entire laboratory. It had 18,000 vacuum tubes and weighed more than 30 tons.

ENIAC was designed and built to handle computations for the military's artillery firing table. Before ENIAC, that work would take hours.

Newspapers at the time called it "Giant Brain." It remained in operation until 1955 and was eventually moved to Aberdeen, Maryland.

The university also chose six women to be programmers of ENIAC. They played an important role in the development and usage of the computer through the years.

Today, students walk by and study next to this piece of computing history every day.

While Silicon Valley in California is known for the tech industry's giants, ENIAC's history is tied to Pennsylvania. More information on ENIAC is available at https://www.seas.upenn.edu.

 📸credit: Paul W. Shaffer, University of Pennsylvania

ENIAC, the First Computer, is On Display at the University of Pennsylvania

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Smithsonian Magazine

Dogs were hanging around people a lot earlier than the genetic record had shown.

Two studies published in Nature on March 25 found that dogs were living alongside humans in western Eurasia about 14,000 to 16,000 years ago, before humans developed agriculture. The findings push back the earliest genetic evidence of a domesticated canine by about 5,000 years and add new detail to how dogs spread.

Modern dogs descended from ancient wolves, but researchers still do not know exactly when domestication began. A 2015 analysis using computer simulations of the canine family tree suggested the split happened around 27,000 to 40,000 years ago. Before the new papers, the oldest genetic evidence of a domesticated dog came from remains in northwestern Russia dated to nearly 11,000 years ago.

One of the new studies examined DNA from bones of more than 200 canines recovered from archaeological sites in Europe and southwestern Asia, including Turkey, Switzerland and Scotland. The analyses showed that some of the animals were dogs. The oldest was a Swiss animal dated to 14,200 years ago that lived with a hunter-gatherer group.

That Swiss dog shared ancestry with later dogs from other places, suggesting the animals descended from one population and that different human societies were acquiring dogs from each other.

“It is kind of the equivalent of a new blade or a new point or a new kind of material culture or art form or something, where everybody’s getting really excited about having this fun new thing around,” Greger Larson, a paleogeneticist at the University of Oxford in England and co-author of both studies, told Emily Anthes at the New York Times. “And it’s useful, and it’s interesting, and it’s probably cute.”

The second study found even older genetic evidence of a dog. Remains from a site in Turkey produced a 15,800-year-old domesticated animal. DNA analysis also identified ancient dogs at other sites in western Eurasia, including a 14,300-year-old individual in England.

The Turkish and English dogs lived nearly 2,000 miles apart, but they were still closely genetically related. The researchers said that suggests dogs were already widespread across the region by then.

The studies also found signs that humans in different places treated dogs in similar ways. William Marsh, a paleogeneticist at the Natural History Museum in London and co-author of the study, told Ewen Callaway at Nature that the animals “were treated in very similar ways.”

Chemical analyses suggested that people at both sites fed their dogs the same food they ate. The English dog’s skull had decorative perforations like those found on human skulls. In Turkey, dogs were buried on top of deceased people.

The research also tracked what happened later, when the first farmers moved into Europe from southwestern Asia about 9,000 years ago. The studies found that these farmers brought dogs with them, which led to more animal trading.

Those farmers nearly fully replaced earlier human populations in Europe, but the research suggests they did not do the same with dogs. According to the studies, only about 50 percent of European dog DNA was replaced in later animals.

“They seem to incorporate these dogs rather than trying to replace them with their own,” Anders Bergström, a geneticist at the University of East Anglia in England who co-authored both papers, told David Grimm at Science.

The work supports the idea that all dogs came from one place, possibly somewhere in Asia, with additional interbreeding between early dogs and wolves. Adam Boyko, a geneticist at Cornell University who was not involved in the research, told Science News’ Tom Metcalfe, “Of course, we can’t rule out that some early fossils classified as wolves were actually tame and effectively dogs.” He added, “But from the standpoint of modern dogs, it seems they all share a single domestication origin.”

Researchers still do not know what roles dogs had in hunter-gatherer groups 14,000 years ago. Laurent Frantz, a paleogeneticist at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich in Germany who worked on both studies, told the Times that it is possible the animals did different jobs in different human societies.

Beth Shapiro, an evolutionary biologist at the University of California, Santa Cruz, who was not involved in the work, told Science News the studies were a “significant advance” in understanding the origins of dogs.

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Scientists Identify World’s First Known Dog, Pushing Back Genetic Record 5,000 Years

Talker News

For Becky Chaplin, the road from a bag on a roadside in Kenya to a hospital ship in Sierra Leone has come full circle.

Chaplin, 30, was found abandoned in a bag on the side of the road as a newborn in Kenya in 1995. She was so young that her umbilical cord was still attached.

A missionary was out jogging when they spotted the bag and looked inside to find the baby girl. She was taken to an orphanage, and seven weeks later she was adopted by two British missionary workers stationed in Kenya.

Becky said: "Mom said when she picked me up that she felt that God was saying 'this is your daughter'."

She was raised in Kenya by her British parents until the age of 10, when the family moved back to East Grinstead, London.

Chaplin said her early years in Kenya shaped what came next.

She said: "Living in Kenya, I was exposed to extreme poverty and the opportunities you can have with education.

"I was fortunate to be adopted into a family that gave me that opportunity."

She said she had wanted to work with disabled children and adults since she was young.

Becky said: "I've known since I was little that I wanted to help children and adults with disabilities."

She went on to pursue a career in healthcare and became an occupational therapist. After completing her degree, she also pursued a master's degree focusing on hand therapy, burns and working in low-income countries.

Chaplin then worked in the UK for four-and-a-half years. She specialised in hand therapy and gained experience on the burns unit in East Grinstead.

Later, she heard about Mercy Ships, a hospital charity, and decided to leave her job in the UK to volunteer.

Becky said: "I left my work in the UK to volunteer with Mercy Ships because I've always had a heart to come back to an African country.

"I wanted to do it once I had the skill or experience to be able to help."

She joined the Global Mercy in Sierra Leone as a rehabilitation team leader. In that role, she worked with burns patients recovering from free surgery on the hospital ship.

Her work then shifted when the Global Mercy moved to the port of Freetown in Sierra Leone.

In 2018, Sierra Leone established its first university-level physiotherapist course at the Tonkolili District College of Health Sciences.

Chaplin said that before the degree programme began, people who wanted to train as physiotherapists had to leave the country.

She said: "Before the degree programme was started, anyone wishing to become a physiotherapist would have to fly to Ghana, Cuba, Kenya, or further afield for training."

With an estimated population of around nine million people, Sierra Leone had six fully trained physiotherapists, according to the source text.

That began to change in 2023, when 15 new graduates emerged from the bachelor's programme and another 15 from the diploma programme. Chaplin said she had the privilege of working alongside them.

Over time, she said, the mentorship programme grew. She now works in a local hospital close to where the Global Mercy is docked in Freetown, assisting with mentoring and upskilling physiotherapists around burn patients.

Her focus is on helping local staff build their methods of treating patients, especially young children.

Becky said: "The high proportion of burn patients are under five years old.

"You see many accidents from boiling water or soup spilling onto small children.

"I work alongside the physios to build their methods of treating patients.

"As Sierra Leone develops their resources, we hope we'll begin to see less contractures come to the ship when we next visit Sierra Leone."

Mercy Ships is an international health charity that deploys hospital ships to some of the poorest countries, delivering free healthcare.

Chaplin now serves as a mentor to trainee physiotherapists in Sierra Leone, after first volunteering there as rehabilitation team leader on board the Global Mercy.

Abandoned At Birth, She's Now Leading Care On A Hospital Ship

Four snow leopard cubs at Melbourne Zoo have had their vaccinations before stepping out confidently into their habitat.

The cubs, the only snow leopard cubs in Australia, were born in January to 9-year-old mother Miska and 10-year-old father Kang Ju.

The two girls and two boys are named Maya, Kira, Lumi and Sabu.

Laura Weiner, manager of carnivores and ungulates, said: "The names were inspired by the range countries where snow leopards are found, a wide variety of locations around the Himalayas.

"We didn’t know what their personalities would be like and it was obvious very quickly, three of them were really quite calm and curious and the other one was very feisty and quite a handful!”

The cubs weigh 3 kilograms and have been playful with their mother.

Laura Weiner said: "As the cubs grow they start to practice some of those hunting behaviors and they’ve started to practice them on Miska, they’re pouncing on her, they’re chewing on her tail, they’re grabbing her.

"As you can imagine, four cubs are a lot to handle! So, she does take some time on her own away from them."

Snow leopards are classed as vulnerable, and Zoos Victoria is contributing to a global breeding program for their conservation.

📸 Talker News

Melbourne Zoo Snow Leopard Cubs Get Vaccinations Before Habitat Debut

Good News Network

After years of empty flights over part of Virunga, the view has changed. Elephants are crossing back into the park in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, and mountain gorillas have recorded a run of healthy births, including rare twins.

Things are looking up in the Virunga Mountains, where scores of elephants have been returning across the border following a reduction in militia violence. This spring, 9 healthy births have also been recorded among the mountain gorillas, including twins that a ranger officer called “a very encouraging sign.”

There were once thousands of African bush elephants roaming freely between Virunga National Park in Congo and Queen Elizabeth National Park in Uganda. But mountains, jungles and borderlands are among the areas most commonly used by violent rebel groups around the world, and Virunga includes all three.

The park has suffered from decades of violent insurgency in DR Congo, with elephants poached by rebels to sustain themselves. In recent years, however, 480 elephants from the Ugandan side have been documented travelling back into Virunga.

“For years I haven’t seen any animals when I flew over this area, just rebels,” said Anthony Caere, a Belgian anti-poaching helicopter pilot at Virunga National Park.

“Now not only are we seeing the elephants, which is an unbelievable sight from above, but we’re noticing the impact of such a big herd on the park. They’re restoring everything back to what it was 50 years ago and doing so much faster than we could have imagined. If the elephants continue to stay here in these numbers, this place will look totally different in just a few years.”

The returning elephants are also changing the park itself. Their size and appetites are cutting trails through the forest, scything back invasive shrubs and expanding clearings. The area is beginning to look like a “forested savannah” again.

There have also been sightings of buffalo, Ugandan kob, warthogs, topi and even a pair of lions.

Virunga is the oldest national park on the continent and is home to extraordinary biodiversity. It has received millions in aid money from Re:Wild, Global Wildlife Conservation, the European Union and other organisations, including from a fund established by Leonardo DiCaprio.

That backing has helped the park scale back poaching and put development programs in place to try to steer impoverished locals away from illegal agriculture, poaching or militia life.

The recent stability has also benefited the park’s mountain gorillas. A female in the Bageni family, the park’s largest gorilla family group with 59 members, was recently observed to have given birth to twins. The babies are now 2 months old.

Jacques Katutu, head of gorilla monitoring, said the twins are developing well and that their mother is managing the demands of two babies, which is uncommon among gorillas.

“The five births recorded since the start of 2026, including twins in the Bageni family, are a very encouraging sign,” Mr. Katutu said in a statement. “Behind every confirmed birth is the patient and dedicated work of our community trackers. Present in the field every day, often under challenging conditions, they are the first to witness these extraordinary moments.”

The births add to the signs of recovery in a park that has long been shaped by conflict. Alongside the gorilla births, the return of 480 elephants from Uganda has brought back the ecosystem engineering associated with the largest land animal on Earth.

According to the account from Virunga, the elephants are helping restore the park to what it was decades ago. Caere said the change is already visible from the air.

“They’re restoring everything back to what it was 50 years ago and doing so much faster than we could have imagined,” he said.

📸 credit: Virunga National Park

Virunga National Park Sees Elephant Return and Rare Gorilla Twins Born

Sunny Skyz

What started as a letdown at a hockey game in Hartford ended with a police officer turning the night around for one young fan.

Earlier this month, a family was at a Hartford Wolf Pack game when the team mascot pointed to a girl and her brother and tossed a T-shirt toward them.

For a moment, it looked like the children had their big souvenir.

Instead, the shirt bounced off the wall and ended up with another child, and the excitement quickly gave way to disappointment.

Officer Christopher Vanwey, who was working the game, saw what happened and decided to step in.

He surprised the little girl with a hockey toy and a soccer ball, changing the course of her night with what the family later described as a simple act of kindness.

The moment stayed with the family, who said it gave them a chance to teach their children about compassion and the positive role police officers play in the community.

In a letter later shared with the Hartford Police Department, the girl’s mother thanked Vanwey for what he did.

She wrote that the gesture “made my daughter’s day.”

She also wrote: “I hope this card can get to the police officer. Thanks for all you do each and every day to protect us all. Thanks for teaching my children about kindness. A very appreciative mom, Leah.”

The girl, Bella, wrote her own thank-you note to the officer.

“You are very thoughtful. Thank you for the hockey toy and the soccer ball. I hope you have a good day. – Bella.”

The Hartford Police Department later shared the story on Facebook and said the moment reflected the kind of work that matters most to officers.

“This is what policing is about, showing up, paying attention, and making a difference when it matters most.”

 📸Credit: Hartford Police CT

A Young Fan Lost a Souvenir — So, An Officer Made It Right

For women in midlife, keeping moving appears to matter a lot.

New research found women who stayed active throughout middle age cut their risk of premature death by half. The study tracked more than 11,000 women and found that meeting exercise guidelines during midlife had “strong” benefits in terms of living longer.

The findings showed that women who consistently met physical activity guidelines throughout middle age had half the chance of dying from any cause compared to women who remained inactive.

Researchers used data from 11,169 women born between 1946 and 1951 who enrolled in the Australian Longitudinal Study on Women’s Health. Participants were surveyed nine times between 1996 and 2019, about once every three years.

The study collected data on how often the women met the World Health Organization recommendation of at least 150 minutes of moderate-to-vigorous physical activity per week.

The results were published in the journal PLOS Medicine.

Physical activity is already known to provide multiple well-being benefits and to reduce the risk of chronic diseases and premature death. But the researchers said most previous studies measured physical activity at only a single point in time, which failed to capture how activity levels changed over time.

In this study, consistently meeting moderate-to-vigorous physical activity recommendations throughout midlife was linked to a relative risk of death from any cause that was half that of women who consistently did not meet the recommendations.

The incidence of death was 5.3 percent among women who consistently met the guidelines. That compared with 10.4 percent among women who consistently did not meet them.

The researchers said the apparent effect was similar, or even stronger, for deaths linked to cardiovascular disease and cancer. But they said those estimates came with greater uncertainty, making the findings less conclusive. They said that may be because fewer deaths from those causes were observed in the study.

The study also looked at the benefits of starting to meet physical activity recommendations later in midlife, at age 55, 60 or 65, instead of throughout all of midlife. The researchers said the evidence for benefits in those cases was uncertain and inconclusive.

Study author Dr. Binh Nguyen, of the University of Sydney, Australia, said: “This study supports the growing evidence that maintaining an active lifestyle in midlife provides health benefits.

“Women should be encouraged to meet physical activity recommendations throughout middle age to derive these benefits.”

Dr. Nguyen added: "Staying active throughout midlife can make a real difference for women’s long-term health.

"Our study shows that maintaining recommended levels of physical activity over multiple years helps protect against early death.”

The study followed women over more than two decades, with surveys carried out from 1996 to 2019. It focused on a group born between 1946 and 1951 and measured how often they reached the World Health Organization target of at least 150 minutes of moderate-to-vigorous physical activity each week.

The central finding was clear. Women who kept meeting that target across middle age had a much lower risk of dying from any cause than women who stayed inactive. The death rate in the active group was 5.3 percent, compared with 10.4 percent in the inactive group.

The researchers said the findings add to evidence in support of regular physical activity in midlife, while also showing the value of tracking activity over time instead of relying on a single snapshot.

Dr. Nguyen said: “Women should be encouraged to meet physical activity recommendations throughout middle age to derive these benefits.”

Exercise In Midlife Cuts Premature Death Risk For Women in Half, Study Finds

It turns out some young stars may come with their own built-in monitoring system.

Carnegie researcher Luke Bouma is studying a new way to examine how stars shape the planets around them, using naturally occurring "space weather stations" that appear around some young stars. His findings are being presented this week at the American Astronomical Society meeting.

The work focuses on M dwarf stars, which are smaller, cooler and dimmer than our Sun. Most of them host at least one rocky planet about the size of Earth.

Many of those planets are not seen as friendly to life. The source text says they may be too hot, may lack stable atmospheres, or may be exposed to frequent flares and intense radiation. Even so, they give scientists a chance to study how stars affect the conditions around their planets.

"Stars influence their planets. That's obvious. They do so both through light, which we're great at observing, and through particles -- or space weather -- like solar winds and magnetic storms, which are more challenging to study at great distances," Bouma explained. "And that's very frustrating, because we know in our own Solar System that particles can sometimes be more important for what happens to planets."

Directly placing instruments around distant stars to measure that space weather is not possible, according to the source text. Bouma, working with Moira Jardine of the University of St Andrews, instead turned to an unusual class of M dwarfs known as complex periodic variables.

These young stars spin rapidly and show repeated dips in brightness. Scientists had been unsure if those dips came from dark spots on the star itself or from material orbiting nearby.

"For a long time, no one knew quite what to make of these oddball little blips of dimming," Bouma said. "But we were able to demonstrate that they can tell us something about the environment right above the star's surface."

To study that further, the team created what the source text describes as "spectroscopic movies" of one of the stars. Their analysis found the dimming comes from large clouds of relatively cool plasma trapped within the star's magnetosphere.

Those plasma clumps are carried along by the star's magnetic field and form a doughnut-shaped structure called a torus.

"Once we understood this, the blips in dimming stopped being weird little mysteries and became a space weather station," Bouma exclaimed. "The plasma torus gives us a way to know what's happening to the material near these stars, including where it's concentrated, how it's moving, and how strongly it is influenced by the star's magnetic field."

Bouma and Jardine estimate that at least 10 percent of M dwarfs may have these plasma structures during their early stages. The source text says that could give astronomers a way to better understand how stellar particles affect planetary environments.

Bouma's next goal is to work out where the material in the torus comes from, either the star itself or an external source.

"This is a great example of a serendipitous discovery, something we didn't expect to find but that will give us a new window into understanding planet-star relationships," Bouma concluded. "We don't know yet if any planets orbiting M dwarfs are hospitable to life, but I feel confident that space weather is going to be an important part of answering that question."

 📸 Credit: Navid Marvi, Carnegie Science

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