Ines Lee
Lead Writer at VeMail

Hi Reader, It’s Nobel season - the week when the world pauses to celebrate science that reshapes our understanding of reality. The 2025 Nobel Prize in Physics went to John Clarke, Michel Devoret, and John Martinis for breakthroughs that brought quantum effects into everyday electrical circuits. In Medicine, Mary Brunkow, Fred Ramsdell, and Shimon Sakaguchi were honored for revealing how the immune system learns tolerance, preventing it from attacking the body’s own cells.

Together, these discoveries remind us that progress in science is often slow and invisible. This week, we’re exploring a few of those frontiers ourselves - from the chemistry of the oceans to the physics of batteries and the next generation of cancer therapy.

Coming up this week:
🌊 Our oceans have become too acidic
🔬 A radioactive cancer treatment that beats chemotherapy
🔋 MIT researchers solve a 100-year battery puzzle
+more

CLIMATE

Our Seas Have Become Too Acidic

Powerful ocean wave crashing with white foam. — *Photo Credit:* *Jonathan Borba*

A major international report has delivered a stark warning: Earth has now crossed seven of nine planetary boundaries. The newest boundary to fall is ocean acidification.

According to the 2025 Planetary Health Check by the Potsdam Institute, the oceans’ chemistry is shifting in dangerous ways, stressing many marine species. The nine planetary boundaries - covering climate change, biodiversity loss, land use, freshwater, and more - serve as vital signs of Earth’s stability. Exceeding them elevates the risk of abrupt, hard-to-reverse changes. In this assessment, only the ozone layer and aerosol loading boundaries remain classified as safe.

Ocean acidification happens when the ocean absorbs CO₂, forming carbonic acid and lowering pH. Since the Industrial Revolution, surface ocean pH has dropped about 0.1 units, corresponding to a roughly 30–40% increase in acidity. That threatens species that build calcium carbonate shells such as corals, pteropods (tiny marine snails), mollusks, among others. Tropical and cold-water coral reefs and Arctic ecosystems are especially vulnerable. The effects cascade: pteropods are food for fish, which support seabirds, marine mammals, and coastal fisheries around the world.

“The ocean is becoming more acidic, oxygen levels are dropping, and marine heatwaves are increasing,” says Levke Caesar, co-lead of the Planetary Boundaries Science Lab. “This is ramping up pressure on a system vital to stabilise conditions on planet Earth.”

TL;DR: A new global assessment reports that seven out of nine planetary boundaries are now exceeded, the latest being ocean acidification. The shift in ocean chemistry, driven by CO₂ emissions, threatens marine ecosystems and the services we depend on.

MEDICINE

A New Way to Eradicate Cancer Using Radioactive Isotopes

red roses with white background — *Photo Credit:* *National Cancer Institute*

Cancer treatment has long relied on blunt instruments: chemotherapy poisons healthy tissue alongside tumors, and radiation burns everything in its path.

But a new generation of therapies called radiopharmaceuticals is changing that. These drugs deliver radioactive isotopes directly to cancer cells, guided by antibodies or peptides that act as homing beacons. The most promising are alpha emitters such as actinium-225. Their particles travel just a few cell widths but unleash enough energy to slice through cancer DNA, killing tumors while sparing nearby tissue. The approach builds on early success with beta-emitting drugs like Pluvicto and Lutathera and could soon redefine radiation therapy itself. In small-scale prostate cancer cases, actinium-225 treatment reportedly eliminated detectable disease after three doses.

The bottleneck is supply. Historically, Oak Ridge National Laboratory “milked” thorium-229 sources to produce Ac-225, but yields are extremely small, enough only for early trials. Other companies are racing to fill the gap, investing in advanced production methods such as cyclotron irradiation and neutron/fusion sources. If they succeed, these “radioactive scalpels” could transform oncology, giving us treatments powerful enough to cure where chemo fails, yet focused enough to spare healthy cells.

TL;DR: Radiopharmaceuticals armed with alpha-emitting isotopes like actinium-225 can obliterate tumors while sparing healthy tissue. With firms racing to solve isotope shortages using fusion reactors and nuclear stockpiles, precision radiotherapy could soon move from experimental to mainstream.

PHYSICS

MIT Researchers Crack the Battery Puzzle After a Century

black smartphone — *Photo Credit:* *Tyler Lastovich*

Battery progress has often felt incremental: tinker, test, repeat. What researchers lacked was a reliable theory explaining the fundamental reaction that drives lithium-ion cells.

A new study from MIT may change that. The team found that the standard model used since the 1920s, the Butler–Volmer equation, does not reliably predict how lithium ions intercalate into electrodes. By measuring more than 50 electrode-electrolyte combinations, they revealed that actual reaction rates can diverge by orders of magnitude from classical predictions. The researchers propose that lithium ions and electrons move together in a coupled ion–electron transfer (CIET) mechanism.

This framework offers a more predictive lens. Rather than purely empirical searching, scientists may estimate how altering electrolyte composition, electrode structure, or surface chemistry will affect the energy barrier for coupled transfer. In effect, it hints at a path toward smarter battery design. The team is already combining automated experiments and machine learning, guided by the CIET model.

“What we hope is enabled by this work is to get the reactions to be faster and more controlled, which can speed up charging and discharging,” one of the researchers said. The result is a clearer path toward faster-charging, longer-lasting batteries for electric vehicles, grid storage, and beyond.

TL;DR: Researchers propose that lithium-ion intercalation involves a coupled ion–electron transfer step, not the century-old mechanism previously assumed. This discovery offers the first broadly predictive model for battery design.

In Other News

A fertility “breakthrough” once thought impossible. Scientists have made human eggs from skin cells (via a process called “mitomeiosis”). Every embryo so far has shown chromosomal errors, but the result offers proof of concept and might one day help infertile people or same-sex couples have genetically related children.

First gene therapy slows Huntington’s by ~75%. A one-time gene therapy (AMT-130) achieved ~75% slowing of disease progression over three years in a trial compared with matched controls. It’s the first treatment to show a potential disease-modifying effect in HD.

Sign of life on Saturn’s moon? A new analysis reveals fresh, complex organic molecules erupting from Saturn’s moon Enceladus. These compounds may originate from the moon’s hidden ocean rather than from space radiation, bolstering its potential habitability. While no life has been found, the discovery cements Enceladus as one of the prime targets in the search for extraterrestrial life.

How Alzheimer’s may spread in the brain. Researchers have identified dendritic nanotubes (DNTs) in mice and human neurons, ultra-thin bridges between dendrites that bypass synapses. These structures appear capable of transporting signals, calcium, and amyloid-beta proteins. In lab models, DNT prevalence correlates with early amyloid accumulation, suggesting a possible new pathway for neurodegenerative spread.

Scientists may finally explain ghostly swamp lights. For centuries, people have reported mysterious blue flames dancing over marshes. A new study proposes that microlightning, tiny electrical sparks between methane microbubbles, can ignite methane under ambient conditions, producing faint glows. While the connection to early-Earth chemistry is speculative, the mechanism offers a plausible physical basis for folklore’s will-o’-the-wisp phenomenon.

Data Centers in Space? Bezos Thinks So. Jeff Bezos forecasts that within 10–20 years, gigawatt-scale data centers will orbit Earth, exploiting uninterrupted solar power and low cooling costs to outperform terrestrial infrastructure if we can solve launch, maintenance, and in-space engineering challenges.

Scientists wake 40,000-year-old microbes from permafrost. Microbes trapped in Alaskan permafrost for up to 40,000 years revived when thawed. As Arctic summers lengthen under climate change, these ancient communities may contribute renewed CO₂ and methane emissions. Permafrost holds an enormous carbon reservoir, estimated to be comparable to, or more than, the carbon in today’s atmosphere.

This Week in History

October 4, 1923. While studying the Andromeda “nebula,” Edwin Hubble spotted a flickering Cepheid star and realized it was far beyond the Milky Way. Overnight, our galaxy became just one of many. The universe had suddenly gotten a lot bigger, and Cepheid stars became astronomy’s go-to tool for measuring cosmic distances.

October 4, 1947. Max Planck, the physicist who founded quantum theory, died at 89. His idea that energy comes in discrete packets, or quanta, transformed physics and paved the way for quantum mechanics, semiconductors, and lasers. Planck’s death marked the end of an era, but his equations still power the modern world.

October 6, 1997. Stanley Prusiner discovered something that shouldn’t exist: a protein that infects like a virus. His “prion” theory explained mad cow disease and shattered the belief that only genes can copy themselves. For revealing life’s strangest loophole, Prusiner took home the Nobel Prize, and biology gained a new exception.