Hi Reader, an autonomous submarine just left Martha's Vineyard on a five-year, 73,000-kilometer journey to circle the globe, powered only by gravity and buoyancy. Redwing moves by adjusting its buoyancy, sinking and rising in a sawtooth pattern, surfacing every 8-12 hours to transmit data on ocean temperature, salinity, and currents. The data will help predict hurricane intensity and track climate change in the ocean's least-sampled regions. Over 50 Rutgers University students developed the navigation software and will guide it remotely. It's the kind of audacious project that we love.

Coming up this week:
🎁 The Veritasium tabletop experience...
⏰ Scientists Made Time Twice as Accurate
🐁 Could Naked Mole Rats Hold The Key to Longevity?
🔦 The Muon Flashlight That Sees Through Mountains
​+more

Coming soon:​
The Official Veritasium Game

Introducing ​Elements of Truth​, the tabletop game we’ve been working on for the past ten months! A new way to discover, discuss, and test your knowledge while having fun with family & friends.
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After playtesting with a wide range of fans, experts, and members of the team, we’re finally ready to put it out in the world.

Launching on Kickstarter this November - you can join the waitlist now to reserve the limited edition Founders Pack and get notified of the upcoming launch.

PHYSICS

MIT Physicists Make Atomic Clocks Twice as Precise

Every GPS signal, financial transaction, and smartphone clock depends on atomic clocks, devices that measure time by counting the oscillations of atoms. The best versions use ytterbium atoms vibrating a hundred trillion times per second.

But there's a hard limit: quantum noise. The more precisely you try to measure an atom's oscillation, the more uncertainty blurs the signal. That quantum fuzz has defined the ceiling for how accurately we can measure time. Physicists hunting for dark matter need clocks sensitive enough to detect tiny frequency shifts. Better clocks could even study subtle gravitational shifts linked to earthquakes. Current state-of-the-art atomic clocks are so precise that if they’d been running since the Big Bang, they’d only be off by about half a second. But to catch these subtle effects, that's still not good enough.

Until now. A team at MIT led by Professor Vladan Vuletić noticed something everyone else had dismissed. When laser light passes through entangled ytterbium atoms, it leaves behind a faint shift called a "global phase", a background effect physicists assumed was irrelevant. The team realized it wasn't noise. It was information revealing how closely the laser's frequency matched the atoms' natural rhythm.

By amplifying that whisper through "global phase spectroscopy," they turned background interference into signal. The result, published this week in Nature, is a doubling of the precision of an optical atomic clock. The same atoms now reveal twice as many ticks per second without violating quantum limits.

The technique could make optical clocks smaller, more stable, and usable outside high-end labs. "With these clocks, people are trying to detect dark matter and dark energy, and even see if they can predict earthquakes," Professor Vuletić says. "We think our method can help make these clocks transportable and deployable to where they're needed."

TL;DR: Physicists doubled optical atomic clock precision by transforming a once-ignored laser effect (the "global phase") into a useful signal, pushing timekeeping beyond previous quantum limits and potentially enabling new dark matter searches.

BIOLOGY

Naked Mole Rat’s DNA Could Hold The Key To Longevity

Naked mole rats live up to 37 years, nearly nine times longer than mice of comparable size. They stay fertile throughout their lives, rarely get cancer, and show almost no decline in physical function as they age. For nearly 30 years, scientists have puzzled over what makes these wrinkly rodents so resilient.

In a new Science paper, researchers have traced part of that longevity to a protein called cGAS. In most mammals, this protein acts like an internal alarm. When it detects damaged DNA, it triggers inflammation to summon the immune system. That’s useful for fighting infection, but over time it accelerates aging. In naked mole rats, cGAS carries a few small amino-acid changes that turn the alarm into a repair signal. Instead of igniting inflammation, it strengthens DNA maintenance and keeps cells young for longer.

When researchers engineered human and mouse cells to carry the mole-rat version, the cells repaired DNA damage more efficiently and showed fewer signs of senescence. In fruit flies engineered to express the mole-rat version of cGAS, median lifespan increased by about ten days. In mice treated with gene therapy, researchers observed improved physical function and reduced signs of cellular aging in several tissues.

"I think if we could reverse-engineer the naked mole-rat's biology, we might bring some much-needed therapies for an ageing society,” says Professor Gabriel Balmus, who studies DNA repair and aging at the University of Cambridge. But researchers caution that naked mole rats' longevity likely results from several concurrent adaptations, not just this single protein.

TL;DR: Scientists found that naked mole rats carry a modified version of the cGAS protein that boosts DNA repair instead of triggering inflammation. When inserted into other species, it slowed aging, potentially revealing a blueprint for longevity.

PHYSICS

The Muon Flashlight That Sees Through Mountains

Imagine pointing a camera at a mountain and seeing through it. For decades, scientists have done exactly that using muons - tiny, high-energy particles created when cosmic rays strike the atmosphere. They've imaged volcanoes, pyramids, and tunnels by tracking how muons scatter as they pass through rock. In 2017, researchers used this technique to discover a 100-foot-long hidden void in Egypt's Great Pyramid, a chamber that hadn't been seen in 4,500 years.

But there's a catch: natural muons arrive at random, at a rate of just one per square centimeter per minute. Getting a clear picture can take months of data collection. When scientists used muon tomography to assess damage at Fukushima's reactors, it took a few months of measurements. A team planning to map the entire Great Pyramid estimates a full scan will take about two years.

Now, physicists have built a shortcut. Using a laser-plasma accelerator, researchers at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory have built a compact experimental setup that fires ultra-intense laser pulses, accelerating electrons over just 30 centimeters. When those electrons smash into a dense material like lead, they produce muons. The resulting beam, published in Physical Review Accelerators and Beams, is bright, directed, and controllable—essentially a "muon flashlight" that can see through solid rock on demand.

The implications are vast. Imaging that once required months of exposure can now be done in hours. The team demonstrated that their laser-driven muons have comparable penetration capabilities to cosmic muons, but with vastly higher controllable flux. Archaeologists could scan buried ruins without excavation. Geologists could map magma chambers in real time. Engineers could inspect aging dams or nuclear waste containers without touching them.

TL;DR: Physicists have created a portable laser-plasma system that generates muons on demand, enabling X-ray-like imaging of volcanoes, pyramids, and tunnels in hours instead of months.

In Other News

Scientists find the brain cells behind depression. Two brain cell types show distinctive molecular changes in depression, revealing how mood and immune circuits interact and paving the way for more precise treatments.

These “natural killer” cells could help fight cancer. Scientists have created stealthy CAR-NK cells that evade immune rejection and effectively kill cancer cells in mice, bringing us closer to fast, off-the-shelf cell therapies with fewer side effects.

First pig-to-human liver transplant succeeds in China. Surgeons implanted a gene-edited pig liver segment into a 71-year-old man. It worked for 38 days without rejection before removal; the patient later died of his underlying cancer.

NASA sends “mini me” tissue chips to space. NASA’s AVATAR project will fly personalized organ-on-chip devices alongside astronauts so we can see how human cells respond to space before full damage appears. This will potentially guide safer, tailor-made protection on future missions.

15,000 blood samples show a rise in antibiotic-resistant superbugs in newborn babies. In Southeast Asia, many newborns’ bloodstream infections are caused by drug-resistant bacteria, which makes standard antibiotics ineffective and threatens decades of progress in reducing infant deaths.

We could finally “see” what the world looks like at light speed. Physicists recreated what an object would look like moving at 99.9% light. They showed that relativity makes it appear rotated, not flattened, revealing this strange optical illusion in real life.

The world’s hottest engine. A single microparticle in a vacuum has been engineered into the “hottest engine” exceeding the Sun’s core temperature. At that scale, fluctuations dominate, offering a new laboratory for probing thermodynamics and molecular machines.

This Week in History

October 16, 1843. Dublin’s mathematician William Rowan Hamilton had a sudden epiphany while walking across Broom Bridge. He realized that spatial rotations demand a four-number system (quaternions) and, in excitement, carved the core formula into the bridge stone: i² = j² = k² = ijk = -1. That moment reshaped how we compute in 3D. (The Ve Team loves this amazing video made by 3Blue1Brown.)

October 11, 1889. James Prescott Joule passed away. The physics world lost the man who proved that heat and motion are the same currency of energy. Stirring water with falling weights, he showed that work could be turned into warmth, an insight that powered the laws of thermodynamics. Today, every joule of energy still bears his name.

October 16, 2006. Russian and U.S. scientists briefly created the heaviest atom ever made: element 118. Formed by fusing calcium with californium, it lived for less than a millisecond before decaying. Now named oganesson, the element honored physicist Yuri Oganessian and marked the outer edge of the periodic table.

This Week’s Puzzle

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Random Cards
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Your friend picks a random card from a standard 52-card deck and keeps it hidden. After hearing the answer, you have to guess exactly which card it is.

Before you guess, you can ask one of these three yes-or-no questions:

1. Is the card red?
2. Is it a face card (Jack, Queen, or King)?
3. Is it the ace of spades?

Your friend will answer truthfully.

Which question should you ask to give yourself the best chance of guessing correctly?

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Until next time,

The Ve Team 👋

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Research by Pablo
Written by Ines

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Solution

It doesn’t matter. Whichever question you ask, your odds of guessing the card correctly are 1 in 26. (That’s what makes this puzzle sneaky!) Let’s see why.

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Case 1: “Is the card red?” Half the cards are red, half are black. Once your friend answers, you’ll know which half to guess from - 26 possibilities. That gives you a 1 in 26 chance of being right.

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Case 2: “Is it a face card?” Twelve cards are face cards, forty are not. If your friend says yes, you have a 1 in 12 chance. If they say no, you have a 1 in 40 chance. Multiply each case by its probability, and both paths give you the same overall result:
(12/52 × 1/12) + (40/52 × 1/40) = 1/26.

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Case 3: “Is it the ace of spades?” There’s a 1 in 52 chance your friend says yes (and you win instantly). Otherwise, you have to choose among the remaining 51 cards. That gives you:
(1/52 × 1) + (51/52 × 1/51) = 1/26 again.

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So, no matter what you ask, your chances of success double from 1 in 52 to 1 in 26.