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July 17, 2025—Ever brighter times ahead for our sun, seven mysteries about an interstellar comet en route to the inner solar system and a better deep-brain implant for Parkinson's. —Robin Lloyd, Contributing Editor | | 3I/ATLAS streaks across a dense star field in this image captured by the Gemini North telescope's Gemini Multi-Object Spectrograph (GMOS-N). International Gemini Observatory/NOIRLab/NSF/AURA/K. Meech (IfA/U. Hawaii) Image Processing: Jen Miller & Mahdi Zamani (NSF NOIRLab) (CC BY 4.0) | | | Deep-Brain Treatment for Parkinson's | A new implant for people with Parkinson's listens to brain waves, "tunes" to frequencies in a region associated with movement, and then tailors the rhythm of electrical stimulation delivered to treat patients' tremors and other symptoms. These implants, featuring "brain radio" chips and thin wires to deliver electrical pulses, are designed to tamp down the exaggerated brain signals thought to drive the halting and involuntary movements of patients with the progressive disorder, reports science journalist Sally Adee. Continuous deep-brain-stimulation (DBS) implants were approved decades ago to treat Parkinson's. The new implants are adaptive (aDBS), such that pulses can be dialed up or down in response to thresholds of brain-activity sensed by the implants.How it works: The thin wires deliver electrical pulses to a deep region of the brain that's associated with movement control. The idea is that the pulses regulate exaggerated brain activity (called oscillopathy) that occurs intermittently in people with Parkinson's, keeping tremors and other symptoms at bay.
Why this matters: About 1 million people in the U.S. and 1.2 million people in Europe currently are living with Parkinson's. Unlike some treatments for the condition, aDBS is not associated with slurred speech, increased risk of falling or involuntary movements. Researchers hope to develop similar aDBS treatments for Tourette's syndrome, OCD and depression.
| | | Can Life Survive the Death of the Sun? | On a day-to-day basis, the sun might appear unchanging. However, give it an eon or two, and the star will grow brighter and consume Mercury and Venus. Earth's temperature will rise to about 1,300 degrees C, and the oceans will evaporate—stopping all life from existing. At this temperature, rocks will melt and Earth will become a world of lava, writes astronomer and columnist Phil Plait. How it works: Every second the sun shines it produces millions of tons of inert helium. This helium settles in the center of the sun like ash, and builds up over hundreds of thousands of years. As the helium pile gains mass, it gets squeezed by the weight of the sun's layers above it. The compressed helium heats up, brightening and swelling the sun into a giant red star.
How will other planets fare?: Not well. The only possibility of sanctuary lies on Pluto, an icy body 50 times more distant from the sun than the Earth is now. Its surface temperature will be around -10 degrees C, which is pretty chilly. But frozen carbon and methane in the planet's atmosphere may vaporize and heat the tiny world up just enough to make it comfortable.
—Andrea Tamayo, newsletter intern
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Amenipa Kyando (center) is an aquatic scientist at the Aqua-Farms Organization in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. Kang-Chun Cheng | | Aquatic scientist Amenipa Kyando runs a development project that empowers women to secure a fair income from seaweed farming in Tanzania. "We train them to farm seaweed more productively and sustainably. We also show them how to turn their harvest into value-added products ranging from shampoos, body oils and scrubs, to nutritional powders and even hot sauce," she says. "In Zanzibar, the 58 women we have worked with so far have increased their earnings per kilogram of seaweed from less than US$0.25 to $4." Nature | 3 min read | | Long ago, my uncle had an apartment close to the Charles River in Cambridge, Mass. This fortuitous rental afforded the local extended family a likely once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to sneak out at night to lay on crusty grass in Magazine Beach Park to look for Halley's Comet during its 1986 return to the inner solar system. Halley's orbits the sun, unlike 3I/ATLAS, which is an interstellar object. The latter currently is just visiting our solar system, traveling 70 kilometers per second, relative to the sun—faster than any solar system object ought to, Scientific American news intern Nora Bradford reported on July 3. It is only the third-known interstellar object seen in our solar system, but astronomers suspect that the local frequency is higher. Fortunately, the Vera C. Rubin Observatory, as part of its 10-year mission, could provide clues to the true abundance of interstellar objects both in our solar system at any given time and throughout the galaxy. Thanks, Vera! | | Thanks for reading and, as always, send comments, questions and interstellar observations to: newsletters@sciam.com. —Robin Lloyd, Contributing Editor
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