Research roundup: Six cool science stories we almost missed

Ars Technica · Mar 2, 2026 · Collected from RSS

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The best of the rest Smart underwear measures farts, brain cells play Doom, and AI discovers rules of an ancient game. Illustration of a star that collapsed, forming a black hole. Credit: Keith Miller, Caltech/IPAC - SELab It’s a regrettable reality that there is never enough time to cover all the interesting scientific stories we come across each month. So every month, we highlight a handful of the best stories that nearly slipped through the cracks. February’s list includes the revival of a forgotten battery design by Thomas Edison that could be ideal for renewable energy storage; a snap-on device to turn those boxers into “smart underwear” to measure how often we fart; and a dish of neurons playing Doom, among other highlights. Reviving Edison’s battery design Credit: Maher El-Kady/UCLA Credit: Maher El-Kady/UCLA At the onset of the 20th century, electric cars powered by lead-acid batteries outnumbered gas-powered cars. The internal combustion engine ultimately won out, in part because those batteries had a range of just 30 miles. But Thomas Edison believed a nickel-iron battery could extend that range to as much as 100 miles, while also having a long life and recharging times of seven hours. An international team of scientists has revived Edison’s concept of a nickel-iron battery and created their own version, according to a paper published in the journal Small. The team took their inspiration from nature, specifically how shellfish form their hard outer shells and animals form bones: Proteins create a scaffolding onto which calcium compounds cluster. For the battery scaffolding, the authors used beef byproduct proteins, combined with graphene oxide, and then grew clusters of nickel for positive electrons and iron for negative ones. The team superheated all the ingredients in water followed by baking them at very high temperatures. The proteins charred into carbon, stripping away the oxygen atoms in the graphene oxide and embedding the nickel and iron clusters in the scaffolding. Essentially, it became an aerogel. The folded structure limited the clusters to less than 5 nanometers, translating into significantly more surface area for the chemical reactions fueling the battery to occur. The resulting prototype recharged in mere seconds and endured for more than 12,000 cycles, equivalent to about 30 years of daily recharging. However, their battery’s storage capacity is still well below current lithium-ion batteries, so powering EVs might not be the most promising application. The authors suggest it might be ideal for storing excess electricity generated by solar farms or other renewable energy sources. DOI: Small, 2026. 10.1002/smll.202507934 (About DOIs). Vanishing star became a black hole In 2014, NASA’s NEOWISE project picked up a gradual brightening of infrared light coming from a massive star in the Andromeda galaxy, an observation that was confirmed by several other ground- and space-based telescopes. Astronomers kept monitoring the star, so they also noticed when it quickly dimmed in 2016. Once one of the brightest stars in that galaxy, it effectively “vanished” from sight; it would be like Betelgeuse suddenly disappearing. It’s now only detectable in the mid-infrared range. The obvious explanation was that the star was dying and had collapsed into a black hole, but if so, it didn’t go through the supernova phase that usually occurs with stars of this size. That makes it an intriguing object for further study. After analyzing archival data from NEOWISE, a team of astronomers concluded that this was indeed a case for direct collapse, according to a paper published in the journal Science. Theoretical work from the 1970s provided a possible explanation. As gravity begins to collapse the star, and the core first forms a dense neutron star, the accompanying burst of neutrinos typically creates a powerful shock wave strong enough to rip apart the core and outer layers, leading to a supernova. But some theorists suggested that the shock wave might not always be powerful enough to expel all that stellar material, which instead falls inward, and the baby neutron star directly collapses into a black hole without ever going supernova. Convection, it seems, is key. It occurs because the matter near the star’s center is hotter than the outer regions, so the gases move from hotter to cooler regions. The authors of this latest paper suggest that as the core collapses, gas in the outer layers is moving rapidly, which prevents them from falling into the core. The inner layers orbit outside the new black hole and eject the outer layers, which cool and form dust to hide the hot gas still orbiting the black hole. The dust warms in response into mid-infrared wavelengths, giving the object a slight glow that should last for decades. This work has already led the team re-evaluate a similar star first observed a decade ago, so this may constitute a new class of objects—ones that are harder to detect because they don’t go supernova and because of the faintness of the afterglow. At least now astronomers know to look for that distinctive signature. DOI: Science, 2026. 10.1126/science.adt4853 (About DOIs). Smart undies measure the gas you pass Credit: University of Maryland. Credit: University of Maryland. Let’s face it, everybody farts, and those suffering from conditions that produce excess gas fart more than most. But physicians don’t have a reliable means of quantifying just how much gas people produce each day. In other words, they lack a baseline of what is normal—like we have for blood glucose or cholesterol—which makes it difficult to determine whether the farting in any given case is excessive. To address this, scientists at the University of Maryland have devised “smart underwear” to measure the wearer’s flatulence, according to a paper published in the journal Biosensors and Bioelectronics. Brantley Hall and his cohorts developed a small device with electrochemical sensors that snaps onto one’s underwear; those sensors track any emitted farts around the clock, including as the wearer sleeps. In the past, fart frequency relied on small studies using invasive methods or unreliable self-reports. So perhaps it’s not surprising that Hall et al. recorded much higher farting estimates in their study: healthy adults pass gas on average 32 times per day, compared to just 14 times per day reported in past studies. There was also considerable variation among individuals, with a lowest fart rate of just four times per day and a highest rate of 59 per day. This is a first step to determining a healthy baseline, which the team hopes to do via their Human Flatus Atlas program. People can volunteer to don the smart underwear 24/7 in hopes of correlating the flatulence patterns with diet and microbiome composition across a much larger sample size. You can enroll in the Human Flatus Atlas here; you must live in the US and be 18 years or older to participate. (Fun bonus fact: noted gastroenterologist Michael Levitt was apparently known as the “King of Farts” because of his extensive body of research on the subject.) DOI: Biosensors and Bioelectronics, 2026. 10.1016/j.biosx.2025.100699 (About DOIs). Do you wanna build a snowman? Credit: NASA/Public domain Credit: NASA/Public domain Just past Neptune lies the Kuiper Belt, a band littered with remnants from the early formative period of our Milky Way, including dwarf planets and smaller bodies known as planetesimals. Roughly 10 percent of those planetesimals consist of two connected spheres resembling a rudimentary snowman, called contact binaries. In a paper published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, Michigan State University researchers reported evidence for a process by which these contact binaries may have formed. Planetesimals are the result of dust and pebbles gradually packing together into aggregate objects in response to gravity, much like forming a snowball. Every now and then, these nascent objects get ripped in two by the rotating cloud and form two separate planetesimals that orbit each other. Most theories of how the unusual snowman-shaped contact binaries formed rely on rare events or exotic phenomena, which would not account for the large number of contact binaries that we observe. Prior computational simulations modeled colliding objects in the Kuiper Belt as fluid-like blobs that merged into spheres, but this did not result in conditions conducive to forming the snowman configuration. These new simulations retained the strength of the colliding objects and allowed them to rest against each other. This revealed that after two colliding planetesimals begin to orbit one another, gravity causes them to spiral inward, until they eventually make contact and fuse together. Because the Kuiper Belt is relatively empty, it is rare for the contact binaries to crash into another object, so they are less likely to break apart. DOI: Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, 2026. 10.1073/pnas.1802831115 (About DOIs). Is this carved rock a Roman board game? Credit: Het Romeins Museum Credit: Het Romeins Museum There is archaeological evidence for various kinds of board games from all over the world dating back millennia: Senet and Mehen in ancient Egypt, for example; a strategy game called ludus latrunculorum (“game of mercenaries”) favored by Roman legions; a 4,000-year-old stone board discovered in 2022 that just might be a precursor to an ancient Middle Eastern game known as the Royal Game of Ur; or a Bronze Age board game that might be the earliest form of Hounds and Jackals, originating in Asia, which challenges the longstanding assumption that the game originated in Egypt. There may be other ancient games that archaeologists still don’t know about, nor is it always possible for them to tease out what the rules of play might be. AI is emerging as a useful tool for determining the latter. Most recently, researchers have used AI tools to work out t