It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way (K.Marx, Letter to F.Engels on the Indian Mutiny)
Drug resistance has accelerated in recent years with the emergence of deadly bacteria and “superbugs.” UC San Diego biologists have developed a new CRISPR-based technology capable of removing antibiotic-resistant elements from populations of bacteria.
Antibiotic resistance (AR) has steadily accelerated in recent years to become a global health crisis. As deadly bacteria evolve new ways to elude drug treatments for a variety of illnesses, a growing number of “superbugs” have emerged, ramping up estimates of more than 10 million worldwide deaths per year by 2050.
Scientists are looking to recently developed technologies to address the pressing threat of antibiotic-resistant bacteria, which are known to flourish in hospital settings, sewage treatment areas, animal husbandry locations and fish farms. University of California San Diego scientists have now applied cutting-edge genetics tools to counteract antibiotic resistance.
The laboratories of UC San Diego School of Biological Sciences Professors Ethan Bier and Justin Meyer have collaborated on a novel method of removing antibiotic-resistant elements from populations of bacteria. The researchers developed a new CRISPR-based technology similar to gene drives, which are being applied in insect populations to disrupt the spread of harmful properties, such as parasites that cause malaria. The new Pro-Active Genetics (Pro-AG) tool called pPro-MobV is a second-generation technology that uses a similar approach to disable drug resistance in populations of bacteria.
“With pPro-MobV we have brought gene-drive thinking from insects to bacteria as a population engineering tool,” said Bier, a faculty member in the Department of Cell and Developmental Biology. “With this new CRISPR-based technology we can take a few cells and let them go to neutralize AR in a large target population.”
In 2019 Bier’s lab collaborated with Professor Victor Nizet’s group (UC San Diego School of Medicine) to develop the initial Pro-AG concept, in which a genetic cassette is introduced and copied between the genomes of bacteria to inactivate their antibiotic-resistant components. The cassette launches itself into an AR gene carried on plasmids, circular types of DNA that replicate within cells, thereby restoring sensitivity of the bacteria to antibiotic treatments.
Building upon this idea, Bier and his colleagues developed a follow-on system that spreads the antibiotic CRISPR cassette components via conjugal transfer, which is similar to mating in bacteria. As they described in the Nature journal npj Antimicrobials and Resistance, the researchers showed that this next-generation pPro-MobV system can exploit a naturally created bacterial mating tunnel between cells to spread the key disabling elements. They demonstrated the process working within bacterial biofilms, which are communities of microorganisms that contaminate various surfaces and can be extremely difficult to remove under conventional cleaning methods. Biofilms also contribute to the spread of disease and are created in the majority of infections that lead to serious disease, in part because biofilms help combat antibiotics by creating a protective layer of cells that is difficult for antibiotics to diffuse through. The new technology therefore carries potential in health care settings, environmental remediation and microbiome engineering.
“The biofilm context for combatting antibiotic resistance is particularly important since this is one of the most challenging forms of bacterial growth to overcome in the clinic or in enclosed environments such as aquafarm ponds and sewage treatment plants,” said Bier. “If you could reduce the spread from animals to humans you could have a significant impact on the antibiotic resistance problem since roughly half of it is estimated to come from the environment.”
The researchers also found that components of the active genetic system could be carried and delivered by bacteriophage, or phage, which are viruses that are natural evolutionary competitors of bacteria. Phage are being specially engineered to combat antibiotic resistance by evading bacterial defenses and inserting disruptive factors inside cells. pPro-MobV elements, the researchers envision, would work in conjunction with such engineered phage viruses. This active genetic platform also can incorporate a highly efficient process known as homology-based deletion as a safety measure to remove the gene cassette if desired.
“This technology is one of the few ways that I’m aware of that can actively reverse the spread of antibiotic-resistant genes, rather than just slowing or coping with their spread,” said Meyer, a professor in the Department of Ecology, Behavior and Evolution, who studies the evolutionary adaptations of bacteria and viruses.
After leaving the Gerdt Lab for a post-doctoral position at the Swiss Federal Technology Institute of Lausanne, Zhiyu Zang decided to focus on the human immune system. Photo courtesy Zhiyu Zang.
Antimicrobial resistance — when bacteria and fungi defend themselves against the drugs design to kill them — is an urgent threat to global public health, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
To combat this threat, the Gerdt Lab at Indiana University Bloomington studies how to weaken bacteria’s defenses against viruses.
“Bacteria get sick, too,” said J.P. Gerdt, assistant professor of chemistry in the College of Arts and Sciences at IU Bloomington. “Our lab tries to understand how their immune systems work so we can figure out how to inhibit them.”
Bacteriophages, the viruses that attack and kill bacteria, can be a useful alternative to antibiotics. Antibiotics kill not just pathogens but also good bacteria, but bacteriophages can be deployed in a more targeted way to kill just one problematic strain of bacteria, leaving beneficial microbes untouched.
Bacteriophages are also useful in agriculture because they provide a more targeted approach to killing bacteria. Whereas many antibiotics tend to kill not just infection- and disease-causing bacteria but good bacteria as well, bacteriophages can be deployed to kill just one strain of bacteria.
However, just as bacteria have evolved antibiotic resistance, they can also become immune to bacteriophages.
That is where the Gerdt Lab’s work comes in. Former lab member Zhiyu Zang, now a post-doctoral candidate at the Swiss Federal Technology Institute of Lausanne, discovered a chemical molecule that when paired with the bacteriophage helps the virus overwhelm a bacteria’s immune system.
This finding was revealed in Zang and Gerdt’s paper “Chemical inhibition of a bacterial immune system,” recently published in Cell Host and Microbe.
While antibiotics will likely remain the first line of defense for human bacterial infections, the Gerdt Lab’s discovery could still apply to hard-to-treat infections in humans. It could also be applied in places like agriculture, where antibiotic overuse can worsen the spread of antibiotic resistance.
A needle in a haystack
Just as millions of bacteria strains exist, there are potentially as many chemical molecules that could be deployed to inhibit bacterial immune systems. Gerdt hopes that in 10 to 15 years, his lab will create a library of inhibitors for different bacteria.
Gerdt and Zang’s strategy with this paper was to begin research with a bacterium that was relatively easy and safe for undergraduates to study. Students like Olivia Duncan, who was an undergraduate when she worked in Gerdt’s lab, helped Zang and Gerdt find molecules that chemically inhibited that bacterium’s immune system.
“Our study is important not just because we found the first example of a small molecule that can inhibit a bacteria’s immune system,” Zang said. “It’s also important because the immune system we’re studying in this paper is present in around 2,000 different bacteria species.”
This finding allows them to develop general rules and tools for a targeted approach to pathogenic bacteria with similar immune systems like Pseudomonas aeruginosa or Staphylococcus aureus, both often resistant to antibiotics and the cause of many deadly hospital-acquired infections.
Duncan, who is the second author on the paper and currently a Ph.D. student at Cornell University, worked with Zang to identify a chemical molecule that helped a virus evade the bacterium’s immune system.
“Our goal is to have a collection of inhibitors that will work for different immune systems,” Gerdt said. “We hope that this paper will be a catalyst for other labs to work on this with us as a community. That’s what makes this paper so exciting: We’re starting something new and seeing where it takes off.”
Golden Gate method enables rapid, fully-synthetic engineering of therapeutically relevant bacteriophages
Simplified bacteriophage design and synthesis to propel long-obstructed bacteriophage research in new PNAS study from New England Biolabs® and Yale University
Bacteriophages have been used therapeutically to treat infectious bacterial diseases for over a century. As antibiotic-resistant infections increasingly threaten public health, interest in bacteriophages as therapeutics has seen a resurgence. However, the field remains largely limited to naturally occurring strains, as laborious strain engineering techniques have limited the pace of discovery and the creation of tailored therapeutic strains.
Now, researchers from New England Biolabs (NEB®) and Yale University describe the first fully synthetic bacteriophage engineering system for Pseudomonas aeruginosa, an antibiotic-resistant bacterium of global concern, in a new PNAS study. The system is enabled by NEB’s High-Complexity Golden Gate Assembly (HC-GGA) platform. In this method, researchers engineer bacteriophages synthetically using sequence data rather than bacteriophage isolates. The team assembled a P. aeruginosa phage from 28 synthetic fragments, and programmed it with new behaviors through point mutations, DNA insertions and deletions. These modifications included swapping tail fiber genes to alter the bacterial host range and inserting fluorescent reporters to visualize infection in real time.
“Even in the best of cases, bacteriophage engineering has been extremely labor-intensive. Researchers spent entire careers developing processes to engineer specific model bacteriophages in host bacteria,” reflects Andy Sikkema, the paper’s co-first author and Research Scientist at NEB. “This synthetic method offers technological leaps in simplicity, safety and speed, paving the way for biological discoveries and therapeutic development.”
A new approach to bacteriophage engineering
With NEB’s Golden Gate Assembly platform, scientists can build an entire phage genome based on digital sequence data outside the cell, piece by piece, with any intended edits already included. The genome is assembled directly from synthetic DNA and introduced into a safe laboratory strain.
The method removes long-standing challenges of relying on the propagation of physical phage isolates and specialized strains of host bacteria, a heightened challenge for therapeutically-relevant phages, which specifically infect human pathogens. In addition, the process removes the need for labor‑intensive screening or iterative editing required by in-cell engineering methods.
Unlike DNA assembly methods that join fewer and longer DNA fragments, Golden Gate Assembly’s segments are shorter, making them less toxic to host cells, easier to prepare, and much less likely to contain errors. The method is also less sensitive to the repeats and extreme GC content found in many phage genomes.
Through simplification and increased versatility, the Golden Gate method of bacteriophage engineering dramatically shifts the window of possibilities for researchers dedicated to developing bacteriophages as therapeutic agents to overcome antibiotic resistance.
Molecular tools finding their purpose
Realizing the rapid method of synthetic bacteriophage engineering required an intersection of expertise between NEB’s scientists, who developed the basic tools to make Golden Gate reliable for large targets and many DNA fragments, and bacteriophage researchers at Yale University who recognized its potential, and reached out to collaborate on new, ambitious applications.
Researchers at NEB first worked to optimize the method in a model phage, Escherichia coli phage T7. Since then, partnering teams have worked with NEB scientists to expand the method to non-model bacteriophages that target highly antibiotic-resistant pathogens.
A related study, which used the Golden Gate method to synthesize high-GC content Mycobacterium phages, was published in PNAS in November 2025 in conjunction with the Hatfull Lab at the University of Pittsburgh and Ansa Biotechnologies. Researchers from Cornell University have also worked with NEB to develop a method to synthetically engineer T7 bacteriophages as biosensors capable of detecting E. coli in drinking water, described in a December 2025 ACS study.
“My lab builds 'weird hammers' and then looks for the right nails,” said Greg Lohman, Senior Principal Investigator at NEB and co-author on the study. “In this case, the phage therapy community told us, 'That’s exactly the hammer we’ve been waiting for.’”
About New England Biolabs
For over 50 years, New England Biolabs (NEB) has pioneered the discovery and production of innovative products tailored for molecular biology research. Our commitment to scientific discovery is evident in all that we do, including our ever-expanding product portfolio, investment in our basic and applied research program, and support of customers’ research in academia and industry, including cutting-edge technologies for use in molecular diagnostics and nucleic-acid vaccines development. Guided by our founding principles, NEB proactively invests in efforts to improve the well-being of our employees, surrounding communities, as well as the future of our planet. NEB remains a privately held company with global reach, supported by our headquarters in Ipswich, MA, USA, subsidiary offices in 10 countries, and over 60 distribution partners around the world. For more information about New England Biolabs, visit www.neb.com.
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Credit: NASA on The Commons, Flickr (CC0, https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/)
In a new study, terrestrial bacteria-infecting viruses were still able to infect their E. coli hosts in near-weightless “microgravity” conditions aboard the International Space Station, but the dynamics of virus-bacteria interactions differed from those observed on Earth. Phil Huss of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, U.S.A., and colleagues present these findings January 13thin the open-access journal PLOS Biology.
Interactions between phages—viruses that infect bacteria—and their hosts play an integral role in microbial ecosystems. Often described as being in an evolutionary “arms race,” bacteria can evolve defenses against phages, while phages develop new ways to thwart defenses. While virus-bacteria interactions have been studied extensively on Earth, microgravity conditions alter bacterial physiology and the physics of virus-bacteria collisions, disrupting typical interactions.
However, few studies have explored the specifics of how phage-bacteria dynamics differ in microgravity. To address that gap, Huss and colleagues compared two sets of bacterial E. coli samples infected with a phage known as T7—one set incubated on Earth and the other aboard the International Space Station.
Analysis of the space-station samples showed that, after an initial delay, the T7 phage successfully infected the E. coli. However, whole-genome sequencing revealed marked differences in both bacterial and viral genetic mutations between the Earth samples versus the microgravity samples.
The space-station phages gradually accumulated specific mutations that could boost phage infectivity or their ability to bind receptors on bacterial cells. Meanwhile, the space-station E. coli accumulated mutations that could protect against phages and enhance survival success in near-weightless conditions.
The researchers then applied a high-throughput technique known as deep mutational scanning to more closely examine changes in the T7 receptor binding protein, which plays a key role in infection, revealing further significant differences between microgravity versus Earth conditions. Additional experiments on Earth linked these microgravity-associated changes in the receptor binding protein to increased activity against E. coli strains that cause urinary tract infections in humans and are normally resistant to T7.
Overall, this study highlights the potential for phage research aboard the ISS to reveal new insights into microbial adaption, with potential relevance to both space exploration and human health.
The authors add, “Space fundamentally changes how phages and bacteria interact: infection is slowed, and both organisms evolve along a different trajectory than they do on Earth. By studying those space-driven adaptations, we identified new biological insights that allowed us to engineer phages with far superior activity against drug-resistant pathogens back on Earth.”
In your coverage, please use this URL to provide access to the freely available paper in PLOS Biology: https://plos.io/4q4S9AO
Citation: Huss P, Chitboonthavisuk C, Meger A, Nishikawa K, Oates RP, Mills H, et al. (2026) Microgravity reshapes bacteriophage–host coevolution aboard the International Space Station. PLoS Biol 24(1): e3003568. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.3003568
Author countries: United StatesFunding: This work was supported by the Defense Threat Reduction Agency (https://www.dtra.mil/) (Grant HDTRA1-16-1-0049) to S.R. C.C. was supported by a graduate training scholarship from the Anandamahidol Foundation (Thailand). The sponsors or funders did not play any role in the study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.
Competing interests: I have read the journal’s policy and the authors of this manuscript have the following competing interests: P.H. and S.R. have equity holdings are board members of Synpha Biosciences, a phage therapeutics company. Authors RPO, HM and OH are employees of Rhodium Scientific Inc. The authors declare that they have no other competing interests.
The path to solar weather forecasts
Space-based measurements of solar eruptions are the first of their kind
At times the sun ejects energetic material into space which can have consequences for space-based and even ground-based electronic technology. Researchers aim to understand this phenomenon and find ways to forecast it, including how ejected material evolves as it travels through the solar system. For the first time, researchers, including those from the University of Tokyo, made high-quality measurements of an evolving cloud of solar ejecta by using multiple space-based instruments which were not designed to do so, and observed the way the clouds reduce background cosmic-ray activity.
Solar storms, known as coronal mass ejections (CME), are surprisingly common. When detected in the vicinity of Earth, some satellites are even put into a safe, low-power mode until the storm passes in order to protect them. But as with more familiar terrestrial weather, it’s the events you can’t prepare for that necessarily cause the most damage. To aid in this regard, researchers are trying to figure out how CMEs evolve as they head away from their source, the sun. While some different approaches have been tried over time, a new method which pools the resources of several scientific satellites could lead to better space-weather forecasting.
“Understanding how huge clouds of solar material travel through space is essential for protecting satellites, astronauts, and even power grids on Earth,” said Ph.D. researcher Gaku Kinoshita from the Department of Earth and Planetary Science. “In our new paper, we show that the paths of these solar eruptions can be tracked using drops in cosmic rays, high-energy particles that constantly bombard the solar system, measured by spacecraft. By combining observations from several spacecraft at different locations, we were able to watch how one eruption changed shape and strength as it moved away from the sun, revealing new ways to improve space-weather forecasting.”
The researchers’ method works thanks to an effect known as Forbush decrease, which is the way a CME isn't perfectly transparent to cosmic rays coming from behind it. This is because the CME produces a strong magnetic field which can deflect charged particles like cosmic rays. By observing cosmic rays as a CME passes through a region, the team could interpret the physical makeup of the CME, and crucially, how it changes with time.
“In March 2022, three spacecraft — the European Space Agency (ESA)’s Solar Orbiter, ESA and Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA)’s BepiColombo, and NASA’s Near Earth Spacecraft — happened to be ideally positioned to observe the same solar eruption from different locations in space. This rare alignment allowed us to compare how the event looked along different directions and distances from the sun,” said Kinoshita. “By combining cosmic-ray data with magnetic-field and solar-wind measurements, we could link changes in the particle signal directly to the physical structure of the eruption. One of the most important results of this work is showing that instruments never designed for science can still deliver valuable scientific data. We used a simple system-monitoring instrument onboard the BepiColombo spacecraft, originally meant only to keep the spacecraft healthy, and, through careful calibration, turned it into a detector of cosmic-ray decreases. Data that had long been ignored turned out to be too valuable to waste.”
While there are advanced instruments capable of monitoring CMEs directly, their operational periods are limited; whereas the above approach repurposes more general instruments that are always on, meaning they can continuously gather data. Researchers can also improve the quality of their data by combining data from multiple spacecraft — this is also important to build a 3D picture of the CMEs.
“Because the instruments used were never intended for scientific research, there was no existing framework to rely on. We had to evaluate an instrument’s behavior, calibrate it from scratch and develop new analysis methods ourselves before we could confidently use the data to study cosmic-ray decreases,” said Kinoshita. “With many spacecraft now operating between the sun and Earth, and more planned for the future, the chances of making routine multipoint observations are increasing. If we continue to combine data from multiple missions and use all available instruments, we can gain a far more complete picture of how solar ejections propagate through space.”
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Journal: Gaku Kinoshita, Beatriz Sanchez-Cano, Yoshizumi Miyoshi, Laura RodrÃguez-GarcÃa, Emilia Kilpua, Benoit Lavraud, Mathias Rojo, Marco Pinto, Yuki Harada, Go Murakami, Yoshifumi Saito, Shoichiro Yokota, Daniel Heyner, David Fischer, Nicolas Andre, and Kazuo Yoshioka, “Spatiotemporal Evolution of the 2022 March Interplanetary Coronal Mass Ejection Revealed by Multipoint Observations of Forbush Decreases”, The Astrophysical Journal, https://doi.org/10.3847/1538-4357/ae1834
Funding: This work was supported by JST SPRING (JPMJSP2108), STFC (ST/V004115/1 and ST/Y000439/1), the European Space Agency, the German Ministry for Economic Affairs and Climate Action / DLR (50QW2202), CNES, and the Institute for Space-Earth Environmental Research (ISEE), Nagoya University.
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As lunar exploration intensifies, the cislunar space is experiencing increasing congestion. Traditional two-body Keplerian elements, which have long been the standard for Earth-orbiting objects, prove insufficient for accurately describing the complex orbits near the Earth–Moon Lagrange points due to the chaotic and non-integrable nature of three-body dynamics. This fundamental deficiency has hindered the development of an effective space situational awareness (SSA) framework for this strategically vital region. A research team from the National University of Defense Technology (NUDT) has successfully developed a novel parameterization method (published in the Chinese Journal of Aeronautics, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cja.2025.103869) for orbits near collinear libration points. This advancement enables the systematic cataloging and robust identification of cislunar objects, representing a critical enabler for the safety and sustainability of future space operations.
Professor Leping Yang, the team's lead scientist, underscored the practical imperatives driving this investigation: "With the lunar economy on the horizon, libration point regions face inevitable congestion. We need an efficient and intuitive cataloging method, analogous to the systems currently employed for Earth orbits, to accurately characterize the situation of cislunar space. Our work aims to build the foundational lexicon for describing orbital mechanics within this emerging domain."
The core contribution of this research involves deriving a new set of dynamical parameters. The study, led by doctoral researchers Chenyuan Qiao and Xi Long, leverages canonical transformations and center manifold theory within the Circular Restricted Three-Body Problem (CRTBP) framework. This procedure effectively translates the complex dynamics near libration points into a set of intuitive parameters.
These parameters distinctly characterize motion along two directions. The hyperbolic parameters (q₁, p₁) function as a monitor, signaling when a spacecraft transits into or out of a libration point orbit and precisely identifying its associated invariant manifold. "This is crucial for understanding spacecraft maneuvers," Chenyuan Qiao explained, "Since many fuel-efficient transfers in cislunar space utilize these invariant manifolds, our parameters provide direct insight into transfer events and subsequent orbital changes."
This framework directly enables orbit identification. Given a segment of a spacecraft's observed trajectory, the method determines the best-matching CRTBP reference orbit by minimizing the discrepancy between their respective action variables. The team conducted a sensitivity analysis to demonstrate the method's robustness, showing reliable identification performance, achieving success with position errors up to 100 km and velocity errors below 1 m/s. Notably, the findings suggest that improving velocity measurement accuracy is paramount for the development of future cislunar tracking systems.
While the developed framework represents a significant leap forward, its current applicability is restricted primarily to the collinear libration points (L1 and L2) within the simplified CRTBP. Professor Yanwei Zhu from the team acknowledges the next major challenge explicitly, "The dynamics near the triangular libration points L4 and L5 are significantly influenced by solar gravity, which cannot be ignored. The assumptions underpinning our current model become inadequate there."
The researchers' immediate next step involves extending this parameterization method to a more realistic, non-autonomous ephemeris model that incorporates the gravitational perturbations from the Sun. The ultimate goal is ambitious but critical: to establish a single, unified parameterization and cataloging system applicable to all libration points within the Earth-Moon system. Achieving this comprehensive framework would provide a standardized "common language" for cislunar SSA, which is essential for effectively managing the safe and efficient utilization of the cislunar space in the decades to come.
Original Source
C. QIAO, X. LONG, L. YANG, Y. ZHU, P. WANG, Orbital parameter characterization and objects cataloging for Earth-Moon collinear libration points, Chinese Journal of Aeronautics , 2025, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cja.2025.103869
About Chinese Journal of Aeronautics
Chinese Journal of Aeronautics (CJA) is an open access, peer-reviewed international journal covering all aspects of aerospace engineering, monthly published by Elsevier. The Journal reports the scientific and technological achievements and frontiers in aeronautic engineering and astronautic engineering, in both theory and practice. CJA is indexed in SCI (IF = 5.7, Q1), EI, IAA, AJ, CSA, Scopus.
MINNEAPOLIS / ST. PAUL (01/13/2026) — Researchers at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities and Universit´e Paris-Saclay have challenged a decades-old dark matter theory. Their new research shows that the Universe’s most mysterious material could have been “incredibly hot”–moving at nearly the speed of light–when it was first born.
The study was recently published in Physical Review Letters, the premier journal of the American Physical Society. The research gives new clues about the origins of our Universe and opens up a broader range of possibilities for dark matter and how it interacts with other matter.
Previously, researchers believed for decades that dark matter must be cold–or slow moving–when it “freezes out” from the radiation bath in the early Universe. The team studied dark matter production during an era in the Universe's history known as post-inflationary reheating.
"The simplest dark matter candidate (a low mass neutrino) was ruled out over 40 years ago since it would have wiped out galactic size structures instead of seeding it,” said Keith Olive, professor in the School of Physics and Astronomy. “The neutrino became the prime example of hot dark matter, where structure formation relies on cold dark matter. It is amazing that a similar candidate, if produced just as the hot big bang Universe was being created, could have cooled to the point where it would in fact act as cold dark matter."
Researchers showed that dark matter can decouple while ultrarelativistic–or very hot–and still have time to cool before galaxies begin to form into what we know today. The key feature which enables this to be possible is that dark matter is produced during an era in the early Universe's history known as reheating.
"Dark matter is famously enigmatic. One of the few things we know about it is that it needs to be cold,” said Stephen Henrich, graduate student in the School of Physics and Astronomy and lead author of the paper. “As a result, for the past four decades, most researchers have believed that dark matter must be cold when it is born in the primordial universe. Our recent results show that this is not the case; in fact, dark matter can be red hot when it is born but still have time to cool down before galaxies begin to form."
The research will continue by determining the best methods to detect these particles either directly using colliders or scattering experiments, or indirectly via astrophysical observations.
"With our new findings, we may be able to access a period in the history of the Universe very close to the Big Bang,” said Yann Mambrini, professor from the Universit´e Paris-Saclay in France and co-author on the paper.
This research was funded by the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie grant agreement.
PASADENA, CA – January 13, 2026 – The GMTO Corporation, the international consortium building the Giant Magellan Telescope, today announced it has appointed Daniel T. Jaffe as president, succeeding Robert N. Shelton, who announced his retirement last year after guiding the observatory through a period of significant growth.
“Dan brings decades of leadership in research, astronomy instrumentation, public-private partnerships, and academia,” said Taft Armandroff, board chair of the GMTO Corporation. “His deep understanding of the Giant Magellan Telescope, combined with his experience leading large research enterprises and cultivating a collaborative environment, make him exceptionally well suited to lead the observatory through its next phase of construction and toward operations.”
Jaffe served as vice president for research at The University of Texas at Austin from 2016 to 2025. During his tenure, research expenditures increased by 89% and the university landed important new research centers funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF), National Institutes of Health (NIH), Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), and Department of Energy (DOE). He led the university’s academic enterprise through the COVID-19 pandemic while serving as interim provost from 2020 to 2021. He is the Jane and Roland Blumberg Centennial Professor in the Department of Astronomy and was department chair from 2011 to 2015.
Jaffe’s experience includes serving on the board of directors of the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy (AURA) and the Gemini Observatory. He also played a lead role in establishing The University of Texas at Austin’s partnership in the Giant Magellan Telescope while serving on its Science Advisory Council. His honors include Harvard University’s Bart J. Bok Prize, a Humboldt Fellowship, and a David and Lucile Packard Foundation Fellowship.
“I am honored to lead the Giant Magellan Telescope at this exciting stage,” Jaffe said. “Robert Shelton leaves behind a strong foundation, and I look forward to working with our consortium partners and the U.S. government to advance construction. For me, as for the U.S. astronomical community and our international partners, the Giant Magellan Telescope represents a profound leap in our ability to explore the Universe and employ a host of new technologies to make fundamental discoveries.”
Jaffe is widely recognized for developing advanced astronomical instrumentation that enhances telescope performance. His research group pioneered the manufacture and use of micromachined silicon diffractive immersion gratings for high-resolution spectroscopy, a technology that has reshaped modern instrument design. His devices are used on both ground-based telescopes, including those at the McDonald Observatory, as well as space-based observatories such as the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s (NASA) James Webb Space Telescope. Jaffe’s IGRINS spectrograph has served the astronomical community at multiple leading observatories. His latest instrument, the Giant Magellan Telescope Near-Infrared Spectrograph (GMTNIRS), will revolutionize the study of planetary system formation, small stars, and other near-infrared objects.
Jaffe joins the GMTO Corporation at a pivotal time, as the Giant Magellan Telescope continues to gain momentum as one of the most ambitious research projects in astronomy. In June 2025, the NSF advanced the observatory into its Final Design Phase, one of the final steps before becoming eligible for federal construction funding. The recent addition of Northwestern University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to its international consortium also underscores the observatory’s status as a top research priority for the world’s leading institutions. These partnerships further strengthen the observatory’s scientific and artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities in exoplanets, cosmology, and time-domain astronomy, while also reinforcing its strategic ties with the Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile.
With this leadership transition, the board of directors of the GMTO Corporation reaffirms its commitment to completing the NSF’s Final Design Phase and its next funding round to continue advancing the Giant Magellan Telescope beyond its current 40% under-construction status.
