Harvard researchers reported an experiment in which engineered marine bacteria helped olivine weather faster in seawater. The bacteria produce iron-binding molecules that prevent a coating from slowing the mineral's reaction.

Harvard Medical School's September 8 account describes roughly a threefold increase in rock weathering in a pilot tank experiment. The work explores a way to accelerate a natural process that can turn dissolved carbon into a more stable form.

This is an earlier laboratory result worth revisiting, not a November deployment in the ocean. Larger systems, costs and environmental performance remain questions for further research. The encouraging part is the demonstrated mechanism: a small biological intervention helped the mineral keep reacting in a controlled experiment.

Source published September 8, 2026; research coverage revisited today.

A study published online in Astronomy & Astrophysics on September 30 identifies 104 unique candidate magnified stellar events in the Dragon arc, a distant galaxy seen through the gravitational lens of the Abell 370 galaxy cluster.

The researchers compared James Webb Space Telescope observations from 2022 through 2024, looking for changes in brightness. After accounting for repeated detections across filters and observing times, they assembled a much larger sample than earlier work on the same galaxy.

The catalogue gives researchers more material for investigating distant stellar populations and improving models of the gravitational lens. These are candidate events, not 104 newly confirmed individual stars or a confirmed discovery of dark matter. The progress is in the sample and the method: repeated observations have made an unusually distant stellar population more accessible to study.

Source published September 30, 2026 (online publication); observations from 2022–2024.