NASA’s PUNCH Sharpens Solar Storm Forecasting in First Test

Using continuous imagery from NASA’s PUNCH (Polarimeter to Unify the Corona and Heliosphere) mission, scientists predicted the near-Earth arrival of a solar eruption to within 30 minutes in an initial proof of concept test. The results, presented Tuesday at the Committee on Space Research Scientific Meeting and under review at the journal Space Weather, could revolutionize the way Earth-impacting storms are forecasted.

“We thought PUNCH would be good at this, but it’s a stunning result,” said Craig DeForest, principal investigator for PUNCH at Southwest Research Institute’s Solar System Science and Exploration Division in Boulder, Colorado. “To put it in perspective, this could be the space weather equivalent of going from a steam engine to a modern internal combustion engine.”

Solar storms are caused by huge explosions of material off the Sun called coronal mass ejections. Forecasting when the ejections will reach Earth is key for mitigating their impacts on power grids, satellites, and astronauts. However, until recently, coronal mass ejections could not continuously be tracked for much of their journey across the solar system.

That changed in 2025 with the launch of the PUNCH mission, which uses four spacecraft in low Earth orbit to make continuous 3D observations of the inner solar system. Before PUNCH, coronal mass ejections could only be seen as they traversed one-fifth the way from the Sun to Earth, leaving scientists to guess what happened over the rest of the distance. With PUNCH’s wider field-of-view, scientists can now routinely track the solar explosions nearly all the way to Earth, capturing a new image every four minutes.

This video created from PUNCH images shows the May 31, 2025 coronal mass ejection (CME) streaming out from the Sun. The yellow line shows the leading edge of the CME. By tracking a CME across the inner solar system, scientists are now able to predict when a solar storm will reach Earth better than ever before.

NASA/PUNCH/SwRI

Scientists used data from a coronal mass ejection that left the Sun on May 31, 2025, to retroactively test if they could improve forecast modeling. Scientists input the images into a computer model, which analyzed the leading edge of the coronal mass ejection over time. As it moved and evolved across the inner solar system, the model used the coronal mass ejection’s speed and geometry to calculate when it would reach Earth.

Twelve hours after the coronal mass ejection left the Sun, the model settled on a final prediction showing the storm would arrive eight hours later. That predicted arrival time was ultimately accurate to within a half hour, making it 10 times better than currently used methods, which only provide a 5-hour window. In addition, the model itself revealed when the estimate had stabilized, so that a space weather forecaster would be able to predict the arrival time with confidence.

“We accomplished an order of magnitude better result than the state-of-the-art method with a really basic process, just informed by the fact that the coronal mass ejection could be tracked continuously across the solar system,” DeForest said.

These first results demonstrate the power of PUNCH’s wide-field imagery to track the solar events as they travel out from the Sun. Ultimately, the scientists think that with more refined PUNCH data and better models, they could be able to forecast coronal mass ejection arrival times even further in advance.

Beyond space weather forecasting, the images also help scientists glean new insights on coronal mass ejections. The high-resolution images allowed the scientists to see new structures in coronal mass ejections, revealing that the clouds of material are clumpier than previously thought and continue to evolve as they cross the solar system.

The PUNCH data is also helping scientists better understand how plasma, the solar material launched by coronal mass ejections, moves across space. This information can help astrophysicists better understand plasma’s behavior across the galaxy, such as in star-forming regions where it is nearly impossible to study on small scales.

Southwest Research Institute, based in San Antonio, leads the PUNCH mission and operates the mission’s four spacecraft from its facilities in Boulder. The mission is managed by Space Science Mission Operations at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, for the Science Mission Directorate at the agency’s headquarters in Washington.

By Mara Johnson-Groh

NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md. 

Source: NASA’s PUNCH Sharpens Solar Storm Forecasting in First Test 

Cleaning Cholesterol From Blood Also Removed “Forever Chemicals” and Plastic, And No One Knows Why Yet

A machine that’s been running in hospitals for roughly four decades just turned up an unexpected side effect. Therapeutic apheresis , a treatment that filters blood to strip out excess cholesterol in patients whose levels won’t budge with medication, appears to pull PFAS (“forever chemicals”) and microplastics out of the bloodstream along with the fat it was designed to remove. Nobody set out to test this. A team at Technische Universität Dresden, which runs the largest apheresis program in the world, decided to check what else was ending up in the discard bag.

The idea behind it

PFAS are a family of over 4,700 synthetic compounds found in the blood of more than 99% of the U.S. population, with some taking years to clear the body. Microplastics are just as pervasive, people are estimated to ingest tens of thousands of plastic particles a year, and the particles have turned up in blood, placenta, lung tissue, and brain tissue in prior research.

The researchers’ working idea is that both pollutants don’t just float freely in blood, they may stick to fat particles like LDL cholesterol, picking up a coating of lipids and proteins that makes them larger and longer-lived in circulation. If that’s true, a machine built to filter out lipoproteins at scale should drag some of these pollutants out with them.

What the results showed

In a small study of patients undergoing the procedure, cholesterol and inflammation markers dropped as expected. But blood tests from two independent labs also found real reductions in several PFAS compounds after treatment, in some cases over 40–70% lower after a single session, with the chemicals also showing up in the material the machine filtered out.

The plastics data was messier. Using several detection methods across a handful of patients, some plastic types consistently decreased while others rose or barely changed, and the authors are upfront that the results are exploratory and inconsistent across individuals. One striking but very small finding: when apheresis was paired with an additional filtering device, two patients showed complete removal of certain plastic types from detectable levels. Separately, the team used a laser-based imaging technique to directly locate plastic particles embedded in human skin tissue, confirming plastics aren’t just passing through the blood but settling into tissue.

What it doesn’t show

The researchers are careful to flag major limitations: tiny sample sizes, no control group, no long-term outcome data, and no proof yet that the treatment reaches plastic already lodged in tissue rather than just what’s circulating in blood at the time. Lead author Stefan Bornstein was direct that this isn’t a demonstrated treatment, the next step is animal studies using radioactive tracers to see whether apheresis can reach plastics that have already settled into the body.

Also worth noting: this isn’t a poverty-linked exposure. Prior research has actually found that PFAS exposure tends to rise with income, likely tied to diet (seafood in particular) and PFAS-treated fabrics, which means the “worst hit” patients aren’t necessarily who you’d expect.

Why it matters

Apheresis isn’t a scalable public health fix, it’s an intensive, hospital-based procedure for people with specific medical needs, not a detox spa treatment. But if the underlying hypothesis holds up, it could reshape how researchers think about where pollutants hide in the body and how (or whether) they can be cleared. For now, the authors are blunt that prevention still beats cleanup: avoiding exposure in the first place remains far easier than trying to filter it out afterward.

Source

·         Bornstein SR, et al. “Therapeutic apheresis: An effective strategy for a combined targeting of circulating lipoproteins, inflammatory markers, PFAS, and microplastics in cardiometabolic and neurodegenerative disease?” Brain Health, 2026.

 

Source: Cleaning Cholesterol From Blood Also Removed “Forever Chemicals” and Plastic, And No One Knows Why Yet