Life's capacity to survive in simulated lunar and Martian soils has been explored in two papers published in Scientific Reports. Treating simulated lunar soil with both symbiotic fungi and worm-produced compost can significantly improve the likelihood of reproduction for chickpea plants growing in the soil, indicates one study. A separate paper suggests that some microbes may be able to absorb enough water from the atmosphere to grow in simulated Martian soil at atmospheric humidity levels comparable to those on the planet.

In the absence of gravity, electrostatic forces can induce semi-stable orbital motion between charged bodies.

Using a homemade Van Der Graff generator to charge droplets with opposite polarity to a statically charged rod create these crazy orbits!

Bones fractured in a (skiing) accident often mend without medical intervention. However, when a break is especially severe, or a bone tumor must be surgically removed, doctors may place an implant to stabilize the area and help the bone knit back together.

These implants are commonly made from the patient’s own bone, referred to as autografts, or from metal or ceramic materials. One major limitation of many current treatments is that harvesting autografts requires a second surgical procedure. Metal implants also present challenges. Because they are typically much stiffer than natural bone, they can loosen over time and reduce long-term stability.

Taking biology into account
Bone is not simply a hard, lifeless structure. It is a living organ filled with an intricate system of tiny channels and hollow spaces.

“For proper healing, it is vital that biology is incorporated into the repair process,” says Xiao-Hua Qin, Professor of Biomaterials Engineering at ETH Zurich. For healing to succeed, different types of cells must first move into the implant and establish themselves there before new bone tissue can form.

With this in mind, Qin and his team, working alongside ETH Professor Ralph Müller, developed a new type of hydrogel designed for future implant use. The material has a soft, jelly-like consistency and slowly dissolves inside the body. It could potentially be customized for individual patients

Researchers have identified segments of “flipped” DNA that may allow fish to adapt rapidly to new environments and eventually form new species. These unusual genetic changes appear to function as evolutionary “superchargers,” helping populations diversify at remarkable speed.

Why does Earth contain such a vast variety of plants and animals? One of the central questions in biology is how new species originate and how the extraordinary diversity of life developed over time.

Cichlid fish in Lake Malawi in East Africa provide an important example. Within this single lake, more than 800 species have emerged from a shared ancestor. This diversification happened in far less time than it took humans and chimpanzees to split from their own common ancestor.

Even more striking is that this evolutionary explosion took place in the same body of water. Some cichlids evolved into large predators, while others specialized in grazing on algae, filtering sand for food, or feeding on plankton. Over time, each species adapted to its own ecological niche.

Searching the Genome for Answers
Scientists from the University of Cambridge and the University of Antwerp set out to understand how this rapid evolutionary change occurred. Their findings were published in the journal Science.

The research team examined the DNA of more than 1,300 cichlid fish to see whether any unusual genetic features might explain the group’s extraordinary rate of diversification. “We discovered that, in some species, large chunks of DNA on five chromosomes are flipped – a type of mutation called a chromosomal inversion,” said senior author Hennes Svardal from the University of Antwerp.

In most animals, reproduction involves a process called recombination. During this process, genetic material from each parent is shuffled and mixed together.

However, recombination is largely prevented inside a chromosomal inversion. As a result, the group of genes contained in that flipped section remains linked and is passed down together from one generation to the next. This preserves useful combinations of genes that support survival in specific environments, which can accelerate evolutionary change.

“It’s sort of like a toolbox where all the most useful tools are stuck together, preserving winning genetic combinations that help fish adapt to different environments,” said first author Moritz Blumer from Cambridge’s Department of Genetics.

You could fit about a dozen of them across the full stop at the end of this sentence. Under a microscope they look like tiny eight legged bears shuffling around in slow motion. They have been frozen, boiled, irradiated, sent into the vacuum of open space and brought back alive. Scientists have been studying them for over two hundred years and they still have the capacity to astonish. Their name is tardigrade, though most people know them by the rather more charming nickname of water bears. And right now, they might be one of our best tools for figuring out how to survive on Mars.

A team of researchers from Penn State University has just published a study that used tardigrades in a genuinely novel way, not to test how tough they are, but to test how tough Mars is. Specifically, they wanted to understand how the planet's regolith, the loose mineral deposits that cover the Martian surface rather like soil covers our own, would interact with living animals. Could it ever be adapted to support plant growth for future human explorers? And could it actually help protect the planet from contamination that humans might inadvertently bring with them?

To find out, they mixed active tardigrades with two different simulated Martian soils, both designed to precisely replicate the mineral and chemical composition of regolith sampled by NASA's Curiosity Rover from a region called the Rocknest deposit, inside the Gale Crater.

The first simulant, known as MGS-1 was designed to represent the Martian surface broadly and yielded terrible results. Within just two days, the tardigrades showed severely reduced activity. For an animal that routinely shrugs off the vacuum of space, that is extraordinary. The second simulant was still inhibitory but far less damaging, which itself tells researchers something important about exactly which aspects of Martian soil pose the greatest risk.

Then came the surprise. When the team rinsed the MGS-1 simulant with water before introducing fresh tardigrades, the damage almost vanished entirely. Something in the soil, possibly dissolved salts or another soluble compound, was responsible for the harm, and water washed it away. The same property that made the regolith so hostile to life also makes it a potential natural barrier against Earthly contamination. Mars, in a sense, may have its own built in defence system.

We’ve finally seen a star exploding in real time. For the first time, we have a front-row seat to one of the most violent events in the universe: a supernova. But there’s a catch - the shape of the explosion was not what we expected. In this video, we investigate the inner workings of the blast to find out what’s really going on inside.

0:00 We Saw a Supernova
5:09 Type II Supernovae
7:56 Collapse
8:44 Shockwave
9:42 Explosion
11:40 Polarisation Patterns
14:14 Neutrinos
15:36 Jets
16:57 SN 2024ggi
20:15 Catching More Supernovae

As it goes, there are many reasons why dung is so important to dung beetles - including all of the above!

See how and why their lives centre around this smelly substance in this week’s Surprising Science! 🪲

For decades, scientists have dreamed of creating a universal vaccine capable of protecting against many different pathogens. The idea has often been compared to a Holy Grail of medicine — a goal that seemed almost impossible to achieve.

Now, researchers at Stanford Medicine and their collaborators say they may have taken a major step toward that vision. In a study conducted in mice, the team developed an experimental vaccine designed to defend against a wide variety of respiratory threats, including viruses, bacteria, and even allergens. The vaccine is administered through the nose — such as with a nasal spray — and produced broad immune protection in the lungs that lasted for several months.

The findings, published in Science, showed that vaccinated mice were protected from SARS-CoV-2 and other coronaviruses, as well as from Staphylococcus aureus and Acinetobacter baumannii (common hospital-acquired infections). The animals were also shielded from house dust mites (a common allergen). According to Bali Pulendran, PhD, the Violetta L. Horton Professor II and professor of microbiology and immunology, who served as senior author of the study, the vaccine has demonstrated protection against an unusually wide range of respiratory dangers tested so far.

If future research confirms these results in people, the approach could eventually replace several yearly vaccines for seasonal respiratory infections and also serve as a rapid defense against emerging pandemic viruses.

Extra virgin olive oil is a fundamental pillar of the Mediterranean diet and is well known for supporting heart and metabolic health. Scientists have long recognized these benefits, but its potential influence on the brain through the digestive system has received far less attention.

New research led by scientists from the Human Nutrition Unit at the Universitat Rovira i Virgili (URV), the Pere Virgili Health Research Institute (IISPV), and CIBERobn suggests that extra virgin olive oil may help protect cognitive function by shaping the gut microbiota.

Improved cognitive function and more diverse microbiota
The findings showed that participants who regularly consumed virgin olive oil instead of refined olive oil experienced improvements in cognitive performance. These individuals also had greater diversity in their gut microbiota, which is considered an important indicator of digestive and metabolic health.

By comparison, people who consumed refined olive oil tended to show a decline in microbiota diversity over time.

Researchers have uncovered evidence for our sun joining a mass migration of similar "twins" leaving the core regions of our galaxy, 4 to 6 billion years ago. The team created and studied an unprecedentedly accurate catalog of stars and their properties using data from the European Space Agency's Gaia satellite. Their discovery sheds light on the evolution of our galaxy, particularly the development of the rotating bar-like structure at its center.

While archaeology on Earth studies the human past, galactic archaeology traces the vast journey of stars and galaxies. For example, scientists know that our sun was born around 4.6 billion years ago, more than 10,000 light years closer to the center of the Milky Way than we are today.

While studies of the composition of stars support this theory, this has long proven a conundrum for scientists. Observations reveal an enormous bar-like structure at our galactic center which creates a "corotation barrier," which makes it difficult for stars to escape so far from the center.

So how did we get here? To answer this question, a team led by Assistant Professors Daisuke Taniguchi from Tokyo Metropolitan University and Takuji Tsujimoto from the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan have undertaken an unprecedentedly large study of solar "twins," stars which have very similar temperature, surface gravity, and composition to our sun. The team has published their findings in two papers in Astronomy and Astrophysics.

They used data taken by the European Space Agency's Gaia satellite mission, a daunting trove of observations from two billion stars and other objects. They created a catalog of 6,594 stellar "twins," a collection around 30 times larger than previous surveys.

From this immense list, they were able to obtain the most accurate picture to date of the ages of these stars, carefully correcting for selection bias of stars which are easier to see.

By simulating the life cycle of a minimal bacterial cell—from DNA replication to protein translation to metabolism and cell division—scientists have opened a new frontier of computer vision into the essential processes of life. The researchers, led by chemistry professor Zan Luthey-Schulten at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, present their findings in the journal Cell.

The team simulated a living cell at nanoscale resolution and recapitulated how every molecule within that cell behaved over the course of a full cell cycle. The work took many years: vast computer resources, large experimental datasets, a suite of experimental and computational techniques and an understanding of the roles, behaviors and physical interactions of thousands of molecular players.

The researchers had to account for every gene, protein, RNA molecule and chemical reaction occurring within the cell to recreate the timing of cellular events. For example, their model had to accurately reflect the processes that allow the cell to double in size prior to cell division.

Comet 3I/ATLAS continues to make astonishing headlines, thanks to new findings from astronomers using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA). This new research reveals that 3I/ATLAS is packed with an unusually large amount of the organic molecule methanol—more than almost all known comets in our own solar system.

"Observing 3I/ATLAS is like taking a fingerprint from another solar system," shares Nathan Roth, lead author on this research, and a professor with American University. "The details reveal what it's made of, and it's bursting with methanol in a way we just don't usually see in comets in our own solar system."

The team says that the ants' headings during accelerating and decelerating moons fit a kind of linear extrapolation prediction rule. The ants predict the moon's movement by combining linear extrapolation with a rapid "speed-step" when the moon is at its highest point in the sky—its lunar apex. However, they also found that errors in the ants' prediction peak around the speed-step due to night-to-night variability in the moon's arc. Still, these are apparently sophisticated navigation abilities, showing parallels to human-made navigation systems.

The Chinese didn't invent the rocket but they came remarkably close. More than a thousand years ago, during the Song Dynasty, Chinese engineers were packing black powder into bamboo tubes and launching fire arrows that hissed across battlefields on jets of smoke and flame. Those crude devices were the distant ancestors of every launch vehicle that has ever punched through Earth's atmosphere and there's a pleasing symmetry in the fact that, today, China operates one of the most capable and ambitious space programmes on the planet. From its first satellite in 1970 to a fully operational crewed space station orbiting overhead right now, the journey has been extraordinary. And in 2026, it's about to get even more interesting.

How to make planet Jupiter:
1) be on the Space Station
2) make a thin film sphere of water
3) add food coloring
4) blow on the edge to create swirls

This is way cool!

For humans, regrowing a lost body part would require superpowers. But for some other animals, it’s business as usual.

Salamanders are perhaps the most famous examples. If a salamander loses a leg or a tail, it can grow a new one in a matter of weeks. Golden apple snails can rebuild eyes within months. Some sea spiders can regrow their backsides in months, too. And those aren’t even the most extreme cases of regeneration. Some sea slugs can rebuild their whole bodies from the head down!

Scientists have long been fascinated by animals’ powers of regeneration. They want to know why some creatures can rebuild body parts while others can’t — and how these species pull off their feats of superhealing.

Recent studies have offered some clues. Salamanders, for instance, develop very slowly. As a result, adult salamanders may still have plenty of stem cells in their bodies. Stem cells can grow into many different types of tissue, making them useful building blocks for new limbs. Lungfish — which also develop slowly and can regenerate — may have a similar trick in their genes as salamanders.

Our Sun is, by everyday standards, a barely believable object. A million Earths could fit inside it. Every second, it converts around four million tonnes of its own mass into pure energy and the light and heat it generates, make life on this planet possible. And yet for all its power, we understand it only imperfectly. Its surface seethes with magnetic complexity, hurling billion tonne clouds of charged particles into space and unleashing radiation bursts powerful enough to fry electronics across an entire hemisphere. We know it does these things. What we've never been able to do particularly well is predict when.

Imagine receiving a severe weather forecast not hours before a storm hits, but weeks ahead. Time to batten down the hatches, reroute flights, protect critical infrastructure. For hurricanes and blizzards, that kind of foresight is still largely beyond us. But for space weather, scientists have just taken a significant first step toward making it a reality. Researchers at the Southwest Research Institute and the National Science Foundation's National Centre for Atmospheric Research have developed a new forecasting tool that could extend space weather warnings from a matter of hours to potentially weeks in advance. Given that a major solar storm can knock out GPS networks, collapse power grids and endanger astronauts in orbit, the stakes couldn't be higher.

The trouble with predicting solar storms has always been the same that by the time the warning signs appear on the Sun's surface, it's almost too late. The tangled magnetic regions that generate solar flares and coronal mass ejections only become visible a few hours before they unleash their fury. That's barely enough time to do anything useful.

But those active regions don't appear from nowhere. They bubble up from deep inside the Sun, driven by powerful magnetic forces operating in a thin but critical layer far beneath the surface called the tachocline, the boundary between the Sun's steadily rotating core and the more turbulent churning of its outer layers. If you could peer down there and read what's happening, you'd have weeks of warning. The problem is that the tachocline sits roughly 209,000 kilometres below the surface, you can't see it directly.

The team's solution was actually really rather elegant. Using magnetic measurements from NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory, they realised that patterns visible at the surface could be mathematically inverted to reconstruct what was happening further down. They then built PINNBARDS; a ‘Physics Informed Neural Network Based Active Region Distribution Simulator’ to do exactly that at scale, connecting surface observations to subsurface magnetic dynamics in ways that weren't previously possible.

🧭 Which way to Mars for less space radiation, please?

☢️ Data from esa's ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter confirms that travelling during solar maximum is the safest time for a trip to Mars and back.

🤯 The radiation paradox: esa.int/Science_Explor…

A large international study has mapped the genetic landscape of feline cancers for the first time, revealing striking similarities between tumor-driving mutations in cats, humans, and dogs.

The genetics of cat tumors are no longer a “black box,” according to researchers behind a new study that represents one of the most significant advances in feline cancer research.

Published in Science, the research provides the first large-scale genetic analysis of cancers in domestic cats. The findings could deepen scientific understanding of cancer in both animals and humans. The project has also produced a publicly available resource that other researchers can use to study the genetics of feline cancers.

Cancer is one of the most common causes of illness and death in cats. Even so, scientists have historically had limited information about the genetic factors behind these diseases.

That gap in knowledge is something the new study aims to address, says Dr. Geoffrey Wood, a pathobiology professor at the University of Guelph and co-senior author of the international research project.

“Despite domestic cats being common pets, there was very little known about the genetics of cancer in these animals,” Wood says, “until now.”

NASA’s DART (Double Asteroid Redirection Test) spacecraft changed the motion of an asteroid system in space, demonstrating that a kinetic impactor could be a viable way to deflect a near-Earth object if one ever threatened Earth.

New findings show that when the spacecraft deliberately crashed into the asteroid moonlet Dimorphos in September 2022, the impact did more than alter the small body’s motion around its larger companion, Didymos. The collision also slightly changed the path that both asteroids follow around the Sun. Didymos and Dimorphos are gravitationally bound and circle a shared center of mass, forming what astronomers call a binary asteroid system. Because the two bodies are linked in this way, changing one affects the other.

First Measurable Human Impact on a Solar Orbit
According to a study published in the journal Science Advances, scientists carefully tracked the motion of the asteroid pair after the collision. They discovered that the system’s 770-day orbit around the Sun shifted by a fraction of a second following the DART impact.

This marks the first time that a spacecraft built by humans has measurably changed the solar orbit of a natural object.

“This is a tiny change to the orbit, but given enough time, even a tiny change can grow to a significant deflection,” said Thomas Statler, lead scientist for solar system small bodies at NASA Headquarters in Washington. “The team’s amazingly precise measurement again validates kinetic impact as a technique for defending Earth against asteroid hazards and shows how a binary asteroid might be deflected by impacting just one member of the pair.”

The last time I covered the science of humanoid robots, the state of the art looked downright Orwellian — by which I mean, “four legs good, two legs bad.” It was 2015. Boston Dynamics’ first “Spot” quadruped had taken YouTube by storm, confidently trotting up stairs and recovering from vicious kicks. Also popular at the time: humanoids falling down. Constantly. I felt sorrier for those tottering metal lobsters than I ever did for Spot. Bipedal locomotion is hard.

Cut to now. Humanoids have apparently become so advanced that Tesla is mothballing some electric car models to make way for its Optimus humanoid robot, and start-ups are preselling android butlers with a straight face. Hype aside, I was genuinely curious: Did a paradigm shift happen in the field when I wasn’t looking? Sure, “AI” happened (that is, in the post-ChatGPT sense). I certainly hadn’t overlooked that. But I had no idea what it possibly had to do with robots not falling down anymore.

For a reality check, I called Scott Kuindersma, who recently left Boston Dynamics after many years there, and Jonathan Hurst of Agility Robotics. Both scientists had been present and involved during the robot-faceplant days. Surely today’s robotic bipedal marvels can ascend a few stairs and open a door without breaking a nonexistent sweat, something they famously struggled with a decade ago. I asked each researcher: Can your flagship robot — Boston Dynamics’ Atlas or Agility’s Digit, two of the most credible and pedigreed humanoids on Earth — handle any set of stairs or doorway?

“Not reliably,” Hurst said.

“I don’t think it’s totally solved,” Kuindersma said.

Don’t get me wrong: I don’t believe that some sock-faced robot zombie is close to taking over my household chores. But stairs and doors? It’s 2026. Why are humanoids still this … hard?