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?

Measles' return is no mystery: At its root is the falling vaccination rate.

Around 90% of the U.S. population has received the MMR vaccine, which protects against measles, mumps and rubella, and in some regions of the country, the rate is below 60%. Since about 2019-2020, that overall number has dropped below the 95% needed for herd immunity. It is necessary to keep that rate nationally, but maintaining herd immunity at the local level is equally important in order to prevent measles from finding pockets of unvaccinated communities.

Countries that remain free of continuous transmission for 12 months are deemed to have eliminated measles — a designation the U.S. achieved in 2000. The Pan American Health Organization was scheduled to decide in April whether the U.S. should lose that designation, but the organization postponed its meeting until November.

Current trends suggest that both the U.S. and Mexico, which has also been battling the disease, may lose this status — as Canada did in November 2025. All three countries have seen their vaccination rates fall below the 95% threshold, and their outbreaks may share epidemiological links.

Neutrinos are extremely lightweight and electrically neutral particles that rarely interact with ordinary matter. Due to these rare interactions, neutrinos can travel across space almost entirely unaffected, carrying information about highly energetic cosmological events, such as exploding stars or supermassive black holes.

The KM3NeT neutrino telescope, an observatory located at the bottom of the Mediterranean Sea, recently detected the presence of a neutrino carrying extremely high energy, above 100 PeV (peta-electronvolts). This is one of the most energetic neutrinos observed to date.

Theoretical predictions suggested that another large-scale neutrino detector, namely the IceCube detector, would also observe similar high-energy neutrino events. However, this did not happen, which might potentially hint at some new physics, such as a new type of neutrinos or non-standard interactions, that are not included in the standard model of physics.

Researchers at Oklahoma State University set out to explore a possible explanation for the reported discrepancy between predictions and recent neutrino observations.

Most people know only two things about the appendix: You don't need it — and if it bursts, you need surgery fast.

That basic story traces back at least to Charles Darwin, the English naturalist who developed the theory of natural selection. In "The Descent of Man," he described the appendix as a vestige: a leftover from plant-eating ancestors with larger digestive organs. For more than a century, that interpretation shaped both textbook and casual medical wisdom.

But the evolutionary story of the appendix turns out to be much more complicated.

Scientists from the University of Manchester have played a leading role in the discovery of a new subatomic particle at CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC). The particle, known as the Ξcc⁺ (Xi‑cc‑plus), is a new type of heavy proton-like particle containing two charm quarks and one down quark.

The result is the first particle discovery made using the upgraded LHCb detector, a major international project involving more than 1,000 scientists across 20 countries. The UK made the largest national contribution to the upgrade, with significant leadership from Manchester.

The newly observed Ξcc⁺ is a heavier relative of the proton, which was famously discovered in Manchester by Ernest Rutherford and colleagues in 1917–1919. The proton contains two up quarks and a down quark. Details of the Ξcc⁺ discovery were presented at the Rencontres de Moriond Electroweak conference.

The new discovery replaces the up quarks with their heavier relatives, the charm quarks. It also extends a legacy begun in the 1950s, when Manchester physicists were the first to identify a member of the Ξ (Xi) particle family.

Professor Chris Parkes, head of the University's Department of Physics and Astronomy, led the international collaboration during the installation and first operation of the LHCb Upgrade detector. He also led the UK contribution to the project for over a decade, from approval through to delivery.

It's no secret that prolonged periods spent in microgravity takes a toll on the human body. This includes muscle atrophy, bone density loss, and changes to the cardiovascular, endocrine, and nervous systems. But for female astronauts, there is also the greater risk of developing blood clots, according to recent findings. This highlights the fact that, to date, most studies of human health in space have involved male astronauts. But as the number of female astronauts continues to grow, more research is required to address potentially gender-related health risks.

This was the motivation behind a new study that examined how microgravity affects blood clotting, specifically in women. The study was conducted by Simon Fraser University (SFU) and the European Space Agency (ESA), with support provided through a grant from the Canadian Space Agency (CSA). It consisted of 18 women participating in a 5-day dry immersion test to assess the risk of developing potentially life-threatening blood clots. The results support existing evidence that women are at a greater risk of venous thromboembolism and identified hypercoagulability as a potential key mechanism.

For more than 100 years, scientists have pursued the idea of delivering insulin as a pill. This goal has remained difficult to achieve because insulin breaks down in the digestive system and the intestine lacks a natural transport pathway that allows the hormone to enter the bloodstream.

Because of these biological barriers, many people with diabetes still depend on daily insulin injections, which can place a significant burden on long-term treatment and quality of life.

Researchers at Kumamoto University, led by Associate Professor Shingo Ito, have now developed a promising drug delivery strategy designed to overcome these obstacles. Their approach uses a cyclic peptide that can pass through the small intestine. The molecule, called the DNP peptide, helps insulin move across the intestinal barrier and into the body after oral administration.

Astronomers say unusual readings from a star system 11,000 light-years away suggest that two of the planets circling the star crashed into each other, creating a huge, light-obscuring cloud of rocks and dust.

The analysis, laid out this week in a paper published by The Astrophysical Journal Letters, could provide new insights into the occasionally cataclysmic process that governs the evolution of planetary objects — including our own planet Earth and its moon.

“There are only a few other planetary collisions of any kind on record, and none that bear so many similarities to the impact that created the Earth and moon,” University of Washington graduate student Anastasios Tzanidakis, the study’s lead author, said in a news release. If we can observe more moments like this elsewhere in the galaxy, it will teach us lots about the formation of our world.”

Tzanidakis found the first clues while combing through archival data from the Gaia spacecraft and other sky surveys. He was particularly intrigued by Gaia20ehk, a sunlike star near the constellation Puppis.

“The star’s light output was nice and flat, but starting in 2016 it had these three dips in brightness. And then, right around 2021, it went completely bonkers,” Tzanidakis recalled. “I can’t emphasize enough that stars like our sun don’t do that. So when we saw this one, we were like ‘Hello, what’s going on here?’ ”

Tanzania's Mt Kilimanjaro, among the clouds over East Africa. Photographed in space from the ISS, and on Earth from Amboseli National Park with National Geographic's BabakTafreshi

It may sound fanciful, but a Los Angeles-based company says it has conceived of a plan to fly out to a smallish, near-Earth asteroid, throw a large bag around it, and bring the body back to a “safe” gathering point near our planet.

The company, TransAstra, said Wednesday that an unnamed customer has agreed to fund a study of its proposed “New Moon” mission to capture and relocate an asteroid approximately the size of a house, with a mass of about 100 metric tons.

“We envision it becoming a base for robotic research and development on materials processing and manufacturing,” said Joel Sercel, chief executive officer of TransAstra. “Long term, instead of building space hardware on the ground and launching propellant up from the Earth, we could harvest it from raw materials in space.”

Lots of targets
Sercel said there are as many as 250 potential target asteroids, with a diameter of up to about 20 meters, that could be reached with reusable, robotic spacecraft over the next decade. He envisions aggregating dozens, and then hundreds, of small asteroids at the “New Moon” processing facility, which could potentially be located at the Earth-Sun L2 point, about 1.5 million km from Earth.

Such asteroids could provide water for use as propellant and minerals for everything from solar panels to radiation shielding. Various asteroids could be targeted for their content, such as C-type asteroids as a source of water or M-types for metals.

All of this may seem a little bit out there, and to some extent it is. That’s the point of the feasibility study, which Sercel said will be completed by May, which will further refine a mission plan and its trajectory and the spacecraft needed to fly it. If fully funded, the mission could rendezvous with an asteroid by as early as 2028 or 2029. TransAstra is working with the University of Central Florida, Purdue, and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory/Caltech to complete its analysis.

Humans may not be the only primates with the power to imagine. A bonobo named Kanzi recently showed that he could keep track of make-believe juice and grapes during a pretend tea party.

This finding adds to a growing body of evidence that apes — primates without a tail, such as bonobos and gorillas — can picture things that aren’t really there. Scientists once thought only people did this.

By a year old, human children can start playing pretend. By age three, most kids can build whole imaginary words in their minds. This ability is necessary for many complex tasks.

In a happy twist of fate, NASA's Hubble Space Telescope witnessed a comet in the act of breaking apart. The chance of that happening while Hubble watched is extraordinarily minuscule. The findings are published in the journal Icarus.

The comet K1, whose full name is C/2025 K1 (ATLAS)—not to be confused with interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS—was not the original target of the Hubble study.

"Sometimes the best science happens by accident," said co-investigator John Noonan, a research professor in the Department of Physics at Auburn University in Alabama. "This comet got observed because our original comet was not viewable due to some new technical constraints after we won our proposal. We had to find a new target—and right when we observed it, it happened to break apart, which is the slimmest of slim chances."

Noonan didn't know K1 was fragmenting until he viewed the images the day after Hubble took them. "While I was taking an initial look at the data, I saw that there were four comets in those images when we only proposed to look at one," said Noonan. "So we knew this was something really, really special."

From cleanroom to ocean world – our Dragonfly mission has begun integration and testing at JHUAPL. Engineers are powering up key systems, including the spacecraft’s “brain” and power units, preparing the rotorcraft for the journey to Saturn’s moon Titan. go.nasa.gov/4ljsD9w

A new study by University of Vermont researchers finds that a majority of people across the globe favor protecting the environment over growing the economy when the two goals conflict. The paper, published recently in the journal Ecological Economics, analyzed data from two major international surveys, encompassing responses from residents in 92 countries.

Overall, the researchers found nearly 58% of people worldwide value environmental protection over economic growth when the two goals are at odds.

"The political discourse is often very much focused around the goal of economic growth, but our results show that this is actually not people's priority," said Jukka Kilgus, a master's student studying natural resources at the Rubenstein School of Environment and Natural Resources and the lead author of the paper. "Instead, they often favor ecological and social well-being. And these are not just left-leaning college graduates in rich countries, but a diverse group of people with many different backgrounds across countries."

A more complex global picture
Previous studies have largely focused on residents of the Global North and have identified characteristics common among individuals in those countries who favor environmental protection over economic growth. They tend to be well-educated, lean politically to the left, are younger, and female.

Kilgus, who is also a Gund Graduate Fellow, said this analysis showed a drop off in support for environmental protection over economic growth among some less wealthy or only recently industrialized nations.

But it also showed that in many non-Western countries, commonly assumed traits like education, gender, age, income, and political orientation do not behave as expected. In some cases, stronger environmental support is found among men, older individuals, lower-income groups, or those leaning politically to the right, underscoring how deeply cultural, political, and economic context shapes public opinion.

"This shows that there is no universal set of factors that influences people's prioritization of the environment over the economy," the authors write.

Why do widely supported solutions to major problems, such as climate change, so often struggle to gain real traction? A new study suggests that part of the answer lies in understanding why people resist change, and how the combination of their preferences and social networks can help overcome that resistance.

A study published in Nature Human Behaviour by researchers at the University of Zurich (UZH) shows that it is possible to measure people's individual thresholds for change. This threshold value describes how much social support a person needs before adopting a new behavior.

Personal thresholds vary widely
The research brings together two fields that have traditionally studied social change separately: behavioral science, which examines what drives individual decisions, and complexity science, which looks at how behaviors spread through complex social networks.

"People don't change in isolation," says Manuel S. Mariani from the Department of Business Administration. "They respond to what others around them are doing, but the amount of encouragement they need varies from person to person. Some people will try a new idea the moment they hear about it. Others wait until everyone else is doing it."

Every ounce counts when launching a rocket, which is why considerations for the Size, Weight, and Power (SWaP) of every component matters so much. For decades, one of the heaviest and most power-hungry components on a spacecraft has been its optical and communications hardware - specifically the bulky mechanical mirror used for LiDAR and free-space laser communications. But a new paper, published in Nature by researchers at MIT, MITRE, and Sandia National Laboratories, might have just fundamentally changed the SWaP considerations of LiDAR systems. Their technology, which they’re called a “photonic ski-jump” could one day revolutionize how spacecraft communicate.

At its core, the technology described in the paper is a photonics innovation. To get light off a computer chip and out into the world, engineers typically have to rely on a frustrating trade-off. They either use diffractive optics or micromechanical scanners - each has its own set of disadvantages. Diffractive optics are easy to scale, but they have poor beam quality. Micromechanical sensors, on the other hand, are physically huge and not easily scalable, especially on spacecraft.

The new “ski-jump” bypasses their weaknesses entirely. It is a nanoscale optical waveguide integrated directly onto a piezoelectrically controlled microcantilever - which makes it look like a series of miniaturized “ski jumps” taking off from the chip itself. It’s fabricated in a standard 200-mm CMOS foundry, and uses the thermal forces between the cooling of different layers of the chip, causing the cantilever to curve out at a 90 degree angle - straight up from the chip surface.

All the essential ingredients to make the DNA and RNA underpinning life on Earth have been discovered in samples collected from the asteroid Ryugu, scientists said Monday.

The discovery comes after these building blocks of life were detected on another asteroid called Bennu, suggesting they are abundant throughout the solar system.

One longstanding theory is that life first began on Earth when asteroids carrying fundamental elements crashed into our planet long ago. The asteroids that hurtle through our solar system give scientists a rare chance to study this possibility.

In 2014, the Japanese spacecraft Hayabusa-2 blasted off on a 300-million-kilometer (185-million-mile) mission to land on Ryugu, a 900-meter-wide (2,950-feet-wide) asteroid.

It successfully managed to collect two samples of rocks weighing 5.4 grams (under a fifth of an ounce) each and bring them back to Earth in 2020. Research in 2023 showed that these samples contained uracil, which is one of the four bases that make up RNA.

While DNA, the famed double helix, functions as a genetic blueprint, single-strand RNA is an all-important messenger, converting the instructions contained in DNA for implementation.

On Monday, a new study by a Japanese team of researchers in Nature Astronomy demonstrated that the samples contained all the "nucleobases" for both DNA and RNA.

These included uracil as well as adenine, guanine, cytosine and thymine. This "does not mean that life existed on Ryugu," the study's lead author, Toshiki Koga, told AFP.

"Instead, their presence indicates that primitive asteroids could produce and preserve molecules that are important for the chemistry related to the origin of life," added the biochemist from the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology.

The discovery also "demonstrates their widespread presence throughout the solar system and reinforces the hypothesis that carbonaceous asteroids contributed to the prebiotic chemical inventory of early Earth," according to the study.

Happy vernal equinox! 🍀

Today marks the first day of spring in the Northern Hemisphere and the first day of autumn in the Southern Hemisphere.

After today, the Sun will shine more directly on the Northern Hemisphere than on the Southern Hemisphere until the autumnal equinox.

America’s return to the Moon is underway 🇺🇸

🚀 Artemis II rolled to the pad overnight in preparation for launch as soon as April 1

Humans really do rule the world. We took over fast and far, more than any other wild vertebrates. We inhabit nearly every corner of the world, and can thrive in deserts, tropical rainforests and even extremely cold climates. But how? Scientists say we did it through not only biological evolution, but another system: cultural evolution. That is what makes us so special.

Culture as the engine of expansion
New research from Arizona State University evolutionary anthropologist Charles Perreault measures just how important culture was relative to biology. In a study appearing in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, he uses empirical data to show human global dominance was predominately achieved through cultural evolution.

"As humans moved into new environments, they didn't have to wait for genetic mutations to adapt to Arctic cold, tropical forests, deserts or high altitudes," said Perreault, a research scientist at the Institute of Human Origins and an associate professor at ASU's School of Human Evolution and Social Change.

"Instead, humans adapted through culturally transmitted technologies, ecological knowledge and cooperative social norms. Innovations in clothing, shelter, hunting strategies, food processing and social organization could spread rapidly through social learning."

The result, his research shows, is that humans encompass about 51 million square miles of land while the typical wild mammal species occupies about 64 square miles.

Putting human uniqueness in numbers
Perreault's work demonstrates that if humans were an average mammal that relied only on genetic evolution, achieving today's geographic range would have required tens of millions of years, thousands of separate species and enormous differences in body size.

"This research helps put human uniqueness into a measurable evolutionary perspective," Perreault said. "We often say that culture makes us different, but here we can estimate by how much. The results suggest that cultural evolution compressed what would normally require roughly 88 million years of biological diversification into about 300,000 years within a single species.

"It reframes recent human history as a kind of adaptive radiation—but one powered by cultural diversification rather than speciation—and shows that adding a cultural inheritance system changes how quickly and extensively a lineage can expand."