Human-driven climate change is slowing Earth's rotation at a rate not seen in 3.6 million years, with sea level rise increasing the length of days by 1.33 milliseconds per century, according to a new study.

Earth spins faster when its mass is more concentrated, just as twirling figure skaters pull in their arms to speed up and spread out their arms to slow down. Rising sea levels have long been known to redistribute that mass and change the planet's spin, but the newly identified rate is unprecedented, scientists say.

Many factors influence Earth's spin speed. The moon's pull on the planet is the most significant over the long term. Its gravitational pull creates a bulge in the planet that slows Earth's rotation rate, Michael Mann, a climatologist at the University of Pennsylvania who was not involved with the new study, told Live Science. The moon's influence increases Earth's day length by about 2.4 milliseconds per century.

Although the impact would likely not be perceptible to humans, the findings have other real-world implications. For example, Mann said, instruments that require precise knowledge of Earth's rotation rate, such as those on spacecraft, may need to be recalibrated. Other precise timekeeping applications, such as in computing, could be affected, Shahvandi said.

The findings also underscore the rapidity of modern warming. "It tells us about the rapid climate change," Shahvandi said, "[the] melting of snow and ice in polar ice sheets and mountains glaciers, and increase in the sea levels."

Anybody who has tried to use a smartphone or tablet with long nails knows that there's a learning curve. Rather than effortlessly tapping with a fingertip, you must awkwardly lay the pads of your fingers onto the screen. Wouldn't it be easier if you could just type with your fingernails instead? To try and make this idea a reality, a group of researchers is formulating a clear nail polish that could turn long fingernails into touchscreen-compatible styluses.

To find the perfect combination of clarity and conductivity, Desai turned to good, old-fashioned trial and error. Using 13 commercially available clear-coat polishes and more than 50 different additives, she slowly worked her way through the combinations to find which ones resulted in a conductive topcoat for nails. The molecules that performed the best were forms of taurine, an organic compound commonly sold as a dietary supplement, and ethanolamine, another simple, organic molecule.

These initial results are promising, but the team still has a long way to go before the polish will be available on store shelves. Even the best-performing ethanolamine-taurine formula is finicky and doesn't yet work consistently when painted on a nail. Plus, ethanolamine evaporates quickly, so the polish only works on a touchscreen for a few hours once outside the bottle, and researchers would prefer a truly nontoxic compound.

Despite these setbacks, the researchers now have an idea of how the successful formula works, and they are continuing to screen compounds and test new formulas to find the best-performing combination.

To build a sustained human presence on the Moon, we are building NASA Moon Base, prioritizing surface operations and scalable infrastructure. 

- Frequent robotic landings and mobility testing including MoonFall drones 
- Starting in 2027 nearly monthly cadence of equipment and rovers with scientific payloads landing on the Moon. 
- Investments in power, communications, and surface mobility 
- Scalable infrastructure to support long-term human presence

The objective is clear: build the foundation for an enduring lunar base and take the next step toward Mars.

NASA is building on 25 years of continuous human presence aboard the International Space Station. Before its decommissioning in 2030, we intend to:  
 
- Increase support for commercial crew PAM and cargo missions to the ISS 
- Maximize research missions in low Earth orbit with commercial potential
- Help industry mature technical and operational capabilities
- A future where NASA becomes one of many customers for commercial stations 
 
America will work with industry and our international partners to ignite a sustainable orbital economy. We will never surrender our presence in low Earth orbit.

‍NASA is building SR-1 Freedom, a nuclear electric propulsion spacecraft, launching to Mars in 2028. 

We are proud to announce this during the 250th year of the United States, the mission’s name reflects the spirit of American innovation and exploration. 
This mission will bring America’s nuclear power capabilities to space and deliver the Skyfall payload of Ingenuity class helicopters to explore the Red Planet.  
 
Nuclear power and propulsion will be the key to undertaking crewed missions to Mars and exploring the outer solar system.  
 
Space Reactor-1 (SR-1) Freedom will make the next giant leap and accomplish a key component of the National Space Policy, bringing nuclear to space alongside U.S. Department of Energy.

NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman on Tuesday laid out a sweeping vision for the space agency’s next decade during an event called “Ignition” in which he and other senior leaders set out their exploration plans.

Isaacman and his colleagues shared a number of major announcements, including outlining a nuclear-powered mission to Mars that will release three helicopters there and major changes to commercial space stations. However, most significantly, Isaacman outlined a detailed plan to construct a substantial Moon base over the next decade. He framed it as part of a “great power” challenge, saying that if NASA does not succeed now it will cede the Moon to China.

The base included long-range drones, multiple sources of power, sophisticated communications, permanent habitats, scientific laboratories, local manufacturing, and more. To accomplish this, NASA will work with a broad range of industry partners capable of sending medium-size and large cargos to the lunar surface. Isaacman also confirmed that NASA will no longer build a Lunar Gateway in orbit around the Moon, but would rather focus all of its energy and resources on the lunar surface.

You wouldn’t know this teensy speck was a robot if you saw it. At less than a millimeter across, you might not notice it at all. But the itty-bitty machine offers big opportunities to explore the microscopic world. It’s the smallest robot that can move, think and act on its own, its creators say.

The mini robot was inspired by nature’s tiny, complex machines. “Cells and microorganisms are phenomenally sophisticated,” says Marc Miskin. “Nature has chosen this length scale to organize all of life.” An engineer, Miskin works at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. He hopes that similarly tiny robots will help uncover the secrets of the cellular realm.

The new robot is as small as a paramecium — a single-celled organism that lives in water. It isn’t the first machine less than a millimeter long, Miskin says. But it’s the first one that’s fully autonomous. Once programmed, it decides where to go, how to get there and what to do.

Such small robots might someday be able to travel through the human body to study cells or deliver drugs.

Solar energy is widely seen as a key tool in reducing reliance on fossil fuels and slowing climate change. The Sun delivers a vast amount of energy to Earth every second, but today’s solar cells can only capture a small portion of it. This limitation comes from a so-called “physical ceiling” that has long been considered unavoidable.

Breakthrough Spin-Flip Technology Boosts Solar Efficiency
In a study published today (March 25) in the Journal of the American Chemical Society, researchers from Kyushu University in Japan, working with collaborators at Johannes Gutenberg University (JGU) Mainz in Germany, introduced a new approach to overcome this barrier. They used a molybdenum-based metal complex known as a “spin-flip” emitter to capture extra energy through singlet fission (SF), often described as a “dream technology” for improving light conversion.

This method achieved an energy conversion efficiency of about 130%, exceeding the traditional 100% limit and pointing toward more powerful future solar cells.

Scientists in Geneva took some antiprotons out for a spin—a very delicate one—in a truck, in a never-tried-before test drive that has been deemed a success.

If this so-called antimatter had come into contact with actual matter, even for a fraction of an instant, it would have been annihilated in a quick flash of energy. So experts at the European Organization for Nuclear Research, known as CERN, had to be extra careful when they took 92 antiprotons on the road for a short ride on Tuesday.

The antiprotons were suspended in a vacuum inside a specially designed box and held in place by supercooled magnets.

In methodical exercise over about three hours, the nearly 1,000-kilogram (2,200-pound) cryogenic box was craned up slowly and moved through a cavernous lab the onto the truck.

The drive on CERN's campus itself lasted only about a half-hour to test how—if at all—the infinitesimal particles could be transported by road without seeping out.

The antiprotons were then placed back in their usual lab area, and the operation was concluded with applause, claims of success, and a bottle of Champagne.

"Transporting antimatter is a pioneering and ambitious project," said Gautier Hamel de Monchenault, CERN's director for research and computing. "We are at the beginning of an exciting scientific journey that will allow us to further deepen our understanding of antimatter."

Our Artemis II crew will be going around the Moon, but they'll always find their way back home 🌎

During this complex journey, the four astronauts will travel ~685,000 miles on a trajectory around the Moon and back to Earth.

See their daily agenda: go.nasa.gov/4bw1ddt

Astronomers have observed two planets forming in the disk around a young star named WISPIT 2. Having previously detected one planet, the team has now employed European Southern Observatory (ESO) telescopes to confirm the presence of another. These observations, and the unique structure of the disk around the star, indicate that the WISPIT 2 system could resemble a young solar system.

"WISPIT 2 is the best look into our own past that we have to date," says Chloe Lawlor, Ph.D. student at the University of Galway, Ireland, and lead author of the study published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

The system is only the second known, after PDS 70, where two planets have been directly observed in the process of forming around their host star. Unlike PDS 70, however, WISPIT 2 has a very extended planet-forming disk with distinctive gaps and rings.

"These structures suggest that more planets are currently forming, which we will eventually detect," Lawlor says.

"WISPIT 2 gives us a critical laboratory not just to observe the formation of a single planet but an entire planetary system," says Christian Ginski, study co-author and researcher at the University of Galway.

With such observations, astronomers aim to better understand how baby planetary systems develop into mature ones, like our own.

The first newborn planet found in the system—named WISPIT 2b—was detected last year, with a mass almost five times that of Jupiter and orbiting the central star at around 60 times the distance between Earth and the sun.

Feeling like you had “a good night’s sleep” depends on more than just the number of hours you spent in bed. It also comes down to how deeply and uninterrupted that sleep felt. Scientists still do not fully understand what is happening in the brain that creates this sense of deep, refreshing rest.

A new study from researchers at the IMT School for Advanced Studies Lucca, published today (March 24) in Plos Biology, offers a surprising clue. It suggests that dreams, especially vivid and immersive ones, may actually make sleep feel deeper and more restorative rather than disrupting it.

Rethinking Deep Sleep and Brain Activity
For a long time, deep sleep was thought to mean the brain was essentially “switched off,” with slow brain waves, minimal activity, and little awareness. Under this view, deeper sleep meant less brain activity. In contrast, dreaming has typically been linked to Rapid Eye Movement (REM) sleep and seen as a sign of partial “awakenings” in the brain.

However, this creates a puzzling contradiction. REM sleep involves intense dreaming and brain activity that resembles wakefulness, yet people often describe it as a period of deep sleep.

To explore this paradox, researchers examined 196 overnight recordings from 44 healthy adults. Participants slept in a lab while their brain activity was monitored using high-density electroencephalography (EEG). The data came from a larger project funded by a European Research Council (ERC) Starting Grant focused on how sensory stimulation influences the experience of sleep.

There is a limit on how many times a mammal can be cloned before suffering "mutational meltdown," Japanese scientists have discovered, after making 1,200 clones over two decades that started off with a single mouse.

The 58th generation of mice did not survive, establishing for the first time that mammals cannot be cloned an infinite number of times, the scientists said in a study published on Tuesday.

It had been hoped that this method, which involves making clones of other clones, could have a range of uses in the future, including saving endangered species or mass-producing animals for their meat.

"We had believed that we could create an infinite number of clones. That is why these results are so disappointing," the study's senior author Teruhiko Wakayama of the University of Yamanashi told AFP.

Every time two black holes collide somewhere in the universe, they send ripples through the fabric of spacetime itself. We call these ripples gravitational waves. The problem is detecting them since they are almost impossibly faint by the time they reach Earth. LIGO, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory, solves that problem with a 4 kilometre laser tunnel so sensitive it can measure a change in distance a thousand times smaller than a proton. But what if there was another way to measure such changes?

Researchers at Stockholm University, Nordita, and the University of Tübingen think there might be. Their new theoretical study, published in Physical Review Letters, suggests that gravitational waves leave detectable fingerprints in the light emitted by atoms and that a cloud of atoms just a few millimetres across might one day serve as a gravitational wave detector.

Some of the longest, most important migrations of species on Earth are happening beneath the surface of the world's rivers and many are rapidly collapsing, according to a major new assessment by the Convention on the Conservation of Migratory Species of Wild Animals (CMS), an environmental treaty of the United Nations.

The Global Assessment of Migratory Freshwater Fishes, being launched at the CMS 15th Meeting of the Conference of the Parties (COP15) in Brazil, finds that migratory freshwater fish—a group of species that maintain river health, underpin some of the world's largest inland fisheries, and sustain hundreds of millions of people—are among the most imperiled wildlife on the planet.

The Assessment identifies hundreds of migratory fish needing cross-border action, presenting authoritative evidence that species whose life cycles depend on connected rivers across national borders face accelerating declines driven by dam construction, habitat fragmentation, pollution, overfishing, and climate-driven ecosystem changes.

The analysis identifies 325 migratory freshwater fish species as candidates for coordinated international conservation efforts, highlighting a largely overlooked biodiversity crisis unfolding across the world's shared river basins.

Researchers at the University of St Andrews have unveiled two breakthrough techniques for chemically recycling and upcycling nitrile‑rubber products, such as disposable gloves, seals, and industrial parts, into new materials that are also capable of capturing carbon dioxide.

The development of sustainable methods for the upcycling of plastic waste is one of the most important challenges in achieving a circular economy and can play a significant role in tackling the climate crisis.

Among various plastics that need to be recycled, nitrile butadiene rubber (NBR) has received comparatively little attention, despite a large market of 36 million tons or $2.5 billion globally per year. NBR has wide applications ranging from disposable gloves to hoses, seals, and circular seals used to prevent leaks.

NBR is challenging to recycle due to its thermoset nature, with less than 2% currently recycled, often through low-value downcycling.

However, in a paper published in Angewandte Chemie, researchers from the School of Chemistry at St Andrews introduce two new ways to chemically recycle NBR and turn it into useful new materials.

The body depends on vitamin B2, also called riboflavin, but it cannot make the nutrient itself. That means it has to come from food, including dairy products, eggs, meat, and green vegetables. Inside cells, riboflavin is converted into helper molecules that support metabolism and protect against oxidative damage.

That sounds entirely beneficial, but researchers have now uncovered a troubling tradeoff. The same vitamin-linked system that helps protect healthy cells can also help cancer cells stay alive.

Scientists at the Rudolf Virchow Centre (RVZ) at Julius-Maximilians-Universität Würzburg (JMU) have found that this protective role has an unexpected downside. The same mechanism can also help cancer cells survive.

“Vitamin B2 plays a crucial role in protecting cancer cells from ferroptosis, a special form of programmed cell death,” says PhD student Vera Skafar. She is a member of the research group led by José Pedro Friedmann Angeli, Professor of Translational Cell Biology. The results have been published in the renowned journal Nature Cell Biology.

It seems like every day a new study finds tiny plastic particles called microplastics where they should not be: in our bodies and our food, water and air.

Yet finding and identifying microplastics is extremely challenging, especially given their small size. One microplastic can range from as large as a ladybug to as small as an eighth of a red blood cell.

In addition, it can be hard for researchers to avoid unintentionally contaminating their samples, because these plastics are practically everywhere. As a result, much of this research may be overestimating the number of microplastics.

In a new study published in March 2026, our team found that, even when following established protocols, using certain methods to measure environmental microplastics can potentially contaminate the results.