3I/ATLAS created quite the buzz as it flew through our Solar System. As just the third interstellar object (ISO) ever detected, what our instruments observed as it approached our Sun and began heading back to deep space provided tantalizing clues about the star system in which it formed. In particular, new observations from the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) have yielded the first-ever measurement of deuterated water (or "semi-heavy water") in an ISO. The discovery provides a chemical window into the cold conditions that characterize its home star system.

The research was led by PhD student Luis E. Salazar Manzano, a PhD student at the University of Michigan, and assistant professor Teresa Paneque-Carreño, the Principal Investigator of the ALMA Director's Discretionary Time program that made the discovery. They were joined by researchers from the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO), the Laboratory for Instrumentation and Research in Astrophysics (LIRA), the Leach Science Center, the Millennium Nucleus on Young Exoplanets and their Moons (YEMS), and NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC) and Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL).

The team's observations were made in December 2025, six days after 3I/ATLAS reached its closest point to the Sun. This narrow observation window was made possible by two things. First, there's the ALMA's Atacama Compact Array (ACA), a series of four 12-meter (39.4 ft) and 7-meter (23 ft) telescopes grouped in a compact configuration to combine measurements (aka short-baseline interferometry), allowing them to see very faint objects in space. Second, there's ALMA's unique ability to point toward the Sun, which most optical telescopes cannot. As Paneque-Carreño noted in an NRAO press release

Most instruments can't point toward the Sun, but radio telescopes like ALMA can. We were able to observe the comet within days after perihelion, just as it peeked out from its transit behind the Sun. This gave us a constraint on these molecules that's not possible using other instruments.

Every breath you take traces back to a deep evolutionary past. The steady rise of your chest, the muscles between your ribs expanding outward, and the flow of air into your lungs feel routine. Yet this familiar process has ancient origins. A small, mummified reptile that died in an Oklahoma cave around 289 million years ago has revealed the earliest known example of this breathing system in amniotes – a group that includes reptiles, birds, mammals, and their shared ancestors, some of the first animals to fully adapt to life on land.

Ancient Fossil Reveals Early Breathing System
In a study published in Nature, researchers describe the remarkable preservation of Captorhinus aguti, a small reptile from the early Permian period. Though only a few inches long, this fossil contains far more than bones. It preserves three-dimensional skin, calcified cartilage, and even traces of proteins. These protein remnants are nearly 100 million years older than any previously identified in fossils.

“Captorhinus is an interesting lizard-looking critter that is critical to understanding early amniote evolution,” said Ethan Mooney, who co-led the study while a student at the University of Toronto in co-author Professor Robert R. Reisz’s lab and is now a PhD candidate in the Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University where he works with paleontologist Professor Stephanie Pierce. These early reptiles ranged in size from just a few centimeters to several feet and were among the first to explore life on land. They were widespread and successful during their time.

The force of a pumping heart changes how cancer cells function, halting their ability to multiply and spread, a new study shows.

The finding may help to explain why heart cancer is so rare, occurring in fewer than 2 in 100,000 people per year.

A protein called Nesprin-2 is key to this phenomenon. Found in the outer membrane of a cell's nucleus, the protein was already known to sense and respond to mechanical forces. Now, Nesprin-2 has been found to sense the force of heartbeats and stop cancerous cells from multiplying.

In addition to offering a possible explanation for why heart cancer is so rare, the findings could open the door for new therapies for other cancers, researchers concluded in the study, which was published April 23 in the journal Science.

We're going to "try to exploit this knowledge to develop a mechanical therapy for cancer," study author Serena Zacchigna, head of the Cardiovascular Biology Laboratory at the International Centre for Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology in Italy, told Live Science.

Zacchigna and colleagues are developing bands that can be strapped around tumors on the skin and then reproduce the force of a beating heart. Because metastatic skin cancer is one of the more common cancers to spread to the heart, this is a good first clinical case to look at, Zacchigna said.

Capturing carbon dioxide (CO2) before it enters the atmosphere is an important way to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. However, despite decades of development, these technologies have not been widely adopted. The main reason is simple. Most existing methods are expensive and inefficient. For instance, the widely used aqueous amine scrubbing process requires heating large volumes of liquid to temperatures above 100 °C to release the captured CO2 and reset the system. This high energy demand significantly increases operating costs and limits large-scale use.

Carbon-Based Adsorbents as a Lower-Energy Alternative
Solid carbon materials have emerged as a promising option. These materials are affordable and have a high surface area, allowing them to capture CO2 and release it using less heat, particularly when nitrogen-containing functional groups are present. Even so, there has been a major challenge. Traditional synthesis methods place these nitrogen groups randomly across the material, often in mixed forms. This randomness makes it difficult to determine which specific arrangement is responsible for better performance.

New Viciazite Materials With Controlled Nitrogen Structure
To solve this issue, a research team led by Associate Professor Yasuhiro Yamada from the Graduate School of Engineering and Associate Professor Tomonori Ohba from the Graduate School of Science at Chiba University, Japan, developed a new category of carbon materials known as ‘viciazites.’ These materials are designed so that nitrogen groups are positioned next to each other in a controlled and predictable way. The study, published in the journal Carbon, was co-authored by Mr. Kota Kondo, also from Chiba University.

For most of human spaceflight history, the go to for communications has been radio waves, a technology that has served us remarkably well, but one that is beginning to show its age. When NASA's Artemis II mission carried four astronauts around the Moon in April the year, engineers quietly tested a laser communications terminal that could one day rewrite the rules of deep space exploration.

Bolted to the exterior of the Orion spacecraft, the Orion Artemis II Optical Communications System that was developed by MIT Lincoln Laboratory, became the first laser communications terminal ever to support a crewed mission at lunar distance. Rather than radio waves, the device used invisible infrared light to carry data between the spacecraft and receivers on Earth, exploiting the fact that the shorter the wavelength, the more information you can squeeze into a single beam.

Traditional radio systems, operating at the distances involved in a lunar mission, were limited to single digit megabits per second. The optical terminal routinely achieved downlink speeds of 260 megabits per second, and ground stations at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and White Sands Complex set a record of their own. In just under an hour, they received, processed it and retransmitted it to mission control! Until I had fibre installed, this was far superior than my home broadband system.

Over the course of the roughly ten day journey, the system transferred 484 gigabytes of data between Orion and the ground in total. Those figures weren't just impressive on paper, they translated directly into the images that stopped the world. The striking photographs of Earthset, Earthrise, and the solar eclipse captured from the Moon's far side, images that circulated across front pages and social media feeds within hours of being taken. It all came home via that laser link.

Looks like Mother Earth is putting her best face forward for Earth Day with some spectacular Aurora Australis, or Southern Lights! I couldn’t look away from the Space Station cupola window as I witnessed this magnificent Earthly phenomenon dance its magical ballet. Covering a majority of the area I could see, our precious blue gem had turned completely green! Mother Earth is undeniably gorgeous, but she is also utterly fragile. Let’s remember to treat her as well as she has treated us.

I never saw anything near this scale during my previous mission here on the ISS. That’s because we are currently near a strong peak of the solar cycle, while my first mission coincided with solar minimum.

Researchers at the University of East Anglia have identified a previously unknown property of light that allows it to twist, spin, and behave in unusual ways – without the need for mirrors, materials, or specialized lenses.

In a finding that could reshape medical diagnostics, data transmission, and future quantum systems, scientists from the UK and South Africa demonstrated that light can be “programmed” by taking advantage of its inherent geometry.

This result challenges long-standing assumptions, showing that light can develop chiral behavior – meaning it can act like a left or right hand – while moving freely through space.

According to the team, this could eventually enable light to carry information, examine biological systems, manipulate matter, and safeguard quantum signals.

Why Chirality Matters
Chirality, or “handedness,” plays a key role in science. Many molecules, including those used in medicines, exist in left- and right-handed forms that appear nearly identical but can behave very differently in the body.

To distinguish between them, scientists typically rely on specialized light that rotates either clockwise or anticlockwise. Until now, generating and controlling this type of light required carefully designed surfaces, advanced materials, or intense focusing with powerful lenses.

The new research shows those steps may not be necessary.

“Our work shows that light can naturally develop this handed behavior all on its own,” said Dr. Kayn Forbes from UEA’s School of Chemistry, Pharmacy and Pharmacology.

“You just have to prepare it in the right way. Most people think of light as traveling in straight lines. But scientists can also create structured light – light whose brightness, shape, and direction are carefully arranged.”

Why do some dreams feel vivid and lifelike while others seem disjointed or hard to understand? A new study from researchers at the IMT School for Advanced Studies Lucca offers answers, showing that both personal traits and shared life experiences shape what we dream about.

Large Study Tracks Dreams and Daily Experiences
Published in Communications Psychology, the study examined more than 3,700 descriptions of dreams and waking experiences from 287 participants ranging in age from 18 to 70. Over a two-week period, participants recorded their experiences each day. Researchers also collected detailed data on sleep patterns, cognitive abilities, personality traits, and psychological characteristics.

AI Analysis Reveals Patterns in Dream Content
The team used advanced natural language processing (NLP) methods to analyze the meaning and structure of dream reports. This approach allowed them to study dreams in a systematic and measurable way. The results show that dreams are not random or chaotic. Instead, they reflect a complex interaction between internal factors such as mind-wandering tendencies, interest in dreams, and sleep quality, and external influences, including major societal events like the COVID-19 pandemic.

How the Brain Reworks Reality During Sleep
By comparing descriptions of daily life with dream reports, researchers found that the brain does not simply replay waking experiences. Instead, it reshapes them. Familiar settings like workplaces, hospitals, or schools are not reproduced exactly. They are transformed into vivid scenes that often combine different elements and shift perspectives in unexpected ways.

This process suggests that dreams actively reconstruct reality. The mind blends memories with imagined or anticipated experiences, creating new scenarios that can feel immersive or even surreal.

Quantum technology has promising potential to revolutionize how large and complex amounts of information are processed. While already in use primarily in laboratory and research settings globally, quantum technologies are in a transition phase for broader industry applications across many economic sectors.

Exploring unusual behavior in quantum matter
In researching fundamental aspects of quantum physics, or the behavior of nature at the smallest scales—involving atoms, electrons and photons—a study led by Cal Poly Physics Department Lecturer Ian Powell analyzed how a changing magnetic field can make matter behave in unusual ways.

Powell and student researcher Louis Buchalter, who graduated with a Cal Poly bachelor's degree in physics in 2025, published the article "Flux-Switching Floquet Engineering" in the journal Physical Review B, highlighting how changing magnetic fields over time can create quantum states that do not exist in any stationary material (remaining in the same state as time elapses).

"On a big-picture level, I would describe this as an advance in our understanding of how time-dependent control can create and organize new forms of quantum matter," Powell said. "The central idea is that useful quantum properties can depend not just on what a material is, but on how it is driven in time. In our case, we show that periodically changing a magnetic field can produce driven quantum phases with no static counterpart."

By engineering new quantum behaviors by timing the field, physicists can potentially create technologies that are very stable and hard to disrupt by "noise" or imperfections that can interfere with quantum technology functionality and avoid system errors.

Admittedly, Powell said that it's difficult to describe the technical aspects of the study to non-physicists. But conceptually, research points to possible routes for engineering these kinds of exotic-driven quantum states in controlled platforms such as ultracold-atom experiments.

Astronomers have detected an atmosphere that shouldn't exist on an icy object beyond the orbit of Pluto — sparking calls for follow-up observations.

Japanese astronomers found evidence for a thin atmosphere surrounding the body, which is located within the Kuiper Belt in the cold outer reaches of the solar system, according to a new study published May 4 in the journal Nature Astronomy.

The object, known as (612533) 2002 XV93, is supposed to be too small and too cold to sustain an atmosphere. At about 311 miles (500 kilometers) across — a little wider than the Grand Canyon is long — the object is more than four times smaller than Pluto, which was thought to be the only body beyond Neptune with an atmosphere in our solar system.

The new observations challenge assumptions about which objects can sustain atmospheres in our solar system. However, these initial findings must be verified by outside researchers, with some experts keen to make follow-up observations with the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) to confirm the atmosphere exists.

"This is an amazing development, but it sorely needs independent verification," Alan Stern, a planetary scientist and principal investigator for NASA's New Horizons mission to explore Pluto and the Kuiper Belt, who was not involved in the new study, told the Associated Press. "The implications are profound if verified."