The Spirit rover (Mars Exploration Rover A) left our planet to begin the journey to its new home OTD in 2003. This view captured 20 years ago at the beginning of 2006 shows rippled sand deposits of the "El Dorado" ripple field in Gusev Crater on Mars.

Designed for a 90-day mission, Spirit operated for more than 6 years on Mars. It's twin, Opportunity, operated for almost 15 years.

Ten days ago, in a moment of very high drama in orbit, NASA directed its astronauts living on the International Space Station to briefly seek emergency refuge in a Crew Dragon spacecraft.

Since then, neither the US space agency nor Roscosmos has provided additional public information about the situation in orbit. But according to sources who spoke to Ars, following the spectacle in space, the problem has been successfully fixed.

At issue were persistent cracks in a small area of the International Space Station attached to the Russian Zvezda service module, known as the PrK module. The problem has been ongoing since 2019, and Russian astronauts have been attempting various fixes, often using a sealant called Germetall-1.

A new study finds that plants respond to injury by actively redirecting sugars to damaged tissues, helping fuel the regeneration process. Using a fluorescent sensor to track sugar movement in living plants, researchers have discovered that wounds trigger a localized shift in energy transport, concentrating glucose around the injury site. The findings published in PNAS offer new insight into how plants coordinate repair and recovery and could help scientists better understand the mechanisms that support resilience in crops facing physical damage or environmental stress.

When a plant is damaged, whether by a storm, an animal, or a gardener's pruning shears, it faces an immediate challenge: how to deliver enough energy to the wounded area to rebuild lost tissue. The study reveals how plants solve that problem. The team discovered that injuries trigger a rapid rerouting of sugars, directing energy toward damaged tissues where repair and regeneration are underway.

Using a fluorescent sensor that allowed them to watch sugar movement inside living plants, the researchers found that glucose accumulates around wounds as regeneration progresses. They also identified several genes that help drive this process, providing new insight into how plants recover from injury.

Viruses are highly effective at infecting human cells, largely because of specialized proteins that cover their outer surfaces. These proteins are also a key focus for vaccine design. To study them, scientists often create lab-made versions to see how the immune system might respond. However, these simplified versions usually omit important sections embedded in the virus’ membrane. Without those pieces, the proteins do not fully behave the way they do in real viruses, making it harder to understand how antibodies recognize and disable them.

Researchers at Scripps Research, working with IAVI and other collaborators, have now developed a new platform that allows these viral proteins to be studied in a form that closely resembles their natural state. The method uses nanodisc technology, where the proteins are placed into tiny particles made of lipids. This creates a membrane-like environment that better preserves their structure and function. As a result, scientists can gain clearer insights into how viral proteins and antibodies interact.

Nanodisc Technology Improves Vaccine Research
The new platform, described in Nature Communications, was tested using proteins from HIV and Ebola. These viruses have been particularly difficult targets for vaccines because their surface proteins are not easily recognized by the immune system. The researchers say the same approach could also be used to study other viruses with similar membrane-bound proteins, including influenza and SARS-CoV-2.

“For many years, we’ve had to rely on versions of viral proteins that are missing important pieces,” says co-senior author William Schief, a professor at Scripps Research and executive director of vaccine design at IAVI’s Neutralizing Antibody Center. “Our platform lets us study these proteins in a setting that better reflects their natural environment, which is critical if we want to understand how protective antibodies recognize a virus.”

Researchers at MIT are testing a new propulsion technology that could give small satellites a major boost in capability. The system combines two very different forms of spacecraft propulsion in a single package, allowing satellites to perform both rapid maneuvers and highly efficient long-distance travel.

At the heart of the design is a single propellant that can power both chemical and electric thrusters. Traditionally, these systems require separate fuel sources, adding complexity and taking up valuable space on a spacecraft.

“If you can have chemical and electrical propulsion in one small package, it’s the best of both worlds,” says Amelia Bruno, a former postdoctoral researcher in MIT’s Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AeroAstro). “This opens the door for small satellites to do even more science, more observations, and more interesting missions, all on a smaller and cheaper platform.”

Bruno is the lead author of a study published in the Journal of Propulsion and Power. The research demonstrates that a type of environmentally friendlier monopropellant originally developed by the U.S. Air Force for chemical propulsion can also be used to operate miniature electric thrusters known as electrospray thrusters.

Day 121, orbit 1873 — Sunday morning science with Sophie, episode 9: Hunting for sounds, part 2.

Before anyone from the NASA engineering teams starts wondering why the TOCA is clicking while it’s switched off… I obviously could not turn it on just for the purpose of this video, so I recorded the sound later on during actual operations. It’s my absolute favourite sound onboard the Station! The sound consists of the checkout of several valves, which are used by this Total Organic Carbon Analyzer. This beautiful piece of engineering is used to test the quality of the Station's drinking water. 98% of the water onboard is recycled, isn’t it amazing?

At age 19, John McFall thought he might never walk again after his right leg was amputated above the knee following a motorcycle accident. Fast-forward more than two decades, and he is now on the verge of becoming the first physically disabled person in space.

McFall, 45, is a British surgeon and former Paralympic athlete who won multiple medals as a T42-class sprinter. In 2022, he joined the European Space Agency's (ESA) Fly! program, which aimed to see if a person with a physical disability could live and work in low Earth orbit. And in February 2025, he became the first member of the program to be cleared for a potential future mission to space.

More recently, on June 2, the U.K. government announced that McFall had been selected as a prospective member of the first crew to live on Haven-1, an upcoming commercial space station from U.S. company Vast that is scheduled to be the first of its kind in low Earth orbit, if it launches on time early next year.

A warming climate has been helping drive a global rise in sea levels. A new analysis now finds that hundreds of major studies missed just how much sea levels have risen. Past estimates were too low, the new study shows. On average, true sea levels are 20 to 30 centimeters (8 to 12 inches) higher than what past studies reported.

This means that the toll of future sea level rise is even greater than expected.

Katharina Seeger and Philip Minderhoud did the research. They work at Wageningen University in the Netherlands. These physical geographers evaluated data from 385 global and regional studies. All had been published between 2009 and 2025.

Some 99 percent of the studies had incorrectly estimated ocean height, they found. And 45 of the studies were used a few years ago in a major report. It was issued by a global panel of climate experts convened by the United Nations.

Knowing the rate of ocean rise is crucial for coastal planners around the world. It helps them predict when sea water will start to flood — and permanently cover — large swaths of land. The errors in past studies, the researchers say, mean that coastal land may disappear faster than expected. In some places, it could vanish as much as a century sooner than thought.

In a first, a large, international team led by multiple labs at Harvard Medical School and Princeton University has published a complete wiring diagram of all the connections between neurons in the central nervous system of an adult fruit fly.

The work allows researchers to begin to study how the brain and body interact to carry out complex behaviors such as walking and flying. It also empowers deeper investigations into the basic principles of how nervous systems work.

"We can see all of the neurons and their connections as a complete unit for the first time and ask, "What do we learn from that?'" said study co-senior author Rachel Wilson, the Joseph B. Martin Professor of Basic Research in the Field of Neurobiology in the Blavatnik Institute at HMS.

The highly detailed diagram of neural connections—known as a connectome—adds a map of the fruit fly's spinal cord equivalent, called a nerve cord, to a previously published connectome of the fly brain.

"It is really important to have a central nervous system connectome that is as complete as possible so we can link up the brain and body and start thinking about behavior holistically," said study co-senior author Wei-Chung Allen Lee, associate professor of neurobiology at HMS and HMS professor of neurology at Boston Children's Hospital.

In analyzing the connectome, the team found that many fruit fly behaviors are controlled by local neural circuits in the body parts that are involved, rather than by a central hub in the brain.

The entire connectome is now freely available online so that other scientists can use it to propel neuroscience research.

Rarely seen by humans, a humpback whale birth is a truly special moment. Now that it has entered the world, this humpback calf will spend the next 10 years of its life growing to its full adult size.

Biomedical engineers at Brown University have created a wound dressing that releases antibiotics only when harmful bacteria are detected. In a new study, the team found that the material may quickly eliminate wound infections and speed healing while cutting back on unnecessary antibiotic use. Overuse of antibiotics is a key factor behind antibiotic resistance and difficult-to-treat “superbug” infections, which kill tens of thousands of people worldwide each year.

The material is a smart hydrogel packed with antibiotics and designed to be applied directly to a wound beneath a bandage. It responds to an enzyme made by many harmful bacteria. When that enzyme is present, the hydrogel begins to break down and releases the antibiotics stored inside. If harmful bacteria are absent, the hydrogel remains intact and keeps the medication sealed away.

“Antimicrobial resistance is a major problem worldwide, so we need better approaches for how we use antibiotics,” said Anita Shukla, a professor in Brown’s School of Engineering who led the development of the smart hydrogel. “We’ve developed a material that releases antibiotics only when harmful bacteria are present, so it limits exposure to antibiotics when they’re not needed but still provides these important medications when they are needed.”

In the study, published in Science Advances, the researchers tested the hydrogel and found that it was highly selective for enzymes produced by common bacteria that cause wound infections. The findings also suggest that the material may clear infections and support wound healing more effectively than a hydrogel dressing currently used in clinical care.

For decades, the semiconductor industry has boosted computing power by making transistors smaller and fitting more of them onto a single chip. That strategy has fueled remarkable advances in electronics, but it is now approaching fundamental physical limits. As devices shrink toward atomic scales, engineers must contend with the constraints of material properties and the effects of quantum mechanics.

Researchers believe the next major advance may come not from making chips smaller, but from building them upward.

A team at the University of Illinois Grainger College of Engineering has demonstrated a new way to stack layers of silicon circuits directly on top of one another, creating compact three-dimensional chips that could deliver greater computing power while using less energy. Their work, published in Nature, overcomes a major obstacle that has long prevented widespread adoption of this approach.

“Take something as simple as static random-access memory, which is universal in CPUs and GPUs. Today it takes six microelectronic devices called transistors on a single plane to store one bit of information. With vertical integration, you can distribute them across multiple layers. It’s like replacing a sprawling suburb with high-rises: you get the same functionality, but the spatial footprint is reduced while making communication between layers faster and more efficient,” said Qing Cao, a professor of materials science and engineering at Illinois Grainger Engineering.

Researchers at the University of Houston's College of Pharmacy have discovered an unexpectedly simple strategy to improve the performance of mRNA vaccines and gene therapeutics: adding salt. The findings, published in Small, address one of the biggest challenges facing modern gene medicine—getting fragile therapeutic material to the right place inside cells.

"We are introducing salt-loaded lipid nanoparticles as a novel and broadly applicable design principle for gene delivery," said Fanfei Meng, assistant professor and Presidential Frontier Faculty member in the Department of Pharmacological and Pharmaceutical Sciences. "What makes this exciting is that we can significantly improve delivery efficiency without needing to invent entirely new materials."

Lipid nanoparticles, or LNPs, are tiny fat-based delivery vehicles widely used to transport fragile genetic material into cells. They became widely recognized during the COVID-19 pandemic through mRNA vaccines developed by Moderna and Pfizer. Today, scientists are also using LNPs to develop new treatments for cancer, rare diseases and genetic disorders.

Despite their success, a major obstacle has remained. After entering cells, much of the therapeutic cargo becomes trapped inside endosomes—membrane-bound compartments that prevent the genetic material from reaching the interior of the cell, where it must go to function properly.

Researchers have long considered this "endosomal escape" problem one of the major bottlenecks limiting the effectiveness of mRNA vaccines and other gene-based medicines.

"Many gene therapies fail because of this," said Meng. "We found a surprisingly simple way to help more of that cargo escape."

The escape plan
Meng and his research team discovered that loading salt into lipid nanoparticles creates pressure inside the endosomes, helping release the therapeutic material into the cell, where it can become active. The team believes the strategy could eventually help improve a wide range of treatments, including mRNA vaccines, gene-editing technologies and other nucleic acid-based therapeutics.

The approach relies on basic physical principles rather than complex chemical redesigns, making it easier to adapt for future therapies and large-scale manufacturing.

Plants, animals and microorganisms constantly communicate through chemical signals. A research team has now shown that these signals merge in the environment to form complex "chemical landscapes" that have effects far beyond those of their individual components. Published in Nature Ecology & Evolution, the findings open new perspectives on understanding biodiversity, ecosystems and the impacts of global environmental change. The study was coordinated by Bielefeld University.

How does a butterfly find a suitable mate and then the right host plant for its offspring? How do pollinators locate the most attractive flowers? Many organisms rely on chemical signals to accomplish these tasks. These invisible messages permeate air, water and soil, helping organisms navigate complex environments.

Researchers say that these chemical signals do not act in isolation. Instead, compounds released by different organisms mix within their shared environment and form complex chemical patterns. Together, they create a dynamic "chemodiversity landscape"—the total chemical diversity present within a habitat.

"We already know that individual chemical compounds convey important information. Our work shows that when many compounds interact, new properties can emerge that cannot be predicted from the individual components alone," says Dr. Thomas Dussarrat of Bielefeld University, one of the study's lead authors.

When diversity creates new functions
In their review article, the researchers synthesize findings from across the field of chemical ecology. They argue that chemical mixtures operating at the landscape scale can generate novel ecological effects. Scientists refer to these as "emergent functions"—properties that arise only through the interaction of many components. Such effects may influence how plants interact with pollinators, herbivores and microorganisms, thereby shaping entire ecosystems. Such chemical patterns could also arise at the interfaces between terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems, thereby influencing interactions between different habitats.

Relevance for biodiversity and climate change
Another lead author of the study is Dr. Robin Heinen of the Technical University of Munich (TUM). "With the concept of the chemodiversity landscape, we expand our perspective from individual organisms to entire ecological communities. This enables us to better understand ecological processes in natural ecosystems," says Heinen.

The new concept not only advances an understanding of ecological relationships. It may also enable practical applications in the future, for example in biodiversity conservation, the development of sustainable agriculture, and the prediction of climate change impacts.

The researchers therefore see a strong need for further research to better understand the significance of these largely hidden processes. Environmental changes such as drought, climate change and species loss may also alter nature's chemical landscapes, with consequences for numerous interactions among organisms.

For decades, physicists have pursued a goal that sounds nearly impossible: to build a clock that keeps time using an atom's nucleus rather than the electrons orbiting it.

Now, researchers have demonstrated the first functioning nuclear clock  — an advancement that could eventually lead to more robust timekeeping devices and new ways to search for dark matter and physics beyond the Standard Model.

"Having worked in this field for more than 15 years, it is just beautiful, how a very 'wild' idea such as manipulating an atomic nucleus with a laser has turned into reality," Thorsten Schumm, a professor of quantum metrology at the Vienna University of Technology and a member of the research team, told Live Science via email.

How is a nuclear clock different from an atomic clock?
Today's most accurate clocks are optical atomic clocks, which measure the frequency of electrons jumping between different energy levels inside atoms. These clocks are so precise that they would lose less than a second over a 100 million years.

A nuclear clock works similarly, but it uses a transition within the nucleus itself, where the nucleus jumps between energy levels. Because the nucleus sits deep inside the atom, it's far less affected by external disturbances from things like electric or magnetic fields. According to Schumm, the nuclear transition can be 1,000 to 10,000 times less sensitive to environmental noise than atomic transitions are.

Stars shine because atoms fuse in their interiors, releasing energy. When a very massive star has exhausted its nuclear fuel, radiation pressure can no longer provide sufficient counterforce to gravity. The star then collapses under its own mass until only a single point remains: the singularity.

While the formation of a black hole appears plausible, black holes themselves continue to pose major challenges for science. How can 10 billion solar masses concentrate at a single tiny point? How can spacetime be curved infinitely at that point, the singularity? At this stage, the laws of physics break down, making it impossible to predict what happens. Moreover, black holes conceal all information from observation: Everything, including light, disappears irretrievably beyond the event horizon.

Filled with dark energy
It is therefore possible that black holes are in fact entirely different objects, such as ultra-compact stars, which cannot be seen because of their intense gravity and are therefore also called gravastars. In addition to ordinary matter present in their outer layers, they would be filled with dark energy, which exerts an outward pressure and stabilizes their mass, which wants instead to collapse. Gravastars are easier for physicists to accept than black holes because they do not possess a singularity or an event horizon and yet are almost as massive and compact as black holes. What had remained unclear, however, was how such gravastars could form in practice.

The theoretical physicists Daniel Jampolski and Professor Luciano Rezzolla have now presented, for the first time, a dynamic solution to the field equations of Albert Einstein's general relativity describing the collapse of a star that could lead to the formation of such a gravastar. The solution showed that the collapse may trigger the creation of a mini-universe inside the collapsing matter, not very different from the Big Bang from which our universe emerged. Like our own universe, its expansion is driven by dark energy. The findings are published in the journal Physical Review D.

In this way, the expansion of the new universe counteracts the gravitational forces and halts the collapse of the star before a black hole can form. In this process, an equilibrium is established between the expanding mini-universe and the collapsing matter, and this equilibrium is what leads to a stable gravastar. With this solution to general relativity, the Frankfurt physicists have provided the first answer to a question that scientists have been debating for 25 years: How do gravastars form during the collapse of ordinary matter?

An international team of researchers has identified at least two biologically distinct forms of autism by examining how different regions of the brain communicate with one another. The findings could help advance more precise and personalized approaches to autism care and support.

The researchers found two recurring patterns of brain connectivity. In one group, known as the “hyperconnectivity” subtype, communication between brain regions was stronger than usual. In the other, called the “hypoconnectivity” subtype, communication was reduced.

Brain Connectivity Patterns Reveal Autism Subtypes
According to the research team, this work represents the first systematic attempt to interpret human brain imaging patterns (via fMRI) by tracing them back to underlying biological mechanisms identified in mouse models. By connecting specific brain connectivity patterns to particular biological pathways, the study provides a potential framework for future precision medicine strategies.

To investigate these relationships, the researchers analyzed functional connectivity in 20 mouse models and examined brain scans from 940 children and young adults with autism, along with scans from more than 1,000 neurotypical individuals.

The analysis uncovered two reproducible autism subtypes. The hypoconnectivity subtype was associated with synaptic pathways, while the hyperconnectivity subtype was linked to immune-related biological systems. Together, these two groups represented approximately 25% of the people with autism included in the study.

From self-driving cars navigating busy streets to drones surveying disaster zones, lidar has become one of the most important technologies for helping machines perceive the world in three dimensions. By sending out rapid pulses of infrared light and measuring their reflections, lidar systems can build highly detailed maps of their surroundings in real time.

But today’s most powerful lidar sensors often come with major drawbacks: they are bulky, expensive, and rely on moving mechanical components that can wear out over time.

Researchers at MIT have now demonstrated a potential solution. They developed a new silicon-photonics chip that could enable compact, durable lidar systems with no moving parts. Silicon photonics uses semiconductor technology to manipulate light rather than electricity, opening the door to lidar sensors that are smaller, cheaper, and easier to manufacture at scale.

One of the biggest obstacles facing silicon-photonics lidar has been its limited field of view. Existing chip-based systems struggle to scan wide angles, while methods for expanding their coverage typically introduce noise and reduce measurement accuracy.

To overcome this challenge, the MIT team designed an array of integrated antennas that dramatically reduces unwanted interference, known as crosstalk, between neighboring antennas. Their approach allows a lidar chip to scan a much wider area while maintaining the low-noise, high-precision performance needed for demanding applications such as autonomous vehicles, aerial mapping, and construction-site monitoring.

Solid-State Lidar Could Transform Autonomous Navigation
The breakthrough could support the development of advanced lidar sensors for applications such as autonomous driving, aerial surveying, and construction site monitoring.

“The functionality we demonstrated in this work solves a fundamental problem for integrated optical-phased-array technology, enabling future lidar sensors that can achieve significantly higher performance than we could demonstrate previously,” says Jelena Notaros.

We often hear about glacier melting and predictions of what climate change could do. But very little is mentioned about the effects on ecosystems or the animals that call them home. To redress some of this imbalance, an international team of researchers set out to map this hidden biodiversity. Their findings are published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Rich glacial ecosystems
Glaciers are more than just massive chunks of moving ice. They are also teeming with a wide variety of terrestrial and freshwater animals. In their study, the team combed through prior research and identified at least 152 species known to live on glaciers. These include rotifers (microscopic animals), springtails (small hexapods closely related to insects) and tardigrades (microscopic, eight-legged invertebrates known as water bears).

To find out exactly what lives in these frozen worlds, the study authors reviewed 2,695 published papers, narrowing them down to 124 studies about terrestrial and freshwater glacier habitats.

They created a global map containing 482 verified records of glacier-dwelling animals, including the name of the glacier where each lived and its habitat type. The organisms were divided into two groups: glacier animals (use glaciers but can live elsewhere) and glacier specialists (found only on glaciers). The researchers then overlaid these maps with predictions of glacier melt from climate change models to estimate how much habitat would disappear by 2100.

What if some of the Universe’s oldest objects are actually older than the Big Bang itself?

A new study from the University of Portsmouth suggests that ancient black holes may have survived from a time before the Universe as we know it existed. These hypothetical relics, described as “cosmic fossils,” could have endured a dramatic cosmic transition and may still be scattered throughout the cosmos today. If they exist, they could help solve one of astronomy’s biggest mysteries: the identity of dark matter, the invisible substance that appears to outweigh ordinary matter and shape the growth of galaxies.

The research challenges the conventional view that everything began with a singular Big Bang. Instead, it explores a “bounce” scenario in which the Universe was once contracting before reversing into the expansion we observe today. In that picture, some structures may have survived the transition, carrying information from a cosmic era that predates the Universe’s earliest observable light.