After an earthquake, survivors can become trapped beneath piles of unstable debris where conventional rescue robots are too large to enter. Tiny flying machines modeled on insects could one day move through these narrow gaps while avoiding fixed barriers and falling rubble.

Until recently, however, aerial microrobots could only travel slowly along simple, smooth paths, falling far short of the rapid and agile flight seen in insects — until now.

AI unlocks insectlike aerial agility
MIT researchers have demonstrated aerial microrobots that can match the speed and agility of their biological counterparts. They developed a new AI-based controller that allowed the robotic insect to perform demanding flight maneuvers, including repeated body flips.

The two-part control system combines strong performance with computational efficiency. Compared with the researchers’ best earlier demonstrations, it increased the robot’s speed by about 450 percent and its acceleration by roughly 250 percent.

The microrobot completed 10 consecutive somersaults in 11 seconds while maintaining control even as wind disturbances pushed against it.

Flight performance approaches living insects
“We want to be able to use these robots in scenarios that more traditional quadcopter robots would have trouble flying into, but that insects could navigate. Now, with our bioinspired control framework, the flight performance of our robot is comparable to insects in terms of speed, acceleration, and the pitching angle. This is quite an exciting step toward that future goal,”

Life has scarcely found a boundary on Earth that it can’t push. While much of life’s diversity exists in lush, bountiful habitats like tropical rainforests and coral reefs, even the most brutal corners of the planet are also occupied. The organisms that thrive in extreme environments — blistering temperatures, crushing pressures, corrosive acid — are what we call “extremophiles.”

Most of these imperiled pioneers are rugged microbes, such as bacteria or archaea. Some have evolved to live in poisonous brine that would fatally pickle nearly everything else. Some can happily grow in subzero temperatures, using special enzymes that chug along where others grind to a halt. Others can shrug off the menaces of heavy metals, ionizing radiation, or the vacuum of space and still thrive.

These organisms aren’t just curiosities. Understanding their resilient biology has many possible applications. Discovering biochemicals that function under extreme temperatures, pH levels, or pressure could be a boon for a broad array of industrial processes. The organisms may also help clean up toxic pollutants by growing, thriving, and digesting where nothing else can. Extremophiles and their enzymes are even responsible for the modern era of genetics and molecular biology.

Extremophiles can also provide a window into life’s deep origins. The planet where life first evolved was a harsh place compared to today, and it likely had high concentrations of toxins and heavy exposure to radiation. By divining the limits of what life can endure today, researchers can get a better idea of what made life possible in the first place, and what has allowed life to adapt to almost any environment.

And if life can be found at our planet’s extremes, then there’s a chance that life may exist elsewhere in the universe. Extremophiles offer a hypothetical peek at alien biology, helping us better imagine what kinds of life forms might evolve on other relatively inhospitable worlds, from our neighbor Mars to far beyond.

Bacteria have spent decades evolving resistance to virtually every antibiotic we have thrown at them. To stay ahead, new drugs must hit targets that existing antibiotics have never touched. A research team at the Helmholtz Institute for Pharmaceutical Research Saarland (HIPS) has now developed a series of synthetic drug candidates that do exactly that: By blocking an essential molecular supply system, these molecules cut off the bacteria's supply of essential vitamins and starve them to death. The team published its findings in two studies in the Journal of Medicinal Chemistry.

Like all living cells, bacteria need vitamins to survive and cause infection. Unlike humans, many bacteria rely on specialized membrane transporters—called energy-coupling factor transporters, or ECF transporters—to actively and efficiently import vitamins from their surroundings into the cell. Block these transporters, and the bacteria run out of essential nutrients and die.

What makes ECF transporters particularly attractive as a drug target is that human cells do not have them. A drug designed to block these transporters would therefore attack the bacteria while leaving human cells largely unaffected, substantially reducing the risk of side effects.

More than 550 million years ago, a small, flattened animal moved across the seafloor and repeatedly favored one direction. Fossils of Spriggina floundersi suggest that when it bent its body, it tended to turn right.

That preference may represent the oldest-known example of lateralized behavior, in which an animal consistently favors one side of its body over the other. The evidence pushes the roots of this behavior back to the Ediacaran Period, long before the emergence of most familiar animal groups.

The study, published in Scientific Reports, was led by researchers at the American Museum of Natural History, Florida State University, Harvard University, and the University of California, Riverside. By examining how Spriggina fossils were curved, the researchers found a population-wide pattern rather than a random mix of leftward and rightward movement.

“When we talk about being right-or-left-handed, most people likely think about how they hold a pencil or kick a soccer ball. But our research shows that an animal without hands or feet, living over 500 million years ago, may have had its own version of handedness,” said lead author Scott Evans, assistant curator of invertebrate paleontology at the museum.

Space weather warnings could be received hours before Earth is hit rather than minutes with the help of a miniature UK-built instrument soon to be stationed in deep space. MAGIC (MAGnetometer from Imperial College) is part of the European Space Agency's Heliospheric Pioneer for Solar and Interplanetary Threats Defense (HENON) CubeSat mission, which is scheduled for launch in early 2027.

By measuring the sun's magnetic field much farther upstream than current real-time space weather monitors, the mission aims to extend advance warning of severe solar storms from just tens of minutes to several hours.

"I am really excited to be working on the HENON mission because it paves the way for a dramatic improvement in our ability to respond to severe space weather," said Eastwood.

Researchers at EMBL Hamburg and collaborators at the Leibniz Research Institute for Molecular Pharmacology (FMP) have mapped how the influenza A virus rewires infected human cells in unprecedented detail. To do this, the researchers used a customized experimental workflow to directly observe how proteins interact inside intact infected cells.

Every year, seasonal influenza kills up to 650,000 people globally and causes serious illness for 3–5 million individuals. The influenza A virus, in particular, has been responsible for several pandemics, including the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic. When this virus infects cells, it releases its genetic material, called RNA, which contains blueprints for a handful of proteins. These proteins then spread throughout the host cell and repurpose its molecular machinery to make more viruses.

Scientists want to understand this process in detail because it would help in designing better drug therapies and vaccines against the flu virus. That's why it's crucial to figure out how proteins of the flu virus interact with proteins of host cells and subvert them to meet the virus's needs. This is the first time scientists have mapped direct virus-host protein contacts at scale inside intact influenza-infected cells, with enough structural detail to model how the proteins fit together.

"Our work provides a new way to study flu-host interactions in their native context and with structural insight," said Jan Kosinski, group leader at EMBL Hamburg and Centre for Structural Systems Biology (CSSB). "The current results are a snapshot of a moment during infection, and they open the door to studying flu-host interactions across the entire infection cycle."

Advances in computing power, artificial intelligence (AI) and fancy tools that measure sounds promise to bring people closer to conversing with other animals. These advances could turn animal chatter into bits of information that can be decoded by humans.  

Of course, some animals can already talk to us — in our preferred languages, too. Jarvis tells the story of a parrot that left its California home. It returned years later speaking Spanish, he says.  

Such language skills are rare. Thinking up a message and making intricate vocal sounds to convey it take special mental skills and a great flexibility of body systems. These traits are present in fewer than 1 percent of vertebrate species, says Michael Long. He’s a neuroscientist at New York University in New York City.  

Not all animals may be good conversationalists. Take vervet monkeys. “Their cognitive abilities are huge,” Long says. But they flounder when it comes to producing complex sounds. “So they have one of those requirements, but they need to get the other one,” Long says.  

And with rare exceptions, none really speak our language. But that gap can be overcome. It may just take a slight shift in what we consider talking. “Animals are speaking, often — to use speaking in a very loose way — more vibrantly than we had ever given them credit for,” Long says. 

Understanding animals 
Like parrots, dolphins and whales may similarly make good conversation partners with people. In 2023, scientists used a decoded whale “hello” to enjoy a short conversation with an Alaskan humpback. This exchange consisted of a volley of whale whups, translated into English as “hello.” Still, both parties engaged in this interspecies chat. 

Another group of researchers has since discovered that whale language shares statistical properties with those spoken by humans. With these sorts of advances, perhaps we’ll soon be swapping krill recipes.

Some of Jarvis’ research includes mice that have been genetically changed to produce more complex sounds. He is part of a team that’s closely examining key genes that are active in good vocal learners. Mice with a human version of a protein called NOVA1, for instance, made more complex vocalizations. To be clear, this is not yet a talking mouse. But the research is moving fast.

Some animal messages are clear even without a fancy sci-fi gadget. “Animals are broadly expressive,” Long points out. Anguished yowls of a cat sitting by her unfilled food dish are no great mystery.  

A person may be unable to form a sentence after a stroke yet still solve a difficult puzzle, recognize a hidden pattern, or make a sound logical judgment. That contrast points to a basic question about the mind: does reasoning depend on language, or can the brain think logically without words?

Cognitive neuroscientists at MIT’s McGovern Institute for Brain Research found that severe language impairment does not prevent people from performing well on logical reasoning tasks. Brain scans also showed that the regions responsible for processing language were not recruited when healthy participants reasoned through logical problems. The research was published in PNAS and led by Evelina Fedorenko, an MIT associate professor of brain and cognitive sciences.

Logic may not depend on language
For thousands of years, philosophers, linguists, and cognitive scientists have argued over whether language is the machinery of thought or simply one of the tools used to express it. Logic and language appear closely connected because both can be broken into smaller parts and assembled into more complicated structures.

Hope Kean, a postdoc and former K. Lisa Yang Integrative Computational Neuroscience (ICoN) Center graduate fellow in Fedorenko’s lab, notes that this resemblance has made language seem like a plausible foundation for abstract reasoning. “Abstract thinking has properties that look a lot like language,” Kean says, pointing to structural similarities. “You can decompose a thought into subcomponents, like little atoms of logical propositions, and you can combine them in a hierarchical manner to make more complex structured rules, very akin to language.”

Kean and Fedorenko, who is also a McGovern Institute investigator, questioned whether that similarity meant the same brain system must support both abilities. People usually need language to receive a logic problem, describe their reasoning, or explain an answer, but the mental work between those steps might occur elsewhere.

“There are aspects of thinking that seem to go beyond some of the limitations of language,” Kean explains. Logical reasoning demands precision that language often lacks. And language is linear, progressing one word at a time, whereas evaluating available information to reach logical conclusions can require thinking in less linear ways.

Global hunger declined for a third consecutive year in 2025, demonstrating that progress is possible. However, the improvements remain fragile, unevenly distributed and insufficient to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals by 2030, according to The State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World 2026 (SOFI 2026) report, released Tuesday by five United Nations specialized agencies.

The report estimates that 7.8% of the global population faced hunger in 2025, down from 8.1% in 2024 and 8.6% in 2022, confirming a sustained, albeit slow, improvement. This means that around 645 million people were affected by hunger in 2025, representing a reduction of nearly 14 million compared with 2024 and 43 million compared with 2022.

Despite global progress, recovery remains uneven across regions. Asia, together with Latin America and the Caribbean, has recorded steady improvements in recent years. In contrast, Africa is now home to approximately 309 million hungry people, compared with 292 million in Asia. Although Africa's previously rising trend is beginning to stabilize, with the share of its population facing hunger decreasing from 20.3% in 2024 to 20.0% in 2025, the continent now has the highest number of hungry people in absolute terms amid a rapidly growing population.

Broader measures of food access tell a similar story. In 2025, an estimated 25.8% of the global population (around 2.1 billion people) experienced moderate or severe food insecurity, meaning they were at times forced to compromise on the quality or quantity of the food they ate. This is down from 27.1% in 2024 and 28.7% in 2020—equivalent to nearly 86 million fewer people than in 2024 and 135 million fewer than in 2020, though still above pre-pandemic levels.

Regional disparities remain stark. More than half of Africa's population (56.6%) faced moderate or severe food insecurity in 2025, compared with 20.3% in Asia, 22.9% in Latin America and the Caribbean, and 8.7% in Northern America and Europe. Food insecurity also continues to be more prevalent in rural areas than in peri-urban and urban areas, while women remain disproportionately affected, although the gender gap narrowed slightly in 2025.

Light moves quickly enough to transmit enormous amounts of information, but that speed creates a problem when a computer needs to hold, delay, or synchronize an optical signal. Researchers from Seoul National University and the University of Seoul have now designed a programmable photonic integrated circuit that can slow light whenever needed.

The rapid growth of generative AI and large-scale artificial intelligence models has sharply increased computing demands. Conventional electronic semiconductors face persistent constraints, including heavy power use and limited data transfer speeds, driving interest in optical computing systems that process information rapidly with less energy. Yet because light naturally travels at a fixed speed, creating the buffers and memory functions needed for optical computing has remained difficult.

The researchers addressed this limitation with a programmable photonic circuit that controls both the speed and shape of optical signals. Their approach provided greater control over “slow light” than previously proposed methods.

What dangers does smoke from wildfires pose? Who is most at risk? Here are some answers to health questions often asked, especially now with fires in France and Spain.

What is in the smoke?
Fires burning vegetation generate gases and particles in the air that are dangerous to our health, notes Anses, France's health safety agency.

Fine particles are especially harmful because they can penetrate deeply into the lungs.

Carbon monoxide is one of the major pollutants released by such fires, the agency says. It also listed other chemical substances, such as carbon dioxide, volatile organic compounds including acrolein, formaldehyde and benzene.

Other pollutants can be mixed in if vehicles or buildings are consumed by flames.

Who is most at risk?
Individuals closest to a fire can display symptoms of respiratory irritation. But effects will be felt more widely among the population if wind carries the smoke over the following hours or several days later, French pulmonologist Bruno Crestani told AFP.

Especially at risk are "vulnerable persons—those who are old, who have a respiratory disease, infants or asthmatics—because this (smoke) can unbalance a situation that was previously under control," said Crestani, who heads France's Respiratory Health Foundation.

The impact is "not only respiratory," he pointed out. "These particles can enter the circulatory system" and possibly trigger diabetes, a stroke or a heart attack, he said.

Because these particles are so fine and light, they can be carried long distances and affect people well away from the fire zone.

In September 2025, the World Meteorological Organization stressed that wildfires can send a toxic mix of pollutants thousands of kilometers. It noted that, in 2024, smoke from wildfires in Canada caused air pollution as far away as Europe.

A poor night’s sleep can affect far more than energy the next day. Research from Florida International University links sleep disorders with structural differences in brain regions that help control attention, motivation and decision-making.

Published in the journal Scientific Reports, the findings provide one of the broadest comparisons yet of how different sleep disorders are associated with the brain. The results could eventually support earlier diagnosis and treatments tailored to specific conditions.

Multiple disorders reveal shared brain changes
An estimated 50 to 70 million Americans live with sleep disorders. To search for common neurological patterns, researchers at FIU’s Center for Children and Families conducted a meta-analysis combining results from 57 brain imaging studies.

Rather than examining one condition at a time, the researchers compared two broad categories. Dyssomnias, such as insomnia and sleep apnea, interfere with falling asleep or remaining asleep. Parasomnias, including sleepwalking, nightmare disorder and sleep terrors, involve unusual events that disrupt the sleep cycle.

“As more people recognize how important sleep is, there’s growing urgency to understand what’s happening in the brain,” said Matthew Sutherland, a cognitive neuroscientist at FIU and senior author of the study. “By bringing together results from many studies, this research gives us a clearer picture of how sleep disorders affect brain structure and function and where we need to focus next.”

Attention centers show a common decline
Both categories were associated with decreases in the thalamus, a region that filters incoming information, supports concentration, and contributes to higher-level thinking. The researchers identified changes specifically in the pulvinar, an area within the thalamus that directs attention and helps manage cognitive control.

These differences were connected with wider brain networks that support concentration and task performance. That pattern may help explain why disrupted sleep is associated with slower reactions, poorer decision-making and a greater likelihood of errors and accidents.

One of the challenges of searching for technosignatures (i.e., signs that intelligent life somewhere in the universe has created technology) is understanding what to look for. Technology is a very broad area, and different types would show up as different features. One of the most commonly cited is a Dyson sphere, which attempts to encapsulate a star and capture its outgoing light to produce energy. But while we've looked for the mid-infrared waste heat these structures would produce for decades, we haven't found a definitive instance of one. According to a new paper, available as a preprint on arXiv by Turkish high school student Sahin Torlakcik, that might be because we are looking for the wrong type of energy altogether.

In his paper, Torlakcik introduces the concept of stellar J-harvesting—building a system that could deliberately extract a star's rotational angular momentum. To be clear, this solution wouldn't capture the same energy output as a full Dyson sphere (or, more accurately, swarm), but it does have two massive advantages—it requires much less physical material to build, and it would generate waste heat millions of times lower than the star's luminosity, essentially making it "invisible" to most infrared surveys.

So how would this work in practice? You can't simply set up a frictional braking system on a star. Instead, you would have to sap its energy by using one of a few different electromagnetic coupling techniques.

According to the paper, one technique would be to build a massive conducting structure embedded in the solar wind that extracts angular momentum using Alfvén-wave coupling. These low-frequency oscillations of magnetic fields can interact with the tether, transferring some of the star's angular momentum into the tether itself.

An alternative approach is to create what is essentially a giant orbital flywheel. Building a massive ring at approximately 1 AU (the distance from the Sun to Earth) could capture angular momentum from the star via Lorentz-force coupling. Using the Lorentz force, the fundamental force exerted on a charged particle by a magnetic field, this megastructure could scavenge angular momentum from the star by using its magnetic field to push on a massive electrically conductive ring.

Another interesting alternative is a synchrotron spin-down array. Synchrotron radiation is a form of radiation that occurs when a particle, such as an electron, travels a curved path near the speed of light. When these particles travel along a magnetic field line, they lose energy by emitting highly directional beams of radiation, known as synchrotron radiation.

By placing an array of extremely strong electrically conductive structures in the flow of the solar wind, this technosignature would accelerate those charged particles to near-relativistic speeds and thereby emit synchrotron radiation. Because Newton's third law holds that every action has an equal and opposite reaction, this radiation has a reactive torque that pushes the array. Since the array is coupled to the star's stellar wind, it opposes and slows the star's rotation. Crucially, this technique would also emit a specific technosignature of its own, in the form of radio waves or X-rays, depending on the speed and field strength of the system.

Some of these techniques are similar to those seen in another technosignature idea—starlifting—whereby an advanced civilization intentionally harvests material from a star, either to use that material to build megastructures or to artificially extend the star's life by lowering its mass. However, this particular use case has a very distinct pattern that we can easily search for—stars that are rotating more slowly than their peers.

Oxygen is declining across oceans, coastal waters, rivers, lakes and streams, threatening the organisms and chemical processes that depend on it. A review led by researchers at UC San Diego’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography warns that this widespread deoxygenation is moving Earth toward an “unsafe space,” with some effects potentially lasting beyond human timescales.

The researchers examined how aquatic deoxygenation, meaning the loss of dissolved oxygen from marine and freshwater environments, interacts with the nine processes included in the Planetary Boundaries framework. Introduced in 2009, the framework identifies major Earth systems and evaluates how human activity is pushing them beyond the conditions that support a stable and resilient planet.

Those nine boundaries cover climate change, ocean acidification, biodiversity loss, atmospheric aerosol loading, stratospheric ozone depletion, freshwater change, land use change, chemical pollution and biogeochemical flows (including the nitrogen cycle). The authors argue that dissolved oxygen should also be included.

Oxygen loss threatens planetary stability
“The health and stability of our planet depends on the health and stability of aquatic ecosystems, which need oxygen to function normally,” said lead author Erica Ferrer, a Scripps Oceanography alumna and current postdoctoral scholar at UC Santa Barbara’s National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis. “This study is designed to elevate the profile of aquatic deoxygenation as a global threat and show that it does not operate in isolation.”

A pet gecko known for developing tumors at an exceptionally high rate could offer scientists a valuable new way to study how cancer begins, evolves, and spreads, according to research led by experts at the University of Nottingham.

Published in BMC Biology, the findings may also help researchers understand why certain animals are especially vulnerable to cancer while others develop the disease only rarely.

A Gecko With an Extraordinary Cancer Risk
Cancer appears to be uncommon in some reptiles, including turtles and tortoises. However, the leopard gecko color variety sold in the pet trade as the “lemon frost” morph presents a striking exception. Aggressive tumors develop in about 80% of these geckos.

Researchers have now identified genomic changes associated with the disease. Several of those changes involve genes and biological processes that are also connected to cancer in humans.

Dr. Chiari said: “By studying why some animals are so susceptible to cancer while others are remarkably resistant, we hope to uncover the different ways species have evolved to deal with cancer. Specifically, this gecko could become an incredible model in cancer research because tumors appear naturally at a relatively early age. Together, these natural strategies could inspire new ways of preventing, detecting, and treating cancer in humans.”

Sugars are central to life. They help form the structural backbone of DNA and RNA and participate in essential metabolic reactions.

They are also thought to have been necessary for the formation of the earliest nucleic acids. Yet researchers studying life’s origins still face a major puzzle: laboratory experiments indicate that prebiotic conditions on early Earth would not have produced enough sugar.

Ribose and glucose have been found in meteorites and asteroid material, raising the possibility that some sugars formed in the ancient molecular cloud that gave rise to the Solar System. Until now, however, no sugar had been identified directly in interstellar space.

A four-carbon sugar appears in space
An international group led by CAB researcher Izaskun Jiménez-Serra has detected erythrulose, the first sugar identified in the interstellar medium. Erythrulose is the only possible ketose containing four carbon atoms. On Earth, it occurs naturally in raspberries and is also used in sunless tanning products.

Researchers found it toward G+0.693−0.027, a molecular cloud near the center of the Milky Way. The detection relied on highly sensitive broadband spectroscopic surveys conducted with the 40-m Yebes radio telescope and the 30-m telescope operated by the Institute for Radio Astronomy in the Millimeter Range (IRAM).

During sleep, the brain activates a cleanup network that helps remove accumulated waste. A review led by Victoria University (VU) researcher Dr. James Broatch examined whether exercise could strengthen this glymphatic system, which becomes increasingly important for maintaining brain health as people age.

Exercise is already closely associated with healthy aging, but exactly how it protects the brain remains uncertain. Understanding that mechanism is especially important because more than 10 million people worldwide are diagnosed with dementia each year, and no cure currently exists.

Published in Trends in Neurosciences, the peer-reviewed paper evaluated existing animal and human research on the glymphatic system. Although more evidence is needed (including research Dr Broatch is now conducting), the review found that exercise improves several biological processes involved in regulating brain waste clearance.

Exercise supports brain waste clearance
The reported effects include:
• Lower blood pressure and reduced vascular stiffness
• Improved activation of neurons in the brain
• Reduced inflammation in the brain
• Lower resting norepinephrine levels

Better sleep, including improved deep sleep and increased slow wave activity associated with waste clearance

Dr. Broatch said the connection between exercise and brain protection could help researchers identify scientifically supported physical activity strategies for limiting brain deterioration with age.

“If we don’t have opportunities for the brain to essentially clean out the junk from the day, we know that build-up is damaging, especially as we age. Sleep is more crucial than ever to play this role, but the irony is, good quality sleep can often be harder to get as we get older. This study asked, what if exercise could support that process?” Dr. Broatch said.

The face of a young woman crowned with a laurel wreath, buried in elaborate clothing and unusual cork sandals, has appeared nearly 1,700 years after her death.

She is one of 16 people from Aquincum, a Roman-era city in present-day Hungary, whose faces have been reconstructed for "Once We Were Like You," a new exhibition at the Aquincum Museum in Budapest. The display pairs skulls excavated in and around the ancient city with scientifically informed approximations of how their owners may have looked in life.

Six of the reconstructions are hyperrealistic silicone models, complete with artificial eyes, human hair, eyebrows, eyelashes and, in some cases, beards. The exhibition, which runs through Oct. 31, includes men, women and a child who lived during the region's period of Roman rule.

There's nothing more disorienting than falling asleep in transit only to wake up and find you've somehow drifted billions of miles beyond the orbit of Pluto.

Fortunately for NASA's New Horizon spacecraft, which scientists just awakened from a nearly yearlong hibernation at the solar system's edge, all systems are in "good health," according to a NASA statement. Now, with the probe recovered from its 321-day sleep and beginning to transmit science data again, New Horizons appears ready to continue its mission of studying the mysterious boundary where the sun's realm ends and interstellar space begins.

"Every status report through this hibernation period was 'green,' meaning all was well aboard New Horizons each and every week," Alice Bowman, the New Horizons mission operations manager at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Maryland, said in the statement.

New Horizons launched in 2006, breaking the record for fastest-ever space launch at roughly 36,400 mph (58,500 km/h). On its way to the edge of the solar system, the spacecraft picked up speed during a flyby of Jupiter in 2007 and then again while passing Pluto in 2015. Today, New Horizons is about 5.9 billion miles (9.5 billion kilometers) from Earth, or roughly 64 times the distance from Earth to the sun (64 astronomical units, or AU).

With the exception of the twin Voyager probes that launched in 1977, New Horizons is the farthest working spacecraft in the universe. (Two other probes, Pioneer 10 and 11, have traveled farther, but each stopped working several decades ago.)

Like the Voyager twins, New Horizons is on a trajectory toward the heliopause — the extreme outer edge of the sun's influence, where solar wind collides with the interstellar medium.

The Voyager probes proved that this dividing line is a measurable, physical boundary in space, marked by a hot, thick plasma barrier. However, New Horizons will eventually pass this boundary with far more sensitive instruments than the Voyagers held, enabling it to collect the most detailed data about this region ever.

Reliably generating controlled miniature rotations has long been a challenge: Chemical propulsion systems wear out, and methods that use electric or magnetic fields require complex setups. A team from KIT's Institute of Microstructure Technology (IMT) and the Suzhou Institute of Nano-tech and Nano-bionics (SINANO) at the Chinese Academy of Sciences has now demonstrated that flow at a water surface alone is sufficient to rotate a floating object in a fixed direction. Their research is published in the journal Science Advances.

"We were able to show that motion on a small scale can be controlled entirely without chemistry, electricity, or magnetic fields, relying solely on the forces acting at a water surface. This opens up a simple and versatile way to assemble ultrafine structures in a targeted manner," said Professor Jan G. Korvink from KIT's IMT.

Why speed determines direction
At the heart of the setup is a 3D-printed component with a spiral channel. It keeps a tiny object on the water surface without touching it. When the component moves slowly up and down, the object merely oscillates back and forth, leaving no net rotation. At a higher speed, however, small vortices form, tipping the balance. The object rotates bit by bit in the same direction—just like a ratchet—gradually accumulating the rotation.

Researchers at KIT were able to visualize this process through flow simulations. "In the simulation, we could accurately trace how the flow breaks the symmetry of motion at higher speeds. It is precisely this symmetry breaking that transforms a back-and-forth movement into a directed rotation," said Professor Yongbo Deng from IMT.

Fine fiber bundles for wires, sutures and artificial muscles
The effect can be used in a targeted way. The component behaves like a tiny motor powered solely by the water surface. Its torque is about 10⁻⁸ newton-meters, which is far below that of an electric motor but significantly greater than that of biological motors. Using this approach, the scientists gradually assembled silk fibers with diameters between 10 and 20 micrometers into multilayered twisted bundles. Such structures are also typical of Litz wires and surgical suture materials.

Potential applications are low-loss transmission cables in data centers, multifunctional suture materials and artificial muscles. Conventional braiding machines fail at this scale because the fibers break under tension. The novel approach, by contrast, requires no mechanical contact and thus opens an innovative way to manufacture helical structures in a controlled manner.

LINK, the robotic spacecraft from Katalyst Space designed to boost our Swift mission’s orbit, experienced issues with attitude control over the weekend, causing the spacecraft to spin and resulting in sporadic communications. The team is working to stop LINK’s spin over the next few days and then will update LINK’s guidance, navigation, and control to accommodate the spacecraft’s new configuration.

Learn more: go.nasa.gov/4xcuamQ