Space changes you. It strengthens some muscles, weakens others, shifts fluids within your body, and realigns your sense of balance. NASA's Human Research Program works to understand—and sometimes even counter—those changes so astronauts can thrive on future deep space missions.

Astronauts aboard the International Space Station work out roughly two hours a day to protect bone density, muscle strength and the cardiovascular system, but the longer they are in microgravity, the harder it can be for the brain and body to readapt to gravity's pull. After months in orbit, returning astronauts often describe Earth as heavy, loud, and strangely still. Some reacclimate within days, while other astronauts take longer to fully recover.

Strange nodules of unusual minerals found on speckled rocks on Mars have offered more tantalizing clues that ancient life may have once thrived on the now-dead planet, NASA says.

NASA's Perseverance rover found one such arrow-shaped rock, nicknamed Cheyava Falls, in 2024 along the northern bank of Neretva Vallis, the dried-up remnants of an ancient river that once rushed into Mars' Jezero crater.

An initial analysis of the rock, which appeared in a lake bed formation known as Bright Angel, revealed it was crammed with organic compounds, had evidence that water once flowed through it, and contained flecks of leopard-like spots from chemical reactions that ancient microbes could have used for energy.

These features may result from non-biological processes occurring over millions of years. But now, in a new study published Sept. 10 in the journal Nature, NASA scientists have announced intriguing details about additional rock samples found at two nearby sites — and they say these clues bolster the case for past life on Mars.

"After a year of review, they have come back and they said, listen, we can't find another explanation," Acting NASA Administrator Sean Duffy, said during a news briefing following the announcement. "So this very well could be the clearest sign of life that we've ever found on Mars, which is incredibly exciting."

How well do we understand the Universe if we struggle to understand its most energetic events? This question can trigger a wide-ranging philosophical or even epistemological discussion. It's the kind of question that can bring the Universe's most mysterious incidents into the foreground of busy lives.

While the Big Bang is, without a doubt, the most energy-dense event in the Universe's history, there are other energetic events that lack clear causes. Scientists have a pretty clear theoretical framework for the Big Bang, but when it comes to Gamma-Ray Bursts (GRB), our understanding of them is lacking. Unlike the Big Bang, which happened more than 13 billion years ago, GRBs are happening right now, yet scientists don't have a clear understanding of their underlying physics.

Usually in science, discovering more examples of a class of objects leads to greater understanding. However, that may not be the case when it comes to the most recently detected GRB. It's unlike any previous GRB that scientists have encountered.

The new GRB is called GRB 250702B and it was discovered on July 2nd, when the Fermi Gamma-Ray Space Telescope detected it and sent out an alert. But this detection was different. Rather than a single burst, there were three separate bursts over a nearly day-long period.

GRBs are extremely energetic explosions, the most energetic in the Universe, and they usually last only milliseconds, or sometimes several minutes. They're likely caused by massive stellar explosions or by supermassive black holes tearing huge stars apart. But this GRB's multiple bursts, that span almost an entire day, set it apart from other GRBs. In a press release, Martin-Carrillo said that the GRB is "unlike any other seen in 50-years of GRB observations." Lead author Levan also pointed out how unusual this GRB is. "This is 100-1000 times longer than most GRBs,” he said.

Makemake, also known as 2005 FY9 and (136472), was discovered in 2005 by a team of astronomers from the California Institute of Technology led by Mike Brown.
This dwarf planet is located in a region beyond Neptune that is populated with small Solar System bodies.

It has a radius of approximately 715 km (444 miles) — just slightly smaller and dimmer than Pluto.

It takes about 305 Earth years for this dwarf planet to make one trip around the Sun.

Previously observed stellar occultations suggested that Makemake lacked a substantial global atmosphere, though a thin one could not be ruled out.

Meanwhile, infrared data of the dwarf planet hinted at puzzling thermal anomalies and unusual characteristics of its methane ice, which raised the possibility of localized hot spots across its surface and potential outgassing.

“Makemake is one of the largest and brightest icy worlds beyond Neptune, and its surface is dominated by frozen methane,” said Dr. Silvia Protopapa, an astronomer at the Southwest Research Institute.

“Webb revealed that methane is also present in the gas phase above the surface, a finding that makes Makemake even more fascinating.”
“It shows that Makemake is not an inactive remnant of the outer Solar System, but a dynamic body where methane ice is still evolving.”

The observed methane spectral emission is interpreted as solar-excited fluorescence, which is the re-emission of sunlight absorbed by methane molecules.
According to the team, this could indicate either a tenuous atmosphere in equilibrium with surface ices — similar to Pluto — or more transient activity, such as cometary-like sublimation or cryovolcanic plumes.

Repetition has a strange relationship with the mind. Take the experience of déjà vu, when we wrongly believe we have experienced a novel situation in the past – leaving us with an spooky sense of pastness.

But we have discovered that déjà vu is actually a window into the workings of our memory system.

Our research found that the phenomenon arises when the part of the brain which detects familiarity de-synchronises with reality. Déjà vu is the signal which alerts you to this weirdness: it is a type of "fact checking" for the memory system.

But repetition can do something even more uncanny and unusual.

The opposite of déjà vu is "jamais vu", when something you know to be familiar feels unreal or novel in some way. In our recent research, which has won an Ig Nobel award for literature, we investigated the mechanism behind the phenomenon.

Jamais vu may involve looking at a familiar face and finding it suddenly unusual or unknown. Musicians have it momentarily – losing their way in a very familiar passage of music. You may have had it going to a familiar place and becoming disorientated or seeing it with "new eyes".

It's an experience which is even rarer than déjà vu and perhaps even more unusual and unsettling. When you ask people to describe it in questionnaires about experiences in daily life they give accounts like: "While writing in my exams, I write a word correctly like 'appetite' but I keep looking at the word over and over again because I have second thoughts that it might be wrong."

Your name goes here!

We’re collecting names to fly around the Moon. 3.4 million of you joined us for Artemis I. How many of you would like to come along with the Artemis II mission? https://nasa.gov/send-your-name-with-artemis/

Submitted names will be included on an SD card that will fly inside Orion when the Artemis II mission launches in 2026.

Neuroscientists from around the world have worked in parallel to map, for the first time, the entire brain activity of mice while they were making decisions. This achievement involved using electrodes inserted inside the brain to simultaneously record the activity of more than half a million neurons distributed across 95 percent of the rodents’ brain volume.

Thanks to the image obtained, the researchers were able to confirm an already theorized architecture of thought: that there is no single region exclusively in charge of decisionmaking and instead it is a coordinated process among multiple brain areas.

Ice formation on propeller blades or aircraft wings can cause major problems. It can limit flight time, increase costs and pose safety and environmental risks.
That is why researchers at SINTEF have developed a new coating material that makes ice removal both more efficient and cheaper—without harming the environment.

Today, ice is usually removed using electrical heating, either with permanent heating systems in the rotor blades, or by temporarily applying chemical de-icing agents. The challenge is that these methods do not provide sufficient protection against the formation of new ice. As a result, they have to be repeated several times, leading to high maintenance costs.

The industry is therefore eyeing the new anti-icing method that SINTEF is developing, according to researcher Christian Karl, who is part of the research team on the project called IceMan. "This is a more effective and long-lasting method for removing ice on technical surfaces. We're seeing that more and more industrial sectors, like wind energy, aerospace, automotive and marine technology, have turned their attention to our solution."

The coating is based on polyurethane, a type of polymer material, and can be sprayed or brushed directly onto the surfaces, giving them ice-repellent properties and slowing down ice formation. The study is published in the Journal of Nanoparticle Research.

"In practice, this will mean that supercooled water droplets that land on the rotor blades won't be able to freeze onto the surface. The water will bead up and roll off the surface before it has time to freeze. If, contrary to expectations, it remains there, it will adhere less well and be easier to remove," says the SINTEF researcher.

Research colleague Monika Pilz led the project. She says that the additives are environmentally friendly and are made in such a way that they can easily be scaled up and used in industry settings.

Scientists have used a gravitational wave detector to "hear" two black holes getting bigger as they merged into a single, gigantic entity.

The detection, made by the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO) on Jan. 14, provides the best evidence yet for a theory put forth by famed physicist Stephen Hawking more than half a century ago, but which was never proven in his lifetime.

Now with a decade of experience under their belts, LIGO collaborators have made many improvements to the detectors — such that black hole mergers are now spotted about once every three days instead of once a month, according to a statement from Caltech, which jointly operates LIGO along with MIT.

During the event detected Jan. 14, LIGO witnessed two black holes merging, with the resulting black hole measuring significantly bigger than the two objects entering into the collision.

Before the merger, the combined surface area of the two black holes was about 93,700 square miles (243,000 square kilometers) — roughly the size of Oregon. After the merger, by contrast, the newly formed and single black hole had a surface area of roughly 154,500 square miles (400,000 square km) — about the size of California. In other words, the newly merged black hole was larger than the sum of its parts.

The Atlas blue butterfly, also known as Polyommatus atlantica, has been genetically confirmed as having the highest number of chromosomes out of all multicellular animals in the world.

This insect boasts 229 pairs of chromosomes, while many of its close relatives have only 23 or 24 pairs. Researchers at the Wellcome Sanger Institute and the Institute of Evolutionary Biology (IBE: CSIC-UPF), Barcelona, have revealed that these chromosomes have been broken up over time, instead of duplicated.

The first genomic study of this butterfly, published in Current Biology, allows experts to begin to explore the evolutionary reasons behind this extreme number of chromosomes.

Chromosome changes are also seen in human cancer cells, and therefore, understanding this process in different species could help inform cancer research.

This is the first time that the Atlas blue butterfly has been sequenced. From this, experts have produced a gold-standard reference genome for this species, allowing researchers to compare this extreme genome to other butterflies and moths to understand more about how species form and change over time.

Evolution and the development of new species happen over millions of years, making it hard to study practically. Instead, experts can use the DNA of a species and compare this to others in the same family to understand which genes and traits have been kept and which have been lost and then make informed guesses as to why.

Cells bumping against one another use electricity to identify which of their neighbors has the least energy to expel them. The King's College London study in partnership with the Francis Crick Institute provides insight into diseases including cancer and stroke, where cellular energy levels can be disrupted, preventing the maintenance of healthy cell numbers.

Epithelial cells, which line all organs in the body, turnover rapidly to maintain a tightly packed protective layer. They undergo a process called extrusion to eliminate excess or damaged cells, essential for balancing cell division and cell death.
Extrusion is a fundamental process, common in living organisms from sea sponge to humans, that drives most epithelial cell death. When it goes wrong and the balance of healthy cells is disrupted, it can lead to disease.

Earlier work by the group led by Professor Jody Rosenblatt at King's College London discovered that extrusion is mechanical—when too many epithelial cells accumulate, crowding triggers some to be physically squeezed out, causing them to die.

The scientists were unsure if the crowded cells selected to extrude were randomly selected, or some were specifically targeted. This latest discovery, published in Nature, reveals that crowding selectively targets the weakest, energy-poor cells for death.

Epithelial cells spend a remarkable amount of energy establishing and maintaining an electrically charged surface or membrane. While this electrical potential is well known in nerve cells, its role in other cell types has been largely overlooked.

Crispr gene-editing technology has demonstrated its revolutionary potential in recent years: It has been used to treat rare diseases, to adapt crops to withstand the extremes of climate change, or even to change the color of a spider’s web. But the greatest hope is that this technology will help find a cure for a global disease, such as diabetes. A new study points in that direction.

For the first time, researchers succeeded in implanting Crispr-edited pancreatic cells in a man with type 1 diabetes, an autoimmune disease where the immune system attacks insulin-producing cells in the pancreas. Without insulin, the body is then unable to regulate blood sugar. If steps aren’t taken to manage glucose levels by other means (typically, by injecting insulin), this can lead to damage to the nerves and organs—particularly the heart, kidneys, and eyes. Roughly 9.5 million people worldwide have type 1 diabetes.

In this experiment, edited cells produced insulin for months after being implanted, without the need for the recipient to take any immunosuppressive drugs to stop their body attacking the cells. The Crispr technology allowed the researchers to endow the genetically modified cells with camouflage to evade detection.

Researchers have developed a tiny device that extinguishes one of the biggest heat sources in quantum computers, cutting their running costs and potentially bringing these machines closer to commercial reality.

Most quantum computers operate at temperatures close to absolute zero (459.67 degrees Fahrenheit, or minus 273.15 degrees Celsius) using specialized cooling equipment to maintain the delicate quantum states of qubits — the core processing units of quantum systems.

Cryogenic amplifiers are also used in quantum computers to boost the extremely weak signals qubits emit at these ultra-low temperatures. This makes it possible to accurately measure their quantum states — which is needed in order to understand what the quantum computer is actually doing.

The challenge with existing amplifiers used to measure qubit behaviour — or any electronics used in quantum computers, for that matter — is that they generate heat. This means the quantum systems require additional cooling systems that add bulk and cost, both of which present major barriers to making quantum systems practical and scalable.

Now, Qubic, a Canadian startup, has devised a cryogenic traveling-wave parametric amplifier (TWPA) made from unspecified "quantum materials" that enables an amplifier to operate with virtually zero heat loss, representatives from the company said in a statement.

They added that this device reduced thermal output by a factor of 10,000 — down to practically zero.

Developed over more than a decade at the University of the Sunshine Coast (UniSC) as part of a global collaborative effort, the vaccine is designed to protect the tree huggers from chlamydia, a bacterial infection that’s been devastating their populations for decades. Chlamydia spreads rapidly among wild populations, causing painful urinary tract infections, infertility, blindness, and even death. But now, a breakthrough single-dose vaccine could turn the tide for the species.

A new book brings NASA's earliest, and most harrowing spaceflights back to life.

60 years after Gemini, newly processed images reveal incredible details
https://arstechnica.com/space/2025/09/60-years-after-gemini-newly-processed-images-reveal-incredible-details/

#PPOD: Saturn in Infrared 🪐

Saturn viewed at infrared wavelengths, as imaged by NASA's Cassini spacecraft in 2014. The hexagon at the top represents a giant jet stream, approximately 29,000 to 30,000 kilometers wide, with sides approximately 14,500 kilometers long – longer than Earth's diameter. This massive storm spans 75 to 300 kilometers high and is a long-lived atmospheric feature centered around Saturn's north pole.

Credit: NASA NASAJPL Caltech spacescienceins #CICLOPS; Processing: Maksim Kakitsev