This photo of Earth, dubbed the Blue Marble, was taken by the Apollo 17 crew #OTD in 1972 as they traveled to the Moon.

It soon became one of the most widely-distributed photographs in history.

Your sunscreen sits in the bathroom cabinet, slowly changing. The mayonnaise in your fridge gradually separates. That prenoscription cream loses effectiveness over time. All these materials share something fundamental, they're soft matter, substances like gels, foams, and colloids whose internal structure reorganises slowly and mysteriously over months or years.

Understanding exactly what happens inside these materials as they age has always been complicated by gravity. Even sitting still on a shelf, Earth's gravitational pull constantly influences how particles within these substances settle, cluster, and rearrange themselves. So a team of researchers from Politecnico di Milano and the Université de Montpellier decided to study soft matter somewhere gravity that gravity will have no effect.

The result is COLIS, a new experimental facility now operating aboard the International Space Station. The laboratory represents the culmination of more than 25 years of collaboration between Luca Cipelletti, a physicist at the Laboratoire Charles Coulomb, and Roberto Piazza, who runs the Soft Matter laboratory at Politecnico di Milano.

COLIS uses sophisticated optical techniques to look inside materials without disturbing them. Dynamic light scattering analyses how laser beams pass through samples, revealing tiny variations called speckle patterns that show how gels and other soft materials restructure over time. The facility can also carefully heat samples to trigger aging processes in precise, reproducible ways, then watch what happens at the molecular level.

Early results have already surprised the research team. Gravity affects soft matter structure more dramatically than expected, influencing material properties even over long timescales.

Gamma-ray bursts, the most powerful class of cosmic explosions, usually last under a minute. But astronomers spotted one in July that continued for days. Learn how NASA telescopes and other facilities are helping us narrow down the possible causes: go.nasa.gov/49Yr5hL

A review by researchers from the University of Birmingham and the University of Oxford in the UK has found that controlled doses of laughing gas (or nitrous oxide) really can provide quick-acting relief from depression.

The treatment seems to be viable over longer periods of time, with repeated doses, and can be effective in individuals with both major depressive disorder (MDD) and treatment-resistant depression (TRD) – some of the people who are hardest to treat.

"This population has often lost hope of recovery, making the results of this study particularly exciting," says consultant psychiatrist Steven Marwaha, from the University of Birmingham.

"These findings highlight the urgent need for new treatments that can complement existing care pathways, and further evidence is needed to understand how this approach can best support people living with severe depression."

The oldest evidence of fire-making has been unearthed in the UK! 🔥

Dating back 400,000 years, it shows early Neanderthals were controlling fire in northern Europe as our own species was only just emerging.

Find out how this shaped human evolution 🏻
nhm.ac.uk/discover/news/…

Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) researchers now think they have found the answer to a puzzle that has lingered for nearly four decades involving Uranus and its unusual radiation environment.

When Voyager 2 completed its first and only visit to the planet in 1986, the spacecraft detected an unexpectedly intense electron radiation belt, far stronger than scientists had predicted. Comparisons with other worlds suggested that Uranus should not have produced such extreme values. The discovery left scientists questioning how a planet so different from the rest of the solar system could maintain such a powerful band of trapped electrons.

New investigations are offering a potential explanation. SwRI scientists propose that the conditions recorded by Voyager 2 may resemble events seen near Earth during major solar wind disturbances. Researchers now suspect that a solar wind feature known as a co-rotating interaction region was moving through the Uranian system at the time of the flyby. If so, this passing structure could account for the unusually high energy levels Voyager 2 measured.

A joint effort between two of the world’s largest neutrino experiments has brought scientists closer to understanding how the universe survived its violent beginnings.

The findings could reveal why matter exists at all — and why everything didn’t vanish long ago.

Scientists Unite to Explore Why the Universe Exists
A Michigan State University researcher has helped lead a groundbreaking collaboration that could bring scientists closer to understanding how the universe came to be.

For the first time, two of the world’s largest neutrino experiments — T2K in Japan and NOvA in the United States — combined their data to gain new insight into neutrinos, the ghostlike particles that constantly stream through space but almost never interact with other matter.

Their joint analysis, published in Nature, offers some of the most precise measurements ever made of how neutrinos shift between types as they travel. This achievement lays important groundwork for future experiments that could reshape our understanding of how the universe evolved — or reveal that current theories are incomplete.