Made it.

At 6:42pm ET on Jan. 17, the stacked Artemis II rocket and spacecraft reached Launch Pad 39B after a nearly 12-hour journey from the Vehicle Assembly Building at NASAKennedy in Florida.

A quantum state of matter has appeared in a material where physicists thought it would be impossible, forcing a rethink on the conditions that govern the behaviors of electrons in certain materials.

The discovery, made by an international team of researchers, could inform advances in quantum computing, improve electronic efficiencies, and enhanced sensing and imaging.

The state, described as a topological semimetal phase, was theoretically predicted to appear at low temperatures in a material composed of cerium, ruthenium, and tin (CeRu4Sn6), before experiments verified its existence.

At extremely low temperatures, CeRu4Sn6 reaches quantum criticality, a point where a material teeters between changes in its phase, where conditions are so cold that quantum fluctuations dominate, effectively turning the material into a puddle of waves rather than a fog of particles.

The plot twist in this study is that quantum criticality can give rise to states thought to be defined by interactions between particles, such as the behavior of electrons as discrete charge carriers.

"This is a fundamental step forward," says physicist Qimiao Si, from Rice University in the US.

"Our work shows that powerful quantum effects can combine to create something entirely new, which may help shape the future of quantum science."

In physics, topology refers to the geometry of material structures. Particular topological states can protect properties of particles, unlike the way neighboring particles might jostle and disrupt each other's behavior.

It’s true that there are a lot of different theoretical proposals that serve as alternatives or extensions to mainstream physics: string theory, supersymmetry, Gauss-Bonnet gravity, GUTs, and much more. 

Many point to the success of our standard picture of reality, based on Einstein’s general relativity and the quantum field theory of the Standard Model, and (prematurely) dismiss all such alternative explorations. 

However, a tremendous amount of progress has been made simply by constraining and ruling out many such alternatives and extensions through data-driven experiments and observations. That progress is underappreciated, representing a huge achievement whenever it occurs.

Ever since their discovery more than 165 years ago, massive fossilized structures left by an organism known as Prototaxites have proven impossible to categorize.

Researchers in the UK have suggested in a recently published study that there's a very good reason these oddities don't fit neatly on the tree of life – they belong to a branch all of their own, with no modern equivalent.

Some 400 million years ago, the swamps of the late Silurian period would have sprouted a mix of horsetails, ferns, and other prototype plants that look positively alien today.

Among them stretched 8-meter (26-foot) tall towers that defy easy identification. Wide and branchless, these organisms may have been a form of algae or ancient conifer, researchers suspect, based on what little evidence remains.

Loud and clear: Curiosity and Perseverance are both back in touch with Earth following solar conjunction. They’re beginning to downlink data collected while the Sun was blocking the signal path between us and the Red Planet.

Keep up with the latest at science.nasa.gov/mars/

The phrase “House of Cards” is often associated today with a Netflix political drama, but its original meaning refers to a structure that is inherently unstable. That idea is exactly how Sarah Thiele, who began this work as a PhD student at the University of British Columbia and is now at Princeton, and her co-authors describe today’s satellite mega constellation system in a new study released as a preprint on arXiv.

Their choice of words is supported by the numbers. Across all Low-Earth Orbit mega constellations, calculations show that a “close approach”, defined as two satellites passing within less than 1 kilometer of each other, happens about once every 22 seconds. For Starlink alone, such encounters occur roughly every 11 minutes. In addition, each of Starlink’s thousands of satellites must carry out an average of 41 maneuvers each year to avoid collisions with other objects in orbit.

At first glance, this may look like a carefully managed system functioning as intended. But engineers know that “edge cases”, events that fall outside normal operating conditions, are often what trigger major failures. According to the paper, solar storms represent one such edge case for satellite mega constellations. Under typical conditions, solar storms disrupt satellite operations in two main ways.

Days away from irreversible collisions
According to their calculations, as of June 2025, if satellite operators were to lose their ability to send commands for avoidance maneuvers, there would be a catastrophic collision in around 2.8 days. Compare that to the 121 days that they calculated would have been the case in 2018, before the megaconstellation era, and you can see why they are concerned. Perhaps even more disturbingly, if operators lose control for even just 24 hours, there’s a 30% chance of a catastrophic collision that could act as the seed case for the decades-long process of Kessler syndrome.

Tomorrow marks 40 years since Voyager 2 made its closest approach to Uranus. It remains humanity's first and only spacecraft to have flown by the 7th planet from our Sun.

Voyager 2 discovered 10 moons, and examined Uranus's ring system, discovering two new rings.