Tour the International Space Station with NASA astronauts Nicole Mann and Kjell Lindgren as they celebrate 25 years of continuous human presence in orbit. Explore what it’s like to live in microgravity, float through the station, and conduct science that benefits people on Earth and enables NASA’s missions to the Moon and Mars.
Celebrate with us at nasa.gov/international-sp....

Researchers have pinpointed the tiny chemical attractions that help spider silk pull off its famous balancing act: extreme strength without losing flexibility. By explaining what holds the material together at the molecular scale, the work could make it easier to design bio-inspired fibers for aircraft parts, protective clothing, and medical uses. The same kinds of self-organizing behaviors may also offer clues about neurological diseases, including Alzheimer’s.

Instead of treating spider silk as a mystery material to copy outright, the team focused on the underlying “rules” that nature uses, principles that could be applied to build a new generation of high-performance, more sustainable fibers.

Revealing the Molecular Design of Spider Silk
Spider silk is made from proteins, long chains built from amino acids. The study reports that, inside these proteins, certain amino acids interact in a way that behaves like molecular “stickers.” Those repeating, reversible connections help the proteins gather, organize, and ultimately lock into a structure that can handle both stretching and heavy loads.

Hubble has captured the light show around a dying star

This is the Egg Nebula 🥚 the first, youngest, and closest pre-planetary nebula ever discovered. This pre-planetary stage lasts only a few thousand years, making the Egg Nebula a valuable target for astronomers studying stellar evolution. Twin beams from the star light up polar lobes that pierce a series of concentric arcs. Their shapes and motions suggest the presence of companion stars hidden within the thick dust.

The patterns captured by Hubble are too orderly to result from a violent explosion like a supernova. Instead, they likely come from a mysterious sequence of sputtering events in the core of the dying star!

Read more: esahubble.org/news/heic2604/

Researchers at Northwestern University have created the most sophisticated lab grown model of human spinal cord injury so far.

In the new study, scientists worked with human spinal cord organoids grown from stem cells. These miniature, simplified versions of the spinal cord allowed the team to recreate different forms of spinal cord trauma and evaluate a promising regenerative treatment.

For the first time, the organoids closely reproduced the major features of spinal cord injury seen in people. That included widespread cell death, inflammation, and glial scarring. Glial scars are thick clusters of scar tissue that form after injury and create both physical and chemical barriers that block nerve repair.

When the damaged organoids were treated with “dancing molecules” — a therapy that previously reversed paralysis and repaired tissue in animal studies — the results were striking. The injured tissue produced significant neurite outgrowth, meaning the long extensions of neurons began growing again. Scar like tissue was greatly reduced. The findings strengthen hopes that the treatment, which recently received Orphan Drug Designation from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), could improve recovery for people living with spinal cord injuries.

A world can look promising from afar and still be missing the chemical ingredients that biology depends on. Two of the most critical are phosphorus and nitrogen, and they act like gatekeepers for life. Phosphorus is built into DNA and RNA, the molecules that store and pass along genetic information, and it also helps cells manage energy. Nitrogen is a core ingredient in proteins, which living things rely on to build cells and keep them working.

What makes these elements especially interesting is that a planet can lose access to them long before its surface becomes stable. A study led by Craig Walton, a postdoctoral researcher at the Centre for Origin and Prevalence of Life at ETH Zurich, together with ETH professor Maria Schönbächler, found that phosphorus and nitrogen must be available at the moment a planet forms its core.

“During the formation of a planet’s core, there needs to be exactly the right amount of oxygen present so that phosphorus and nitrogen can remain on the surface of the planet,” explains Walton, lead author of the study.

Earth appears to have hit that chemical balance around 4.6 billion years ago, which may help explain why it ended up with the raw materials life needs. The result could reshape how scientists judge the chances for life elsewhere in the universe.

Core formation as a form of cosmic roulette
Young rocky planets begin as roiling oceans of molten rock. As gravity pulls materials into layers, dense metals such as iron sink inward to form the core, while lighter material remains above to become the mantle and, later, the crust. That physical separation is only half the story. At the same time, chemistry is deciding which elements prefer metal and which prefer rock, and oxygen is one of the biggest drivers of that choice.

Researchers at Kyoto University are advancing a new idea about how space weather might intersect with earthquake physics. Their model asks whether changes in the ionosphere could, in rare situations, apply additional electrical forces to already fragile parts of the Earth’s crust and help nudge a large quake toward initiation.

The work is not an earthquake forecasting method. Instead, it lays out a physical pathway that starts with solar flares and other intense solar activity, which can rapidly reshape the distribution of charged particles high above Earth. Those ionospheric charge shifts are measurable because they alter how satellite navigation signals travel through the upper atmosphere, a key reason scientists track total electron content in the first place.

Inside the crust, the model focuses on fractured rock zones that can trap water at extreme temperatures and pressures, potentially reaching a supercritical state. Under these conditions, the researchers treat the damaged region as electrically active, acting like a capacitor that is linked through capacitive coupling to both the ground surface and the lower ionosphere. In effect, the crust and the ionosphere become parts of one large electrostatic system rather than isolated layers.

Electrostatic Forces From Solar Activity
During strong solar events, electron density in the ionosphere can rise enough to form a more negative layer at lower altitudes. The model proposes that this atmospheric charge does not stay confined overhead. Because the system is capacitively connected, the changing ionospheric charge can translate into intensified electric fields within tiny voids in fractured crustal rock, on the scale of nanometers.

Why does that matter for earthquakes? Pressure inside small cavities can influence how cracks grow and merge, especially when a fault zone is already close to failure. In the Kyoto team’s calculations, the resulting electrostatic pressure can reach levels comparable to other subtle forces known to affect fault stability, including tidal and gravitational stresses.

“This is a crucial advance,” says Ramón Aguado, a CSIC researcher at the Madrid Institute of Materials Science (ICMM) and co author of the study. He explains that the team has shown it is possible to retrieve information stored in Majorana qubits using a technique known as quantum capacitance. According to Aguado, this method works as “a global probe sensitive to the overall state of the system,” allowing researchers to detect properties that were previously out of reach.

Why Topological Qubits Are So Hard to Measure
Aguado compares topological qubits to “safe boxes for quantum information.” Instead of keeping data in a single, fixed location, these qubits spread information across two linked quantum states called Majorana zero modes. Because the information is distributed in this non local way, it is naturally shielded from small, local disturbances that typically disrupt fragile quantum systems.

This built in protection is what makes topological qubits so appealing for quantum computing. “They are inherently robust against local noise that produces decoherence, since to corrupt the information, a failure would have to affect the system globally,” Aguado explains. But that same strength has created a major experimental challenge. If the information does not sit in one specific place, how can scientists actually detect or measure it? As Aguado puts it, “this same virtue had become their experimental Achilles’ heel: how do you “read” or “detect” a property that doesn’t reside at any specific point?”

Building a Kitaev Minimal Chain
To solve this problem, the researchers constructed a carefully designed nanostructure known as a Kitaev minimal chain. Aguado likens the process to assembling Lego pieces. The device consists of two semiconductor quantum dots connected through a superconductor, forming a small but precisely controlled system.

While we wait for #Crew12 to launch 🚀, did you know astronauts follow special pre‑launch traditions?
From planting trees to signing walls and doors, these rituals connect each crew to the long legacy of human spaceflight.

🔗 esa.int/ESA_Multimedia… #εpsilon

If you were asked to picture how electrons move, you could be forgiven for imagining a stream of particles sluicing down a wire like water rushing through a pipe. After all, we often describe electrons as “flowing” in an “electric current.”

In reality, water and electricity flow in completely different ways. Whereas water molecules move together to form a swirly, coherent substance, electrons tend to fly past one another. “Water is seeing nothing but other water,” said Cory Dean, a physicist at Columbia University, “but in an electronic system, in a wire, that’s manifestly not the case.” Water molecules unite to flow, but each electron acts on its own.

This every-particle-for-itself movement serves as the foundation for all of electronic theory. It explains why a warm wire resists more than a cold wire, and why a round wire conducts as well as a square wire.

But since the 1960s, theorists have suspected that electrons can be coaxed to act more like their watery counterparts, and to form an electron fluid.

In recent years, a string of experiments has confirmed that prediction. Last fall, in the most dramatic demonstration yet, Dean and his collaborators arranged for electrons to form a type of shock wave that occurs when a quickly flowing fluid crashes into a slowly flowing fluid. It was a surefire sign that electrons were flowing at extremely high speeds. “That’s really the frontier right now,” said Thomas Scaffidi, a physicist at the University of California, Irvine who was not involved in the experiment.

Sending a mission to the solar gravitational lens (SGL) is the most effective way of actually directly imaging a potentially habitable planet, as well as its atmosphere, and even possibly some of its cities. But, the SGL is somewhere around 650–900 AU away, making it almost four times farther than even Voyager 1 has traveled—and that's the farthest anything human has made it so far.

It will take Voyager 1 another 130+ years to reach the SGL, so obviously traditional propulsion methods won't work to get any reasonably sized craft there in any reasonable timeframe. A new paper by an SGL mission's most vocal proponent, Dr. Slava Turyshev of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, walks through the different types of propulsion methods that might eventually get us there—and it looks like we would have a lot of work to do if we plan to do it anytime soon. It is available on the arXiv preprint server.

Carbon dioxide emissions from China have flatlined or fallen for 21 months, meaning the world's biggest greenhouse gas emitter may have reached a global turning point sooner than expected.

China's carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions dropped by 1% in the last quarter of 2025 and likely by 0.3% over the whole year, keeping them just beneath the record highs reached in May 2024, according to a new analysis by the Finland-based Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air (CREA) for Carbon Brief. The nearly two-year flatline or fall is the longest on record not driven by an economic slowdown in the country, which emits over a third of global CO2.

If the trend holds, China's emissions could reach an all-time peak before 2030 — the country's official target date — or even sooner, marking a key win in the global effort to curb fossil fuel use and slow global warming. Yet whether the drop is sustained or demand will drive a rebound in emissions before the officially targeted peak remains an open question.

The Trump administration on Thursday revoked a scientific finding that long has been the central basis for U.S. action to regulate greenhouse gas emissions and fight climate change, the most aggressive move by the president to roll back climate regulations.

The rule finalized by the Environmental Protection Agency rescinds a 2009 government declaration known as the endangerment finding that determined that carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases endanger public health and welfare.

The endangerment finding by the Obama administration is the legal underpinning of nearly all climate regulations under the Clean Air Act for motor vehicles, power plants and other pollution sources that are heating the planet.

President Donald Trump called the move "the single largest deregulatory action in American history," while EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin called the endangerment finding "the Holy Grail of federal regulatory overreach."

EPA has a clear scientific and legal obligation to regulate greenhouse gases, McCarthy said, adding that evidence backing up the endangerment finding "has only grown stronger" as the health and environmental hazards of climate change have "become impossible to ignore."

A kidney transplant can be life-changing, but it usually comes with a lifelong tradeoff: daily immunosuppressant pills that keep the immune system from attacking the donated organ.

A new study suggests there may be another path in the future, one that could reduce the daily medication burden to a monthly treatment. Researchers say the goal is not just convenience. The approach could also limit side effects and help donor kidneys keep working longer.

Right now, most kidney transplant recipients take several drugs every day to prevent rejection. While these standard immunosuppressants protect the new kidney, they can gradually harm kidney function and may lose effectiveness over time.