NASA on Tuesday announced new uncrewed missions to aid in the future creation of a lunar surface base, a project beginning to take shape despite recent setbacks.

Three U.S. companies were awarded contracts for missions to deliver cargo, including scientific instruments, to the moon, NASA said. The agency will pay nearly $600 million for the projects, which supplement others announced in May.

The efforts are part of plans to use robotic vehicles to build infrastructure that future human explorers to the moon could eventually use.

The announcement comes as the U.S. space agency's lunar ambitions have faced setbacks following the spectacular explosion this spring of the New Glenn rocket, which is built by tech billionaire Jeff Bezos' company Blue Origin.

Senior agency officials have acknowledged that the situation would likely cause lunar program delays but voiced optimism Tuesday, also indicating there were alternatives to launch a lander carrying equipment developed by Blue Origin.

"We're working with Blue Origin very closely to understand their timelines to recovery and also looking at other options in case it doesn't meet our timeline," said Carlos Garcia-Galan, NASA program manager for the moon base, during an event with journalists Tuesday.

After spending years creating a lunar orbital space station known as Gateway, NASA overhauled its plans in March, saying it would now focus on creating a base for surface operations.

The agency pledged $20 billion to the moon base efforts.

The base is planned for a site near the lunar south pole, a strategic area because of the presence of water ice in the soil. NASA had previously said construction could begin in 2029.

Conceived to compete with China—which also aims to send humans to the moon and establish a base there—NASA's ambitious plan remains vague in several aspects.

But the U.S. agency has started to roll out its vision, which includes lunar landers, lunar rovers and drones designed to survey the terrain and subsequently build up infrastructure, including a power grid and pressurized habitats.

The agency on Tuesday floated the possibility of repurposing a Mars rover as part of the efforts it is aiming to complete in a tight time frame.

A rush rescue mission to save a NASA space telescope remains grounded, this time because of a last-minute launch problem.

Northrop Grumman 's rocket-launching plane took off from the Marshall Islands in the Pacific on Thursday, following weather delays all week. While in flight, the team observed a warning in the stream of data and decided against releasing the Pegasus rocket strapped to the plane's belly, the company said. It was not immediately clear whether the warning came from the rocket or the plane.

The rocket holds a three-armed robotic spacecraft built by Katalyst Space Technologies to capture the Swift Observatory, which will come crashing down by October if no help arrives. No new launch date has been set.

NASA paused Swift's science operations earlier this year to preserve its orbit as long as possible. It has detected thousands of gamma ray bursts and exploding stars since its launch in 2004, tipping off other telescopes for more detailed observations.

Anxious to continue Swift's scanning of the universe, the space agency hired Katalyst Space last September for the $30 million salvage operation.

The hantavirus outbreak that struck a cruise ship in April, killing three people and sparking fears of further spread, is over, the World Health Organization (WHO) has announced.

"Today, the final contact of a person exposed to hantavirus on the cruise ship MV Hondius completed their quarantine period, tested negative and returned home. No further cases have been reported since the 25th of May," Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the WHO's director-general, said in his opening remarks at a news conference Thursday (July 2). "We are therefore very pleased to say that WHO considers the outbreak of hantavirus over."

The total number of cases linked to the outbreak was 13. All those affected were either passengers or crew on the ship.

The outbreak began aboard the Dutch-flagged cruise ship MV Hondius after it departed southern Argentina on April 1. It involved the Andes virus, the only known hantavirus that can spread between people.

Hantaviruses are rodent-borne viruses that are found in the Americas, Europe and Asia and spread to humans relatively rarely, usually via contact with the urine, droppings or saliva of infected rodents. The Andes virus, however, has sparked short chains of human-to-human transmission in the past.

A light intro to LLMs, chatbots, pretraining, and transformers.

Dig deeper here:
Neural networks  
Technical details as a talk:
Visualizing transformers and attention

The giant trees of tropical forests are important allies in the fight against climate change because of their ability to store carbon, yet they are still poorly understood by science. However, a study published in the journal Science reveals a crucial survival mechanism: These trees, which exceed 70 meters (230 feet) in height, have no difficulty transporting water to their tops and are no more vulnerable than smaller trees.

They have developed internal adaptations that compensate for the challenges of transporting water to the highest branches. Furthermore, tests conducted during severe droughts showed that they did not experience a more pronounced decline in growth than smaller trees. This contradicts the hypothesis that very tall trees would be more susceptible to water stress.

How giant trees move water
To date, the scientific literature suggests that as trees grow taller, their ability to move water upward is impaired by the greater distance between roots and leaves, as well as by the effects of gravity. This would reduce photosynthesis, limit growth and increase vulnerability to drought.

The research found that adjustments to the xylem conduits (microscopic "tubes" that the plant uses to transport water and nutrients to the leaves)—which increase in diameter as the tree grows taller—compensate for the increased resistance to water flow along the way. In practice, it's as if a larger hose were needed to carry water further. These complex adaptations reduce the likelihood of water transport failure when the plant is in drought conditions.

An international team of quantum researchers has shown how machine learning can be used to filter a practically infinite number of possible material combinations to identify candidates for superconductivity. Thanks to the breakthrough, new superconductors can now be found much faster, says Aalto University Professor Päivi Törmä, who leads the SuperC consortium behind the research.

Superconductors carry electric current with zero resistance, thanks to a quantum effect appearing only at extremely low temperatures. They power not only quantum computers but many other things, from neuroimaging to fusion reactors and maglev trains.

However, these unicorn materials are prohibitively hard to identify. Any endlessly variable combination of elements could be a superconductor—yet few actually are. And the ones already discovered require expensive cooling equipment to bring them to the near-absolute-zero temperatures that give them their quantum properties.

For scientists the world over, the race is on to find a scalable superconductor that works at room temperature.

"Superconductive materials that can operate at room temperature would forever change the way we consume energy," explains Törmä. "If such a material could replace regular conductors in applications like computers and data centers, global energy consumption could be slashed and the heat footprint of the ICT sector vastly reduced."

Arriving at proof of concept
Driven by a shared desire to harness quantum physics in the fight against climate change, Professor Törmä and a team of renowned physicists formed the SuperC consortium in 2023. It is the first coordinated global collaboration to find new superconductors—and they aim to find a room-temperature superconductor by 2033.

According to Törmä, SuperC's combination of quantum geometry and machine learning gives them an excellent starting point. This latest discovery has its underpinning in traditional Japanese basket-making patterns; both of the newly discovered materials (YRu3B2 and LuRu3B2) gain their superconductivity from electrons forming flat bands in a traditional pattern known as a kagome lattice.

To identify the two new superconductors, the team used machine learning to narrow down promising elemental combinations. After prescreening these with a unique algorithm, the team carried out detailed calculations to determine which materials could be superconductive.

After theoretical confirmation, SuperC collaborators at Rice University set about synthesizing the samples. This complex process, which involves chemically combining raw elements into new compounds, was led by Professor Emilia Morosan. The team at Rice was then able to run tests on the materials to confirm their superconductivity.

A new study by a doctoral researcher at The University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH), part of The University of Alabama System, suggests global dust storms on Mars may organize the Martian atmosphere into regions favorable for electrical activity, increasing the potential for electrostatic discharges that could affect missions to the red planet by interfering with electronics, causing arcing between conductive surfaces, and damaging exposed scientific instruments and spacecraft systems. The research, conducted by Chali Idosa Uga, a third-year Ph.D. student in the Department of Space Science at UAH, is published in The Planetary Science Journal.

The work focuses on the Martian Year 34 global dust storm, a planet-encircling event that occurred on Mars in 2018. It is one of the best-studied Martian weather events because multiple orbiters and rovers observed it simultaneously. Uga's research focused on whether such events can create conditions in which electric fields may build up to levels favorable for electrical breakdown in localized regions of the lower atmosphere. The researcher was advised by Dr. Gary Zank, director of the UAH Center for Space Plasma and Aeronomic Research (CSPAR), and Dr. Dennis Gallagher at NASA Marshall Space Flight Center.

"Mars does not have thunderstorms in the terrestrial sense, but it does have intense dust storms in a thin carbon dioxide atmosphere," Uga explains. "During such events, dust is lifted, transported and mixed through the lower atmosphere, creating conditions in which grain collisions can separate electric charge while the weakly conducting atmosphere may allow that charge to persist."

Electrified dust as a mission hazard
The study also highlights potential implications for future Mars missions, which may need to account for electrostatic environments during dust storms.

"For future Mars exploration, our study suggests that major dust storms should be evaluated not only as atmospheric, thermal and visibility hazards, but also as structured electrostatic environments," Uga notes. "We do not quantify risk to a specific spacecraft, habitat, instrument or communication system. What we show is that during the Martian Year 34 global dust storm, the lower atmosphere developed localized and altitude-dependent regions where charge separation could persist, and modeled electric fields approached breakdown-favorable conditions."

A mysterious wavelength of light is missing from the dwarf planet Pluto and Saturn's supersized moon Titan, new James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) observations show. The surprising discovery hints that these worlds harbor an unknown molecule that has not been seen in any other solar system world or exoplanet so far.

Every element or molecule in the universe absorbs unique wavelengths of electromagnetic radiation. Therefore, one of the main ways astronomers study distant worlds — both inside and outside the solar system — is by closely examining the light that reflects off them and searching for dark "absorption lines" that correspond to the wavelengths of known chemical compounds.

For example, molecular oxygen absorbs light at 230 nanometers, so if the electromagnetic spectrum of a faraway exoplanet has an absorption line at this frequency, researchers can be confident that its atmosphere contains oxygen, according to a 2021 study.

JWST has proved to be exceptionally good at capturing electromagnetic spectra and identifying specific chemicals in exoplanet atmospheres, around distant stars and within primitive galaxies. It has even identified a molecule on one alien world that could point to extraterrestrial life.

In a new study, uploaded June 11 to the preprint server arXiv, researchers analyzed JWST data from Pluto and Titan, focusing on very small wavelengths that have been relatively unexplored until now. This revealed a specific absorption line at around 5.11 micrometers in both worlds' spectra. (These findings have not been published in a peer-reviewed journal yet.)

The team pored through similar studies on other planetary spectra but "did not find any band referenced in these publications that corresponds to the location of the observed absorption in Titan and Pluto," the researchers wrote in the paper.

A molecular mystery
The discovery is even stranger because there are very few similarities between Pluto and Titan that could explain why they share a molecule not found anywhere else.
...
The researchers proposed that it could be benzene — a ring-shaped hydrocarbon — mixed with an unknown molecule, or some form of acetylene or ketene ice. However, much more work is needed to prove that any of these potential candidates are responsible for absorbing this specific wavelength, they wrote.

Researchers at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) have found how plant cells respond to stress. If their energy supply is disrupted by heat, drought or saline soils, chloroplasts—the cells' powerhouses—send an intracellular distress signal by forming tiny, finger-like projections. This signal specifically activates protection programs that help limit damage. The study, published in Plant Physiology, reveals the function of these previously mysterious structures and presents an approach for making crops more resilient to climate stress.

Each plant cell contains chloroplasts, which work like little solar power stations. The tiny structures are the green energy centers of plant cells. Absorbing sunlight and extracting carbon dioxide from the air, they produce sugar—the energy source every plant needs for growth and survival. Without these solar power stations, plants would not be able to produce energy and thus could not serve as a food resource for other living beings. Another effect would be that less oxygen would be released into the atmosphere.

Protection against heat, drought, or salt
If plants are under stress because of, for example, a lack of water, high temperatures such as those Germany and Central Europe are currently experiencing, or saline soils, this delicate energy system gets out of balance. Aggressive substances develop that can affect and damage important parts of the cell. To survive, the plant needs to respond quickly and activate protective measures.

In this stress situation, chloroplasts react by forming the "fingers" that were recently investigated. The researchers revealed that these structures send a signal to the central control of the cell. "Particular genes are enabled or disabled, which triggers protection programs that support the damaged areas," said Professor Peter Nick from KIT's Botanical Institute.

The human brain evolved for a world of familiar faces, immediate threats and small social groups. But the world around us is changing far faster than human biology can keep pace. That mismatch may help explain some of the stress, loneliness and constant comparison people experience today.

The review, co-authored by Dr. Jose Yong, senior lecturer at James Cook University, Singapore, and Dr. Sarah Chan, research fellow at the Lee Kuan Yew Centre for Innovative Cities at SUTD, is published in Behavioral Sciences. Titled Evolutionary mismatch, stress, and competition: Making sense of psychosocial problems in the polycrisis era, it examines how stress, competition and loneliness can be understood through an evolutionary lens.

Evolutionary mismatch describes what happens when human instincts shaped in one kind of environment are forced to operate in a very different one. Humans evolved in smaller, close-knit groups, where danger, belonging, status and trust were read through familiar people and everyday face-to-face signals. Now, those same instincts are being triggered in dense cities, digital platforms, unequal societies and a world shaped by overlapping pressures. The result is internal confusion: Responses that once made sense in a small, familiar group can feel out of place, or simply overwhelming, in modern life.

Social media makes this mismatch especially visible. The urge to understand our place within a group may once have helped people maintain trust and cooperation among familiar faces. Today, that same instinct can be triggered by an endless stream of curated lives, achievements and status signals.

At the center of the paper is competition. Modern environments can intensify the feeling that others are judging, outperforming or leaving us behind. The authors propose that this heightened sense of competition may be one pathway through which evolutionary mismatch contributes to stress and poorer well-being.

"Competition is not new, but modern life can make it feel constant," said Yong. "An evolutionary perspective may help explain why people respond so strongly to comparison and the fear of falling behind, even when those signals come from strangers or screens rather than a small social group."

The paper draws on existing research and theory rather than new data. It presents evolutionary mismatch as one way of understanding modern social and psychological problems, alongside psychological, social and economic explanations. These ideas will need to be tested through real-world research.

That matters because the response to modern stress cannot rest only on telling individuals to be more resilient. If environments are activating old instincts in new and unhelpful ways, then cities, workplaces, digital platforms and communities also need to be part of the solution.

The state of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) has been a hot topic among climate scientists in recent years. The AMOC is crucial for climate regulation because it pulls warm surface water from the tropics north and sends colder, deeper water south, redistributing large amounts of heat, helping to sustain marine ecosystems and keeping global weather patterns steady. However, most standard AMOC-focused climate models may be missing an important piece of the puzzle—they don't include the growing pulse of freshwater from Greenland ice melt, which could further disrupt the AMOC.

But now, a study published in Science Advances has incorporated the freshwater influx from Greenland's ice melt into a new model. The results show that while the meltwater plays a significant role, it may not push the AMOC over the edge just yet.

To tip or not to tip?,
Most climate models agree that the AMOC will continue to weaken this century, but the abrupt collapse that some models suggest remains debated. A recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) model found that none of the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project phase 6 (CMIP6) models show an abrupt AMOC collapse during the 21st century.

Yet another recent study found that the Atlantic "cold blob" indicated a tipping point was nearing if conditions worsen. Earlier work has suggested that the Greenland meltwater contributes to the weakening of the AMOC, but it's been unclear whether that weakening would lead to an abrupt tipping point in which the AMOC collapses completely or is very difficult to reverse.

"However, it currently remains an open question whether these meltwater-induced AMOC changes are associated with tipping point characteristics such as abruptness and irreversibility. In addition, the physical mechanisms of how Greenland meltwater affects the AMOC beyond 2100 have, to our knowledge, not yet been explored," write the authors of the new study.

The Solar System is surrounded by a vast bubble of plasma created by solar wind flowing outward from the Sun. This bubble shields the system from most of the cosmic radiation that passes through the interstellar medium. Meanwhile, as our system orbits the center of the Milky Way, it creates a rounded "nose" region ahead of it and a "tail" in its wake. Scientists are divided as to the shape of the heliosphere, with some arguing that it resembles a comet, while others favor a croissant-shaped profile.

The boundaries of the heliosphere are dynamic, the outer edge constantly shifting in response to changing solar conditions, expanding during solar maximum and contracting at solar minimum. Researchers at the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) are busy studying the heliosphere so astronomers can create predictive models that will tell them the location of the termination shock - the heliosphere's outer boundary - in the direction the New Horizons probe is traveling.

Their findings were presented in two scientific papers that appeared in The Astrophysical Journal and the journal Advances in Space Research. The team, led by SwRI Post-Doctoral Researcher Dr. Jonathan Gasser, combined a solar wind forecasting method with analytical and numerical heliosphere models to determine where New Horizons will encounter the first plasma boundary in the outer heliosphere.

As temperatures rise around the world, air conditioning is saving lives. But a growing reliance on it is also placing unprecedented pressure on electricity grids, increasing greenhouse gas emissions and making cities even hotter.

A global review led by UNSW Sydney's Professor Mat Santamouris AM—an expert in innovative heat mitigation technologies and strategies for cities—argues that keeping buildings cool without relying solely on air conditioning will be critical for adapting to climate change.

Published in Nature Reviews Clean Technology, the review examines the latest advances in passive cooling technologies, from emerging materials for radiative, evaporative and combined radiative/evaporative cooling to sophisticated solar control systems and personalized intelligent ventilation technologies that can help buildings shed heat without consuming electricity.

Professor Santamouris says passive cooling should no longer be viewed as a niche architectural feature, but as essential infrastructure for a warming world.

"Air conditioning saves lives and will remain essential during extreme heat," he says. "But we cannot air-condition our way out of climate change. If every building depends entirely on mechanical cooling, we create enormous pressure on electricity systems while adding even more heat to our cities."

Demand for cooling is soaring
The review highlights the rapid growth in cooling demand worldwide. Global electricity consumption for cooling has reached almost 10 percent of total electricity use, with around 10 new air conditioners sold every second. By 2050, the number of residential air-conditioning units is projected to increase to almost 5.6 billion worldwide.

At the same time, billions of people living in hot climates still lack access to affordable cooling.

When Charlotte Mason ponders cosmic mysteries, she likes to doodle. “I am quite a visual person,” she said. “I usually draw a lot of pictures trying to understand what’s going on.”

Mason, an astrophysicist at the Cosmic Dawn Center in Copenhagen, has lately been filling pages with sketches of “little red dots,” perplexing objects discovered by the hundreds in images from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). Little red dots were never seen before the telescope came online in 2022. But we now know that they started to appear in significant numbers roughly 650 million years after the Big Bang.

These dots are just one of the thrilling mysteries that have emerged from JWST’s observations of the early universe. Others include black holes that seem impossibly large for their age, as well as ancient galaxies that defy what we thought we knew about the first billion years after the Big Bang. At first, scientists were astounded: The universe revealed by JWST simply didn’t square with our understanding of astrophysics. Now, a wave of new theories offers tantalizing solutions — but which ones portray reality is an open question.

Recent ideas suggest that little red dots could be black holes cocooned in thick gas, possibly representing a completely new type of object called a black hole star, in which the tight shroud of gas emits light like a stellar atmosphere.

“This would be my black hole,” Mason said, drawing a small circle and filling it in. “I might put a disk on it, because we think that’s where some of the emission comes from.” She slashed a line through the circle’s center. “Then the kind of naïve picture is just this dense gas cloud around the black hole.” She drew a larger circle surrounding the object.

But Mason thinks there may be more to these cosmic enigmas. She and colleagues recently analyzed the spectrum of light emitted by one little red dot. If the dense-cloud picture is correct, then some of the light should have been altered from passing through the gas — but that’s not what they saw.

“Now what do I do? Start again. But now if I make my gas clumpy,” Mason said, drawing a new diagram with holes in the clouds surrounding the black hole, “I should be able to get [a signal] that looks closer.”

All around the world, researchers like Mason are eagerly piecing together JWST’s glimpses of the ancient cosmos to create a clearer picture of our universe’s beginnings. And like the photons that travel billions of light-years to reach us, new fragments are constantly falling into place.

🆕 The NIR Cam on Webb has captured the protostars of the FS Tau system. These are just 1 to 3 million years old – young by cosmic standards! 👶⭐ ‍

A pair known as FS Tau A is responsible for the large diffraction pattern left of centre, while the red and orange outflows seen amidst the dust are thought to be caused by FS Tau B, the orange protostar just right of centre. 

Read more: esawebb.org/images/FS-Tau/

For decades, age-related memory loss has largely been viewed as a problem that begins in the brain. But growing evidence suggests that some of the processes shaping cognition may start much farther south — in the gut, home to trillions of microbes that help regulate everything from digestion to immunity.

A new mouse study from researchers at Stanford Medicine and the Arc Institute in Palo Alto, California, points to a surprising gut-brain connection behind cognitive aging.

The team found that age-related changes in gut bacteria can interfere with signals traveling along the vagus nerve, a major communication highway linking the gastrointestinal tract and the brain. Their findings suggest that memory decline may be influenced by changes outside the brain itself, opening new possibilities for preserving cognitive function later in life.

“Although memory loss is common with age, it affects people differently and at different ages,” said Christoph Thaiss, PhD, assistant professor of pathology. “We wanted to understand why some very old people remain cognitively sharp while other people see significant declines beginning in their 50s or 60s. What we learned is that the timeline of memory decline is not hardwired; it’s actively modulated in the body, and the gastrointestinal tract is a critical regulator of this process.”

The study found that the gut microbiome, the natural community of bacteria living in the intestine, changes as mice grow older. Some bacterial species become more common while others decline. Immune cells in the gastrointestinal tract detect these changes and trigger inflammation that weakens signaling through the vagus nerve to the hippocampus, the brain region involved in memory formation and spatial navigation. When researchers stimulated vagus nerve activity in older mice, the animals regained the ability to remember unfamiliar objects and escape mazes as well as younger mice.

After more than two decades, the orbit of NASA’s Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory has entered a phase of rapid decay. While NASA could allow the observatory to re-enter Earth’s atmosphere, as many missions do at the ends of their lifetimes, this situation has presented an opportunity to advance American spacecraft servicing technology while also extending the life of a productive science mission. To accomplish this, NASA awarded the U.S. company Katalyst Space a contract in September 2025 to attempt to raise Swift’s orbit.

A mission to raise the altitude of NASA’s Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory is underway after launching at 8:36 p.m. Marshall Islands Time (4:36 a.m. EDT), Friday, July 3, from Kwajalein Atoll in the South Pacific Ocean. Source

The 1.7 million satellites that companies are aiming to launch into Earth's orbit in the coming years will have "devastating consequences for astronomy," new research warned Wednesday.

The plans to swarm Earth with huge, extremely bright satellites represent an "existential threat" to telescopes viewing the universe, according to the European Southern Observatory (ESO), which conducted the research.

To retain humanity's ability to properly explore the night sky, the team of researchers called for a maximum limit of 100,000 satellites orbiting Earth.

The study is the first to calculate how much the constellations of big and particularly bright satellites being planned would affect astronomical observations by making the night sky brighter.

The number of satellites orbiting Earth has now reached 14,000 after surging in recent years, many of them part of trillionaire Elon Musk's Starlink internet constellation.

But that is just the start.

Musk's SpaceX has announced plans to launch more than 1 million satellites by 2028 to serve as data centers powering the artificial intelligence boom.

Other projects such as the "Cinnamon" plans of startup E-Space and Chinese constellations CTC-1 and CTC-2 would add hundreds of thousands more satellites spinning around our planet.

And U.S. startup Reflect Orbital hopes to launch 50,000 huge satellites that use giant mirrors to point sunlight back down to Earth, with the aim of providing light during the night.

In total, more than 1.7 million satellites could soon be lighting up the night sky, obscuring or blotting out the view of ground-based telescopes.

RMIT University researchers have tested a more effective way to capture microplastics from wastewater, using a combination of microbubbles and nanobubbles to achieve removal rates of more than 90%.

The dual-bubble approach can be adopted by wastewater treatment plants without major infrastructure changes by optimizing existing operating conditions, including air pressure, saturation time and bubble size.

The paper "Micro-Nanobubble Integrated Dissolved Air Flotation: A High-Efficiency Strategy for Microplastic Mitigation in Wastewater," is published in ACS ES&T Water. Lead author, Associate Professor Biplob Pramanik, said the approach suggests a practical way to reduce microplastic pollution—a growing global issue.

"Wastewater treatment plants are a major pathway for microplastics because they slip through filtration processes, posing risks to ecosystems and human health," Pramanik said. He is also the director of RMIT's Water Effective Technology and Tools Research Center.

"Our approach is simple to implement and significantly increases the removal of microplastics during the primary stage of treatment."

The study investigated an enhanced version of dissolved air flotation, a widely used water treatment process that removes contaminants by attaching them to air bubbles and lifting them to the surface.