Some animals can move efficiently beneath granular surfaces. These include the sandfish (Scincus scincus), a lizard native to the Sahara. It can burrow into the sand and then literally "swim" through the desert sand to hunt or escape predators. German researchers are working on a rover wheel design that mimics that swimming motion. In testing, the wheel system outperformed regular wheels.

A new study reevaluates the Kardashev Scale using a new framework that includes the Bitcoin network as a means of measuring the trajectory of human development.

Exoplanet hunters are keen to find the next extrasolar earthlike planet, one that may harbor life as we know it. But preliminary results from a new study indicate that our galaxy may be filled with a plethora of exo-Venuses. Yet as one exoplanetary researcher notes: the template for such exo-worlds --- our own Venus --- has been ‘criminally underexplored.’

Spacecraft often use planets for gravity-assist or "slingshot" maneuvers. NASA's Psyche mission used Mars for that purpose during a May 15th flyby. The flyby accelerated the spacecraft and aimed it at its eventual destination, the asteroid 16 Psyche. The flyby was also an opportunity to take some pictures of Mars, and to test and calibrate the spacecraft's science instruments.

In 2014, researchers presented the discovery of water vapour plumes being emitted from Jupiter's moon Europa. This caused quite a stir; it meant that the moon's buried ocean was accessible without contending with the thick ice shell that concealed it. But new research by the same researchers questions those detections.

Typically when we think of astronomy, we think of pictures of M87 captured on a backyard telescope or the soaring colorful peaks of the Eagle Nebula seen by Hubble. But perhaps the most influential type of astronomy of the last 100+ years doesn’t directly result in the stunning pictures we’re so accustomed to today. It captures radio waves from some of the most interesting objects in the universe. And in her new book, The Echoing Universe: How Radio Astronomy Helps Us See the Invisible, Dr. Emma Chapman, a radio astronomer at the University of Nottingham, tracks how these longest wavelengths of the electromagnetic spectrum have influenced the practice of astronomy and our understanding of our place in the universe.

Ingenuity, the Mars helicopter, which performed the first controlled, powered flight on another planet, was an excellent demonstration of human ingenuity. But it was just that - a demonstrator. The intention with Ingenuity was simply to prove that we could, in fact, fly on another planet. But now we’ve proved that we can, it’s time to do something more useful with that new ability - like do actual science. A new mission designed to do just that recently passed a critical testing milestone, opening the way for future Mars helicopter missions that will make Ingenuity look like our very first steps.

When people eventually head to the Moon for long-term exploration and habitation, they'll need equipment and habitats made of well-tested materials. That's where NASA's Lunar Environment Test Rig (LESTR) comes in handy. It simulates extreme cold lunar night conditions right here in a NASA Glenn lab, testing equipment in temperatures ranging from 40K to 125K (-233 C to -148 C) in a vacuum.

Galaxies grow through mergers and collisions, and astronomers want to know more about the mergers in the Milky Way's past. But mergers can stir up the stars in the resulting galaxy, making it difficult to determine exactly when an ancient merger occurred. A new study led by researchers at the Institute of Cosmos Sciences of the University of Barcelona (ICCUB) and the Institute of Space Studies of Catalonia (IEEC) may have overcome that challenge.

Years of grievance against dust. It ruins lungs, suits, rovers, and Mars missions. The first installment of an apology, sort of, to the most annoying substance in the cosmos.

In the closing decades of the 20th century, several proposed explanations were put forward for why humanity has not yet found evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence in the cosmos.

Ever since the JWST found over-massive black holes in the early Universe, researchers have been trying to understand them. Theory showed that black holes and their galaxies grew in synchronization with each other. That can't explain the JWST's findings, but new research might.

No quantum gravity. The wrong peak in the wave function. Boltzmann Babies. Roger Penrose pointing out that the arrow of time was smuggled in through the back door. The no-boundary proposal is beautiful. It is also possibly wrong in many specific ways.

You’re doing some late afternoon work on the habitat as part of humanity’s first exoplanet settlement, but the sun is going down so you’re trying to speed things up. Just as the light dims, everything suddenly starts getting brighter. You look up and see the sun starting to rise again, except it’s your second sun. You kick yourself for not checking the daily sunrise and sunset logs, but you’re happy you get to put in a bit more work before you eat dinner.

There's a distinct category of exoworlds out there that orbit two stars. They're called "circumbinary" planets and up until recently, astronomers had only found about 18 of them among the 6000+ other known exoplanets and candidates. Now, a team at the University of New South Wales (UNSW) in Sydney, Australia, have found 27 more potential circumbinary worlds. They credit a new method, called apsidal precession, for their finding.

During the 1970s, the first interstellar probes were launched, carrying messages specifically designed to be intelligible to extraterrestrial species. The messages were essentially a "message in a bottle" intended for an advanced civilization, should they find the probes someday.

Our Solar System is currently passing through the Local Interstellar Cloud, a region of highly diluted gas and dust between the stars. On its path, Earth continuously accumulates iron-60, a rare radioactive isotope of iron produced in stellar explosions. This has now been confirmed by an international research team led by the Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf (HZDR) through the analysis of Antarctic ice tens of thousands of years old. From the steady but time-varying influx, the researchers conclude that the radioactive isotope has been stored within the cloud since a long-past stellar explosion.

Asteroid mining seems simple in theory. A spacecraft flies up to a giant rock in space, scoops out some material, and either processes it on site or returns it back to a huge central processing facility. But in practice, it is certainly not that simple, and a new paper from some Spanish researchers, available in pre-print form on arXiv, showcases one of the reasons why - many small asteroids are spinning ridiculously fast.

How can astronomers observe ancient galaxies when they're so challenging to resolve? By looking at a whole bunch of them at once in a single spectral line and seeing how it changes over time. That's what a new instrument called the Tomographic Ionized-carbon Mapping Experiment (TIME) does.

Run Hawking's machinery and out pops something startling: the most likely universe looks an awful lot like ours, complete with inflation, a low-entropy beginning, and an arrow of time. All of cosmology, falling out for free. Almost.

We may be getting better images of the Milky Way's supermassive black hole in the future. Astronomers used 10 years of observations of a distant blazar to detect turbulence in the Milky Way's interstellar medium. This turbulence makes images of Sagittarius A-star blurry.

The Traveling Salesman is a classic problem in mathematics that requires a solution to the most efficient path to take to visit a given number of cities in the least amount of time. But scale this relatively simple concept up to space travel and the calculation becomes much more complex. Instead of visiting a stationary spot on Earth, when calculating the most efficient path to visit asteroids you must account for the fact they are traveling tens of thousands of miles an hour, and their exact position will change based on when a spacecraft leaves. This is known as the Asteroid Routing Problem, and a new paper from a group of Canadian and European researchers lays out a framework that can find the exact solution to any particular combination of asteroids to be visited.

Hawking faced a question with no answer hiding behind it. The best boundary condition for the universe, he decided, was that there was no boundary at all. To make that statement into physics, he had to do something deeply strange to time.

The equations of general relativity give up at the singularity. Decades before Stephen Hawking dared to guess what came before, John Wheeler and Bryce DeWitt built the strange mathematical machinery that would make the question askable in the first place.

A study led by UC Riverside physicist Hai-Bo Yu suggests that a new type of dark matter could explain three astrophysical puzzles across vastly different environments.

Enigmatic crownlike surface formations on Venus hold keys to understanding our twin planet’s deep interior. Or so says a new paper presented at the recent European Geosciences Union 2026 general assembly in Vienna.

A study of NASA's Black Marble data reveals a pattern of regional volatility in nighttime illumination across the planet.

The galaxy cluster Abell 2029 is sometimes described as “the most relaxed cluster in the Universe.” This moniker does not arise from some sort of mellow vibe, but rather because of how calm and undisturbed the superheated gas that pervades the cluster appears to be. But new Chandra X-ray observations of the massive cluster highlight a major merger 4 billion years ago that still shape it today.

Earth has a group of cosmic stalkers. Known as “co-orbitals”, these small bits of rock have a 1:1 mean motion resonance with Earth. Basically, they take the exact same amount of time to orbit the Sun as we do. Astronomers have long believed these objects wandered in from the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, but recent spectral analysis suggests they better match the space-weathered lunar silicates that make up the Moon’s surface. As such, there has been an ongoing debate about whether these cosmic stalkers are actually visitors from the belt or blasted pieces of the Moon. A new study, published in Icarus, from researchers Elisa Alessi and Robert Jedicke provides strong hints that the belt is the more likely source - but pretty soon we’ll get a definitive answer from a spacecraft.

The Moon has a busy week ahead of it. If skies are clear, be sure to get outside on the evenings of May 18th/19th and surrounding nights to check out the evolving view to the west, in one of the best sky shows for 2026.

Dark matter makes up roughly 85 percent of all the matter in the universe. We have never directly detected a single particle of it. But a new method developed by physicists at MIT and across Europe may have just opened a door we didn't know existed. When two black holes collide and merge, they send ripples through the fabric of spacetime, these are known as gravitational waves and if those black holes happened to spiral through a dense cloud of dark matter on their way in, those waves carry an imprint of it. For the first time, scientists have a technique to read that imprint and one signal in the existing data is already raising eyebrows.

Artemis II has barely left the headlines. On April 1st 2026, four astronauts climbed aboard NASA's Orion spacecraft, rode the most powerful rocket ever to carry humans beyond low Earth orbit, and swung around the far side of the Moon. The world watched. Now, before the dust has settled, NASA has outlined its plans for what comes next. Artemis III won't be landing on the Moon. But what it will do is arguably just as important and if history is any guide, it's exactly the kind of mission that makes the difference between a Moon landing and a disaster.

Right now, as you read this, Earth is drifting through a cloud of debris from an ancient stellar explosion. Stardust, real stardust, is raining down on us so thinly scattered that we have only just found the proof. Locked inside Antarctic ice cores up to 80,000 years old, an international team led by the Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf has discovered traces of iron-60, a radioactive isotope that can only be created in the heart of an exploding star.

For ten years, astronomers at UCLA have been pointing one of the world's most powerful radio telescopes at the stars and listening. Not for pulsars or gas clouds, or the hiss of the cosmic microwave background, but for something far more extraordinary. A signal from another civilisation. The result of a decade's work, 70,000 stars, and 100 million candidate signals is now in and every single one of them was us! But far from being a disappointment, the findings are among the most rigorous and revealing in the history of the search for extraterrestrial intelligence.

Shalbatana Vallis is a 1300 km water channel on Mars. It was carved out in one cataclysmic flooding event, possibly triggered by a massive impact. It's more evidence that liquid water once flowed on Mars.

University of Cincinnati astrophysicist Paul Smith is part of an international team studying TOI-2031Ab, a gas giant orbiting a star 901 light years from Earth. Smith and his colleagues used the James Webb Space Telescope to study its atmosphere.

One of the core community surveys of NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, the Galactic Bulge Time-Domain Survey, is expected to locate over a thousand exoplanets that orbit far away from their stars, beyond the orbital distance of Earth from the Sun. Although Roman hasn’t launched yet, astronomers already are gathering useful supporting data by utilizing NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, which could assist astronomers in analyzing Roman data.

Perseverance has travelled almost 26 miles, or 42 km. That's just shy of a marathon, which is 26.2 miles or 42.195 kilometers. Along the way, it's abraded and studied 62 rocks and collected 27 rock cores. And it's not done yet.

When a massive star dies, it can leave behind a black hole. That much has been understood for decades. But the most monstrous black holes in the universe, the heavyweights detected by the faint ripples they send through the fabric of space and time aren't born that way at all. According to a new Cardiff University study, they're built through repeated, catastrophic collisions in the most densely packed star clusters in the cosmos.

Hot Jupiters are the bullies of the planetary world. These colossal gas giants orbit impossibly close to their stars and their gravity is so overwhelming that anything nearby gets scattered, swallowed, or flung into oblivion. Finding a smaller planet surviving inside a hot Jupiter's orbit should be virtually impossible. Yet 190 light years away, that's exactly what astronomers have found.

Every time an astronomer points a telescope at a distant supernova, they're trying to measure how far away it is. But the light from these stellar explosions arrives tangled up with interference from dust, the age of the host galaxy and the chemical make up of the original star . Unpicking it all has always been a painstaking business. Now a team of researchers has used artificial intelligence to cut through the noise in a single step, potentially making cosmological measurements four times more precise. In a universe full of unanswered questions, that's a very significant leap forward.

During the 1970s, pioneering experiments were conducted that are known today as Messaging Extraterrestrial Intelligence (METI). At the same time, NASA launched four spacecraft bound for interstellar space, each carrying "messages in a bottle" intended for extraterrestrial beings.

The search for life elsewhere focuses on biosignatures. These are chemicals in atmospheres that can only be attributed to life. But despite the prowess of the JWST, finding slam-dunk proof of life on other worlds is a confounding exercise. New research suggests that rather than focus on individual chemicals, we should look for statistical patterns.

Extremely powerful quasars in the early Universe drove star-forming gas out of their galaxies. These Super-quasars are behind the JWST's puzzling early Universe observations.

Brown dwarfs are notoriously difficult to find. These “failed stars” aren’t big enough to sustain nuclear fusion, and therefore aren’t as bright as more traditional main sequence stars. In fact, they’re nearly invisible in optical light, and faintly visible in infrared. But thanks to dozens of citizen scientists combing through archival infrared datasets from the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE), and a paper published in the Astronomical Journal detailing their work, we now have an additional set of over 3,000 candidate new brown dwarfs in our stellar neighborhood, more than doubling the total number found so far.

A close flyby past the Red Planet this week will send NASA’s Psyche mission on its way towards its final destination. The mission’s closest approach to Mars occurs on Friday, May 15th, when the spacecraft passes only 4,500 kilometers (2,800 miles) from the surface of the Red Planet. That’s just 1.3 Mars radii distant, inside the orbits of Phobos and Deimos.

Step outside on a clear night almost anywhere in Britain and look up. Chances are you won't see much. An orange coloured washed out glow hangs over every town and city, drowning the stars in a tide of misdirected light. Now the Royal Astronomical Society is demanding that tide be turned back, not just for the sake of astronomy, but because the evidence of what artificial light at night is doing to our health, our wildlife, and our ecosystems has become impossible to ignore. The night, it turns out, isn't just a backdrop. It's a habitat that’s more entwined with our very wellbeing and health than you can possibly imagine. And we're destroying it.

Turn on your kitchen tap and watch the water hit the sink. That split second where fast, shallow water suddenly slows and spreads is known as a hydraulic jump. Now imagine the same thing happening in the atmosphere of Venus, but stretched across 6,000 kilometres of sulphuric acid cloud. Researchers at the University of Tokyo have just revealed that this extraordinary phenomenon, the largest hydraulic jump ever identified in the Solar System, is responsible for a mysterious wave that has been sweeping around our neighbouring planet for years.

When NASA's Artemis II spacecraft carried four astronauts around the Moon earlier this year, the world's largest fully steerable radio telescope was quietly watching from a quiet valley in West Virginia. The Green Bank Telescope tracked the Orion capsule across 213,000 miles of empty space with a precision that would embarrass most speedometers and what it produced isn't just an engineering triumph. It's a glimpse of how the world's most sensitive ears are becoming indispensable to the future of human spaceflight.

You’re an anaerobic microbe sunbathing on a Martian beach billions of years ago listening to the small waves hit the shoreline as you take in the perchlorates in the Martian regolith. This is because while Mars is warm and wet, it still lacks sufficient oxygen, so anaerobic life like yourself doesn’t need oxygen to survive. You’re chilling for several hours and eventually notice the water hasn’t touched you. You remember over-hearing some otherworldly fellows who briefly landed and discussed the landscape didn’t look well formed, so they left.