Eastern Africa’s Turkana Rift is both a hotbed for fossil discoveries of our earliest ancestors and a literal hotbed of volcanic activity caused by shifting tectonic plates. Now researchers have found that Earth’s underlying crust in the region has been significantly thinned, presaging Africa’s eventual breakup—and with that finding, the researchers offer a new perspective on how Turkana’s world-famous fossil record of human evolution came to be. The findings are published in Nature Communications.

NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope team now is targeting as soon as early September 2026 for launch, ahead of the agency’s commitment to flight no later than May 2027.

An origami-inspired reflectarray antenna developed by researchers at Institute of Science Tokyo enables CubeSats to achieve high antenna gain while fitting within the tight size constraints of small satellites. Weighing just 64 grams, it folds compactly inside a 3U CubeSat for launch and expands in space. Such designs could support higher data-rate communications, expanding the capabilities of future CubeSat missions, including deep-space and lunar exploration.

Fifteen years after Western astronomers first discovered “buckyballs” in space (soccer ball-shaped molecules that resemble a hollow sphere), they’re back with stunning images and rich data generated using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST)—the most powerful space telescope ever built. The team led by Jan Cami, a physics and astronomy professor, first detected buckyballs using NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope in 2010. The fantastic find came from the planetary nebula Tc 1, formed from a dying star more than 10,000 light-years away in the constellation Ara.

One of the biggest open questions in particle physics today is how the Higgs boson interacts with itself. This “self-coupling” could help explain the evolution of the early universe and the mechanism that gives mass to elementary particles. To try to shed light on this fundamental interaction, the ATLAS Collaboration has recently studied one of the “golden” decay channels of a pair of Higgs bosons, where one Higgs boson decays into two photons and the other into a pair of bottom quarks.

NASA successfully sent four astronauts around the moon for the first time in more than 50 years, setting the stage for future lunar landing missions. As the agency continues to push the bounds of space exploration, NASA’s Ames Research Center in California’s Silicon Valley provided essential support in preparing for the mission.

A team of astronomers led by Elisabeth Matthews at the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy (MPIA) has made a discovery that highlights the limits of most current models of exoplanet atmospheres: water-ice clouds on a distant Jupiter-like exoplanet called Epsilon Indi Ab.

Getting people to change their behavior is a challenging task. From the Stanford Marshmallow Experiment to the Piano Stair Experiment, scientists have been trying to understand what motivates people to alter their actions for decades. Those hurdles are especially pronounced when it comes to climate change, where overcoming the intention-action gap is a major challenge. Just because someone is concerned about climate change doesn’t mean they will change what they do on a daily basis.