A University of Texas at Austin-led team has reconstructed the most detailed map to date of the molecular machines that carried out the functions of life in an ancient ancestor that gave rise to all complex life on Earth, including us, shedding new light on genetic causes of human diseases.
On May 22, 2026, the Pentagon released a second batch of previously classified photos and videos showing what appear to be unexplained flying objects. These file dumps were the culmination of a process that was set in motion back in July 2023, when a group of government whistleblowers testified before Congress that the U.S. government was secretly in possession of extraterrestrial spacecraft and suspected alien body parts.
NASA is already ordering landers, rovers and drones for a sprawling moon base, less than two months after the Artemis II’s record-breaking lunar flyaround.
NASA had a big—and little—problem. For a small satellite, the agency needed a tiny antenna, with very specific communication capabilities and very strict limits on size and weight. The agency gave the problem to a design team adept at simulating the way natural selection engineers solutions.
For about half the global population, rice is the staple food. Yet every year, a fungal disease—rice blast—destroys harvests that could feed 60 million people. Researchers at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) have uncovered how the pathogen outsmarts the rice plant’s defense system. The findings, published in the Journal of Experimental Botany, open up new possibilities for making rice more resilient, directly benefiting global food security.
Researchers from the University of Glasgow’s Institute for Gravitational Research are celebrating the publication of a vast new treasure trove of gravitational wave detections, hailed as a milestone marking the coming of age of gravitational astronomy.
Researchers at the Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf (HZDR) have developed a new procedure, enabling them to speed up elaborate computer simulations that analyze matter under extreme conditions. In particular, this work improves the evaluation of experiments at large-scale research facilities like the European XFEL—and should facilitate substantial progress, among others, in fusion research and laboratory astrophysics.
A large protocluster of galaxies that existed 12.6 billion years ago, first discovered with the Subaru Telescope, has been examined in detail using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). The study found that galaxies in crowded regions are more extended than similar galaxies in less dense environments. The results, published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters , show that even when the universe was only 1.2 billion years old, environment was already influencing how galaxies grow.
Across the world, air pollution is associated with more early deaths than any other environmental exposure, raising risks of dying from lung cancer, respiratory infection, heart and lung disease and other causes.
The source of the significant water ice deposits hidden in Mercury’s polar regions has been a topic of debate among researchers. A new study, published in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Planets, suggests that these deposits were accumulated in only one Mercurian day (176 Earth days) by a large impactor, such as a comet or asteroid. While previous studies have suggested a similar scenario, this is the first study to fully model the impact. Furthermore, these new models suggest that the impactor may have been larger and slower than previously suggested.
Translucent, speckled, and barely the size of a grain of rice, a new species of sea slug has been identified in the coastal waters of Keelung, Taiwan. Because of its minute size and distinctive black and yellow markings, researchers from National Taiwan Ocean University, National Museum of Natural Science and National Taipei University of Education have named the creature Thecacera sesama.
Using NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), astronomers have discovered a triply-eclipsing star system. The newfound system, designated TIC 295741342, consists of two sun-like stars in an eclipsing binary and a giant tertiary companion, which orbits the binary. The finding was reported in a paper published May 19 on the arXiv pre-print server.
Britain broke its record on Monday for the hottest day in May, according to the national weather agency, with the mercury rising to 33.5C near London as the country baked in a sweltering heat wave.
New observations from the James Webb Space Telescope have revealed fresh details about one of the most luminous known objects in the universe: the dust-shrouded quasar W2246−0526, seen just 1.2 billion years after the Big Bang. The paper outlining the results was published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society on May 14.
A material recently discovered and tested at NASA’s Glenn Research Center in Cleveland could help astronauts pack lighter for future missions to the moon. NASA is researching ways explorers could “live off the land” by harnessing lunar resources, including melting moon rocks to extract metals for building infrastructure and oxygen for fuel and life support.
China launched its crewed Shenzhou-23 spacecraft and eased it into a successful docking with a space station early Monday as part of Beijing’s ambitions to send humans to the moon by 2030, state media said.
A Hong Kong astronaut will join a Chinese space mission for the first time as part of a three-person crew launching on Sunday, as Beijing edges closer to its goal of landing people on the moon.
SpaceX launched its biggest, most powerful Starship yet on a test flight Friday, an upgraded version that NASA is counting on to land astronauts on the moon.
When the solar system formed, a disk of gas and dust orbited the young sun. Over the course of millions of years, the dust gradually clumped together to form kilometer-sized chunks known as planetesimals. Some grew into planets, while the rest are considered to be the precursors of today’s asteroids. Researchers assume that this development did not proceed in a linear fashion, with different stages of planetesimal development occurring simultaneously, and not every region of the disk offering favorable “starting conditions” for planetesimals.
A collaborative research team has revealed the long-overlooked carbon storage potential of coral reef ecosystems and how reef-dwelling fish, corals, and surface sediments jointly shape reef carbon reservoirs. The paper is published in the journal Advanced Science. The team was led by The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST), the Institute of Zoology at the Chinese Academy of Sciences (IOZ-CAS) and the Southern Marine Science and Engineering Guangdong Laboratory (Guangzhou) (GML).
