When the wholesale prices of essential goods like food or oil suddenly rise, it can cause deep shifts in the economy that upend trade balances and hike inflation rates. This is known as a commodity price boom.

A collaborative research team has improved visual localization and topographic mapping techniques that enable China’s Zhurong rover to navigate and conduct scientific investigations on Mars. These techniques played a crucial role in the success of the Tianwen-1 mission, which is China’s first independent interplanetary exploration effort.

Up until recently, astronomy was reliant entirely on electromagnetic waves. While that changed with the confirmation of gravitational waves in 2016, astronomers had developed fundamental frameworks in the electromagnetic spectrum by that point.

What kind of mission would be best suited to sample the plumes of Saturn’s ocean world, Enceladus, to determine if this intriguing world has the ingredients to harbor life? This is what a recent study presented at the 56th Lunar and Planetary Science Conference (LPSC 2025) hopes to address as a team of researchers investigated the pros and cons of an orbiter or flyby mission to sample Enceladus’ plumes.

In 2021, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) released a report detailing recently-declassified information on unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP). Since then, the Department of Defense has released annual reports on UAP through the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO). Nevertheless, there is still a lack of publicly available scientific data. To address this, a new study led by the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) and the Galileo Project proposes an All-Sky Infrared Camera (Dalek) to search for potential indications of extraterrestrial spacecraft.

Thanks to a mouse watching clips from “The Matrix,” scientists have created the largest functional map of a brain to date—a diagram of the wiring connecting 84,000 neurons as they fire off messages.

The universe doesn’t come with an instruction manual—but if it did, University of Missouri Assistant Professor Charles Steinhardt suspects a few pages are missing. Either the universe has been playing by different rules all along, or humanity has been reading the script wrong.

Black holes are fundamental to the structure of galaxies and critical in our understanding of gravity, space, and time. A stellar mass black hole is a type of black hole that forms from the gravitational collapse of a massive star at the end of its life cycle. These black holes typically have masses ranging from about 3 to 20 times the mass of our sun.

The NASA/ESA Solar Orbiter recently recorded the highest-ever concentration of a rare helium isotope (3He) emitted from the sun. A Southwest Research Institute-led team of scientists sought the source of this unusual occurrence to better understand the mechanisms that drive solar energetic particles (SEPs) that permeate our solar system. SEPs are high-energy, accelerated particles including protons, electrons and heavy ions associated with solar events like flares and coronal mass ejections.

The nominee for NASA’s top job, billionaire spacewalker Jared Isaacman, outlined his vision for space exploration on Wednesday that prioritizes sending astronauts to Mars without giving up on the moon.