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Just a few days in simulated microgravity can subtly change the way women's blood clots, sparking bigger questions about health monitoring protocols for astronauts who spend six months or more in orbit. First reported in 2020, an International Space Station (ISS) mission detected an unexpected blood clot in a female astronaut's jugular vein.

For the first time, scientists have successfully measured magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) turbulence on scales below one parsec within the gamma-ray halo surrounding the Geminga pulsar wind nebula. Published in Science Advances, this groundbreaking observation extends to the highest energies—above 100 tera-electron volts (TeV)—providing entirely new insights into the behavior of cosmic rays and magnetic fields within the Milky Way.

It is one of the most famous questions in science, asked over lunch by physicist Enrico Fermi. With hundreds of billions of stars and billions of years, life should have emerged many times over. And yet, no signals. No visitors. No evidence of anyone at all. The universe is 13 billion years old. Our galaxy alone contains hundreds of billions of stars, a significant proportion of which host planets. Many of those planets sit in the right temperature range for liquid water.

Here's a thought experiment that keeps planetary scientists awake at night. Strip every living thing from our planet—every bacterium, every blade of grass, every creature that has ever drawn breath—and ask a simple but profound question: Would Earth still be a world capable of supporting life? The answer, it turns out, is yes. And that finding has enormous implications for how we search for life beyond our solar system. The problem is subtle but important.

Using the MeerKAT radio telescope, astronomers have discovered a natural "space laser" originating from a violently merging galaxy more than 8 billion light-years away. When gas-rich galaxies collide, the impact compresses enormous reservoirs of gas. This violent cosmic crash can stimulate molecules—specifically hydroxyl (OH) molecules—causing them to emit incredibly bright, coherent radio waves.

Imagine trying to reconstruct the history of a city by studying only its oldest surviving buildings. By tracking ancient, pulsating stars, astronomers are doing exactly that for our galaxy. When astronomers study the formation of our galaxy, they can't watch it being built. All they have are the structures themselves, their materials, their arrangement, and the subtle clues locked into their very fabric.

An international team has uncovered SN 2024abvb—a violently stripped, carbon-rich supernova exploding deep in intergalactic space. When a massive star dies, its explosive finale provides essential clues to the evolution of the universe. Most supernovae (SNe) fall into neat categories based on what elements they vomit into space: Type II explosions are rich in hydrogen, while Type I explosions lack it entirely.

SpaceX's Starship is rewriting the rules of spaceflight. But a rigorous new analysis from the German Aerospace Center proposes a European alternative that trades brute force for pure efficiency. In the summer of 2023, SpaceX's Starship—a stainless steel tower taller than a 30-story building—lit its 33 engines simultaneously and lifted off. By flight test five, the Super Heavy booster was caught midair by the enormous mechanical arms of its own launch tower.

The Vera Rubin Observatory has begun scanning the night sky, unleashing a torrential stream of data that will transform our view of the cosmos from a static painting into a dynamic, living movie. To us, the night sky seems static. But the cosmos is actually alive with objects that change, move, and explode.

For decades, we wondered if lightning strikes the Red Planet. A rare electromagnetic "whistle" caught by NASA's MAVEN orbiter finally breaks the silence. While sifting through a decade of data from NASA's Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution (MAVEN) spacecraft, scientists stumbled upon a ghost in the machine: a Whistler Wave.

Before we can deflect a killer asteroid, we must know its mass. For small objects, traditional tracking fails. A daring new dual-spacecraft maneuver aims to solve the problem. Estimating the mass of a Potentially Hazardous Asteroid (PHA) is the single most important metric after determining its trajectory. If we need to send a kinetic impactor to knock it off course, we need to know exactly how heavy it is to calculate the necessary force.

For two decades, the bright, striped "zebra pattern" of the Crab Pulsar baffled scientists. Now, the mystery has been solved by an invisible battle between plasma and gravity. In the year 1054, Chinese and Japanese astronomers witnessed a new star appear in the sky. Today, we know it as the Crab Nebula—the remnants of a violent supernova. At its very center sits the Crab Pulsar, a rapidly spinning neutron star emitting beams of radiation.