Astronomy

Interval cancers are aggressive tumours that grow during the interval after someone has been screened for cancer and before they are screened again, and AI seems to be able to identify them at an early stage

Astronomers have solved a bit of a mystery that had them questioning whether one of the most extreme stars ever observed was about to explode. WOH G64, a massive red supergiant in the Large Magellanic Cloud, began behaving so strangely that researchers suspected it had evolved into a rare yellow hypergiant on the brink of supernova. But new observations from the Southern African Large Telescope reveal the star is still very much a red supergiant, yet still exhibiting strange behaviour.

NASA has completed its first major testing of nuclear reactor hardware for spacecraft propulsion in over 50 years, marking a crucial step toward faster, more capable deep space missions. Engineers at Marshall Space Flight Center conducted more than 100 ‘cold flow’ tests on a full scale reactor engineering development unit throughout 2025, gathering vital data on how propellant flows through the system under various conditions.

Finding Earth-like planets is the primary driver of exoplanet searches because as far as we know, they're the ones most likely to be habitable. Astronomers sifting through data from NASA's Kepler Space Telescope have found a remarkably Earth-like planet, but with one critical difference: it's as cold as Mars.

SpaceX and xAI could join forces ahead of Elon Musk’s plan to take the former public later this year, according to Reuters

Novel artificial lungs could help keep people whose lungs no longer function alive long enough to get an organ transplant

A new analysis suggests that genes play a much larger role in human longevity than previously believed. But lifestyle factors still matter

Americans are living longer than ever but still well behind the life expectancy of other developed countries

A reanalysis of twin data from Denmark and Sweden suggests that how long we live now depends roughly equally on the genes we inherit, and on where we live and what we do

A reanalysis of twin data from Denmark and Sweden suggests that how long we live now depends roughly equally on the genes we inherit, and on where we live and what we do

New observations reveal a strange structure in the iconic nebula that has evaded astronomers for centuries.

The post The Ring Nebula Has an “Iron Bar”  appeared first on Sky & Telescope.

Feeling sluggish and crabby? Got cloudy skies? You might be suffering from SDS.

The post Starlight Deprivation Syndrome appeared first on Sky & Telescope.

The story of a woman whose discoveries in materials science quietly shape our everyday world but whose legacy was long eclipsed by the famous scientist she worked with at the General Electric Company

The Milky Way's Galactic Center and Bulge are shrouded in thick dust and tightly-packed with stars. It's a tough region to observe, but the Nancy Gracy Roman Space Telescope is built for the task. Its Galactic Bulge Time-Domain Survey will find more than 100,000 exoplanets, along with stars, black holes, neutron stars, and even rogue planets.

These polar bears appear to be maintaining their physical health despite the loss of sea ice—their preferred hunting grounds

Shrinking sea ice has made life harder for polar bears in many parts of the Arctic, but the population in Svalbard seems to be thriving

Shrinking sea ice has made life harder for polar bears in many parts of the Arctic, but the population in Svalbard seems to be thriving

A new image from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope of a portion of the Helix Nebula highlights comet-like knots, fierce stellar winds, and layers of gas shed off by a dying star interacting with its surrounding environment. Webb’s image also shows the stark transition between the hottest gas to the coolest gas as the shell expands out from the central white dwarf.

Adults with kidney cancer who received faecal microbiota transplants on top of their existing drugs did better than those who had placebo transplants as their add-on intervention

Adults with kidney cancer who received faecal microbiota transplants on top of their existing drugs did better than those who had placebo transplants as their add-on intervention