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U.S. Man Dies of Rabies after Receiving Infected Kidney Transplant
A man has passed away after he received a kidney transplant from a person who had died with undiagnosed rabies, according to U.S. public health officials
The Solar and Heliospheric Observatory Celebrates 30 Years in Space
The groundbreaking mission designed to observe our Sun and its interactions with Earth celebrates three decades in space this week.
The post The Solar and Heliospheric Observatory Celebrates 30 Years in Space appeared first on Sky & Telescope.
Scientific American’s Best Fiction of 2025
The 10 best fiction books of 2025 explore far-off planets, future climate catastrophes, and more
Scientific American’s Best Nonfiction of 2025
The 10 best nonfiction books of 2025, from the history of replaceable body parts to our AI future
AI can influence voters' minds. What does that mean for democracy?
AI can influence voters' minds. What does that mean for democracy?
AI Chatbots Shown to Sway Voters, Raising New Fears about Election Influence
Chatbots can measurably sway voters’ choices, new research shows. The findings raise urgent questions about AI’s role in future elections
Why is AI making computers and games consoles more expensive?
Why is AI making computers and games consoles more expensive?
New Book for Young Readers Brings the Stories of 10 Remarkable Women to Life
Ten great stories about 10 forgotten female scientists that we hope will inspire middle school readers to pursue their own curiosity and get involved in STEM fields
NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope Completed
NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope Completed
Two technicians look up at NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope after its inner and outer segments were connected at the agency’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland on Nov. 25, 2025. This marked the end of Roman’s construction. After final testing, the telescope will move to the launch site at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida for launch preparations in summer 2026. Roman — named after Dr. Nancy Grace Roman, NASA’s first chief astronomer — is slated to launch by May 2027, but the team is on track for launch as early as fall 2026.
See more photos of the completed observatory.
Image credit: NASA/Jolearra Tshiteya
NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope Completed
Two technicians look up at NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope after its inner and outer segments were connected at the agency’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland on Nov. 25, 2025. This marked the end of Roman’s construction. After final testing, the telescope will move to the launch site at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida for launch preparations in summer 2026. Roman — named after Dr. Nancy Grace Roman, NASA’s first chief astronomer — is slated to launch by May 2027, but the team is on track for launch as early as fall 2026.
See more photos of the completed observatory.
Image credit: NASA/Jolearra Tshiteya
NASA Sets Coverage for Astronaut Jonny Kim, Crewmates Return
NASA astronaut Jonny Kim, accompanied by Roscosmos cosmonauts Sergey Ryzhikov and Alexey Zubritsky, is preparing to depart the International Space Station aboard the Soyuz MS-27 spacecraft and return to Earth.
Kim, Ryzhikov, and Zubritsky will undock from the station’s Prichal module at 8:41 p.m. EST on Monday, Dec. 8, headed for a parachute-assisted landing at 12:04 a.m. on Tuesday, Dec. 9 (10:04 a.m. local time in Kazakhstan), on the steppe of Kazakhstan, southeast of the city of Dzhezkazgan.
Watch NASA’s live coverage of the crew’s return on NASA+, Amazon Prime, and the agency’s YouTube channel. Learn how to stream NASA content through a variety of online platforms, including social media.
The space station change of command ceremony will begin at 10:30 a.m. Sunday, Dec. 7, on NASA+ and the agency’s YouTube channel. Rzyhikov will hand over station command to NASA astronaut Mike Fincke for Expedition 74, which begins at the time of Soyuz MS-27 undocking.
Kim and his crewmates are completing a 245-day mission aboard the station. At the conclusion of their mission, they will have orbited Earth 3,920 times and traveled nearly 104 million miles. This was the first flight for Kim and Zubritsky to the orbiting laboratory, while Ryzhikov is ending his third trip to space.
After landing, the three crew members will fly by helicopter to Karaganda, Kazakhstan, where recovery teams are based. Kim will board a NASA aircraft and return to Houston, while Ryzhikov and Zubritsky will depart for their training base in Star City, Russia.
NASA’s coverage is as follows (all times Eastern and subject to change based on real-time operations):
Sunday, Dec. 7:
10:30 a.m. – Expedition 73/74 change of command ceremony begins on NASA+ Amazon Prime, and YouTube.
Monday, Dec. 8:
4:45 p.m. – Farewells and hatch closing coverage begins on NASA+, Amazon Prime, and YouTube.
5:10 p.m. – Hatch closing
8:15 p.m. – Undocking coverage beings on NASA+, Amazon Prime, and YouTube.
8:41 p.m. – Undocking
10:30 p.m. – Deorbit and landing coverage begins on NASA+, Amazon Prime, and YouTube.
11:10 p.m. – Deorbit burn
Tuesday, Dec. 9:
12:04 a.m. – Landing
For more than 25 years, people have lived and worked continuously aboard the International Space Station, advancing scientific knowledge and making research breakthroughs that are not possible on Earth. The station is a critical testbed for NASA to understand and overcome the challenges of long-duration spaceflight and to expand commercial opportunities in low Earth orbit. As commercial companies concentrate on providing human space transportation services and destinations as part of a robust low Earth orbit economy, NASA is focusing its resources on deep space missions to the Moon as part of the Artemis campaign in preparation for future human missions to Mars.
Learn more about International Space Station research and operations at:
-end-
Josh Finch / Jimi Russell
Headquarters, Washington
202-358-1100
joshua.a.finch@nasa.gov / james.j.russell@nasa.gov
Sandra Jones / Joseph Zakrzewski
Johnson Space Center, Houston
281-483-5111
sandra.p.jones@nasa.gov / joseph.a.zakrzewski@nasa.gov
NASA Sets Coverage for Astronaut Jonny Kim, Crewmates Return
NASA astronaut Jonny Kim, accompanied by Roscosmos cosmonauts Sergey Ryzhikov and Alexey Zubritsky, is preparing to depart the International Space Station aboard the Soyuz MS-27 spacecraft and return to Earth.
Kim, Ryzhikov, and Zubritsky will undock from the station’s Prichal module at 8:41 p.m. EST on Monday, Dec. 8, headed for a parachute-assisted landing at 12:04 a.m. on Tuesday, Dec. 9 (10:04 a.m. local time in Kazakhstan), on the steppe of Kazakhstan, southeast of the city of Dzhezkazgan.
Watch NASA’s live coverage of the crew’s return on NASA+, Amazon Prime, and the agency’s YouTube channel. Learn how to stream NASA content through a variety of online platforms, including social media.
The space station change of command ceremony will begin at 10:30 a.m. Sunday, Dec. 7, on NASA+ and the agency’s YouTube channel. Rzyhikov will hand over station command to NASA astronaut Mike Fincke for Expedition 74, which begins at the time of Soyuz MS-27 undocking.
Kim and his crewmates are completing a 245-day mission aboard the station. At the conclusion of their mission, they will have orbited Earth 3,920 times and traveled nearly 104 million miles. This was the first flight for Kim and Zubritsky to the orbiting laboratory, while Ryzhikov is ending his third trip to space.
After landing, the three crew members will fly by helicopter to Karaganda, Kazakhstan, where recovery teams are based. Kim will board a NASA aircraft and return to Houston, while Ryzhikov and Zubritsky will depart for their training base in Star City, Russia.
NASA’s coverage is as follows (all times Eastern and subject to change based on real-time operations):
Sunday, Dec. 7:
10:30 a.m. – Expedition 73/74 change of command ceremony begins on NASA+ Amazon Prime, and YouTube.
Monday, Dec. 8:
4:45 p.m. – Farewells and hatch closing coverage begins on NASA+, Amazon Prime, and YouTube.
5:10 p.m. – Hatch closing
8:15 p.m. – Undocking coverage beings on NASA+, Amazon Prime, and YouTube.
8:41 p.m. – Undocking
10:30 p.m. – Deorbit and landing coverage begins on NASA+, Amazon Prime, and YouTube.
11:10 p.m. – Deorbit burn
Tuesday, Dec. 9:
12:04 a.m. – Landing
For more than 25 years, people have lived and worked continuously aboard the International Space Station, advancing scientific knowledge and making research breakthroughs that are not possible on Earth. The station is a critical testbed for NASA to understand and overcome the challenges of long-duration spaceflight and to expand commercial opportunities in low Earth orbit. As commercial companies concentrate on providing human space transportation services and destinations as part of a robust low Earth orbit economy, NASA is focusing its resources on deep space missions to the Moon as part of the Artemis campaign in preparation for future human missions to Mars.
Learn more about International Space Station research and operations at:
-end-
Josh Finch / Jimi Russell
Headquarters, Washington
202-358-1100
joshua.a.finch@nasa.gov / james.j.russell@nasa.gov
Sandra Jones / Joseph Zakrzewski
Johnson Space Center, Houston
281-483-5111
sandra.p.jones@nasa.gov / joseph.a.zakrzewski@nasa.gov
China’s CO2 Emissions Might Have Finally Peaked
China has rapidly become the world leader in renewable energy, but continued coal use means it could take longer for its emissions to decline
The Black Death May Be Linked to a Mysterious Volcanic Eruption
The Black Death ravaged Europe, and scientists and historians are still working to understand how it became so deadly
Volcano eruption may have led to the Black Death coming to Europe
Volcano eruption may have led to the Black Death coming to Europe
NASA-JAXA XRISM Finds Elemental Bounty in Supernova Remnant
4 min read
NASA-JAXA XRISM Finds Elemental Bounty in Supernova RemnantFor the first time, scientists have made a clear X-ray detection of chlorine and potassium in the wreckage of a star using data from the Japan-led XRISM (X-ray Imaging and Spectroscopy Mission) spacecraft.
The Resolve instrument aboard XRISM, pronounced “crism,” discovered these elements in a supernova remnant called Cassiopeia A or Cas A, for short. The expanding cloud of debris is located about 11,000 light-years away in the northern constellation Cassiopeia.
“This discovery helps illustrate how the deaths of stars and life on Earth are fundamentally linked,” said Toshiki Sato, an astrophysicist at Meiji University in Tokyo. “Stars appear to shimmer quietly in the night sky, but they actively forge materials that form planets and enable life as we know it. Now, thanks to XRISM, we have a better idea of when and how stars might make crucial, yet harder-to-find, elements.”
A paper about the result published Dec. 4 in Nature Astronomy. Sato led the study with Kai Matsunaga and Hiroyuki Uchida, both at Kyoto University in Japan. JAXA (Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency) leads XRISM in collaboration with NASA, along with contributions from ESA (European Space Agency). NASA and JAXA also codeveloped the Resolve instrument.
Observations of the Cassiopeia A supernova remnant by the Resolve instrument aboard the NASA-JAXA XRISM (X-ray Imaging and Spectroscopy Mission) spacecraft revealed strong evidence for potassium (green squares) in the southeast and northern parts of the remnant. Grids superposed on a multiwavelength image of the remnant represent the fields of view of two Resolve measurements made in December 2023. Each square represents one pixel of Resolve’s detector. Weaker evidence of potassium (yellow squares) in the west suggests that the original star may have had underlying asymmetries before it exploded.NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center; X-ray: NASA/CXC/SAO; Optical: NASA/ESA/STScI; IR: NASA/ESA/CSA/STScI/Milisavljevic et al., NASA/JPL/CalTech; Image Processing: NASA/CXC/SAO/J. Schmidt and K. Arcand Download high-resolution images from NASA’s Scientific Visualization Studio
Stars produce almost all the elements in the universe heavier than hydrogen and helium through nuclear reactions. Heat and pressure fuse lighter ones, like carbon, into progressively heavier ones, like neon, creating onion-like layers of materials in stellar interiors.
Nuclear reactions also take place during explosive events like supernovae, which occur when stars run out of fuel, collapse, and explode. Elemental abundances and locations in the wreckage can, respectively, tell scientists about the star and its explosion, even after hundreds or thousands of years.
Some elements — like oxygen, carbon, and neon — are more common than others and are easier to detect and trace back to a particular part of the star’s life.
Other elements — like chlorine and potassium — are more elusive. Since scientists have less data about them, it’s more difficult to model where in the star they formed. These rarer elements still play important roles in life on Earth. Potassium, for example, helps the cells and muscles in our bodies function, so astronomers are interested in tracing its cosmic origins.
The roughly circular Cas A supernova remnant spans about 10 light-years, is over 340 years old, and has a superdense neutron star at its center — the remains of the original star’s core. Scientists using NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory had previously identified signatures of iron, silicon, sulfur, and other elements within Cas A.
In the hunt for other elements, the team used the Resolve instrument aboard XRISM to look at the remnant twice in December 2023. The researchers were able to pick out the signatures for chlorine and potassium, determining that the remnant contains ratios much higher than expected. Resolve also detected a possible indication of phosphorous, which was previously discovered in Cas A by infrared missions.
Watch to learn more about how the Resolve instrument aboard XRISM captures extraordinary data on the make-up of galaxy clusters, exploded stars, and more using only 36 pixels.Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center
“Resolve’s high resolution and sensitivity make these kinds of measurements possible,” said Brian Williams, the XRISM project scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. “Combining XRISM’s capabilities with those of other missions allows scientists to detect and measure these rare elements that are so critical to the formation of life in the universe.”
The astronomers think stellar activity could have disrupted the layers of nuclear fusion inside the star before it exploded. That kind of upheaval might have led to persistent, large-scale churning of material inside the star that created conditions where chlorine and potassium formed in abundance.
The scientists also mapped the Resolve observations onto an image of Cas A captured by Chandra and showed that the elements were concentrated in the southeast and northern parts of the remnant.
This lopsided distribution may mean that the star itself had underlying asymmetries before it exploded, which Chandra data indicated earlier this year in a study Sato led.
“Being able to make measurements with good statistical precision of these rarer elements really helps us understand the nuclear fusion that goes on in stars before and during supernovae,” said co-author Paul Plucinsky, an astrophysicist at the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian in Cambridge, Massachusetts. “We suspected a key part might be asymmetry, and now we have more evidence that’s the case. But there’s still a lot we just don’t understand about how stars explode and distribute all these elements across the cosmos.”
By Jeanette Kazmierczak
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.
Media Contact:
Claire Andreoli
301-286-1940
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.