What happened. Why it matters. Plainly.
Space, research and discovery: what was measured, who measured it, and what is still waiting on confirmation.
Japan’s space agency JAXA targets a 3:41 p.m. EDT launch on Oct. 19 for MMX, a probe to land on Mars’ moon Phobos and bring a sample back to Earth in 2031.
Warwick astronomers report some white dwarfs would look green, pink or cyan up close, roughly one in 30 differ from white, but the median white dwarf is white.
Archaeologists say a wreck off Kekova Island, Turkey, is the world’s oldest, dated to 4,400 to 4,700 years ago by pottery style, not by a physical method.
A SpaceX Dragon cargo capsule lifted off from Cape Canaveral on Oct. 13 carrying the last pair of roll-out solar arrays for the International Space Station and NASA research on brain tissue, crop disease and antibiotic-resistant bacteria. It is due to arrive on Oct. 15.
Copernicus reported a record 29.70 C monthly sea-surface temperature in the Nino3.4 region in September; the article explains what that does and does not show.
Webb found the host of FRB 20240304B, a small dwarf galaxy seen 3 billion years after the Big Bang, the most distant fast radio burst with an identified host.
Nature published two papers on Oct. 7 reporting working thorium-229 nuclear clocks from Vienna and Beijing; neither claims to beat today’s best atomic clocks.
Francis Halzen of the University of Wisconsin-Madison wins the 2026 Nobel Prize in Physics for IceCube, the South Pole neutrino detector, the Academy said.
The 2026 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was awarded to Karl Deisseroth, Peter Hegemann and Georg Nagel for light-gated ion channels and optogenetics.
Academy of Natural Sciences closes Oct. 3 in Philadelphia. William Penn Foundation offers operating support for another year; Drexel says no formal proposal has been received.
As of NASA’s 10:01 p.m. EDT post, Crew-13’s four members are now aboard the space station after Dragon’s hatch opened at 9:19 p.m. EDT on Thursday, Oct. 1.
Swiss glaciers lost 5.5% of their ice volume in 2026, an extrapolation from 23 measured glaciers, the second-biggest annual drop in GLAMOS records after 2022.
Starship reached orbit for the first time Monday, then splashed down north of Hawaii nearly seven hours early after an engine shut down, SpaceX said.
SpaceX launched Starship’s 14th flight on Sept. 28; it reached orbit for the first time but splashed down about 3 hours after liftoff. Here is the pre-launch plan.
A new Science study finds that dogs’ and humans’ brains track invented words by their consonants more than their vowels, a pattern long seen in humans.
A sub-Neptune, GJ 3090 b, orbits its red dwarf star against the star’s spin, astronomers report, but the 136-degree angle carries a wide margin of error.
Three fossilized T. rex teeth put its body temperature at 36.3°C, near a modern elephant’s, using clumped isotope thermometry with a real margin of error.