Space & Aerospace

Nanoscale spectroscopy at 20nm resolution on Bennu sample OREX-800066-3 reveals a chemical patchwork that defies uniform processing — nitrogen-bearing organics survived extensive water alteration, and organosulfur compounds point to late-stage brine chemistry on the asteroid.

A container ship ran aground in the Red Sea in May 2025 after GPS interference placed it hundreds of miles away in the Sahara. A phonon laser paper in Nature Communications (DOI 10.1038/s41467-026-70564-3) narrows the path to a GPS-independent quantum compass.

NASA tested silicon carbide electronics in simulated Venus surface conditions for 21.7 consecutive days without failure — a lander concept from TU Delft is betting that and a few other advances are enough to stay for 200 days, vs the current 127-minute record.

They have sent 31 passengers to space in their entire history. Blue Origin just quit the market. At $750,000 per seat, Virgin Galactic is the only ride left — and it has a going-concern warning in its SEC filing.

On Earth, fiber-optic seismic sensors must be buried because wind shakes surface cables. The Moon has no wind. That single fact means a rover can roll out the cable and it works, no digging required. Two peer-reviewed papers confirm the physics.

For 35 years Arm made money by licensing CPU designs to Apple, Qualcomm, Amazon and everyone else. Now it is selling its own chip to the same customers. The $71M Austin lab, 1,000 engineers, and Meta as co-developer are not the actions of a neutral IP company.

XRISM clocked M82s hot wind at over 2 million miles per hour and found that supernovae, not cosmic rays, do the driving. Sixty percent of every blasts energy goes into the wind. Three solar masses per year still go missing.

The hard part of putting a chemical sensor on a chip is not the sensor itself. It is getting three different material systems — graphene, MoS2, and silicon — to coexist on the same substrate and actually work together.

Quantum gravity usually can't predict anything testable. This paper can — and the universe gets to prove it wrong.

Apollo flew through solar storms on luck. Artemis 2 has a radiation sensor, a storm shelter, and a 48-hour warning window — infrastructure that did not exist in 1972.

IBM Research has published an empirical study showing that general-purpose coding agents — with no hardware-specific training — can meaningfully optimize hardware designs described in high-level code.