More office space in the U.S. is being removed than added for the first time in at least 25 years. New data from CBRE Group shows that across the 58 largest US markets, 23.3 million square feet of office space is slated for demolition or conversion by year-end, while developers will complete just 12.7 million square feet of new construction.

New simulations suggest that the long-assumed collision between the Milky Way and Andromeda galaxies is not guaranteed, with the odds now estimated at just over 50% within the next 10 billion years. Factoring in other massive galaxies like M33 and the Large Magellanic Cloud revealed that their gravitational influence significantly alters the likelihood of a merger. ScienceAlert reports: The Milky Way and Andromeda are not, however, alone in this little corner of the cosmos. They belong to a small group of galaxies within a radius of about 5 million light-years from the Milky Way known as the Local Group. The Milky Way and Andromeda are the largest members, but there are quite a few other objects hanging out that need to be taken into consideration when modeling the future. [Astrophysicist Till Sawala of the University of Helsinki] and his colleagues took the latest data from the Hubble and Gaia space telescopes, and the most recent mass estimates for the four most massive objects in the Local Group -- the Milky Way, Andromeda, the Triangulum galaxy (M33), and the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC). Then, they set about running simulations of the next 10 billion years, adding and removing galaxies to see how that changed the results.

Their results showed that the presence of M33 and LMC dramatically altered the probability of a collision between the Milky Way and Andromeda. When it is just the two large spiral galaxies, the merger occurred in slightly less than half the simulation runs. The addition of M33 increased the merger probability to two in three. Taking M33 back out and adding LMC had the opposite effect, decreasing the probability to one in three. When all four galaxies were present, the probability of a merger between the Milky Way and Andromeda within 10 billion years is slightly more than 50 percent. "We find that there are basically two types of outcomes," Sawala said. "The Milky Way and Andromeda will either come close enough on their first encounter (first 'pericenter') that dynamical friction between the two dark matter haloes will drag the orbit to an eventual merger, which very likely happens before 10 billion years, or they do not come close enough, in which case dynamical friction is not effective, and they can still orbit for a very long time thereafter."

"The main result of our work is that there is still significant uncertainty about the future evolution -- and eventual fate -- of our galaxy," Sawala added. "Of course, as a working astrophysicist, the best results are those that motivate future studies, and I think our paper provides motivation both for more comprehensive models and for more precise observations."

The research has been published in Nature Astronomy.

A new analysis argues that Stack Overflow's decline began years before AI tools delivered the "final blow" to the once-dominant programming forum. The site's monthly questions dropped from a peak of 200,000 to a steep collapse that began in earnest after ChatGPT's 2023 launch, but usage had been declining since 2014, according to data cited in the InfoWorld analysis.

The platform's remarkable reputation system initially elevated it above competitors by allowing users to earn points and badges for helpful contributions, but that same system eventually became its downfall, the piece argues. As Stack Overflow evolved into a self-governing platform where high-reputation users gained moderation powers, the community transformed from a welcoming space for developer interaction into what the author compares to a "Stanford Prison Experiment" where moderators systematically culled interactions they deemed irrelevant.

A new business model has emerged across China's major cities, El Pais reports, where companies charge unemployed individuals to rent desk space and pretend to work, responding to social pressure around joblessness amid rising youth unemployment rates. These services charge between 30 and 50 yuan ($4-7) daily for desks, Wi-Fi, coffee, and lunch in spaces designed to mimic traditional work environments.

Some operations assign fictitious tasks and organize supervisory rounds to enhance the illusion, while premium services allow clients to roleplay as managers or stage workplace conflicts for additional fees. The trend has gained significant traction on Xiaohongshu, China's equivalent to Instagram, where advertisements for "pretend-to-work companies" accumulate millions of views. Youth unemployment reached 16.5% among 16-to-24-year-olds in March 2025, according to National Bureau of Statistics data, while overall urban unemployment stood at 5.3% in the first quarter.

Adam Riess won a Nobel Prize in Physics for helping discover that the universe's acceleration is expanding, remembers The Atlantic. But then theorists "proposed the existence of dark energy: a faint, repulsive force that pervades all of empty space... the final piece to what has since come to be called the 'standard model of cosmology.'"

Riess thinks instead we should just replace the standard model: When I visited Riess, back in January, he mentioned he was looking forward to a data release from the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument, a new observatory on Kitt Peak, in Arizona's portion of the Sonoran Desert. DESI has 5,000 robotically controlled optic fibers. Every 20 minutes, each of them locks onto a different galaxy in the deep sky. This process is scheduled to continue for a total of five years, until millions of galaxies have been observed, enough to map cosmic expansion across time... DESI's first release, last year, gave some preliminary hints that dark energy was stronger in the early universe, and that its power then began to fade ever so slightly. On March 19, the team followed up with the larger set of data that Riess was awaiting. It was based on three years of observations, and the signal that it gave was stronger: Dark energy appeared to lose its kick several billion years ago.

This finding is not settled science, not even close. But if it holds up, a "wholesale revision" of the standard model would be required [says Colin Hill, a cosmologist at Columbia University. "The textbooks that I use in my class would need to be rewritten." And not only the textbooks — the idea that our universe will end in heat death has escaped the dull, technical world of academic textbooks. It has become one of our dominant secular eschatologies, and perhaps the best-known end-times story for the cosmos. And yet it could be badly wrong. If dark energy weakens all the way to zero, the universe may, at some point, stop expanding. It could come to rest in some static configuration of galaxies. Life, especially intelligent life, could go on for a much longer time than previously expected.

If dark energy continues to fade, as the DESI results suggest is happening, it may indeed go all the way to zero, and then turn negative. Instead of repelling galaxies, a negative dark energy would bring them together into a hot, dense singularity, much like the one that existed during the Big Bang. This could perhaps be part of some larger eternal cycle of creation and re-creation. Or maybe not. The point is that the deep future of the universe is wide open...
"Many new observations will come, not just from DESI, but also from the new Vera Rubin Observatory in the Atacama Desert, and other new telescopes in space. On data-release days for years to come, the standard model's champions and detractors will be feverishly refreshing their inboxes..." And Riess tells The Atlantic he's disappointed when complacent theorists just tell him "Yeah, that's a really hard problem."

He adds, "Sometimes, I feel like I am providing clues and killing time while we wait for the next Einstein to come along."

"The Doctor is dead. Long live the Doctor!" writes Space.com. (Spoilers ahead...) "The era of Ncuti Gatwa's Fifteenth Doctor came to a surprise end on Saturday night, as the Time Lord regenerated at the end of "Doctor Who" season 2 finale... [T]he Doctor gradually realises that not everything is back to normal. Poppy, his daughter with Belinda Chandra in the "Wish World" fantasy, has been erased from history, so the Time Lord decides to sacrifice himself by firing a ton of regeneration energy into the time Vortex to "jolt it one degree" — and hopefully bring her back. It goes without saying that his madcap scheme saves Poppy, as we learn that, in this rewritten timeline, the little girl was always the reason Belinda had been desperate to get back home. But arguably the biggest talking point of the episode — and, indeed, the season — is saved until last, as the Doctor regenerates into a very familiar face...
Hint: They played the Doctor's companion, Rose Tyler, "alongside Christopher Eccleston's Ninth Doctor and David Tennant's Tenth Doctor during the phenomenally successful first two seasons of the show's 2005 reboot."

Showrunner Russell T Davies called it "an honour and a hoot" to welcome back Billie Piper to the TARDIS, "but quite how and why and who is a story yet to be told. After 62 years, the Doctor's adventures are only just beginning!" Although the show's post-regeneration credits have traditionally featured the line "And introducing [insert name] as the Doctor", here it simply says "And introducing Billie Piper". The omission of "as the Doctor" is unlikely to be accidental, suggesting that Davies is playing a very elaborate game with "Who" fandom...

Another mystery! The BBC and Disney+ are yet to confirm if and when "Doctor Who" will return for a third season of its current iteration.
"There's no decision until after season two..." Davies told Radio Times in April (as spotted by the Independent). "That's when the decision is — and the decision won't even be made by the people we work with at Disney Plus, it'll be made by someone in a big office somewhere. So literally nothing happening, no decision."

"For a new series to be ready for 2026, production would need to get under way relatively soon," writes the BBC. "So at the moment a new series or a special starring Billie Piper before 2027 looks unlikely." The Guardian adds: Concerns have been raised about falling viewing figures, which have struggled to rally since Russell T Davies' return in 2023. Two episodes during this series, which aired in May, got less than 3 million viewers — the lowest since the modern era began airing in 2005.
The Independent has this statement from Piper: "It's no secret how much I love this show, and I have always said I would love to return to the Whoniverse as I have some of my best memories there, so to be given the opportunity to step back on that Tardis one more time was just something I couldn't refuse, but who, how, why and when, you'll just have to wait and see."

An anonymous reader shared this report from Space.com: Three world travelers, two Space Camp alums and an aerospace executive whose last name aptly matched their shared adventure traveled into space and back Saturday, becoming the latest six people to fly with Blue Origin, the spaceflight company founded by billionaire Jeff Bezos.

Mark Rocket joined Jaime Alemán, Jesse Williams, Paul Jeris, Gretchen Green and Amy Medina Jorge on board the RSS First Step — Blue Origin's first of two human-rated New Shepard capsules — for a trip above the Kármán Line, the 62-mile-high (100-kilometer) internationally recognized boundary between Earth and space...

Mark Rocket became the first New Zealander to reach space on the mission. His connection to aerospace goes beyond his apt name and today's flight; he's currently the CEO of Kea Aerospace and previously helped lead Rocket Lab, a competing space launch company to Blue Origin that sends most of its rockets up from New Zealand. Alemán, Williams and Jeris each traveled the world extensively before briefly leaving the planet today. An attorney from Panama, Alemán is now the first person to have visited all 193 countries recognized by the United Nations, traveled to the North and South Poles, and now, have been into space. For Williams, an entrepreneur from Canada, Saturday's flight continued his record of achieving high altitudes; he has summitted Mt. Everest and five of the other six other highest mountains across the globe.
"For about three minutes, the six NS-32 crewmates experienced weightlessness," the article points out, "and had an astronaut's-eye view of the planet..."

On social media Blue Origin notes it's their 12th human spaceflight, "and the 32nd flight of the New Shepard program."

AI company Anthropic (founded in 2021 by a team that left OpenAI) is now making about $3 billion a year in revenue, reports Reuters (citing "two sources familiar with the matter.") The sources said December's projections had been for just $1 billion a year, but it climbed to $2 billion by the end of March (and now to $3 billion) — a spectacular growth rate that one VC says "has never happened." A key driver is code generation. The San Francisco-based startup, backed by Google parent Alphabet and Amazon, is famous for AI that excels at computer programming. Products in the so-called codegen space have experienced major growth and adoption in recent months, often drawing on Anthropic's models.
Anthropic sells AI models as a service to other companies, according to the article, and Reuters calls Anthropic's success "an early validation of generative AI use in the business world" — and a long-awaited indicator that it's growing. (Their rival OpenAI earns more than half its revenue from ChatGPT subscriptions and "is shaping up to be a consumer-oriented company," according to their article, with "a number of enterprises" limiting their rollout of ChatGPT to "experimentation.")

Then again, in February OpenAI's chief operating officer said they had 2 million paying enterprise users, roughly doubling from September, according to CNBC. The latest figures from Reuters...

• Anthropic's valuation: $61.4 billion.
• OpenAI's valuation: $300 billion.

In December it looked like NASA's next administrator would be the billionaire businessman/space enthusiast who twice flew to orbit with SpaceX.

But Saturday the nomination was withdrawn "after a thorough review of prior associations," according to an announcement made on social media. The Guardian reports: His removal from consideration caught many in the space industry by surprise. Trump and the White House did not explain what led to the decision... In [Isaacman's] confirmation hearing in April, he sought to balance Nasa's existing moon-aligned space exploration strategy with pressure to shift the agency's focus on Mars, saying the US can plan for travel to both destinations. As a potential leader of Nasa's 18,000 employees, Isaacman faced a daunting task of implementing that decision to prioritize Mars, given that Nasa has spent years and billions of dollars trying to return its astronauts to the moon...

Some scientists saw the nominee change as further destabilizing to Nasa as it faces dramatic budget cuts without a confirmed leader in place to navigate political turbulence between Congress, the White House and the space agency's workforce.
"It was unclear whom the administration might tap to replace Isaacman," the article adds, though "One name being floated is the retired US air force Lt Gen Steven Kwast, an early advocate for the creation of the US Space Force..."

Ars Technica notes that Kwast, a former Lieutenant General in the U.S. Air Force, has a background that "seems to be far less oriented toward NASA's civil space mission and far more focused on seeing space as a battlefield — decidedly not an arena for cooperation and peaceful exploration."

"More than 200 climate and weather scientists from across the U.S. are taking part in a marathon livestream on YouTube," according to this report from Space.com. For 100 hours (that started Wednesday) they're sharing their scientific work and answering questions from viewers, "to prove the value of climate science," according to the article.

The event is being stated in protest of recent government funding cuts at NASA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the United States Geological Survey, and the National Science Foundation. (The event began with "scientists documenting their last few hours at NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies as the office was shuttered.") The marathon stream features mini-lectures, panels and question-and-answer sessions with hundreds of scientists, each speaking in their capacity as private citizens rather than on behalf of any institution. These include talks from former National Weather Service directors, Britney Schmidt, a groundbreaking glacier researcher, and legendary meteorologist John Morales.

In its first 30 hours, the stream got over 77,000 views.

Ultimately, the goal of the event is to give members of the public the chance to learn more about meteorology and climate science in an informal setting — and for free. "We really felt like the American public deserves to know what we do," Duffy said. However, many of the speakers and organizers also hope the transference of this knowledge will spur people to take action. The event's website features a link to 5 Calls, an organization that makes it easy for folks to contact their representatives in Congress about the importance of funding climate and weather research.

Astronomers have discovered a mysterious cosmic object, ASKAP J1832-0911, that emits both radio waves and X-rays in precise 44-minute cycles, making it unlike anything observed before. Space.com reports: This is the first time an object like this, a so-called "long-period transient" or "LPT," has been seen in high-energy X-ray light as well as low-energy radio wave light. The team behind this discovery hopes the finding could help reveal what these flashing objects actually are and how they launch their mystery signals. However, not only is there no explanation for how the signals from LPTs are generated yet, but astronomers also don't know why these signals "switch on" and "switch off" at long, regular and unusual intervals. "This object is unlike anything we have seen before," team leader and Curtin University researcher Zieng (Andy) Wang said in a statement. [...]

The team believes the true nature of ASKAP J1832-0911 is a dead star, they just don't quite know what form that star takes. A highly magnetic neutron star, or "magnetar," is one option, and a a white dwarf -- the kind of stellar remnant the sun will leave behind when it dies in over 5 billion years -- is another. "ASKAP J1831- 0911 could be a magnetar, the core of a dead star with powerful magnetic fields, or it could be a pair of stars in a binary system where one of the two is a highly magnetized white dwarf, a low-mass star at the end of its evolution," Wang said. "However, even those theories do not fully explain what we are observing. "This discovery could indicate a new type of physics or new models of stellar evolution." The research has been published in the journal Nature.

SpaceX's Starship Flight 9 successfully launched and reached space -- marking the first reuse of a Super Heavy booster -- but both rocket stages were ultimately lost mid-mission due to a "rapid unscheduled disassembly." SpaceX CEO Elon Musk said in a statement: "Starship made it to the scheduled ship engine cutoff, so big improvement over last flight! Leaks caused loss of main tank pressure during the coast and re-entry phase. Lot of good data to review." Musk said the next three Starship test launches could lift off every three to four weeks in the days ahead. Space.com reports: The mission lifted off from Starbase today at 7:37 p.m. EDT (2337 GMT; 6:37 p.m. local Texas time), sending the 40-story-tall rocket into the Texas sky atop a pillar of flame. It was a milestone launch, marking the first-ever reuse of a Super Heavy booster; this one earned its wings on Flight 7 in January. (SpaceX swapped out just four of its Raptors after that mission, meaning that 29 of the engines that flew today were flight-proven.) "Lessons learned from the first booster refurbishment and subsequent performance in flight will enable faster turnarounds of future reflights as progress is made towards vehicles requiring no hands-on maintenance between launches," the company wrote in a Flight 9 mission preview.

The Super Heavy had a somewhat different job to do today; it conducted a variety of experiments on its way back down to Earth. For example, the booster performed a controlled rather than randomized return flip and hit the atmosphere at a different angle. "By increasing the amount of atmospheric drag on the vehicle, a higher angle of attack can result in a lower descent speed, which in turn requires less propellant for the initial landing burn," SpaceX wrote in the mission preview. "Getting real-world data on how the booster is able to control its flight at this higher angle of attack will contribute to improved performance on future vehicles, including the next generation of Super Heavy." These experiments complicated Super Heavy's flight profile compared to previous missions, making another "chopsticks" catch at Starbase a tougher proposition. So, rather than risk damaging the launch tower and other infrastructure, SpaceX decided to bring the booster back for a "hard splashdown" in the Gulf of Mexico on Flight 9. That was the plan, anyway; Super Heavy didn't quite make it that far. The booster broke apart about 6 minutes and 20 seconds into today's flight, just after beginning its landing burn. "Confirmation that the booster did demise," [Dan Huot, of SpaceX's communications team] said during the Flight 9 webcast. Super Heavy's flight ended "before it was able to get through landing burn," he added.

Ship, by contrast, improved its performance a bit this time around. It reached space today on a suborbital trajectory that took it eastward over the Atlantic Ocean -- the same basic path the vehicle took on the truncated Flight 7 and Flight 8. But Flight 9 got choppy for Ship after that. The vehicle was supposed to deploy eight dummy versions of SpaceX's Starlink satellites about 18.5 minutes after liftoff, which would have been a landmark first for the Starship program. That didn't happen, however; the payload door couldn't open fully, so SpaceX abandoned the deployment try. Then, about 30 minutes after launch, Ship started to tumble, which was the result of a leak in Ship's fuel-tank systems, according to Huot. "A lot of those [tanks] are used for your attitude control," he said. "And so, at this point, we've essentially lost our attitude control with Starship." As a result, SpaceX nixed a plan to relight one of Ship's Raptor engines in space, a test that was supposed to happen about 38 minutes after launch. And the company gave up hope of a soft splashdown for the vehicle, instead becoming resigned to a breakup over the Indian Ocean during Ship's reentry.

The company therefore will not get all the data it wanted about Flight 9. And there was quite a bit to get; for example, SpaceX removed some of Ship's heat-shield tiles to stress-test vulnerable areas, and it also tried out several different tile materials, including one with an active cooling system. But the company plans to bounce back and try again soon, just as it did after Flight 7 and Flight 8. You can watch a recording of the launch on YouTube.

OnePlus is replacing its iconic Alert Slider with a new customizable "Plus Key" on the upcoming OnePlus 13s, which launches the new AI Plus Mind feature that lets users capture and search content found on screen. This update is part of a broader AI push for its devices that includes tools like AI VoiceScribe for call summaries, AI Translation for multi-modal language support, and AI Best Face 2.0 for photo corrections. Engadget reports: What AI Plus Mind does is save relevant content to a dedicated Mind Space, where users can browse various information that they've saved. Users can then search for the detail they want to find using natural language queries. Both the Plus Key and the AI Plus Mind will debut on the OnePlus 13s in Asia. AI Plus Mind will roll out to the rest of the OnePlus 13 Series devices through a future software update, while all future OnePlus phone will come with the new physical key. Notably, the new button and feature bear similarities to Nothing's physical Essential Key that can also save information inside the Essential Space app. Nothing was founded by Carl Pei who co-founded OnePlus.

"For decades, Hollywood directors including Stanley Kubrick, James Cameron and Alex Garland have cast AI as a villain that can turn into a killing machine," writes the Los Angeles Times. "Even Steven Spielberg's relatively hopeful A.I.: Artificial Intelligence had a pessimistic edge to its vision of the future."

But now "Google — a leading developer in AI technology — wants to move the cultural conversations away from the technology as seen in The Terminator, 2001: A Space Odyssey and Ex Machina.". So they're funding short films "that portray the technology in a less nightmarish light," produced by Range Media Partners (which represents many writers and actors) So far, two short films have been greenlit through the project: One, titled "Sweetwater," tells the story of a man who visits his childhood home and discovers a hologram of his dead celebrity mother. Michael Keaton will direct and appear in the film, which was written by his son, Sean Douglas. It is the first project they are working on together. The other, "Lucid," examines a couple who want to escape their suffocating reality and risk everything on a device that allows them to share the same dream....

Google has much riding on convincing consumers that AI can be a force for good, or at least not evil. The hot space is increasingly crowded with startups and established players such as OpenAI, Anthropic, Apple and Facebook parent company Meta. The Google-funded shorts, which are 15 to 20 minutes long, aren't commercials for AI, per se. Rather, Google is looking to fund films that explore the intersection of humanity and technology, said Mira Lane, vice president of technology and society at Google. Google is not pushing their products in the movies, and the films are not made with AI, she added... The company said it wants to fund many more movies, but it does not have a target number. Some of the shorts could eventually become full-length features, Google said....

Negative public perceptions about AI could put tech companies at a disadvantage when such cases go before juries of laypeople. That's one reason why firms are motivated to makeover AI's reputation. "There's an incredible amount of skepticism in the public world about what AI is and what AI will do in the future," said Sean Pak, an intellectual property lawyer at Quinn Emanuel, on a conference panel. "We, as an industry, have to do a better job of communicating the public benefits and explaining in simple, clear language what it is that we're doing and what it is that we're not doing."

Astronomers have confirmed the existence of a bizarre planet in the Nu Octantis binary star system that orbits in reverse between two stars -- one of which is now a white dwarf. This retrograde orbit, once thought impossible, defies traditional planetary formation models and may have resulted from dramatic shifts in the system's history. New Scientist reports: The key observation was that the Nu Octantis planet is retrograde -- the planet and one star both orbit the second star, but they do so in opposite directions, with the planet having the tighter orbit around the second star. [Man Hoi Lee at the University of Hong Kong] says this is unusual but makes the system's configuration stable -- even though it means that the planet repeatedly moves through the narrow space between the two stars. His team was able to determine this with lots of certainty thanks to improved measuring devices, such as the HARPS spectrograph at the European Southern Observatory's 3.6-metre telescope in Chile. The fact that the planet's signal persisted through years of observation helped too. "We are pretty sure [the planet] is real, because if it was something like stellar activity, it shouldn't be so consistent in years of data," says Lee.

But this backwards-moving planet isn't the only exotic feature of Nu Octantis. The researchers used the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope, also in Chile, to determine that one of its stars is a white dwarf, which means that it has reached the end of its life cycle, becoming denser and smaller. Lee says this complicates the Nu Octantis threesome's history because mathematical models of its past show that the planet's current orbit was impossible when this star was younger, bigger and brighter. So, the planet either used to orbit both stars at once, but then radically shifted trajectory when one of the two stars became a white dwarf, or it was formed from the mass that the star ejected as it transformed into a white dwarf. Future observations, and a lot more mathematical modelling, may be able to pinpoint which of these scenarios is more likely to have occurred, but both are rather novel, says Lee. The research has been published in the journal Nature.

China has achieved substantial technological advances across robotics, AI, and semiconductor manufacturing as part of a seven-year self-reliance campaign that has tripled the country's research and development spending to $500 billion annually.

Chinese robot manufacturers captured nearly half of their domestic market by 2023, up from a quarter of installations just years earlier, while AI startups now rival OpenAI and Google in capabilities. The progress extends to semiconductors, where Huawei released a high-end smartphone powered by what industry analysts believe was a locally-produced advanced processor, despite U.S. export controls targeting China's chip access.

Morgan Stanley projects China's self-sufficiency in graphics processing units will jump from 11% in 2021 to 82% by 2027. Chinese companies have been purchasing as many industrial robots as the rest of the world combined, enabling highly automated factories that can operate in darkness. In space technology, Chinese firms won five of 11 gold medals when U.S. think tanks ranked the world's best commercial satellite systems last year, compared to four for American companies.

Wisk Aero and NASA have signed a new five-year partnership to advance the safe integration of autonomous, all-electric aircraft into U.S. airspace, focusing on urban air mobility and regulated eVTOL flight. Electrek reports: Wisk Aero shared details of its refreshed partnership with NASA this week. The autonomous aviation specialist has signed a new five-year Non-Reimbursable Space Act Agreement (NRSAA) with the renowned space administration. Per Wisk, this new agreement focuses on critical research led by NASA's Air Traffic Management Exploration (ATM-X) project, which is centered around the advancement of commercialized autonomous aircraft travel under Instrument Flight Rules (IFR) in the National Airspace System (NAS).

As a specialist in autonomous, zero-emission aircraft, Wisk intends to continue its research alongside NASA to help regulators determine future eVTOL flight procedures and capabilities in the US. Regulatory developments on the to-do list for the latest NRSAA include optimizing airspace and route designs for highly automated UAM operations, establishing critical aircraft and ground-based safety system requirements for autonomous flight in urban environments, and establishing Air Traffic Control (ATC) communication protocols and procedures for seamless integration of future UAM aircraft. To achieve these goals, Wisk said its research with NASA will more specifically focus on utilizing advanced simulation and Live Virtual Constructive (LVC) flight environments, which combine live flights with a simulated airspace to enable researchers to assess future operations.

The teams from Wisk and NASA already met last month, continuing their research while beginning to determine how instrument flight procedures and advanced technologies can work together to enable safe autonomous passenger flights by 2030. Wisk Aero is a wholly owned subsidiary of Boeing based in California. The aerospace manufacturer said last year that it expects its pilotless air-taxi to begin carrying passengers "later in the decade."

Scientists have discovered a previously unknown bacterium aboard China's Tiangong space station. "It has been named Niallia tiangongensis, and it inhabited the cockpit controls on the station, living in microgravity conditions," reports Wired. From the report: According to China Central Television, the country's national broadcaster, taikonauts (Chinese astronauts) collected swab samples from the space station in May 2023, which were then frozen and sent back to Earth for study. The aim of this work was to investigate the behavior of microorganisms, gathered from a completely sealed environment with a human crew, during space travel, as part of the China Space Station Habitation Area Microbiome Program (CHAMP). A paper published in the Journal of Systematic and Evolutionary Microbiology describes how analysis of samples from the space station revealed this previously unseen bacterial species, which belongs to the genus Niallia. Genomic sequencing showed that its closest terrestrial relative is the bacterium Niallia circulans, although the Tiangong species has substantial genetic differences. [...]

It is unclear whether the newly discovered microbe evolved on the space station or whether it is part of the vast sea of as yet unidentified microorganisms on Earth. To date, tens of thousands of bacterial species have been cataloged, although there are estimated to be billions more unclassified species on Earth. The discovery of Niallia tiangongensis will provide a better understanding of the microscopic hazards that the next generation of space travelers will face and help design sanitation protocols for extended missions. It is still too early to determine whether the space bacterium poses any danger to taikonauts aboard Tiangong, although it is known that its terrestrial relative, Niallia circulans, can cause sepsis, especially in immunocompromised people.

Starfish Space plans to perform the first commercial satellite docking in orbit with its Otter Pup 2 mission, aiming to connect to an unprepared D-Orbit ION spacecraft using an electrostatic capture mechanism and autonomous navigation software. NASASpaceFlight.com reports: This follows the company's first attempt, which saw the Otter Pup 1 mission unable to dock with its target due to a thruster failure. The Otter Pup 2 spacecraft will be deployed from a quarter plate on the upper stage adapter of the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, placing it into a sun synchronous orbit altitude of 510 km inclined 97.4 degrees. The target will be a D-Orbit ION spacecraft which will simulate a client payload, which is not equipped with a traditional docking adapter or capture plate as you might see aboard a space station or other rendezvous target. Instead, Starfish Space's Nautilus capture mechanism will feature a special end effector connected to the end of the capture mechanism. This end effector will enable Otter Pup 2 to dock with the ION through electrostatic adhesion.

"An electromagnet will be integrated into the end effector and will be used as a backup option to the electrostatic end effector, to dock with the ION through magnetic attraction," the company notes. The goal is to eventually commission its Otter satellite servicing vehicle to allow for servicing of previously launched satellites. The company's first Otter missions include customers such as NASA, the U.S. Space Force, and Intelsat, with the goal of flying those missions as soon as 2026. [...] Following the thruster issues on the first mission, this flight will feature two ThrustMe thrusters, which use an electric propulsion system based on gridded ion thruster technology.

A new study reveals that about 3.8 million years after the solar system's first solids formed, Jupiter was twice its current size with a magnetic field 50 times stronger, profoundly influencing the structure of the early solar system. Phys.Org reports: [Konstantin Batygin, professor of planetary science at Caltech] and [Fred C. Adams, professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Michigan] approached this question by studying Jupiter's tiny moons Amalthea and Thebe, which orbit even closer to Jupiter than Io, the smallest and nearest of the planet's four large Galilean moons. Because Amalthea and Thebe have slightly tilted orbits, Batygin and Adams analyzed these small orbital discrepancies to calculate Jupiter's original size: approximately twice its current radius, with a predicted volume that is the equivalent of over 2,000 Earths. The researchers also determined that Jupiter's magnetic field at that time was approximately 50 times stronger than it is today.

Adams highlights the remarkable imprint the past has left on today's solar system: "It's astonishing that even after 4.5 billion years, enough clues remain to let us reconstruct Jupiter's physical state at the dawn of its existence." Importantly, these insights were achieved through independent constraints that bypass traditional uncertainties in planetary formation models -- which often rely on assumptions about gas opacity, accretion rate, or the mass of the heavy element core. Instead, the team focused on the orbital dynamics of Jupiter's moons and the conservation of the planet's angular momentum -- quantities that are directly measurable.

Their analysis establishes a clear snapshot of Jupiter at the moment the surrounding solar nebula evaporated, a pivotal transition point when the building materials for planet formation disappeared and the primordial architecture of the solar system was locked in. The results add crucial details to existing planet formation theories, which suggest that Jupiter and other giant planets around other stars formed via core accretion, a process by which a rocky and icy core rapidly gathers gas. The findings have been published in the journal Nature Astronomy.