On May 12, 2008, the magnitude 7.9 Wenchuan Earthquake shook central China, its destructive tremors spreading from the flank of the Longmen Shan, or Dragon's Gate Mountains, along the eastern margin of the Tibetan Plateau.

Over 69,000 people died in the disaster, nearly a third are thought to be from geohazards like the more than 60,000 landslides that rushed down the slopes of the Longmen Shan.

After more than a decade and a half of work, scientists finally have an account of the fate of the landslide debris. Surveys of a reservoir downstream of the epicenter revealed how and how quickly the region’s major river moved this sediment, as well as the effect it had on the river channel itself. The results, published in Nature, suggest that the hazards caused by megaquakes may last long after the ground has settled. What’s more, they offer insights into a fundamental question of Earth science: How do earthquakes build mountains?

Harvard SEAS and University of Chicago researchers have tested and validated lightweight nanofabricated structures that can passively float in the mesophere, which is about 45 miles above Earth’s surface. The devices levitate via photophoresis, or sunlight-driven propulsion, which occurs in the low-pressure conditions of the upper atmosphere.

In 2024, NASA’s Mars rover Perseverance collected an unusual rock sample, Sapphire Canyon, that features white, leopardlike spots and might hold clues about sources of organic molecules within Mars. In Review of Scientific Instruments, researchers used optical photothermal infrared spectroscopy to study a visually similar rock to try to determine if O-PTIR can be applied to the Sapphire Canyon sample when it is eventually brought here. They aimed to see if O-PTIR could differentiate between the rock’s primary material and its dark inclusions and found it was extremely effective because of the enhanced spatial resolution of O-PTIR.

Medical imaging methods are often affected by background noise. To solve this, some researchers have drawn inspiration from quantum mechanics, which describes how matter and energy behave at the atomic scale. Their studies draw an analogy between how particles vibrate and how pixel intensity spreads out in images and causes noise. Now authors apply the same mathematics to decipher the localization of pixel intensity in images. In this way, they can separate the noise-free “signal” of the anatomical structures in the image from the visual noise of stray pixels.

In a new study, scientists at the University of Missouri looked deep into the universe and found something unexpected. Using infrared images taken from NASA’s powerful James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), they identified 300 objects that were brighter than they should be.