The inside of Mars isn’t smooth and uniform like familiar textbook illustrations. Instead, new research reveals it’s chunky - more like a Rocky Road brownie than a neat slice of Millionaire’s Shortbread.

The textbook picture of how planets form – serene, flat discs of cosmic dust – has just received a significant cosmic twist. New research, published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters, is set to reshape this long-held view. An international team of scientists, wielding the formidable power of the Atacama Large Millimetre/submillimetre Array (ALMA), has found compelling evidence that many protoplanetary discs, the very birthplaces of planets, are in fact subtly warped.

University at Albany chemists have created a new high-energy compound — manganese diboride — that could revolutionize rocket fuel and make space flights more efficient. 

Triboelectric nanogenerators (TENGs) offer a self-sustaining power solution for marine regions abundant in resources but constrained by energy availability. Since their pioneering use in wave energy harvesting in 2014, nearly a decade of advancements has yielded nearly thousands of research articles in this domain. Researchers have developed various TENG device structures with diverse functionalities to facilitate their commercial deployment. Nonetheless, there is a gap in comprehensive summaries and performance evaluations of TENG structural designs. This paper delineates six innovative structural designs, focusing on enhancing internal device output and adapting to external environments: high space utilization, hybrid generator, mechanical gain, broadband response, multi-directional operation, and hybrid energy-harvesting systems. We summarize the prevailing trends in device structure design identified by the research community. Furthermore, we conduct a meticulous comparison of the electrical performance of these devices under motorized, simulated wave, and real marine conditions, while also assessing their sustainability in terms of device durability and mechanical robustness. In conclusion, the paper outlines future research avenues and discusses the obstacles encountered in the TENG field. This review aims to offer valuable perspectives for ongoing research and to advance the progress and application of TENG technology.

Clues about how worlds like Earth may have formed have been found buried at the heart of a spectacular 'cosmic butterfly'. With the help of the James Webb Space Telescope, researchers say they have made a big leap forward in our understanding of how the raw material of rocky planets comes together. This cosmic dust – tiny particles of minerals and organic material which include ingredients linked to the origins of life – was studied at the core of the Butterfly Nebula, NGC 6302, which is located about 3,400 light-years away in the constellation Scorpius. From the dense, dusty torus that surrounds the star hidden at the centre of the nebula to its outflowing jets, the Webb observations reveal many new discoveries that paint a never-before-seen portrait of a dynamic and structured planetary nebula. They have been published today in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

Using a cutting-edge adaptive optics system developed at the University of Arizona's Steward Observatory, a growing planet outside our solar system has been discovered to inhabit a gap in a disk of dust and gas. The images provide a glimpse of what our solar system likely looked like during its infancy.