Luna Labs has selected UNC Greensboro (UNCG) chemistry professor Nicholas Oberlies to lead a NASA-funded project exploring whether fungi can be grown into building materials for construction on the moon and Mars. The project will investigate whether certain fungi can be combined with regolith — loose rock and soil found on the surface of the moon and other planets — to create materials that could one day support construction in places other than Earth.

The University of Portsmouth, as part of Space South Central (SSC), one of the UK’s largest regional space clusters, is leading a new international partnership with Saudi space-tech company SARsatX. Together, they are developing the concept for an Earth observation satellite mission aimed at supporting a range of sectors, including climate science and environmental resilience.

While the Amazon River is world-renowned for its massive flow, a significant portion of its water evaporates before it can reach calm water reservoirs or the ocean. Anshul Yadav, a doctoral student in the civil and environmental engineering department at Texas A&M University, has received a prestigious Future Investigators in NASA Earth and Space Science and Technology (FINESST) fellowship to measure this invisible loss.

Samples from Ryugu, a small, near-Earth asteroid, preserve natural remanent magnetization (NRM) from the early history of the solar system. However, despite multiple studies, there is currently no consensus on the interpretation of results from Ryugu particles due to the limited number of samples examined. Now, researchers have conducted NRM measurement of 28 Ryugu particles, clarifying the differing observations of previous studies, offering new insights into their magnetic characteristics and evolution of the solar system.

Now, a research team led by Beihang University has unveiled the first high-throughput, non-destructive characterization of these precious materials, revealing that the "soil" on the lunar far side possesses unique physical properties which are vital for future lunar bases.

The imaging resolution has long been constrained by the Abbe-Rayleigh diffraction limit. While the 2014 Nobel Prize recognized fluorescence microscopy, achieving single-shot, label-free far-field superresolution remains challenging. Scientists in China propose “k-space (momentum space) superoscillation.” By designing a metalens with topology-optimized responses in real- and k-space, this method breaks the spatial shift-invariance assumption to surpass the diffraction limit. Microwave experiments verified a twofold resolution enhancement without post-processing, opening avenues for biology, astronomy, and materials science.