A nanosatellite designed and built almost entirely by USC students is set to launch in July aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rideshare mission, carrying technologies that could shape the future of autonomous space operations.

Using the Hobby-Eberly Telescope at McDonald Observatory, astronomers have taken a closer look at a nearby exoplanet and discovered it may be more Earth-like than previously thought.Using the Hobby-Eberly Telescope at McDonald Observatory, astronomers have taken a closer look at a nearby exoplanet and discovered it may be more Earth-like than previously thought.

Reliable power generation remains a major challenge in extreme environments where access to conventional energy infrastructure is limited. In a recent review, researchers from Hanyang University examine how perovskite solar cells could provide lightweight, efficient, and durable power solutions for applications in space, underwater settings, deserts, polar regions, and high-altitude locations. The review highlights advances in materials and device engineering that could support future remote and off-grid energy systems.

Kyoto, Japan -- Peering far into the distant, high-redshift universe, the James Webb telescope has discovered an abundance of small red galaxies known as the Little Red Dots. From their observations, astronomers believe that at least some of these galaxies may be home to growing supermassive black holes at their centers, objects which they believe are embedded in dense gaseous envelopes, an environment that is suitable for producing high-energy neutrinos.

Neutrinos are electrically neutral elementary particles with masses near zero. High-energy neutrinos from across the universe have been detected on Earth, but the origin of all-sky high-energy neutrino background radiation has remained a mystery.

Neutrino production involves the collision of high-energy particles such as protons with surrounding photons or matter, and the resulting neutrinos can escape even if they are produced inside thick gas. Sources that produce high-energy neutrinos generally also produce gamma rays, yet if all sources that produced neutrinos also produced gamma rays, the result would exceed observed gamma ray background levels.

Rice grown on the Moon? No, this is not something out of science fiction, but a future possibility thanks to a plasma technology developed by Tohoku University and JAXA. The plasma technology synthesizes gas from atmospheric air and turns it into a nitrogen-based fertilizer. Researchers also tested the fertilizer on rice seedlings planted in a lunar soil simulant, finding that the fertilizer released critical minerals from the Moon's soil while suppressing harmful ones. The technology is portable and energy-efficient, meaning it can even be used here on Earth for a more sustainable form of rice farming.

SAN ANTONIO — June 29, 2026 —A new Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) study based on data from NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft has uncovered fascinating insights into why the solar wind gradually slows as it moves toward the edge of the solar system and the boundary with interstellar space.

Advances in foundation models (FM) have opened the gates to an advanced use of artificial intelligence for healthcare. FMs are an AI system with a great ability to perform accurately on new sets of data or tasks, instead of just memorizing the material it was trained with. Vision-language foundation models (VLFM) are particularly of interest to clinicians as a means to aid in report generation and question answering, with vision-language agents (VLAs) being representative of the next frontier for AI acting in a healthcare space.

Scientists are looking to nature for bioinspired adhesion and friction materials. Geckos, tree frogs and octopuses all provide scientists with the inspiration for these materials. Current research focuses mostly on a single environment or single performance for these materials, lacking a systematic framework across scales, media, and disciplines. A research team has proposed a framework that overcomes these barriers by creating highly adaptable, multifunctional systems for bioinspired adhesion and friction materials. Potential applications range from space environments that are tolerant of robotics for lunar exploration to self-adjusting biomedical devices for health monitoring.