For decades, aerospace engineers have confronted the life-threatening challenge of reigniting aircraft engines in high-altitude, low-pressure environments. Traditional spark ignition systems, limited by short discharge time and low energy efficiency, consistently fail to ignite lean kerosene-air mixtures in some difficult conditions. Although, gliding arc plasma ignitor offers improvements, its dependence on external gas sources prevents compatibility with combustor wide flight envelopes. This critical bottleneck has impeded next-generation aerospace propulsion systems.

Performance of Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) in providing positioning, velocity estimation, and timing services in urban environments often suffers significant degradation due to multipath effects and Non-Line-of-Sight signal reception. Traditional Fault Detection and Exclusion methods face technical bottlenecks, including high computational complexity and insufficient exclusion accuracy caused by the complex and diverse nature of fault modes. This study proposed a novel fault detection and correction method for Doppler-observable-based velocity estimation: GS-LASSO (Grouping-Sparsity Least Absolute Shrinkage and Selection Operator). Experiment results demonstrated that the GS-LASSO method could provide high-precision velocity estimates at the decimeter-per-second (dm/s) level in complex urban environments with limited computational resources.

Strong Northern Lights-like activity is the standout feature of today’s weather report, which is coming at you from a strange, extrasolar world, instead of a standard TV studio. That is thanks to astronomers from Trinity College Dublin, who used the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope to take a close look at the weather of a toasty nearby rogue planet, SIMP-0136.

The exquisite sensitivity of the instruments on board the space-based telescope enabled the team to see minute changes in brightness of the planet as it rotated, which were used to track changes in temperature, cloud cover and chemistry. 

Surprisingly, these observations also illuminated SIMP-0136’s strong auroral activity, similar to the Northern Lights here on Earth or the powerful aurora on Jupiter, which heat up its upper atmosphere.

A swarm of spherical rovers, blown by the wind like tumbleweeds, could enable large-scale and low-cost exploration of the martian surface, according to results presented at the Joint Meeting of the Europlanet Science Congress and the Division for Planetary Sciences (EPSC-DPS) 2025. Recent experiments in a state-of-the-art wind tunnel and field tests in a quarry demonstrate that the rovers could be set in motion and navigate over various terrains in conditions analogous to those found on Mars. 

Researchers at the Mark and Mary Stevens Neuroimaging and Informatics Institute (Stevens INI) at the Keck School of Medicine of USC have developed a groundbreaking brain imaging technique that reveals how tiny blood vessels in the brain pulse with each heartbeat—changes that may hold clues to aging and diseases such as Alzheimer’s. The study, published in Nature Cardiovascular Research, introduces the first noninvasive method for measuring “microvascular volumetric pulsatility”—the rhythmic expansion and contraction of the brain’s smallest vessels—in living humans. Using ultra-high-field 7T magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), the team showed that these microvessel pulses increase with age, especially in the brain’s deep white matter, a region critical for communication between brain networks that is particularly susceptible as people age to reduced blood supply of distal arteries, the blood vessels that carry blood away from the heart and into the farthest parts of the body. Increasing microvessel pulses can disrupt systems in the brain, possibly speeding up memory loss and Alzheimer’s disease. The USC team’s innovation combines two advanced MRI approaches—vascular space occupancy (VASO) and arterial spin labeling (ASL)—to track subtle volume changes in microvessels over the cardiac cycle. The researchers confirmed that older adults show heightened microvascular pulsations in deep white matter compared to younger adults, and that hypertension further amplifies these changes.