BOULDER, COLO. — December 9, 2025 — A new study led by Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) links quasi-periodic pulsations (QPPs) in solar flares to dynamic oscillations in magnetic reconnection, a phenomenon that can drive space weather and affect technology on Earth. This research could help refine traditional solar flare models and provide new insights into the mechanisms driving them.

Helical pulses, shaped like flying electromagnetic conches, long predicted but never directly observed, have now been experimentally realized in both optical and microwave bands. The work shows that light can twist through space and time within a single cycle, forming truly space time nonseparable wave packets. This breakthrough confirms a decades old theoretical prediction and opens new paths for ultrafast communication, topological field control, and advanced imaging.

Leading X-ray space telescopes XMM-Newton and XRISM have spotted a never-seen-before blast from a supermassive black hole. In a matter of hours, the gravitational monster whipped up powerful winds, flinging material out into space at eye-watering speeds of 60 000 km per second.

A research team from the Songshan Lake Materials Laboratory has developed an AI-guided "Recommendation System" to discover new metallic glasses (MG). By combining element embeddings learned from Wikipedia by a language model with graph neural networks analyzing hidden material relationships. This approach addresses longstanding challenges related to the vast chemical space and limited experimental datasets, opening new horizons for materials design and accelerating the development of next-generation MGs.

Stanford researchers have become the first to demonstrate that machine-learning control can safely guide a robot aboard the ISS, laying the groundwork for more autonomous space missions.

Described in a study published Dec. 8 in Nature Electronics, BISC includes a single-chip implant, a wearable “relay station,” and the custom software required to operate the system. “Most implantable systems are built around a canister of electronics that occupies enormous volumes of space inside the body,” says Ken Shepard, Lau Family Professor of Electrical Engineering, professor of biomedical engineering, and professor of neurological sciences at Columbia University, who is one of the senior authors on the work and guided the engineering efforts. “Our implant is a single integrated circuit chip that is so thin that it can slide into the space between the brain and the skull, resting on the brain like a piece of wet tissue paper.”