Dust storms on Mars could one day pose dangers to human astronauts, damaging equipment and burying solar panels. New research gets closer to predicting when extreme weather might erupt on the Red Planet.

New observations from the James Webb Space Telescope suggest that a new feature in the universe—not a flaw in telescope measurements—may be behind the decadelong mystery of why the universe is expanding faster today than it did in its infancy billions of years ago.

In photosynthesis, harnessing the power of the Sun is made possible by the flow of electrons from one protein to another inside an organelle called the chloroplast. This organelle contains a complex system of membranes, some of which are densely stacked, and others that are organized into more expansive assemblies. Until now, the scientific consensus was that this spatial structure forces the electrons to cover large distances between proteins, slowing down the process of photosynthesis. But in a paper recently published in Nature Plants, a research team led by staff scientist Dr. Reinat Nevo from Reich’s lab revealed that the membranes change their organization in space during the transition from darkness to light, enabling the proteins to come closer to one another and thus shortening the distance the electrons must cross.