Astronomers have uncovered a vast cloud of energetic particles — a ‘mini halo’ —  surrounding one of the most distant galaxy clusters ever observed, marking a major step forward in understanding the hidden forces that shape the cosmos.

Space flight with the associated absence of gravity and limited strain on muscles causes muscle weakness, a prominent feature of sarcopenia, within a short period of time, providing a time lapse view on age-related atrophy-associated changes in the muscle. This relatively short window of time in space provides a microgravity model for muscular aging and opens opportunities for studying sarcopenia, which normally takes decades to develop in patients on earth.

To understand the changes of muscle in microgravity, Siobhan Malany, Maddalena Parafati, and their team from the University of Florida, USA, engineered skeletal muscle microtissues from donor biopsies and launched them to the International Space Station (ISS) aboard SpaceX CRS-25. Their findings were published today in Stem Cell Reports.

The NSF-DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile has unveiled the very first “mega” images of the cosmos obtained thanks to the extraordinary features and wide-field view of its LSST camera—the largest in the world. The camera took nearly two decades to build and involved hundreds of scientists across the globe, including a number of CNRS teams. The world-wide First Look unveiling event is held on 23 June at the National Academy of Sciences in Washington, D.C.