Chinese scientists have discovered that the Moon’s mantle contains less water on the lunar farside than on the nearside, based on analysis of basalts collected by the Chang'e-6 (CE6) lunar mission.

SAN ANTONIO — April 9, 2025 —The NASA/ESA Solar Orbiter recently recorded the highest-ever concentration of a rare helium isotope (³He) emitted from the Sun. A Southwest Research Institute-led team of scientists sought the source of this unusual occurrence to better understand the mechanisms that drive solar energetic particles (SEPs) that permeate our solar system. SEPs are high-energy, accelerated particles including protons, electrons and heavy ions associated with solar events like flares and coronal mass ejections.

Traditionally, astronomers have grouped galaxies into two different categories: blue, which are young and actively forming stars, and red, which are older and have ceased star formation. Now, University of Missouri Assistant Professor Charles Steinhardt is challenging the traditional understanding of galaxies by proposing a third category: red star-forming. They don’t fit neatly into the usual blue or red — instead, they’re somewhere in between.

In a paper published in Science Bulletin, an international team of physicists from Singapore and China demonstrates how quasi-bound states in the continuum (QBICs) can induce abrupt lateral beam shifts in the terahertz regime. By applying Brillouin zone folding to a compound grating waveguide, the researchers created a QBIC band that enables sudden and significant beam shifts, offering new insights into real-space QBIC properties and potential applications in sensing and wavelength multiplexing.

A recent paper published in National Science Review presents a multi-space alignment approach for cross-species and cross-modality electroencephalogram (EEG) based epileptic seizure detection. By employing deep learning techniques, including domain adaptation and knowledge distillation, it aligns cross-species and cross-modality EEG signals to enhance the detection capability beyond traditional within-species and within-modality models. Experiments on multiple scalp and intracranial EEG datasets of humans and canines demonstrated substantial improvements in the detection accuracy, achieving over 90% AUC scores for cross-species and cross-modality seizure detection with extremely limited labeled data from the target species/modality. This is the first study that demonstrates the effectiveness of integrating heterogeneous data from different species and modalities to improve EEG-based seizure detection performance.

Black holes are fundamental to the structure of galaxies and critical in our understanding of gravity, space, and time. A stellar mass black hole is a type of black hole that forms from the gravitational collapse of a massive star at the end of its life cycle. These black holes typically have masses ranging from about 3 to 20 times the mass of our Sun. 

Sometimes black holes generate beams of ionized gas (plasma) that shoot outward at nearly light speed. Although discovered more than a century ago, how and why jets occur has remained a mystery, described as one of the “wonders of physics”. 

Prof. Kazutaka Yamaoka from Nagoya University in Japan, along with his colleagues from University of Toyama and other international institutes, have discovered key conditions needed for a stellar black hole to create plasma jets. Their findings, published in Publications of the Astronomical Society of Japan, show that when superheated gas material experiences a rapid shrinkage towards the black hole, jet formation occurs.

Development of a new type of optical receiver, able to restore chaotic signals in free-space optical communication links distorted by atmospheric turbulence. By use of a system of optical antennas integrated into a programmable photonic chip, the receiver can adapt in real time, maintaining the integrity of the signal even in harsh atmospheric conditions. The study by a team of researchers led by Télécom Paris and the Politecnico di Milano, has just been published in Light: Science & Applications, and paves the way for the use of chaos-based encryption for secure, high-speed communication in hostile environments.