With the advent of commercial spaceflight, an increasing number of people may be heading into space in the coming years.  Flying to the moon or living on Mars could become commonplace. One of the major health risks associated with spaceflight involves the immune system; current and past astronauts report clinical issues such as respiratory illnesses and skin rashes. Researchers have put together a comprehensive guide describing a full array of science linking spaceflight and the immune system. The new subdiscipline, called Astroimmunology, is aimed at developing countermeasures to protect those exploring life off of Earth.

Researchers at Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden and the US space agency NASA have made an unexpected discovery that challenges one of the basic rules of chemistry and provides new knowledge about Saturn’s enigmatic moon Titan. In its extremely cold environment, normally incompatible substances can still be mixed. This discovery broadens our understanding of chemistry before the emergence of life. 

ChromSolutions Ltd and Wiley have announced an agreement to distribute Wiley’s KnowItAll spectral software and databases, expanding access to advanced untargeted analysis technologies for scientists working in chromatography and spectroscopy.

New study reveals, for the first time, a tidal disruption event (TDE), where a black hole tears apart a star, occurring outside the center of a galaxy that produced exceptionally strong and rapidly evolving radio signals. This rare discovery shows that supermassive black holes can exist and remain active far from galactic cores, challenging current understanding of where such black holes reside and how they behave. The event’s delayed and powerful radio outbursts also suggest previously unknown processes in how black holes eject material over time.

Pulsars suggest that ultra–low-frequency gravitational waves are rippling through the cosmos. The signal seen by international pulsar timing array collaborations in 2023 could come from a stochastic gravitational-wave background—the sum of many distant sources—or from a single nearby binary of supermassive black holes. To tell these apart, Hideki Asada, theoretical physicist and Professor at Hirosaki University, and Shun Yamamoto, researcher at the Graduate School of Science and Technology, Hirosaki University, propose a method that exploits beat phenomena between gravitational waves at nearly the same frequency, searching for their imprint in the tiny shifts of pulsars’ radio-pulse arrival times. 

Their work has just been published in the Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics JCAP.