Astronomers have long searched for life within a rather narrow ring around a star, the “habitable zone,” where a planet should be neither too hot nor too cold for liquid water. A new study argues that this ring is too strict: on tidally locked worlds that keep one face in daylight and the other in permanent night, heat may still circulate enough for liquid water to persist on the dark side, even when the planet orbits closer to cool M- and K-dwarf stars than conservative climate models allow. The study also points outward: liquid water could exist far beyond the classical outer edge, hidden beneath ice as subglacial or intraglacial lakes, meaning the number of worlds worth checking for water, and potentially life-friendly conditions, may be much larger than the traditional map suggests.

This study introduces a custom-designed NV quantum sensing based microscopy for high-sensitivity microscopic magnetic imaging (MMI) of individual Chang'e-5 lunar regolith grains, achieving the first direct observation of surface magnetic field distributions at the single-particle scale. Overcoming the limitations of traditional orbital magnetometry (kilometer-scale) and macroscopic bulk rock-magnetic measurements (e.g., VSM), our approach realizes the separation and identification of magnetic signals at the micro- to nanoscale. Results indicate that native irons in basalt clasts exhibits weak and directionally uniform magnetism, suggesting it records the lunar paleomagnetic field during magma cooling; in contrast, carriers such as nanophase iron and Fe-Ni alloys in breccia grains, as well as crack-associated magnetic “stripe” features, display distinct magnetic signals reflecting the influence of multiple geological processes, including meteorite impacts and space weathering. Overall, this study advances lunar magnetic detection to the single-particle microscopic level, providing direct evidence for understanding the origin of lunar magnetic anomalies and the magnetic field evolution history, offering a new microscopic perspective for lunar and planetary science.

Chiral metasurfaces can strongly twist the polarization of light, but how this process unfolds in space and time has been unclear. Scientists in China have now used ultrafast electron microscopy and photon-induced near-field electron microscopy to directly image the near fields of a chiral metasurface at nanometer-femtosecond resolution, revealing their correlation to the far-field ellipticity and geometry-dependent energy dissipation pathways for the chiral light transformation.

NYU Abu Dhabi researchers discover the first organic crystalline material that not only remains flexible, but can also self-heal after damage at temperatures where most polymer materials become brittle and fail.

University of Warwick-led study shows how tabletop devices could uncover the fundamental texture of the universe.

The University of Bonn has opened its own supermarket, in which pineapples, canned tomatoes, and toast are neatly lined up on black shelves. The space measuring 55 square meters (approx. 600 square feet) has pretty much everything you’d need in everyday life. The ‘clientele’, however, is very special: they are subjects participating in scientific studies. Here, researchers from the fields of food and resource economics, psychology, economics, and behavioral science are investigating how health- and sustainability-oriented purchases can be encouraged, for example, through product placement and other incentives. Robots are also demonstrating their capabilities here. 

At Frontiers Science House, SPARK Microgravity GmbH revealed plans to build Europe’s first dedicated commercial orbital cancer lab. The lab will accelerate the path from discovery to therapy. In microgravity, researchers can run experiments that are impossible on Earth – including 3D tumor growth and revealing new drug targets.

To overcome the lack of wavelength-selective extraction in existing on-chip metasurfaces, Chinese scientists developed a novel approach by leveraging a nonlocal on-chip design based on symmetry-broken quasi-bound states in the continuum (q-BICs) physics, enabling precise wavelength-selective extraction and color routing of guided waves. Beyond free-space spatial-multiplexing schemes, these on-chip cascaded-multiplexing architectures achieve a significant improvement in the energy utilization efficiency, offering a new pathway for high-efficiency spectral control and routing on chip-integrated metadevices.