After clearing its last hurdle on its way to space, the Pandora satellite mission is awaiting to be launched into orbit, where it will study at least 20 exoplanets and their host stars over long periods of time. The data will establish a firm foundation for interpreting measurements by NASA's James Webb Space Telescope and future missions aimed at searching for habitable worlds.

A record of repeated retreat of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet during the past warm climates has been identified by IODP Exp379 Scientists. By analyzing deep-sea sediments from the Amundsen Sea and tracing their geochemical signatures, the study shows that the ice sheet retreated far inland at least five times during the warm Pliocene Epoch. The findings highlight the ice sheet’s sensitivity to warming and its potential to drive future sea-level rise.

SGR turns adversarial shortcuts into teachers, isolating invariant subgraph rationales and delivering the first XGL framework provably robust against spurious correlations on both synthetic and real-world graphs.

Existing sea surface height prediction models require excessive computing power and training times and suffer from progressive error accumulation, limiting their accuracy to 14–15 days in the future. A team of researchers recently developed a lightweight deep learning model called GTU-Net with unique loss function and physical constraints that improve the reliability of medium- and long-range sea surface height predictions to improve long-term ocean monitoring, climate studies and operational ocean forecasting.

A group of “gifted word learner” dogs can learn new words that label objects by overhearing their owners talking with each other, according to a new study by Shany Dror and colleagues. These dogs can map a new word to a new object even when the word and object are not presented simultaneously. Together, these abilities put these special dogs at the same word-learning level as 18 to 23-month-old children, Dror et al. conclude. Their findings suggest that humans are not the only animals that can learn new labels by overhearing third-party interactions. The researchers tested this effect in dogs dubbed “gifted word learners” that had previously shown unusually good ability to acquire new word labels under natural conditions, without intentional training. The gifted dogs were able to learn new words/labels passively, by listening in on conversations.