On 29 April 2025, the European climate satellite Biomass was launched from Europe’s Spaceport in Kourou, French Guiana. Onboard is groundbreaking technology capable of weighing the world’s forests from space – and research from Chalmers University of Technology, in Sweden, has played a key role in the development of the mission.

Astronomers have discovered a second long-sought production site of gold, uranium and other heavy elements — and answered a decades-long mystery in the process. The new work shows that such elements are produced not only by supernovae and neutron star collisions, but also by giant flares from highly magnetized neutron stars called magnetars. These enormous flares also create unique gamma-ray signals, one of which was seen 20 years ago that had, until now, defied explanation.

A study led by Paolo Padoan, ICREA research professor at the Institute of Cosmos Sciences of the University of Barcelona (ICCUB) and currently on leave at Dartmouth College (United States), is challenging the understanding of planetary disk formation around young stars. The paper, published in Nature Astronomy, reveals that the environment plays a crucial role in determining the size and lifetime of these planetary disks, which are the sites of planet formation.

A metasurface-based approach is proposed for single-shot optical imaging that simultaneously captures all the three parameters of optical fields with arbitrary intensity, phase, and polarization distributions.

On Jan. 1, 2024, a 7.5-magnitude earthquake struck the Noto Peninsula in Japan, resulting in extensive damage in the region caused by uplift, when the land rises due to shifting tectonic plates. The observed uplift, however, varied significantly, with some areas experiencing as much as a 5-meter rise of the ground surface. To better understand how the characteristics of the affected fault lines impact earthquake dynamics, researchers in Japan used recently developed simulations to make a detailed model of the fault. The findings could help develop models to simulate scenarios of different earthquakes and mitigate disasters in the future.

New Curtin University research has revealed that a massive meteorite struck northwestern Scotland about 200 million years later than previously thought, in a discovery that not only rewrites Scotland’s geological history but alters our understanding of the evolution of non-marine life on Earth.