We’re thrilled to announce the launch of Biocontaminant, a multidisciplinary journal dedicated to tackling biocontamination and its impacts on sustainable development and global health. From pathogens and toxins to invasive species and antimicrobial resistance – this journal explores the critical challenges threatening our SDGs.

Locked beneath a single-plate crust, Mars’ mantle holds a frozen record of the red planet’s primordial past, according to a new study of Martian seismic data collected by NASA’s InSight mission. The findings reveal a highly heterogenous and disordered mantle, born from ancient impacts and chaotic convection in the planet’s early history. “Whereas Earth’s early geological records remain elusive, the identification of preserved ancient mantle heterogeneity on Mars offers an unprecedented window into the geological history and thermochemical evolution of a terrestrial planet under a stagnant lid, the prevalent tectonic regime in our Solar System,” write the authors. “This evolution holds key implications for understanding the preconditions for habitability of rocky bodies across our Solar System and beyond.” A planet’s mantle – the vast layer that lies sandwiched between its crust and core – preserves crucial evidence about planetary origin and evolution.  Unlike Earth, where active plate tectonics continually stirs the mantle, Mars is a smaller planet with a single-plate surface. As such, Mars’ mantle undergoes far less mixing, meaning it may preserve a record of the planet’s early internal history, which could offer valuable insights into how rocky worlds form and evolve. Using data from NASA’s InSight lander, Constantinos Charalambous and colleagues studied the seismic signatures of marsquakes to better constrain the nature of Mars’ mantle. By analyzing eight well-recorded quakes, including those triggered by meteorite impacts, Charalambous et al. discovered that high-frequency P-wave arrivals were systematically delayed as they traversed the deeper portions of the mantle. According to the authors, these delays reveal subtle, kilometer-scale compositional variations within the planet’s mantle. Because Mars lacks plate tectonics and large-scale recycling, these small-scale irregularities must instead be remnants of its earliest history. The scaling of Mars’ mantle heterogeneity suggests an origin in highly energetic and disruptive processes, including massive impacts early in the planet’s history, which fractured the planet’s interior, mixing both foreign and crustal materials into the mantle at a planetary scale. Moreover, the crystallization of vast magma oceans generated in the aftermath likely introduced additional variations. Instead of being erased, these features became frozen in place as Mars’ crust cooled and mantle convection stalled.

The inside of Mars isn’t smooth and uniform like familiar textbook illustrations. Instead, new research reveals it’s chunky - more like a Rocky Road brownie than a neat slice of Millionaire’s Shortbread.

The textbook picture of how planets form – serene, flat discs of cosmic dust – has just received a significant cosmic twist. New research, published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters, is set to reshape this long-held view. An international team of scientists, wielding the formidable power of the Atacama Large Millimetre/submillimetre Array (ALMA), has found compelling evidence that many protoplanetary discs, the very birthplaces of planets, are in fact subtly warped.

Clues about how worlds like Earth may have formed have been found buried at the heart of a spectacular 'cosmic butterfly'. With the help of the James Webb Space Telescope, researchers say they have made a big leap forward in our understanding of how the raw material of rocky planets comes together. This cosmic dust – tiny particles of minerals and organic material which include ingredients linked to the origins of life – was studied at the core of the Butterfly Nebula, NGC 6302, which is located about 3,400 light-years away in the constellation Scorpius. From the dense, dusty torus that surrounds the star hidden at the centre of the nebula to its outflowing jets, the Webb observations reveal many new discoveries that paint a never-before-seen portrait of a dynamic and structured planetary nebula. They have been published today in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.