A swarm of spherical rovers, blown by the wind like tumbleweeds, could enable large-scale and low-cost exploration of the martian surface, according to results presented at the Joint Meeting of the Europlanet Science Congress and the Division for Planetary Sciences (EPSC-DPS) 2025. Recent experiments in a state-of-the-art wind tunnel and field tests in a quarry demonstrate that the rovers could be set in motion and navigate over various terrains in conditions analogous to those found on Mars. 

A study by the Earth-Life Science Institute (ELSI) at Institute of Science Tokyo offers insights into how microbial life may have functioned during a critical phase in Earth's history, when oxygen was only beginning to accumulate in the atmosphere. By studying iron-rich hot springs in Japan that mirror the conditions of early, low-oxygen oceans, researchers discovered microbial communities sustained by iron metabolism, supported through a relationship with oxygen-producing photosynthetic microbes.

The polar regions of the Sun remain among the least-explored territories in solar physics, yet they play a crucial role in driving the solar magnetic cycle, generating the fast solar wind, and shaping space weather throughout the heliosphere. Limited by the Earth’s position in the ecliptic plane, past missions have only provided oblique views of the poles, leaving their behavior and evolution poorly understood. This observation gap has left three top-level scientific questions unanswered: How does the solar dynamo work and drive the solar magnetic cycle? What drives the fast solar wind? How do space weather processes globally originate from the Sun and propagate throughout the solar system? The Solar Polar-orbit Observatory (SPO), scheduled for launch in January 2029, aims to address this gap by achieving the first direct imaging observation of the Sun’s poles from high heliolatitudes. Using multiple Earth flybys and a Jupiter gravity assist, SPO will reach an orbital inclination of up to 75° (80° in an extended mission), with a 15-year lifetime (including the 8-year extended mission) covering an entire solar cycle. In order to achieve its scientific goals, SPO will carry a suite of remote-sensing and in-situ instruments to measure the vector magnetic fields and Doppler velocity fields in the photosphere, to observe the Sun in the extreme ultraviolet and X-ray wavelengths, to image the corona and the heliosphere up to 45 solar radii, and to perform in-situ detection of magnetic fields and charged particles in the solar wind. The mission’s vantage point will allow extended observation periods above ±55° latitude, including during the next solar maximum around 2035, when a polar magnetic field reversal is expected. By directly imaging the poles, SPO will provide invaluable insights, revolutionizing our understanding of the Sun and the space weather processes.

A new study involving 176 women found a correlation between menstrual periods and the Moon’s cycles – and observed that the strength of this relationship waned from 2010 onwards. Charlotte Helfrich-Förster and colleagues attribute the phenomenon’s fade to the spread of artificial LED light. Although menstrual-lunar synchrony has lessened, it remained strong around January when lunar gravity is highest, the researchers found. Many animals’ reproductive behaviors overlap with lunar cycles. In fact, species that menstruate – including humans – often have cycles close in length to the Moon’s cycle. These observations have sparked debate about whether human reproduction operates in circadian synchrony with the Moon. Building off a 2021 Science Advances paper with several authors in common, Helfrich-Förster et al. have now analyzed self-logged menstrual records from 176 individual women who did not use contraceptives for the past 24 years. They also included the 22 women from the prior study to incorporate more records from 1950 to 1980. Helfrich-Förster et al. then compared these menstrual logs with lunar cycles between 1950 and 2024, looking at both population-level trends and individual patterns. They supplemented this data by reviewing international Google Trends queries for menstruation-related terms. They observed that cycles prior to 2010 had significant synchrony at the individual and population level with all three of Moon’s cycles (the synodic, anomalistic, and tropical months). After then – and coinciding with the widespread adoption of LED lights – menstrual cycles at the population level were only circalunar in January. “Light pollution that has increased markedly during the past decades together with our changed lifestyle, which leads to an increased exposure to artificial light at night has strongly weakened the entrainment of the menstrual cycle to the lunar cycle,” Helfrich-Förster et al. write. They also attribute continued menstrual-Moon synchrony in January to high gravimetric forces during the annual Perihelion, in which the Earth and the Moon are both closest to the Sun. Synchrony also occurred during the Minor Lunar Standstills, which occur every 18.6 years during the tropical months around the solstices.

For reporters interested in the relationships between menstruation and the Moon, a 2021 Science Advances study with several authors in common found that women’s menstrual cycles temporarily synchronize with Moon cycles: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.abe1358