Roman Space Telescope, Launch Date: The NASA Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is scheduled for launch on 30 August 2026 from Kennedy Space Center on a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket to study the universe's history and dark matter and energy as well as exoplanets.

MPIA Heidelberg Contribution: The Max Planck Institute for Astronomy (MPIA) in Heidelberg played a key role in developing the Coronagraph Instrument (CGI), including designing, manufacturing, and testing its Precision Alignment Mechanisms (PAMs).

Scientific Goals: CGI aims to observe older, cooler gas giants closer to their stars than previously possible and analyze their atmospheres with an integrated spectrograph.

The warming climate is reshaping populations of the snail that transmits schistosomiasis in China. Now, researchers show that 92% of studied snail populations had positive temperature sensitivity, while body size and land use shaped survival and density. Projections suggest that more than 20% of populations could increase under future warming, highlighting regions and habitats where climate-adaptive surveillance and targeted snail control should be strengthened to sustain progress toward schistosomiasis elimination and protect communities nationwide.

Complex mathematical problems, such as combinatorial optimization problems, have wide-ranging industrial applications and require extensive computational resources to solve. Slime molds represent a promising avenue for developing new, efficient computing paradigms to mitigate this issue. However, their physical implementation is still challenging. Now, researchers have developed a new, simpler amoeba-inspired computing model that enables physical implementation across diverse materials and physical phenomena, without compromising optimization performance.

Lithium metal batteries (LMBs), that use pure lithium (Li) for their negative electrodes, are attracting significant attention due to their extremely high theoretical capacity. However, their practical applications are limited by low cycling stability and safety issues, arising from dendrite formation, electrolyte breakdown and uneven solid-electrolyte interface formation.