The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope has passed its post-launch systems check while operating in deep space, NASA said this week. The observatory launched on August 30 aboard a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket from Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Roman is an infrared telescope with a field of view far larger than Hubble's, which lets it survey wide patches of sky in single exposures. It will study dark energy and find exoplanets through microlensing. The mission now enters commissioning, a phase expected to last several months as teams calibrate detectors, check pointing stability and test observing modes. NASA had committed to launch no later than May 2027 and moved the date forward after final assembly finished in late 2025, which the agency cites as evidence it can still deliver flagship science missions on schedule and within budget.
The Lasker Foundation announced its 2026 awards, often called America's Nobel prizes. Emmanuel Mignot of Stanford University School of Medicine and Masashi Yanagisawa of the University of Tsukuba share the Albert Lasker Basic Medical Research Award for work that explained how sleep is regulated and what goes wrong in narcolepsy. Kunihiro Hattori, Takehisa Kitazawa and Tomoyuki Igawa of Chugai Pharmaceutical receive the Lasker-DeBakey Clinical Medical Research Award for a new kind of hemophilia treatment. Michael J. Fox receives the Lasker-Bloomberg Public Service Award for building the largest nonprofit funder of Parkinson's research.
An international team led by Cardiff University says the inductive effect, a standard concept in organic chemistry, travels only across a single bond in neutral molecules rather than weakening over three or four bonds as textbooks have taught for almost 100 years. Their new paper in the Journal of Chemical Education pulls together scattered evidence and their own dataset. Two A-level exam boards have already announced reviews of how they teach the topic.
The LUX-ZEPLIN experiment, a detector holding seven tonnes of liquid xenon a mile underground in South Dakota, has recorded a single particle interaction that researchers cannot easily explain with known backgrounds. The event happened on 16 June 2023, and the new analysis puts it at 2.6 sigma, short of the 5-sigma threshold for a discovery. If it came from dark matter, the particle would be a WIMP with a mass of at least 200 GeV. Researchers say more data will decide whether the hint survives.
Researchers at the Technical University of Denmark have built a nanolaser small enough that thousands could fit on a single microchip, a step toward moving data with light instead of electricity. The device traps photons and electrons in the same microscopic cavity and runs at room temperature. The team estimates that photonic links could cut a computer's energy use by as much as half, by removing resistive heating in circuits, easing data centre cooling and speeding up transfers. The work was published in Science Advances. Powering the laser electrically remains the next hurdle.
The European and Japanese BepiColombo mission has entered its arrival phase after eight years of travel through the inner solar system. On September 3, mission controllers confirmed that the Mercury Transfer Module separated from the rest of the spacecraft stack, with signals picked up by ESA tracking antennas in Spain and Argentina. The composite spacecraft is set to enter orbit around Mercury on November 21, 2026. Two science orbiters, ESA's Mercury Planetary Orbiter and JAXA's Mercury Magnetospheric Orbiter, will separate from each other on December 9 and 10. The science phase is scheduled to start in April 2027, making BepiColombo the first mission to study Mercury from two spacecraft at once. Engineers chose a slow route on purpose: the spacecraft used flybys of Earth, Venus and Mercury to shed speed instead of burning fuel, a journey that took about 7.2 years.
New research has traced the stones of Britain's tallest surviving prehistoric stone row to Brimham Rocks in North Yorkshire, at least 18 kilometers, or 11 miles, away. The Devil's Arrows near Boroughbridge rise as high as seven meters and weigh more than 25 tonnes each. A team from Curtin University and the University of York found that builders passed over Plumpton Rocks, a closer source that had been the leading candidate. The authors say the distant origin suggests the landscape itself held cultural, symbolic or spiritual meaning. The stones were probably raised in the Late Neolithic or Early Bronze Age, possibly around 2000 BC.
New research from the University of Reading shows that today's best weather computers, including modern machine-learning models, would still have struggled to call the weather for the D-Day landings better than Captain James Stagg did in 1944. Published in the journal Weather ahead of the release of the D-Day film Pressure, the study used AI-based models to produce 50 forecasts of the storm that forced General Dwight Eisenhower to delay the invasion by a day. Even with 80 years of improved science and modern computing power, the models produced a muddled picture. The authors say the case shows that computing power alone cannot replace human judgment when weather data is thin and the stakes are high.
Astronomers using the Hubble Space Telescope have found a giant ten-sided storm, or decagon, taking shape around Saturn's south pole. The roughly 104,000-mile-wide jet pattern is a geometric twin to the famous six-sided hexagon that has circled Saturn's north pole for more than 40 years, and it is the first large regular-sided jet ever seen in the planet's southern hemisphere. The feature appears to have formed between 2017 and 2023, while Saturn's south pole was tilted out of view from Earth. Hubble images from August 2025 show the storm still evolving. The discovery, based on the telescope's OPAL program data, is reported in the journal Science Advances.
The two Mercury-bound spacecraft of the European-Japanese BepiColombo mission separated from their cruiser on Thursday and began the final leg of a voyage that began in 2018. Controllers at the European Space Agency's control center in Germany waited two anxious hours for radio confirmation from more than 124 million miles away. The craft still have about 2 million miles to travel before entering Mercury's orbit in November, then they will split apart in December to study the planet from different altitudes. The mission has already traveled more than 6 billion miles on a roundabout route that required nine planetary flybys.