May 2026 Satellite Puzzler

Identifying and analyzing climate risks is a necessary function of governments, but researchers at Adelaide University's Environment Institute argue such processes will not lead to effective action without taking additional steps to understand which risks are considered unacceptable by the community and prioritizing responses accordingly.

In early phases of drug development, new active substances are tested in animals—alongside numerous other experimental methods. Researchers face a dilemma: on the one hand, for ethical reasons, they aim to keep the number of animals used in an experiment as low as possible. On the other hand, animal experiments must include enough animals to produce reliable and representative results, for example, to determine whether a new drug candidate produces a specific effect.

Written by Michelle Minitti, MAHLI Deputy Principal Investigator Earth planning date: Friday, May 8, 2026 While we know the monikers Ingenuity and Perseverance are attached to our sister helicopter and rover on the Mars 2020 mission, those characteristics were in full force with Curiosity over the past week. The science we achieved this week was […]

A recent study published in the International Journal of Osteoarchaeology documented skeletal changes linked to scurvy in Late Holocene archaeological sites in California (500 BCE–1834 CE). The change observed shows the cascading impacts of dietary practices on skeletal development, including in infants, which may have been affected during pregnancy or breastfeeding, highlighting the largely invisible impacts of pregnancy in the archaeological record.