NASA’s X-59 Aircraft Flies Supersonic for First Time

Astronomers have investigated a puzzling binary star system in which two stars that may have formed together now show dramatically different chemical compositions. The new study, uploaded to the arXiv preprint server on May 29, hints at the possibility that one of the stars may have swallowed its own planets.

NASA announced the Massachusetts Institute of Technology project, Exploration-Class Lunar Integrated Power SystEm, as the first place winner for the 2026 Revolutionary Aerospace Systems Concepts – Academic Linkage (RASC-AL) competition, which challenges students to bridge gaps in aerospace technology by innovating new system concepts and prototypes.  Another team from the same university won second place overall for their project, Mars Exploration Layered Infrastructure for Operations, Research,

Waves of light and sound interact to drive electronic and structural changes in a perovskite crystal. At the atomic scale, nothing is ever truly still. Materials that appear perfectly rigid and motionless to the naked eye are in fact swarms of vibrating atoms. This motion is generally random and uncoordinated, but with the right input, the atoms in certain materials will start to move together, vibrating in sync.

Many animals, including humans, rely on their eyes to detect changes in their surroundings. The eyes of vertebrates, animals with a backbone or a similar supporting structure, contain a transparent structure (i.e., the lens) that focuses incoming light onto a layer of light-sensitive cells, known as the retina. Cells in the retina then convert light into signals that are sent to the brain.