Category: 7. Science

Editor’s Note: This release was edited Aug. 9, 2025, to update the International Space Station docking port for the Crew-10 mission.

The first crew to splash down in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of California as part of NASA’s Commercial Crew Program completed the agency’s 10th commercial crew rotation mission to the International Space Station on Saturday.

NASA astronauts Anne McClain and Nichole Ayers, JAXA (Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency) astronaut Takuya Onishi, and Roscosmos cosmonaut Kirill Peskov returned to Earth at 11:33 a.m. EDT. Teams aboard SpaceX recovery vessels retrieved the spacecraft and its crew. After returning to shore, the crew will fly to NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston and reunite with their families.

“Splashdown! Crew-10 is back on Earth from the International Space Station marking the completion of another successful flight,” said NASA acting Administrator Sean Duffy. “Our crew missions are the building blocks for long-duration, human exploration pushing the boundaries of what’s possible. NASA is leading the way by setting a bold vision for exploration where we have a thriving space industry supporting private space stations in low Earth orbit, as well as humans exploring the Moon and Mars.”

The agency’s SpaceX Crew-10 mission lifted off at 7:03 p.m. on March 14, from Launch Complex 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. About 29 hours later, the crew’s SpaceX Dragon spacecraft docked to the Harmony module’s forward-facing port at 12:04 a.m. on March 16. Crew-10 undocked at 6:15 p.m. Aug. 8, to begin the trip home.

During their mission, crew members traveled nearly 62,795,205 million miles and completed 2,368 orbits around Earth. The Crew-10 mission was the first spaceflight for Ayers and Peskov, and the second spaceflight for McClain and Onishi. McClain has logged 352 days in space over her two flights, and Onishi has logged 263 days in space during his flights.

Along the way, Crew-10 contributed hundreds of hours to scientific research, maintenance activities, and technology demonstrations. McClain, Ayers, and Onishi completed investigations on plant and microalgae growth, examined how space radiation affects DNA sequences in plants, observed how microgravity changes human eye structure and cells in the body, and more. The research conducted aboard the orbiting laboratory advances scientific knowledge and demonstrates new technologies that enable us to prepare for human exploration of the Moon and Mars.

McClain and Ayers also completed a spacewalk on May 1, relocating a communications antenna, beginning the installation of a mounting bracket for a future International Space Station Roll-Out Solar Array, and other tasks. It was the third spacewalk for McClain, the first for Ayers, and the 275th supporting space station assembly, maintenance, and upgrades.

Crew-10’s return to Earth follows the Crew-11 mission, which docked to the station on Aug. 2 for its long-duration science expedition.

NASA’s Commercial Crew Program provides reliable access to space, maximizing the use of the International Space Station for research and development, and supporting future missions beyond low Earth orbit, such as to the Moon and Mars, by partnering with private U.S. companies, including SpaceX, to transport astronauts to and from the space station.

Learn more about NASA’s Commercial Crew Program at:

https://www.nasa.gov/commercialcrew

-end-

Joshua Finch / Jimi Russell
Headquarters, Washington
202-358-1100
joshua.a.finch@nasa.gov / james.j.russell@nasa.gov

Sandra Jones / Joseph Zakrzewski
Johnson Space Center, Houston
281-483-5111
sandra.p.jones@nasa.gov / joseph.a.zakrzewski@nasa.gov

Steven Siceloff
Kennedy Space Center, Florida
321-867-2468
steven.p.siceloff@nasa.gov

A study conducted by researchers from Japan, China, Canada, and the U.S. found that DNA once considered “junk” makes up nearly half of the human genome.

This “junk” DNA comes from transposable elements belonging to the MER11 family. Researchers say that transposable elements function as genetic switches that control gene activity in specific cell types.

They also believe that gaining a clearer understanding of the human genome could help them make sense of genetic mutations linked to cancer and rare diseases. “Our genome was sequenced long ago, but the function of many of its parts remains unknown,” Dr. Inoue, one of the co-corresponding authors, said. “Transposable elements are thought to play important roles in genome evolution, and their significance is expected to become clearer as research continues to advance.”

The study also found that 8% of the human genome originates from viruses that infected our ancestors millions of years ago.

Researchers say the study provided them with a new approach to trace the evolutionary history of viral DNA. They suggest that viral sequences that were once overlooked may have important regulatory functions in gene expression.

“If we can clearly map what parts of our genome are specific to humans or primates, and what parts came from viruses, we’re one step closer to understanding what makes us human and how our DNA influences health and disease,” said Guillaume Bourque, one of the study’s lead authors and a professor in McGill’s Department of Human Genetics.

Four astronauts returned to Earth on Saturday after hustling to the International Space Station five months ago to relieve the stuck test pilots of Boeing’s Starliner.

Their SpaceX capsule parachuted into the Pacific off the Southern California coast a day after departing the orbiting lab.

“Welcome home,” SpaceX Mission Control radioed.

Splashing down were NASA’s Anne McClain and Nichole Ayers, Japan’s Takuya Onishi and Russia’s Kirill Peskov. They launched in March as replacements for the two NASA astronauts assigned to Starliner’s botched demo.

Starliner malfunctions kept Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams at the space station for more than nine months instead of a week. NASA ordered Boeing’s new crew capsule to return empty and switched the pair to SpaceX. They left soon after McClain and her crew arrived to take their places. Wilmore has since retired from NASA.

READ MORE: Astronaut Butch Wilmore retires from NASA several months after extended spaceflight

Before leaving the space station on Friday, McClain made note of “some tumultuous times on Earth” with people struggling.

“We want this mission, our mission, to be a reminder of what people can do when we work together, when we explore together,” she said.

McClain looked forward to “doing nothing for a couple of days” once back home in Houston. High on her crewmates’ wish list: hot showers and juicy burgers.

It was SpaceX’s third Pacific splashdown with people on board, but the first for a NASA crew in 50 years. Elon Musk’s company switched capsule returns from Florida to California’s coast earlier this year to reduce the risk of debris falling on populated areas. Back-to-back private crews were the first to experience Pacific homecomings.

The last time NASA astronauts returned to the Pacific from space was during the 1975 Apollo-Soyuz mission, a détente meet-up of Americans and Soviets in orbit.

The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

Now, an ancient fossil has revealed these elusive ants have seen much more of the planet’s dirt throughout their history than scientists previously realized.

In findings published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B, a team led by New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT) biologists has reported the first fossil Basiceros dirt ant recovered from the Caribbean, preserved in 16-million-year-old amber from the Dominican Republic.

Researchers say the fossil adult worker ant — a newly discovered species notably smaller than its modern relatives, named Basiceros enana — now offers direct evidence that the cryptic ant group once inhabited the Caribbean islands before undergoing local extinction sometime during the Miocene epoch (23 to 5.3 million years ago).

“Dirt ants are rare finds in the wild. Finding one today is exciting given how well they stay hidden, but captured in amber, it’s like finding a diamond,” said Gianpiero Fiorentino, corresponding author of the study and Ph.D. candidate at NJIT’s Barden Lab. “This fossil is singularly distinct from all its modern relatives and reshapes the evolutionary history of Basiceros.”

Until now, Basiceros ants — best known for their ability to camouflage themselves in dirt using specialized particle-binding hairs on their bodies — had only been known to the neotropical rainforests stretching from Costa Rica to Southern Brazil. While the genus includes a total of nine living species today, the unexpected fossil discovery raises new questions about how the ant group reached their present-day habitats.

“Often lineages will have what appear to be fairly straightforward biogeographic histories. If you find a group of animals that only live in South America up to Costa Rica today, you really have no reason to expect that their early relatives lived in the Caribbean,” said Phil Barden, the paper’s senior author and associate professor of biology at NJIT. “A fossil like this underscores how the distribution of living species can belie the complex evolutionary history of life on our planet.”

To explore this long-hidden chapter of Basiceros’ history, the team applied advanced imaging and 3D reconstruction techniques at NJIT and Japan’s Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology Graduate University to capture Basiceros enana in detail. “The use of Micro-CT scanning really amplified this study, enabling us to capture features that were virtually impossible to see otherwise,” Fiorentino explained.

They compared the specimen’s physical characteristics with those of all known modern dirt ant species and conducted molecular dating analyses to trace its evolutionary lineage. “Because amber preserves entire organisms in three dimensions, we can extract a ton of data from even a tiny ant,” Barden said.

Measuring at 5.13 millimeters long, Basiceros enana is considerably smaller than its modern relatives which can reach nearly 9 millimeters in length, making the Caribbean species the smallest now known across the lineage.

“Our results show that the embiggening of these ants was relatively rapid,” explained Fiorentino. “They almost doubled in size in the span of 20 million years. Previous hypotheses suggested that these ants were ancestrally large and shrank over time, so this flips that on its head and really illustrates how important fossils can be to understanding the evolution of a lineage.”

However, Basiceros enana also suggests some of the same adaptations that make modern dirt ants nearly invisible to predators and prey in their environment (an ability known as crypsis) were already in place at least 16 million years ago.

These features include two layers of specialized hairs (or setae) for adhering soil and leaf litter particles against their bodies: longer erect “brush hairs” and shorter, appressed “holding hairs” that trap particles against its exoskeleton, or cuticle.

“What this shows is that playing dead and hiding pays off,” said Fiorentino. “Uncovering a unique fossil like this helps us understand how long organisms may have been employing this strategy, though the presence of these characteristics does not necessarily guarantee they behaved in this way.”

The fossil ant also possesses other distinctive morphological characteristics like today’s dirt ants, including an upturned propodeal spine, a trapezoid-like head structure, as well as predatory features such as mandibles with 12 triangular teeth.

Despite these specialized adaptations, the ancient Caribbean dirt ants ultimately vanished from the region during significant ecological changes of the Miocene.

“The presence of Basiceros in Dominican amber suggests ancient land bridges may have provided pathways for these ants to traverse from the mainland to the Caribbean,” Barden said. “This fossil is a piece of a larger puzzle that will help us understand why some groups of organisms undergo extinction and others stick it out for millions of years.”

“Their extinction could have come down to a loss of available niches or interspecific competition. These ants are predators, and an overall trend that we see from the Caribbean is a loss of predator ant diversity,” said Fiorentino. “Over a third of ant genera have gone extinct on the island of modern-day Dominican Republic since the formation of Dominican amber.

“Understanding what has driven this pattern of local extinction is crucial to mitigating modern human-driven extinction and protecting biodiversity.”

A team of Chinese scientists may have cracked the secret behind the strange Canyon Diablo diamonds. Hexagonal in form rather than cubic, the process behind how these diamonds formed has, until now, remained elusive.

Diamonds are usually made of carbon atoms in a cubic arrangement (like stacked Lego blocks in a cube pattern). But there is a rarer form, the hexagonal diamond (atoms stacked in a honeycomb-like pattern), that seems to originate when meteorites smash into Earth, producing extreme heat and pressure.

The very first hexagonal-structured diamond was found within the ‘Diablo Canyon’ meteorite which is believed to have hit the Earth about 50,000 years ago and landed in what is present-day Arizona.

Now, a joint team of experts from the Centre for High Pressure Science and Technology Advanced Research and the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ Xian Institute of Optics and Precision Mechanics have claimed to have recreated the enigmatic ‘meteorite diamond’ in a laboratory.

Cracking the meteorite’s secrets

Most diamonds are forged nearly 90 miles (150 kilometers) below the Earth’s surface, where temperatures can reach more than 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit (1,093 degrees Celsius). The temperature and pressure at this depth causes carbon atoms to arrange themselves into cubic shapes.

In contrast, the Diablo Canyon meteorite contains a series of strange, alien diamonds formed during its violent path to Earth. The diamonds found inside the meteorite have a hexagonal crystal structure called lonsdaleite. This crystal structure makes the diamonds even harder than ‘traditional’ ones, perhaps by as much as 60%.

Since their discovery, there has been a decades-long debate about whether meteorite diamonds actually exist in pure form, or if these tiny crystals are just mixed phases of cubic diamond and graphite.

Earlier attempts at finding answers usually ended up making ordinary cubic diamonds or messy mixtures. For example, a team was partially successful in synthesizing them using gunpowder and compressed air on graphite disks. However, the Chinese team’s success appears to have now settled a 60-year scientific argument.

Synthesizing alien diamonds

According to reports, the team managed to make pure hexagonal diamond crystals which are 100 micrometres in width, or about the thickness of a strand of human hair. This was achieved by using extremely pure, single-crystal graphite with the idea that fewer impurities would mean less chance of ‘defaulting’ to the cubic structure.

Using this, the scientists applied controllable high pressure and temperature, plus quasi-hydrostatic conditions (meaning the pressure is uniform in all directions). They also used in-situ X-ray techniques during the process to observe the transformation real time and adjust conditions to favor hexagonal diamond growth.

The breakthrough is being touted as the first macroscopic proof that hexagonal diamond really exists as a distinct, stable structure. It also pushes the limits of what ‘superhard’ means, beyond the properties of a traditional cubic diamond.

Considering that the new synthetic hexagonal diamond promises superior hardness and thermal resistance, its could be used in manufacturing cutting tools, wear-resistant coatings, and possibly high-end electronics (diamonds are excellent thermal conductors and can handle extreme conditions).

“This synthesized hexagonal diamond is expected to pave new pathways for the development of superhard materials and high-end electronic devices,” stated Ho-kwang Mao from the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

The study has been published in the journal Nature.

So much for heliocentrism.

An international team of astronomers using observations made with the James Webb Space Telescope have found evidence of massive planets out there that’re capable of forming their own planetary systems — without a star. 

These planets would be the center of something like a mini version of our solar system where other, smaller planets revolve around it. But without the light of a star, these systems, if they exist, would go largely overlooked by our telescopes, lost to the dark void of space.

The work, a new study accepted for publication in the The Astronomical Journal, focuses on free-floating “rogue” planets which are not gravitationally bound to a star. While some rogue planets are first formed around a stellar object before being ejected from their system, the astronomers believe these ones may have formed from the same mechanism that gives birth to stars.

“These discoveries show that the building blocks for forming planets can be found even around objects that are barely larger than Jupiter and drifting alone in space,” lead author Belinda Damian, an astronomer at the University of St Andrews in Scotland, said in a statement about the work. “This means that the formation of planetary systems is not exclusive to stars but might also work around lonely starless worlds.” 

Using James Webb observations taken between August and October 2024, the astronomers examined eight free-floating planets. With masses between five to ten times that of Jupiter, these belong to a class of objects believed to be the lowest mass objects that form from the collapse of the giant gas clouds that are sometimes referred to as stellar nurseries, as they’re typically associated with star formation. 

For one reason or another, these objects didn’t accumulate enough mass to sustain nuclear fusion reactions in their cores and become proper stars. These shouldn’t be confused with brown dwarfs, however, which are much more massive substellar objects that are dozens of times heavier than Jupiter that also fail to kickstart nuclear fusion, earning them the moniker of “failed” stars.

In this latest work, the astronomers detected excess emissions in the infrared spectra of these objects, showing that six of them have emissions associated with warm dust. This indicates the presence of a disk, or a circumstellar cloud of gas and dust that surrounds the planet. 

In itself, this isn’t unusual, and such disks have been detected around rogue planets before. Around stars, these disks, referred to as protoplanetary disks, are where dense regions of gas and dust can coalesce to form planets, and are the leftover material from the star’s formation which didn’t get sucked into its collapsing core.

But the kicker here is that the scientists have detected signs that the rogue planets’ disks are already exhibiting the crucial first steps of planetary formation in the form of harboring silicate grains, which appear to be growing and crystallizing. These dusty grains can clump together to form planetesimals, the large, solid objects that are the building blocks of a baby planet. 

This is the first detection of silicate grains around a planetary mass object, the authors said. And it pairs tantalizingly with their previous study which showed that the rogue planet disks can last for millions of years, providing more than enough time to incubate inchoate worlds.

“Taken together, these studies show that objects with masses comparable to those of giant planets have the potential to form their own miniature planetary systems,” coauthor Aleks Scholz, who is also a St Andrews astronomer, said in the statement. “Those systems could be like the solar system, just scaled down by a factor of 100 or more in mass and size. Whether or not such systems actually exist remains to be shown.”

Ironically, then, maybe our ancestors weren’t totally off the mark with their whole geocentrism fixation — they just had the wrong planetary system in mind.

More on exoplanets: James Webb Spots Planets Forming Into Solar System in Real Time, Like an Organism’s First Cells

Plants are essential when designing the perfect pool area. Whether you’re looking to create a super-luxe space, a tropical-inspired paradise, or a romantic retreat, the right choices truly help to set the scene. And opting for scented picks will only add to the sensory experience as you take a dip or lounge on a daybed nearby.

Below, gardening experts share their recommendations for fragrant pool planting ideas, so if you’re looking for inspiration, you’ve come to the right place. You’ll find quick tips on keeping them looking their best, too.