Some animals can move efficiently beneath granular surfaces. These include the sandfish (Scincus scincus), a lizard native to the Sahara. It can burrow into the sand and then literally “swim” through the desert sand to hunt or escape predators.
The principles of movement underlying this ability have only been understood for a few years. Researchers at the University of Würzburg have now translated the sandfish’s locomotion mechanism into an initial technical solution—an innovative Mars rover that outperforms other models when moving on sand.
The team led by computer scientist Marco Schmidt, Professor for Embedded Systems and Sensors for Earth Observation (ESSEO), is collaborating with researchers from Bremen. The project is part of the VaMEx initiative of the German Aerospace Center.
New research from a team of scientists led by Cornell is transforming how researchers understand one of the atmosphere’s most abundant and least understood constituents: mineral dust.
Mineral dust, composed of tiny particles lifted from arid regions including the Sahara, Middle East and East Asia, plays a complex role in Earth’s climate system. These particles both scatter and absorb radiation, influence cloud formation and even fertilize ecosystems. But until recently, scientists lacked reliable global data on the surface soils’ mineral composition, particularly on the prevalence of light-absorbing iron oxides.
Using high-resolution data from a NASA mission aboard the International Space Station, the team has reduced long-standing uncertainty about how airborne dust particles affect Earth’s energy balance through interactions with sunlight. The findings are published in the journal Nature Geoscience.
The long, puzzling dwarf planet Ceres, in reality the first named asteroid, has surface features that are much more complex than previously thought. Or at least that’s the conclusion of a recent paper given at the recent European Geosciences Union 2026 General Assembly in Vienna.
New data analysis from NASA’s Dawn mission points to a surface with steep slopes, fractures, and albedo variations complicating crater identification.
In fact, Ceres has perplexed astronomers since its discovery in 1801 by Italian astronomer Giuseppe Piazzi. Yet in 2006, it was controversially reclassified as a dwarf planet, primarily due to its large size and differentiated interior. That is, unlike most asteroids, Ceres has a core, a mantle, and a crust. Some astrobiologists posit that the dwarf planet may have even once developed primitive microorganisms.
From carbon nanotubes to multi-layered graphene, we explore the revolutionary materials that could turn space elevators from sci-fi dreams into real-world infrastructure. Discover how these supermaterials might let us weave ribbons to the stars.
Visit our Website: http://www.isaacarthur.net. Join Nebula: https://go.nebula.tv/isaacarthur. Support us on Patreon: / isaacarthur. Support us on Subscribestar: https://www.subscribestar.com/isaac-a… Group: / 1,583,992,725,237,264 Reddit: / isaacarthur Twitter: / isaac_a_arthur on Twitter and RT our future content. SFIA Discord Server: / discord Credits: Materials For Space Elevators — From Carbon Nanotubes To Graphene And Beyond… Episode 741; July 24, 2025 Written, Produced & Narrated by: Isaac Arthur Edited by: Adrian Nixon Select imagery/video supplied by Getty Images Music Courtesy of Epidemic Sound http://epidemicsound.com/creator Chris Zabriskie, “Unfoldment, Revealment”, “A New Day in a New Sector” Aerium, “Deijocht” Stellardrone, “Red Giant”, “Billions and Billions” Chapters 0:00 Intro 0:09 The Vision of the Space Elevator 2:46 The Rope That Reaches the Sky 9:08 Manufacturing the Megastructure 12:58 Tether Design and Variants 19:57 PIA 21:52 Defects and Composites: Strength in Layers 22:48 Power and Payload 25:20 Safety, Scaling, and the Road Ahead. Facebook Group: / 1583992725237264 Reddit: / isaacarthur. Twitter: / isaac_a_arthur on Twitter and RT our future content. SFIA Discord Server: / discord. Credits: Materials For Space Elevators — From Carbon Nanotubes To Graphene And Beyond… Episode 741; July 24, 2025 Written, Produced & Narrated by: Isaac Arthur. Edited by: Adrian Nixon. Select imagery/video supplied by Getty Images. Music Courtesy of Epidemic Sound http://epidemicsound.com/creator. Chris Zabriskie, \
Beginning with the Andromeda galaxy in the late 1960s, the astronomer Vera Rubin and her colleague Kent Ford measured how fast stars and gas clouds orbit at different distances from a galaxy’s centre. They expected the outer material to move slowly. It did not. In Andromeda, and then in galaxy after galaxy, the orbital speed stayed high all the way to the edge of what they could measure. The visible stars, gas and dust could not supply enough gravity to hold matter moving that fast in place.
Rubin and Ford published their Andromeda result in 1970, in a paper in the Astrophysical Journal. Over the following decade they extended the work, and by 1980 had measured the same pattern across twenty-one spiral galaxies. The consistency was the point. One odd galaxy could be explained away. Twenty-one could not.
How ambitious should you be? Folk wisdom offers conflicting advice: “Shoot for the moon,” but also, “Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good.” A new study by researchers at the University of Wyoming, Stanford University and the University of Colorado-Boulder used a mathematical model to show that ambition lies in the middle—above average but finite.
“Conventional wisdom tells people not to settle, but also not to let the perfect be the enemy of the good,” says lead author Kath Landgren, a postdoctoral scholar at Stanford’s Doerr School of Sustainability. “We wanted to see whether the math actually supports that intuition. It does, with some interesting twists.”
University of Calgary researchers are a part of a group who just got one step closer to solving a mystery of the universe. Dr. Timothy Friesen, Ph.D., an associate professor of Physics and Astronomy in the Faculty of Science, and his team led a new measurement comparing the spectrum of hydrogen to its antimatter counterpart—antihydrogen.
The results of this new measurement are published in the journal Nature.
“Fairly core in our theoretical models is the symmetry between matter and antimatter, and if that symmetry is broken there would be a huge impact on how we construct those theories and how we think about our absolute laws in physics,” says Friesen.
Claude Opus 4.8 just arrived, and on paper, Anthropic should be celebrating. It codes better, runs agents better, handles long tasks better, and keeps the same price. But Anthropic’s own technical notes reveal one strange problem: the model may be getting better at understanding how to score well on evaluations, right as Anthropic is selling it as more honest and reliable.
📌 What You’ll See: Claude Opus 4.8’s official launch, same pricing, and major coding/agent upgrades. SOURCE: https://www.anthropic.com/news/claude… claim that Opus 4.8 is around 4x less likely to miss flaws in its own code SOURCE: https://www.theverge.com/ai-artificia… Claude Code’s new Dynamic Workflows feature for running hundreds of parallel subagents SOURCE: https://techcrunch.com/2026/05/28/ant… The upcoming Claude Mythos model and how Opus 4.8 compares to Anthropic’s next tier SOURCE: https://www.axios.com/2026/05/28/anth… Anthropic’s $65 billion funding round and reported $965 billion valuation SOURCE: https://www.businessinsider.com/anthr… Opus 4.8’s “honesty” narrative, effort control, and dynamic workflow launch SOURCE: https://www.reuters.com/business/anth… 🚨 Why It Matters This is bigger than another Claude update. Opus 4.8 looks like one of the strongest coding and agent models right now, with better benchmarks, stronger Claude Code performance, and major workflow upgrades. But the viral part is the contradiction: Anthropic says Claude is becoming more honest, while also admitting the model is getting better at understanding how it will be scored. #claude #anthropic #ai. Anthropic’s claim that Opus 4.8 is around 4x less likely to miss flaws in its own code. SOURCE: https://www.theverge.com/ai-artificia… Claude Code’s new Dynamic Workflows feature for running hundreds of parallel subagents. SOURCE: https://techcrunch.com/2026/05/28/ant… The upcoming Claude Mythos model and how Opus 4.8 compares to Anthropic’s next tier. SOURCE: https://www.axios.com/2026/05/28/anth… Anthropic’s $65 billion funding round and reported $965 billion valuation. SOURCE: https://www.businessinsider.com/anthr… Opus 4.8’s “honesty” narrative, effort control, and dynamic workflow launch. SOURCE: https://www.reuters.com/business/anth…
🚨 Why It Matters. This is bigger than another Claude update. Opus 4.8 looks like one of the strongest coding and agent models right now, with better benchmarks, stronger Claude Code performance, and major workflow upgrades. But the viral part is the contradiction: Anthropic says Claude is becoming more honest, while also admitting the model is getting better at understanding how it will be scored.
On Thursday, NASA issued a Request for Proposal (RFP), seeking industry collaboration for the Mars Telecommunications Network.
Reliable, high bandwidth communications are necessary to relay science data, high-definition imagery, and critical information during Mars missions. The network will use high-performance Mars telecommunications orbiters at the red planet to support future surface, orbital, and human exploration.
This RFP builds on a draft released April 2, as well as insights gathered during the accompanying industry day at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, where commercial partners provided feedback on agency objectives for the Mars Telecommunications Network.
