Great news from Saturn’s moon Enceladus in the search for life in space

What are the chances of finding extraterrestrial life in our solar system? Frank Postberg, a professor of planetary science at Freie Universität Berlin, has published a study in Science Advances with an international team of researchers. They present new evidence that it is easier to determine the constituents of the ocean hidden beneath Enceladus’s icy surface than previously assumed.

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Testing an antenna layout for the SKA-Low telescope

SKA-Low is a radio telescope under construction in Western Australia. It will operate across a wide frequency range, from 50 to 350 MHz, and will be the most sensitive telescope of its kind ever built. The completed instrument will link 512 stations spread across an area roughly 75 km (47 miles) wide. Each station’s antennas work together like a single large dish, so their arrangement directly shapes what the telescope can detect.

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Spin rephasing helps quantum memories store single-photon states longer for future networks

We are continuously sending information to each other, transmitting zeros and ones through a giant network of connected computers and devices. Scientists are now trying to extend this familiar concept of the internet to the quantum realm, looking for an efficient way to exchange quantum rather than classical information: qubits instead of bits. The motivation is not just scientific curiosity. Qubits can be a 0, a 1 or any superposition of the two. They can also become entangled, showing a degree of correlation that is out of reach for classical bits.

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Webb detects ammonia and unexpected chill on a distant giant planet

Using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), a team of astronomers led by the University of Maryland identified water, methane and ammonia in the atmosphere of HATS-6 b, a giant planet 500 light-years from Earth. The observations also revealed that HATS-6 b may be significantly cooler than standard calculations predict—suggesting that the planet’s relationship with its star may be far more complicated than previously thought.

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Private spacecraft falls back to Earth after failing to rescue aging NASA telescope

The robotic spacecraft that failed to rescue an aging NASA telescope plunged back to Earth on Friday less than three months after launching on the bold mission.

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Discovery confirms rare, switchable electrical property in widely used electronics material

A Husker research team’s latest research could open the door to broader use of a class of materials whose electrical properties may someday power next-generation electronics, high-density energy storage, improved computer memory and new strategies for cooling.

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Retired Fla. officer killed by wife in apparent murder-suicide, sheriff’s office says

Joanne Baker was the primary caretaker for retired Pembroke Pines Officer John Baker following his severe injuries in a 2019 on-duty motorcycle crash

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Video: Carjacker skids across lanes, flees in reverse as multiple PITs destroy vehicle during pursuit

The driver, who had escaped a South Florida hospital after an involuntary mental health hold, kept fleeing in spite of multiple PIT maneuvers before being nabbed by state troopers

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Ore. K-9 killed during last shift before retirement

K-9 Kylo was killed during an attempt to arrest a suspect, who also died during the incident; he had served with the Portland Police Bureau since 2020

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Rare quantum state reveals particles with quarter-electron charge

An electron’s charge is normally fixed, like a coin you can’t break into pieces. But if electrons are cooled close to absolute zero and trapped in a two-dimensional layer under a powerful magnetic field, they organize into a collective state of “quasiparticles” that seem to hold only a fraction of an electron’s charge.

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Random access quantum memory lets one processor select among seven storage cells

Classical computers can temporarily store the information required to perform specific tasks in a short-term memory component known as RAM (random access memory). This component allows computer processors to retrieve information from a chosen location without searching through all stored data.

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Cosmic lockdown: How the environment can isolate quantum fields

A simplified cosmological model suggests that decoherence can suppress quantum tunneling, effectively locking fields into the vacuum state they have reached.

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US-India satellite captures time-lapse video of volcanic eruption

Like tendrils on a vine, lava spreads out from the northern crater of Krasheninnikov, a volcano pair on the Pacific coast of Russia’s Kamchatka Peninsula. On July 30, 2025, an 8.8-magnitude earthquake struck in the nearby ocean, apparently jolting one of the two volcanoes awake. A few days later, for the first time in nearly five centuries, Krasheninnikov started erupting. Since then, the northern volcano has been spilling a steady, eastward-flowing field of molten rock and debris, and the NASA-ISRO Synthetic Aperture Radar (NISAR) mission has been tracking the changes in the landscape.

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Coolest lava world yet with signs of an atmosphere offers clues to early Earth

In the search for extraterrestrial life, it makes sense to first look for rocky planets with an atmosphere, like Earth. Without an atmosphere, a planet can’t have surface water. But of the more than 6,300 exoplanets cataloged thus far, the vast majority are not rocky, and only a handful of the rocky worlds appear to have an atmosphere.

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Higher-dimensional black holes hide an exact symmetry in their ringing, and string-inspired gravity breaks it

Strike a bell, and it rings with a pitch and a fading that tell you about the bell: its size, its shape, the metal it is made of. Black holes ring too. When two merge, the newborn black hole shivers and sheds gravitational waves in a brief, dying chord, and since 2015, gravitational-wave detectors have been listening. The notes of that chord, which physicists call quasinormal modes, depend only on the black hole’s mass and spin and on the law of gravity itself. Change the law, and the chord changes.

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