Anak Krakatau erupted for more than 24 hours in early September, sending volcanic ash as high as 50,000 feet into the atmosphere, according to ScienceDaily. The ash cloud shut eight airports, disrupted nearly 3,000 flights and affected air quality as far away as Jakarta. The volcano sits in the Sunda Strait between Java and Sumatra, in the caldera left by the 1883 eruption of Krakatau, one of the deadliest in recorded history. Ash is dangerous to jet engines because the particles melt and stick to turbine blades, which is why authorities close airspace instead of flying through a plume.
A study led by the Southwest Research Institute offers the first evidence that liquid nitrogen has recently flowed on Pluto's surface. Researchers used images from NASA's New Horizons spacecraft to examine dark, narrow features along the northern edge of Sputnik Planitia, the huge nitrogen glacier that forms the western lobe of Pluto's heart-shaped region. The features resemble patterns on Greenland's ice sheet where liquid water darkens snow and ice. The team suggests nitrogen melts near the base of the glacier and rises through cracks. The paper was published in The Planetary Science Journal.
The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope has passed its post-launch systems check while operating in deep space, NASA said this week. The observatory launched on August 30 aboard a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket from Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Roman is an infrared telescope with a field of view far larger than Hubble's, which lets it survey wide patches of sky in single exposures. It will study dark energy and find exoplanets through microlensing. The mission now enters commissioning, a phase expected to last several months as teams calibrate detectors, check pointing stability and test observing modes. NASA had committed to launch no later than May 2027 and moved the date forward after final assembly finished in late 2025, which the agency cites as evidence it can still deliver flagship science missions on schedule and within budget.
The Lasker Foundation announced its 2026 awards, often called America's Nobel prizes. Emmanuel Mignot of Stanford University School of Medicine and Masashi Yanagisawa of the University of Tsukuba share the Albert Lasker Basic Medical Research Award for work that explained how sleep is regulated and what goes wrong in narcolepsy. Kunihiro Hattori, Takehisa Kitazawa and Tomoyuki Igawa of Chugai Pharmaceutical receive the Lasker-DeBakey Clinical Medical Research Award for a new kind of hemophilia treatment. Michael J. Fox receives the Lasker-Bloomberg Public Service Award for building the largest nonprofit funder of Parkinson's research.
An international team led by Cardiff University says the inductive effect, a standard concept in organic chemistry, travels only across a single bond in neutral molecules rather than weakening over three or four bonds as textbooks have taught for almost 100 years. Their new paper in the Journal of Chemical Education pulls together scattered evidence and their own dataset. Two A-level exam boards have already announced reviews of how they teach the topic.
The LUX-ZEPLIN experiment, a detector holding seven tonnes of liquid xenon a mile underground in South Dakota, has recorded a single particle interaction that researchers cannot easily explain with known backgrounds. The event happened on 16 June 2023, and the new analysis puts it at 2.6 sigma, short of the 5-sigma threshold for a discovery. If it came from dark matter, the particle would be a WIMP with a mass of at least 200 GeV. Researchers say more data will decide whether the hint survives.
Researchers at the Technical University of Denmark have built a nanolaser small enough that thousands could fit on a single microchip, a step toward moving data with light instead of electricity. The device traps photons and electrons in the same microscopic cavity and runs at room temperature. The team estimates that photonic links could cut a computer's energy use by as much as half, by removing resistive heating in circuits, easing data centre cooling and speeding up transfers. The work was published in Science Advances. Powering the laser electrically remains the next hurdle.
The European and Japanese BepiColombo mission has entered its arrival phase after eight years of travel through the inner solar system. On September 3, mission controllers confirmed that the Mercury Transfer Module separated from the rest of the spacecraft stack, with signals picked up by ESA tracking antennas in Spain and Argentina. The composite spacecraft is set to enter orbit around Mercury on November 21, 2026. Two science orbiters, ESA's Mercury Planetary Orbiter and JAXA's Mercury Magnetospheric Orbiter, will separate from each other on December 9 and 10. The science phase is scheduled to start in April 2027, making BepiColombo the first mission to study Mercury from two spacecraft at once. Engineers chose a slow route on purpose: the spacecraft used flybys of Earth, Venus and Mercury to shed speed instead of burning fuel, a journey that took about 7.2 years.
New research has traced the stones of Britain's tallest surviving prehistoric stone row to Brimham Rocks in North Yorkshire, at least 18 kilometers, or 11 miles, away. The Devil's Arrows near Boroughbridge rise as high as seven meters and weigh more than 25 tonnes each. A team from Curtin University and the University of York found that builders passed over Plumpton Rocks, a closer source that had been the leading candidate. The authors say the distant origin suggests the landscape itself held cultural, symbolic or spiritual meaning. The stones were probably raised in the Late Neolithic or Early Bronze Age, possibly around 2000 BC.
New research from the University of Reading shows that today's best weather computers, including modern machine-learning models, would still have struggled to call the weather for the D-Day landings better than Captain James Stagg did in 1944. Published in the journal Weather ahead of the release of the D-Day film Pressure, the study used AI-based models to produce 50 forecasts of the storm that forced General Dwight Eisenhower to delay the invasion by a day. Even with 80 years of improved science and modern computing power, the models produced a muddled picture. The authors say the case shows that computing power alone cannot replace human judgment when weather data is thin and the stakes are high.