The U.S.-French SWOT (Surface Water and Ocean Topography) satellite captured the leading edge of a tsunami wave that rolled through the Pacific Ocean on July 30, 2025 (11:25 a.m. local time), in the wake of a magnitude 8.8 earthquake that struck Russia’s Kamchatka Peninsula. The satellite captured the data about 70 minutes after the earthquake…
In this week’s edition of The Prototype, we look at the U.K.’s first space launch license, growing mini-organs instead of transplanting them, nuclear reactors on the Moon and more. You can sign up to get The Prototype in your inbox here. Skyrora CEO Volodymyr Levykin Sportsfile via Getty Images Glasgow, Scotland-based company Skyrora, which is…
The process of Greenland’s ice sheet melting is not only raising sea levels, it is also feeding life in the ocean. As the most productive for marine life, phytoplankton harvesting energy from this nutrient-filled climate change is altering how this biological pump works in these warming ares. In a new study, scientists employed cutting-edge computer…
SpaceX’s Crew-10 mission coming to an end; 4 astronauts to return from International Space Station on Aug. 7, 2025 Almost five months into the mission, the crew — NASA’s Anne McClain (commander) and Nichole Ayers, JAXA’s Takuya Onishi, and Roscosmos’s Kirill Peskov — were flying over Mongolia when a workload scenario was suddenly imposed including…
The search for alien life traditionally focuses on planets in the “Goldilocks zone” — the orbital band where surface water can exist. But new research suggests life might thrive far from starlight in a so-called “radiolytic habitable zone,” where penetrating cosmic rays break buried water molecules (a process called radiolysis) into hydrogen, oxygen and energy-rich…
The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has returned to Hubble’s Ultra Deep Field, capturing over 2,500 galaxies across cosmic history. It is part of JWST’s JADES survey, re-imaging the same patch in infrared. Webb’s infrared cameras (NIRCam and MIRI) see much fainter objects than Hubble. While Hubble’s UDF showed about 10,000 galaxies in visible light,…
The skyscraper size of methane ice might cover around 60% of the equatorial region of Pluto, a larger area than astronomers actually estimated. This study was published on July 5, 2025 in the Journal of Geophysical Reserach. It was based on the data from NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft which captured close images of it around…
Just over a minute before liftoff on July 31, SpaceX called off the launch of NASA’s Crew-11 mission due to unsafe weather at Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The scrub came after a dense bank of cumulus clouds drifted within a 10-mile radius of the launch pad, violating flight safety criteria. The Crew-11 mission is…
Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) and NASA launched the NISAR satellite aboard the GSLV-F16 went on July 30, 2025, at 5:40 p.m. After 18 minutes later it injected its satellite into the orbit of the Sun. It has successfully and accurately injected the NISAR satellite, which weighs 2,392 kg, into its intended orbit, as said…
On Oct. 9, 2022, astronomers recorded an extraordinary flash of high-energy light. This gamma-ray burst (GRB 221009A), nicknamed the “BOAT” (Brightest Of All Time), was the brightest and most energetic cosmic explosion ever witnessed. It came from a galaxy about 2 billion light-years away, and its blast of gamma rays briefly overwhelmed detectors on orbiting…