Shielding astronauts from the deadly radiation they face is a central challenge for any designer of a deep-space crewed mission. Even relatively low levels of exposure over long periods can lead to everything from central nervous system damage to cancer. But current solutions, such as passive water shells or active superconducting magnets, have their own limitations. To get around those, a new paper, available in preprint on arXiv by Valerio Parisi and a team of researchers from Italy and Germany, looks at the feasibility of using a permanent magnet (and its associated permanent magnetic field) to potentially block some of that radiation without the costs of competing technologies.

First, let’s l...

Some people find it useful to talk through their problems—but language isn’t necessary for logical reasoning, cognitive neuroscientists at MIT’s McGovern Institute for Brain Research say.

In research published in the journal PNAS, researchers led by MIT associate professor of brain and cognitive sciences Evelina Fedorenko have shown that people can perform well on tasks that require logical reasoning even if their language abilities are severely impaired. What’s more, brain imaging shows that language-processing parts of the brain are not called on for logical reasoning.

Philosophers, linguists an...

Korean researchers have developed a hierarchical AI technology that autonomously plans even complex, long-horizon tasks. The development of this hierarchical task-planning AI technology, which reduces hallucinations and doubles the success rate, is expected to help robots and agents carry out long-term missions.

The Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute (ETRI) developed the hierarchical task-planning artificial intelligence (AI) technology “ReAcTree,” which autonomously divides tasks requiring complex and lengthy procedures into subgoals and carries them out, and presented it at AAMAS 2026, one of the world’s premier conferences in the AI agent field.

This research achievem...

Stars like our sun are formed from the collapse of stellar objects called prestellar cores, cold and dense concentrations of gas and dust held together by gravity. While many questions remain about the exact mechanisms of star formation, advanced radio telescopes have given researchers new insights into the inner workings of infant stars.

Now, publishing in Astronomy & Astrophysics, researchers from Kyushu Univers...