As NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft traveled through the Kuiper Belt at a distance of 438 million miles from Earth, an international team of astronomers used the far-flung probe to conduct an unprecedented experiment: the first-ever successful demonstration of deep space stellar navigation.

A paper describing the results was accepted for publication in The Astronomical Journal. The pre-print is available on the server arXiv.

As a proof-of-concept test, the researchers took advantage of the spacecraft’s unique vantage point as it traveled toward interstellar space to image two of our nearest stellar neighbors, Proxima Centauri, which is 4.2 light-years from Earth, and Wolf 359, which is 7.86 light-years away.

From New Horizons’ perspective, the two nearby stars shifted their app...

Capital Medical University, in collaboration with the Chinese Academy of Sciences, reports that betaine, a molecule produced in the kidney and enhanced through sustained exercise, operates as a potent inhibitor of inflammatory and aging-related pathways.

Regular physical activity boosts health across cardiovascular, metabolic, and neurological systems. Scientists have traced improvements in immune function, insulin sensitivity, clearing of senescent cells and tissue regeneration to consistent physical activity. Earlier animal studies suggested that long-term exercise can delay aging processes and reduce vulnerability to chronic disease.

Precise molecular explanations for how sustained exercise reshapes human biology remain incomplete...

Researchers at Helmholtz Munich have developed an artificial intelligence model that can simulate human behavior with remarkable accuracy. The language model, called Centaur, was trained on more than ten million decisions from psychological experiments—and makes decisions in ways that closely resemble those of real people. This opens new avenues for understanding human cognition and improving psychological theories.

For decades, psychology has aspired to explain the full complexity of human thought. Yet traditional models could either offer a transparent explanation of how people think—or reliably predict how they behave. Achieving both has long seemed out of reach.

The team le...

Astronomers using the European Space Agency’s Cheops mission have caught an exoplanet that seems to be triggering flares of radiation from the star it orbits. These tremendous explosions are blasting away the planet’s wispy atmosphere, causing it to shrink every year.

This is the first-ever evidence of a “planet with a death wish.” Though it was theorized to be possible since the nineties, the flares seen in this research are around 100 times more energetic than expected.

The work is published in the journal Nature.

This planet’s star makes our sun look sleepy
Thanks to telescopes like the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope and NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS...