A'cosmic highway' may explain the journeys of some space silicates. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. Some of the solar system's most distant comets can be very confusing. Many contain crystalline silicates that only form after exposure to high heat, which doesn't make a lot of sense to astronomers. These comets spend most of their time inside the extremely cold Oort cloud and Kuiper Belt, at temperatures averaging -450 degrees Fahrenheit.

The two images of Westerlund 2 show just how far the technology has come. Astronomers are studying the hundreds of young, brown dwarf stars inside the stellar nursery. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. In 2015, NASA celebrated the Hubble Space Telescope's 25th year in orbit by releasing one of its most stunning images to date--a colorful star cluster in the constellation Carina known as Westerlund 2 . However, a lot can change in a decade.

The fast-moving comet likely comes from a solar system that is older than our own. This image shows the halo of gas and dust, or coma, surrounding comet 3I/ATLAS, the third interstellar object ever detected by astronomers as it passes through our solar system. The image was taken on Oct. 9, 2025, by an instrument onboard NASA's MAVEN spacecraft, which has been studying Mars from its orbit since 2014. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. Today, NASA released the most detailed images yet of 3I/ATLAS .

Science Space Deep Space Exoplanets Rogue planet is gobbling up 6.6 billion tons of dust per second The cosmic oddities experience their own growth spurts. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. About 620 light-years from Earth, a gigantic rogue proto-planet is currently devouring 6.6 billion tons of dust and gas per second. Based on recent observations, the relatively new resident of the Chamaeleon constellation isn't stopping anytime soon--and the situation may get even more intense. But according to astronomers, that may be pretty standard behavior for these cosmic objects.

$ $The usage of generative artificial intelligence (AI) tools based on large language models, including ChatGPT, Bard, and Claude, for text generation has many exciting applications with the potential for phenomenal productivity gains. One issue is authorship attribution when using AI tools. This is especially important in an academic setting where the inappropriate use of generative AI tools may hinder student learning or stifle research by creating a large amount of automatically generated derivative work. Existing plagiarism detection systems can trace the source of submitted text but are not yet equipped with methods to accurately detect AI-generated text. This paper introduces the idea of direct origin detection and evaluates whether generative AI systems can recognize their output and distinguish it from human-written texts. We argue why current transformer-based models may be able to self-detect their own generated text and perform a small empirical study using zero-shot learning to investigate if that is the case. Results reveal varying capabilities of AI systems to identify their generated text. Google's Bard model exhibits the largest capability of self-detection with an accuracy of 94\%, followed by OpenAI's ChatGPT with 83\%. On the other hand, Anthropic's Claude model seems to be not able to self-detect.

NASA's James Webb Space Telescope has detected what were believed to be fabled'dark stars' that could solve one of the universe's biggest mysteries. A team of astronomers led by The University of Texas (UT) at Austin identified three potential'dark stars' that formed about 320 million years after the Big Bang, making them the earliest stars ever seen by human eyes. The image shows three fuzzy dots glowing in the blackness of space, but astronomers believe the tiny specs could lead to uncovering the elusive dark matter. Dark stars could only exist if dark matter creates heat at the core, preventing the stars from collapsing and causing them to puff up, which the team found in JWST's observations. Although dark matter makes up about 85 percent of the universe, its nature has eluded scientists.

The era of AI-generated conversational search is, apparently, here. On 16th December I published a piece about whether ChatGPT could pose a threat to Google, as many were already suggesting that it might, just two and a half weeks on from the chatbot's release. At the time of writing, neither Google nor Microsoft – a major backer of ChatGPT's parent organisation, OpenAI – had indicated any plans to actually integrate technology like ChatGPT into their search engines, and the idea seemed like a far-off possibility. While ChatGPT is an impressive conversational chatbot, it has some significant drawbacks, particularly as an arbiter of facts and information: large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT have a tendency to "hallucinate" (the technical term) and confidently state wrong information, a task that ChatGPT's makers have called "challenging" to fix. But the idea of a chat-based search interface has its appeal.

As Google's AI-powered Bard prepares to compete against ChatGPT, don't count on the chatbot programs always being right: A recent demo of Bard shows it spouting inaccurate information. Bard, which Google announced on Monday, is slated to arrive in the coming weeks. To promote the AI program, the company posted a GIF on social media that shows Bard answering a question about what new discoveries NASA's James Webb Space Telescope has made. The program lists three discoveries the space telescope made in an easy-to-read, bulleted format. Hence, through Bard, a user can quickly learn information, without having to scroll through a long list of search results to find the applicable site.

It sounds like the stuff of science fiction but some experts think it may be the answer to saving Earth from climate catastrophe. Scientists in the US say dust launched from the moon could be a good way of blocking sunlight and alleviating global warming. According to their new study, moon dust would intercept a proportion of sunlight before it reaches our planet, acting as a'temporary sunshade'. Once the dust dissipates and floats away after a few days, more would be launched from the moon, allowing constant relief from the sun's light and heat. How exactly the dust would be launched from the moon is yet to be determined – although it could potentially be flung up using some kind of catapult.

If the unofficial debut of Google's Bard chatbot is any indication, misinformation is about to get a lot worse. The company posted an ad to Twitter this week showing off the natural-language AI model displaying false information about the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). In the advertisement (via Reuters), a short GIF shows an example of a Q&A with Bard. "What new discoveries from the James Webb Space Telescope can I tell my 9-year old about?" the query reads. The machine quickly spits out three ideas, including the last one that says, "JWST took the very first pictures of a planet outside of our own solar system.