A planet is about to be destroyed by the collapse of a binary star system in Slow Gods, Claire North's first venture into classic science fiction. It's bad luck for those living on Adjumir, which is set to be obliterated Claire North is a successful and prolific novelist, writing under three separate names, but this is their first shift into classic science fiction, i.e. a novel with spaceships in it. I loved the title of this book, Slow Gods, and I loved the cover art. All of which is to say that I went in with high hopes. It begins: "My name is Mawukana na-Vdnaze, and I am a very poor copy of myself."

Vascular anastomosis, the surgical connection of blood vessels, is essential in procedures such as organ transplants and reconstructive surgeries. The precision required limits accessibility due to the extensive training needed, with manual suturing leading to variable outcomes and revision rates up to 7.9%. Existing robotic systems, while promising, are either fully teleoperated or lack the capabilities necessary for autonomous vascular anastomosis. We present the Micro Smart Tissue Autonomous Robot (micro-STAR), an autonomous robotic system designed to perform vascular anastomosis on small-diameter vessels. The micro-STAR system integrates a novel suturing tool equipped with Optical Coherence Tomography (OCT) fiber-optic sensor and a microcamera, enabling real-time tissue detection and classification. Our system autonomously places sutures and manipulates tissue with minimal human intervention. In an ex vivo study, micro-STAR achieved outcomes competitive with experienced surgeons in terms of leak pressure, lumen reduction, and suture placement variation, completing 90% of sutures without human intervention. This represents the first instance of a robotic system autonomously performing vascular anastomosis on real tissue, offering significant potential for improving surgical precision and expanding access to high-quality care.

Axel Krieger is the Head of the Intelligent Medical Robotic Systems and Equipment (IMERSE) Lab at Johns Hopkins University, where Justin Opfermann is pursuing his PhD degree. Below, Axel and Justin tell us more about their work, the methodology, and what they are planning next. Our research is focused on the design and evaluation of medical robots for autonomous soft tissue surgeries. In particular, this paper describes a surgical robot and workflow to perform autonomous anastomosis of the small bowel. Performance of the robot is conducted in synthetic tissues against expert surgeons, followed by experiments in pig studies to demonstrate preclinical feasibility of the system and approach.

The search for'another Earth' has been a staple of science fiction for decades, and now a group of astronomers hope to discover one on our galactic doorstep. Alpha Centauri is a triple star system just over four light years from the Earth, split into a pair of sun-like stars known as AB, and a red dwarf called Proxima Centauri. So far planets have only been found orbiting Proxima Centauri, but experts from the University of Sydney and Breakthrough Initiatives believe they will find a world orbiting the larger binary pair using a new privately funded telescope. Known as the Toliman mission, it will launch in 2023 and scan Alpha Centauri AB for worlds in the habitable zone, where liquid water can flow on the surface. The team hope to be able to say whether there are habitable worlds orbiting either or both of the binary stars by the middle of this decade.

In 1996 Nasa and the White House made the explosive announcement that the rock contained traces of Martian bugs. The meteorite, catalogued as Allen Hills (ALH) 84001, crashed onto the frozen wastes of Antarctica 13,000 years ago and was recovered in 1984. Photographs were released showing elongated segmented objects that appeared strikingly lifelike.

A star in the centre of our galaxy keeps blinking in and out of existence, and scientists have not been able to work out why. In the middle of the Milky Way galaxy, 25,000 light years away, is the mysterious star VVV-WIT-08. Many stars change in brightness because they pulsate, or are eclipsed by another star, but this one is exceptionally rare because it becomes fainter over a several months – then suddenly brighter again. Astronomers believe that VVV-WIT-08 is a new class of'blinking giant' binary star system, where the giant mass of gas is blocked every few decades. Scientists still don't know what could be hiding the planet, though; the companion object, which could be another star or planet, is surrounded by an opaque disc, covering the star.

A team of NASA astrophysicists has put the fate of entire star systems in the hands of an AI algorithm. The system -- dubbed SPOCK -- by NASA and Princeton University astrophysicist Daniel Tamayo, doesn't actually decide which worlds will live and die. But it can predict the paths of exoplanets, and determine which ones will remain stable and which will crash into other worlds or stars, far more accurately and at greater scale than humans ever could. Since the first exoplanet was discovered in 1995, scientists have identified more than 4,000 worlds elsewhere. Over 700 of them are in star systems containing more than one planet, Tamayo said in a press release, which potentially puts them at risk of devastation collisions.

A planet with a similar surface temperature and size to the Earth has been discovered 300 light years away orbiting in its star's habitable zone. Kepler-1649c was discovered hidden away in data collected from the Kepler space telescope two years after it was retired by NASA and in seven-year-old observations. It's been described as'the most similar planet to Earth ever found' in data from the Kepler space telescope observations by the Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence. The rocky planet is just 1.06 times larger than the Earth and gets about 75 per cent of the starlight from its star that the Earth receives from the Sun. Astronomers from the University of Texas found Kepler-1649c while looking through old observations from 2013 - they found a computer algorithm had misidentified it.

NASA's next flagship telescope is the James Webb spacecraft, but the long-term direction of NASA's research remains uncertain. America's space agency has now turned to a team of expert astronomers to choose its eventual successor which will be built and sent into space in the 2030s. Four vastly different designs have been put forward which are designed to look for alien life, distant Earth-like worlds, black holes and the birth of new galaxies and high-energy gas disks. All four of the proposed missions look vastly different and the momentous decision will likely sculpt NASA's research for decades to come. Analysis of The Great Observatory programme in the 1970s gave the scientific community, and the wider world at large, access to analysis of the entire spectrum of electromagnetic light from Gamma rays to infrared radiation. LUVOIR will continue a mission similar to that which has been covered over the last two decades by Hubble and will study the first stars of the universe to find signs of life and the creation of worlds.

We present Web-STAR, an online platform for story understanding built on top of the STAR reasoning engine for STory comprehension through ARgumentation. The platform includes a web-based IDE, integration with the STAR system, and a web service infrastructure to support integration with other systems that rely on story understanding functionality to complete their tasks. The platform also delivers a number of "social" features, including a community repository for public story sharing with a built-in commenting system, and tools for collaborative story editing that can be used for team development projects and for educational purposes.