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5 Low Maintenance Bob Haircuts Celebrities Are Loving for Summer  ELLE

QUALCOMM Incorporated (QCOM) Is a Trending Stock: Facts to Know Before Betting on It  Yahoo Finance

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5. Coming Soon: New Oura Features to Help You Stay Ahead of Your Health  Oura Ring

1. Qualcomm announces Snapdragon C for budget Windows 11 ARM laptops targetting $300 and up  VideoCardz.com
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NASA’s X-59 quiet supersonic research aircraft flies above NASA’s Armstrong Flight Research Center in Edwards, California, on April 28, 2026, during testing focused on lower-speed and altitude flight conditions in support of NASA’s Quesst mission.

The X-59 has completed initial test flights at high altitudes and near-supersonic speeds, opening the door for additional flights focused on its full operating range. These more recent, lower-altitude flights at lesser speeds are helping to confirm the X-plane’s performance across a wide range of conditions, including flying with the landing gear both retracted and extended.

Read more about this series of test flights.

Image credit: NASA/Jim Ross

NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is poised to make a major leap in the hunt for worlds outside our solar system, known as exoplanets. Scientists expect the mission to reveal around 100,000 worlds — a staggering leap compared to the nearly 6,300 found so far thanks to NASA missions working in tandem with other observatories. And Roman will primarily find them in underexplored regions of the Milky Way.

“Our galaxy is home to a variety of different environments, but when it comes to hunting for exoplanets, we’ve really only explored one: our own neighborhood,” said Elisa Quintana, an exoplanet researcher at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. Quintana leads a team focused on building software and simulations to help prepare for Roman’s exoplanet transit observations. “Roman will extend the search far enough to encompass other galactic habitats, which could help us learn how planet formation varies across different regions of the Milky Way.”

Most known exoplanets are located within a couple thousand light-years of Earth. But  one of Roman’s core surveys will peer all the way through the Milky Way’s galactic bulge, the central hub where stars are packed more densely than anywhere else, to the fringes of the far side of the galaxy.

Exploring Earth’s birthplace

Roman will monitor stars scattered throughout a deep slice of the galaxy to watch for any that change in brightness. Some stars periodically dim as orbiting planets cross in front of, or transit, them. Others temporarily appear to brighten as the gravity of an intervening star and orbiting planets magnify a farther star’s light, thanks to a phenomenon called microlensing.

These two methods tend to reveal very different types of planets. The transit method, which Roman will use to reveal around 100,000 worlds, is best at finding gigantic, scorching worlds since they block the most starlight and transit more frequently.

Microlensing, which Roman will use to find more than 1,000 worlds, is better suited to finding planets with larger orbits, like those in our solar system, whose gravity can be more easily separated from the gravity of their host stars. Microlensing can find planets as small as Earth and Mars and can find them within their star’s habitable zone and even farther out. Such planets are almost undetectable by other methods and are virtually unknown outside of our own solar system. Pairing the two techniques will help astronomers explore planet formation throughout the galaxy, including Earth’s birthplace and beyond.

Today, our solar system is located about 27,000 light-years from the center of the Milky Way. However, scientists think it formed about 10,000 light-years closer in and then migrated out to its current position.

The Sun’s chemical makeup is the primary clue. Most stars that form in the outskirts of the galaxy are low in heavy elements, which is a blanket term for any elements other than hydrogen and helium, which formed with the birth of the universe. Heavy elements are forged by stars, so they’re more common in places that have seen successive generations of stars.

Stars in the galactic bulge are much older than those in the disk of the Milky Way and thus have a slightly different chemical mixture that is richer in elements like silicon, oxygen, and magnesium.

Those differences matter because planets form out of the same material as their host stars. Stars with different compositions may host planets that are different too, perhaps rockier or larger. It could even influence whether planets form at all, or how many coalesce with each star.

Astronomers have already seen hints of such connections nearby.

“Stars with more heavy elements tend to host more planets, especially giant ones,” said Robby Wilson, a postdoctoral fellow at NASA Goddard, who led a study about Roman’s expected transiting planet yield.

By sampling completely different populations of stars and planets, Roman will take these studies to a whole new level. Astronomers may soon uncover how common planetary systems like our own are throughout the Milky Way.

“Roman will be especially powerful because it will observe hundreds of millions of distant stars, letting scientists compare faraway planet populations to those found nearby,” said Wilson. “All of that data will give us a lot to comb through, so we’re prepping by creating synthetic data, detecting simulated planets, and using machine learning to filter out false positives. That way we’ll be ready to go right away when real data comes pouring in.” And since all Roman data will be publicly available, anyone can join the hunt for other worlds.

Otherworldly climates

Scientists also could study the atmospheres of perhaps a few thousand of the transiting planets Roman finds.

“Roman won’t analyze atmospheres in the same in-depth way as missions like NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, but it will gather different information on a much larger scale,” Wilson said.

While telescopes like Webb search for detailed chemical fingerprints on individual targets, Roman will measure temperature patterns and climate behavior for thousands of planets. The mission will create a big-picture statistical view of exoplanet atmospheres, which Webb could follow-up on for further study.

Roman’s infrared heat vision will detect glowing “hot Jupiters.” About as large as Jupiter, which is around 11 times as wide as Earth, hot Jupiters orbit their stars in only a few days. These worlds are warm enough to radiate a detectable amount of infrared light.

Planetary systems with transiting hot Jupiters can have two dimming episodes: one when they cross in front of the star, and a second smaller one when they pass behind it and the star blocks the planet’s light.

“That secondary dip tells us how bright, and therefore how hot, the planet is,” said Wilson. “By tracking how the planet’s brightness changes over its orbit, Roman can also see differences between the day side and night side, and even detect shifts in where the hottest region is on the planet. That tells us about atmospheric winds and heat circulation.”

“NASA’s now-retired Kepler mission’s survey of 100,000 stars revolutionized the field of exoplanets over a decade ago, and taught us that planets are even more common than stars in our galaxy,” said Jorge Martínez-Palomera, an astronomer at NASA Goddard who is helping prepare for Roman’s exoplanet data. “Roman’s galactic bulge survey will observe around 100 million stars and probe underexplored areas of our galaxy, which will provide a foundational dataset that will likewise revolutionize what we know about other worlds and our place in the universe.”

To learn more about NASA’s Roman mission, visit:

https://nasa.gov/roman

Download high-resolution video and images from NASA’s Scientific Visualization Studio

By Ashley Balzer
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.

Media contact:

Claire Andreoli
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.
301-286-1940

Tens of thousands of abandoned mines threaten waterways across the American West, but identifying which sites urgently need cleanup is slow and expensive. Now, NASA’s EMIT instrument can analyze the unique light signatures of mine waste from space to help focus remediation efforts where they’re needed most.

Expedition 74 astronauts aboard the International Space Station are continuing research efforts to manufacture large quantities of stem cells for therapies on Earth. Previous studies have focused on fine-tuning hardware that allows scientists to produce greater quantities of high-quality stem cells. Now, the InSPA-StemCellEX-H2 investigation is aiming to demonstrate large scale production of blood stem cells for pharmaceutical and clinical use.

The research uses stem cells derived from the human body to produce large quantities of cells for patient use through a process called “expansion”. Although stem cells can be expanded in labs on Earth, they have limitations. For example, Earth-produced cells lose their ability to form the different cells in our blood system, like red and white blood cells or platelets, which are critical for leukemia patients that receive stem cells to build up their blood system after chemotherapy.

Dr. Tobias Niederwieser, assistant research professor at BioServe Space Technologies within the University of Colorado Boulder says, “The microgravity environment in space is much more suitable for keeping the stem cells in their high-quality state during expansion.” Scientists predict that growing cells in space may lead to higher expansion potential and a lower risk of rejection when used in patients on Earth. This research could create long-term cell supplies for patients suffering from fatal blood disorders, various blood cancers, or severe immune diseases, and enable more reliable and accessible therapies. “The end result is really to benefit patients in hospitals here on Earth,” Dr. Niederwieser says.

Space station research allows scientists and commercial companies around the world to test new technologies and innovative medical solutions that have the potential to greatly benefit life on Earth.

The land is always changing, sometimes by human hands: cities are built, farms expanded, and forests logged. Other changes lie mostly outside people’s control: wildfires burn through communities, and hurricanes reshape coastlines. For most of the past four decades, observations from the Landsat satellite record show that humans have dominated changes to the U.S. landscape. Recent research revealed a shift in that trend, suggesting that disasters might be catching up.

In a NASA-funded study published in Nature Geoscience, scientists analyzed nearly 35 years of data from NASA/USGS Landsat satellites to better understand what has been shaping the continental U.S. landscape. The researchers, led by former Landsat science team member Zhe Zhu, found that “human-directed disturbances” like logging, agricultural expansion, and construction have declined, while “wild disturbances” like wildfires and hurricanes—disasters that can be influenced by human activity but are not controlled by people—have risen in frequency and intensity.

Robert Emberson, associate program manager for the NASA Disasters program and not affiliated with the study, said that understanding the forces transforming the U.S. landscape is critical for future planning. “If you know what’s causing them, you can begin to plan around disasters,” Emberson said. “Any understanding of causal factors impacts the adaptation strategy.”

This research is especially useful for policymakers working to prepare communities for resilience, he said. For example, a region expecting to see increased wildfires could strategically perform prescribed burns, remove brush or dry grass around homes, and construct new buildings with fire-resilient materials.

Between 1988 and 2022, 18 percent of the land area in the continental U.S. was disturbed at least once, the researchers found. Adding repeated disturbances, the cumulative area disturbed rises to almost 700,000 square miles, equivalent to nearly one-third of the continental U.S. Humans drove more than half of that change, clearing or developing over 446,000 square miles of land—that’s bigger than the size of Texas and California combined. For example, the animation above, composed of Landsat images from 1985 to 2025, shows the expansion of Reno, Nevada, into a previously undeveloped desert landscape.

Meanwhile, wild disturbances—disasters like wildfires, hurricanes, and landslides—drove much of the remaining change, transforming more than 165,000 square miles of the continental U.S. The Landsat images in the animation below show areas burned by wildfires in Eldorado National Forest west of California’s Lake Tahoe from 1985 to 2025. Major fires in 1992, 2014, and 2022 cleared large swathes of forest, leaving behind bare ground that slowly reforested.

Although human activity has disturbed a larger cumulative area than wild events, the trends over time are moving in opposite directions. That is, land disturbance caused directly by people has been decreasing, while wild disturbance has been increasing.

Specifically, human-directed land disturbances decreased by nearly 232 square miles (600 square kilometers) each year over the course of the study period. Researchers attribute this change to declines in construction, agricultural expansion, and logging, likely brought about by a combination of policy changes, technological improvements, and the 2008 financial crisis’s effect on construction.

In contrast, land affected by wild disturbances increased by more than 77 square miles (200 square kilometers) per year. Fire, drought-related stress, and wind disturbances all became more frequent, likely due to climate warming and other environmental factors, the study authors wrote.

“What this study basically tells me is that what we’ve been doing is not working,” said Ramakrisna Nemani, a retired NASA scientist and co-author on this study. “We have to go back and come up with new strategies on how to deal with these natural disturbances.”

The study’s findings drew on the deep archive of Landsat data, which has long been a key resource for detecting change on Earth’s surface. Think of it like a “spot-the-difference” game. Historically, identifying differences between images required scientists to manually identify the source of the change; for example, using ground observations combined with satellite imagery to determine whether a bare spot resulted from wildfires or logging. For this study, scientists trained a new machine-learning algorithm to do that differentiation work for them.

They fed the algorithm 40 years of land-change data acquired by satellites, manually inspecting and identifying changes at 50,000 locations. After a decade of work, they developed a product that achieves more than 75 percent accuracy across most disturbance types.

The resulting product details the causes of disturbance across the continental U.S. over the course of nearly 35 years. With this information, communities can analyze the past to better plan for the future. “The USA is entering a new era of disturbance,” the study authors wrote. “The challenge now is to transform our relationship with disturbance from one of control to one of coexistence.”

NASA Earth Observatory image by Lauren Dauphin, based on data from Qiu, S. et al. Animations by Ross Walter, Landsat Project Science Support. Story by Madeleine Gregory, Landsat Project Science Support.

References & Resources

• Qiu, S. et al. (2025) A shift from human-directed to undirected wild land disturbances in the USA. Nature Geoscience, (18) 989-996.

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