NASA has a clear interest in saving the Swift mission. The $500 million observatory’s primary mission is detecting gamma-ray bursts, the most powerful explosions in the known Universe. Despite its age, astrophysicists still rely on Swift’s multi-wavelength instruments to identify and locate gamma-ray bursts for follow-up observations by other observatories.

But part of the reason for launching a rescue mission to Swift is simply to see if it can be done. NASA launched Space Shuttles to service and upgrade the Hubble Space Telescope, but those missions required hands-on work from spacewalking astronauts. A safer, cheaper robotic servicing platform would have a broader set of applications.

“This is a historic mission,” said Robert Lamontagne, vice president of strategic partnerships at Katalyst. “Some would call it the first of its kind, a robotic spacecraft that can go and capture an unprepared satellite. It’s a commercial mission, first and foremost. It’s doing an operational, real-world objective. It’s not just a demonstration. We’re doing this as a service.

“At Katalyst, we are very passionate about the idea of dynamic space operations,” Lamontagne said. “What I mean by that is, for years and years, folks have thought about space as something where you build a satellite, you launch a satellite, it does its mission, and at the end of the mission, it gets disposed of, either it re-enters, or it goes to a graveyard orbit. That’s a throwaway type of model.

“We think the spacecraft operator should no longer be constrained by the silly decisions that we made before launch,” he said. “You should be able to refuel, reposition, repurpose, repair, and even upgrade satellites, even if they were never prepared for it, and that’s where Katalyst is trying to change everyone’s mindset.”

https://arstechnica.com/space/2026/07/katalysts-satellite-rescue-mission-is-now-in-pursuit-of-nasas-swift/

The new statistics released by PEER were made public as a result of a lawsuit PEER and other groups filed to compel the Chemical Safety Board to disclose industrial chemical releases as required by the Clean Air Act. A federal judge ruled in 2019 that communities have a right to know what hazardous chemicals are released nearby.

Yet Trump’s EPA removed a public data tool designed to inform communities of nearby risks last year. President Trump has also tried to eliminate the Chemical Safety Board by withholding funding, though Congress has continued to fund the agency.

Earlier this year, the administration proposed to significantly weaken RMP rules finalized in 2024 “to reduce regulatory burden” and accepted public comment on the rules until early May.

The Biden administration’s strengthened RMP rules require a number of measures to reduce the risk of catastrophic accidents, including safer-alternatives analyses, independent analyses of accidents’ root causes, worker participation in accident-prevention plans and preparations to adapt to climate change.

An EPA spokesperson said the agency is reviewing public comments and continues to work toward completing the final rule in late 2026.

“EPA’s proposal relies on a rigorous analysis of RMP reportable incidents between 2014 and 2023, which shows accidental releases unequivocally declined significantly over that period,” the spokesperson said. “This means that RMP-regulated facilities had successful prevention programs in place before the Biden EPA finalized its nonsensical and burdensome 2024 rule.”

The Biden EPA used the same data and came to the opposite conclusion, said PEER’s Ruch. Plus, he added, “the conclusion that any decline is due to industry prevention plans is a supposition which the current EPA does not have the data to support.”

Meanwhile, chemical accidents resulting in evacuations, injuries, or multiple casualties continue to happen at least once a week.

“With each passing year the risk gets greater because the infrastructure continues to age,” Ruch said. At the same time, he added, “the federal response to it is shrinking.”

This article originally appeared on Inside Climate News, a nonprofit, non-partisan news organization that covers climate, energy, and the environment. Sign up for their newsletter here.

https://arstechnica.com/science/2026/07/chemical-accidents-rise-as-trump-administration-proposes-weakening-safety-rules/

The simulations that captured the localized effects of individual large impacts also produced wholesale recycling of crust back into the mantle, with material dripping down to depths of at least 600 kilometers. Johnson thinks this recycling explains why so little Hadean crust survived to the present. It also explains, he argues, the near-total absence of shock-deformed Hadean zircons in the geological record. The researchers suggest that with so much melt present at shallow depths, it would have absorbed and scattered shock waves before they left lasting deformation in surviving crystals.

A turning point

The impact flux didn’t stay high forever; it declined more or less exponentially. Between 3.9 and 3.5 billion years ago, it had dropped enough that internal heat sources took over as the dominant influence on the crust. As impact heating faded, the upper mantle cooled, and the once-thin basaltic crust thickened.

The team’s modeling suggests crustal thickness reached around 30 kilometers by the early Archean, the era that came after the Hadean. This thicker, cooler, more rigid crust was also finally able to support plate tectonics, and it’s around this same time that the first continental rocks show up in the geological record. “As soon as you can create thick crust and you can create a mantle lithosphere underneath, you can start building continents,” Johnson said.

The team admits much of the argument rests on physics-based modeling rather than rock samples. In the absence of geological evidence, though, Johnson thinks reliance on modeling is justified. “We need to start taking seriously the outputs of these models rather than just say, well, we can’t find any rocks, so let’s give up,” he said. But ancient rocks, as hard to find as they are, may also pop up in near future—the Earth is extremely good at covering the tracks of its history, but it’s not perfect.

“In Nuvvuagittuq Greenstone Belt in Canada, a team of North American researchers has recently dated a dark, mafic rock as 4.2 billion years old,” Johnson said. “I also know another group has found a rock which is possibly even older. Hopefully you will be able to read about it in the next couple of months.”

Science, 2026.  DOI: 10.1126/science.aeb5402

https://arstechnica.com/science/2026/07/the-missing-500-million-cosmic-bombardment-melted-earths-first-crust/

About 14 years ago, Chrissi Kelly lost her sense of smell. She had traveled to the Czech Republic to visit family and caught some virus. Months later, when she still couldn’t smell, she made the rounds to doctors, including her general practitioner and an ear, nose and throat specialist, trying to find answers.

She was diagnosed with anosmia (smell loss), and like many patients with her condition, was told she’d have to learn to live with it. But for her, the loss was catastrophic. “After about six months of complete loss, I was just climbing the walls, and I did not feel like myself anymore,” she says.

Researchers estimate that up to 22 percent of the population lives with smell impairments, like hyposmia (partial smell loss) or anosmia (complete smell loss). And many others live with smell disorders like phantosmia, in which a person picks up phantom smells, or parosmia, where typically pleasant scents like coffee or shampoo begin to register as highly unpleasant (think feces or vomit). Yet the conditions have been poorly understood, underdiagnosed and often minimized by clinicians.

The pandemic changed that. Covid brought unprecedented attention—and research interest — to the sense of smell. There have been 780 million reported cases of Covid-19 since December 2019 (and many more unreported), according to the World Health Organization, and smell loss is a well-known symptom. In one 2023 survey published in the journal Laryngoscope, 60 percent of individuals with Covid experienced smell loss, most temporarily, but some over the longer term.

With Covid causing millions of noses worldwide to malfunction at roughly the same time, the virus spurred newfound appreciation for, and research into, this critical sense. As scientists learn more about the way that the sense of smell operates, evidence is mounting that smell is deeply tied not only to quality of life but also to brain health.

https://arstechnica.com/science/2026/07/when-the-ability-to-smell-goes-away/

NASA’s Perseverance rover has spent five years traversing Jezero Crater looking for the chemical leftovers of whatever processes were at work on Mars billions of years ago. The rover has found organic carbon, but it has mostly been inside rocks that had to be drilled or abraded to expose it. But now, at an outcrop on the edge of an ancient river channel named Neretva Vallis, Perseverance detected complex macromolecular carbon sitting right on the rock’s surface.

“To our knowledge, that’s the shallowest detection of organic matter on Martian surface to date,” said Ashley E. Murphy, a researcher at the Planetary Institute in Tucson, Arizona, and lead author of the study of the rock, which was found at a site called Bright Angel. On Earth, this much macromolecular carbon usually suggests a biological origin. But to learn what this Bright Angel carbon is and where it came from, we might need to bring samples back to Earth.

Carbon on the rocks

The detection of Bright Angel carbon came from SHERLOC (Scanning Habitable Environments with Raman and Luminescence for Organics and Chemicals), a UV Raman spectrometer fitted on Perseverance’s robotic arm. SHERLOC fires a deep-ultraviolet laser at a target and reads the light that bounces back at shifted energies, a signal that enables scientists to identify specific molecular bonds.

Between sols 1180 and 1218, the rover pointed this UV laser at four targets at Bright Angel. One, called Steamboat Mountain, was an ordinary rock the team used as a control. The remaining three (called Cheyava Falls, Apollo Temple, and Walhalla Glades) returned a spectroscopic signature of macromolecular carbon. This signal, called the graphitic band (G-band), indicates the presence of a tangled, cross-linked network of mostly reduced carbon atoms that is resistant to chemical and thermal breakdown.

At least within the precision limits of the Perseverance’s instruments, the material roughly matches terrestrial kerogen. Using the word “kerogen,” though, was a no-go, the researchers decided. On Earth, kerogen is made almost exclusively of biological matter, mainly fossilized microbes that were buried millions of years ago. “The term kerogen implies biogenic source,” Murphy explained. “Macromolecular carbon implies we don’t know whether its origin is biotic or abiotic.”

https://arstechnica.com/science/2026/07/a-martian-rock-has-lots-of-carbon-on-it-and-its-not-clear-why/

Refurbishment over production… The production of 1,000 Merlin 1D engines is a remarkable milestone for any rocket engine, but it’s important to note that the Merlin 1D is reusable. The Merlin 1D has logged more than 6,000 engine flights with 1,000 units. “With Falcon’s reusability, recovering these engines has enabled continued reliability enhancements, making Merlin one of the most reliable rocket engines ever manufactured,” SpaceX wrote on X. Another highly reliable, but single-use, rocket engine with similar thrust is Russia’s RD-107/108. Five of those have powered each variant of Russia’s R-7 rocket family since the 1950s, a legacy now carried on by the Soyuz launch vehicle. With more than 2,000 flights by Soyuz and its kin, that amounts to more than 10,000 RD-107 and 108 engines produced at a plant in Samara, Russia.

SpaceX launches rare GEO mission. A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket launched Sunday carrying a multi-ton radio broadcasting satellite for SiriusXM to replace two aging satellites in geostationary Earth orbit, Spaceflight Now reports. The SXM-11 satellite is a behemoth as far as spacecraft go, with a launch mass of about roughly 7 metric tons (15,000 pounds). The satellite is destined for a position over the equator at an altitude of more than 22,000 miles (nearly 36,000 kilometers), where its velocity will match the Earth’s rotation to provide continuous radio broadcast coverage over the United States.

Still in business… Of SpaceX’s 78 launches of the Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy this year, this was just the third carrying a payload heading for geostationary orbit, once the preferred destination for nearly all commercial communications satellites. Today, the trend is decidedly bending toward low-Earth orbit with megaconstellations like Starlink. But SiriusXM remains in business, as does the manufacturer of the SXM-11 satellite: Lanteris Space Systems, a subsidiary of Texas-based Intuitive Machines. The company, formerly branded as Maxar, was acquired by Intuitive Machines in January 2026 for about $800 million.

https://arstechnica.com/space/2026/07/rocket-report-indian-startup-nears-first-launch-spacexs-millenary-milestone/

But the complex of proteins needed to make more proteins is far too large to go through a small pore. So the researchers encased these proteins and other large materials in a different membrane and then fed those to the SpudCells. To get the two membranes—one from the SpudCell, one from its food—to interact, the researchers added a tag to the pore protein that they had already been using. They then added something that would interact with that tag to the food membrane. This allowed the two to interact long enough to fuse, spilling the food into the interior of the SpudCell and adding additional membrane material to it.

This “feeding” process allows the SpudCells to continue making new proteins even after they would have exhausted their initial supply of raw materials. The added membrane material also increased the SpudCell’s size, literally causing it to grow.

Normally, cell growth eventually results in cell division, splitting the membranes and their context between two new cells. But the SpudCells had no mechanism for achieving this. Initially, the researchers simply passed them through a wire grid and applied physical force to cause the membranes to split. But they eventually developed a system that could cause the pore proteins to clump by adding certain chemicals to the solution. That altered the membrane’s shape and eventually led to parts of it budding off. While this is a far more random process, it approximates cell division.

So in a limited, carefully engineered sense, these “cells” could feed, grow, and divide, driven by proteins encoded by their own genome. As noted above, though, that genome was only distributed into the next generation of cells at random, and pieces of it were progressively lost over each generation. As a result, no SpudCells were taken past five generations in this work.

https://arstechnica.com/science/2026/07/artificial-cell-manages-a-few-rounds-of-cell-division/

Shane Jacobson, CEO of the American Cancer Society, had similar thoughts. “Codifying shifting policy preferences into formal federal regulations risks triggering repeated cycles of overhaul with each change in administration,” he said in a statement. “Such back-and-forth would create a chronically unpredictable environment, making it extremely difficult for institutions and investigators to plan and sustain the multi-year, long-term research essential to clinical trials and breakthrough discoveries that patients urgently need.”

Nancy Brown of the American Heart Association echoed these worries, saying, “Policies that undermine independence or shift decisions away from established scientific and public health expertise risk weakening the innovation and collaboration needed to meet current and future health challenges.”

And it’s not just the people in the biomedical sciences who are worried. The American Geophysical Union called the change “a rule that would rewrite the terms of US science” and accused the government of “using the language of scientific rigor as a screen for political gatekeeping.” Its statement echoed a number of the concerns in Ars’ coverage.

“Political officials would have the authority to reject proposals that passed rigorous expert evaluation if they determine the work does not advance ‘the President’s policy priorities’ or is inconsistent with ‘the national interest,’ which could change or reverse course at any moment,” its statement said. “We have spent generations building peer review precisely because decisions about which science to fund should rest on scientific merit, not political alignment. This proposal would undo that.”

The American Physical Society was equally blunt. “These proposals would let political preference override expert peer review, restrict travel, limit collaboration, impede the sharing of results, and affect programs that train the next generation of scientists,” it said. “The proposed federal rule would establish regulations that would have politics shadow every research dollar, making it far harder to undo, no matter who holds office next.” In a follow-up, it said, “The proposal crosses the line, threatening all science, under any administration, now and into the future.”

https://arstechnica.com/science/2026/07/editorial-the-most-important-thing-you-can-do-to-protect-science/

Nature Communications, 2026. DOI: 10.1038/s41467-026-72566-7.

How did Botticelli’s model really die?

Credit: Sandro Botticelli/Public domain

One of 15th-century painter Sandro Botticelli’s most famous works is the Birth of Venus, depicting the naked goddess, newly birthed, standing in a giant scallop shell. The model for the painting (disputed by some historians) was allegedly Simonetta Vespucci (nee Cattaneo), a renowned beauty in Florentine high society whom Botticelli greatly admired. He painted her five times before her untimely death in her early 20s. Her open coffin was carried through the streets of Florence. The poet Poliziano dubbed her “the Unrivaled” (La Sans Par).

It was long believed that Simonetta had succumbed to tuberculosis, but in 2019, Paolo Pozzilli of Queen Mary University of London and several co-authors argued that she may have suffered from a pituitary tumor (adenoma) that gradually increased in size due to prolactin and growth hormone secretions, citing her appearance in several portraits as evidence. This could have caused a sudden tumor-related fatal apoplexy.

Pozzilli et al. have now expanded their analysis in a paper published in the journal Endocrinology, Diabetes & Metabolism. For instance, they examined letters between Simonetta’s father-in-law, Piero Vespucci, and Lorenzo de Medici, which described how Simonetta had collapsed during a ball a few days before her death. Her symptoms included headache, hallucinations, vomiting, and a high fever, all symptoms of a rapidly expanding pituitary tumor, per the authors. Pozzilli et al. also think the tumor would explain the irregular eye positioning in the Birth of Venus, suggesting the model had a squint or a misalignment of the eyes, which will be the subject of future research.

Endocrinology, Diabetes & Metabolism, 2026. DOI: 10.1002/edm2.70261.

https://arstechnica.com/science/2026/06/june-research-roundup-6-cool-science-stories-we-almost-missed/

The real issue is whether publishers of scientific journals should retroactively apply contemporary standards regarding duplicate publication or self-plagiarism to historical papers. The journal publishing norms in the early 20th century were substantially different. The emphasis was on achieving the widest dissemination of knowledge across a fragmented scientific community separated by language and geographical distance, publishing in many different journals. As a result, the boundaries were heavily blurred between lectures, conference proceedings, booklets, collected essays, published journal articles and so forth.

The scientific enterprise has since evolved to the point where it is dominated by large commercial publishing groups that are much more sensitive to protecting copyrights and turning a profit. Duplication/self-plagiarism is also more of an issue now, when publications are a major factor when it comes to hiring and promoting scientists, as well as acquiring research fundings. Applying these contemporary standards can be problematic for the “digital circulation of historical texts,” the authors concluded.

The journal’s publisher, Springer Nature, killed an editorial Scarlata planned to run addressing the issue. Springer Nature also declined to comment for the Science article, merely telling Kean through a representative that “detailed information about specific retractions is usually confidential and can only be shared with the relevant authors.”

Given that Planck died in 1947, he can’t get a direct answer either. Both papers are now in the public domain in most countries, so it’s not like copyright violation is even an issue anymore. It’s still possible to access both papers via the Internet archive. But as Gingras and Khelfaoui argue in the their preprint, removing the two papers distorts the historical record.  “Whoever did it, I don’t care,” Gingras told Science. “Just put them [back] in the database. Intellectually, it’s not acceptable.”

https://arstechnica.com/science/2026/06/why-did-this-journal-retract-two-1940s-papers-by-max-planck/