UK: An eye surgeon with a passion for space since childhood predicts that as astronauts start to make journeys to the Moon and Mars in the near future, eye surgery in space will eventually become a necessity. Speaking at the 44^th Congress of the European Society of Cataract and Refractive Surgeons (ESCRS), Dr Morgan Micheletti said that cataract surgery, in particular, will be needed as people travel through space and stay in space stations for longer periods of time. Therefore, it was vital to know how medical supplies such as intraocular lenses (IOLs) and the other equipment needed for surgery could best be packed, transported, stored and protected from the space environment.

As orbital space resources become increasingly scarce, the problem of orbital pursuit-evasion games among spacecraft has attracted widespread attention. In multi-to-one pursuit-evasion scenarios, multiple pursuit spacecraft are required to cooperatively capture a non-cooperative evasive target under impulsive maneuver and fuel constraints, giving rise to an optimal control problem characterized by strong nonlinearity and complex constraints. Existing differential game methods suffer from high computational complexity and poor real-time performance; numerical optimization approaches are sensitive to initial guesses and struggle to handle long-duration constraints; and although deep reinforcement learning has demonstrated advantages in some scenarios, it lacks proactive prediction capability when confronting unknown evasion strategies, thereby limiting pursuit performance. Consequently, how to predict the actions of the evading spacecraft in multi-to-one scenarios and accordingly optimize the cooperative strategies of multiple pursuers has become a key challenge for improving pursuit efficiency in complex orbital games.

Mars is a terrible place to build a house. It’s bitterly cold, blasted by radiation, and a near vacuum. Not to mention that the building materials, even for a modest shelter, could spend months hurtling through space before construction begins.

But they don’t have to. In a study publishing September 10 in the journal Chem Circularity, researchers developed a recipe that could one day be used to 3D print houses on Mars. The recipe combines Martian rocks with Earthly ingredients: gelatin and yeast. Once dried and hardened, this living building material is as strong as low-grade concrete and can be broken down, recycled, and brewed again for new construction.

As high-value orbital regions become increasingly congested, pursuit–evasion confrontations among spacecraft have emerged as a critical issue in the field of space security. Active defense strategies, in which a target spacecraft releases defensive vehicles to implement counter-interception against the pursuer, constitute a three-body engagement scenario involving the target, the pursuer, and the defender. However, in actual engagements, the presence of observation noise, incomplete information, and multi-strategy adversarial conditions arising from uncertain pursuit policies render existing guidance methods—whether based on unilateral optimal control, differential games, or conventional reinforcement learning—incapable of simultaneously addressing the multiple challenges posed by unknown pursuit strategies, information deficiencies, and high-maneuverability confrontations. Consequently, how to achieve cooperative adaptive guidance between the target and the defender under conditions of incomplete observations and variable pursuit policies has become a key technological bottleneck for enhancing spacecraft survivability.

With the rapid advancement of global aerospace technology, human space exploration is progressively extending from near-Earth orbit to the lunar sphere. Large-scale deep-space exploration activities, such as the construction of lunar research stations and lunar bases, are gradually becoming a reality. Major spacefaring entities, including China, the United States, Europe, and Japan, have successively proposed their own lunar exploration and long-term residency programs. Current lunar exploration missions now encompass complex scenarios such as scientific investigation, in-situ resource utilization, lunar construction, and operational maintenance, which impose entirely new demands on lunar robotic technologies. However, existing lunar and Mars exploration missions still predominantly rely on pre-programmed commands and ground-based teleoperation, exhibiting limited intelligence levels. They face significant challenges in addressing five core issues: multi-task high-precision manipulation, autonomous navigation and obstacle avoidance, self-learning interactive collaboration, adaptation to extreme environments, and high-reliability long-duration operation. Consequently, the systematic integration of emerging technologies—including artificial intelligence, deep learning, large-scale models, and embodied intelligence—into lunar robotic design, so as to achieve the transition from programmed robots to intelligent robots, has become a critical technological bottleneck for supporting future large-scale lunar exploration and development.

The unexplained results could enhance future efforts to study out-of-body experiences, researchers say.

Previous studies may have underestimated how much Mercury has contracted as the planet cooled over billions of years because its rough surface hides some of the geological evidence.