Looking for the perfect vacation? Do you crave late-night fun? PSO J318.5−22, the planet with no star where nightlife never ends, is perfect for you! Prefer some peace and a chance to catch some rays? Kepler-16b, the land of two suns—where your shadow always has company—is waiting!

In 2015, NASA launched an unusual and brilliant exoplanet outreach campaign, offering retro-style posters, virtual guided tours, and even coloring books. The project quickly went viral worldwide. What explains the success of a campaign about a relatively young field of science that—unlike other areas of space research—lacks spectacular imagery?

Ceridwen Dovey, science communicator, writer, filmmaker, and researcher, has just published in the Journal of Science Communication (JCOM) a Practice Insight paper that presents a case study focusing on the Exoplanet Travel Bureau’s poster campaign. Dovey describes the productive working relationships between scientists and artists that produced this standout work and shows how, in contexts like this, artists are not merely in service to science but can also inspire research itself and help scientists clarify their own thinking.

For the first time, the famous “spirograph” Planetary Nebula IC418’s non-explosive stellar evolution has been captured over an unprecedented period of 130 years—almost double the length of a typical human lifetime. These results have recently published in the prestigious Astrophysical Journal Letters by Professor Albert ZIJLSTRA, Professor of Astrophysics at The University of Manchester, and Professor Quentin PARKER, Director of the Laboratory for Space Research at The University of Hong Kong.

A new study co-led by Professor Dazhi XI, climatologist from the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences at The University of Hong Kong (HKU), and Zheng-Hang FU, a Ph.D. student from Fudan University reveals that over the past decades, clustered tropical cyclone—storms that occur in close succession—are becoming less frequent in the Northwestern Pacific, including Hong Kong, Japan, and the Philippines, while becoming more common in the North Atlantic, affecting regions such as the U.S. East Coast and the Caribbean. The study, titled “Shifting Hotspot of Tropical Cyclone Clusters in a Warming Climate,” was recently published in Nature Climate Change.

The European Space Agency-led Solar Orbiter mission has split the flood of energetic particles flung out into space from the Sun into two groups, tracing each back to a different kind of outburst from our star.

Prof Heidi Newberg is an astrophysicist at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Her research focuses primarily on understanding the structure of our own galaxy through using stars. In a newly published Frontiers in Astronomy and Space Sciences article, she and her co-authors lay out the case that a telescope with a rectangular mirror, rather than a roughly circular one as is used in traditional telescopes, could provide a clearer path to discovering habitable worlds. In the following guest editorial, she highlights the feasibility and advantages of this design.

Middle-ear effusion (MEE)—fluid trapped behind the eardrum—can quietly erode hearing, often without pain or fever. In a breakthrough simulation study, researchers used a finely tuned finite element (FE) model of the human ear to mimic six levels of MEE, from barely present to completely filling the cavity. The results reveal a tipping point: when fluid occupies less than half the middle ear space, hearing loss is minimal, averaging about 3 dB. But once it passes the 50% mark, sound transmission plummets, energy absorbance (EA) rates collapse below 20%, and hearing loss can soar to nearly 46 dB. This “fluid threshold” could sharpen diagnostic accuracy and guide timely treatment.