Alain Berinstain, director of the Florida Space Institute at UCF, has been named director of the Florida Space Research Consortium. He will lead the eight-university partnership as it works to strengthen Florida's position in space research, innovation and workforce development.

Research led by the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Mumbai along with Professor Subir Sarkar from the University of Oxford questions the widely accepted argument that the expansion rate of the universe is accelerating and that this is driven by ‘dark energy’ arising from the quantum vacuum. Their letter has been published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. The findings divide opinion; in the same journal issue, a paper co-authored by Professor Maria Vincenzi also from the University of Oxford maintains that evidence does indeed point to the universe still accelerating.

Scientists at the Simon Foundation’s Flatiron Institute have modeled the strange dynamics of supersize fruit fly sperm, which swim about in a storage organ one-tenth the length of a single sperm. A new paper published June 22 in the journal Nature Physics shows how researchers combined mathematical models with more traditional biological approaches to find that, unlike human sperm, fruit fly sperm propel themselves off each other to create a slow collective churn.

SAN ANTONIO — June 22, 2026 —Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) scientists are using a solar wind forecasting method combined with analytic and numerical heliosphere models to find out where the first plasma boundary of the outer heliosphere lies as NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft hurtles toward this mysterious region of space.