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There are volcanoes erupting hundreds of millions of miles beyond Earth. And a NASA spacecraft is watching it happen.

The space agency’s Juno probe, which has orbited Jupiter since 2016, swooped by the gas giant’s volcanic moon Io last week, its last close planned flyby. The craft captured a world teeming with volcanoes, which you can see in the footage below.

“We’re seeing an incredible amount of detail on the surface,” Ashley Davies, a planetary scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory who researches Io, told Mashable in February after a recent Io flyby. “It’s just a cornucopia of data. It’s just extraordinary.”

The robot is controlled by a neural network trained in deep reinforcement learning via simulation.

Students at ETH Zurich are creating a robot that can move around in extremely low gravity by hopping like a human.


ETH Zurich students are developing a robot that can hop like humans for exploring challenging terrains featuring ultra-low gravity.

For the first time, astronomers have measured the speed of fast-moving jets in space, crucial to star formation and the distribution of elements needed for life.

The jets of matter, expelled by stars deemed ‘cosmic cannibals’, were measured to travel at over one-third of the speed of light — thanks to a groundbreaking new experiment published in Nature today.

The study sheds new light on these violent processes, making clever use of runaway nuclear explosions on the surface of stars.

Last September, the James Webb Space Telescope, or JWST, discovered JWST-ER1g, a massive ancient galaxy that formed when the universe was just a quarter of its current age. Surprisingly, an Einstein ring is associated with this galaxy. That’s because JWST-ER1g acts as a lens and bends light from a distant source, which then appears as a ring—a phenomenon called strong gravitational lensing, predicted in Einstein’s theory of general relativity.

Astronomers have produced the largest 3D map of the universe, which can be explored in an interactive VR video. In the process, they’ve uncovered some tantalizing hints that our understanding of physics, including the ultimate fate of the cosmos, could be wrong.

The Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) is a huge international project to map out the universe in three dimensions, which began collecting data in 2021. This early version of the map only includes data collected during the first year – 5.7 million galaxies and quasars out of the planned goal of 40 million. This data allows the scientists to peer as far as 11 billion light-years into deep space and time, providing a glimpse into the very early universe with an unprecedented precision of less than 1%.

With a view that zoomed-out, the cosmos resembles a colossal web, made up of bright strands of galaxies separated by unimaginably empty voids. If you feel up for an existential crisis, check out this VR fly-through video and remember that each of these blurry blobs of light is an entire galaxy, each containing millions of stars and billions of planets.