What’s Up: October 2026 Skywatching Tips from NASA

 

A Meteor Shower and the Moon Near the Pleiades

See Saturn at opposition, catch the Orionid meteor shower, and watch the Moon pass close to the Pleiades, also known as the Seven Sisters.

Skywatching Highlights

• Oct. 4: Saturn reaches opposition, making the ringed planet visible for much of the night
• Oct. 6: A thin crescent Moon appears close to bright Jupiter before sunrise
• Oct. 21–22: The Orionid meteor shower peaks; moonlight may interfere, so look before dawn after moonset
• Oct. 27–28: The Moon passes near the Pleiades star cluster, also known as the Seven Sisters

Meteors streak across the sky during the 2017 Orionid meteor shower, with the Milky Way visible overhead.

Ben Goldstein via Flickr_CC BY-NC-SA

Transcript

Saturn takes center stage, a meteor shower lights up the sky, and the Moon visits the Seven Sisters. That's What's Up for October. 

A sky chart showing Saturn above the eastern horizon on Oct. 4, 2026, around 9 p.m.

NASA/JPL-Caltech

On October 4th, Saturn reaches opposition, giving skywatchers one of the year's best opportunities to see the ringed planet. Opposition happens when Earth passes between the Sun and Saturn. That puts Saturn opposite the Sun in our sky, so it rises around sunset and stays visible for much of the night.

Astronomers have long known about a hexagon-shaped jet stream that spans nearly 20,000 miles across Saturn's north pole. But just last month, observations using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope revealed a ten-sided atmospheric wave encircling the planet's south pole. This southern hemisphere feature appears to be strengthening, giving scientists the rare opportunity to watch a giant atmospheric pattern develop.

A sky chart illustrating where to view the Orionid meteor shower.

NASA/JPL-Caltech

The Orionid meteor shower peaks on the night of October 21st into the morning of October 22nd. The Orionids are created by tiny pieces of debris left behind by Halley's Comet. They appear to radiate from the direction of Orion, but the meteors can streak across any part of the sky. A bright waxing gibbous Moon will wash out some of the fainter meteors this year. Your best chance may come in just a few hours before dawn, after the Moon sets. Find a dark location. Give your eyes time to adjust and look up.

A sky chart showing the Moon next to the Pleiades on Oct. 27, 2026, looking east at around 11 p.m.

NASA/JPL-Caltech

On the night of October 27th into the 28th, look for the Moon passing close to a famous star cluster called the Pleiades, also known as the Seven Sisters. Many ancient cultures had stories associated with the Pleiades, due in part to the fact that the star cluster is visible from almost everywhere on the globe.

To spot them yourself, look east in the evening as the Moon and cluster climb higher into the night sky. The Pleiades appear as a slightly fuzzy grouping of 6 to 7 stars. They are visible to the unaided eye, but binoculars or a telescope reveal more spectacular detail.

Here are the phases of the Moon for October.

A chart showing the phases of Earth's Moon in October 2026.

NASA/JPL-Caltech

You can stay up to date on all of NASA's missions exploring the solar system and beyond at NASA Science.

I'm Raquel Villanueva from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and that's What's Up this month.

By: Raquel Villanueva

Source: What's Up: October 2026 Skywatching Tips from NASA - NASA Science

In Scotland, NASA Scientists Search for Clues About Mars’ Past

Planetary Expeditions

A NASA fieldwork blog. The quest to understand our solar system begins at home.

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This summer, NASA scientists headed to the Scottish Highlands to follow up on last year’s announcement of potential biosignatures on Mars and prepare for future research. The rocks and cliffs of Scotland’s Stoer formation offer a combination difficult to find on Earth: Not only did they form in environments comparable to ancient Martian lakes and rivers, but they also hold evidence of microbial life from 1.2 billion years ago, before land plants existed. This overlap is ideal for scientists working to interpret NASA’s rover data from the Red Planet.

Red sandstone with reduction spots (gray-green) can be seen at the Bay of Stoer in Scotland, and a rock hammer for scale. Reduction spots are sometimes evidence of ancient microbial life interacting with the rock, but they can be formed in other ways, too. Photo from the Goddard Instrument Field Team’s 2026 expedition.

NASA/Pedro Cota

Though Mars is dry today, the Martian landscape, like our own planet’s, is shaped by an ancient history of flowing water. Both worlds have layered areas of mudstones and siltstones rich in clay minerals. Learning how signs of ancient life show up in Earth rocks like these Scottish cliffs can help us understand the story of habitability and the potential for biosignatures to be preserved and detected on Mars.

Adrian Broz of Purdue University (left) and Field Lead Mike Thorpe of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center (cliff’s far edge) look for reduction spots as Amy McAdam (wearing brimmed hat) and Fuen Cañadas Blasco (right), also of NASA Goddard, prepare to collect samples at the Bay of Stoer in Scotland. The water level at this worksite changes by 11 to 15 feet with the tides; the puddle on the top of the cliff in the foreground is a tidepool.

NASA/Pedro Cota

NASA’s Goddard Instrument Field Team, based at the agency’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, hiked the coasts and cliffs of the Clachtoll region with science instruments on their backs. Climbs were timed to access investigation sites in between high tides and leave safely while the slopes were dry, not always an easy task in the wet climate of the Scottish Highlands. Scientists used handheld instruments to check mineral and chemical compositions on the spot, searched their surroundings for clues about the environment, and identified and collected samples for further analysis.

Deputy Field Lead Hemani Kalucha of NASA Goddard, Adrian Broz of Purdue University, and Fuen Cañadas Blasco of NASA Goddard hold samples of rock containing reduction spots at Clachtoll Bay in Scotland.

NASA/Pedro Cota

With the samples safely home, the story continues to unfold. This research was inspired by questions raised when the Perseverance rover found reduction spots, telltale signs of a chemical reaction that could point to ancient microbial life, in Mars’ Jezero Crater. The team’s work is poised to help fill gaps in our knowledge of Earth’s geologic record, too. In labs across the United States and beyond, with access to cutting-edge tools that can’t be carried into the field, an interdisciplinary coalition of scientists is preparing for deeper analysis of the chemical and mineral traces of ancient life left in Stoer’s rocks. Follow-on work is designed to advance our understanding of data from Mars, help mission teams plan new rover investigations, and prepare the science community for potential Martian sample analysis in the future.

The Goddard Instrument Field Team and collaborators at Split Rock, Scotland. Front row: Pedro Cota, Dina Bower, Amy McAdam, Fuen Cañadas Blasco, Hemani Kalucha, Mike Thorpe, of NASA Goddard and S. J. Ralston of NASA Johnson. Back row: Jessie Wilde of NASA Goddard, Alex Jones, Adrian Broz, William McMahon, David Davis, and Zachary Dickeson.

Credit: NASA/Pedro Cota

This expedition was led by the Goddard Instrument Field Team with collaboration from NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, the University of Glasgow, the University of Maryland, Purdue University, Stony Brook University, and the University of Cambridge. The Goddard Instrument Field Team specializes in studying Earth’s extreme environments to understand similar landscapes on other worlds, also called planetary analog research.

By Caela Barry

NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md. 

Source:  In Scotland, NASA Scientists Search for Clues About Mars' Past - NASA Science

Ask the Chatbot, Get the Same Answer: Study Warns of ‘Knowledge Collapse’

“Let me just ask the chatbot.” For many of us, it has become an automatic reflex, whether we are planning dinner, wording a tricky email or trying to understand what rising interest rates mean. But a new study led by the University of Copenhagen suggests that this convenience comes with a hidden cost: the answers we get are much more alike than the ones a simple web search would give us.

What the researchers did

A team from the Department of Computer Science (DIKU) at the University of Copenhagen, together with colleagues from Aalborg University, Stanford, the University of Colorado Boulder and the University of Texas at Austin, tested 27 large language models from OpenAI, Meta, Google and Alibaba. They covered 155 topics relating to 12 countries, from nuclear weapons, marriage and racism to Marine Le Pen, the Falklands War and K-pop.

For each topic, the models were given 200 different phrasings of questions based on real user queries. Together, this produced around 1.7 million answers containing roughly 70 million individual claims. The researchers then measured how varied that information was and compared it with the diversity of a conventional Google search.

The main finding

Every model tested gave users more uniform information than a search engine, across every topic. Even the best performer, OpenAI’s GPT-5, offered information that was at least 18.7% less varied than Google. Two smaller patterns also emerged: smaller models tended to produce more diverse content than larger ones, and newer models were somewhat more diverse than older ones.

“So AI chatbots are not just changing how we find knowledge, but also which knowledge we have access to,” says first author Dustin Wright, now an assistant professor at Aalborg University.

Why are the answers so similar?

The reason lies partly in how language models work. They compress enormous amounts of text and learn the patterns that appear most often. Information that departs from those common patterns tends to be filtered out along the way. The result is answers that gravitate toward the mainstream view.

The researchers compare it to globalisation: the same products and the same coffee chains now appear almost everywhere. That brings real advantages, but it also reduces diversity.

What is ‘knowledge collapse’?

The concern grows when AI models are trained on text written by other AI models, which the researchers expect to become more common. Those models would learn from outputs that are already less diverse than human writing. Repeated over several generations, the range of available information could gradually narrow. This is what the team calls knowledge collapse.

The authors are careful to add that this is not happening yet. Newer models actually show slightly more diversity than older ones. But, as senior author Professor Isabelle Augenstein points out, the mechanism that could trigger it is already in place.

What can we do about it?

The researchers do not argue against using chatbots, since their summaries are clearly useful. Their advice is to use them thoughtfully:

·         Consult more than one source to see the nuances and get a broader picture, especially for topics where perspectives differ.

·         Keep thinking for yourself. The authors are particularly concerned about younger people growing up with AI becoming too dependent on it.

·         Ask developers to protect breadth. The team has created a method for measuring diversity in language models, which AI developers could use to make sure future models do not become less diverse.

Worth keeping in mind

This study compares language models with a Google search, and it measures diversity of claims across the topics chosen by the researchers. It does not say that chatbot answers are wrong, only that they are more uniform. The paper has been accepted at the international EMNLP 2026 conference in October 2026, which reflects peer review by the field, though the results will likely be debated as models keep changing quickly.

Sources

·         Original paper: Wright D, Augenstein I, et al. What and Whose Knowledge? Measuring Epistemic Diversity in Large Language Models. arXiv, DOI: 10.48550/arXiv.2510.04226. Accepted at EMNLP 2026. Read the paper

·         Press release: University of Copenhagen, AI chatbots give us a narrow slice of knowledge: Researchers warn of ‘knowledge collapse’, September 28, 2026, via EurekAlert!. Read the press release

Source: Ask the Chatbot, Get the Same Answer: Study Warns of ‘Knowledge Collapse’ 

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One CRISPR Infusion, One Year Later: Cholesterol and Triglycerides Stay Down by About Half

What if lowering your cholesterol did not mean taking a pill every day for the rest of your life, but a single treatment that rewrites one instruction in your liver? A first-in-human trial led by Cleveland Clinic has just shown that this idea holds up, at least for one year and in a small group of patients.

The headline result

In this Phase 1 trial, 15 people with lipid disorders that did not respond well to standard medication received a one-time infusion of an experimental CRISPR-Cas9 gene-editing therapy called CTX310. The researchers had already reported encouraging results two months after treatment. The new question was simple: do the effects last?

They do, so far. Twelve months after treatment, participants who received the highest dose showed:

·         52.5% lower LDL (“bad”) cholesterol compared with baseline

·         47.8% lower triglycerides compared with baseline

·         No serious adverse events related to the therapy during the one-year follow-up

How does CTX310 work?

CRISPR-Cas9 is a gene-editing tool that can be directed to a specific stretch of DNA to change it. CTX310 delivers the editing machinery, packaged in tiny lipid nanoparticles, through a single intravenous infusion. The particles travel to the liver, where the editing takes place directly inside the body’s own cells.

The target is a gene called ANGPTL3. When this gene is switched off, the liver produces less of a protein that helps regulate blood fats, and both LDL cholesterol and triglycerides fall. The logic comes from nature: people who are born with naturally inactive versions of this gene tend to have lower lipid levels and a lower risk of coronary artery disease. CTX310 is an attempt to reproduce that protective genetic profile in people who were not born with it.

Doses in the trial ranged from 0.1 to 0.8 mg/kg, and participants were pre-treated with corticosteroids and antihistamines to reduce the risk of infusion reactions. At the highest dose, both LDL cholesterol and triglycerides dropped by roughly 50% on average after a year.

Why durability matters

Statins and other lipid-lowering drugs work well, but they only work while you keep taking them, and many people stop within the first year. A therapy that edits the gene once would change that equation completely, because there would be nothing to forget, skip or run out of. That is why a result at 12 months is more meaningful than one at two months: it is the first sign that the edit is stable and the effect is not fading.

“The durability of the lipid-lowering effect was impressive.” Dr. Luke Laffin, Cleveland Clinic cardiologist and first author of the study

What this does not tell us yet

It is worth keeping the excitement in proportion:

·         The trial is small. Fifteen participants took part across several dose groups, so only a handful received the highest dose.

·         One year is short for a permanent edit. Because gene editing cannot be undone, the FDA recommends long-term safety monitoring, and this study plans follow-up for the next 15 years.

·         Lower lipids are not the same as fewer heart attacks. Phase 1 trials test safety and biological effect; they are not designed to show that the therapy prevents cardiovascular events.

·         Funding and disclosure. The study was funded by CRISPR Therapeutics AG, and Dr. Laffin’s institution has received research funding from the company.

What comes next

The results were presented at the 2026 European Society of Cardiology annual meeting and published at the same time in the New England Journal of Medicine. The researchers say they want to study the therapy in a larger number of patients, and CRISPR Therapeutics is advancing CTX310 into a Phase 1b trial. If the safety and durability hold up in bigger and longer studies, one-time gene editing could become a new way to think about preventing heart disease.

Sources

·         Original paper: Laffin LJ, Nicholls SJ, et al. Durability of CRISPR-Cas9 Gene Editing Targeting ANGPTL3 with CTX310. New England Journal of Medicine, August 28, 2026. DOI: 10.1056/NEJMc2609825. Read the paper

·         Press release: Cleveland Clinic, First-In-Human Trial of CRISPR Gene-Editing Therapy Shown to Safely and Continuously Lower Cholesterol and Triglycerides After One Year, August 28, 2026. Read the press release

·         Press release: CRISPR Therapeutics, Phase 1a Data for CTX310 at ESC Congress 2026. Read the press release

Source: One CRISPR Infusion, One Year Later: Cholesterol and Triglycerides Stay Down by About Half 

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