NASA Delivers Navigation System for Commercial Lunar Relay

The Moon's rocky, uneven, and otherworldly surface features are highlighted by the terminator – the difference between light and darkness.

Credits: NASA

NASA delivered the NavCube3-mini payload on July 13 to Intuitive Machines for integration into Altus-1, the company’s first lunar relay satellite, marking an important milestone in the development of future lunar communications and navigation services. The lunar relays are designed to enable communications and navigation for astronauts and rovers operating at the agency’s future Moon Base.

About half the size of a shoebox and weighing just 3.5 pounds, NavCube3-mini is a compact but powerful navigation receiver designed to use signals from Earth-based GPS and Galileo Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) at lunar distances. Operating on less than 20 watts of power, roughly the same as a laptop computer, it can determine a spacecraft’s precise position far beyond Earth orbit. The compact payload builds on a series of navigation technology advancements developed at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, each extending GPS navigation to new record-breaking distances from Earth.

NavCube3-mini in the Space Navigation Laboratory at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., prior to delivery to Intuitive Machines for integration into the Altus-1 lunar relay satellite.

NASA/Dave Ryan

The payload will fly aboard Intuitive Machines’ Altus-1 lunar relay satellite, the first of a planned network of lunar relay satellites being developed under the company’s Near Space Network Services contract with NASA. The relays will provide communications and navigation support for missions operating at the Moon, including the challenging lunar South Pole region, where Artemis astronauts will land in 2028, and where direct communications with Earth can be difficult. By extending communications coverage and improving navigation services, the relay network will help realize NASA’s vision for a sustained human presence on the lunar surface. 

Before being shipped to Intuitive Machines, NavCube3-mini underwent an extensive environmental and performance test campaign at NASA Goddard to verify it is ready for spaceflight. The environmental testing included vibration testing to simulate launch conditions, thermal vacuum testing in the extreme temperatures and vacuum of space, and electromagnetic compatibility testing to ensure the payload can operate reliably alongside other spacecraft systems without causing or experiencing electromagnetic interference. Performance testing was conducted before and after each environmental test using high-fidelity simulations of the GPS and Galileo signals the NavCube will encounter in lunar orbit, verifying functionality and performance throughout the testing campaign. 

Munther Hassouneh, the NavCube3-mini project manager, in the Space Navigation Laboratory at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.

NASA/Dave Ryan

NavCube3-mini will serve as a key technology demonstration aboard Altus-1, validating the use of GNSS-based navigation in the lunar region and providing valuable performance data to support the development of future lunar navigation infrastructure. This technology is part of NASA’s broader strategy to develop communications and navigation services that work across both commercial providers and NASA’s networks. These capabilities are designed to support a growing lunar ecosystem that includes orbiters, landers, rovers, and, eventually, astronauts living and working on the Moon.

The delivery of NavCube3-mini marks another step toward building the communications and navigation infrastructure needed for long-term lunar exploration. Through partnerships with commercial providers like Intuitive Machines, NASA is building a more connected and capable lunar environment. As activity around the Moon continues to grow, these capabilities will enable lunar spacecraft and explorers to operate more safely, efficiently, and autonomously. 

Source: NASA Delivers Navigation System for Commercial Lunar Relay - NASA

Gut Jet Lag: How Trans-Meridian Travel Disrupts Athletes’ Internal Clocks and Microbiomes

What does rapid long-distance travel actually do to the body’s internal clock and gut bacteria, and can any of it be managed?

Two clocks, one disruption
The body runs on a central circadian clock in the brain’s suprachiasmatic nucleus, which is set primarily by light exposure. But the gut has its own daily rhythms too, governed by feeding and fasting cycles and a local molecular clock in the intestinal lining. Normally these two systems stay in sync. Rapid time-zone travel throws that synchrony off, producing what researchers are increasingly calling “gut jet lag”, a state where the internal body clock and the gut’s own rhythm fall out of step with each other and with local time.

East is harder than west
Because the human body’s natural clock runs slightly longer than 24 hours, adjusting to travel that delays the schedule (westward flights) tends to be easier than adjusting to travel that advances it (eastward flights). The review cites real performance data to back this up: NBA teams playing on the East Coast shortly after flying from the West Coast saw win percentages drop by about 6%, alongside worse shooting accuracy. Major League Baseball showed a similar pattern, with eastward travel linked to reduced home-team offensive output. An 11-year analysis of Super Rugby travel found measurable declines in performance indicators after roughly 24 hours of eastward long-haul travel across 12 time zones, even after accounting for team ranking and other confounding factors.

What actually shifts in the gut
Beyond circadian misalignment itself, travel brings a cluster of secondary stressors, dehydration, disrupted meal timing, higher intake of processed food, and psychological stress, that independently reshape gut bacteria. The review points to a study of international travelers where gut microbial diversity dropped in 61% of participants, with a rise in E. coli abundance and new colonization by Klebsiella and Shigella strains. Separately, a study comparing airline pilots to fitness instructors found pilots had meaningfully lower levels of beneficial bacteria like Akkermansia muciniphila and Faecalibacterium prausnitzii, species linked to gut barrier integrity and short-chain fatty acid production.

Why gut bacteria matter for performance
Short-chain fatty acids (SCFAs) like acetate, propionate, and butyrate, produced when gut bacteria ferment fiber, aren’t just digestive byproducts. In animal studies, these compounds get taken up directly by skeletal muscle and used as fuel, activate a key metabolic enzyme (AMPK) that boosts glucose uptake and fat oxidation, and support glycogen storage and insulin signaling in muscle tissue. Germ-free mice, lacking gut bacteria entirely, show reduced muscle mass, lower glycogen stores, and impaired endurance, effects that are reversible once the microbiota is restored. The authors are careful to flag that most of this mechanistic evidence comes from animal models, with direct human athletic data still limited.

What might help
The review lays out evidence-informed (not yet gold-standard) strategies for athletes: timed light exposure to reset the central clock faster, chrononutrition (aligning meal timing with the destination time zone to help entrain peripheral clocks), and targeted probiotic or prebiotic supplementation aimed at restoring SCFA-producing bacteria. One small proof-of-concept trial cited in the review found a multi-strain Lactobacillus intervention improved self-reported sleep quality by up to 69% and energy levels by 31% in elite athletes, though the authors note this is based on a small cohort and needs replication.

The caveat that matters
This is a narrative review, not a systematic one, and the authors are upfront that a lot of the mechanistic story is built on animal and non-athlete human data. Whether the same effects hold up cleanly in elite athletes under real competition conditions is still an open question. But with a World Cup spanning six time zones on the calendar, it’s a timely reminder that recovery planning for major tournaments may need to think about the gut as seriously as it thinks about sleep.

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Source

·         Biliński, K.; Wiśniewski, K.; Rafner, L.; Witko, P.; Gaweł-Dąbrowska, D. “Travel-Induced Circadian and Microbiota Disturbances: Implications for Athlete Health and Performance: A Narrative Review.” Nutrients 2026, 18(10), 1523. https://doi.org/10.3390/nu18101523

Source: Gut Jet Lag: How Trans-Meridian Travel Disrupts Athletes’ Internal Clocks and Microbiomes

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NASA Telescopes Create Colorful ‘Craft’ From Nearby Nebula - UNIVERSE

Like a collage made of layered sheets of colored cellophane, a vibrant new image layers observations of a famous star-forming nebula from NASA space telescopes. The resulting cosmic “craft” reveals new details about the star formation region known as 30 Doradus, or the Tarantula Nebula. 

Located in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a small neighbor galaxy to the Milky Way about 160,000 light-years from Earth, the Tarantula has thousands of young stars embedded in a vibrant honeycomb-like structure of gas and dust.

X-ray: NASA/CXC/Ohio State Univ./J. Rodriguez et al; Infrared: NASA/ESA/CSA/STScI; Optical: NASA/ESA/STScI; Image Processing: NASA/CXC/SAO/P. Edmonds

Like a collage made of layered sheets of colored cellophane, a vibrant new image layers observations of a famous star-forming nebula from NASA space telescopes. The resulting cosmic “craft” reveals new details about the star formation region known as 30 Doradus, or the Tarantula Nebula. 

Located in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a small neighbor galaxy to the Milky Way about 160,000 light-years from Earth, the Tarantula has thousands of young stars embedded in a vibrant honeycomb-like structure of gas and dust. 

The new composite image contains X-rays from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory, which has repeatedly observed the Tarantula Nebula over the course of its mission, in the layer that appears in blue. The X-ray data reveals gas blown away by winds from the surfaces of young, massive stars and heated to millions of degrees by shock waves, like sonic booms from supersonic jets. 

The red represents infrared data from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope showing thousands of young stars, plus swaths of cool dust that will provide the ingredients to form new stars and planets. Optical data in the green layer from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope uncovers hydrogen gas that is warmer than seen with Webb, as well as some individual stars through the nebula. 

The composite image shows the full Hubble and Webb images of this region, as well as a large section of the Chandra image, all recently published in a research paper in the Astrophysical Journal. In some regions the blue Chandra layer stands alone, and in others it combines with either the red Webb data or the green Hubble data. In the middle region all three images overlap to provide a holistic view in red, orange, yellow, green, and blue. 

Previously, astronomers had studied the amount and the impact of energy produced by winds from young, massive stars in the Tarantula Nebula. Scientists expect that much of this energy should heat gas so that it produces X-rays. However, the research paper shows that there is much less X-ray-emitting gas in the nebula than expected. This led researchers to ask: Where has this energy gone and what tamed the Tarantula Nebula? 

By studying the data from Chandra, Hubble, and Webb, combined with data from NASA’s retired Spitzer Space Telescope, the team concluded the Tarantula may be losing energy from several sources. 

First, up to half of the hot gas is leaking through the shell walls of the gas and dust structures and escaping the nebula. Next, there is stirring and mixing between the cold gas near the shell walls and some of the hot gas, lowering the overall temperature of the gas. Finally, comparisons with computer simulations suggest the Tarantula may be losing energy through conduction. This involves direct physical contact between hot and cooler material, like with a frying pan on a burner, causing the hot and cooler material to equalize in temperature. In the case of the Tarantula Nebula, the hot gas would be conducting heat by being in direct contact with the cooler gas in the shells, especially in the densest regions. This scenario does not necessarily involve mixing the hot and cooler gas. 

The combination of these three channels for losing large amounts of energy leads to this colorful and complex display revealed by NASA's telescopes working together.

Tarantula Nebula / 30 Doradus, cropped version.

X-ray: NASA/CXC/Ohio State Univ./J. Rodriguez et al; Infrared: NASA/ESA/CSA/STScI; Optical: NASA/ESA/STScI; Image Processing: NASA/CXC/SAO/P. Edmonds

The paper describing these results was led by Jennifer Rodriguez of The Ohio State University in Columbus. Additional authors on the paper include Laura Lopez, Ohio State; Lachlan Lancaster, Columbia University in New York City; Anna Rosen, San Diego State University; Omnaraynai Nayak, Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore; Sebastian Lopez, Ohio State; Tyler Holland-Ashford, NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland; and Trinity Webb, Ohio State. 

NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, manages the Chandra program. The Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory's Chandra X-ray Center controls science operations from Cambridge, Massachusetts, and flight operations from Burlington, Massachusetts. 

To learn more about Chandra, visit:https://nasa.gov/chandra

Source: NASA Telescopes Create Colorful ‘Craft’ From Nearby Nebula - NASA Science

These Immune Cells Kill by Exploding, And They Were Hiding in a Flatworm

For decades, our picture of how the body kills dangerous or infected cells has been built almost entirely around blood-derived immune cells, T cells, natural killer cells, neutrophils. A new study out of Stanford, published in Cell, just added something stranger to that picture: a cell that kills not by attacking, but by exploding.

Researchers studying the planarian flatworm, a small aquatic worm famous for regenerating entire new bodies from cut-up fragments of itself, discovered a previously unknown class of immune cell they’ve named “ruptoblasts.” Unlike typical immune cells, ruptoblasts aren’t blood-derived at all; they’re specialized gland cells. When triggered, they undergo a dramatic form of cell death the researchers call “ruptosis”: the cell bursts open in a synchronized, explosive rupture, releasing cytotoxic contents that kill nearby cells — including bacteria and even mammalian cells — within minutes, then vanish without a trace.

The trigger turns out to be hormonal. Activin, a hormone that normally helps regulate regeneration, reproduction, and tissue balance in these worms, doubles as an inflammatory signal. When activin levels spike, through injected protein, genetic chimerism between different worm strains, or bacterial infection, ruptoblasts detonate in response. It’s a mechanism that appears to let the flatworm’s immune system solve a problem mammals also face: catching cells that are secreting hormones abnormally, including the worm’s own highly proliferative stem cells (neoblasts), before they can perpetuate an imbalance.

When the researchers selectively eliminated ruptoblasts, inflammation went down, but so did the worm’s ability to clear bacterial infections, underscoring how broadly these cells contribute to immune defense. Mechanistically, ruptosis looks nothing like apoptosis, necrosis, or other known forms of cell death; it depends on calcium released from the endoplasmic reticulum and a cytoskeleton-driven amplification step that produces the rapid, synchronized burst.

It’s a reminder of how much immune biology remains unmapped outside of well-studied mammalian systems. Flatworms have been quietly refining their defenses for hundreds of millions of years, and this discovery suggests they arrived at a strategy with no real precedent in human biology, one that might, eventually, offer new ideas for how we think about targeted cell killing in medicine.

Original paper: Explosive cytotoxicity of ruptoblasts bridges hormone surveillance and immune defense 

Source: These Immune Cells Kill by Exploding, And They Were Hiding in a Flatworm 

The Science of Why Yawning Is Contagious

You see someone yawn across the room. Ten seconds later, you’re yawning too. It happens with strangers on the subway, with dogs watching their owners, even sometimes just from reading the word “yawn” enough times. Researchers have been trying to pin down exactly why for decades, and the answer turns out to be more tangled than a simple reflex.

The mirror neuron theory

The leading explanation involves mirror neurons, brain cells that fire both when you perform an action and when you watch someone else perform it. The idea is that seeing a yawn activates the same neural circuitry involved in yawning yourself, and that circuitry overlaps heavily with regions tied to empathy and social bonding. An early fMRI study found that watching videos of yawning faces activated part of the right inferior frontal gyrus, a region belonging to this so-called mirror neuron system.

That overlap with empathy circuitry lines up with a striking behavioral pattern: people are far more likely to catch a yawn from someone they’re emotionally close to than from a stranger. Studies on dogs found the same thing, dogs yawn more in response to their owners yawning than to unfamiliar people, and similar effects show up in chimpanzees and bonobos responding more to familiar group members.

Empathy, or something more basic?

Susceptibility to contagious yawning also tracks with empathy and social development. In humans and other primates, the behavior tends to emerge around age four, roughly when children develop “theory of mind”, the ability to recognize that other people have their own separate thoughts and feelings. And people with conditions affecting social processing, such as autism spectrum disorder, tend to show reduced contagious yawning.

But the mirror neuron explanation isn’t settled science. Later brain imaging work has complicated the picture: some studies found that the core regions typically associated with the mirror neuron system don’t actually light up during contagious yawning, suggesting the phenomenon might involve a broader, less specialized kind of unconscious mimicry rather than a dedicated “mirror” mechanism.

Not just about being polite

Contagious yawning isn’t only a social nicety, it may serve a coordinating function. Because ordinary (non-contagious) yawning tends to cluster around transitions in alertness, like waking up, winding down, or the sluggish stretch after a meal, some researchers think contagious yawning helps synchronize arousal levels across a group. In highly social animals, that kind of synchrony, everyone getting sleepy, alert, or settled around the same time, could have real survival value.

What we still don’t know

Despite how ordinary it feels, yawning remains oddly resistant to a clean explanation. The old idea that yawning boosts brain oxygen has never been confirmed, and a competing theory that it helps sustain attention hasn’t reached consensus either. What is fairly well established is that contagious yawning affects somewhere between 40 and 60% of adults, and that it can be triggered not just by seeing a yawn, but by hearing one, reading about one, or simply thinking about one, which is a good bet you’re fighting one off right about now.

Sources

·         Why is yawning contagious? — Live Science

·         What Makes Yawning Contagious? — Neuroscience News

·         The science of yawning: physiology, evolutionary role, behavioral impact — PMC

·         Mirror neuron activity during contagious yawning — an fMRI study — PubMed

·         Why Is Yawning Contagious? — Psychology Today

·         A Neural Basis for Contagious Yawning — Current Biology (Cell Press)

·         Contagious yawning and the brain — ScienceDirect

Source: The Science of Why Yawning Is Contagious 

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