‘Never quit the lunar quest’ was this moon mission’s motto. Here’s its tragic tale

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As scientists search for worlds that may be habitable for life, they’ve discovered a type that is common in the universe — but doesn’t exist in our own solar system.

These enigmatic planets are called sub-Neptunes, which are larger than Earth but smaller than Neptune.

An April study catapulted one such world, named K2-18b, into the spotlight. Astronomers at the University of Cambridge claimed they detected molecules in the planet’s atmosphere that might be biosignatures — markers of biological activity that could hint at past or present life.

Now, other groups of astronomers have looked at the same data and disagree with the findings, saying there is more to the story.

The twists and turns in the ongoing conversation around planet K2-18b showcase why the search for evidence of life beyond Earth is so difficult.

Lunar update

Indeed, persistence is everything when it comes to space investigation. “Never quit the lunar quest” was the motto underpinning a high-stakes mission that aimed to touch down on the moon Thursday. But Tokyo-based Ispace lost contact with its vehicle at the time it should have landed.

The Resilience spacecraft was Ispace’s second bid at a soft lunar landing. The company’s previous try with the Hakuto-R lunar lander crashed into the moon in April 2023.

“This is our second failure, and about these results, we have to really take it seriously,” said Ispace CEO Takeshi Hakamada of the nail-biting attempt. Ispace has its work cut out for it, but it isn’t giving up.

A long time ago

New research combining artificial intelligence with radiocarbon dating is changing the way scholars think about the Dead Sea Scrolls.

Bedouin shepherds first spotted the scrolls in 1947 within a cave in the Judaean Desert. Archaeologists then recovered thousands of scroll fragments, including the oldest copies of the Hebrew Bible, from 11 caves near the site of Khirbat Qumran.

“They completely changed the way we think about ancient Judaism and early Christianity,” said lead study author Mladen Popović, a dean at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands.

Scholars thought the roughly 1,000 manuscripts, written mostly on parchment and papyrus, ranged from the third century BC to the second century AD. But some of the scrolls, which serve as a crucial intellectual time capsule, could be much older, the new analysis suggests.

Ocean secrets

A World War I-era submarine was lost at sea off California’s coast nearly 108 years ago, killing 19 crew members. Now, researchers from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution have captured never-before-seen deep-sea imagery of the wreckage.

Curiosities

The plague pandemic known as the Black Death killed at least 25 million people across medieval Europe over five years.

The culprit behind the disease is a bacterium called Yersinia pestis, which has led to three major plague outbreaks since the first century AD — and it still exists today.

How has the plague persisted for centuries? Changes to one gene in the bacterium created new, less deadly strains that kept hosts alive longer so it could keep spreading.

The weaker strains have since gone extinct, according to new research. But the findings could yield key clues to help scientists manage the current bacterium’s dominant lineage, which is of the deadlier variety.

Fantastic creatures

If you’ve ever walked through a fruit orchard, you might have been steps away from a living tower of worms.

That’s what researchers from the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior and the University of Konstanz in Germany found when they inspected rotten pears and apples.

Hundreds of the microscopic worms, called nematodes, climbed on top of one another to form structures 10 times their size — even making a twisting “arm” to sense the environment — leading scientists to question what’s driving the behavior.

“What we got was more than just some worms standing on top of each other,” said senior study author Serena Ding, a Max Planck research group leader of genes and behavior. “It’s a coordinated superorganism, acting and moving as a whole.”

Discoveries

These stories will pique your curiosity:

— For over a century, astronomers thought the Milky Way and Andromeda galaxies would collide in 4.5 billion years, but new telescope observations may change that. However, another galaxy could entangle with ours sooner.

— Archaeologists who uncovered the remains of an ancient Mayan complex in Guatemala named the site after two humanlike rock figures that are believed to represent an “ancestral couple,” according to the country’s Ministry of Culture and Sport.

— A fossil of the earliest known bird that was kept in a private collection for decades has provided scientists with “one ‘Wow!’ after another,” including the first flight feathers seen in an Archaeopteryx specimen, said Dr. Jingmai O’Connor, associate curator of fossil reptiles at the Field Museum.

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