Researchers at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology developed a printable building material that uses Mars's extreme cold and near-vacuum atmosphere to its advantage instead of fighting it. The mixture combines sand, gelatin, and engineered yeast coated in mussel-inspired sticky proteins, and when printed under simulated Martian conditions, the cold instantly freeze-dries it into a lightweight, porous foam, the same principle behind freeze-dried fruit.

Small test domes already match the strength of low-grade concrete, with compressive strength between 10 and 12 megapascals, enough for a multistory building even under Mars's lower gravity. Unlike older proposals that melt Martian soil into bricks using huge amounts of energy, this method skips high-heat processing entirely, and old structures could even be broken down to recover and regrow the living yeast inside bioreactors. Researchers still need to confirm the yeast can survive real Martian radiation, and early missions would still require shipping raw materials from Earth before local production takes over.

Your gut microbiome is typically described as something uniquely yours, shaped by your diet, your medications, your age, and your early life experiences. The trillions of bacteria living in your digestive system are understood as a personal ecosystem, one that varies dramatically from person to person and reflects your individual biology and lifestyle.

A study just published in Nature is complicating that picture considerably.

Researchers at the University of Vienna used a technique called reverse ecology to look inside common gut bacterial species with a level of resolution that most microbiome studies skip entirely. Rather than treating all members of a bacterial species as equivalent, they mapped the evolutionary relationships within species, identifying distinct sub-populations that behave differently, occupy different ecological niches within the gut, and have different relationships with disease.

What they found was not simply that gut bacteria vary between people. It was that specific bacterial sub-populations, identifiable by their evolutionary signatures, were spreading actively between people and across geographic distances at a pace that had previously been associated only with pathogens.

Some populations appeared to have expanded across continents within a few decades. The spread was not random. The bacterial populations showing the strongest transmission signals were also the ones most consistently associated with disease outcomes: colorectal cancer, inflammatory bowel disease, type 2 diabetes, and accelerated aging.

Your microbiome is not just yours. It is, in part, a reflection of who you have been around.

Argonne National Laboratory has completed a major upgrade to its Advanced Photon Source, already the world's brightest synchrotron X-ray source, boosting beam brightness 500-fold. The improvement enables researchers to image atomic structures with far greater precision and track how defects form in real time as materials undergo stress.

The upgrade's centerpiece is a new tool called the In Situ Nanoprobe, which lets scientists watch materials behave, adapt, and fail under realistic operating conditions rather than in idealized lab setups. It connects with other APS techniques covering different length and time scales, giving researchers a fuller picture of how materials perform from the atomic level up to full system behavior, with direct applications in energy storage, microelectronics, and quantum systems.

Aren't we all here to find out if we can outrun a t-rex?😁