Hubble observations of massive stars in metal-poor dwarf galaxies are revealing clues to why the early universe looks so unusual. Researchers found that stellar winds weaken sharply at extremely low metallicities, potentially allowing massive stars to retain more material and evolve in unexpected ways. The team also found large differences in iron abundance, a key ingredient in stellar winds and supernovae.

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Astronomers have discovered the first globular cluster stellar stream beyond the Milky Way, opening a new way to study dark matter in distant galaxies. These faint trails of stars trace a galaxy’s gravitational structure and could eventually help scientists map invisible matter across the universe.

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Ancient iron meteorites reveal that some of the Solar System’s first solid bodies were built mostly from tiny heat-forged rock beads called chondrules, while water-rich dust was largely excluded. The finding pushes this selective planet-building process back to within the Solar System’s first million years.

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Stanford researchers have recorded the first real-time quantum jumps of sound, watching single phonons abruptly vanish from one energy state to another. The breakthrough could open new paths for quantum computing, error correction, highly sensitive biological sensors, and next-generation sound-based devices.

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Scientists at Oak Ridge National Laboratory have developed a surprisingly simple way to turn polyethylene, the common plastic used in shopping bags and cutting boards, into gasoline and diesel-like fuels. The process uses inexpensive aluminum-based molten salts to break long plastic molecules into smaller hydrocarbons, producing about 60% gasoline under relatively mild conditions.

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Scientists have found evidence that black holes of vastly different sizes may launch powerful jets according to the same universal rule. Supermassive black holes can produce jets soon after tearing apart a star, then fire up again hundreds or thousands of days later when their feeding rate drops to about 2% of the Eddington limit. That same threshold is known to trigger jets from much smaller black holes in the Milky Way.

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Physicists have put a decades-old idea about why the strange rules of quantum mechanics disappear in our everyday world to one of its toughest experimental tests yet. Deep beneath Italy’s Gran Sasso mountain, researchers searched for an extremely faint radiation signal predicted by a theory suggesting that tiny fluctuations in spacetime, caused by gravity, gradually destroy quantum superpositions. After 62 days of measurements with a highly shielded germanium detector, they found no such signal.

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