Sunday, May 31, 2026

Three Chinese astronauts returned to Earth on Friday after spending nearly seven months aboard the Tiangong space station, setting a record for the longest on-orbit stay by a Chinese crew. Mission commander Zhang Lu became the Chinese astronaut with the most spacewalks, completing seven operations across two missions.^[1]

SpaceX successfully launched its first Starship V3 megarocket on May 22, completing the most complex test flight the program has attempted despite one vacuum Raptor engine shutting down early. The flight computer autonomously compensated for the lost thrust by extending burn durations on remaining engines, validating the vehicle's fault-tolerant design.^[2]

Researchers at the National University of Singapore found that caffeine can restore a specific type of memory impaired by sleep deprivation by acting on the hippocampal CA2 region, a brain pathway crucial for recognizing familiar individuals. In laboratory studies, caffeine reversed the social memory deficits caused by sleep loss in a remarkably targeted way.^[3]

Astronomers using the James Webb Space Telescope solved a decades-old mystery about Saturn's apparent changing rotation rate, revealing it was never caused by the planet speeding up or slowing down but by powerful winds high in its atmosphere. The observations showed Saturn's northern lights actively heat the atmosphere, creating winds that generate electrical currents in a self-sustaining cycle.^[4]

Stanford University researchers developed a tiny room-temperature quantum device that uses twisted light to entangle photons and electrons, overcoming one of quantum computing's biggest hurdles. The breakthrough could enable smaller, cheaper quantum systems without requiring temperatures near absolute zero.^[5]

Singapore's Foreign Minister Vivian Balakrishnan met with South Korean officials in Seoul after visiting North Korean counterpart Choe Son-hui in Pyongyang, discussing Korean Peninsula peace and stability. The visit marked the first trip by a Singaporean foreign minister to South Korea since 2007.^[6]

Meta's newly released open-source ESMFold2 AI tool has generated a massive new atlas of protein structures, vastly increasing humanity's known protein universe. The atlas will help researchers understand biological processes and accelerate drug development.^[7]

U.S. President Donald Trump attended a White House meeting on a potential deal with Iran to end the ongoing Middle East conflict, though no final decision was reached. An Iranian news agency described Trump's public characterization of the deal as a 'mixture of truth and lies.'^[8]

French scientists will launch an expedition on June 15 from Brittany to map more than 200,000 barrels of radioactive waste dumped in the northeast Atlantic over nearly five decades, assessing their condition and impact on surrounding marine ecosystems.^[9]