Discovery of the Week

Physicists have held a single particle of antimatter — the mirror-image twin of ordinary matter, identical in mass but opposite in electrical charge — inside a laboratory trap, Nature reports. Antimatter vanishes in a flash of energy the instant it touches normal matter, so isolating even one particle is a serious technical achievement. Being able to study one on its own could sharpen tests of why the universe ended up almost entirely matter, with hardly any antimatter left over. (Nature News)

Space Missions & Astronomy

Japan launches a mission to bring home a piece of Phobos — The spacecraft MMX is on its way to Phobos, one of Mars's two small moons, where it will attempt up to two landings and return samples to Earth. _Significance: High._ (Ars Technica Science)

Russian spacecraft sidles up to a Ukrainian-used satellite — A Russian craft closed from hundreds of kilometres away to "extreme proximity" with the ICEYE-X36 satellite, a commercial radar-imaging spacecraft. _Significance: High._ (Ars Technica Science)

Lab-made "nanoflares" may explain the Sun's hot corona — Researchers recreated miniature versions of solar flares in the lab and showed they can help explain why the Sun's outer atmosphere is far hotter than its visible surface. _Significance: Medium._ (New Scientist)

Hubble rehearses for the Roman telescope — Hubble took a batch of gravitational-lensing images — pictures of distant galaxies whose light is bent and magnified by closer galaxies' gravity — to help plan science for the upcoming Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope. _Significance: Medium._ (NASA News)

Artemis engine fires for a full launch duration — NASA test-fired an RS-25 engine for 500 seconds, the same length of burn the engines perform during a Space Launch System launch. _Significance: Medium._ (NASA News)

Hubble captures a spiral galaxy edge-on — The image shows NGC 1827, about 37 million light-years away, part of a survey of 260 small satellite galaxies orbiting Milky Way–like hosts. _Significance: Low._ (NASA News)

Life Sciences & Medicine

A huge map of how the brain tracks the body — A large-scale mapping study reveals how the brain represents what the body is feeling, from heartbeat to touch. _Significance: High._ (Nature News)

Body-clock disruption linked to one in four depression cases — A large study suggests that scrambled daily (circadian) rhythms contribute to roughly a quarter of depression cases. _Significance: Medium._ (Nature News)

$41 million bet on preventing Alzheimer's — A US health agency is funding trials of supplements and already-approved drugs to ward off dementia in people at elevated risk, ahead of a coming blood test. _Significance: Medium._ (Science Magazine News)

Congo launches high-stakes Ebola vaccine trial — As an epidemic continues, researchers will first test a vaccine mismatched to the circulating Bundibugyo strain, with strain-specific shots possibly added next month. _Significance: Medium._ (Science Magazine News)

First human death from a recently found livestock virus — A person in Europe has died after infection with Shamonda virus, a livestock pathogen; scientists say there is no cause for alarm but more study is needed. _Significance: Medium._ (Science Magazine News)

Physics & Materials

Quantum error correction clears the break-even point — A demonstration of error-corrected quantum bits (qubits, the quantum equivalent of a bit) showed errors shrinking substantially as the system grew, a key step toward reliable quantum computers. _Significance: High._ (Ars Technica Science)

Iron in Earth's core may form cubic crystals — X-ray experiments suggest the iron at the centre of the Earth can arrange itself in a cubic crystal structure, which would complicate standard pictures of the inner core. _Significance: Medium._ (Science Magazine News)

Climate & Earth Science

Europe's summer heat killed more than 50,000 in cities — Researchers estimate that climate change was responsible for two-thirds of those urban deaths. _Significance: High._ (Science Magazine News)

Emissions are slowing, but 2 °C of warming looms — Global emissions growth has eased, yet the world is still on course for about 2 °C of warming. _Significance: High._ (Nature News)

Amazon emissions driven by people, amplified by drought — Human actions are the main source of the Amazon's carbon emissions, with droughts making the damage worse. _Significance: Medium._ (Nature News)

Salt marshes blunt extreme storm waves — A giant wave-machine experiment and a related study show how much wave energy salt marshes absorb during severe storms — useful evidence for coastal defence. _Significance: Medium._ (Nature News)

Fires scorch New Guinea — Human-set fires are spreading across a drought-parched landscape, with unusually high emissions on both sides of the island. _Significance: Medium._ (NASA News)

Technology-Driven Science

NASA overhauls how it picks science missions — A letter to the science community announces changes to mission competition and selection, with a virtual town hall on Monday, Oct. 26. _Significance: Medium._ (NASA News)

Autonomous nuclear reactor controller headed for ground test — DARPA awarded Space Nuclear Power Corporation an agreement to test a controller that runs a reactor without a human hand on the dial — hardware aimed at powering spacecraft. _Significance: Medium._ (SpaceNews)

Space-based quantum key distribution gains momentum — Quantum key distribution (QKD) uses quantum states to create encryption keys that reveal eavesdropping; engineers report accelerating progress toward doing it from orbit. _Significance: Low._ (SpaceNews)

The science behind baseball's automated strike zone — High-speed cameras and a "pitch cannon" are helping researchers refine the automated ball-strike system before its first World Series. _Significance: Low._ (Science Magazine News)

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