An astronaut*1 from Japan is going to space for the first time. JAXA, the space agency*2 of Japan, announced that astronaut Makoto Suwa will fly to the International Space Station. He will stay there for a long time.
Suwa will ride on a spacecraft*3 called Crew Dragon. This will be the 14th regular flight of Crew Dragon. It will also be Suwa's first trip into space.
Right now, Suwa is training and getting ready for his long stay. He said that he still has a lot of training to do before the launch*4. He also said that he wants to bring his experiences and feelings from space back to Earth and share them with many people.
The launch is planned for March 2027 or later. JAXA has not chosen the day yet. It will tell people the date when it is decided.
Scientists from China have found the bones of many whales at the bottom of the Indian Ocean. Some of the bones are more than five million years old. The team wrote about the discovery in Nature, a science magazine, on June 10, 2026.
The team was led by Xiaotong Peng of the Institute of Deep-sea Science and Engineering. The institute is part of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and is in Sanya, a city in China.
In February and March 2023, the team went down to the sea floor in a submersible*1 called Fendouzhe. They made 32 dives in the Diamantina Fracture Zone, a long crack in the sea floor in the southeast part of the Indian Ocean. The water there is between 4,616 and 7,001 meters deep.
The team looked at an area of about 0.64 square kilometers*2 along a line about 1,200 kilometers long. They found 485 places with whale bones. Some of the bones were fossils*3. At other places, sea animals were living on the bones. The deepest find was three backbone bones at 6,788.7 meters.
Tests on the bones showed that the oldest ones are at least about 5.3 million years old. The team found 35 species*4 of large animals living on the sea floor. They also identified six species of whales. Two of these are extinct*5. One is a new species. The team gave it the name Pterocetus diamantinae.
*1 submersible: a small boat that can go deep under the water with people inside
*2 square kilometers: a way to measure how big an area is; one square kilometer is a square with sides of one kilometer
*3 fossils: bones or other parts of animals or plants that turned to stone over a very long time
Scientists have found a new kind of amoeba*1 that can grow in very hot water. They named it Incendiamoeba cascadensis, and they call it the "fire amoeba." A team supported by NASA, the space agency of the United States, wrote about it in the science magazine Cell on Tuesday, September 22. The leader of the study is Beryl Rappaport, a graduate student*2 at Syracuse University.
The team took the amoeba from hot spring*3 water in Lassen Volcanic National Park in California. In the lab*4, the amoeba grew by cell division*5 at 63 degrees Celsius (145 degrees Fahrenheit). This is a new record. The fire amoeba is a eukaryote*6. Before this, the hottest temperature for a growing eukaryote was 60 degrees Celsius (140 degrees Fahrenheit). Some fungi*7 and some red algae*8 held that record.
Above 63 degrees, the fire amoeba stops growing. But it can still move and look for food up to 64 degrees Celsius (147 degrees Fahrenheit).
This finding surprised scientists. They thought the membranes*9 around the small parts inside a eukaryote cell could not stay stable above 62 degrees Celsius (144 degrees Fahrenheit). The fire amoeba shows that this idea was wrong.
The team also studied the genome*10 of the amoeba. In the heat, some genes*11 became more active. Some of these genes keep the DNA*12 stable and stop it from breaking down. Others sense the world outside the cell. Others keep proteins*13 in the right shape when it is hot. The team also found that some of the amoeba's proteins have a strong positive charge*14 on their surface. Bacteria*15 and archaea*16 that live in very hot places have proteins like this too.
Similar pieces of DNA have been found in hot places around the world, for example in New Zealand and in Yellowstone National Park. So there may be other heat-loving amoebas like this one all over the world.
Alison Olcott, a scientist in the astrobiology*17 program at NASA headquarters, said the discovery helps us understand where complex life can live, and how much of it there can be. Rappaport said that heat is only one part of the story. To live, a living thing also needs the right acidity*18, oxygen*19, pressure*20, water, and food.
*1 amoeba: a very small living thing made of one cell that can move and change its shape
*2 graduate student: a student who is doing more study at a university after finishing a first degree
*3 hot spring: a place where hot water comes up out of the ground
