Daily Info Dose

Mystery Pits on Mars That Nobody Can Explain NASA's Curiosity rover has been exploring Mars since 2012 — fourteen years on the Red Planet — and it is still finding things nobody can explain. Its latest puzzle: broad, shallow pits, about one centimetre wide, scattered through the bedrock of Mount Sharp. In a mission update, Michelle Minitti, deputy principal investigator of the rover's MAHLI camera, described the features as "unlike quite anything we have seen in the past." That is a striking statement from a team that has spent over a decade studying Martian rock up close. Normally, a pit like this has a simple explanation: a small pebble sits in the rock for ages and eventually weathers out, leaving a hole behind. But these pits break that rule. They are broader and shallower than the usual kind, and there is no object anywhere nearby that could once have filled them. Wind does not explain them either. Some headlines joked that the pits look like tiny "footp...

Dead Stars Are Breaking Their Size Limit For decades, astronomers thought dead stars came with a strict weight limit. A white dwarf — the dense, burnt-out core left behind when a star like the Sun dies — was never supposed to exceed about 1.4 times the mass of the Sun. Pass that threshold, known as the Chandrasekhar limit, and the star should blow itself apart. New computer simulations suggest that rule has a loophole: magnetism. In research published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, scientists at the Indian Institute of Science and their collaborators followed stars through their entire evolution, tracking what happens as a white dwarf keeps pulling in extra material from a companion. As the white dwarf gains mass, it compresses — and that compression strengthens the magnetic field buried inside it. The field acts like an internal scaffold, holding up far more weight than the classic limit allows. In one simulation, the white dwarf kept growing until it reached roughly 2.4 ti...

A Microbe That Could Build Homes on Mars Building a home on Mars sounds like pure science fiction, but a tiny microbe might one day do the heavy lifting. Researchers at Pioneer Labs in California have created a modified microbe, known as sPL.001, that can grow using materials similar to Martian soil. That is no small trick. Real Martian soil is laced with perchlorates, toxic chemicals that make it hostile to most Earth life. The engineered microbe, however, can thrive on a diet of prepared Mars-like soil, water and air — ingredients that settlers could realistically gather or produce on the Red Planet. While it grows, sPL.001 produces something remarkably useful: bioplastic. This living material factory could supply the raw material for everyday cups, feedstock for 3D printers, and even building materials for shelters and habitats. The bigger idea is independence. Every kilogram shipped from Earth to Mars costs a fortune, so future settlers who can grow what they need locally — in...

The past 48 hours packed an extraordinary run of science, space and technology news into a single window, and our latest Daily Info Dose roundup brings the ten biggest stories of 6–7 October 2026 together in one video. The Nobel season opened with a ghostly winner: work linked to Francis Halzen and the IceCube observatory, which detects elusive neutrinos beneath Antarctic ice, took centre stage in physics. Chemistry also celebrated asymmetry, with the prize recognising Kagan and Soai for research on mirror molecules — compounds that exist in left- and right-handed forms with very different effects. Artificial intelligence delivered shocks of its own. Anthropic's Claude Mythos was reported to have uncovered around 129,000 hidden flaws, underlining how AI systems are changing software security, while France pushed back in the global AI race with Mistral Large 4, a new flagship model aimed at keeping Europe competitive. Beyond Earth, NASA's Curiosity rover marked a record clim...