A new paper released today documents the first soil, airfall dust, and rock fragment samples collected by NASA for return from Mars. We checked in with the UNLV astrobiologist leading the specimen selection team for intel on what the samples so far reveal.

NASA's Perseverance rover has successfully collected its first soil, airfall dust, and rock fragment samples, marking a historic step in Martian exploration. A new study highlights these early sample returns and their implications for understanding Mars' past.

In the search for extraterrestrial life, few things are more valuable than a scoop of dirt, provided it’s from the right place. NASA’s Perseverance rover has now collected such samples from Mars’ Jezero Crater, a location specifically chosen for its potential to reveal whether the Red Planet once harbored life, according to a new international study.

Two days of record high temperatures could trigger an early response from Mother Nature.

It's actually good news that NASA spotted a sizable asteroid with a (small) chance of hitting Earth in 2032. It means our asteroid-sleuthing telescopes are working.

Multiple lines of research, including medicine, perinatal psychology and physics, suggest that our consciousness links to higher dimensions.

Mysterious fast radio bursts, or millisecond-long bright flashes of radio waves from space, have intrigued astronomers since the first detection of the phenomenon in 2007. The enigmatic signals, known as FRBs, release as much energy in less than the blink of an eye as the sun emits in one day.

The devastating wildfires tearing across Southern California are being exacerbated by climate change, according to Drew Peltier, an assistant professor of ecology at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.

You dry pots with it, wipe your hands on it, and use it to swab the counter, but when you’re done—if you’re like me—you probably hang your trusty kitchen towel right back on the oven or dishwasher door handle. And this cycle repeats for days, weeks, maybe even months with a single dish rag.

In Hidden in the Heavens, Jason Steffen tells the tale of the Kepler mission: from its conception in the early 1980s, through its long road to approval in 2001, to the drama of its launch in 2009, to its bounty of early science results, to its heartbreaking demise in 2014, to its miraculous second life as the K2 mission through 2018. During its lifetime, Kepler detected some 5,000 planets. Those of us who worked on it were blessed to be part of a revolution in astronomy. The book is, at turns, a popular science survey of exoplanet discovery, an oral history of the Kepler mission, and Steffen’s own personal memoir.

Bullfrog removal at Pakoon Springs, by multiple parties including the University of Arizona and the University of Nevada-Las Vegas, began in 2010 and was completed in 2019, when the last bullfrogs were removed. After repeated surveys confirmed the bullfrogs were gone, Relict Leopard Frogs, raised in a captive breeding program at the University of Nevada-Las Vegas, were finally released at Pakoon Springs in 2022. Follow-up surveys confirm that a self-sustaining population now thrives at Pakoon Springs.

On Episode 137 of This Week In Space, Rod Pyle and Tariq Malik talk with Dr. Jason Steffen, a professor of physics at UNLV and a member of the science team for the Kepler Space Telescope mission. This mission finally ended in 2018, but the discoveries keep coming. Kepler returned so much data that it was like "drinking from a firehose," Jason tells us.