“On its second try, Blue Origin nailed the landing of its New Glenn rocket booster on Thursday.

A booster landing is not a novel feat. SpaceX, Elon Musk’s space company, accomplished it for the first time a decade ago with its Falcon 9 rocket, and it now performs it routinely, most recently on Monday night.

But no other company had pulled that off for an orbital-class rocket, until Blue Origin.

With two successful launches in a row, New Glenn could win a sizable slice of the business of sending stuff to space…

Thursday’s launch also accomplished its primary task: launching ESCAPADE, or Escape and Plasma Acceleration and Dynamics Explorers, a NASA mission that will head to Mars to measure the magnetic fields buffeting charged particles around that planet.

The two small identical spacecraft that comprise the mission, nicknamed Blue and Gold, were successfully deployed 33 minutes after launch. They will first loop around Lagrange-2, one of five points in space where the gravitational pull of the sun and Earth balance. Later in November, they will fire their engines in a maneuver that will use Earth’s gravity as a slingshot to send them on a trajectory to Mars.”

From New York Times.

“In the darkness of the deep ocean, where pressure crushes and light fails, an expedition has found an astonishing array of life, including a carnivorous ‘death-ball’ sponge (from the genus Chondrocladia) covered in tiny prey-catching hooks; ‘zombie worms’ (genus Osedax) lacking mouths but harboring symbiotic bacteria that digest whale bones; armored scale worms of iridescent colors (genus Eulagisca); and rare mollusks adapted to the volcanic seafloor.

The footage, recorded in March 2025, confirms 30 previously unknown deep-sea species from one of the planet’s most inaccessible regions in the South Atlantic Ocean.”

From Mongabay.

“Chinese scientists have become the first to visit one of Earth’s most remote and geologically intriguing realms: an underwater volcanic ridge in the Arctic Ocean.

The expedition, which concluded late last month, explored the eastern part of the Gakkel ridge — part of the global system of submerged mountain chains that play a key part in plate tectonics. A team of scientists took a submersible vessel beneath the Arctic sea ice and completed more than 40 dives, going as deep as 5,277 metres.

The analyses are far from complete, but this section of the Gakkel ridge might have hot-water vents that spew from the sea floor. Similar vents on the western, and better-explored, part of the ridge are home to bizarre ecosystems that thrive far from the reach of sunlight. They provide scientists with some of the best opportunities to understand how life might arise and evolve in icy oceans on worlds beyond Earth, such as on Jupiter’s ice-encrusted moon Europa.”

From Nature.

“In a new paper, scientists have reported the first successful human transplant of a kidney converted from blood type A to the universal type O using special enzymes developed at the University of British Columbia. These enzymes are designed to help prevent a mismatch and rejection of the organ…

According to the scientists, an enzyme-converted kidney was transplanted into a brain-dead recipient with consent from the family. They then observed the body’s immune response to the new organ. They report that for two days post-transplant, the kidney functioned without signs of hyperacute rejection. By the third day, they observed that some blood-type markers reappeared and triggered a mild reaction. However the damage was less severe than would typically be seen in cases when an organ was mismatched. They also observed signs that the body was beginning to tolerate the new organ.”

From GEN.