ISS astronauts briefly take shelter

June 05, 2026

ISS astronauts briefly take shelter

June 5, 2026—NASA astronauts briefly take shelter on the ISS due to worsening air leaks, plus a possible new class of exoplanet and how the game Battleship helped train an AI to make efficient decisions.

—Emma Gometz

Newsletter Editor

TODAY'S NEWS

The Russian segment of the International Space Station can be seen in this 2021 photograph. Chronic air leaks from a Russian module are of increasing concern for the station’s safety and longevity. NASA

Breaking: Astronauts on the International Space Station (ISS) briefly took shelter in case an evacuation was needed today, due to leaks in a small vestibule of a Russian module. NASA personnel cleared them to return to the space station and resume normal operations. | 3 min read
The Trump administration is officially conducting an investigation into the safety of the abortion pill mifepristone. Health experts worry the move is politically motivated, rather than based on science. | 2 min read
In a first, a brain-dead man received a transplant of two kidneys and a whole liver from a genetically-modified pig. The organs functioned for about 36 hours before showing signs of rejection. | 3 min read
How so-called Gödel numbers can help you do math with math itself. | 3 min read
Surveys of more than half a million Americans show that remote workers who lived alone were in more mental distress than their peers. | 3 min read
Researchers have found a way to use breast cancer screenings to identify calcium buildups in breast tissue—which can also help predict heart disease risk. | 3 min read
The area around a stellar-mass black hole isn't very hospitable for planets. But planets might be able to orbit around supermassive black holes, and maybe even form around them. | 5 min read

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TOP STORIES

Artists depiction of a planet covered in a mushy layer of magma near a star

The planet L 98-59 d doesn’t seem to fit any categories for worlds around other stars. Mark Garlick

A New Type of Exoplanet?

Exoplanet L 98-59 d (what should we call it for short? Betty?) was first spotted orbiting a star trillions of miles away in 2019. In a recent study, scientists used computer models to pin down its makeup, and it turns out Betty may constitute a new class of planet. Its surface is a scalding 1,500 degrees Celsius. L 98-59 d is neither rocky nor an ocean world. It is likely covered in a mushy magma ocean and smells like rotten eggs from its sulfur-rich atmosphere. The planet is also about 5 billion years old—old enough for scientists to be surprised it hasn’t outgrown this sulfurous phase that typically afflicts planets when they go through a volcanic stage. So far, it’s the first exoplanet found to fit this peculiar description.

Why this matters: The first exoplanet was discovered a short 34 years ago, making the field of exoplanetary research still very new. Scientists are hopeful that identifying more categories of planets will help fill in the gaps in our knowledge of how planets form and evolve. In the study, researchers found that a disk of material with enough of the hydrogen sulfide and sulfur dioxide required could create this type of planet around other stars—and that such planets might even be common.

What the experts say: “Really, the dream of an observer is to construct a classification scheme that then doesn’t just describe the universe; it tells you something new about [it],” says Thomas Beatty, an astronomer at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, who was not part of the study.

AI Plays Battleship

Board games are a great way to test if AI is good at making decisions—especially with limited resources. In a recent study, researchers designed a version of the classic two-player game Battleship to test how efficiently AI chatbots chose targets compared with humans. At first, humans always beat out the AI. But through training, researchers optimized the models to maximize the chances of hitting targets accurately and to increase the amount of information they gained with each question. After that, the group got several models to consistently win in fewer moves than humans.

Why this matters: Teaching AI bots to make more efficient decisions when locating missing information could help machine learning models collaborate with humans on solving problems in science. Science requires lots of decisions—researchers must choose which hypotheses to pursue and which simulations to run. An AI that can make those choices in fewer “moves” will determine which path to follow when resources are limited.

What the experts say: “The framework will be very useful to measure whether language models are really making progress” in deciding which hypotheses to pursue among all possibilities, says Yuanqi Du, a researcher focused on AI for chemistry who recently completed his Ph.D. at Cornell University and was not involved in the study. “Understanding the whole hypothesis space you’re searching, that’s the hardest part.”

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RECOMMENDED READS

Every Friday in summer we're recommending a great, freshly-published science read. Tell us what you're reading, or if you try any of our recommendations!

Entangled States: A Life According to Quantum Physics

By Karmela Padivic-Callaghan. Penguin Random House, May 19 2026.

In Entangled States, science journalist Padavic-Callaghan pulls off two magic tricks at once. In passages of lucid physics translation, they somehow make nature’s most mystifying shenanigans go down easy. And then, in interposed sections of memoir, they wield those nuggets of understanding as potent metaphors for life’s great challenges. The two threads coil seamlessly through deeply personal essays on immigrating from Croatia, metal music, queerness and paths not taken. This book embodies my favorite unsung virtue of science: that every lesson about the universe is a new lens into the strange experience of being one of its living subjects. You leave feeling that the quantum world is actually more relatable than it is weird, and that pop science can be as soul-nourishing as a good novel. —Joseph Howlett, staff reporter

Maybe I'm not the only one, but sometimes when I hear news that some exoplanet has such-and-such qualities, I think to myself, so what? But diving into today's story about exoplanet L 98-59 d reminded me of just how new the field of exoplanet research is. How cool is it that astronomers are learning such novel and unexpected information all the time that they're still settling on what types of planets there are in the first place? Even with all the astronomy advances in the past few decades, the universe is still so mysterious.

Thanks for reading Today in Science! Enjoy your weekend—Andrea will be back on Monday. If you have any thoughts, questions, or ideas, reply to this email or send them to newsletters@sciam.com.

—Emma Gometz, Newsletter Editor

P.S. If you enjoyed today’s newsletter, send it to a friend who loves science, weird facts or asking “wait…how does that work?” Thanks for helping us grow.

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