Eliana Willis

When the wind blows on Mars, electricity crackles through the air.

For the first time, scientists have detected electricity in the Red Planet’s atmosphere. A microphone on NASA’s Perseverance rover captured the sounds and electrical interference of dozens of electrical discharges generated by colliding dust grains, researchers report November 26 in Nature.

The jolts are relatively small, packing a punch that’s akin to the shock from touching a doorknob on a dry, winter day. Nonetheless, they could pose a hazard for future astronauts and electronics and hamper the search for Martian life, if it ever existed, the researchers warn. More

Small, icy moons might be boiling under their surface.

Many moons in the outer solar system are thought to harbor subsurface oceans beneath their icy crusts. New computer simulations, reported November 24 in Nature Astronomy, suggest that changes in the thickness of these icy shells can cause water in the underlying oceans to boil at low temperatures. This boiling may lead to geologic features, such as the ridgelike formations called coronae seen on Uranus’ moon Miranda. More

McKenzie Prillaman is a science and health journalist based in Washington, DC. She holds a bachelor’s degree in neuroscience from the University of Virginia and a master’s degree in science communication from the University of California, Santa Cruz. She was the spring 2023 intern at Science News. More

More than 2 billion kilometers farther from the sun than Pluto, a frigid world named Makemake sports the most distant gas ever seen in our solar system, new observations reveal.

“By surprise, we found evidence of gas” on Makemake, even though it currently resides 53 times as far from the sun as Earth does, says Silvia Protopapa, a planetary scientist at the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colo. She and her colleagues submitted the discovery September 8 to arXiv.org. More

McKenzie Prillaman is a science and health journalist based in Washington, DC. She holds a bachelor’s degree in neuroscience from the University of Virginia and a master’s degree in science communication from the University of California, Santa Cruz. She was the spring 2023 intern at Science News. More

Aaron Tremper is the editorial assistant for Science News Explores. He has a B.A. in English (with minors in creative writing and film production) from SUNY New Paltz and an M.A. in Journalism from the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism’s Science and Health Reporting program. A former intern at Audubon magazine and Atlanta’s NPR station, WABE 90.1 FM, he has reported a wide range of science stories for radio, print, and digital media. His favorite reporting adventure? Tagging along with researchers studying bottlenose dolphins off of New York City and Long Island, NY. More