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SpaceX launched its Starship rocket on its latest test flight Thursday, but the spacecraft was destroyed following a thrilling booster catch back at the pad.

Elon Musk’s company said the spacecraft’s six engines appeared to shut down one by one, with contact lost just 8min 30sec into the flight.

“We did lose all communications with the ship – that is essentially telling us we had an anomaly with the upper stage,” SpaceX communications manager Dan Huot said, confirming minutes later that the ship was lost.

The spacecraft was supposed to soar across the Gulf of Mexico from Texas on a near loop around the world similar to previous test flights. SpaceX had packed it with 10 dummy satellites for practice at releasing them. It was the first flight of this new and upgraded spacecraft.

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A cosmic mystery surrounding a black hole some 270 million light-years from the Milky Way is deepening.

For years, astronomers have been perplexed by this particular supermassive black hole, a behemoth as large as a million suns in a distant galaxy. In 2018, astronomers observed that the black hole’s corona – a cloud of whirling, white-hot plasma – suddenly disappeared before reassembling months later.

A growing body of evidence shows that eating a diet high in these clever natural chemicals offers numerous health benefits, improving everything from heart and metabolic health to lowering the risk of neurodegenerative diseases, such as Alzheimer’s.

There is also research that suggests eating more polyphenols can slow down the signs of skin ageing and reduce waist size.

Polyphenols are a group of phytonutrients (though the terms are often and erroneously used interchangeably), naturally occurring chemicals in plants that help to protect them in nature from threats such as insects and UV light, and, as it turns out, also help to protect us when we eat them.

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"Brain rot" is the Oxford word of the year for 2024, and it's pretty much what it sounds like: a perceived mental decline from consuming too much online media. If just reading that definition has you worried about your gray matter, never fear! Researchers are finding promising — and surprising — ways to boost our brain health and de-stress our minds. Here are nine stories on the topic that engaged our readers this year.

1. Writing by hand beats typing for learning and memory

Yes, typing is usually much faster than writing by hand. But increasingly studies are finding deep brain benefits when we write out letters and words by hand. For kids, it can improve letter recognition and learning; and when adults take notes by hand it can lead to better conceptual understanding of material.

Researchers in the Alto Mayo region of north-west Peru have discovered 27 species that are new to science, including a rare amphibious mouse, a tree-climbing salamander and an unusual “blob-headed fish”. The 38-day survey recorded more than 2,000 species of wildlife and plants.

The findings are particularly surprising given the region’s high human population density, with significant pressures including deforestation and agriculture.

The expedition was “thrilling to be part of”, said Dr Trond Larsen, senior director of biodiversity and ecosystem science at Conservation International’s Moore Centre for Science, who led the survey. “The Alto Mayo landscape supports 280,000 people in cities, towns and communities. With a long history of land-use change and environmental degradation, I was very surprised to find such high overall species richness, including so many new, rare and threatened species, many of which may be found nowhere else.”

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On Dec. 24, NASA's Parker Solar Probe will get closer to the sun than any human-made object ever has before. The spacecraft is the size of a small car, and it has been orbiting the sun for the past six years. In 2021, it became the first spacecraft to enter the sun's upper atmosphere — known as the corona — about 6.5 million miles from the sun's surface, according to NASA.

Every three months, it completes a full revolution around the sun, gradually getting closer to the sun. This year, on Christmas Eve, it is expected to get within approximately 3.9 million miles from the sun's surface while traveling about 430,000 miles an hour.

NPR's Manoush Zomorodi interviewed project scientist Nour Rawafi, an astrophysicist based at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory.

"We are getting close and personal with a star," Rawafi told Zomorodi. "Sometimes it's like a dream. But you are living it."

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