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Say what you want about the changes to the space industry that’s happened over the past 10-20 years, but one thing is for certain - there are a lot more people that have access to space now than there ever has been before. Some of them have some absolutely crazy stories about how they got there, and plenty of those have written their own books about their experiences, before, during, and after their flight. Add to that list A Heart for Space by Dr. Eiman Jahangir - a cardiologist that officially became an astronaut when he crossed the Kármán line on a Blue Origin flight in August 2024. But the story of how an Iranian-American cardiologist made it all the way to space has lessons for anyone that hopes to follow in his footsteps.

Scientists have discovered that one of the most unusual creatures in the animal kingdom is far more diverse and evolutionarily complex than previously known. An international team led by the University of Göttingen has reconstructed the evolutionary history of branching marine worms—rare annelids that live hidden inside sea sponges and whose bodies branch repeatedly into multiple posterior ends.

Astronomers have detected extreme, never-before-seen behavior from a rare kind of pulsar and stumbled on a surprising link to one of astronomy's biggest current mysteries. Using 174 hours of radio observations, researchers detected PSR J1227-4853, a rapidly spinning neutron star known as a "transitional millisecond pulsar," which unleashes hundreds of ultrashort, ultrapowerful "giant pulses." Their paper was published in The Astrophysical Journal on July 31.

The waters of the remote Scottish island of Jura have long been famous for making whiskey. Now, the island's rivers have helped geologists learn more about how rivers erode rocks, providing new evidence that what streams carry plays an important role in how they carve through landscapes.