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A battery-free underwater “piezoelectric” sensor invented by MIT researchers transmits data by absorbing or reflecting sound waves back to a receiver, where a reflected wave decodes a 1 bit and an absorbed wave decodes a 0 bit — and simultaneously stores energy.

This artist's illustration depicts the exoplanet LHS 3844b, which is 1.3 times the mass of Earth and orbits an M dwarf star. The planet's surface may be covered mostly in dark lava rock, with no apparent atmosphere, according to observations by NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope.

Artist’s rendering of the surface of LHS 3844b, a planet that has been found to have no atmosphere.

A new experiment designed by MIT physicists may help to pin down the rate at which huge, massive stars produce oxygen in the universe.

SOAR telescope (left) and Gemini Observatory (right) The 4.1-meter SOAR telescope at Cerro Pachón in Chile, is the pathfinder facility for AEON and successfully completed its first observing night for the network.

An artist’s impression of a collision between young Jupiter and a massive planetary embryo.

Aerial view of white roofed homes and streets forming circular patterns; St. Petersburg, Florida, USA

In 2014, megafires in Canada’s Northwest Territories scorched more than 7 million acres of forest, releasing half as much carbon back into the atmosphere as all the plants and trees in Canada typically absorb in an entire year.

Astronomers seeking life on distant planets may want to go for the glow. Harsh ultraviolet radiation from red suns, once thought to destroy surface life on planets, might help uncover hidden biospheres as they glow. That neon-like glimmer is a star-induced gleam called biofluorescence, which could turn distant exoplanets into the black-light posters of outer-space, according to new Cornell research, published Aug. 13 in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society “Biofluorescent Worlds II: Biological Fluorescence Induced by Stellar UV Flares, a New Temporal Biosignature,”