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SPONSORED BY  | | | | March 18, 2025: The stranded space station astronauts are finally coming home. Plus, these birds are redefining biology of the sexes, and the best "baby pictures" of the universe ever seen. —Andrea Gawrylewski, Chief Newsletter Editor | | | ACT Collaboration; ESA/Planck Collaboration | | | • How do postgraduate students describe AI? As a spaceship, a mirror, a performance-enhancing drug, a self-driving car, makeup, a bridge, fast food and more. | 5 min read | | | NASA's Boeing Crew Flight Test astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams.NASA | | | After 286 days of being "stuck" at the International Space Station (ISS), NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams are finally coming home. Wilmore and Williams are aboard SpaceX's Dragon starship, hitching a ride alongside NASA's Nick Hague and Russian cosmonaut Aleksander Gorbunov, who arrived at ISS last September. Dragon undocked from the ISS early this morning. If all goes well, the crew will enter Earth's orbit at about 5 P.M. ET—soon after this newsletter reaches your inbox—and splash down near the Florida coast around 6 P.M. ET, pending weather conditions. (You can see NASA's live coverage of the splashdown here.) Check our site after touchdown for coverage. How this happened: Wilmore and Williams arrived at the station on June 6 last year, but couldn't ride Boeing's Starliner back home after the craft suffered a variety of hardware issues and NASA decided to bring it back to Earth uncrewed. Wilmore and Williams have made good use of their extra time on the station: monitoring microbes in space, testing on-demand medical technology and exploring wooden alternatives for satellite materials. "It's really just a great place to live and work. We're up here a little bit longer than we had originally planned," Williams said during a media session last week.
What the experts say: We tend to forget about the risks of space travel, says Ella Atkins, head of the aerospace department at Virginia Tech. "Space travel is not safe. It is more usual for there to be anomalies, [so] then the question is: How do you deal with them?" Boeing and NASA's decision to leave Butch and Suni was entirely for the safety of our astronauts. "We left the astronauts up there [in the ISS] last fall because we trusted the space station to keep them safe." —Gayoung Lee, news intern | | | Like many birds, the White-throated Sparrows ( Zonotrichia albicollis) come in two forms: A flashy and loud singer with striking black and white stripes on its crown, and its partner—a more drab bird, with tan and gray stripes on its head and brown streaks through its white throat. As with peacocks and cardinals you might assume that the flashy bird is the male. But in the case of White-throated Sparrows, the showy bird can be male or female. Birds of each form, or morph, are just as likely to have testes or ovaries. Researchers conducted genetic sequencing, hormone manipulation, and neural analyses and found a "supergene" that controls the behavioral traits that accompany both morphs of the bird.
Why this matters: Typically, sex-based behavior is determined by sex chromosomes. But not in the case of these sparrows. Sex-linked traits are not rigidly tied to male and female categories but instead are fluid, shaped by environmental pressures and genetic recombination. Other animals have evolved interesting interplays between sex and their environment: Many fish change their gamete production from eggs to sperm, or vice versa. And whether many reptile embryos develop ovaries or testes is determined by the temperature at which the eggs are incubated, not by genetic code.
What the experts say: "The genes and proteins that contribute to making a gonad are not the same across species, even closely related ones," writes Donna L. Maney, a neuroscientist at Emory University. "These pathways are not well conserved, suggesting they remain flexible for good reason." | | | SPONSORED CONTENT BY CALIFORNIA CORRECTIONAL HEALTHCARE SERVICES (CCHCS) | Where Work-Life Balance Fuels Your Growth | For Psychologists, work-life balance isn't just a goal—it's the foundation that fuels your personal growth and success. Find it here with us. | | | • Using facial analysis and eye-tracking data in urban environments, a group at Tufts University observed an increase in positive emotions when people viewed streets that didn't have cars on them, versus ones with cars. "People appear to be happier when cars aren't in the picture" in cities, write the authors of the study. "We can now understand how people experience cities, and these insights can provide a roadmap for creating more just, sustainable and healthy places." | 5 min read | | | The record for the longest a human has ever spent in space goes to Russian cosmonaut Valeri Vladimirovich Polyakov. He spent 437 days, 18 hours aboard the Mir space station, as part of an experiment to determine human health effects of long-term microgravity. Without prior planning, Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams are now on the top 10 list of most time spent in space for NASA astronauts (NASA needs to update its site). | —Andrea Gawrylewski, Chief Newsletter Editor | | Subscribe to this and all of our newsletters . | | | | Scientific American
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