Highlights from the last week of May, 2026: A key climate tipping point is disrupting the Arctic Ocean food chain (more of a lowlight, I guess). Scuba-diving tourism may not be the benefit to coral reef systems that we once thought, and might actually be unsustainable. And an experimental mRNA vaccine showed promising results against strains of Ebola.
Plus: Blue Origin loses one; your cells are dying; here comes El Niño:
Disassembly rapid, unscheduled
A Blue Origin New Glenn rocket exploded during a launch pad test on Thursday, May 28, a setback for the long-beleaguered, Jeff Bezos-owned company. Launch Complex 36 is located near public beaches and witnesses captured hundreds of photos of the fiery explosion. Currently, Elon Musk’s SpaceX has a near-monopoly on private spaceflight services. The mishap follows an April incident in which a New Glenn rocket dropped a satellite in the wrong orbit after an engine failure; the rocket was grounded following the misdelivery.
Blue Origin hopes eventually to launch Artemis moon missions for NASA using the New Glenn. Like the SpaceX Falcon Heavy, the New Glenn is intended as a reusable, heavy-lift launch vehicle to reduce the high costs of spaceflight. Named for John Glenn, the first American to orbit Earth, it’s a two-stage-to-orbit, liquid propellant rocket designed to accomplish up to 100 flights. Its payload capacity is 29,000 pounds to geostationary transfer orbit, 99,000 pounds to low Earth orbit. The cause of the explosion is under investigation.
Cellular research suggests you should start hammering a coffin together
A technique called single-cell ribosome profiling has given scientists a window into the specific cellular processes behind your accelerating decay across the passage of time. The researchers, working at the Institute for Regenerative Medicine in Switzerland, tracked the molecular choreography within epidermal stem cells and they say it’s not your imagination—you really are descending into decrepitude with each passing day because your aging stem cells are experiencing shifts in protein production capability.
Single-cell ribosome profiling revealed the “translational landscapes” of aging skin by tracking protein production capability over time. The researchers looked at which messenger RNAs were being translated into proteins within the stem cells at a given moment. They realized that aging stem cells in skin are reprogrammed, shifting the translation capacity of cells to make proteins.
“Somatic stem cells exhibit a unique signature marked by high ribosome biogenesis and low protein synthesis rates, a feature that is implicated in independently driving their stemness, regardless of cellular proliferation, cell cycle, or total mRNA content,” said lead author Clara Duré, clarifying the processes by which your body is coming to the end of its journey in this plane of existence.
Now, here’s a look at the weather in your neck of the hemisphere
NASA and the ESA are tracking waves of warmer water moving eastward across the Pacific Ocean as a likely El Niño develops. Warmer water expands, which means the ocean levels rise, particularly along the west coast of South America, so this rise is a good measure of ocean temperature. The space agencies detected these waves, called Kelvin waves, with the Sentinel-6 Michael Freilich satellite, which measures and maps water height for the entire Pacific Ocean.
As easterly winds switch to a westerly cycle over the western equatorial Pacific, water in the west Pacific tropics becomes warmer and rises. This wave propagates eastward over several weeks, reaching South America. Once multiple Kelvin waves appear over several months, our little friend El Niño (“the boy”) appears and will grant you three wishes, as long as they relate to the formation of tropical cyclones, economic effects on local fishing, global weather pattern disruptions, destroyed crops and changes in the incidence of epidemic diseases.
These are obviously terrible things to wish for, but El Niño is not a very good wish-granting imp. Josh Willis at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory says, “While this year’s event started a bit later than the big El Niños of 2015 and 1997, it’s beginning to catch up. We’ll see how big it gets.”
Written for you by our author Chris Packham, edited by Lisa Lock, and fact-checked and reviewed by Robert Egan—this article is the result of careful human work. We rely on readers like you to keep independent science journalism alive.
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Saturday Citations: Failure to launch; cellular mortality; heavy weather (2026, May 30)
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