A team led by Harvard University has detected helium streaming from LHS 1140b, a rocky super-Earth orbiting a red dwarf 49 light-years away, marking the first time an atmosphere has been identified on a planet of this size inside its star’s habitable zone. The signal, captured by the Magellan Clay telescope in Chile during a planetary transit, appears as a spectral fingerprint of gas escaping the upper atmosphere. The finding, published in Science, does not confirm habitability, but it satisfies a critical condition: a stable climate-shielding envelope that could retain liquid water. The planet, 1.7 times Earth’s diameter and five times its mass, had already been flagged as a prime candidate for hosting oceans; the new data suggest its upper atmosphere is helium-dominated after primordial hydrogen was stripped away, while heavier gases such as nitrogen or carbon dioxide may persist at lower altitudes.

The same week, a separate survey published in The Astronomical Journal reported the deepest radio reconnaissance yet of exoplanet K2-18b, a Hycean-world candidate 124 light-years away. Using the Very Large Array in the United States and South Africa’s MeerKAT telescope, researchers sifted through millions of signals but found no narrow-band technosignature. The null result, scientists stress, refines filtering algorithms and narrows the parameter space for future searches rather than ruling out microbial or intelligent life.

Closer to home, an International Ocean Discovery Program expedition drilled 1.3 kilometres below the Atlantic seafloor at the Lost City hydrothermal field and recovered formation water whose chemistry closely matches the alkaline, hydrogen-rich fluids venting from the site’s carbonate chimneys. The water’s magnesium-depleted, calcium-enriched profile indicates it reacted with mantle rocks at temperatures exceeding 300 °C, a process that generates the chemical energy fuelling entire ecosystems in the absence of sunlight. The study, published in Geochemistry, Geophysics, Geosystems, strengthens models of how life could arise on ocean worlds such as Europa or Enceladus.

On the engineering front, a Swiss-American collaboration from MIT and EPFL unveiled a 300-gram flapping-wing robot that transitions seamlessly between air and water, mimicking diving birds. The vehicle, described in Science, uses passively flexing carbon-fibre wings to swim and then pitches steeply to break the surface and take off in under a second. Researchers see it as a platform for sampling remote aquatic environments on Earth and, eventually, on icy moons. Meanwhile, a growing body of work on airborne environmental DNA—including a 2025 shotgun-sequencing study in Nature Ecology & Evolution that reconstructed a Florida forest ecosystem from a single air filter—demonstrates how routine monitoring infrastructure can double as a biodiversity sensor, a technique that could one day inform life-detection protocols on other worlds.