8 April 2026

Today’s Visualized takes a look at some of the stunning images captured by the crew of Artemis II. But first, catch up on the latest science news, including an unexpectedly well-distributed worm and fossilized sandstorm ripples on Mars.

Climate Change | News from Science

A warm farewell to Japan’s famous cherry blossoms

As winter’s chill gives way to spring’s warmth, Japan’s iconic cherry trees burst into dazzling pink displays. And each spring, millions of people gather throughout the country to welcome the blossoms’ arrival, in a celebration of life’s ephemeral nature. But climate change may be making the tradition itself ephemeral.

Last week, researchers reported that cherry trees are not only blooming earlier in the year, but in some parts of Japan, they are failing to reach full bloom at all. While the problem is currently confined to southern Japan, the authors warn that in a matter of decades, milder winters may start taking a toll on major cherry blossom-viewing hotspots elsewhere in Japan and around the world.

To make the finding, researchers combined weather data with 59 years of official records of blossom timing from 10 sites from around Japan. They found that in southern Japan, milder winters caused cherry trees to flower up to 32 days later than usual. Apparently, the trees had not become cold enough during winter to sense that spring had arrived. In some years, the trees never reached peak flowering—when 80% of flowers bloom at once.

“This is the equivalent of places in the Rockies or Alps not having enough snow for skiing,” said study co-author and plant ecologist Richard Primack.

Read the full story

Animals | Biology Letters

Ribbon worms range far and deep

The humble Tubulanus lutescens has a record-setting range (scale bar = 1 cm). Seid et al./ZooKeys (2025) via Wikimedia Commons | CC BY-SA

Scientists first discovered Tubulanus lutescens, a species of marine ribbon worm, in shallow Atlantic waters off the western coast of Sweden. So, the authors of a new study were surprised to find similar-looking creatures living thousands of meters below the surface of the Pacific Ocean in methane seeps near Costa Rica.

Using detailed anatomical analyses and genome-scale DNA, the researchers were able to confirm that these two worms indeed belonged to the same species—one that spans two ocean basins and tolerates markedly different environmental extremes. The discovery means that T. lutescens , one of just a few confirmed ribbon worms to inhabit both the shoreline and the deep sea, has one of the widest depth ranges and the largest known geographical range of any member of its phylum.

The findings “underscore how limited our picture of marine invertebrate distributions remains,” the team explained in the paper.

Read the paper

Astronomy | News from Science

Fossil ripples on Mars reveal Earth-like winds

On a blustery afternoon more than 3 billion years ago, powerful winds carried a thick carpet of sand across the surface of Mars. NASA’s Curiosity rover has now spotted vestiges of that ancient sandstorm: fossilized ripples. “ We’ve preserved an instant in geological time ,” said sedimentologist Steven Banham, who led the study. The ripples may be the first direct evidence that the thin Martian atmosphere was once thick enough to sustain Earth-like winds, a clue that the planet was once warm and wet.

The rover team noticed the ripples in late 2024, when Curiosity moved to a new area in Gale crater. The rover’s high-definition camera revealed them to be rare structures known as supercritical climbing ripples, characterized by a steep angle at which each ripple stacks on top of the next. By counting the ripples, the researchers estimate the storm would have blown for hours, carrying sand around waist height.

Today, planet-wide dust storms sweep across Mars every few years. But sand particles are much larger than dust and cannot be lofted as easily by the planet’s wispy atmosphere, which is about 200 times thinner than Earth’s, Banham says. He thinks the ancient sandstorm directly constrains how thick Mars’s atmosphere was early in its history. A thicker atmosphere would also have been better at holding and transporting water. “It all helps to paint the picture surrounding the search for habitability,” Banham said.

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Visualized

At 6:41 p.m. EDT, minutes before temporarily losing communications with Earth as they flew around the lunar far side, the Artemis II crew witnessed Earth “setting” behind the Moon. NASA

First crewed Moon mission since 1972 caught extraordinary glimpses of lunar terrain

On 6 April, the crew of NASA’s Artemis II mission reached 406,771 kilometers from Earth, the farthest humans have ever ventured from our home planet. Flying with experiments tracking the health effects of deep-space radiation, NASA astronauts Reid Wiseman, Vincent Glover, and Christina Koch and Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen also became the first humans to see certain parts of the Moon in full with the naked eye and photograph them directly . As their spacecraft Integrity whisked around the Moon, coming within 6545 kilometers of the lunar surface, the crew witnessed the flashes of several meteoroid impacts on the Moon’s dark side, an “Earthset” foregrounded by the Moon, and a solar eclipse. “Something that just shocked me … is just the three-dimensionality of it,” Hansen said of the Moon after observing it out a spacecraft window. “It really just bent your mind. It was an extraordinary human experience.”

NASA

After passing back around the Moon, the Artemis II crew saw a solar eclipse as the Moon fully blocked the Sun’s light, allowing the glow of the solar corona—the Sun’s outer atmosphere—to come to the fore. “It is indescribable,” Reid Wiseman said to Mission Control of the view. “No matter how long we look at this, our brains are not processing this image in front of us. It is absolutely spectacular.”

photo during the eclipse, when astronauts saw meteor flashes

NASA

From a GoPro on one of Ingenuity’s solar arrays, the Moon looms large in front of the Sun, a dark sphere framed by the ghostly glow of the solar corona. For nearly an hour, the Artemis II crew gazed on a lunar surface shrouded in darkness. As they did so, crewmembers reported seeing six flashes from meteoroids slamming into the Moon, to the delight of lunar scientists at Mission Control.

See more images

Et Cetera

Lies, damned lies, and AI medicine

Medical researcher Almira Osmanovic Thunström made up a disease—“bixonimania”—then uploaded two preprints on it to see if chat bots like ChatGPT would fall for the fake medicine. And they did—even harder than she predicted. “If the scientific process itself and the systems that support that process are skilled, and they aren’t capturing and filtering out chunks like these, we’re doomed,” said one expert in health misinformation. “This is a masterclass on how mis- and disinformation operates.”