The first humans to settle on the moon might need quake-proof housing. Moonquakes recorded during the Apollo missions have been linked to specific cracks on the lunar surface, suggesting that the moon is still geologically active today.

Thomas Watters of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington DC and his colleagues re-examined data collected between 1969 and 1977 from seismometers placed by astronauts at four Apollo landing sites.

The Apollo sensors measured 28 shallow moonquakes, with some reaching magnitude 5.5, which on Earth is enough to cause slight damage to buildings. Previous efforts to pin down their epicentres were only rough estimates, potentially out by as much as 90 kilometres.

Using a new algorithm designed to make sense of the limited seismic data, Watters and his colleagues were able to do much better. When they compared their epicentres to pictures of the moon’s surface taken by NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, they found that eight of the epicentres fell within 30km of geological features known as lobate scarps.

These cliff-like features are typically tens of metres tall and form along thrust faults, where the moon’s crust has broken as it has contracted, and one side has been pushed up over the other.

They are the best way to search for recent activity on the moon, says Amanda Nahm of the Arctic Planetary Science Institute, because they’re believed to be at most 50 million years old – relatively young, geologically speaking.

The researchers also saw disturbances in the lunar soil and boulder movements in these areas. All of this “strongly argues for a recently – as in present day – geologically active moon,” says Nahm.

The findings mean future astronauts should take moonquakes seriously. “We know that there are thousands of these young faults on the moon,” says Watters. “If we’re correct and these are active faults, they are something that we need to be aware of when we go back to the moon.”

Lasers and eyes generally don’t mix. But super thin and flexible laser stickers created by a team of scientists might eventually stick to your contact lenses and act as a security tag.

at the University of St Andrews in Scotland, and his colleagues have made flexible membrane lasers 200 nanometres thick, and attached them to contact lenses and banknotes. These laser stickers are made on a glass substrate with a polymer layer between the glass and the laser. The laser itself is made from an organic semiconducting polymer, similar to the films that activate pixels in smartphone screens.

The polymer fluoresces when light shines on it, powering the laser. The sacrificial polymer layer between the glass and laser is water soluble, so once the laser is complete the whole stack is submerged in water and the laser separates from the glass substrate. “The laser just floats off,” says Gather. A similar technique is used to make flexible solar cells and LEDs.

Changing the laser’s properties would allow scientists to turn each one into a unique security tag. The resulting membrane lasers work both suspended in air and when they are stuck to objects, which makes it possible to embed a security tag or other information onto nearly anything.

Lasting effects

So far, the laser stickers have stood the test of time. Gather says the team stuck one of their lasers onto a banknote over a year ago, and it still gives the same spectral signatures, and security code, that it gave when they first applied it.

“One of the major challenges of organic lasers is the photostability,” says at the University of Quebec in Canada. “[This work shows that] the emission wavelength stayed unchanged over the course of 200 days.”

The team also put a contact lens with one of their lasers onto a bovine eye in the lab. When excited with a pulsing, blue light, the lens emitted a green laser beam onto a screen 50 centimetres away. The team say these lenses could be used as a wearable security tag, like a barcode to be read by an iris scanner.

Gather says he was inspired by a newspaper report based on some of his previous work that said humans emitting lasers from their eyes like superheroes would be possible in the future.

In fact, though the team have not done it, he’s confident the current iteration of laser stickers would be safe to put in the human eye. “The intensity of the laser beam and the amount of energy it requires is so low that you can put it in the eye without damaging the eye,” he says. “I would be willing to try it.”

Read more: Hearing implant uses lasers to shoot sound into your ear

WHITE dwarfs may be dying, but their light could be just right to sustain life as we know it. That could make habitable planets even more common than we think.

Many planet-hunting missions have focused on finding rocky exoplanets around sun-like stars, based on the notion that an exact Earth twin would be a prime breeding ground for alien life.

White dwarfs, by contrast, would seem unlikely hosts. These smouldering cores form when stars around the same mass as our sun reach the end of their lives. First the stars balloon to red giants, then they shed their outer gas layers and leave behind dim, ultradense orbs not much larger than Earth itself.

Still, previous work suggested that the stellar corpses could maintain habitable zones, regions where liquid water can exist on a planet’s surface, for more than 8 billion years. As our own solar system is 4.5 billion years old, a habitable world around a white dwarf should have plenty of time to give rise to some form of life.

Now a new study shows that an Earth-like planet in a white dwarf’s habitable zone would get light at the right wavelengths to sustain photosynthesis. Crucially, such a world would not get too much damaging ultraviolet radiation, which can stop life in its tracks.

“A planet orbiting a white dwarf would get the right wavelengths of light to sustain photosynthesis”

at the Open University in the UK and his colleagues started by assuming that this hypothetical planet has an atmosphere similar to Earth’s.

By simulating the conditions created by a white dwarf, the team calculated the amount of starlight that would reach the planet’s surface. They then compared the results with the wavelengths of light DNA absorbs, particularly UV waves known to damage DNA.

The researchers found that the planet would get just 1.65 times as much UV light as Earth does (). “The dose is remarkably benign from an astrobiological perspective,” says Fossati.

For the optical wavelengths that play roles in photosynthesis, the team found conditions almost identical to those on Earth.

Planets surrounding red dwarf stars have also been proposed as alternative sites for life, says Fossati, in part because these small, cool stars are the most common in our galaxy. But they can experience intense stellar activity, including flares of radiation bigger than the ones that affect Earth. White dwarfs are less temperamental, and would provide life with a more stable home, says Fossati.

“The team’s evaluation of habitable planets at white dwarfs is an excellent way to smash preconceptions about these systems,” says at the University of Leicester in the UK.

One lingering question is how an Earth-sized planet would come to be in the right orbit around a white dwarf star. In our solar system, the sun will expand into a red giant in about 5 billion years’ time, and astronomers think it will pulverise everything well past Earth’s orbit before it shrinks back down into a white dwarf.

While what look like planetary remnants have been seen around white dwarfs, no intact planets have been found so far. “That’s the most tricky bit,” says Fossati. “We don’t yet know if a full planet could survive.”

Fulmars (Fulmarus glacialis) are something of a seabird success story. They were rare 100 years ago but are coming back in great numbers, with half a million pairs breeding in the UK every year. A plentiful food source in the form of fish offal from commercial fishing boats may be behind the boom, though they are vulnerable to ingesting water-borne scraps of plastic pollution.

The birds are monogamous and come back to the same cliff face each year to rejoin their mate. They lay one precious egg per year, and defend their nest by spitting out foul-smelling oil. Parkinson was on an assignment to look at another species when he took this photograph on his day off. Notwithstanding the stinky oil, the trip was not without its challenges. “One day I was told to get out because a force-10 gale was coming,” he recalls. It was a good job he did. “I went back to my tent later on and it had been almost completely destroyed.”

The strong winds, which destroyed another two tents during Parkinson’s trip, later proved crucial to getting this photograph.

Fulmars can be found at their cliffside breeding sites for most of the year, and Parkinson wanted to capture them in this habitat. “This was the ideal place to photograph them,” he says. But it was a little risky. To take this photograph he had to lean out over the steep cliff and into the wind. “I don’t consider myself to be a risk taker,” he says. “But if the wind stopped I would have had a bit of a problem.”