NASA astronaut Scott Kelly landed safely in Kazakhstan Tuesday evening, putting an end to his nearly year-long stay aboard the International Space Station. A Russian Soyuz capsule brought Kelly and two of his Russian fellow crew members home, a seven-hour-trip. Kelly has now concluded the spaceflight portion of NASA’s One-Year Mission — an experiment to see how astronauts’ bodies change during 340 days aboard the ISS.

Kelly and fellow One-Year Mission participant Mikhail Kornienko will undergo field tests to see how well the two astronauts are doing as they return to Earth. Living in microgravity for longer than six months can change the body’s circulation and disturb a person’s sense of balance, making it difficult to re-adjust to gravity again.

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Programmers Whitfield Diffie and Martin E. Hellman, who developed the first form of cryptography for the Internet era, have been awarded this year’s Turing Award. Named after famed British mathematician Alan Turing, the award is a $1 million cash prize sponsored by Google that’s given to scientists and engineers who advance the field of computing.

Diffie and Hellman are being honored for developing the first instance of public-key cryptography back in the 1970s. Called the Diffie–Hellman key exchange, the protocol established a way to send encrypted messages over public channels.

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Today, private space tourism company Virgin Galactic unveiled the new version of its SpaceShipTwo vehicle, dubbed the VSS Unity. It’s the spacecraft that the company wants to use to send paying customers into sub-orbital space someday. The VSS Unity will ultimately replace Virgin Galactic’s former SpaceShipTwo plane, called the VSS Enterprise, which crashed during a test flight in 2014; the accident claimed the life of one the vehicle’s pilots and severely injured the co-pilot.

The VSS Unity was shown off today at a special ceremony at the Mojave Air and Spaceport in California, where Virgin Galactic conducts its flight tests. Outwardly, the vehicle is nearly identical to its predecessor. It will also launch and re-enter the Earth’s atmosphere the same as before. But the spacecraft differs from the previous vehicle in a few key areas. For one, this version is much more automated. The first SpaceShipTwo crashed partly because of pilot error, so this vehicle has new fail-safes in place to protect pilots from making critical mistakes during flight. The vehicle’s rocket engine will also use a different rubber-like fuel, something that will make combustion more efficient, the company said; but this new fuel has also been known to cause Virgin Galactic engine trouble in the past.

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Scientists say they have proven the existence of gravitational waves — the ripples in space-time that stem from objects moving throughout the universe. If true, it’s the first time these waves have been measured directly and marks one of the biggest scientific discoveries in decades. But there have been a few false alarms before.

The discovery was made by the large group of researchers who make up the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) Scientific Collaboration. The LIGO observatories picked up the wave signals on September 14th, 2015, coming from two distant black holes merging 1.3 billion years ago. The black holes spun around each other several times per second before merging in a massive explosion — a process that generates huge gravitational waves. These waves peter out on the way to Earth, requiring delicate instrumentation that must adjust for any interference on our planet. Though LIGO’s observations are ground-breaking, other scientists will need to pore over the data to make sure it’s correct.

Gravitational waves were predicted by Albert Einstein in 1918, as part of his theory of general relativity. Finding them would confirm a big part of that theory — and would also be the first step toward a new way of observing the cosmos.

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Many Asian countries, especially China, have been increasing their investment in scientific research and development at a much faster rate than the United States. That’s according to the new Science and Engineering Indicators 2016 report out today from the National Science Board — a group appointed by the president that sets policies for the National Science Foundation.

The report details how Southeast, South and East Asia now account for 40 percent of the world’s expenditures in R&D. Asia’s advancements are threatening America’s leadership in the field, the NSB report argues, as the United States’ commitment to science and engineering is wavering.

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This article originally appeared on Recode.net.