Science

The hottest giant planets in the galaxy should, in theory, have the fastest winds. The hotter a planet is, the stronger its atmospheric currents should be – and a category of exoplanets known as hot Jupiters contains the hottest worlds we’ve ever found. They orbit so insanely close to their host stars that some of

There is an 80-percent chance of the warming El Niño phenomenon developing between June and August, increasing the risk of extreme weather events, the World Meteorological Organization said Tuesday. “Fuelled by unusually warm ocean waters in the tropical Pacific, El Niño conditions are developing and are set to influence global temperature and rainfall patterns,” the

The elevator display reads “433”, the number of meters below ground. The doors slide open, revealing the entrance to what is expected to be the world’s first permanent repository for radioactive spent nuclear fuel. Blasted into 1.9 billion-year-old stable bedrock in Eurajoki, southwest Finland, the geological repository for spent nuclear waste – dubbed Onkalo, which

TAMPA, Fla. — The U.K. government is exploring sending British astronaut John McFall to Vast’s planned Haven-1 space station in a mission it says could make him the first person with a physical disability to live in orbit. The UK Space Agency announced an agreement June 2 to support the U.S.-based company in securing sponsorships

Just a few years ago, a strange signal was received from the plane of the Milky Way. It was something astronomers had never seen before, pulsing with a radio beat too slow to fit any known astronomical object. It may have just come and gone as a one-off anomaly. But then they found another one.

Australian researchers have trained lab-grown brain cells on a silicon computer chip to play the nineties shooter game “Doom” and say they are just scratching the surface of what the neurons could be capable of doing. It’s the science-fiction work of biotech boffins at Cortical Labs, who researched and developed the technology that harnesses the

HELSINKI — China conducted the maiden launch of its reusable Long March 12B rocket Monday, providing no advance warning and delivering operational payloads to orbit. The first Long March 12B lifted off at 4:40 a.m. Eastern (0840 UTC) June 1 from the Dongfeng Commercial Aerospace Innovation Test Zone at Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in the

A meteor crashing toward Earth exploded over the northeastern United States on Saturday, NASA said, setting off booms that echoed over the region with a blast equivalent to 300 tons of TNT. The fireball broke up over northeastern Massachusetts and southeastern New Hampshire at 2:06 pm (18:06 GMT), the US space agency’s deputy news chief

DUBLIN — Federal Aviation Administration documents have provided new details about a SpaceX project to develop and test reentry vehicles that could be used to support in-space manufacturing projects. The FAA on May 15 issued an environmental assessment for test flights of Starfall, an uncrewed reentry vehicle. The FAA also issued a record of decision

On a stormy Monday in March, 1827, the German composer Ludwig van Beethoven passed away after a protracted illness. Bedridden since the previous Christmas, he was ravaged by jaundice, his limbs and abdomen swollen, and every breath a struggle. As his associates sorted through personal belongings, they uncovered a document Beethoven had written a quarter

Of all the objects in the Universe, few are as perplexing as black holes. Over the last decade, gravitational-wave observatories have revealed them in bewildering variety: giant black holes far chunkier than we thought possible, black holes rotating at dizzying speeds, and pairs so mismatched that scientists struggled to explain them. Now, with the latest

WASHINGTON — As investment pours into defense and space startups, the U.S. Space Force is trying to draw more of those companies into the national security market. After hundreds of startup pitches, the head of the Space Force’s commercial office offers a candid assessment of what companies get right — and wrong — when approaching

If you’ve ever tried to overhaul a garden, you know you’re bound to find broken bits of pottery and long-forgotten statuary swallowed by vines. But for one couple, that imitation of archaeological discovery turned into the real thing. At first glance, the marble slab etched in Latin – including the phrase “spirits of the dead”

The Sun is not known for being quiet. It blasts out energy equivalent to 100 billion nuclear bombs every single second, routinely hurls billion tonne clouds of magnetized plasma into space, and occasionally treats us to auroras visible as far south as my home in Norfolk, UK. But even by the Sun’s own extraordinary standards,

WASHINGTON — The U.S. Space Force awarded SpaceX a $4.16 billion contract to build a constellation of satellites designed to track airborne targets from orbit, marking one of the Pentagon’s biggest bets yet on shifting battlefield surveillance missions from aircraft to space. The agreement, announced May 29, covers the first increment of a space-based Air

Somewhere in the future, there’s a finish line in the marathon to understand supermassive black holes (SMBHs). We can’t say how close we are, or what the final results will be. But astrophysicists keep going, confident that with each passing landmark, the finish draws nearer. Working with the JWST, researchers have now found a SMBH

WASHINGTON — The U.S. Space Force’s proposed $71 billion budget for fiscal 2027 is drawing attention for its investments in missile-warning satellites, proliferated low Earth orbit constellations and other big-ticket systems. Less visible, but increasingly central to the service’s plans, is a major buildout of the ground infrastructure needed to operate those systems during a

Who needs trainspotting when there are so many different moods of the full Moon to see? And the full Moon that will grace Earth’s skies on May 30 and 31 is one you will not want to miss. It’s referred to as a blue micromoon, and it results from a rare concatenation of circumstances that

Europe, which is in the throes of a record-smashing heatwave this week, is the world’s fastest-warming continent and stretches into an even more rapidly heating Arctic. After record high temperatures for May were broken in Britain, Ireland and France on Monday and Tuesday, the continent still faces more brutal heat in the coming days. A

Last week, OpenAI shocked the mathematical community by revealing that one of its internal artificial intelligence (AI) models had found a counterexample to a famous conjecture made by legendary Hungarian mathematician Paul Erdős in 1946. The planar unit distance problem, or Erdős problem 90, has intrigued mathematicians for decades. The new result is no mere

Where will humans go after Mars? Is Mars the end of the line or is it a steppingstone to somewhere else? If we “moon-to-Mars,” do we then “Mars-to-somewhere else?” These are curious questions that have received very little attention even though the answer has implications to current NASA lunar programs and planetary science mission planning.

Diving into virtual reality (VR) can do some strange things to the brain, as a new study highlights. In an experiment, volunteers given VR wings for a couple of hours started thinking of these wings in a similar way as actual body parts. A part of the brain called the occipitotemporal cortex (OTC) is used

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) – NASA is already ordering landers, rovers and drones for a sprawling moon base, less than two months after the Artemis II’s record-breaking lunar flyaround. The space agency outlined the first phase of its moon base plans on Tuesday, awarding hundreds of millions of dollars in contracts to four U.S. companies.

TAMPA, Fla. — Starcloud has ordered optical terminals from SpaceX to use Starlink as a global data-relay network for its future orbital data centers, deepening ties with the company it is counting on to launch full-size spacecraft. The Redmond, Washington-based startup announced a contract May 26 for more than 50 Starlink Mini Lasers, enough to

Think about a word that looks like its meaning. For instance, the word bed kind of looks like a bed, with the vertical lines resembling the posts at either end. Loop looks very loopy. Some words are more subtly evocative – like blizzard, whose zigzagging letters might evoke something chaotic. The term for this is

The European Commission is currently updating its Arctic policy, with a new policy statement expected this coming autumn. Unlike the latest policy from 2021, the update will place greater emphasis on security, defense and connectivity. These additions matter. But there is a risk that Brussels will articulate an ambitious Arctic policy while overlooking one of

A new genealogical study shows how genetic analyses threading together DNA across centuries can save stories of historical migration and ancestry from being eternally lost to time. The beginnings of this particular story are a familiar one: A group of intrepid colonists set out from England in the early 17th century to seek religious freedom

China launched its crewed Shenzhou-23 spacecraft and eased it into a successful docking with a space station early Monday as part of Beijing’s ambitions to send humans to the Moon by 2030, state media said. During this mission, a Chinese astronaut is scheduled to spend a full year in orbit on the Tiangong space station,

WASHINGTON — NASA plans to add more missions to SpaceX’s commercial crew contract, protecting the agency from the possibility that Boeing’s spacecraft is never certified for missions to the International Space Station. In a May 18 procurement filing, NASA announced its intent to add six post-certification missions, or PCMs, to SpaceX’s commercial crew contract on

A brainy human relative who lived during an ice age nearly 150,000 years ago adapted to the bitter cold by developing a sophisticated stone-tool industry, according to a new study of a crystal-studded rib bone found in China. This surprising discovery, described in a recent paper, shows that creativity doesn’t only flourish during peaceful periods,