Science

In the year 1181 CE, the sky exploded. Well, a part of the sky – a pinprick of nothing suddenly blossoming into visibility, a new, temporary ‘guest star’ in the constellation of Cassiopeia that astronomers in China and Japan watched and recorded for months. That star was a supernova, the violent eruption as a dead

Hurricane season seems to be rallying for a final surge of storms. AccuWeather, a world-leading weather forecasting company, predicts that November will bring one to three tropical storms strong enough to get names, and the first one could come in just a week. Florida and the Carolinas are the most at-risk states. Communities there are

HELSINKI — China’s human spaceflight agency has selected two proposals to develop spacecraft for low-cost space station resupply missions, echoing earlier moves by NASA. The China Manned Space Engineering Office (CMSEO) opened a call last year for proposals for low-cost cargo transportation systems to serve the Tiangong space station. Four proposals from 10 submissions were

The creeping shadows and haunting decorations transform the everyday into something eerie at Halloween. And you might be thinking about scaring yourself with a good horror movie. Grotesque imagery, extreme violence, startling jump scares and menacing characters are common elements, making viewers feel fear, dread and disgust. We generally aim to avoid these negative emotions

Remember that amazing ‘first image’ of Sagittarius A* (Sgr A) black hole at the heart of the Milky Way? Well, it may not be completely accurate, according to researchers at the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan (NAOJ). Instead, the accretion disk around Sgr A* may be more elongated, rather than the circular shape we first

Remember that amazing ‘first image’ of Sagittarius A* (Sgr A) black hole at the heart of the Milky Way? Well, it may not be completely accurate, according to researchers at the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan (NAOJ). Instead, the accretion disk around Sgr A* may be more elongated, rather than the circular shape we first

If an explosion of gas opens a great cavity in Siberia’s permafrost, and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound? Well, the methane gases it releases certainly send ripples around the world, and now a team from the United Kingdom and Spain has traced its source. Scientists first noticed these

Say hello to ionocaloric cooling. It’s a new way to lower temperatures with the potential to replace existing methods of chilling things with a process that is safer and better for the planet. Typical refrigeration systems transport heat away from a space via a fluid that absorbs heat as it evaporates into a gas, which

WASHINGTON — Chile and Cyprus are the latest nations to sign the Artemis Accords for sustainable space exploration, part of surge of new signatories this month. At a ceremony at NASA Headquarters Oct. 25, Aisén Etcheverry, Chile’s minister of science, technology, knowledge and innovation, signed the Accords on the behalf of that country. The ceremony was

We know that boys and girls are produced in much the same frequency. But how – and why – is this 1:1 ratio achieved? A new paper searches huge human data sets for gene variants that throw the 1:1 sex ratio off balance, and test the biological and theoretical rules of sex ratio. What produces

A comet that was predicted to become bright enough to see with the naked eye at Halloween seems to be disintegrating right before our eyes. It’s called C/2024 S1, discovered on September 27, a rare Kreutz sungrazer comet whose trajectory is due to bring it within just 1.2 million kilometers (750,000 miles) of the Sun

WASHINGTON — A member of the Crew-8 mission hospitalized for an unspecified medical issue after splashdown has been released after an overnight stay, NASA said Oct. 26. In a statement, NASA said the astronaut, whose identify has not been disclosed, was released from Ascension Sacred Heart Pensacola hospital after an overnight stay. “The crew member

Artificial intelligence (AI) can be trained to see details in images that escape the human eye. Now an AI neural network has identified something unusual about a face in a Raphael painting: It wasn’t actually painted by Raphael. The face in question belongs to St Joseph, seen in the top left of the painting known

In the constellation of Cygnus, some 7,800 light-years from Earth, lurks a real space oddity. There, a black hole in a system named V404 Cygni repeatedly engages in behavior that has simultaneously baffled and delighted scientists. Now it’s whipped a brand new trick out of its seemingly endless arsenal: an unseen binary companion, a star

WASHINGTON — SpaceX’s Super Heavy booster came within a second of aborting a “catch” landing attempt on the latest Starship test flight, according to audio posted online, apparently inadvertently, by Elon Musk. Musk posted a three-minute video Oct. 25 on X, the social media network he also owns, showing action from a video game that

A relative newcomer to the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search (GIMPS) has broken a six-year drought in the search for the next prime oasis in a desert of boring ol’ composite numbers. At an insane 41,024,320 decimal digits in length, writing the entire number would take months to write in full. To keep things brief

A team led by researchers at MIT in the United States has discovered large molecules containing carbon in a distant interstellar cloud of gas and dust. This is exciting for those of us who keep lists of known interstellar molecules in the hope that we might work out how life arose in the Universe. But

Suspended in the relic of an ancient sea beneath southern Arkansas, there may be enough lithium for nine times the expected global demand for the element in car batteries in 2030. A collaborative national and state government research team trained a machine learning model to predict and map the lithium concentrations of salty water deep

Despite huge advances in cyber security, one weakness continues to overshadow all others: human error. Research has consistently shown human error is responsible for an overwhelming majority of successful cyber attacks. A recent report puts the figure at 68%. No matter how advanced our technological defences become, the human element is likely to remain the

“There is every reason to believe China’s BeiDou global navigation satellite system has the ability to imitate American GPS signals and those of Europe’s Galileo,” said Professor Todd Humphreys of the University of Texas Radionavigation Lab. Humphreys was speaking at The Department of Transportation’s annual Civil GPS Service Interface Committee meeting, held for the public

For most of our evolutionary history, human activity has been linked to daylight. Technology has liberated us from these ancient sleep-wake cycles, but there is evidence sunlight has left and continues to leave its mark. Not only do we still tend to be awake in the daytime and sleep at night, we can thank light

A large communications satellite has broken up in orbit, affecting users in Europe, Central Africa, the Middle East, Asia and Australia, and adding to the growing swarm of space junk clouding our planet’s neighbourhood. The Intelsat 33e satellite provided broadband communication from a point some 35,000 km above the Indian Ocean, in a geostationary orbit

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. – Given its dominance in the launch market and Starlink’s explosive growth in satellite communications, what impact will SpaceX have on the optical terminal business? At the Satellite Innovation conference here, panelists discussed SpaceX’s plans, announced in March, to sell its optical or laser communications terminals to satellite manufacturers. Optical terminal suppliers

In the middle of the night, the world can sometimes feel like a dark place. Under the cover of darkness, negative thoughts have a way of drifting through your mind, and as you lie awake, staring at the ceiling, you might start craving guilty pleasures, like a cigarette or a carb-heavy meal. Plenty of evidence

Ships passing in the night used Morse code sent with lanterns and shutters to communicate. That same basic principle has allowed NASA to communicate with Psyche, its mission to a metal-rich asteroid in the main belt. However, the ‘light’ was a version of heat, and instead of being able to see each other, Psyche is

Recording-breaking carbon emissions in 2023 could be a sign that nature’s carbon removal systems are failing, a study awaiting peer-review warns. With last year’s atmospheric CO2 growth going hand-in-hand with record heat, an international team of researchers found high temperatures are likely to have “had a strong negative impact” on the ability of land-based ecosystems

TAMPA, Fla. — Luxembourg’s government has backed a major chunk of OQ Technology’s ongoing 30 million euro ($32 million) Series B funding round, according to the Luxembourg-based operator of small narrowband satellites.  OQ Technology announced an investment Oct. 21 from the Luxembourg Space Sector Development (LSSD), which the government co-runs with SES, a multi-orbit satellite fleet

Fall for me as a teenager meant football games, homecoming dresses – and haunted houses. My friends organized group trips to the local fairground, where barn sheds were turned into halls of horror, and masked men nipped at our ankles with (chainless) chain saws as we waited in line, anticipating deeper frights to come once

One of the great mysteries of the Universe is where all the metal actually comes from. We know it’s forged in cosmic fire – but which fires in particular, and in which proportions, is a little bit more difficult to pin down. A rare kind of supernova devoid of hydrogen and helium is a known

TAMPA, Fla. — SpaceX launched 20 spare OneWeb satellites Oct. 20 to strengthen the resiliency of French operator Eutelsat’s rival low Earth orbit (LEO) broadband network. Eutelsat said it had successfully contacted each satellite following lift-off on a Falcon 9 rocket at 1:13 a.m. Eastern from Vandenberg Space Force Base, California. Eutelsat spokesperson Katie Dowd