Science

The world watched with excitement as former Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos and three others lifted off July 20 toward the farthest edge of Earth’s atmosphere aboard the Blue Origin New Shepard. This mission took place only nine days after Virgin Group founder Richard Branson boarded the Virgin Galactic VSS Unity, embarking on the first fully

The strength and direction of Earth’s magnetic field has changed a lot over the millennia. Scientists are eager to study its past patterns to work out how the field might change in the future – a pretty vital research field, considering this magnetic shield protects us from damaging cosmic radiation. However, instruments capable of directly

Nuclear scientists using lasers the size of three football fields said Tuesday they had generated a huge amount of energy from fusion, possibly offering hope for the development of a new clean energy source. Experts focused their giant array of almost 200 laser beams onto a tiny spot to create a mega blast of energy

The human mind is more resistant to the march of time than conventional wisdom suggests. Like a fine wine, some parts even get better with age. As our brains inevitably grow older, some of our mental power is destined to fade, like spatial visualization or our mind’s processing speed. Yet research has found there are

The Sagittarius arm of the Milky Way spirals out of our galaxy’s center, forming a swooping highway of gas that spans tens of thousands of light-years. This highway is dotted with the headlights of billions of stars, all seemingly moving along the same curvy track. But now, astronomers have found something unusual – a ‘break’ in the arm,

It has just rained at the summit of Greenland’s ice sheet for the first time in recorded history, in yet another worrying milestone in our ecological unravelling. Like much of the Northern Hemisphere, Greenland’s been experiencing a massive heatwave with temperatures at the glacier’s summit rising above freezing for the third time in less than

Swiss researchers said Monday they had calculated the mathematical constant pi to a new world-record level of exactitude, hitting 62.8 trillion figures using a supercomputer. “The calculation took 108 days and nine hours” using a supercomputer, the Graubuenden University of Applied Sciences said in a statement. Its efforts were “almost twice as fast as the

Geost provides hardware for the Ground-Based Electro-Optical Deep Space Surveillance system used by the U.S. Space Force to track deep space objects. WASHINGTON — Geost, a company that supplies space surveillance sensors to the U.S. military and intelligence agencies, has been acquired by ATL Partners, a private equity firm. The value of the acquisition, announced

Human activity has shrunk the size of wild animals the world over, and yet recent research has found many mammals living near cities have become steadily larger, both in length and in weight. The findings are unexpected. Sprawling urban environments, with their vast swathes of sun-soaked cement, can grow much hotter than natural habitats, and warmer

In a significant achievement, physicists have produced a two-dimensional supersolid in the lab for the first time. That may sound incredibly mind-bendy, but it’s a feat researchers have been working towards for more than 50 years. Supersolids are strange materials with atoms arranged in the ordered structure of a solid, yet they can flow without

The partially mummified remains of an urbane Pompeii resident have been discovered in a tomb outside the city center erected before the famous eruption that buried the town in ash. According to the inscriptions on the tomb, the deceased was a man named Marcus Venerius Secundio, who was in his 60s when he died and was, at

One of the biggest questions we have about the Universe is: Are we alone as a technologically advanced species? This raises other questions: If aliens are out there, what would their technology look like? And, pertinently, how could we detect it? A new study has laid out some answers to these questions – at least,

A huge reservoir that supplies water to tens of millions of people in the Western United States is at such low levels that populations it feeds must reduce their usage next year, the government said Monday. ​A chronic drought has left huge swathes of the country parched, as man-made climate change forces shifts in the

If you feel like you’re met with a lot of anger and vitriol every time you open up your social media apps, you’re not imagining it: A new study shows how these online networks are encouraging us to express more moral outrage over time. What seems to be happening is that the likes, shares and

WASHINGTON — A Finnish cubesat designed to test satellite deorbiting technologies will launch on a Rocket Lab Electron after delays with its original launch on a Momentus tug. Rocket Lab announced Aug. 16 that it signed a contract with Aurora Propulsion Technologies to launch its AuroraSat-1 spacecraft on an Electron in the fourth quarter of

A huge horde of mixed animal bones, including the remains of humans, has been found in an ancient lava tube in Saudi Arabia. The hollowed cave, called Umm Jirsan, is a sprawling lava conduit system underneath the volcanic fields of Harrat Khaybar in the northwest of the country. Umm Jirsan extends for a staggering 1.5

Vaccine and drug development, artificial intelligence, transport and logistics, climate science – these are all areas that stand to be transformed by the development of a full-scale quantum computer. And there has been explosive growth in quantum computing investment over the past decade. Yet current quantum processors are relatively small in scale, with fewer than

Over 20 ‘hunger hotspots’ around the world are expected to encounter an increase in severe food insecurity over the next four months, according to a new report from the United Nations (UN). Two UN bodies – the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and World Food Programme (WFP) – published the advice last week, warning these

Neanderthals, long perceived to have been unsophisticated and brutish, really did paint stalagmites in a Spanish cave more than 60,000 years ago, according to a study published on Monday. The issue had roiled the paleoarchaeology community ever since the publication of a 2018 paper attributing red ocher pigment found on the stalagmitic dome of Cueva

Childbirth can trigger a number of odd body changes, but for a woman in Portugal, post-pregnancy symptoms were particularly curious: She started to lactate from her armpit, according to a new report. The 26-year-old woman told doctors that she developed pain in her right armpit two days after giving birth, according to the report, published July

Archaeologists have finally figured out how Arthur’s Stone, the famous Neolithic monument that inspired the ‘stone table’ in The Chronicles of Narnia, came to be. Ever since the large quartz conglomerate rocks were first assembled, sometime around 3,700 BCE, this double-chambered tomb has remained a mysterious beacon of the past, perched on a Welsh hillside all

The mysterious Denisovans were only formally identified about a decade ago, when a single finger bone unearthed from a cave in Siberia clued scientists in to the ancient existence of a kind of archaic hominin we’d never before seen. But that’s only one side of the story. The truth is, modern humans had in fact

When plants first ventured onto the land, evolving from freshwater-dwelling algae, more than 500 million years ago, they transformed the planet. By drawing carbon dioxide from the air, they cooled Earth, and by eroding rock surfaces they helped build the soil that now covers so much land. These changes to the planet’s atmosphere and land

An ancient fragment of clay tablet dating back to 3,700 years ago, during the Old Babylonian period, contains what is now the oldest known example of applied geometry, a mathematician has discovered. That’s more than a millennium prior to the birth of Pythagoras. And this history-altering artifact, known as Si.427, had just been sitting in

The Solar System is positively lousy with magnetic fields. They drape around (most of) the planets and their moons, which interact with the system-wide magnetic field swirling out from the Sun. Although invisible to the naked eye, these magnetic fields leave their marks behind. Earth’s crust is riddled with magnetic materials, for example, that retain

Italy may have just recorded the hottest temperature in European history, according to preliminary reports from local meteorologists. And perhaps fittingly, the culprit of the heat wave has been named Lucifer. Syracuse, a city on the coast of the Italian island of Sicily, registered temperatures of 119.85 degrees Fahrenheit (48.8 degrees Celsius) on Wednesday (Aug.

The typical Australian will change careers five to seven times during their professional lifetime, by some estimates. And this is likely to increase as new technologies automate labor, production is moved abroad, and economic crises unfold. Jobs disappearing is not a new phenomenon – have you seen an elevator operator recently? – but the pace

1st Space Brigade commander Col. Donald Brooks says forces in the field often are not aware of how dependent they are on satellites for every aspect of their operations HUNTSVILLE, Ala. — Without satellites in space, military forces on the ground cannot shoot, move or communicate. That is the mantra that the Army’s 1st Space

Unlike numerous other animals, cats show a strange unwillingness to work for their food. When given the choice between a freely available meal and a meal trapped inside a puzzle, scientists have found most animals, such as dogs, bears, pigeons, pigs, goats, mice, rats, monkeys and other primates, prefer to work for their food –

According to theory, if you smash two photons together hard enough, you can generate matter: an electron-positron pair, the conversion of light to mass as per Einstein’s theory of special relativity. It’s called the Breit-Wheeler process, first laid out by Gregory Breit and John A. Wheeler in 1934, and we have very good reason to