Science

It’s no secret that bottled water has more of an impact on the environment than filling up a bottle from the tap, but now researchers have crunched the numbers on just how much difference there is – and it’s a lot. Using Barcelona in Spain as a test case – home to some 1.35 million

ORLANDO — An Ariane 5 successfully launched two commercial communications satellites July 30 in the first flight of the rocket in nearly a year, and the first of two missions before it launches a NASA space telescope. The Ariane 5 lifted off at 5 p.m. Eastern time from the spaceport in Kourou, French Guiana. The

The ocean is vast, and deep, and dark, and inhospitable to us feeble land-dwelling creatures. There’s much that remains unknown or poorly understood in its roiling, seething belly. Technology is changing that. For over a century, mariners have reported an eerily beautiful phenomenon they called the “milky sea” – enormous patches of glowing water that

Particle accelerators are hugely important in the study of the matter of the Universe, but the ones we think of tend to be gigantic instruments – surrounding cities in some cases. Now scientists have made a much smaller version to power an advanced laser, a setup that could be just as useful as its larger

What makes one person more creative than another? Creativity is hard to define and perhaps even more difficult to measure, but scientists think they’ve come up with a remarkably simple way of assessing at least one aspect of it. It’s a test that you can take yourself in a couple of minutes, and it works

A network of strange features discovered underground at the south pole of Mars may not be lakes of liquid salty water after all. According to a new analysis, the strange shiny patches in radar data collected from the Mars Express orbiting probe could be resulting from frozen clay – specifically, hydrous aluminium silicates, or smectite

Polyfluoroalkyl and perfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) are known as ‘forever chemicals’ because they don’t naturally break down in the environment. Now a new study reveals the increasing pace of Arctic ice melt is leaking more of these chemicals into the environment. PFAS don’t originate in the Arctic, but they do settle there – they’re used in

WASHINGTON — Rocket Lab returned its Electron rocket to flight July 29 with the successful launch of an experimental satellite for the U.S. Space Force. The Electron lifted off from the company’s Launch Complex 1 in New Zealand at 2 a.m. Eastern. The rocket’s two stages performed normally and, after a coast phase, the vehicle’s

Within the remains of 890-million-year-old microbial reefs – a world that was dominated by bacteria and algae – lie possible signs of multicellular animal life, 90 million years before there was thought to be enough oxygen in Earth’s atmosphere to sustain such life. We all personally know oxygen is vital to us as animals –

Push materials to their limits, and strange things can occur – such as the discovery of a previously unknown phase of liquid, which has been reported by scientists looking at the development of super-thin, high-density glass. These types of glass are used in a variety of ways, including in OLED displays and optical fibers, but

Once early humans figured out how to tame a wild flame – to cook food, warm the camp, extend daylight, and keep predators away – some scientists think the skill spread like wildfire. If they’re right, it means early human populations right across Africa, Europe, and Asia were trading knowledge at least 400,000 years ago.

Astronomers have discovered evidence of water vapor in the atmosphere of Jupiter’s moon Ganymede for the first time. Ganymede, the largest moon in the Solar System, is covered in an icy crust. Scientists believe Ganymede may have a liquid ocean 100 miles (161 km) beneath its surface, and that such an ocean could host aquatic

Summer 2021 will mark a turning point in how heat is seen by the public and communicated by experts. For the first time in its 167-year history, the UK’s Met Office has issued an amber warning for extreme heat for much of Wales and parts of southern, central and western England, where temperatures are expected

DoD’s John Hill: ‘The U.S. government’s view is that we should be pursuing voluntary, non-binding norms’ WASHINGTON — A set of guidelines issued by Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin for responsible space operations should be part of a wider conversation about how to maintain safety and security in space, a senior Pentagon official said July 26.

A lagoon in Argentina’s southern Patagonia region has turned bright pink in a striking, but frightful phenomenon experts and activists blame on pollution by a chemical used to preserve prawns for export. The color is caused by sodium sulfite, an anti-bacterial product used in fish factories, whose waste is blamed for contaminating the Chubut river

A newly developed method of levitating and manipulating tiny objects using sound waves could represent a major step forward for the technology. Engineers in Japan have figured out how to pick up objects from reflective surfaces using acoustic levitation. Although they can’t yet do so reliably, the advance could help unlock the full potential of

Spanish prison authorities were baffled after a prisoner who was declared dead by three separate doctors woke up in the morgue – just hours before his own autopsy was set to commence. The prisoner, then-29-year-old Gonzalo Montoya Jiménez, was found unresponsive in his cell during a morning roll call on 7 January 2018 and had

Fifty-two years after the first historical Moon landing, we’ve been given a brand new perspective of a classic Apollo-era photo. Reddit user and visual effects artist Michael Ranger, AKA rg1213, chose the iconic photo of Buzz Aldrin taken by Neil Armstrong during the Apollo 11 mission, and ‘unwrapped’ the lunar vista reflected in the astronaut’s

Space is full of hazards. The Earth, and its atmosphere, does a great job of shielding us from most of them. But sometimes those hazards are more powerful than even those protections can withstand, and potentially catastrophic events can result. Some of the most commonly known potential catastrophic events are solar flares. While normal solar

Extreme weather is striking all over the world, illustrating how vulnerable swathes of humanity are to natural disasters. Some events – like wildfires sweeping the western US – are seasonal, while others came as a total surprise. China and Western Europe were both hit by devastating floods in the past week, with a death toll

TAMPA, Fla. — A federal appeals court denied a motion from satellite operator Viasat to stop SpaceX from enlarging its Starlink megaconstellation. Viasat had requested a stay on a SpaceX license modification that allows it to continue building out the low-Earth-orbit constellation, while legal action seeking to compel a thorough environmental review of the broadband

Dig a teaspoon into your nearest clump of soil, and what you’ll emerge with will contain more microorganisms than there are people on Earth. We know this from lab studies that analyze samples of earth scooped from the microbial wild to determine which forms of microscopic life exist in the world beneath our feet. The

‘Magic angle’ twisted trilayer graphene doesn’t only have an impressively exotic name, it might be a particularly rare type of superconductor, according to new research – one that could be useful everywhere from medical equipment to quantum computers. Scientists are finding that stacking single-atom layers of graphene on top of each other at slightly different

One of the most important open questions in science is how our consciousness is established. In the 1990s, long before winning the 2020 Nobel Prize in Physics for his prediction of black holes, physicist Roger Penrose teamed up with anesthesiologist Stuart Hameroff to propose an ambitious answer. They claimed that the brain’s neuronal system forms

An immobile probe sitting like a squat turtle on the surface of Mars has finally delivered a comprehensive picture of the red planet’s internal structure. The Mars InSight lander measured around 733 marsquakes, and used information on 35 of them, to form a picture of the crust, mantle, and core. It’s the first time seismic

The world’s coral reefs have reached a precipice, and only we can pull them back from the brink. According to a recent perspective, written on behalf of thousands of coral reef scientists, the coming decade will be our last chance to act. If we can limit global warming to 1.5 degrees, up to 30 percent of

EL PASO, Texas — The Federal Aviation Administration has revised its criteria for awarding astronaut wings to those flying on commercial spacecraft, making the requirements stricter while including a significant loophole. The FAA Office of Commercial Space Transportation issued an order July 20 describing its FAA Commercial Space Astronaut Wings Program and the criteria for

A mangled trilobite, found fossilized in Czechia, looks like it narrowly escaped becoming lunch more than 450 million years ago. All that’s left of this ancient marine arthropod is the head, but researchers think the pincers of something like a giant sea scorpion could have been what amputated its eye, scratching the shell and scarring

A slice of material just a single atom thick is breaking records. The ultra-thin wafer is a magnet that operates at room temperature, opening up avenues for the development of technology, particularly memory devices, and for research into ferromagnetism and quantum physics. It’s a huge step up from previous attempts to make a 2D magnet,

By now you might have heard the factoid that modern humans share a pretty large chunk of our genomes with bananas. But delving down much deeper, how much of our genome is uniquely Homo sapiens. A new study has suggested that number could be as small as 1.5 percent, with the rest being shared with our