Science

WASHINGTON — The White House released a new space policy directive Sept. 4 intended to improve cybersecurity of space systems. Space Policy Directive (SPD) 5 is billed as the first comprehensive government policy related to cybersecurity for satellites and related systems, and outlines a set of best practices, but not firm requirements, that agencies and

Hearing loss in humans can make life challenging in our hustle-bustle landscape. But when your world is literally as silent as a grave, being hard of hearing just might be something of a superpower. For naked mole rats and their cousins, the loss of genes that would usually amplify noises is another extraordinary adaptation in

While filming herself getting ready for work recently, TikTok user @gracie.ham reached deep into the ancient foundations of mathematics and found an absolute gem of a question: “How could someone come up with a concept like algebra?” She also asked what the ancient Greek philosopher Pythagoras might have used mathematics for, and other questions that

You’d think a plant scientist would feel at home on a farm, but Neil Stewart was used to working with potatoes, not human cadavers.  Fascinated by environmental contaminants, Stewart was on tour at the University of Tennessee’s ‘body farm’ – more formally known as the Anthropology Research Facility – where forensic anthropologists study the effects

One of the most powerful solar observatories in the world has just completed a major upgrade. And now, the GREGOR solar telescope in Spain has taken some of the most high-resolution images of our Sun ever obtained in Europe. In the upgraded telescope’s new images, details as small as 50 kilometres (31 miles) across can

The physical footprints left behind by humankind don’t wash away with the waves.  Human construction has modified the oceans as much as it has urbanised the land, a new analysis reveals. Mapping the global extent of human development in Earth’s oceans, an international team calculated the footprint occupied by human built structures as of 2018,

New CSIS report looks at three key governance issues: orbital debris mitigation, rendezvous and proximity operations, and insurance requirements WASHINGTON — Commercial and government activities in space keep growing and yet nations are making little progress in establishing rules and norms of behavior, says the Center for Strategic and International Studies in a new report

When an earthquake struck the Italian mountain town of L’Aquila in April 2009, few people would have been thinking that carbon dioxide had anything to do with it. But geologists were on the case straight away. Immediately after the L’Aquila earthquake, a team from the Italian National Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology started measuring the

What happens to materials in Earth’s crust when a meteorite slams into them? Specifically, what happens to the quartz found in many different rock types? Scientists thought they already knew the answer – but new lab tests suggest we might have to think again. In the absence of any imminent meteorite strikes, researchers used a

Earth, with its reassuringly familiar continents, arranged in the dependable configuration you know and love, didn’t always look the way it does now. Its land masses, once locked together in supercontinents, have cracked and broken and slid away from each other, and repeatedly come together again over the course of our planet’s 4.5-billion-year history. In

From 7 billion light-years away, a pair of colliding black holes has delivered up, on a shiny gravitational wave platter, one of the most sought-after detections in black hole astronomy – the extremely elusive ‘middleweight’ black hole, which lies in between stellar-mass black holes and supermassive behemoths. Not only, however, did the two colliding black

The volume of lakes formed as glaciers worldwide melt due to climate change had jumped by 50 percent in 30 years, according to new study based on satellite data. “We have known that not all meltwater is making it into the oceans immediately,” lead author Dan Shugar, a geomorphologist and associate professor at the University

Of the many high expectations we have of quantum technology, one of the most exciting has to be the ability to simulate chemistry on an unprecedented level. Now we have our first glimpse of what that might look like. Together with a team of collaborators, the Google AI Quantum team has used their 54 qubit

WASHINGTON — SpaceX Chief Executive Elon Musk said the company is making “good progress” on its next-generation Starship launch vehicle despite delays in the schedule of test flights of the vehicle. In an interview broadcast during the Humans to Mars Summit by the advocacy group Explore Mars Aug. 31, Musk emphasized the progress the company

Animals have been hibernating for a long, long time, a new study shows. Researchers have analysed 250 million-year-old fossils and found evidence that the pig-sized mammal relation, a genus called Lystrosaurus, hibernated much like bears and bats do today. Finding signs of shifts in metabolism rates in fossils is just about impossible under normal conditions – but

Keeping qubits stable – those quantum equivalents of classic computing bits – will be key to realising the potential of quantum computing. Now scientists have found a new obstacle to this stability: natural radiation. Natural or background radiation comes from all sorts of sources, both natural and artificial. Cosmic rays contribute to natural radiation, for

Spend some time in someone else’s body, and your sense of self and your memory starts to shift, new research shows – almost as if your brain is adapting to better fit its new form. It’s a fascinating insight into the link between the physical and the psychological. Researchers haven’t actually worked out how to

SpaceX is aiming to launch three rockets on Sunday, including two back-to-back Falcon 9 launches in Florida and a Starship test flight in Texas, if weather permits. The aerospace company said it intends to launch its twelfth Starlink mission at 10:12 am EST from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, sending 60 Starlinks into orbit. The second

Songbirds in tropical rainforests curtail their reproduction to help them survive droughts, according to a study Monday. Species with longer lifespans were better able to cope with this environmental volatility than previously thought, researchers found. With more record hot spells gripping parts of the planet and biodiversity threatened by human encroachment on habitats, a crucial

Plants have a seemingly effortless skill – turning sunlight into energy – and scientists have been working to artificially emulate this photosynthesis process. The ultimate benefits for renewable energy could be huge – and a new approach based on ‘photosheets’ could be the most promising attempt we’ve seen so far. The new device takes CO2, water, and sunlight

The launch of NROL-44 was aborted three seconds before the Delta 4 Heavy was to lift off from Space Launch Complex-37 at Cape Canaveral WASHINGTON — A United Launch Alliance Delta 4 Heavy rocket carrying a National Reconnaissance Office classified spy satellite remains on the ground after a mission abort Aug. 29 during the ignition

There’s an enormous variety of life thriving deep beneath Earth’s surface. A new analysis of two major groups of subsurface microbes has now revealed that their evolutionary path to life in the dark has been more curious than we expected. In our planet’s first 2 billion years of existence, there was no oxygen in the

If a tree falls in a forest and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound? Perhaps not, some say. And if someone is there to hear it? If you think that means it obviously did make a sound, you might need to revise that opinion. We have found a new

In the north of the Arabian Peninsula, bordering the Nefud Desert, archaeologists have recently catalogued vast stone monuments dating back 7,000 years. Shaped like long rectangles, the ‘mustatil‘ structures are a mystery – but new evidence suggests they were possibly used for ritual or social purposes. Mustatils are amongst the earliest forms of large-scale stone

The centre of the Milky Way is glowing. Yes, there’s a big chonkin’ black hole there, and it’s a very energetic region, but there’s an additional high-energy, gamma-ray glow, above and beyond the activity we know about, and it’s something that’s yet to be explained. This glow is called the Galactic Center GeV Excess (GCE),

Water covers 70 percent of the Earth’s surface and is crucial to life as we know it, but how it got here has been a longstanding scientific debate. The puzzle was a step closer to being solved Thursday after a French team reported in the journal Science they had identified which space rocks were responsible,

The sound of a key sliding into a lock could be enough information to potentially create a copy of that key and open the lock – that’s the conclusion of researchers who’ve been investigating “acoustics-based physical key inference”. It makes sense, if you think about it: the clicks and clacks of a key pushed into

Introduced by Rep. Dan Crenshaw (R-Texas), the proposal to use navy ranks got a prominent endorsement from the Starfleet captain himself, William Shatner. WASHINGTON — Before the House passed the so-called “Starfleet” amendment, Space Force officials had been internally debating a new rank structure to set the space branch apart from its parent service the

Just before a tiny pup died during the last ice age, it ate a piece of meat from one of Earth’s last woolly rhinos.  Researchers made this discovery while doing a necropsy (an animal autopsy) on the mummified remains of the ice age puppy. After finding an undigested slab of skin with yellow fur in the puppy’s stomach, researchers

The Lebanese capital Beirut was rocked on Tuesday evening local time by an explosion that has killed at least 78 people and injured thousands more. The country’s prime minister Hassan Diab said the blast was caused by around 2,700 tonnes of ammonium nitrate stored near the city’s cargo port. Video footage appears to show a