Science

For hundreds of thousands of years, humans have cultivated a close relationship with fire. But for all our fascination and intimacy, both with its dangers and its uses, fire can still stun us with something we’ve never seen before. The blue whirl flame was discovered quite by accident just a few years ago. Scientists were

For almost as long as stories have been told, stories have been deconstructed. For centuries, theorists, philosophers, and scholars have been pulling narrative structures apart, trying to pin down the most fundamental elements that give stories shape and meaning. As far back as the 4th century BCE, Aristotle was dissecting story structures in this vein,

The sudden dimming of one of the brightest stars in the night sky, Betelgeuse, could be due to a dust cloud spewing up from its surface, astronomers said on Thursday. The mystery has enthralled skywatchers since the star – part of the Orion constellation – began to lose luminosity last October, with some experts suggesting

A woolly brown rhinoceros that weighed two tons once roamed northeastern Siberia before mysteriously disappearing around 14,000 years ago. Was its demise caused by humans, or the warming climate of the time? A new study by a Swedish and Russian team of scientists who examined DNA fragments from the remains of 14 of these prehistoric mammals

The world could be headed for an ‘information catastrophe’ as the rate of production of digital bits continues to accelerate with no sign of stopping, new research suggests. In a new study – one firmly positioned in the more abstract quarters of theoretical physics, it must be said – researcher Melvin Vopson from the University

WASHINGTON — New Federal Communications Commission regulations will go into effect next week intended to make it easier for small satellites to get licenses for commercial operations. The FCC published in the Federal Register July 20 the final version of a new rule for what it calls “streamlined” licensing procedures for small satellites, which formally

A single locust is just bigger than a paper clip. But when these solitary critters attract others into a growing swarm, billions of locusts wind up flying together, forming a moving carpet that can block out the sun and strip the landscape of plants and crops. Giant swarms like this have devastated large swaths of

You wouldn’t think there’s much of a contest between soft hair or a little bit of beard stubble and a sharp steel razor – and yet, most of us know razors quickly lose their sharpness no matter how carefully you shave. Now scientists have a much better idea why this is happening at the smallest

A new analysis of the genomes of the most famous of ancient humans - Neanderthals and Denisovans - has revealed an as-yet-unidentified ancestor for our species – a branch of our distant family tree without any known label to put to it. The study also finds further evidence of interbreeding between humans and Neanderthals, but places it

One of the world’s most prominent astronomical observatories has a hole. On Monday, a 3-inch-thick (76-mm-thick) cable at the Arecibo Observatory broke, tearing a gash 100 feet (30 metres) long in the reflector dish of the 20-acre radio telescope in Puerto Rico. The observatory had just reopened after a temporary closure due to Tropical Storm

A massive chunk of Canada’s last fully intact ice shelf, some 4,000 years old, has broken off, reducing the shelf by more than half, scientists reported last Sunday. After separating from the shelf, the piece split in two, forming an iceberg almost the size of Manhattan. Climate change likely fuelled the collapse of the shelf, researchers

WASHINGTON — The coronavirus pandemic has slowed work on the first ViaSat-3 broadband satellite, making a launch in mid-2021 unlikely, Viasat CEO Mark Dankberg said Aug. 7.  Speaking during an earnings call for the quarter ended June 30, Dankberg said the pandemic continued to weaken demand for inflight connectivity services, but did not have as

In the evolutionary tree of life, the lizard-like tuatara from New Zealand is on a branch all to itself. In the time of the dinosaurs, this extraordinary animal had lots of relatives all around the world, and yet now, there’s nothing else like it on Earth. According to new sequencing of the tuatara’s entire genome

The idea of freezing particles by warming them is counterintuitive, to say the least. But physicists have shown how specially designed mixtures ‘melt’ in the dark but crystallise the moment the lights come on, thanks to their unique thermal activity. Instead of bouncing the particles around and spreading them out, the researchers showed that by

People have searched for sex differences in human brains since at least the 19th century, when scientist Samuel George Morton poured seeds and lead shot into human skulls to measure their volumes. Gustave Le Bon found men’s brains are usually larger than women’s, which prompted Alexander Bains and George Romanes to argue this size difference

There are countless exoplanets in the Milky Way, but some are more hardcore than others. Take a type known as hot super-Earths. These planets are nuts. Imagine a rocky world like Earth, but up to 10 times more massive; now zoom it in so close to its star, it takes just 10 days or fewer

Scientists don’t always like being right: take the team that warned in a paper published in 2017 that the St. Patrick Bay ice caps in Canada would soon disappear, for example. The latest NASA satellite imagery shows that their prediction has sadly come true, and even faster than they expected. Scientists from the National Snow

Updated 7:30 p.m. Eastern with Blue Origin comment. WASHINGTON — Six years ago, SpaceX was the upstart launch company seeking to break United Launch Alliance’s monopoly on national security space launches. Now, it’s part of the establishment. When the U.S. Air Force announced Aug. 7 that SpaceX and ULA would split the National Security Space

For the first time, the innovative CRISPR gene editing method has been used on squid, marking a milestone in the scientific study of these creatures – and opening up many new areas of potential research. CRISPR enables very precise, speedy, and low-cost DNA edits. Put simple, the ingenious molecular workings of the method are often

Scientists can use some pretty wild forces to manipulate materials. There’s acoustic tweezers, which use the force of acoustic radiation to control tiny objects. Optical tweezers made of lasers exploit the force of light. Not content with that, now physicists have made a device to manipulate materials using the force of… nothingness. OK, that may be a

Whether it’s a summer barbecue with friends, your favourite fast food takeaway, or Christmas dinner, we can probably all recall times when we’ve eaten more food in one sitting than we needed to. Plenty of research has looked at the long-term health effects of overeating calories – which include increased fat storage, impaired endocrine (hormone)

When the Sun sets in a blaze of blue and night falls over the dusty plains of Mars, something weird and wonderful occurs. High up above the surface, the atmosphere begins to glow with an ultraviolet light, sometimes pulsing, as nitrogen and oxygen combine into nitric oxide. This invisible glow, first revealed by the Mars

Satellite images of penguin poop in Antarctica have revealed a number of Emperor penguin colonies living and breeding on the icy continent that scientists weren’t previously aware of. Eight completely new communities have now been found in some of the most remote and inaccessible parts of Antarctica, and three additional colonies that were previously identified

The world has a new brightest fluorescent material, and it’s the first of its kind. Rather than trying to improve fluorescent molecules, a team of chemists have developed a new material that preserves the optical properties of fluorescent dyes. This effectively prevents one of the biggest problems in producing fluorescent materials – the tendency of

WASHINGTON — The percentage of small satellites that successfully complete their missions has improved in recent years even as the number of such satellites has dramatically increased. The Aerospace Corporation study, presented at the 34th Annual Small Satellite Conference, found that 87% of smallsats launched between 2009 and 2018 that had completed their missions had

Sperm is critical for the fertilisation of almost every living organism on our planet, including humans. To reproduce, human sperm have to swim a distance equivalent to climbing Mount Everest to find the egg. They complete this epic journey simply by wiggling their tail, moving fluid to swim forwards. Though over 50 million sperm will

When an enormous explosion created a mushroom cloud over Beirut, killing dozens of people and injuring thousands more, online commentators and conspiracy theorists quickly jumped to a frightening claim: A nuclear bomb had gone off in Lebanon’s capital city. But as state officials say, and contrary to those fast-spreading rumours, the explosion was almost certainly not caused

The bed of Lake Titicaca, the largest freshwater lake in South America, is turning out to be a veritable museum of ancient offerings.  Once sacred to the Incas and before that the Tiwanaku, this body of water, nestled between Bolivia and Peru, is littered with sunken sacrifices from centuries ago.  After years of searching, archaeologists

The Sun is a wild place. Up in our skies, it appears pretty much the same day to day, but when you look closer, our star is often riotous with turbulent plasma. One of the wildest things the Sun can do is flare – belch out colossal loops of plasma that utterly dwarf our entire

Tropical Storm Isaias was set to regain hurricane strength Monday before slamming into the US eastern seaboard, bringing life-threatening storm surges to North and South Carolina. The storm, currently 60 miles (100 kilometers) southeast of Charleston, South Carolina, was packing sustained winds of 70 miles (112 kilometers) per hour, with wind speeds predicted to increase