Science

Wombats are among the most peculiar of animals. They look like a massively overgrown guinea pig with a boofy head, a waddling gait, squared-off butt, backwards-facing pouch and ever-growing molars. Indeed, wombats are oddballs and don’t look much like their nearest living relatives, the koala. But koalas and wombats (collectively known as “vombatiformes”) are the

While artificial intelligence systems continue to make huge strides forward, they’re still not particularly good at dealing with chaos or unpredictability. Now researchers think they have found a way to fix this, by teaching AI about physics. To be more specific, teaching them about the Hamiltonian function, which gives the AI information about the entirety

SpaceX on June 30 is scheduled to make its first attempt to recover the Falcon 9 booster after launching a military satellite. WASHINGTON — SpaceX’s Falcon 9 to date has performed 86 launches, in 47 of which the rocket’s first stage landed back on earth. While rocket landings have become the norm for SpaceX launches,

The Indo-Pacific bottlenose dolphins of Shark Bay in Western Australia have an unusual way of obtaining food. They chivvy fish into a large, empty marine gastropod shell. Then they carry the shell and captured fish up to the surface, and shake it upside down. Slurp! go the fish, straight down into the dolphin’s belly. It’s

In the strange field of quantum physics, quantum entanglement – what Einstein called “spooky action at a distance” – stands out as one of the most intriguing phenomena. And now scientists just managed to successfully demonstrate it again, this time onboard a CubeSat satellite orbiting Earth. Quantum entanglement is where two particles become inextricably linked

Not everyone can see pictures in their minds when they close their eyes and summon thoughts – an ability many of us take for granted. While people have been aware of this phenomenon since the 1800s, it hasn’t been widely studied, and was only recently named ‘aphantasia’. This absence of voluntarily generated mental visual imagery

On 15 September 2017, NASA’s Cassini Orbiter concluded its mission by diving into Saturn’s atmosphere. Over the course of the 13 years it spent studying the Saturn system, it revealed a great deal about this gas giant and its largest moon, Titan. In the coming years, scientists are eager to send another mission to Titan to follow up on Cassini

A hot desert wind is carrying a massive cloud of Saharan dust into the southern United States this week. Dust plumes from the Sahara routinely blow westward across the Atlantic at this time of year, but this event is a doozy – by some measures, the biggest in decades. And a second plume appears to

By making use of the ‘spooky’ laws behind quantum entanglement, physicists think have found a way to make information leap between a pair of electrons separated by distance. Teleporting fundamental states between photons – massless particles of light – is quickly becoming old news, a trick we are still learning to exploit in computing and encrypted communications

WASHINGTON — The European Space Agency formally started the search for its next leader June 25, with the current head of the agency recommending it select a “dynamic young successor.” ESA formally posted the job opening for director general a day after the conclusion of a meeting of the ESA Council, featuring representatives of its

As our planet’s permafrosts continue to melt in record-breaking heat, we can expect to find astonishing things from the ancient past. Like this huge wolf head, preserved since the last ice age and unearthed in incredible condition in Siberia in 2018, an estimated 40,000 years since being entombed in frozen wilderness. The giant head, discovered

A 50-year-old theoretical process for extracting energy from a rotating black hole finally has experimental verification. Using an analogue of the components required, physicists have shown that the Penrose process is indeed a plausible mechanism to slurp out some of that rotational energy – if we could ever develop the means. That’s not likely, but

A new photo showing a mystery creature swimming in Loch Ness has sparked new interest in Nessie, the long-necked plesiosaur-like cryptid rumoured to inhabit the loch’s dark and enigmatic depths. There’s just one big problem, and you can probably guess what it is. The image has been digitally manipulated. According to an investigation conducted by

The search for extraterrestrial life is increasingly homing in on the Solar System’s ocean worlds, and there’s new evidence that Jupiter’s moon Europa should be the first port of call. According to new modelling, Europa’s subsurface oceans should be able to support life. The NASA team behind this research has also calculated that processes such

The United Nations said Tuesday it was working to verify reports of a new Arctic record temperature of 38 degrees Celsius (100.4 degrees Fahrenheit) in a Siberian town over the weekend. The suspected record temperature was measured in the Russian town of Verkoyansk on Saturday during a prolonged heatwave, which has also seen a hike

The list of the fastest 500 supercomputers in the world just got updated again, and there’s a new number one: the Fugaku supercomputer built by the RIKEN Institute and the Fujitsu tech company in Japan. IBM’s Summit supercomputer has been comprehensively pushed into second place, because Fugaku can crunch through 415.5 quadrillion computations per second (also

WASHINGTON — The new director of NASA’s Earth science division says identifying ways to implement an “ambitious” decadal survey amid various challenges will be a top priority for her. In a speech June 23 at an online meeting of NASA’s Earth Science Technology Forum, one of her first public talks since starting at NASA in

The current pandemic isn’t just affecting humans, it’s also impacting wildlife. As the world locks down to avoid further spread of the devastating coronavirus, there are suddenly far fewer cars on the road, planes in the sky and ships in the water. And nature has surely noticed. Recently, pumas have been spotted ambling down the

It sounds like something from a sci-fi movie, but the newly revealed Shadow-Effect Energy Generator (SEG) is a real prototype device. The fascinating concept could help us to transform the way renewable energy is generated indoors. The SEG uses the contrast between darkness and light to produce electricity. It’s made up of a series of

Picture a spiral galaxy. You’re probably imagining something like Messier 34 – long, spiralling arms sweeping away from a brightly glowing centre, speckled with glittering star clusters and punctuated with dark streaks of dust. But from our vantage point, galaxies can be oriented any which way, including edge-on – like NGC 5907, also known as

Even after more than 20 years in the ocean, everyday plastics can show very few signs of breaking up or degrading, according to a new study examining the effects of deep-sea submersion on this problematic material. Researchers looked at two plastic samples recovered from 4,150 metres (13,615 feet) below the surface of the eastern Pacific

Stripped of any fancy circuitry and complex layers of higher order thinking, the nervous system is little more than a calculator for making smart choices. Food is good, but what if it’s toxic? Empty calories won’t give you energy, but what if they’re satisfying? To better study how a rudimentary brain deals with decisions between

WASHINGTON — Virgin Galactic announced June 22 it has signed an agreement with NASA to support development of a program to train and potentially procure rides for private individuals seeking to fly to the International Space Station. The company, best known for developing the SpaceShipTwo suborbital spaceplane, said it signed a Space Act Agreement with

With the help of 3D modelling and machine learning, scientists think they’ve solved the mystery of the tiny earthquakes that regularly rumbled under Cahuilla, California from early 2016 to late 2019 – a period of almost four years. Some sort of natural fluid, such as water or liquid carbon dioxide, is likely to be the

The famous cat-in-a-box thought experiment by Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger is an illustration of one of the defining characteristics of quantum mechanics – the unpredictable behaviour of particles at the quantum level. It makes working with quantum systems incredibly difficult; but what if we could make quantum predictions? A team of physicists believes it’s possible.

Nothing rages against the dying of the light harder than a star. Their death throes are wild and violent as the star is wracked with colossal quakes, throwing vast amounts of stellar material out into the surrounding space. Studying the gas and dust thrown off in such events can help us understand how these stars

If we’re really serious about solving the climate crisis, we need to start tackling our economy’s overwhelming ‘power’ of consumption, researchers warn in a new report. While having money is often portrayed as something to aspire to, the wealthiest nations and individuals are also wreaking the most environmental destruction. If we keep heading in this

For the first time, US doctors can prescribe a video game. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has just approved EndeavorRX as an effective treatment for kids with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, or ADHD. Children aged 8-12 years old can now be prescribed gaming sessions on EndeavorRX, in which players pilot a small aircraft through

WASHINGTON — Boeing announced late June 19 several changes in management of its work on the International Space Station and CST-100 Starliner commercial crew vehicle. In a memo to employees of Boeing Space and Launch, Jim Chilton, senior vice president in charge of the division, announced that Mark Mulqueen will retire from the company July

Perhaps the most iconic dinosaur is Tyrannosaurus rex, a massive predator that lived in what is now North America. We have now discovered that carnivorous dinosaurs of a similar size existed in ancient Australia as well. Following the footprints We learned about these carnivores by studying fossils that were discovered up to 90 years ago.