Science

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

Where do dreams come from? It’s an age-old question, something people have been wondering and theorising about for millennia. Whereas ancient civilisations may have interpreted dreams as having supernatural or spiritual origins, in modern society, we’re more likely to analyse our dreams in terms of our waking life, looking for meaningful connections linking the content

A rare merger between clusters of galaxies has just revealed an even rarer sight. Astronomers have found a vast, low-frequency radio ‘bridge’ between the two, spanning a 6.5-million-light-year distance – evidence of a magnetic field connecting them in the early stage of the merging process. It’s only the second time such a radio bridge has

Our planet’s water supply is an incredibly valuable resource that we need to protect, and worrying new figures show between 30-50 percent of it is being stolen – meaning that water isn’t paid for or counted. This theft occurs when people and companies obtain water illegally – often for agricultural purposes. That could mean getting

The internet has transformed most areas of our lives over the last few decades, and the technology keeps improving: researchers just set a new record for data transmission rates, logging an incredible speed of 178 terabits per second (Tbps). That’s around a fifth faster than the previous record, set by a team of researchers in

WASHINGTON — Companies and organizations in the space industry support the recommendations of a recent report that the Commerce Department handle civil space traffic management (STM), but say it’s more important that the government settle on an agency and move forward. A report released Aug. 20 by the National Academy of Public Administration (NAPA) concluded

For half a century scientists feared that the Somali elephant shrew had vanished from the face of the Earth. No one had seen so much as a whisker. But the tiny mammal with its probing trunk-like nose was quietly thriving in the arid, rocky landscape of the Horn of Africa, researchers said Tuesday. The elusive,

One of the major challenges in turning quantum technology from potential to reality is getting super-delicate quantum states to last longer than a few milliseconds – and scientists just raised the bar by a factor of about 10,000. They did it by tackling something called decoherence: that’s the disruption from surrounding noise caused by vibrations, fluctuations

The lives and deaths of animals that lived more than 2,000 years ago are coming to light. A cat, a snake, and a bird that were mummified in ancient Egypt have undergone non-invasive, high-resolution 3D X-ray scans, helping us to understand how they were kept, and the complex mummification procedures practised thousands of years ago.

If you’re a fan of science fiction, chances are you encountered a few franchises where humanity has spread throughout the known Universe. The ships that allow them to do this, maybe they use a warp drive, maybe they “fold space,” maybe have a faster-than-light (FTL) or “jump” drive. It’s a cool idea, the thought of

The world’s oceans have turned into a veritable sponge for our emissions, and new climate models suggest we’ve soaked them right through. Since the 1950s, our planet’s vast bodies of water have absorbed roughly 93 percent of the energy entering the climate system, and while most of that heating has been observed near the ocean

In 2020, we’re sadly used to hearing how disinformation campaigns are being waged to influence people’s thinking, spread fake news, and further political agendas But the same tactics aren’t solely a threat in terms of long-term social manipulation, scientists warn. In a new study, researchers demonstrate that weaponised disinformation campaigns could also hypothetically be exploited to

Northrop Grumman statement: “We will determine next steps once the debriefing process concludes.” WASHINGTON — When Northrop Grumman unveiled its OmegA rocket in April 2018, the company was clear that it developed the vehicle for the sole purpose of challenging United Launch Alliance and SpaceX for national security space launch contracts. The Air Force decided

Radiation that would reduce the DNA inside our own cells into genetic confetti is no match for the microscopic tough-guy known as a tardigrade, and we just got closer to understanding just how these critters are so tough. Their protection works in part due to the shielding provided by a special ‘damage suppression’ protein called

For the first time, pressure over 100 times that found in Earth’s core has been generated in a lab, setting a new record. Using the highest-energy laser system in the world, physicists briefly subjected solid hydrocarbon samples to pressures up to 450 megabars, meaning 450 million times Earth’s atmospheric pressure at sea level. That’s equivalent

Prehistoric sculptures depicting human-like faces have some scientists thinking certain expressions might well be universal across time and culture. New research has found ancient Maya people and other Mesoamerican civilisations, such as the Olmec, were sculpting scenes of pain, elation, sadness, anger, strain and determination in ways that are still recognisable to us up to

The International Space Station (ISS), in Earth orbit at hundreds of kilometres altitude, is not perfectly airtight. Every day, the cabin loses a minute amount of air, monitored carefully so that a liveable atmospheric pressure can be maintained, and to identify leaks. Now the latter has come to pass, just two years after the last