Science

An invisible, weak energy field wrapped around our planet Earth has finally been detected and measured. It’s called the ambipolar field, an electric field first hypothesized more than 60 years ago, and its discovery will change the way we study and understand the behavior and evolution of our beautiful, ever-changing world. “Any planet with an

For nearly 60 million years, our home planet was likely frozen into a big snowball. Now, scientists have discovered evidence of Earth’s transition from a tropical underwater world, writhing with photosynthetic bacteria, to a frozen wasteland – all preserved within the layers of giant rocks in a chain of Scottish and Irish islands. The team,

Scientists have created a ‘living plastic’ that self-destructs when the material begins to erode. In the composting process, the novel product breaks down within a month, compared with more traditional versions that take up to 55 days to decompose under the same conditions. The hopeful technology was inspired by the power of plastic-munching proteins, which

WASHINGTON — Falcon 9 launches are temporarily on hold as the Federal Aviation Administration looks into any public safety implications of the failed landing of a booster early Aug. 28. In an Aug. 28 statement, the FAA stated it was aware of the incident earlier that day when a Falcon 9 booster landed on a

Connecting our dream worlds to our conscious realities might be entirely possible, according to emerging research. A new study by three researchers from the US neurotechnology company, REMspace, has shown with a bit of training, some of us might be able to react and respond to devices around us while we are ‘lucidly’ dreaming. Lucid

We think of planets as the inherently confined children of host stars. Space, however, is a strange and mercurial thing; objects do not always follow the rules we think they ought. Using JWST, astronomers have caught six ‘rogue’, planet-sized objects, zooming untethered to any star, wild and free through interstellar space, in the gorgeous environment

Right now, human population growth is doing something long thought impossible – it’s wavering. It’s now possible global population could peak much earlier than expected, topping 10 billion in the 2060s. Then, it would begin to fall. In wealthier countries, it’s already happening. Japan’s population is falling sharply, with a net loss of 100 people

While the idea of a quantum internet has a huge amount of potential, getting it hooked up to the regular old internet has its challenges. Now a new study hints at how existing and future networks could be combined. An experiment conducted by researchers from Leibniz University Hannover in Germany show how quantum information and

WASHINGTON — ABL Space Systems said it lost its second RS1 rocket after a static-fire test when a fire broke out under the vehicle fed by leaking fuel that could not be extinguished by pad systems. The company released Aug. 26 details about the July 19 incident that led to the loss of the vehicle

A ruined building in Kafr El Sheikh was where ancient Egyptians once stood, gazing at the stars above. More than 2,500 years ago, the building constituted the largest astronomical observatory known in Egypt in the 6th century BCE, part of what we now call the Temple of the Pharaohs in the town of Buto. There,

Two US astronauts who arrived at the International Space Station aboard Boeing’s Starliner will have to stay six more months and return home with rival SpaceX, NASA said Saturday, in a fresh public relations blow to the crisis-hit aviation giant. The return of Barry “Butch” Wilmore and Sunita “Suni” Williams had already been delayed for

It’s winter in Australia, but as you’ve probably noticed, the weather is unusually warm. The top temperatures over large parts of the country this weekend were well above average for this time of year. The outback town of Oodnadatta in South Australia recorded 38.5°C on Friday and 39.4°C on Saturday – about 16°C above average.

WASHINGTON — Boeing’s CST-100 Starliner will return from the International Space Station in September without the two astronauts on board who launched on it in June after NASA concluded thruster problems posed too much risk. NASA announced Aug. 24 that Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams, the NASA astronauts who flew to the ISS on Starliner’s

A surprising number of us can sing with perfect pitch, according to a new study that analyzed the karaoke skills of 30 people – as long as we’re singing one of our ‘earworms’, those songs that get stuck in our heads. Breaking down the stats from the team at the University of California, Santa Cruz

Andromeda is the closest major galaxy to our Milky Way – and it’s getting closer. In fact, astronomers believe that the two galaxies are destined to crash into each other. But a new study suggests this fate isn’t necessarily written in the stars. Andromeda is currently barreling down on us at a speed of about

Underwater avalanches are powerful natural events that happen all the time under the surface of the ocean. They are impossible to see and extremely difficult to measure, which means we know little about how they work. Yet these phenomena pose a hazard to our global communication networks. The proliferation of the internet has required an

WASHINGTON — The U.S. Space Force awarded a $200 million contract to Northrop Grumman to construct a radar site in the United Kingdom to monitor objects in outer space. This initiative is part of the AUKUS security alliance involving Australia, the U.K. and the United States. The contract, announced Aug. 23, is for the second

A 400-year-old mystery around the identity of four men found buried in England’s first permanent settlement in the Americas may have at last been solved, revealing not just their identity but their scandalous connection. Based on a DNA analysis and archaeological research by a team of scholars, it’s now confirmed two of the anonymous souls

On Sept. 26th, 2022, NASA’s Double Asteroids Redirect Test (DART) collided with Dimorphos, the small moonlet orbiting the larger asteroid Didymos. In so doing, the mission successfully demonstrated a proposed strategy for deflecting potentially hazardous asteroids (PHAs) – the kinetic impact method. By October 2026, the ESA’s Hera mission will rendezvous with the double-asteroid system

Record breaking fossil fuel production, all time high greenhouse gas emissions and extreme temperatures. Like the proverbial frog in the heating pan of water, we refuse to respond to the climate and ecological crisis with any sense of urgency. Under such circumstances, claims from some that global warming can still be limited to no more

WASHINGTON — NASA added three companies to a contract for launching smallsat missions, including one publicly traded company that has had recent financial struggles. NASA announced Aug. 22 that it selected Arrow Science and Technology, Impulse Space and Momentus Space for its Venture-Class Acquisition of Dedicated and Rideshare (VADR) contract. That selection allows them to

When the Moon fully slips into Earth’s shadow, a king shall die. So warns an ominous prediction from Old Babylonia, inscribed across several ancient clay tablets. For over a century now, these precious astrological artifacts have been housed at the British Museum, but only recently did archaeologists Andrew George and Junko Taniguchi finish translating them.

From afar, the Sun looks calm and peaceful in our daytime skies. But up close, it’s an erupting, chaotic display of solar activity the likes of which astrophysicists didn’t expect until the last year or so. “We didn’t think the Sun was going to be as active this particular cycle, but the observations are completely

A single coral in Fiji that is more than 600 years old has recorded how Pacific Ocean temperatures have varied during its long life. Scientists know the Pacific has generally been getting warmer over the centuries, with marine heatwaves and widespread coral bleaching in recent years due to anthropogenic climate change. But there are thought

Science fiction is riddled with artificial intelligence going rogue and turning on their human creators. HAL-9000. The Matrix. Skynet. GLaDOS. Cylons. Humanity, it seems, has a deep fear of the rebellion of the machine. With the rise of ever more sophisticated large language models (LLMs), such as Chat GPT, the question of what dangers AI

WASHINGTON — Axiom Space is working with Nokia to adapt terrestrial wireless technologies to provide high-speed communications for the Artemis spacesuits Axiom is developing. The two companies announced a partnership Aug. 21 to develop 4G/LTE communications technologies, called the Lunar Surface Communications System (LSCS), for the suits Axiom is developing for NASA for use starting

Two astronauts marooned in space may sound like the plot of a Hollywood blockbuster, but for two NASA crew members, it is now a reality. Commander Barry Wilmore and pilot Sunita Williams are currently in limbo on the International Space Station (ISS). They arrived in the Boeing Starliner spacecraft – the first test of the

Giant black holes in the centres of galaxies like our own Milky Way are known to occasionally munch on nearby stars. This leads to a dramatic and complex process as the star plunging towards the supermassive black hole is spaghettified and and torn to shreds. The resulting fireworks are known as a tidal disruption event.

No one yet knows what threat plastic pollution poses to human health, but the recent realization that we are drinking invisible fragments of plastic along with our water is making many understandably uneasy. To stop microplastics and nanoplastics from penetrating deep into our bodies and brains, researchers at the University of Missouri have come up

Artificial intelligence (AI) prophets and newsmongers are forecasting the end of the generative AI hype, with talk of an impending catastrophic “model collapse”. But how realistic are these predictions? And what is model collapse anyway? Discussed in 2023, but popularised more recently, “model collapse” refers to a hypothetical scenario where future AI systems get progressively