Science

You’ve heard of hot Jupiters. You’ve heard of mini-Neptunes. You’ve heard of super-Earths. But have you heard of Eyeball Planets? Yep – planetary scientists think there might be a type of exoplanet out there that looks disturbingly like a giant eyeball. Just sitting there. Staring. But it’s actually not as weird as it sounds –

Ocean bays that pinch West Antarctica are home to two distinct populations of Turquet’s octopus (Pareledone turqueti). The shared secrets of their ancestors do not bode well for the future health of our planet. A new DNA analysis of the two geographically separated octopus populations indicates they were once part of one big family. This

Is your dog bothered by something but you can’t work out what? Do you wish they could tell you? There’s a huge range of dog “talking” buttons on the market that now claim to let your dog do this. A very basic kit will set you back about $15, while more sophisticated ones can cost

WASHINGTON — The White House used a Dec. 20 meeting of the National Space Council to discuss the importance of international cooperation but offered few new initiatives along those lines. The purpose of the meeting, the third by the council during the Biden administration and the first since September 2022, was to highlight what the

A shark sheds up to 40,000 teeth in its lifetime – and megalodon, the greatest predator of them all, was no different. As this fearsome beast roamed the world’s oceans between 4 and 20 million years ago, it dropped teeth that are still washing up on beaches, found sticking out of whale bones, or rising

When streams of ultra-fast protons collide, a Higgs boson might pop into existence for the briefest instant before decaying into lighter particles. In that moment, physicists can work backwards to estimate the mass of what could be the most important and yet most elusive particle in the Standard Model. Having crunched the numbers on a

Which is worse: Attending a party you don’t want to attend, or staying home and disappointing a friend? A lot depends on context, of course, but according to a new study, declining an invitation doesn’t typically bring the social backlash invitees may expect. “I was once invited to an event that I absolutely did not

It’s time to put the notion of a cold, lifeless Mars to bed. A new survey using satellite imagery and ground penetrating radar has revealed signs of volcanic activity that’s far more recent than anyone ever expected. Combined with other pieces of evidence, the discovery reveals that under its barren crust, Mars might have quite

As Christmas approaches, many children experience the “gimme-gimmes” and write a list of toys that they hope Santa will bring. This is to be expected. Toys give children a chance to learn and be curious, engage their imaginations in play and become socialised with others. Unfortunately, 80 percent of all toys end up in landfills,

Our brains are remarkably energy efficient. Using just 20 watts of power, the human brain is capable of processing the equivalent of an exaflop — or a billion-billion mathematical operations per second. Now, researchers in Australia are building what will be the world’s first supercomputer that can simulate networks at this scale. The supercomputer, known

WASHINGTON — Astrobotic’s first lunar lander is ready for a launch in early January that would set up a landing on the moon in late February. The Pittsburgh-based company announced Dec. 19 that its Peregrine lunar lander has completed all its pre-launch integration activities, which include fueling the lander and mating it with the payload

Daydreaming is looking less like a vice and more like a virtue the more that neuroscientists and psychologists dig into the phenomenon. Scientists at Harvard University have now found preliminary evidence that when mice ‘daydream’ or quietly reflect on something they saw earlier that day, their brains are rewired in a useful way for memory

Quantum physics is fundamentally weird, so much so that we need thought experiments of hidden cats in boxes and metaphors of spinning coins to even begin to comprehend its laws. Yet even in our classical world, where physics is more intuitive, shades of quantum behavior can be represented using relatively simple scenarios. Researchers experimenting with

Thousands of years before ancient people in Central Eurasia learned to farm, hunter-gatherer groups in the subarctic were building some of the first permanent, fortified settlements, challenging the notion that agriculture was a prerequisite for societies to ‘settle down’. Researchers now think they have dated the earliest known fortifications in the icy north, if not

Cronian moon Enceladus doesn’t look like much. It’s kind of monochrome and small, paling in comparison with Saturn‘s big showy rings and giant hexagon. But, as many Solar System objects make clear, appearances can be very deceptive. Enceladus has a lot more going on than an initial glimpse would indicate. A new analysis suggests that

A methane monster, lurking beneath the Arctic’s frozen ground, is threatening to rear its ugly head. Scientists don’t yet know how big the threat is or where it will strike first, but what is clear is that the Arctic’s permanently frozen soil, called permafrost, is melting, threatening to uncap huge amounts of an extremely potent

ChatGPT was launched on 30 November 2022, ushering in what many have called artificial intelligence’s breakout year. Within days of its release, ChatGPT went viral. Screenshots of conversations snowballed across social media, and the use of ChatGPT skyrocketed to an extent that seems to have surprised even its maker, OpenAI. By January, ChatGPT was seeing

WASHINGTON — Nearly a year after the failed Virgin Orbit launch from England, United Kingdom government officials remain optimistic about the prospects for building up a launch industry in the country. The U.K. Space Agency released a lessons learned report Dec. 14 on the “UK Pathfinder Launch,” the January 2023 launch by Virgin Orbit’s LauncherOne

In late August 2020, wildlife veterinarian Chris Foggin was masked up and dissecting an elephant that was suspected to have died from anthrax when he got a call to say there had been more fatalities. The next day, another five dead elephants were found in the baking hot Zimbabwean sun. Foggin knew he and his

How does the human brain keep track of the order of events in a sequence? Research suggests that ‘time cells’ – neurons in the hippocampus thought to represent temporal information – could be the glue that sticks our memories together in the right sequence so that we can properly recall the correct order in which

The Sun has just belched out an absolute beast of a flare. On 14 December, an active sunspot region named AR 3514 erupted in a class X2.8 solar flare, the most intense category of which our star is capable. The flare is the most powerful we’ve seen for the current solar cycle, and the most

Pine Island glacier is one of the fastest flowing outlets of ice from the west Antarctic ice sheet, draining an area three-quarters the size of the UK. In recent decades, the glacier has been retreating rapidly and losing ice, contributing more to global sea level rise than any other Antarctic glacier. The speed of the

A new venture-backed startup is capitalizing on the productivity that can be channeled while lucid dreaming, Fortune reports. Lucid dreaming is a state of being aware that you are dreaming during your sleep cycle and the ability to control or manipulate the dream narrative. As many as 70% of people experience the phenomenon at least

WASHINGTON — The House on Dec. 14 approved the 2024 National Defense Authorization Act by a vote of 310 to 118. The vote came a day after the Senate approved the bill by an 87 to 13 majority.  The NDAA is now headed to President Biden’s desk for signature. The White House indicated the president

Our favorite feline friends are fairly fussy, but not when it comes to their diet. According to a new global study of what animal species cats devour, free-roaming domestic cats, including pets and feral animals, are extreme generalists that eat whatever they can sink their claws into. While many cat owners – especially those in

Bulky and hard to wrangle, molecules have long defied physicists’ attempts to lure them into a state of controlled quantum entanglement, whereby the molecules are intimately linked even at a distance. Now, for the first time, two separate teams have succeeded in entangling pairs of ultra-cold molecules using the same method: microscopically precise optical ‘tweezer

You may not have ever realized it, but there are many trillions of microorganisms living on our skin – and puncturing the skin and inserting a metal object, also known as getting a piercing, creates a significant shift in that microbiome. A team from McGill University in Canada, in partnership with a local tattoo parlor,

Anyone who regularly watches the skies may well be familiar with the constellation Orion the hunter. It is one of the few constellations that actually looks like the thing it is supposed to look like rather than some abstract resemblance. One prominent star is Betelgeuse and back in 2020 it dimmed to a level lower

The year 2023 shattered the record for the warmest summer in the Arctic, and people and ecosystems across the region felt the impact. Wildfires forced evacuations across Canada. Greenland was so warm that a research station at the ice sheet summit recorded melting in late June, only its fifth melting event on record. Sea surface