Science

Finding a potentially habitable exoplanet isn’t as easy as you might think. Orbiting at a temperate distance from the host star is just the first step. Size and composition also play a role – as does the level of flare activity in the star. And all of that doesn’t mean much if the system is

Earth’s oceans are simmering with the heat trapped by increasing amounts of greenhouse gases. But one patch of water in the North Atlantic is stubbornly resisting the trend, and actually dropping in temperature. This ‘cold blob‘ has been a subject of interest for climatologists ever since it was first spotted back in 2015. Unfortunately, the

DevOps plus ‘work from anywhere’ is the real endgame for satellite operators The space industry as we know it was born in the glory days of the Space Age, the 1960s. The collaboration between astronauts on the surface of the moon and Mission Control engineers in Houston was the most “remote” work ever accomplished to

Whale sharks, the majestic creatures that also happen to be the world’s largest fish, are far more gentle than the name suggests. They swim lazily around tropical waters, filter-feeding on plankton. Now, biologists have discovered the enigmatic giants have a curious trick up their sleeve – teeth-like scales adorning their eyeballs. It appears to be

If you studied algebra in high school (or you’re learning it right now), there’s a good chance you’re familiar with the quadratic formula. If not, it’s possible you repressed it. By this point, billions of us have had to learn, memorise, and implement this unwieldy algorithm in order to solve quadratic equations, but according to

We love flyover videos from other worlds. These stunning videos, created from imagery gathered by orbiting spacecraft, can give us a sense of what it would be like to fly in an airplane on another planet. This latest flyover video from the European Space Agency’s Mars Express spacecraft, provides a stunning view of one of

The coronavirus isn’t the only thing plaguing East Africa. Amid a global pandemic, people in this region of the world are also contending with another “extremely serious” threat to their lives and livelihoods: locusts. After one of the wettest years on record, these voracious insects have been gathering forces since 2019, as weather conditions allowed

A US Navy ship downed a flying drone with a “solid state laser” in the Pacific Ocean, the service branch announced on Friday. The USS Portland (LPD-27), a San Antonio-class amphibious transport dock ship, deployed its Technology Maturation Laser Weapon System Demonstrator (LWSD) against an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) last week during a demonstration, the

WASHINGTON — NASA plans to issue multiple contracts in the coming months for smallsat launch services in the second phase of a program intended to support the emerging small launch vehicle industry. NASA’s Launch Services Program released a draft request for proposals July 1 for its proposed Venture Class Launch Service (VCLS) Demonstration 2 procurement.

Disturbing reports of a mass elephant die-off have emerged from Botswana over the last two months, with more than 350 elephant carcasses spotted since May. Some of the elephants were found face down, suggesting a sudden collapse. Most of their bodies were located around water sources in the northern parts of the Okavango Delta, a

Picture in your mind the delta of a river – the way the main channel splits into smaller rivulets and tributaries. Something similar occurs in waves as they propagate through a certain kind of medium: the path of the wave splits, breaking up into smaller channels like the branches of a tree. This is called

So you want to colonize Mars, huh? Well Mars is a long ways away, and in order for a colony to function that far from Earthly support, things have to be thought out very carefully. Including how many people are needed to make it work. A new study pegs the minimum number of settlers at

Renewable energy such as wind and solar projects are already cheaper to build than it is to continue operating 40 percent of the world’s existing coal fleet, according to analysis released Tuesday. In a report outlining how the world can phase out the most polluting fuel while powering an economic recovery from the coronavirus pandemic,

Synthetic gas, or syngas for short, is a crucial building block in the chemical manufacturing industry. Most people may never have heard of syngas, but every day it is used in the production of drugs, fertiliser, plastic, and biofuels. Unfortunately, even when syngas – a mix of hydrogen and carbon monoxide – is fermented to produce

WASHINGTON — Amazon Web Services is increasing its effort to sell cloud services to the space industry through the formation of a dedicated business segment called “Aerospace and Satellite Solutions.”  “AWS is committed to supporting our customers’ missions, even those outside the Earth’s atmosphere,” Teresa Carlson, vice president of worldwide public sector at AWS, said

Every second, trillions upon trillions of incredibly low-mass subatomic particles called neutrinos shoot out from the Sun and slide undetected through your body. These neutrinos are produced by the two known types of fusion reactions that happen in our Sun, and up until now scientists have only detected one group of them – the neutrinos

For over 1,000 years, the ancient Maya city of Tikal stood tall, embodying one of the largest and most important urban centres ever built by this enigmatic and enduring pre-Columbian civilisation. By the late 9th century CE however, this Maya metropolis was unravelling. Around this time, Tikal and a number of other Maya cities were abandoned,

On 2 July 2019, the Moon cast its shadow on the surface of the Earth. This time, the shadow’s path travelled across the South Pacific Ocean. It also passed over some of Argentina and Chile. For surface dwellers in the path, the Moon briefly blocked the Sun, turning night into day. But for one “eye”

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