Science

Uncommon Courses is an occasional series from The Conversation US highlighting unconventional approaches to teaching. Title of course: “The Science of Cats” What prompted the idea for the course? I’m an evolutionary biologist who has spent my career studying the evolution of small lizards in the Caribbean. I’m also a lifelong cat lover, but it

New results from the first archaeological fieldwork conducted in space show the International Space Station is a rich cultural landscape where crew create their own “gravity” to replace Earth’s, and adapt module spaces to suit their needs. Archaeology is usually thought of as the study of the distant past, but it’s ideally suited for revealing

Roughly one out of every four people on Earth depends on freshwater supplied by the glacial regions that cover 10 percent of our planet’s surface. It’s also a precious resource in crisis, with new research showing just how rapidly these frozen ecosystems are now expected to change. A new study by an international team of

Flying can be a nerve-wracking experience for many people – but a new study out Thursday finds commercial air travel keeps getting safer, with the risk of death halving every decade. The fatality rate fell to 1 per every 13.7 million passenger boardings globally in the 2018-2022 period, a major improvement from 1 per 7.9

LOGAN, Utah — Virgin Galactic is making the case to the financial community that its new line of suborbital spaceplanes can boost the company towards profitability. The company used an Aug. 7 earnings call less to discuss the company’s second quarter financial results than to lay out its financial models for how the new Delta-class

Repetition has a strange relationship with the mind. Take the experience of déjà vu, when we wrongly believe we have experienced a novel situation in the past – leaving us with an spooky sense of pastness. But we have discovered that déjà vu is actually a window into the workings of our memory system. Our

If Boeing and NASA can’t get their spaceship together, SpaceX may have to come to two astronauts’ rescue. The downside is the duo will be stuck on the International Space Station for about eight months longer than planned. Astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams launched into orbit aboard Boeing’s Starliner vehicle on June 5. They

The Great Barrier Reef is vast and spectacular. But repeated mass coral bleachings, driven by high ocean temperatures, are threatening the survival of coral colonies which are the backbone of the reef. Our study, published today in Nature, provides a new long-term picture of the ocean surface temperatures driving coral bleaching. It shows recent sea

Elon Musk‘s recent announcement on Twitter that “Tesla will have genuinely useful humanoid robots in low production for Tesla internal use next year” suggests that robots that have physical human-like characteristics and provide “genuinely useful” function might be with us soon. However, despite decades of trying, useful humanoid robots have remained a fiction that never

TAMPA, Fla. — As Arianespace ramps up following Ariane 6’s July maiden flight from Europe’s spaceport in French Guiana, a Spanish venture is preparing to become the first non-institutional launcher to reach orbit from the base next year. PLD Space plans to start building launch facilities for its Miura 5 rocket in October from the

Homo floresiensis holds the record for the smallest human species to have ever graced our planet, but some of them might have been even smaller than we first imagined. A 700,000-year-old fragment of an adult humerus uncovered in 2013 has recently been classified as belonging to an early representative of a species once colorfully described

Great ready for one of the surefire astronomical events of 2024, as the peak for the Perseid meteors arrives next week. To be sure, the Perseids aren’t the most intense annual meteor shower of the year; in the first half of the 20th century, that title now goes to the December Geminids. What the Perseids

In the not-too-distant past, Greenland lived up to its name. Scientists have discovered plant and insect remains under a two-mile-deep (three km) ice core extracted from the center of the island, providing the clearest proof yet that nearly all of this vast territory was green within the past million years, when atmospheric carbon levels were

It’s only by gobbling up vast amounts of images, text, or other forms of human expression that generative AI models can churn out their own borderline uncanny interpretations. And when that inspiration larder goes bare? Like a handful of marooned sailors, AI is left to turn to its own for a heavily processed source of

LOGAN, Utah – In the future, small satellites are likely to operate in swarms thanks to advancements in autonomy, artificial intelligence, collaboration and networking, Steve Isakowitz, Aerospace Corp. president and CEO, said Aug. 5 during a keynote presentation at the Small Satellite Conference here. To demonstrate his point, Isakowitz began his keynote with a video

The magnificent step pyramid standing tall in the ancient Egyptian necropolis of Saqqara is truly one of the wonders of the ancient world. Erected some 4,500 years ago, the tomb of the pharaoh Djoser is the earliest known example of Egypt’s colossal stone structures; a monument not just to the king but to the engineering

In 2004, scientists at the University of Manchester first isolated and investigated graphene, the supermaterial composed of single-layer carbon atoms arranged in a hexagonal honeycomb lattice. Since then, it has become a wonder, with properties that make it extremely useful in numerous applications. Among scientists, it is generally believed that about 1.9% of carbon in

July 21 was the hottest day ever registered globally, according to preliminary data published Tuesday by the EU’s climate monitor. The Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) said the global average surface air temperature of 17.09 degrees Celsius (62.7 degrees Fahrenheit) on Sunday was the warmest in their record books, which go back to 1940. It

The Australian government this week announced it would spend A$18 million over four years on a new centre aimed at keeping safe the undersea cables that power the nation’s internet. The Cable Connectivity and Resilience Centre is tasked with protecting the critical undersea telecommunications cables throughout the Indo-Pacific region from deliberate interference from malicious actors,

Updated 11:15 p.m. Eastern with Axiom Space comment. LOGAN, Utah — Two Indian astronauts will soon start training at NASA’s Johnson Space Center, with one of them flying to the International Space Station on an upcoming private astronaut mission. The Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) announced Aug. 2 that two of the four members of

Ancient archaeological discoveries can be confusing, exciting, intriguing, educational – and occasionally just a little creepy, as a new excavation of a 2,500-year-old graveyard site in Norway has proved. Here’s the creepy part: the main cluster of graves, comprising 39 individual bodies, were all for children under the age of six – based on a

Every now and again, the night sky lights up with a spectacular explosion that blazes with the most energetic light our Universe can produce. Known as gamma-ray bursts, they can release in a few seconds what our Sun will emit over its lifetime. Now scientists have found a never-before-seen signal buried in the spectrum of

The punishing heat experienced around the Mediterranean in July would have been “virtually impossible” in a world without global warming, a group of climate scientists said Wednesday. A deadly heatwave brought temperatures well above 40 degrees Celsius (104 Fahrenheit) to southern Europe and North Africa, where such extreme summer spells are becoming more frequent. Scorching

LAS VEGAS — NASA is not reconsidering plans to select only one company to develop an Artemis lunar rover, despite a setback in another program procuring key elements of the lunar exploration effort as a service. NASA announced in April that it awarded feasibility study contracts to three companies — Intuitive Machines, Lunar Outpost and

The face of an ancient Egyptian mummy set in a gaping rictus may be the result of a death so painful, her face may have become locked in a scream. Her name is unknown; but so striking is her grim facial expression that she is referred to as the Screaming Woman mummy. In spite of

The stars aren’t fixed and unchanging, unlike what many ancient people thought. Once in a while, a star appears where there wasn’t one before, and then it fades away in a matter of days or weeks. The earliest record of such a “guest star,” named so by ancient Chinese astronomers, is a star that suddenly

The warning signs are all there: record-breaking heat, failing health, vanishing ice sheets, and more unpredictable weather. And yet we’re still pumping increasing amounts of greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere, threatening our very survival. A new study by an international team of experts highlights how global methane emissions have been rising rapidly since 2006, particularly

LAS VEGAS – Space domain awareness remains a priority for Japan’s Space Operations Group, Col. Yuka Nakazato, Japanese Embassy air and space attaché, said July 31 at the AIAA ASCEND conference here. Japan’s Space Operations Group is establishing a unit focused on space domain awareness under the command of a general. Japan’s first space domain

Humans have an incredible ability to guess a person’s name simply based on the appearance of their face. A new study has found it could be a case of self-fulfilling prophecy. When a photograph of an adult was shown to participants with four possible name choices, they choose the correct name at a rate well

Astronomers have recently spotted signs of an extended disk of dust and gas, whirling in orbit around a distant star. While this phenomenon is a normal stage in the development of a star and its planetary system, what makes this find so spectacular is that it’s the first one we’ve seen around a star in