Science

Ancient vessels, discovered by accident on the Mongolian steppe, have given us new insight into how the land’s ancient inhabitants ate. Archeologists have scraped caked residue from the insides of two Bronze Age cauldrons dating back 2,750 years, revealing that the vessels were once used for collecting the blood of ruminants, such as sheep and

SpaceX’s massive Starship rocket achieved its first ever splashdown during a test flight Thursday, in a major milestone for the prototype system that may one day send humans to Mars. Scraps of fiery debris came flying off the spaceship as it descended over the Indian Ocean northwest of Australia, dramatic video from an onboard camera

The return of the cooling La Nina weather phenomenon this year should help lower temperatures somewhat after months of global heat records, the United Nations’ weather agency said Monday. The impact is likely to be felt in the next few months because the warming El Nino weather pattern – which has helped fuel a spike

Throughout history, humans have utilized their incredible intelligence to adapt and flourish in various environments. From traversing oceans to conquering mountains, we have developed technologies to explore and thrive in the unknown. However, human spaceflight presents a unique challenge that requires new strategies to ensure safety and optimize performance. The same methods that have allowed

Research is showing that many of our contemporary problems, such as the rising prevalence of mental health issues, are emerging from rapid technological advancement and modernisation. A theory that can help explain why we respond poorly to modern conditions, despite the choices, safety and other benefits they bring, is evolutionary mismatch. Mismatch happens when an

The Large Binocular Telescope (LBT), located on Mount Graham in Arizona and run by the University of Arizona, is part of the next generation of extremely large telescopes (ELTs). With two primary mirrors measuring 8.4 m (~27.5 ft), it has a collecting area slightly greater than that of a 30-meter (98.4 ft) telescope. With their

Doom, defeat, and despair will get us nowhere in an environmental catastrophe, and yet all too often the negative news drowns out the positive. While it’s true that human activity is wreaking havoc on the natural world, there are glimmers of good. On World Environment Day, it’s worth considering our hopes for the future as

WASHINGTON — NASA will extend the life of the Hubble Space Telescope by switching to a mode where the spacecraft operates on a single gyroscope, having rejected for now commercial proposals to reboost or repair it. The agency announced June 4 that one of three remaining gyros used to control pointing of the telescope had

New research finds Earth’s surface was first sprinkled with fresh water some 4 billion years ago, a whole 500 million years earlier than previously thought. A team of researchers from Australia and China used isotopes of oxygen trapped in ancient minerals to determine when the first signs of fresh water may have dampened the skin

WASHINGTON — Iridium Communications, a provider of mobile satellite communications, on June 4 announced a new five-year contract valued at $94 million — with a potential total value of $103 million — to provide communication support services to the U.S. Department of Defense. The contract, awarded by the Space Systems Command’s Commercial Space Office (COMSO)

The sunspot region responsible for the glorious auroras that shimmered over most of Earth in early May is back, and is still engaging in shenanigans. AR 3664, responsible for several X-class flares, including the most powerful of the current solar cycle, rotated away from view onto the far side of the Sun in the middle

Covering over half of Earth’s land surface, rangelands sustain billions of people. These ecosystems – from deserts and grasslands to shrublands and tundra – produce a bounty of meat, dairy, fiber, and other staple foods. They also play a massive role in Earth’s nutrient, water and carbon cycles. But up to 50 percent of rangelands

WASHINGTON — The once highly-classified ability to detect and pinpoint the locations of radio frequency (RF) emissions from space is rapidly transitioning to the commercial sector — giving companies new powerful capabilities for all sorts of surveillance and intelligence gathering. Interest in RF monitoring from space has soared in recent years as geopolitical conflicts disrupt

When tidal erosion exposed a mysterious Bronze Age structure on a beach in Norfolk, England, it captured the imaginations of archaeologists and pagans alike, who recognized the site may hold spiritual significance. New research supports this hunch, suggesting the monument and a similar structure nearby were created for climate rituals at a time when severe

A newly discovered galaxy has just smashed the record for the earliest seen yet, presenting a major challenge to our current models of galaxy formation. It’s called JADES-GS-z14-0, and its brightly gleaming in the early Universe, as it looked less than 300 million years after the Big Bang. A second recent discovery, called JADES-GS-z14-1, was

HELSINKI — China’s Chang’e-6 mission lander made a successful soft landing on the far side of the moon late Saturday and will soon begin collecting unique lunar samples. The Chang’e-6 lander made a soft landing at 6:23 p.m. Eastern June 1 (2223 UTC), the China National Space Administration (CNSA) announced shortly after the event. The

The human brain may have steadily grown in size not because evolution plucked some big-brained ancestors out of the crowd, favoring their smarts over others, but because energy allocated to growing egg-laden ovarian follicles went to our heads instead. That’s a new idea from Mauricio González-Forero, a mathematical evolutionary biologist at the University of St

Dyson Spheres have been a tantalizing digression in the hunt for alien intelligence. Just recently seven stars have been identified as potential candidates with most of their radiation given off in the infrared wavelengths. Potentially this is the signature of heat from a matrix of spacecraft around the star but alas, a new paper has

KENNEDY SPACE CENTER, Fla. — A parachute failed to fully inflate on the latest Blue Origin New Shepard suborbital flight because a line controlling its expansion was not cut as planned. One of three parachutes on the crew capsule of New Shepard did not fully inflate during the capsule’s descent on the NS-25 mission May

Amidst a cache of glittering golden treasures from the Iberian Bronze Age, a pair of corroded objects might be the most precious of all. A dull bracelet and a rusted hollow hemisphere decorated with gold are forged, researchers have found, not out of metal from beneath the ground, but with iron from meteorites that fell

An unexpected tool is giving us new insight into the fine structure of the outer layers of Mars. Using meteorites that were long ago chipped off the red planet around 11 million years ago and flung into space to eventually land on Earth, scientists have been able to study the way volcanism shaped the crust

HELSINKI — China has carried out a pair of solid rocket launches and sent a communications satellite towards geostationary orbit for Pakistan. A Long March 3B lifted off at 8:12 a.m. Eastern (1212 UTC) May 30 from Xichang, southwest China, carrying Paksat MM1 for Pakistan. The China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation (CASC) confirmed launch

From The Iron Giant to Big Hero 6, many of us will be familiar with tales of kids befriending robots, which suggest generations of young children are more trusting of advice from machines than their own flesh and blood. An international research team has now found it’s not just in fiction. In a study involving

Human visitors to Mars need somewhere to shelter from the radiation, temperature swings, and dust storms that plague the planet. If the planet is anything like Earth or the Moon, it may have large underground lava tubes that could house shelters. Collapsed sections of lava tubes, called skylights, could provide access to these subterranean refuges.

So-called “zombie fires” in the peatlands of Alaska, Canada and Siberia disappear from the Earth’s surface and smoulder underground during the winter before coming back to life the following spring. These fires puzzle scientists because they appear in early May, way ahead of the usual fire season in the far north, and can reignite for

WASHINGTON — Rocket propulsion startup Ursa Major announced it successfully completed ground tests of a new liquid engine being developed with U.S. Air Force funding. The hot-fire tests of the Draper engine, performed at the company’s facilities in Berthoud, Colorado, validated the basic design, founder and chief executive officer Joe Laurienti told reporters. The 4,000-pound-thrust

How Neanderthals went extinct while humans survived is one of the biggest questions in our species’ history. Researchers have long wondered if our closest extinct relatives might have succumbed to viral infections that plague modern humans today. That thinly evidenced theory, first proposed in 2010, has become a little more plausible with the discovery of

Nothing lasts forever, including black holes. Over immensely long periods of time, they evaporate, as will other large objects in the Universe. This is because of Hawking Radiation, named after Stephen Hawking, who developed the idea in the 1970s. The problem is Hawking Radiation has never been reliably observed. A trio of European researchers think

Some of Alaska’s clear, icy blue waterways are turning a startling rust orange – so intense it’s visible from Earth’s orbit. “The stained rivers are so big we can see them from space,” says University of California (UC) Davis environmental toxicologist Brett Poulin. “These have to be stained a lot to pick them up from

Google has rolled out its latest experimental search feature on Chrome, Firefox and the Google app browser to hundreds of millions of users. “AI Overviews” saves you clicking on links by using generative AI – the same technology that powers rival product ChatGPT – to provide summaries of the search results. Ask “how to keep