Science

When my colleagues and I set to work on a century-old cosmic mystery, we found an unexpected celestial laboratory in Terzan 5, a dense star cluster currently plunging through our galaxy at breakneck speed. This stellar oddity has allowed us to study the behaviour of cosmic rays – high-energy particles whose erratic paths through space

The world’s climate is teetering on the brink, and no one knows which way it will fall. A new model of Earth’s climate system suggests that if global warming surpasses the main goal of the Paris Agreement, it could set off a series of tipping points from which it will be very hard, if not

WASHINGTON — Intuitive Machines says it is organizing a coalition of organizations that will offer to take over a NASA lunar rover mission, launching it on one of the company’s landers. In an Aug. 13 earnings call about its second quarter financial results, Intuitive Machines executives said they were planning to respond to a request

Modern forensic techniques have put an end to a nearly 200-year-old conspiracy theory regarding a lost European prince, according to a new preprint paper. In 1828, a “half-wild” 16-year-old boy took the continent by storm when he appeared seemingly out of nowhere in the German city of Nuremberg. The disheveled adolescent carried two letters on

The Earth was hit Monday by an intense solar storm that could bring the northern lights to night skies further south than normal, a US agency announced. Conditions of a level-four geomagnetic storm – on a scale of five – were observed Monday from 1500 GMT, according to a specialized center at the US National

WASHINGTON — A Chinese-born cryptocurrency entrepreneur has funded a SpaceX Crew Dragon mission that will be the first human flight to go over the Earth’s poles. SpaceX announced Aug. 12 that it will launch a private astronaut mission called Fram2 as soon as late 2024. The Crew Dragon will launch into a polar orbit from

Evidence continues to mount against the interpretation of a cave filled with ancient hominid bones as a sacred burial ground, one used long before modern humans were burying their own dead. The Rising Star Cave system in South Africa contains the remains of an unusually high number of individuals of the hominid species Homo naledi

There are literal oceans’ worth of liquid water hiding out on Mars. There’s just one big problem. That water is actually in Mars, at depths that are too far below the surface for us to access. That’s according to new analysis of seismic data collected by the Mars InSight lander, for which huge reservoirs of

WASHINGTON — NASA’s internal watchdog sharply criticized the work Boeing is doing on the next version of the Space Launch System, finding serious lapses in quality control. In a report released Aug. 8, NASA’s Office of Inspector General (OIG) said there were significant issues with Boeing’s work on the Block 1B version of SLS being

Neuroscientists think they have identified the large-scale neural network that keeps the brain’s creative juices flowing. Unlike specific movements or sensory responses, creative thought isn’t confined to any one part of the brain’s wrinkled outer cortex. But a team of researchers, led by Baylor College of Medicine, think they have found the brain circuits fundamental

If we ever want to set up long-term human colonies on Mars, there are going to have to be changes. Mars is not exactly the most hospitable place in the Solar System, and the current situation over there is not optimum for survival. Not least among the problems is the climate. Mars’s temperatures dip way

Paris is aiming to host the most sustainable Olympics in history, and this year’s purple running track is a testament to that green goal. Every year, roughly ten million tons of empty sea shells from oysters, clams, scallops, and mussels are dumped into landfills or the sea, globally. Since 2021, truckloads of these barren bivalves

LOS ANGELES— NASA is requesting concepts from companies and organizations willing to take over a robotic lunar rover that the agency announced last month it would cancel even through it is nearly complete. NASA issued a request for information (RFI) Aug. 9 for the operation of the Volatiles Investigating Polar Exploration Rover (VIPER) spacecraft. NASA

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