Science

HUNTSVILLE, Ala. — The governments of Australia and the United States have signed an agreement that could allow American rockets to launch from Australian spaceports, although it is unclear how much demand there is for them. The U.S. State Department announced Oct. 26 that the two countries signed a technology safeguards agreement (TSA) regarding space

Highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI) has been confirmed in the Antarctic region after brown skuas on Bird Island, South Georgia, tested positive for the virus. These are the first identified cases of avian influenza in the Antarctic. Researchers have previously expressed concern about the devastating impact an outbreak could have on many wildlife species in

Sliding care-free through the complete emptiness of space, light covers a constant 299,792,458 meters every second. No more, no less. This all changes when that wave of electromagnetism is forced to negotiate the electromagnetic fields surrounding bits of matter. Passing through this quagmire, light’s overall speed can slow to a relative crawl. We see this

Sometimes, years of painstaking excavation work are required to uncover the artifacts of the past – and sometimes, as with a recent earthquake in Mexico City, much of the hard digging work is done by nature. The 7.6-magnitude earthquake occurred on 19 September 2022, near Mexico’s west coast, killing two, and the rumbling was felt

Mars may have a hard, dusty shell, but its interior is layered like a jawbreaker – and surprisingly squishy. Two new papers published in the journal Nature detail the way seismic data reveals the specifics of the Martian interior. Each shows a 150 kilometer (93 miles)-thick layer of molten silicate rock at the base of

An ancient river system that has not seen the light of day for at least 14 million years has been discovered underneath the East Antarctic Ice Sheet, new research reports. With ice-penetrating radar and satellite data, Durham University glaciologist Stewart Jamieson and colleagues mapped the topographic features of the landscape hidden beneath the East Antarctic

LAS VEGAS — United Launch Alliance now plans to launch its first Vulcan Centaur rocket on Christmas Eve, carrying a commercial lunar lander. The company announced Oct. 24 that the launch of the Cert-1 mission, the inaugural flight of the Vulcan Centaur, is scheduled for Dec. 24 from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida.

Each year, humans worldwide eat over 100 billion bananas, most of which are a type called the Cavendish. But perhaps not for long. A fungal disease threatens to wipe Cavendish bananas off the face of the Earth. Some scientists are genetically modifying the fruit to be more resistant to disease. But the best solution to

With their whip-like tails, human sperm propel themselves through viscous fluids, seemingly in defiance of Newton’s third law of motion, according to a new study that characterizes the motion of these sex cells and single-celled algae. Kenta Ishimoto, a mathematical scientist at Kyoto University, and colleagues investigated these non-reciprocal interactions in sperm and other microscopic

An extreme drought in parts of the Amazon has led to a dramatic drop in river water levels, exposing dozens of usually submerged rock formations with carvings of human forms that may date back some 2,000 years. Livia Ribeiro, a longtime resident of the Amazon’s largest city, Manaus, said she heard about the rock engravings

If there’s a man in the Moon, as the old beliefs go, he’s a pretty venerable one. Earth’s lunar companion is thought to have formed not long after the planet itself, some 4.4 billion years or so ago, when the Solar System was young. It was then, according to theory, that a Mars-sized object smacked

Researchers have identified increased levels of sodium (Na+) and chloride (Cl–) ions dissolved in wells across the US, a trend which shows the nation’s groundwater is getting saltier. Working for the US Geological Survey (USGS), the team behind the survey suggests that the rising salinity is going to have implications for infrastructure, ecosystems, and human

Desert-dwelling bacteria that feed on sunlight, slurp up carbon dioxide, and emit oxygen could be incorporated into paint that supplements the air in a habitat on Mars. It’s called Chroococcidiopsis cubana, and scientists have developed a biocoating that emits measurable amounts of oxygen on a daily basis while reducing the amount of carbon dioxide in

WASHINGTON — The U.S. Space Force is exploring the use of small geosynchronous satellites to enhance military communications networks — either through purchased commercial services or government-owned constellations. “We’re trying to leverage new capabilities from the commercial industry,” Clare Hopper, chief of the Space Force’s Commercial Satellite Communications Office, said Oct. 19 at the annual

For years, they sleep. Nestled in shallow burrows a few feet beneath North America’s eastern forests, billions of nymphs belonging to the Magicada genus patiently await a time that’s quite literally prime for their emergence. Come one spring evening, around 13 or 17 years after hatching, the immature insects rise as one in the cool

The Universe is flooded with billions of chemicals, each a tiny pinprick of potential. And we’ve only identified 1 percent of them. Scientists believe undiscovered chemical compounds could help remove greenhouse gases, or trigger a medical breakthrough much like penicillin did. But let’s just get this out there first: it’s not that chemists aren’t curious.

An ancient society that once called the Sahara desert home survived for nearly a millennium without water from regular monsoons or continuously flowing rivers. The forgotten civilization was known as the Garamantes to the Romans, and it was the first urbanized society known to establish itself in a desert. Despite the location, its people not

When it comes to Mars and our ongoing efforts to understand that planet’s ancient habitability, evidence is so far elusive. But scientists have an idea where the evidence is likely hiding: in sediments. New research shows that an ancient mud lake is a good place to explore. Where should we search for evidence of life

After years of policymakers push-starting the solar power sector, its engines may finally be rolling on their own. Researchers in the UK have put together three different models to track snowball events in technology and the economy, and the simulations suggest solar power is well on its way to becoming the world’s main source of

Google has shared an update about its AI-driven mission to reduce wait times, fuel use, and polluting emissions at intersections – and the early indications are that stops can be reduced by around 30 percent, with emissions dropping around 10 percent. Multiply that by all the city intersections in the world and we’re potentially looking

WASHINGTON — A SpaceX executive used a Senate hearing to express frustration with the slow pace of launch licensing reviews that is holding up the next flight of the company’s Starship vehicle. At a hearing of the Senate Commerce Committee’s space subcommittee Oct. 18, Bill Gerstenmaier, vice president of build and flight reliability at SpaceX,

We can now hear one of the largest and most ancient living organisms on Earth whisper with the tremble of a million leaves echoing through its roots. The forest made of a single tree known as Pando (“I spread” in Latin) has 47,000 stems (all with the same DNA) sprouting from a shared root system

To pry into the private lives of objects in the microscopic domain (and beyond), scientists often rely on extremely bright sources of light. The free electron lasers that get the best results accelerate electrons over several kilometers towards light speed, wiggling them through a large hall of magnets to shake free intense pulses of photons

A piece of rock with mysterious markings that lay largely unstudied for 4,000 years is now being hailed as a “treasure map” for archaeologists, who are using it to hunt for ancient sites around north-western France. The so-called Saint-Belec slab was claimed as Europe’s oldest map by researchers in 2021 and they have been working

The source of a giant quake on Mars has turned out to be a huge surprise. The quake, detected on 4 May 2022 by NASA’s InSight lander, and registered at 4.7 magnitude, was the result of colossal tectonic activity in the Martian crust, according to an international team led by planetary physicist Benjamin Fernando of

Global emissions of planet-heating carbon dioxide are expected to rise around one percent to reach a new all-time high in 2023, the climate scientist behind the preliminary research said Tuesday. Scientists say carbon pollution will need to be cut almost in half this decade to meet the world’s targets of limiting global warming and avoiding

For the first time, artificial intelligence (AI) has searched for, detected, confirmed, classified, and announced a supernova discovery without any human intervention. An international team of scientists developed a new AI tool called Bright Transient Survey Bot (BTSbot), using over 1.4 million images from nearly 16,000 sources to train its machine-learning algorithm. Northwestern University reports

TAMPA, Fla. — One-year-old Californian startup AnySignal emerged from stealth mode Oct. 16 with $5 million in funding behind a multi-purpose space radio platform. AnySignal’s kit works across multiple spectrum bands, chief operating officer and co-founder Jeffrey Osborne told SpaceNews, and comes with ground equipment for hardware-in-the-loop tests, modems that can be upgraded for different

How much can the written records of ancient civilisations tell us about the animals they lived alongside? Our latest research, based on the venomous snakes described in an ancient Egyptian papyrus, suggests more than you might think. A much more diverse range of snakes than we’d imagined lived in the land of the pharaohs –

For most of us, the passage of time flies in just one inexorable direction. But for theoretical quantum physicists, time’s direction isn’t quite so inflexible. It’s possible to theoretically model, simulate, and observe the backwards flow of time in ways that are impossible to achieve in the real world. And now, scientists have shown that