Science

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

Wider participation in the space economy brings both opportunities and challenges, including a heightened risk of satellite collisions. Since no one group controls space, the open sharing of space situational awareness (SSA) data is critical to ensure safe space operations. However, this data can be sensitive for governments and operators, so in order to facilitate

From the moment you were born until about age 2, your brains’ outer layer – the cortex – rapidly thickened in a frenzy of neuron creation. After all that excitement, that dense hedge of nerve cells was trimmed back in a process called ‘cortical thinning’. Now, a new study has found some key differences in

Magma might be roiling and bubbling just underneath the surface of Venus, even as you read these words – and possibly breaking through. A new analysis of data collected over the space of just eight months in the early 1990s by the Magellan orbiter shows changes in the Venusian surface that can best be attributed

On May 20th, 2024, an iceberg measuring 380 square kilometers (~147 mi2) broke off the Brunt Ice Shelf in Antarctica. This event (A-83) is this region’s third significant iceberg calving in the past four years. The first came in 2021, when A-74 broke off the ice sheet, while an even larger berg named A-81 followed

HELSINKI — China’s experimental reusable spacecraft has released an unknown object into orbit while conducting its third mission. U.S. Space Force space domain awareness teams cataloged the object as 59884 (International designator 2023-195G). The suspected spaceplane launched Dec. 14, 2023 and has been in orbit 164 days. The object appears to have been released May

A Bronze Age armor suit, one of the oldest of its kind, has finally proven itself some 3,500 years after it was forged. The suit was discovered in 1960 after a foiled looting attempt in a richly furnished tomb for a fallen warrior, excavated at an archeological site near the village of Dendra in southern

When massive stars die, as we understand the Universe, they don’t go quietly. As their fuel runs out, they become unstable, wracked by explosions before finally ending their lives in a spectacular supernova. But some massive stars, scientists have found, have simply vanished, leaving no trace in the night sky. Stars clearly seen in older

Cumberland Council in the north of England has announced that people taking pebbles from beaches will now face fines of up to £1,000. Many people found the announcement frustrating, but preventing erosion is critical, as research shows. For many people, visiting the beach brings back joyful childhood memories. It is easy to forget that the

LOS ANGELES — Rocket Lab launched the first of two NASA Earth science cubesats on an Electron rocket May 25, exactly seven years after the company’s first launch. The Electron lifted off from Rocket Lab’s Launch Complex 1 in New Zealand at 3:41 a.m. Eastern after a brief hold because of ground winds. It placed

Only in recent years have scientists found that not everyone has the sense of an inner voice – and a new study sheds some light on how living without an internal monologue affects how language is processed in the brain. This latest study, from researchers at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark and the University

Roughly 1,000 light-years from Earth, there is a cosmic structure known as IRAS 23077+6707 (IRAS 23077) that resembles a giant butterfly. Ciprian T. Berghea, an astronomer with the US Naval Observatory, originally observed the structure in 2016 using the Panoramic Survey Telescope and Rapid Response System (Pan-STARRS). To the surprise of many, the structure has

TAMPA, Fla. — Amazon Web Services is busy positioning its cloud infrastructure business to capitalize on the promise of generative artificial intelligence for transforming space and other industries. More than 60% of the company’s space and aerospace customers are already using some form of AI in their businesses, according to AWS director of aerospace and

The Singapore Airlines turbulence incident that has sadly left one person dead and others hospitalised has made many of us think about the risks of air travel. We’ll hear more in coming days about how the aircraft came to drop so suddenly on its route from London to Singapore earlier this week, injuring passengers and

A mind-boggling number of shining galaxies, a purple and orange star nursery and a spiral galaxy similar to our Milky Way: new images were revealed from Europe’s Euclid space telescope on Thursday. It is the second set of images released by the European Space Agency since Euclid launched last year on the first-ever mission to

WASHINGTON — The U.S. Space Force is soliciting bids from commercial satellite manufacturers for a 10-year procurement of small satellites to carry experimental payloads to space. The Space Test Program office on May 23 issued its final request for proposals for the Space Test Experiments Platform (STEP) 2.0 contract — an indefinite delivery/indefinite quantity (IDIQ)

Humans arrived in Australia at least 65,000 years ago, according to archaeological evidence. These pioneers were part of an early wave of people travelling eastwards from Africa, through Eurasia, and ultimately into Australia and New Guinea. But this was only one of many waves of migration in the story of the human colonization of the

We may have just taken a huge step towards solving a mystery that has deviled scientists for more than a century. Since the solar magnetic field was first discovered in 1908, we’ve struggled to understand where in the Sun it is generated, a region known as the dynamo. Now, new research led by mathematician Geoffrey

If you search “shrimp Jesus” on Facebook, you might encounter dozens of images of artificial intelligence (AI) generated crustaceans meshed in various forms with a stereotypical image of Jesus Christ. Some of these hyper-realistic images have garnered more than 20,000 likes and comments. So what exactly is going on here? The “dead internet theory” has

SAN FRANCISCO – Charles Beames is the new executive chairman of the board for TrustPoint, a Dulles, Virginia, startup developing a global navigation satellite constellation to complement GPS. GPS, established decades ago to provide position, navigation and timing (PNT) for the U.S. military, has become a commercial utility, underpinning aviation, trucking, rideshare applications and delivery