Science

The sex of human and other mammal babies is decided by a male-determining gene on the Y chromosome. But the human Y chromosome is degenerating and may disappear in a few million years, leading to our extinction unless we evolve a new sex gene. The good news is two branches of rodents have already lost

The solar cycle has been reasonably well understood since 1843 when Samuel Schwabe spent 17 years observing the variation of sunspots. Since then, we have regularly observed the ebb and flow of the sunspots cycle every 11 years. More recently ESA’s Solar Orbiter has taken regular images of the Sun to track the progress as

WASHINGTON — Congress is expected to decide in the next two weeks whether to extend current restrictions on regulating the safety of commercial human spaceflight occupants, and if so, for how long. House and Senate negotiators are working to finalize a new long-term Federal Aviation Administration reauthorization bill that would extend and modify existing authorities

A century or so before the pyramids graced the Egyptian horizon, around the same time as the erection of Stonehenge, hunters and gatherers half a world away were building megalithic stone structures to rival those of farmers. One of the earliest examples to date – an 18 meter (about 60 foot) wide circular plaza made

Hopes of discovering some kind of extraterrestrial life within our own Solar System have suffered a blow with a new paper suggesting Saturn‘s largest moon is likely barren. “Unfortunately, we will now need to be a little less optimistic when searching for extraterrestrial lifeforms within our own Solar System,” says University of Western Ontario astrobiologist

A chemical used in agriculture around the world is tightly regulated in the United States, but a preliminary study suggests it could be widespread in the country’s food supply anyway. Scientists at the controversial US nonprofit Environmental Working Group (EWG) found the chemical chlormequat in four out of five urine samples collected from people living

Late last week, OpenAI announced a new generative AI system named Sora, which produces short videos from text prompts. While Sora is not yet available to the public, the high quality of the sample outputs published so far has provoked both excited and concerned reactions. The sample videos published by OpenAI, which the company says

The purpose of the webinar was to explore how today’s SmallSat leaders are employing automation in satellite operations and manufacturing. Among the questions the webinar addressed: How is automation changing the way satellites are being designed, built, deployed and operated? What level of automation is necessary to keep smallsats competitive? Is the smallsat sector ready

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

For over a century, people have dreamed of the day when humanity (as a species) would venture into space. In recent decades, that dream has moved much closer to realization, thanks to the rise of the commercial space industry (NewSpace), renewed interest in space exploration, and long-term plans to establish habitats in Low Earth Orbit

Tiny fragments of plastic aren’t only finding their way into animals, remote ice caps, oceans, and even the depths of our bodies. They’re also seeping through layers of rock, making the emergence of plastics in the geological record a poor marker for the dawn of the human age. In a new study, sediment samples from

Our rapidly increasing need for data storage capacity isn’t going to change anytime soon (thanks, AI!). Thankfully new research is exploring an innovative method for packing a lot more bytes into the same physical space on an optical disc. The approach is based on the same light-based optical data storage (ODS) approach used to write

WASHINGTON — The impending reentry of a defunct European satellite serves as a reminder of the hazards posed by existing objects even as agencies work to mitigate the growth of orbital debris. The European Space Agency’s European Remote Sensing (ERS) 2 satellite is expected to reenter on Feb. 21 after nearly two decades in orbit.

Researchers on the hunt to settle a long-standing debate ended up rewriting the timeline of ancient human history in the process. For years, archaeologists have argued over an ancient culture with the unwieldy title: the Lincombian-Ranisian-Jerzmanowician technocomplex. Even scientists know that’s a mouthful, so they call it the LRJ for short. The LRJ is characterized

Gazing out upon the apparently unchanging sea of stars around us, it’s tempting to think of the Milky Way galaxy as static and everything within it as fixed and immutable. While the timescales on which our galaxy moves often defies human experience, move it does indeed. Not all of these dynamic processes are easy to

WASHINGTON — A United Nations committee will study the interference risks that satellite constellations pose to astronomy, a year after rejecting a similar proposal to do so. At the conclusion of the meeting earlier this month of its scientific and technical subcommittee, the U.N.’s Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space (COPUOS) agreed to

Scientists are investigating whether an oral drug sprinkled with gold nanoparticles could one day treat neurodegenerative diseases like Parkinson’s and multiple sclerosis. The experimental medicine, called CNM-Au8, has now shown success in boosting the brain’s metabolism in phase II clinical trials. Research on the safety and efficacy of the daily drug is still ongoing, but

If you thought you had a voracious appetite, you’ve got nothing on a newly discovered supermassive black hole. The black hole at the center of a quasar galaxy called J0529-4351 is guzzling down so much material it basically swallows about a Sun’s worth of gas and dust a day, onto a black hole that is

WASHINGTON — The IM-1 mission by Intuitive Machines is on track to attempt a landing on the moon later this week after performing an in-flight test of its main engine. The company announced late Feb. 16 that it fired the main engine of its Nova-C lander in a commissioning maneuver. The test was the first

The rise of farming in late Stone Age Europe was no smooth transition from hunter-gatherer lifestyles but a bloody takeover that saw nomadic populations wiped out by farmer-settlers in a few generations, a new study has found. In fact, twice in just a thousand years, the population of southern Scandinavia was entirely replaced by newcomers

Does life appear independently on different planets in the galaxy? Or does it spread from world to world? Or does it do both? New research shows how life could spread via a basic, simple pathway: cosmic dust. One thing scientists have learned in the past few decades is that life on Earth might have had

WASHINGTON — The Space Development Agency selected California-based EpiSci to develop a tool capable of detecting hypersonic missiles in flight from satellite data, a challenging task given the extreme speeds of these weapons. Hypersonic missiles travel at speeds of at least Mach 5, which is five times the speed of sound, posing a significant challenge

One stormy Monday in March, 1827, the German composer Ludwig van Beethoven passed away after a protracted illness. Bedridden since the previous Christmas, he was attacked by jaundice, his limbs and abdomen swollen, each breath a struggle. As his associates went about the task of sorting through personal belongings, they uncovered a document Beethoven had

A US spaceship attempting a lunar landing lifted off early Thursday from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, the second such private-led effort this year after the first ended in failure. Intuitive Machines, the Houston company leading mission “IM-1,” hopes to become the first non-government entity to achieve a soft touchdown on the Moon, and

The Amazon rainforest is facing a barrage of pressures that might tip it into large-scale ecosystem collapse as soon as 2050, according to new research Wednesday warning of dire consequences for the region and the world. The Amazon, which holds more than 10 percent of the world’s biodiversity, helps stabilize the global climate by storing

WASHINGTON — Japan’s H3 rocket successfully reached orbit on its second launch Feb. 16, nearly a year after its inaugural launch failed. The H3 rocket lifted off from the Tanegashima Space Center at 7:22 p.m. Eastern after a two-day delay caused by weather. There were no issues reported during the countdown, with liftoff occurring at

As the world’s population continues to grow, so too does the strain on the environment. Not least among the stressors is food production, especially the vast swathes of land and water required for the cultivation of livestock. It’s still in its infancy, but lab-cultured meat could be one means of easing the pressure – and

For a quiet, dusty lump of a planet we see today, Mars has had a surprisingly violent history, one that could reveal some clues about Earth’s own past. A new survey of the Martian surface suggests that in its younger years, the red planet was littered with volcanoes that might resemble the rumblings of our

A satellite that measures methane leaks from oil and gas companies is set to start circulating the Earth 15 times a day next month. Google plans to have the data mapped by the end of the year for the whole world to see. The partnership between Google and the Environmental Defense Fund, which in March

KENNEDY SPACE CENTER, Fla. — An Intuitive Machines spacecraft is on its way to the moon Feb. 15 in the company’s quest to be the first commercial entity to successfully land on the lunar surface. A SpaceX Falcon 9 lifted off at 1:05 a.m. Eastern from Launch Complex 39A here after a 24-hour delay. The