Science

We might be getting closer to understanding why hundreds of large stone structures were built across the deserts of northwest Saudi Arabia thousands of years ago. According to an in-depth new analysis, the mysterious, rectangular enclosures were used by Neolithic people for unknown rituals, depositing animal offerings, perhaps as votives to an unknown deity or

A sample extracted from an asteroid far from Earth has confirmed that RNA nucleobases can be found in space rocks. Analysis of dust ferried home from asteroid Ryugu has been found to contain uracil – one of the four nucleobases that make up RNA – in addition to niacin, a form of the vitamin B3,

The world hungers for more food while wildlife yearns for untouched habitats. So goes the conflict between our seemingly insatiable need for agricultural land, razing forests to make way for cattle and crops. But an unlikely food source could go some way to ameliorating the loss of forested lands to agriculture. A new study suggests

WASHINGTON — NASA’s plan to spend up to $1 billion on a tug to deorbit the International Space Station is a missed opportunity to instead repurpose or recycle the station, some in industry argue. NASA announced plans as part of its fiscal year 2024 budget proposal this month to develop the tug to help deorbit

A large-scale animal study from 2021 revealed something interesting about yawning: Vertebrates with larger brains and more neurons tend to have longer-lasting yawns. Researchers collected data on 1,291 separate yawns from zoo trips and online videos, covering a total of 55 mammal species and 46 bird species. They found “robust positive correlations” between how long

Walk through a maze of mirrors, you’ll soon come face to face with yourself. Your nose meets your nose, your fingertips touch at their phantom twins, stopped abruptly by a boundary of glass. Most of the time, a reflection needs no explanation. The collision of light with the mirror’s surface is almost intuitive, its rays

For all the damage that the 2019 Notre Dame fire wrought, it presented archaeologists in Paris with a unique opportunity to peer into through the landmark’s history. Parts of the famous cathedral that were concealed for centuries are now being picked apart and put back together, providing a window into the architectural innovations that once

Most of the light streaming through the Universe is invisible to human eyes. Beyond the mid-range wavelengths we can see, there’s a whole cosmos shining in high- and low-energy radiation. But we humans are clever little animals and have managed to build instruments that can see the light we cannot. One of these is NASA’s

An eight-year survey of the famous SS Thistlegorm shipwreck has revealed that it’s been transformed by marine life into an artificial reef, where dozens of different species have made their home. A team of researchers from the University of Bologna in Italy enlisted the help of volunteer divers to check off organisms on a list

SAN FRANCISCO – Satellogic, the South American company known for high-resolution multispectral imagery, is selling Earth-observation satellites for $10 million or less. Satellogic’s new Space Systems product is designed to appeal to customers eager to establish or expand their space capabilities rather than simply buying imagery. “Space agencies around the world want access to this

It’s sometimes difficult to imagine how the planet we call home, with its megalopolis cities and serene farmlands, was once dominated by dinosaurs as big as buses and five-story buildings. But recent research has helped deepen our understanding of why dinosaurs prevailed: the answer may lie in their special bones, structured like Aero chocolate. Brazilian

It’s easy to envisage other universes, governed by slightly different laws of physics, in which no intelligent life, nor indeed any kind of organized complex systems, could arise. Should we therefore be surprised that a universe exists in which we were able to emerge? That’s a question physicists including me have tried to answer for

Countless shelves line the walls of a basement at Denmark’s University of Odense, holding what is thought to be the world’s largest collection of brains. There are 9,479 of the organs, all removed from the corpses of mental health patients over the course of four decades until the 1980s. Preserved in formalin in large white

Earth, currently, is our only blueprint for planetary habitability. There may be life elsewhere out there in the big, wide galaxy, but ours is the only world on which we know, for a certainty, that it has emerged. The problem is that we’ve found nothing out there that’s exactly like our own planet: of the

An enormous stretch of seaweed measuring 5,000 miles (8,047 kilometers) wide is set to bring stench, pests, and bacteria to the beaches of Florida and Mexico. The “Great Atlantic Sargassum Belt” is a massive bloom of brown algae that stretches from the coast of West Africa to the Gulf of Mexico. It is the largest

The company behind the ChatGPT app that churns out essays, poems or computing code on command released Tuesday a long-awaited update of its artificial intelligence (AI) technology that it said would be safer and more accurate than its predecessor. GPT-4 has been widely awaited ever since ChatGPT burst onto the scene in late November, wowing

WASHINGTON — NASA and Axiom Space unveiled a prototype of the spacesuits that astronauts will wear on Artemis missions to the moon. At an event in Houston March 15, Axiom revealed the design of the suit, called the Axiom Extravehicular Mobility Unit (AxEMU), it will provide to NASA for missions starting with Artemis 3 in

We all had to make adjustments as the coronavirus pandemic unfolded – even zoo animals who were suddenly not seeing crowds of visitors pass by every single day. In a study published last year, researchers discovered how primates reacted to that shift, looking at the behavior of bonobos, chimpanzees, western lowland gorillas, and olive baboons,

Transferring information from one location to another without transmitting any particles or energy seems to run counter to everything we’ve learned in the history of physics. Yet there is some solid reasoning that this ‘counterfactual communication‘ might not only be plausible, but depending on how it works could reveal fundamental aspects of reality that have

There’s a new group of people on Earth who believe they’re aliens. Star people, or starseeds, are individuals who believe they have come to Earth from other dimensions to help heal the planet and guide humanity into the “golden age” – a period of great happiness, prosperity, and achievement. It might sound a little crazy

Compared to Earth, the Moon doesn’t have much going on. Where our planet’s surface features an impressive mix of windswept plains, ice-carved ravines, and volcanic mountain peaks, the lunar surface has impact craters. Lots of impact craters. Earth’s satellite is pocked and scarred from being pummeled with space shrapnel over billions of years, without the

The smoke from recent wildfires is threatening to slow and even reverse the recovery of Earth’s ozone layer – the same one that the world has worked so hard to heal since 1987. The ozone layer is a crucial part of the stratosphere that stops our planet from getting scorched by the Sun’s radiation. It’s

Advances in artificial intelligence are coming so hard and fast that a museum in San Francisco, the beating heart of the tech revolution, has imagined a memorial to the demise of humanity.​ “Sorry for killing most of humanity person with smile cap and mustache,” says a monitor welcoming a visitor to the “Misalignment Museum“, a

WASHINGTON — Executives seeking new businesses from connecting satellites directly to standard smartphones are divided over how quickly this market could grow. Regulatory challenges, potential spectrum interference, customer demand, and the need to fund and deploy constellations capable of voice and other high-bandwidth services are big question marks for this emerging market, according to Matt

In the Wasatch Mountains of the western US on the slopes above a spring-fed lake, there dwells a single giant organism that provides an entire ecosystem on which plants and animals have relied for thousands of years. Found in my home state of Utah, “Pando” is a 106-acre stand of quaking aspen clones. Although it

To take a picture, the best digital cameras on the market open their shutter for around around one four thousandths of a second. To snapshot atomic activity, you’d need a shutter that clicks a lot faster. Now scientists have come up with a way of achieving a shutter speed that’s a mere trillionth of a

Right now, your brain is keeping track of the passage of time without your awareness, letting you focus on better things like reading this story. This happens automatically, but not consistently. The brain’s perception of time can fluctuate, with some moments seeming to stretch or shrink relative to each objective second. While these wrinkles in

It’s the classic social faux pas. You’re in a happy clique, surrounded by all your friends – and one by one, you subsume them, absorbing them into yourself, until you’re all alone, a grotesque agglomeration alone in what was once a crowded environment. That seems to be what happened to a galaxy 9.2 billion years

A Lufthansa flight that had to land shortly after takeoff is just the latest example of extreme turbulence. Each year, pilots report an average of 5,500 encounters with severe or greater turbulence. And that number has increased in recent years, thanks to climate change. Several other events have occurred in 2023 alone. The pilot had

After 12 years of work, a huge team of researchers from the UK, US, and Germany have completed the largest and most complex brain map to date, describing every neural connection in the brain of a larval fruit fly. Though nowhere near the size and complexity of a human brain, it still covers a respectable