Science

Human activity and appetites have weakened Earth’s resilience, pushing it far beyond the “safe operating space” that keeps the world liveable for most species, including our own, a landmark study said Wednesday. ​Six of nine planetary boundaries – climate change, deforestation, biodiversity loss, synthetic chemicals including plastics, freshwater depletion, and nitrogen use – are already

Imagine living in a cool, green city flush with parks and threaded with footpaths, bike lanes, and buses, which ferry people to shops, schools, and service centers in a matter of minutes. That breezy dream is the epitome of urban planning, encapsulated in the idea of the 15-minute city, where all basic needs and services

BRUSSELS — A Soyuz spacecraft delivered a new crew to the International Space Station Sept. 15 as NASA and Roscosmos updated plans for later missions. A Soyuz-2.1a rocket lifted off from the Baikonur Cosmodrome at 11:44 a.m. Eastern and placed the Soyuz MS-24 spacecraft into orbit. The spacecraft docked with the station’s Rassvet module at

If you looked up 66 million years ago you might have seen, for a split second, a bright light as a mountain-sized asteroid burned through the atmosphere and smashed into Earth. It was springtime and the literal end of an era, the Mesozoic. If you somehow survived the initial impact, you would have witnessed the

When Isaac Newton inscribed onto parchment his now-famed laws of motion in 1687, he could have only hoped we’d be discussing them three centuries later. Writing in Latin, Newton outlined three universal principles describing how the motion of objects is governed in our Universe, which have been translated, transcribed, discussed and debated at length. But

For the past 24,000 years or so, a hidden sanctuary of Paleolithic rock art has endured on the walls of a cave near Valencia in eastern Spain, holding clues about the ancient artists and the world they inhabited. The cave itself is well-known to locals and spelunkers yet more than 110 paintings and engravings went

The curvature of space-time around a colossal mass has yielded the most detailed measurement of the cosmic distribution of dark matter yet. Aided by a gravitational lens, a team led by cosmologist Kaiki Taro Inoue of Kindai University in Japan has mapped the mysterious form of matter on the smallest scale we’ve ever seen, with

Former political leaders and heads of international organisations called Thursday for national moratoriums on deploying technologies to slow global warming by dimming the impact of the Sun. The Climate Overshoot Commission said research and experiments into so-called solar radiation modification (SRM) should move forward, but only under international supervision and in jurisdictions with strong environmental

For eons, deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) has served as a sort of instruction manual for life, providing not just templates for a vast array of chemical structures but a means of managing their production. In recent years engineers have explored a subtly new role for the molecule’s unique capabilities, as the basis for a biological computer.

TAMPA, Fla. — Three space companies that went public two years ago are seeking ways to build credibility with large institutional investors that have started dipping toes into the deflated market. Launch vehicle and spacecraft developer Rocket Lab, space technology provider Redwire, and Earth observation operator BlackSky started trading shares within weeks of each other after their 2021 merger

Something rather monstrous happens to the nematode Allodiplogaster sudhausi when reduced to snacking on boring old fungus. Scientists have discovered it develops a giant mouth and feasts on other worms, including those from its own family. This new form has been named the teratostomatous morph, with “teras” being an ancient Greek word for monster. Two

Neutrinos are abundant subatomic particles that have a crucial role in the composition of the Universe. Initially considered massless, these barely-detectable particles ought to weigh something according to updated theories. Exactly what that measurement is has yet to be determined experimentally. An international team of scientists has come up with a new way to solving

A recent mission from the American spaceflight company, Virgin Galactic, is facing public backlash after it carried the remains of two extinct hominins into space. The University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa, is custodian of the fossils and its researchers are celebrating the event as a “historic first” and “a tribute to science

Now officially known as unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAPs), ‘UFOs’ have certainly long captivated our curiosity. NASA commissioned a study team in 2022 to investigate such hard-to-easily-classify reports, and tomorrow they’re revealing the highly anticipated findings at a media briefing. The scarcity of high-quality observations of UAPs – defined as objects in the sky that are

For the first time, world demand for oil, gas and coal is forecast to peak this decade due to the “spectacular” growth of cleaner energy technologies and electric cars, the International Energy Agency’s chief said Tuesday. The IEA’s annual World Energy Outlook, due out next month, will show that “the world is on the cusp

We might soon be able to record the tunes we hear in our dreams, thanks to a system that’s under development. A team from the startup REMspace, run as part of the Phase Research Center in Russia, has come up with a combination of hardware and software able to decode a melody being played via

PARIS – In six months, Portuguese startup NeuraSpace has gone from 25 to 250 satellites on its space traffic management platform. “For NeuraSpace, the ball is rolling,” Chiara Manfletti, NeuraSpace chief operating officer, told SpaceNews at the World Satellite Business Week conference here. The latest customer is South Africa’s Dragonfly Aerospace. Dragonfly announced plans Sept.

From their astute ability to read our emotions to their impressive language and number comprehension, canine powers of understanding continue to amaze. Now it seems they may also be able to listen to us in their sleep. A small pilot study of 13 dogs reveals dogs’ brains deep in the throes of slumber light up

Glass might look and feel like a perfectly ordered solid, but up close its chaotic arrangement of particles more closely resemble the tumultuous mess of a freefalling liquid frozen in time. Known as amorphous solids, materials in this state defy easy explanation. New research involving computation and simulation is yielding clues. In particular, it suggests

Heart in your throat. Butterflies in your stomach. Bad gut feeling. These are all phrases many people use to describe fear and anxiety. You have likely felt anxiety inside your chest or stomach, and your brain usually doesn’t hurt when you’re scared. Many cultures tie cowardice and bravery more to the heart or the guts

The Milky Way should be teeming with small black holes. Somewhere out there, lurking in the corners of the galaxy, an estimated 10 million to 1 billion stellar mass black holes are thought to be just hanging out, dark and mysterious. Because we can’t usually see them, unless they’re active, we can’t take a census.

Some parts of the United States are hitting temperatures “too hot for safe fan use” twice as often as they did decades ago, new research shows. Analyzing hourly weather data from the past 20 years and between 1950 and 1969, Luke Parsons, a climate scientist at Duke University, and colleagues found that more US residents

In an effort to create robots capable of controlling their own life-cycles, researchers have developed squishy little devices that can melt themselves into a puddle of goo. “We have mimicked death in a life cycle where the robot could end itself,” Seoul National University engineer Min-Ha Oh told Peter Grad at Tech Xplore. This ‘death’

TAMPA, Fla. — Viasat’s U.K. subsidiary is partnering with Oxford Space Systems, a British satellite antenna specialist, to develop a 50% lighter high-speed communications terminal to improve the mobility of dismounted soldiers. The companies see the potential for a Ka-band satellite communications system that is 15 kilograms or less, Viasat UK managing director Hisham Awad

As elephants wander the African savannah, they might keep in touch with relatives by calling out their individual ‘names’. Researchers have found evidence that wild savannah elephants in Kenya label each other with specific vocal sounds, which they then use to communicate. The research is not yet peer-reviewed, but if the results can be verified

There are several perfectly good reasons why water isn’t a popular medium for calligraphers to write in. Constantly shifting and swirling, it doesn’t take long for ink to diffuse and flow out of formation. An ingenious ‘pen’ developed by the researchers from Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (JGU) and the Technical University of Darmstadt in Germany,

You’re running, but you’re not going anywhere. You’re falling, but you never hit the ground. You’re watching your loved one waste away, but there’s nothing you can do about it. If you’re like most people, then you might be covered in a cold sweat by now, recalling a nightmare. Though our dreams are highly personal,

A comet called Nishimura discovered just a month ago could be visible to the naked eye this weekend, offering stargazers a once-in-a-437-year chance to observe the celestial visitor. The ball of rock and ice, whose exact size remains unknown, is named after the Japanese amateur astronomer Hideo Nishimura who first spotted it on August 12.

​An unprecedentedly violent volcanic eruption that triggered a tsunami off the Pacific island nation of Tonga in 2022 unleashed the fastest underwater currents ever recorded, according to a study published on Thursday. The submerged Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai Volcano sent rocks, ash and gas racing across the seafloor at 122 kilometers (76 miles) per hour in

WASHINGTON — Redwire announced it successfully 3D-printed human tissue in microgravity, a step towards more ambitious biotech applications in space. The company said Sept. 7 that a human knee meniscus, printed on its 3D BioFabrication Facility (BFF) on the International Space Station, was now in the lab on Earth after returning on the Crew Dragon