Science

The US military shot down what US officials called a Chinese surveillance balloon off the coast of South Carolina on 4 Feb 2023. Officials said that the US Navy planned to recover the debris, which is in shallow water. The US and Canada tracked the balloon as it crossed the Aleutian Islands, passed over Western

TAMPA, Fla. — EchoStar Corporation, a U.S. operator with around $1.6 billion in cash, is preparing to disrupt the market for connecting Internet of Things (IoT) devices after ordering satellites it needs for global services next year. The company said last week it had placed an order with California-based Astro Digital for 28 satellites, which

The Sun gives life to our planet through its rays, and yet some fascinating lifeforms don’t need light to live. Instead of using photosynthesis to store energy in their chemical bonds, some microbes rely purely on the oxidation of inorganic molecules like hydrogen to do the trick. Chemosynthesis, as it’s known, was speculated as a

Scientists rattling normal frozen water around in a jar of ultracold steel balls have discovered a previously unknown form of ice, closer to liquid water than any other ice yet. This is amorphous ice, a form not found in nature on Earth. That’s because its atoms are arranged not in a neat repeating crystalline pattern,

If you walk through the woods and pass a beehive, you may catch the sweet scent of honey in the wind and suddenly be flooded with memories: having tea with grandma or eating warm biscuits on a Sunday morning. If you were taking that walk 300,000 years ago with a Denisovan – a now-extinct hominid

You can now listen to the sounds of the space around one of the Milky Way’s most spectacular stars. RS Puppis, a Cepheid variable star around 6,500 light-years away, has gotten the data sonification treatment by the sci-art outreach project SYSTEM Sounds. They took a Hubble image of the star and transcribed the light into

Sophisticated artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms have predicted that the world will be 1.5 °C hotter than it was before the Industrial Revolution by the early 2030s – another climate change alarm bell to add to the cacophony that’s already being sounded. And that’s baked in, the AI says: it doesn’t matter whether greenhouse gases rise

Billion-dollar startup Colossal Biosciences claims it has come a step closer to reviving the dodo, a flightless bird that has been extinct since the 17th century. The futuristic plan is only possible now that the Dallas-based company has decrypted the dodo’s entire genome, according to a press release. The bird is the latest in the

WASHINGTON — U.S. and Indian officials agreed this week to expand civil space cooperation, including training Indian astronauts and flying payloads on commercial lunar landers. In meetings this week in Washington, held with little public fanfare, the United States and India agreed to expanded cooperation in civil space and laid the groundwork for potential new

The adorable, white-spotted pink-nosed marsupial that lives in the top half of Australia would rather die than miss out on sex. During its brief mating window, the males run themselves ragged – then die from exhaustion, a study led by the University of the Sunshine Coast suggests. The study compared the activity of male and

It’s not every day you get to rediscover the words of a world-famous thinker, an influencer of Albert Einstein himself. A nearly 20-minute video interview with the ‘father of the Big Bang‘ was found in the archives of a public-service broadcaster called Vlaamse Radio- en Televisieomroeporganisatie (VRT), located in the Flemish region of Belgium. Watching

Bar charts and line graphs are both designed to help us visualize data. They are tools to convert numerical information into pictorial narratives that can be more easily comprehended. They don’t change the data; they simply represent it. They do represent it in different ways, however, and even those slight differences can be enough to

We have a new exoplanet to one day scour for potential signs of life. Just 31 light-years away, astronomers have identified an incredibly rare Earth-sized world orbiting at a distance from its star that should be hospitable to life as we know it. If, that is, the exoplanet itself has the right conditions to be

It can be tempting to think that the recent wildfire disasters in communities across the West were unlucky, one-off events, but evidence is accumulating that points to a trend. In a new study, we found a 246 percent increase in the number of homes and structures destroyed by wildfires in the contiguous Western US between

Scientists have found a clever way to generate hydrogen straight from salty seawater. This could be another step towards a clean energy future, if renewables power the process. The new device makes a few chemical modifications to existing technologies, making it possible to extract hydrogen from untreated, unpurified seawater – which could alleviate concerns about

TAMPA, Fla. — Remote communications provider Galaxy Broadband said Feb. 1 it is buying capacity from OneWeb for $50 million in a multi-year deal to offer low Earth orbit broadband services to more sites across Canada. The agreement enables Galaxy to expand into the northern territory of Nunavut — a sparsely populated region of northern

The link between ancient volcanic eruptions and the most severe extinction event the world has ever seen just got even stronger. A new analysis of mercury isotopes has provided evidence that a quarter of a billion years ago, far-flung places in Earth’s Southern Hemisphere were blanketed with debris from volcanic eruptions in Siberia. The so-called

A burly figure emerges from the shadows of a forest, only to lumber off into the cover of trees once again. It’s a scene that’s been caught from the corner of a thousand human eyes, yet no one is any closer to looking a Bigfoot or a Sasquatch square in the face. If someone were

A gargantuan effort by a huge international team of scientists has just given us the most precise map of the all matter in the Universe obtained to date. By combining data from two major surveys, the international collaboration has revealed where the Universe does and doesn’t keep all its junk – not just the normal

As city folk sleep blanketed by the warm glow of artificial light that surrounds urban centers, stargazers feel the chill of the night sky and see all its constellations being smudged into a fuzzy blur by those same urban lights. It’s a worrying trend that stretches back decades. In 1973, astronomer Kurt Riegel warned that

Some 540 million years ago, diverse life forms suddenly began to emerge from the muddy ocean floors of planet Earth. This period is known as the Cambrian Explosion, and these aquatic critters are our ancient ancestors. All complex life on Earth evolved from these underwater creatures. Scientists believe all it took was an ever-so-slight increase

TAMPA, Fla. — Inmarsat’s latest geostationary telecoms satellite has arrived at its Florida launch site after a three-day journey from Airbus’ testing facilities in France. An Airbus Beluga plane carrying the 5,500-kilogram Inmarsat-6 F2 (I-6 F2) satellite landed at the Kennedy Space Center on Jan. 27, Airbus Space Systems spokesperson Jeremy Close said, following refueling

The violent fingers of electricity that struck a sand dune in Nebraska have left behind a configuration of crystal rarely found in nature. Inside a piece of fulgurite – or ‘fossilized lightning‘ – created by a powerful bolt of electricity traveling into and fusing sand, scientists have found a quasicrystal, an arrangement of matter once

‘Spin’ is a fundamental quality of fundamental particles like the electron, invoking images of a tiny sphere revolving rapidly on its axis like a planet in a shrunken solar system. Only it isn’t. It can’t. For one thing, electrons aren’t spheres of matter but points described by the mathematics of probability. But California Institute of

A team of archaeologists unearthed what could be the “oldest” and “most complete” mummy ever discovered in Egypt, the leader of the excavation announced on Thursday. Thought to be the remains of a man named Hekashepes, archaeologists found the 4,300-year-old mummy in an ancient tomb near Cairo from the country’s fifth and sixth dynasty –

JWST’s unparalleled ability to peer into the shrouded hearts of distant clouds has revealed the elements of biochemistry in the coldest and darkest place we’ve seen them yet. In a molecular cloud called Chamaeleon I, located over 500 light-years from Earth, data from the telescope has revealed the presence of frozen carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen,

Plastic pollution is out of control. Each year, more than 8 million tonnes of synthetic polymers enter the ocean, and while some sinks to the floor, returns to the shore, or collects in the middle of nowhere, a significant portion isn’t so easily accounted for. All that missing plastic is a mystery, but some researchers

Scientists have made a breakthrough in robotics: a shapeshifting robot that can switch between liquid and metal states to navigate tricky environments without compromising on strength. Because they can be both soft and hard, the small, sea cucumber-inspired robots can overcome the limitations of robots that are only one or the other, and thus have

Lynk Global is close to completing a ground station in Hawaii as part of plans to connect its growing constellation of small satellites to standard smartphones this spring. TAMPA, Fla. — Lynk Global is close to completing a ground station in Hawaii as part of plans to connect its growing constellation of small satellites to

Close to the summit of an underwater mountain west of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, a jagged landscape of towers rises from the gloom. Their creamy carbonate walls and columns appear ghostly blue in the light of a remotely operated vehicle sent to explore. They range in height from tiny stacks the size of toadstools to a