Science

Amidst remains of turtles and fish preserved in a southeastern China fossil bed, scientists have uncovered the skeleton of a dinosaur with curious bird-like features. Estimated to be roughly 30 million years older than any confirmed bird fossil, the finding could tell us a thing or two about the first critical steps into their evolution.

Scientists have been able to observe a common interaction in quantum chemistry for the first time, by using a quantum computer to shadow the process at a speed 100 billion times slower than normal. Known as a conical intersection, the interactions have long been known about, but are usually over in mere femtoseconds – quadrillionths

Researchers have identified living relatives in Tanzania of people whose skulls were pillaged and taken to Germany during the colonial era, Berlin’s museum authority said on Tuesday, a discovery hailed as a “small miracle”. Berlin’s Museum of Prehistory and Early History has been carrying out research on around 1,100 skulls from what was known as

An active supermassive black hole is one of the greatest wonders in the cosmos. A dense, invisible object that can be billions of times the mass of our Sun is surrounded by a vast, churning disk and torus of material, blazing with light as it swirls down onto the black hole center. But how big

Invasive species that wreck crops, ravage forests, spread disease, and upend ecosystems are spreading ever faster across the globe, and humanity has not been able to stem the tide, a major scientific assessment said Monday. The failure is costing well over $400 billion dollars a year in damages and lost income – the equivalent to

WASHINGTON — The European Space Agency plans to set a target launch period for the first Ariane 6 in October, with the hopes that vehicle can finally take flight “not too late” into 2024. At a Sept. 4 briefing, officials from ESA and other partners on the Ariane 6 said they should be able to

In sediment samples from deep within the ocean, scientists have identified a mysterious and unique new species of marine bacteria that advances our understanding of deep-sea conditions and microbiology in general. A team in China grew the bacteria in the lab using sediment from a cold seep, a specific puddle of nutrient-rich liquid and mud

Strange loops in the fabric of reality have finally been witnessed forming in a super cold gas, providing physicists with an opportunity to study the behaviors of a rather peculiar kind of one-sided magnetism. Known as ‘Alice rings’ after the Alice of ‘Wonderland’ fame, the circular structures were observed by a collaboration between researchers in

A team of Peruvian and Japanese archaeologists has unearthed a pre-Hispanic archaeological site in northern Peru dedicated to ancestor worship, with burial chambers, human remains and ceramic offerings. “We have discovered an archaeological site of the Wari period with an antiquity of between 800 to 1000 years CE” in the Cajamarca region 900 kilometers (560

A newly discovered exoplanet has presented astronomers with an interesting problem. It’s called TOI-332b, and its physical properties and orbital distance from its star are challenging to explain with current planetary formation theory. With so few exoplanets of its kind detected in the Milky Way so far, it could shed some light on why fast-orbiting,

Wild boars in southeastern Germany are known to contain high levels of radioactive cesium, which has been widely attributed to the 1986 Chernobyl disaster. But radioactivity levels have decreased in other animals while mysteriously persisting in the boars – a peculiar behavior known as the “wild boar paradox”. New research shows nuclear weapons tests from

The Pentagon has opened up a new portal on the internet for professionals to submit reports about UFOs — now officially known as unidentified anomalous phenomena, or UAPs — and for the rest of us to find out about the reports that have been released. AARO.mil, the website for the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office, is

WASHINGTON — A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket lifted off Sept. 2 at 7:25 a.m. Pacific from Launch Complex 4 East at Vandenberg Space Force Base, California, carrying 13 U.S. military satellites.  The mission to low Earth orbit was the second launch of the Space Development Agency’s Tranche 0 mesh network of military communications and missile

Back in 1867, in an effort to test his thoughts on the emerging science of thermodynamics, physicist James Clerk Maxwell imagined an intelligent ‘demon’ sorting molecules between two containers based on their energy. In 2023, a less diabolical version of Maxwell’s fictitious demon may have been found. According to a new study from researchers at

A rare type of particle has emerged from proton collisions in the Large Hadron Collider. Between 2016 and 2018, physicists recorded more than 100 rare, unstable hypernuclei – atomic cores that contain an unusual flavor of quark in one of their nuclear particles. It’s a discovery that could help us understand the source of mysterious

Nearly a million years ago, some devastating event nearly wiped out humanity’s ancestors. Genomic data from 3,154 modern humans suggests the population was reduced from approximately 100,000 to just 1,280 breeding individuals around 900,000 years ago. That’s a jaw-dropping population decline of 98.7 percent that lasted 117,000 years and could have brought humanity to extinction.

A newly discovered exoplanet has characteristics so peculiar that astronomers think it must have experienced a giant collision some time in its past. TOI-1853b is an exoplanet just a smidge smaller than Neptune, but nearly twice as dense as Earth, suggesting a composition high in rock that’s challenging to explain through normal planet formation and

Polar bears have long symbolized the dangers posed by climate change, as rising temperatures melt away the Arctic sea ice they depend upon for survival. But quantifying the impact of a single oil well or coal power plant on the tundra predators had eluded scientists, until now. A new report published in the journal Science

The abilities of artificial intelligence (AI) systems are advancing at an astounding rate, nearing or bettering what humans can do in simulations and test environments. Setting aside the ethical and environmental concerns around AI and those of autonomous drones for a minute, we can marvel at this latest feat: an AI-controlled drone system that beat

LONDON — Israeli satcoms equipment maker SatixFy announced plans Aug. 31 to sell its satellite payload subsidiary to MDA as part of a $60 million strategic transaction with the Canadian space hardware specialist. MDA is spending $40 million to buy SatixFy Space Systems UK Ltd, a British developer of satellite payload systems and subsystems, including

Climate change has sharply boosted the risk of fast-spreading wildfires, according to a Californian study published Wednesday that offers lessons for prevention after recent disasters in Canada, Greece and Hawaii. Scientists at the Breakthrough Institute, a non-profit research centre, found that human-caused warming increased the frequency of “extreme” wildfires by 25 percent on average compared

A newly observed isotope of oxygen is defying all our expectations for how it should behave. It’s oxygen-28, with the highest number of neutrons ever seen in the nucleus of an oxygen atom. Yet, while scientists believe it should be stable, it decays rapidly – calling into question what we thought we knew about “magic”

The biggest search for the Loch Ness Monster in five decades got underway in the Scottish Highlands Saturday, as researchers and enthusiasts from around the world braved pelting rain to try to track down the elusive Nessie. The expedition deployed drones with thermal scanners, boats with infrared cameras and an underwater hydrophone to try to

The Whirlpool Galaxy, aka M51, is one of the most well-known objects in the night sky. It’s close enough and prominent in the northern sky that amateur astronomers have shared stunning pictures of it for decades. But you’ve never seen anything like this: M51 as seen by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). This image

We’ve been warned that our planet will change in unimaginable ways if we don’t act soon, and new research shows nearly 50 percent of 15–84-year-olds have already experienced significant change. Seeing what lies ahead, climate scientists have been at pains to show us how climate change will intensify such that today’s youth will bear the

It may seem like the ultimate in bling, but a new technique for tattooing gold onto living tissue is a step towards integrating human cells with electronic devices. By building on a fabrication technique called nanoimprint lithography, scientists printed living mouse embryo fibroblast cells with patterns of gold nanodots and nanowires. This, they say, is

WASHINGTON — NASA has confirmed it is delaying the release of the call for proposals for the next New Frontiers planetary science mission, originally planned for this fall, to no earlier than 2026 because of budget issues. In a community announcement published Aug. 24, NASA’s Science Mission Directorate (SMD) said the announcement of opportunity (AO)

Sea ice loss in Antarctica during 2022’s emperor penguin breeding season resulted in the complete failure of four out of the five breeding colonies in the Bellingshausen Sea. Satellite imagery shows none of the chicks from those sites survived. The devastating event is the first recorded widespread breeding failure of emperor penguins (Aptenodytes forsteri); but,

Never let it be said that scientists don’t have an eye for the sublime. Encoding and deciphering a Chinese symbol for duality and harmony into the quantum states of two entangled photons, physicists recently demonstrated the superior efficiency of a new analytical technique. Researchers from the Sapienza University of Rome and the University of Ottawa

For the first time, researchers have been able to extract DNA fragments from an ancient clay brick, demonstrating how these building blocks from times long past could be used to catalog flora found in the environment at the time. When this brick was made some 2,900 years ago in what is now northern Iraq, the