Science

Researchers trawling the ocean near Antarctica uncovered a new species that looks haunting in photos — but named it after a fruit. The Antarctic strawberry feather star is a sea creature with 20 so-called “arms” — some bumpy, some feathery — and can altogether be up to eight inches long, Greg Rouse, a marine biology

Given the right circumstances, it is possible for sound to travel through a perfect vacuum. Now two physicists have worked out what those conditions need to be. Zhuoran Geng and Ilari Maasilta of the University of Jyväskylä in Finland say their findings represent the first rigorous proof of complete acoustic tunneling in a vacuum. To

Beneath the turquoise waters of Lake Ohrid, the “Pearl of the Balkans”, scientists have uncovered what may be one of Europe’s earliest sedentary communities, and are trying to solve the mystery of why it sheltered behind a fortress of defensive spikes.​ A stretch of the Albanian shore of the lake once hosted a settlement of

A red blob lurking in the background of a deep image of space has now been validated as one of the earliest galaxies known in the Universe. It’s called Maisie’s Galaxy, and spectroscopic analysis has confirmed the James Webb Space Telescope observed the object as it appeared just 390 million years after the Big Bang.

NASA has just confirmed July 2023 was the hottest month since 1880. For anyone paying the slightest bit of attention this shouldn’t be a surprise. The heartbreaking disasters still cascading around the world have converted Earth’s fever into a painful reality. “NASA data confirms what billions around the world literally felt: temperatures in July 2023

The idea of space-based solar power (SBSP) – using satellites to collect energy from the Sun and “beam” it to collection points on Earth – has been around since at least the late 1960s. Despite its huge potential, the concept has not gained sufficient traction due to cost and technological hurdles. Can some of these

TAMPA, Fla. — Intelsat said Aug. 14 it is due for a $3.7 billion windfall late this year after becoming the latest satellite operator to clear C-band spectrum ahead of schedule for terrestrial 5G telcos in the United States. Weeks after launching its seventh and final C-band clearing satellite, the company said it had achieved

An Australian TikTok celebrity has filmed a humpback whale doing a rare ‘headstand’ on the calm horizon. While paddling along in a transparent kayak, Brodie Moss says the tail of a whale suddenly pierced the ocean surface ahead of him. “My heart is beating so fast,” Moss says in the background of his video, shared

A recent claim by South Korean researchers that they have created a material which works as a superconductor at room temperature – long a holy grail of physics – has been met with huge excitement on social media but scepticism from scientists. Superconductors can carry electrical currents with zero resistance, unlike traditional materials such as

The way your pupils react to light exercise could reveal whether you’re getting one of the key benefits of movement – the cognitive boost linked to improved mood and enhanced executive function. Researchers in Japan monitored pupil size in 24 participants during 10 minutes of light exercise and then used neuroimaging to see how participants’

A star that is in its death throes gleams like gold in new images from the James Webb Space Telescope. It’s called Messier 57, AKA the Ring Nebula, a glowing circle of gas in the constellation of Lyra, some 2,750 light-years from Earth, produced by the ejection of material by a lower-mass star as it

In 2015, research on global forest cover revealed a concerning fact: 70 percent of the world’s remaining forest now lies within 1 kilometer of the forest’s edge. This process, called fragmentation, is causing the deepest and darkest parts of the world’s forests to shrink. Forest fragmentation is bad news for many unique animal and plant

Cicada wings can kill and remove bacteria, and now researchers have used simulations to study the functions of blunt spikes on their surface, with some surprising findings. Understanding this natural process could solve a significant healthcare challenge. Medical devices like catheters enable microbial colonization and biofilm formation by providing a surface for bacteria to cling

TAMPA, Fla. — Telesat has the funding to move forward with plans for a low Earth orbit (LEO) broadband network after saving $2 billion by pivoting to smaller satellites from MDA following production delays at Thales Alenia Space, the Canadian operator said Aug. 11. MDA is building 198 satellites for Telesat’s Lightspeed constellation under a

Palaeontologists in Egypt have unearthed an extinct species of whale that lived 41 million years ago when whale ancestors were just completing their move from land to sea. The team has dubbed the species Tutcetus rayanensis after the Egyptian boy king Tutankhamun and the Wadi El-Rayan Protected Area in Egypt’s Fayoum Oasis where the type

Experiments on the distinctive wobble of a heavyweight cousin to the electron called the muon are repeatedly finding something isn’t quite adding up, pointing the way towards unknown physics. Nearly 20 years after researchers from Brookhaven Particle Accelerator in New York first provided evidence of an anomaly, hundreds of scientists working with the Muon g-2

Researchers have unearthed the remains of what they believe to be a 17th-century “vampire” child who was buried face down and padlocked to the earth in a likely effort to assuage villagers’ fears that the child would not return from the dead, the lead archaeologist on the dig told Insider. The skeletal remains of the

In recent research published by myself and my colleague Tony Yeates in the journal Tectonophysics, we investigate what we believe – based on many years of experience in asteroid impact research – is the world’s largest known impact structure, buried deep in the earth in southern New South Wales. The Deniliquin structure, yet to be

July was the hottest month ever recorded on Earth, the European Union’s climate observatory confirmed Tuesday, warning of dire consequences. Marked by heatwaves and fires all around the world, the previous month was 0.33 degrees Celsius higher than the record set in July 2019 when the average temperature was 16.63C (32 Fahrenheit), it said. “It

The soothing sounds of binaural beats are thought to sharpen focus when cramming information into our chock-a-block heads. But a new study has found that binaural beats might actually hinder learning, not help it. Michał Klichowski, a cognitive neuroscientist at Adam Mickiewicz University in Poland, and colleagues wanted to see whether listening to binaural beats

TAMPA, Fla. — Viasat is holding off on a contingency plan for ViaSat-3 Americas in the hope it could still get some capacity from the broadband satellite despite its defective antenna, the operator’s chair and CEO Mark Dankberg said Aug. 9. Engineers have been able to get end-to-end measurements showing the rest of the satellite

Scientists keep peeling back new layers of life on our planet like a seemingly endless onion. Most recently, aquanauts on board a vessel from the Schmidt Ocean Institute used an underwater robot to turn over slabs of volcanic crust in the deep, dark Pacific. Underneath the seafloor of this well-studied site, the international team of

Weird things happen on the quantum level. Whole clouds of particles can become entangled, their individuality lost as they act as one. Now scientists have observed, for the first time, ultracold atoms cooled to a quantum state chemically reacting as a collective, rather than haphazardly forming new molecules after bumping into each other by chance.

An international team of scientists has described an ancient human fossil in China unlike any other hominin found before. It resembles neither the lineage that split to form Neanderthals, nor Denisovans, nor us, suggesting our current version of the human family tree needs another branch. The jaw, skull, and leg bones belonging to this yet-to-be

An outburst that erupted from the Sun in 2021 was so violent that it was simultaneously felt on multiple Solar System bodies as it blasted through. For the first time, instruments on Earth, the Moon, and Mars all recorded powerful solar activity, even though the planets were on opposite sides of the Sun at the

The first hours after a fireball sighting are like a detective mystery. Last night around midnight, people across Melbourne took to social media to report sightings of a bright light slowly streaking across the sky. Video footage clearly shows the fireball break apart, with these fragments in turn burning up, meaning this object was big.

Recordings of the interior of Mars have just delivered the most precise measurement of the red planet’s spin yet, and the results are a confusing surprise. According to data from the now-retired InSight lander, Mars’ rotation is accelerating each year by around 4 milliarcseconds. That’s a very small amount – shortening the length of a

2023 has gone from bad to worse for Earth’s southern ocean. In February, climate researchers announced that Antarctica’s sea ice had hit its lowest summer level since satellite records began 45 years ago. A few months later, in June, during what should be a ‘winter growth phase‘, floating sea ice around Antarctica was still struggling

Vast arrays of solar panels floating on calm seas near the Equator could provide effectively unlimited solar energy to densely populated countries in Southeast Asia and West Africa. Our new research shows offshore solar in Indonesia alone could generate about 35,000 terawatt-hours (TWh) of solar energy a year, which is similar to current global electricity

WASHINGTON — Lockheed Martin, a company that for decades has built schoolbus-sized spacecraft for the U.S. government, opened a new facility to assemble small satellites, which are now in higher demand.  Lockheed Martin’s 20,000-square-foot factory is located at the company’s Waterton campus near Denver, Colorado. It has six parallel assembly lines and capacity to manufacture