Science

In 1956, a teenage girl by the name of Tina Negus was summering in the United Kingdom’s Charnwood Forest with her family, when she noticed a curious imprint on an overhanging rock face. It looked like a fern. But as a budding geologist, Negus knew these 600 million year old rocks were too old to

Christopher Nolan’s biopic of J. Robert Oppenheimer has revived morbid curiosity in the destructive power of nuclear weapons. There are now an estimated 12,512 nuclear warheads. A war in which even a fraction of these bombs were detonated would create blast waves and fires capable of killing millions of people almost instantly. The radiation-induced cancers

Twenty years of satellite data show that a stretch of coastal desert extending south from Peru’s north and into Chile is getting greener, but this is not good news. “This is a warning sign, like the canary in the mine,” cautions Cambridge University mathematician Hugo Lepage. Scattered mist oases filled with unique vegetation, called lomas,

Amidst the excitement surrounding ChatGPT and the impressive power and potential of artificial intelligence (AI), the impact on the environment has been somewhat overlooked. Analysts predict that AI’s carbon footprint could be as bad – if not worse – than bitcoin mining, which currently generates more greenhouse gases than entire countries. Record-shattering heat across land,

TAMPA, Fla. — Globalstar, the operator behind Apple’s satellite-enabled SOS app, posted a 50% year-on-year jump in quarterly sales Aug. 3 amid promising growth in its business for connecting remote Internet of Things (IoT) devices. Nearly half the $55 million Globalstar made in the three months ended June 30 came from wholesale capacity service revenues

The bones of a whale that lived 39 million years ago are seriously testing what we thought was possible for the size of vertebrates. The blue whale (Balaenoptera musculus) has long been considered the heaviest animal ever to have lived on Earth. But the newly discovered Perucetus colossus could leave it in the dust. Measurements

Archaeologists have found the body of a child from around 9,000 years ago buried with thousands of beads in what is now Jordan. Based on the shape of the child’s jaw, she was probably a girl roughly 8 years of age, according to an international team led by archeologist Hala Alarashi from Côte d’Azur University

A newly discovered star is so large, bright, and strange that its appearance could be pointing us towards a clump of dark matter in the sky. Named Mothra by its discoverers, it seems bizarrely bright in the sky, for the 10.4 billion years it has taken to reach us. This places it in the class

On the heels of a new record high in the Mediterranean, the North Atlantic reached its hottest-ever level this week, several weeks earlier than its usual annual peak, according to preliminary data released Friday by the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The news comes after scientists confirmed that July is on track to be

Scientists are constantly searching for better ways to store renewable energy, and MIT researchers have now found a way to turn cement and an ancient material into a giant supercapacitor. Potentially, this electrified cement could turn building foundations and roads into almost limitless batteries. To create the new substance, a team from the Massachusetts Institute

WASHINGTON — Innovative Rocket Technologies, known as iRocket, has signed an agreement with the Air Force Research Laboratory to jointly develop and test rocket propulsion hardware.  The New York-based startup, founded in 2018, develops rocket engines and plans to build a small launch vehicle. iRocket signed a four-year cooperative research and development agreement, or CRADA,

The earliest impact scars from asteroids that bombarded Earth’s surface may be lost forever to the ravages of time. According to a new analysis, there’s a reason scientists have been unable to find any craters older than about 2 billion years. The constant erosion and geological processes on Earth have likely erased them from the

Last week, a group of South Korean physicists made a startling claim. In two papers uploaded to the arXiv preprint server, they say they have created a material that “opens a new era for humankind”. LK-99, a lead-based compound, is purportedly a room-temperature, ambient-pressure superconductor. Such a material, which conducts electricity without any resistance under

A Bronze Age arrowhead excavated in Switzerland in the 19th century turns out to be made from an unexpected material. The tiny artifact is made from iron retrieved from an object that fell from the sky. But there’s a twist. It wasn’t even the closest meteorite to the settlement at the time. Rather, a team

Mitigating climate change on Earth is such a dire challenge that scientists are seriously investigating every single option they can think of. The latest idea is wild… but it’s not outside the realm of possibility. Astronomer István Szapudi, of the University of Hawaiʻi Institute for Astronomy, reckons we could catch an asteroid, park it in

Super-heated seawater off the Florida Keys has grown so perilous to the world’s third-largest barrier reef that scientists are now removing samples of coral from ocean nurseries to place in cooler land-based tanks. Sea temperatures off Florida have risen to extraordinary highs this month, presenting a severe threat to the barrier reef. “Hot water is

Say hello to ionocaloric cooling. It’s a new way to lower temperatures with the potential to replace existing methods of chilling things with a process that is safer and better for the planet. Typical refrigeration systems transport heat away from a space via a gas that cools as it expands some distance away. As effective

WASHINGTON — Two crewed missions remain on track to launch to the International Space Station over the next month and a half after addressing technical issues that included a Soyuz coolant leak. At a July 25 briefing, NASA officials said they are planning the launch of the Crew-7 mission to the ISS no earlier than

Scientists have discovered an exceptional case of a partially warm-blooded fish, fundamentally changing our understanding of fish physiology. The fact that basking sharks (Cetorhinus maximus) show elevated body temperatures while swimming is like “finding that cows have wings,” says marine biologist Nicholas Payne from Trinity College in Dublin, Ireland. Of all the shark and fish

Scientists experimenting with some of the most fundamental laws of physics have found more evidence of what they’re calling photonic time crystals (PTCs): materials in which the speed at which light moves (the refractive index) oscillates very quickly. We already know much more about photonic crystals, where a repeating pattern in a material creates a

You probably haven’t spent much time thinking about how heavy your hands are – but if you had to make a guess, you’d probably be wrong. A small study that asked people to compare their hands to various weights suggests that humans generally underestimate the mass of their hands by just over 49 percent. A

Ancient grains of dust are revealing the life story of a Solar System asteroid. According to an analysis of grains collected from asteroid Ryugu, at least part of the carbon-rich rock started its life much farther from the Sun before ending up in the asteroid belt and then, ultimately, at roughly Earth’s distance from the

Science fiction is rife with fanciful tales of deadly organisms emerging from the ice and wreaking havoc on unsuspecting human victims. From shape-shifting aliens in Antarctica, to super-parasites emerging from a thawing woolly mammoth in Siberia, to exposed permafrost in Greenland causing a viral pandemic – the concept is marvellous plot fodder. But just how

WASHINGTON — Sierra Space won an Air Force contract to continue development of an engine that could be used in the upper stage of future launch vehicles. Colorado-based Sierra Space received a $22.6 million contract from the Air Force Test Center July 25 to mature the design of its VR35K-A engine. The contract will allow

An international effort to revive an ancient roundworm, frozen in Siberian permafrost for millennia, has unleashed a lifeform even older than scientists once thought. In 2018, several resurrected nematodes, of the genus Panagrolaimus, were dated to around 32,000 years old. But now, more precise radiocarbon dating suggests these soil worms have remained ‘dead awake’ in

Decades ago, regulations for laboratory maintenance were not quite as stringent as they are today. This, we assume, is at least partially what led the great minds at what was then the US National Accelerator Laboratory, now Fermilab, to an ingenious solution for cleaning a particle accelerator back in 1971. It was February. The Main

Standing atop the mountains in the southern highlands of Peru is the 15th-century marvel of the Inca empire, Machu Picchu. Today, the citadel is a global tourist attraction and an icon of precolonial Latin American history – but it was once the royal palace of an emperor. Our international team of researchers has uncovered the

The biggest volcano in the Solar System could once have been an island in a vast sea, new research has found. When Mars was young, and soggy, billions of years ago, the colossal Olympus Mons may have resembled Stromboli or Savai’i, but on a much larger scale. A new analysis shows similarities with active volcanic

Roughly 2,000 Magellanic penguins have washed up dead on the beaches of Uruguay this July with empty stomachs and “tremendously thin” bodies. “This is mortality in the water,” Carmen Leizagoyen, who works at Uruguay’s Environment Ministry, told AFP. “Ninety percent are young specimens that arrive without fat reserves and with empty stomachs.” The cause of

WASHINGTON — A bill intended to reform satellite spectrum licensing regulations failed to pass the House July 25 after some members objected to provisions they claimed gave the Federal Communications Commission authority to regulate space safety. The House debated H.R. 1338, the Satellite and Telecommunications Streamlining Act, under suspension of the rules, a procedure that