Science

Take one look at Italy’s Leaning Tower of Pisa and a single question springs to mind: just how close is it to toppling right over? For decades going on centuries, engineers, historians, and onlookers have held their collective breath at the fate of the iconic bell tower, which has weathered four earthquakes and swayed back

ChatGPT is the latest and most impressive artificially intelligent chatbot yet. It was released two weeks ago, and in just five days hit a million users. It’s being used so much that its servers have reached capacity several times. OpenAI, the company that developed it, is already being discussed as a potential Google slayer. Why

WASHINGTON — British regulators have issued a launch license to Virgin Orbit for its first LauncherOne mission from the United Kingdom, now expected to take place in January. The U.K. Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) announced Dec. 21 it issued launch and range licenses to Virgin Orbit for its “Start Me Up” mission, which will take

An expedition to a deep-sea ridge, just north of the Hawaiian Islands, has revealed an ancient dried-out lake bed paved with what looks like a yellow brick road. The eerie scene was chanced upon by the exploration vessel Nautilus earlier this year, while surveying the Liliʻuokalani ridge within Papahānaumokuākea Marine National Monument (PMNM). PMNM is

Fractal patterns can be found everywhere from snowflakes to lightning to the jagged edges of coastlines. Beautiful to behold, their repetitive nature can also inspire mathematical insights into the chaos of the physical landscape. A new example of these mathematical oddities has been uncovered in a type of magnetic substance known as spin ice, and

Archaic humans may have worked out how to sail across the sea to new lands as far back as nearly half a million years ago. According to a new analysis of shorelines during the mid-Chibanian age, there’s no other way these ancient hominins could have reached what we now call the Aegean Islands. Yet archaeologists

Looking over the dusty expanse of a Martian lava plain, some 87 million kilometers away, NASA’s Mars Insight lander may have just sent home its last view of the red planet. Since it commenced data collection early in 2019, the lander has revolutionized our understanding of the Martian interior. Now, its solar panels are coated

With their massive bodies and giant plumes of poop, great whales can move a whole lot of organic material around our planet. Depending on the animal’s numbers, this might make them a valuable carbon sink, researchers propose. University of Alaska Southeast marine biologist Heidi Pearson and colleagues review the scientific literature in a new paper,

Putting a screen in front of a child is a tried and trusted way of keeping them entertained and quiet – and it works pretty well for adults, too – but as a constant calming technique, it may have its drawbacks, according to a new study. Researchers looked at the way digital devices were used

The deal comes exactly two years after Lockheed Martin sought to buy Aerojet in a $4.4 billion bid WASHINGTON — L3Harris Technologies on Dec. 18 announced an agreement to acquire Aerojet Rocketdyne for $4.7 billion.   The deal comes exactly two years after Lockheed Martin sought to buy Aerojet in a $4.4 billion bid that was

It’s been a big year for the clitoris. In January, scientists discovered bottlenose dolphins have a large S-shaped clitoris that might be better placed for pleasure than our own species’ version. And just last month, researchers realized they had once again underestimated the female sex organ, when a study showed more than ten thousand nerve

Thousands of years ago, a man living in what is now India wrote down all the grammatical guidelines that govern Sanskrit; one of the earliest documented languages in the ancient world. His name was Pāṇini, and his 4,000-some grammatical sūtras, or rules, are supposed to work like an algorithm that can generate grammatically correct words

Earth is the only planet in the Universe known to host life, but even it was desolate at first. About 4 billion years ago, something happened to give our sterile rock the building blocks of life. Amino acids, for example, needed to exist before Earth could have proteins, a vital component of all life forms.

Some parts of the Arctic don’t look very polar anymore. Many regions are likely transforming from snowfall- to rainfall-dominant climates, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. “At the fringes, the transition is essentially occurring already,” John Walsh, chief scientist at the International Arctic Research Center at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, said in

The Lensa photo and video editing app has shot into social media prominence in recent weeks, after adding a feature that lets you generate stunning digital portraits of yourself in contemporary art styles. It does that for just a small fee and the effort of uploading 10 to 20 different photographs of yourself. 2022 has

WASHINGTON — The White House announced the new membership of an advisory group of the National Space Council Dec. 16 with wholesale changes in the roster reflecting a new emphasis on climate change and workforce issues. Vice President Kamala Harris, chair of the National Space Council, announced a roster of 30 members of the Users’

Bipedalism – walking upright on two legs – is a defining feature of humans, thought to have developed in our ancient relatives as they crept away from the woodlands to take advantage of open spaces. A new study exploring the behavior of wild chimpanzees suggests the evolution of bipedalism may in fact have been a

Scientists have made a “breakthrough” in their quest to harness nuclear fusion. The US Department of Energy officially announced the milestone in fusion energy research on Tuesday. For the first time, researchers created a nuclear fusion reaction that produced more energy than they put into it. The experiment, conducted on December 5 at Lawrence Livermore

The fire that nearly destroyed the Notre Dame Cathedral in 2019 has led to the discovery of two mysterious lead coffins hidden beneath its floor. The sarcophagi were unearthed earlier this year during a dig by France’s national archaeological institute, Inrap, but it was only recently announced what was found inside. From the ashes and

In May, NASA scientists said the Voyager 1 spacecraft was sending back inaccurate data from its attitude-control system [AACS]. In order to find a fix, engineers dug through decades-old manuals. The Voyager team solved the mysterious glitch in late August, NASA officials wrote in an update. Turns out, the spacecraft was beaming information using a

A plastic mist descends from the sky each day. You can’t see it. Or feel it. It has no smell or taste. But researchers think we are seriously underestimating the invisible downpour. New estimates by a team of scientists from the University of Auckland in New Zealand suggest an average of nearly 5000 microplastic particles

WASHINGTON — Two African countries became the first from the continent to join the Artemis Accords as the United States works to bring more emerging space nations into the agreement. During the Space Forum portion of the U.S.-Africa Leaders Summit here Dec. 13, NASA Administrator Bill Nelson announced that Rwanda and Nigeria would sign the

The history of cat domestication stretches back nearly 10,000 years, evidence from a new genetic study shows, and the bond between humans and felines was most likely sparked by a shift in the lifestyles of our ancestors. An international team of researchers looked at the genotypes of more than 1,000 random-bred cats from Europe, Asia

The US Department of Energy said Sunday it would announce a “major scientific breakthrough” this week after media reported a federal laboratory had recently achieved a major milestone in nuclear fusion research. The Financial Times reported Sunday that scientists in the California-based Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) had achieved a “net energy gain” from an

The Nazca desert in Peru is like an art gallery for the gods above. Yet even with decades of surveyance from the skies, we’ve barely explored a small wing of this fading collection of giants among the stones. Last year, an archaeologist in Peru told The Guardian he thought scientists had found only 5 percent

Light that has traveled for over 13.4 billion years to reach our neighborhood of space has been confirmed as originating from the earliest, most distant galaxy detected yet. That places the most distant of these four very young objects at the very dawn of the Universe, just a short time after the Big Bang –

Updated at 5:45 p.m. Eastern after post-splashdown briefing. WASHINGTON — Fifty years to the day after the last Apollo moon mission touched down on the lunar surface, NASA’s plans to return to the moon took a major step forward with the successful splashdown of the Orion spacecraft to end the Artemis 1 mission. The Orion

Kneading is when cats massage an object with the front paws, which extend and retract, one paw at a time. This massaging action, named for its resemblance to kneading dough, is repeated rhythmically. You may have spotted your cat kneading and wondered how on Earth they developed such a behavior. So, why do cats knead?

An alloy of chromium, cobalt, and nickel has just given us the highest fracture toughness ever measured in a material on Earth. It has exceptionally high strength and ductility, leading to what a team of scientists has called “outstanding damage tolerance”. Moreover – and counterintuitively – these properties increase as the material gets colder, suggesting

An encounter with a mysterious and extinct human relative – the Denisovans – has left a mark on the immune traits of modern Papuans, in particular those living on New Guinea Island. This is a new discovery we describe in a study published in PLOS Genetics today. It further suggests that our modern human diversity