Science

A giant creature thought to inhabit the waters of Scotland’s Loch Ness remains a popular subject of speculation, in spite of pretty thorough debunkings. One of the last plausible explanations for the beast has now too joined the discard pile. After careful investigation, data scientist Floe Foxon of Pinney Associates and the Folk Zoology Society

Scientists at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) continue to discover exotic particles that we’ve never seen before. The latest to be spotted in experiments is the first pentaquark to contain a strange quark. If you’re new to quarks, they’re the subatomic building blocks that make up matter, and the strange quark is one of six

In 2022, the Royal Australian Mint issued a $2 coin decorated with honeybees. Around 2,400 years earlier, a mint in the kingdom of Macedon had the same idea, creating a silver obol coin with a bee stamped on one side. Over the centuries between these two events, currency demonstrating a symbolic link between honey and

One of the most interesting baby planet systems in the Milky Way has just yielded a detection of water vapor. And not just anywhere, either. In the extended disk of dust and gas that still clings to the star PDS 70, the James Webb Space Telescope detected the molecular signature of water in the region

We know that meat has a substantial impact on the planet, and that plant-based diets are more environmentally sustainable. But exactly how much impact does the food we eat have on environmental outcomes and what difference would following a vegan diet make compared to consuming a high meat, or even low meat diet? We studied

What happens to the body when a human gets heatstroke? How can we protect ourselves in a warming planet? To answer these burning questions, Arizona researchers have deployed a robot that can breathe, shiver and sweat. The southwestern state’s capital Phoenix is currently enduring its longest heat wave in history: on Friday, the mercury exceeded

WASHINGTON — A NASA procurement document provides details about the plans of several companies that received unfunded Space Act Agreements for commercial space capabilities in June, as well as those who failed to make the cut. NASA selected seven companies June 15 for its Collaborations for Commercial Space Capabilities-2 (CCSC-2) initiative. Those companies will have

The secret to eternal life has been swimming in Earth’s oceans for millions of years. The ‘immortal jellyfish’ is so named because it can, theoretically, live forever. For all we know, some of these tiny, translucent blobs have been drifting along since well before the demise of the dinosaurs, around 66 million years ago. That

Theoretical physicists have a lot in common with lawyers. Both spend a lot of time looking for loopholes and inconsistencies in the rules that might be exploited somehow. Valeri P. Frolov and Andrei Zelnikov from the University of Alberta in Canada and Pavel Krtouš from Charles University in Prague probably couldn’t get you out of

Within months of starting his undergraduate at Stanford University, 18-year-old Theo Baker was already on the trail of a story that would lead him to become the youngest George Polk award winner in American journalism history. His reporting for The Stanford Daily has now culminated in the resignation of Stanford’s President: neuroscientist and billionaire Marc

The galaxy can throw some odd curveballs, but an exoplanet discovered 1,232 light-years away is one of the oddest yet. It’s WASP-193b, and while it’s nearly 50 percent bigger than Jupiter, it’s so light and fluffy that its overall density is comparable to that of cotton candy. It’s just a hair over 1 percent of

A mile-thick ice sheet in Greenland vanished around 416,000 years ago during a period of moderate natural warming, driving global sea rise to levels that would spell catastrophe for coastal regions today, a study said Thursday. The results overturn a long-held view that the world’s largest island was an impregnable fortress of ice over the

TAMPA, Fla. — The first Astranis-built satellite won’t be able to provide commercial broadband over Alaska for local telco Pacific Dataport because it can’t keep solar arrays pointed at the sun, the Californian manufacturer’s CEO John Gedmark said July 20.  Despite the failure of both solar array drive assemblies on Arcturus, used to position solar

Some parasites have taken the simple life to whole new extremes. Scientists have recently found a creepy, mind-controlling worm that is missing some of the most fundamental genes in the animal kingdom. Ironically, the super long and thin ‘hairworm’ (also known as a ‘horsehair worm’) completely lacks the cellular-level ‘hairs’ that allow most animal cells

File this under ‘That’s not supposed to happen!’: Scientists observed a metal healing itself, something never seen before. If this process can be fully understood and controlled, we could be at the start of a whole new era of engineering. A team from Sandia National Laboratories and Texas A&M University was testing the resilience of

A cave in Jerusalem’s western hills might have once been a divine prophecy site where Roman-era gentiles attempted to communicate with the dead. Three skulls and more than 100 ceramic lamps were found squeezed into the cave’s crevices, and two archaeologists in Israel speculate in a new paper that these were likely used to conjure

A strange radio signal pulsing from a spot 15,000 light-years away could point to an unconfirmed type of star. Called GPM J1839-10, the peculiar cosmic object has been caught flashing out radio waves every 22 minutes. That’s incredibly slow, compared to other sources of pulsing radio waves. Moreover, a deep dive into archival information reveals

Human-made climate change is supercharging natural weather phenomena to drive heatwaves roasting Asia, Europe and North America that could make 2023 the hottest year since records began, scientists say. Here experts explain how 2023 has got so hot, warning these record temperatures will get worse even if humanity sharply cuts its planet-warming gas emissions. ​El

Google’s artificial intelligence-powered medical chatbot has achieved a passing grade on a tough US medical licensing exam, but it’s answers still fall short of those from human doctors, a peer-reviewed study said on Wednesday. Last year the release of ChatGPT – whose developer OpenAI is backed by Google’s rival Microsoft – kicked off a race

CLEVELAND — The potential failure of a Viasat broadband satellite could result in a massive claim and a “huge hit” for the space insurance sector, one insurer warns. Viasat announced July 12 that it had encountered an “unexpected event” during the deployment of the large reflector on its ViaSat-3 Americas satellite after its April 30

Surfers often talk about how the sport helps them reconnect with nature, but a recent episode involving an otter with a love for surfboards shows just how brittle our love for wildlife really is. The authorities are trying to capture and remove said otter from her native environment for climbing onto a man’s surfboard in

Footage of thousands of tiny metal spheres set jiggling in a shallow tray has revealed an arrangement of particles once considered impossible. A team of physicists from the University of Paris-Saclay in France has observed an unusual combination of order and chaos known as a ‘quasicrystal’ emerging spontaneously in a granular material on a millimeter-scale

Almost immediately after the Titanic sank in April 1912, there were attempts to recover the wreckage and the bodies of those who had gone down with the ship. But the limited diving technology of the time prevented this from becoming a reality for more than seven decades. In 1985, the wreckage was found during a

It doesn’t look like much: a fuzzy gray scene, a fuzzy white blob in the center, a smaller, fainter fuzzy blob moving from left to right across the scene. What you’re looking at, though, is a marvel of science and engineering. It’s the view from the camera of a robotic orbiter named Mars Express, peering

Scorching weather gripped three continents on Sunday, whipping up wildfires and threatening to topple temperature records as the dire consequences of global warming take shape.​ Predictions of historic heat hung over swathes of Asia, Europe and the United States. In the Vatican, 15,000 people braved sweltering temperatures to hear Pope Francis lead prayer, using parasols

Anyone who has travelled by air in the past ten years will know how stressful airports can be. You didn’t leave home as early as you should have. In the mad rush to get to your gate, the security screening seems to slow everything down. And to add insult to injury, you’re met with the

WASHINGTON — As the House Science Committee considers a commercial space bill, industry officials advocated for key topics they believe should be included in that legislation. A July 13 hearing by the committee offered the industry an opportunity to weigh in on topics they believe should be included in a commercial space package that the

Long-lived fungi are the latest organisms to go under the microscope in search of new understandings as to why they don’t accrue life-limiting mutations, given their age. Researchers at Wageningen University in the Netherlands set out to compare “the peculiarities” of multicellular growth in filamentous fungi. What they ended up with was a new hypothesis

The ancient Romans were master builders and engineers, perhaps most famously represented by the still-functional aqueducts. And those architectural marvels rely on a unique construction material: pozzolanic concrete, a spectacularly durable material that gave Roman structures their incredible strength. Even today, one of their structures – the Pantheon, still intact and nearly 2,000 years old

Scientists have discovered the long-buried secret of a 17th-century French aristocrat 400 years after her death: She was using gold wire to keep her teeth from falling out. The body of Anne d’Alegre, who died in 1619, was discovered during an archaeological excavation at the Chateau de Laval in northwestern France in 1988. Embalmed in