Science

Something rather monstrous happens to the nematode Allodiplogaster sudhausi when reduced to snacking on boring old fungus. Scientists have discovered it develops a giant mouth and feasts on other worms, including those from its own family. This new form has been named the teratostomatous morph, with “teras” being an ancient Greek word for monster. Two

Neutrinos are abundant subatomic particles that have a crucial role in the composition of the Universe. Initially considered massless, these barely-detectable particles ought to weigh something according to updated theories. Exactly what that measurement is has yet to be determined experimentally. An international team of scientists has come up with a new way to solving

A recent mission from the American spaceflight company, Virgin Galactic, is facing public backlash after it carried the remains of two extinct hominins into space. The University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa, is custodian of the fossils and its researchers are celebrating the event as a “historic first” and “a tribute to science

Now officially known as unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAPs), ‘UFOs’ have certainly long captivated our curiosity. NASA commissioned a study team in 2022 to investigate such hard-to-easily-classify reports, and tomorrow they’re revealing the highly anticipated findings at a media briefing. The scarcity of high-quality observations of UAPs – defined as objects in the sky that are

For the first time, world demand for oil, gas and coal is forecast to peak this decade due to the “spectacular” growth of cleaner energy technologies and electric cars, the International Energy Agency’s chief said Tuesday. The IEA’s annual World Energy Outlook, due out next month, will show that “the world is on the cusp

We might soon be able to record the tunes we hear in our dreams, thanks to a system that’s under development. A team from the startup REMspace, run as part of the Phase Research Center in Russia, has come up with a combination of hardware and software able to decode a melody being played via

PARIS – In six months, Portuguese startup NeuraSpace has gone from 25 to 250 satellites on its space traffic management platform. “For NeuraSpace, the ball is rolling,” Chiara Manfletti, NeuraSpace chief operating officer, told SpaceNews at the World Satellite Business Week conference here. The latest customer is South Africa’s Dragonfly Aerospace. Dragonfly announced plans Sept.

From their astute ability to read our emotions to their impressive language and number comprehension, canine powers of understanding continue to amaze. Now it seems they may also be able to listen to us in their sleep. A small pilot study of 13 dogs reveals dogs’ brains deep in the throes of slumber light up

Glass might look and feel like a perfectly ordered solid, but up close its chaotic arrangement of particles more closely resemble the tumultuous mess of a freefalling liquid frozen in time. Known as amorphous solids, materials in this state defy easy explanation. New research involving computation and simulation is yielding clues. In particular, it suggests

Heart in your throat. Butterflies in your stomach. Bad gut feeling. These are all phrases many people use to describe fear and anxiety. You have likely felt anxiety inside your chest or stomach, and your brain usually doesn’t hurt when you’re scared. Many cultures tie cowardice and bravery more to the heart or the guts

The Milky Way should be teeming with small black holes. Somewhere out there, lurking in the corners of the galaxy, an estimated 10 million to 1 billion stellar mass black holes are thought to be just hanging out, dark and mysterious. Because we can’t usually see them, unless they’re active, we can’t take a census.

Some parts of the United States are hitting temperatures “too hot for safe fan use” twice as often as they did decades ago, new research shows. Analyzing hourly weather data from the past 20 years and between 1950 and 1969, Luke Parsons, a climate scientist at Duke University, and colleagues found that more US residents

In an effort to create robots capable of controlling their own life-cycles, researchers have developed squishy little devices that can melt themselves into a puddle of goo. “We have mimicked death in a life cycle where the robot could end itself,” Seoul National University engineer Min-Ha Oh told Peter Grad at Tech Xplore. This ‘death’

TAMPA, Fla. — Viasat’s U.K. subsidiary is partnering with Oxford Space Systems, a British satellite antenna specialist, to develop a 50% lighter high-speed communications terminal to improve the mobility of dismounted soldiers. The companies see the potential for a Ka-band satellite communications system that is 15 kilograms or less, Viasat UK managing director Hisham Awad

As elephants wander the African savannah, they might keep in touch with relatives by calling out their individual ‘names’. Researchers have found evidence that wild savannah elephants in Kenya label each other with specific vocal sounds, which they then use to communicate. The research is not yet peer-reviewed, but if the results can be verified

There are several perfectly good reasons why water isn’t a popular medium for calligraphers to write in. Constantly shifting and swirling, it doesn’t take long for ink to diffuse and flow out of formation. An ingenious ‘pen’ developed by the researchers from Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (JGU) and the Technical University of Darmstadt in Germany,

You’re running, but you’re not going anywhere. You’re falling, but you never hit the ground. You’re watching your loved one waste away, but there’s nothing you can do about it. If you’re like most people, then you might be covered in a cold sweat by now, recalling a nightmare. Though our dreams are highly personal,

A comet called Nishimura discovered just a month ago could be visible to the naked eye this weekend, offering stargazers a once-in-a-437-year chance to observe the celestial visitor. The ball of rock and ice, whose exact size remains unknown, is named after the Japanese amateur astronomer Hideo Nishimura who first spotted it on August 12.

​An unprecedentedly violent volcanic eruption that triggered a tsunami off the Pacific island nation of Tonga in 2022 unleashed the fastest underwater currents ever recorded, according to a study published on Thursday. The submerged Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai Volcano sent rocks, ash and gas racing across the seafloor at 122 kilometers (76 miles) per hour in

WASHINGTON — Redwire announced it successfully 3D-printed human tissue in microgravity, a step towards more ambitious biotech applications in space. The company said Sept. 7 that a human knee meniscus, printed on its 3D BioFabrication Facility (BFF) on the International Space Station, was now in the lab on Earth after returning on the Crew Dragon

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,