Science

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

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