Science

Earth’s largest continental rift, the East African Rift (EAR) system, has been something of a mystery for geologists – but a new study combining computer models with GPS satellite data appears to have found an explanation. Rifts are caused by tectonic plates moving away from each other, leading to the lithosphere (Earth’s crust and upper

In the most massive test to date, physicists have probed a major paradox in quantum mechanics and found it still holds even for clouds of hundreds of atoms. Using two entangled Bose-Einstein condensates, each consisting of 700 atoms, a team of physicists co-led by Paolo Colciaghi and Yifan Li of the University of Basel in

There are all kinds of bacteria living in our gut, contributing to the healthy (or unhealthy) processes going on inside our bodies, but it turns out that we’ve lost a lot of the microbes that we once shared with our ancient primate ancestors. Looking at genetic material in the guts of modern-day chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes

Claims the US government has secretly retrieved crashed alien spacecraft and their non-human occupants are hardly new. They are firmly entrenched in post-war American UFO lore and conspiracy theory, inspiring the most famous narrative in ufology: the “Roswell incident“. Now, however, journalists Leslie Kean and Ralph Blumenthal have injected fresh vigor into these aging claims

A lone polar bear, marooned on a shrinking slab of sea ice, has become a heart-wrenching poster child for the effects of climate change in the Arctic. New climate models from an international team of researchers predict that in as few as 10 years, that iconic creature could have nowhere left to stand in the

“Splinternet” refers to the way the internet is being splintered – broken up, divided, separated, locked down, boxed up, or otherwise segmented. Whether for nation-states or corporations, there’s money and control to be had by influencing what information people can access and share, as well as the costs that are paid for this access. The

Dale Skran is the National Space Society’s chief operating officer and senior vice president. Dale worked at Bell Labs for 17 years and held executive positions at Ascend Communications, Sonus Networks, and CMware, Inc.  David Huntsman is a Space Frontier Foundation member who serves on the Alliance for Space Development’s board of directors. The Outer

Really, we should envy spiders. Imagine being able to make silk like they do, flinging it around to get from place to place, always having a strong-as-steel safety line, or spinning a comfy hammock whenever they need a rest. The fascinating properties of spider silk make it no wonder that scientists have been trying to

David Smith, a retired print technician from the north of England, was pursuing his hobby of looking for interesting shapes when he stumbled onto one unlike any other in November. When Smith shared his shape with the world in March, excited fans printed it onto T-shirts, sewed it into quilts, crafted cookie cutters, or used

Not all animals are the same. Even within a species, some are bolder and better at solving problems than others. We have found this to be true in the case of the critically endangered Bali myna, a rare bird found only on the island of Bali in Indonesia. Fewer than 50 adult Bali mynas remain

One very persistent story about the mid-20th century space race involves the development of the space pen. When humans left the surface of Earth for the weightless environment of space for the first time in the 1960s, they quickly found that ballpoint pens designed for the gravity environment of Earth were not quite so effective

Greenhouse gas emissions are at an all-time high, with yearly emissions equivalent to 54 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide. Humanity has caused surface temperatures to warm by 1.14 °C since the late 1800s – and this warming is increasing at an unprecedented rate of over 0.2 °C per decade. The highest temperatures recorded over land

She’s out there somewhere, lurking in a parallel universe of possibilities. All you have to do to summon her into being is type the right prompt into an AI image generator. Like a digital incantation, the words will reveal the eerie face of a middle-aged woman with dead eyes, a vacant stare, and a disturbing

[embedded content] SAN FRANCISCO — A new Astroscale video shows how the End of Life Services by Astroscale-Multiple mission, ELSA-M, will capture and deorbit a OneWeb communications satellite. “ELSA-M will be the world’s first commercial removal of a client’s inactive spacecraft,” Alex Godfrey, Astroscale business development manager, told SpaceNews. In 2025, Astroscale plans to send

There are a lot of ways that scientists can figure out what’s going on beneath Earth’s surface – like measuring seismic waves as they travel underground – but perhaps nothing beats a really, really, really deep hole. As per China’s state-run Xinhua news agency, work is now underway to dig a 11,100-meter (36,417-foot) borehole in

Paleontologists in South Africa said Monday they have found the oldest known burial site in the world, containing remains of a small-brained distant relative of humans previously thought incapable of complex behaviour. Led by renowned palaeoanthropologist Lee Berger, researchers said they discovered several specimens of Homo naledi – a tree-climbing, Stone Age hominid – buried

Wind that blows from close to the surface of the Sun has now been traced back to its source by a daredevil solar probe rivaling Icarus in its audacity. In November 2021, the Parker Solar Probe skimmed within a more-than-hair-singeing 8.5 million kilometers (5.3 million miles) of the Sun, a feat enabling it to detect

A single injection of an experimental gene therapy treatment may be all that is required to permanently stop a female cat from reproducing, according to a small, proof-of-concept study. Of the more than 600 million-some domestic felines that wander our planet, an astounding 80 percent are believed to be strays, void of owners or homes.

Apple recently unveiled its Vision Pro headset at the Worldwide Developers Conference in California. With it, Apple is venturing into a market of head-mounted devices (HMDs) – which are usually just displays, but in this case is more of a complete computer attached to your head – as well as the worlds of virtual reality

CHANTILLY, Va. —  With a ceremonial ribbon cutting, the Space Systems Command on June 6 marked the opening of its new office and conference center dedicated to doing business with the commercial space industry. The command named the facility COSMIC, short for Commercial Space Marketplace for Innovation and Collaboration.  The Space Systems Command, which is

Fruit flies can be truly annoying when they are buzzing around your living room or landing in your wine. But we have much to thank these tiny nuisances for – they revolutionized biological and medical science. Flies and mosquitoes both belong to Diptera, the group of insects that have only two wings (from the Greek

Physicists have long puzzled over why there is more matter in the Universe than its flipped twin, antimatter. Without this imbalance, the two types of material would have canceled out, leaving nothing but a boring glow in the vast emptiness of space. Somehow, at some point, something changed in the way the Universe works on

Science is founded on hard evidence, but ironically, many of the stories we tell about scientists and their experiments are not based on much truth. An apple falling on Newton’s head didn’t suddenly stimulate his idea of gravity; Darwin’s theory of evolution wasn’t founded on the beaks of finches. And Benjamin Franklin certainly didn’t discover

Say you’re an alien civilization with advanced technology looking to communicate with other civilizations throughout the Milky Way galaxy. Where would you be setting up your beacon? Probably close to home, right? The galactic center – that crowded, fascinating region around supermassive black hole Sagittarius A* – is one of the best spots in the

The colorful chaos of a wildflower meadow is a much ‘greener’ alternative to a perfectly manicured patch of grass, a team of researchers led by the University of Cambridge says. Cultivating a lawn is a highly popular, centuries-old tradition in much of the Western world. Yet as great as these uniform blankets of green are

Since its founding in 2016, Elon Musk‘s neurotechnology company Neuralink has had the ambitious mission to build a next-generation brain implant with at least 100 times more brain connections than devices currently approved by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA). The company has now reached a significant milestone, having received FDA approval to begin

WASHINGTON — The United Arab Emirates has released new details about its planned mission to the main asteroid belt, one that is similar to an ongoing NASA mission. The UAE Space Agency said its Emirates Mission to the Asteroid Belt (EMA) is scheduled to launch in March 2028, flying by six asteroids in the main

Much like symbolically walking a mile in someone else’s shoes, visual perspective-taking is ‘seeing’ through someone else’s eyes: We follow someone’s gaze to learn what caught their attention, or we may even try and work out what someone else is seeing if our view is blocked. A new study by cognitive zoologists from Lund University

In addition to everything else that winemakers have to consider in the production of a perfect bottle is the smell of the drink: In certain types of winemaking processes, that smell can end up being rather undesirable. Aromas that you might describe as “rotten eggs”, “rubber” and “canned corn” are often termed as ‘reductive’ and

The sex of human and other mammal babies is decided by a male-determining gene on the Y chromosome. But the human Y chromosome is degenerating and may disappear in a few million years, leading to our extinction unless we evolve a new sex gene. The good news is two branches of rodents have already lost