Science

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

We have identified the coldest star ever found to produce radio waves – a brown dwarf too small to be a regular star and too massive to be a planet. Our findings, published today [July 13] in the Astrophysical Journal Letters, detail the detection of pulsed radio emission from this star, called WISE J0623. Despite

In 2021, researchers at Purdue University announced that they had developed the whitest paint on Earth. The color is so white that it can reflect over 98% of light. This is particularly useful because light generates heat – and we here on Earth are running a bit hot these days. If used on a building,

Astronomers have discovered more than 5,000 planets outside of the Solar System to date. The grand question is whether any of these planets are home to life. To find the answer, astronomers will likely need more powerful telescopes than exist today. I am an astronomer who studies astrobiology and planets around distant stars. For the

WASHINGTON — House and Senate appropriators have drafted bills that would give NASA slightly less money in 2024 than it received in 2023, rather than the significant increase the administration requested. The Senate Appropriations Committee advanced a commerce, justice and science (CJS) spending bill for fiscal year 2024 on a 28–1 vote during a July

Magpies and crows are using anti-bird spikes collected from buildings to build nests. These long metal rods are intended to discourage birds from hanging around, but some crafty urban avians in Europe have found ways to take advantage of the deterrent. “It’s actually like a joke,” says biologist Auke-Florian Hiemstra of Naturalis Biodiversity Center in

Three objects spotted lurking in the murk of the Cosmic Dawn could be powered by collisions between particles made not of normal star stuff but the enigmatic material known as dark matter. Using data from the James Webb Space Telescope, a team of theoretical astrophysicists has determined that three galaxies – named JADES-GS-z13-0, JADES-GS-z12-0, and

When aliens or our distant progeny sift through layers of sediment 500,000 years from now to decode the Earth’s past, they will find unusual evidence of the abrupt change that upended life half-a-million years earlier: chicken bones. That is the conclusion of scientists whose findings are offered as proof that rapid expansion of human appetites

A retired cosmological theory should be given a second chance at explaining anomalies in our Universe, according to theoretical physicist Rajendra Gupta from the University of Ottawa in Canada. By marrying the existing expanding Universe theory with a fringe explanation called the tired light hypothesis, Gupta has found the Big Bang could have taken place

Many common drugs consist of chemicals sourced from crude oil, a situation that needs to change if we’re to reduce our dependence on fossil fuels. Now scientists have managed to make two well-known painkillers, acetaminophen (also known as paracetamol) and ibuprofen, out of a compound found in pine trees. The compound is also a waste