Science

If any animal were said to be born from Earth’s belly, it might as well be the periodical cicada. The synchronized mass ‘birth’ of this incredible insect is one of the greatest unsolved mysteries of the natural world. In North America, broods of juvenile cicadas, called nymphs, quietly develop underground in the soil, suckling sap

Scientists are always looking for the next weird and wonderful material, and they’ve just found it: A bosonic correlated insulator to give it its technical name, which is both a new material and, indeed, a whole new state of matter. It’s a lattice formed from a layer of tungsten diselenide and a layer of tungsten

A smattering of ancient rock walls along the river Nile in Sudan appear to represent the oldest known hydraulics system of their kind. New findings suggest people living in the ancient empire of Nubia in northern Sudan were manipulating the river to their advantage as far back as 3,000 years ago. River ‘groynes‘ are rigid

An object orbiting a star 1,400 light-years away is seriously confronting our notions of what’s possible in the Universe. It’s a brown dwarf, the curious category of objects that straddle the gap between planets and stars, but it’s on such a close orbit with its very hot host star that its temperature exceeds a blistering

A new study identifies which parts of our airways are getting clogged with microplastics as we inhale about 16.2 bits an hour. That’s a credit card’s worth of microplastic going into our respiratory system a week. We’re also eating and drinking these plastic particles, as microplastics are now everywhere, including in our veins. They’re in

Engineers have demonstrated something marvelous. Almost any material can be used to create a device that continuously harvests energy from humid air. It’s not a development that’s ready for practical application, but it does, its creators say, transcend some of the limitations of other harvesters. All the material needs is to be pocked with nanopores

WASHINGTON — Operating under a veil of secrecy pierced only by the ignition of the rocket’s engines, Rocket Lab launched the first suborbital variant of its Electron vehicle June 17. The vehicle, called Hypersonic Accelerator Suborbital Test Electron (HASTE), lifted off from Launch Complex 2 at the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport on Wallops Island, Virginia, at

Remains of a species of herbivorous dinosaur previously unknown in the Southern Hemisphere have been discovered in Chile, challenging long-held beliefs about the range of duck-billed dinosaurs, scientists said Friday. Measuring up to 4 meters (13 feet) in length and weighing a ton, Gonkoken nanoi lived 72 million years ago in the extreme south of

Showers of particles that erupt when cosmic rays collide with Earth’s atmosphere may have just given us a viable underground navigation system. Cosmic ray muons raining down on, and partially through, the planet’s surface have allowed scientists to calculate an individual’s position in a building’s basement, a location in which satellite global positioning systems don’t

Archaeologists in Lima, Peru, made an astonishing discovery under thousands of pounds of trash – a 3,000-year-old mummy that was likely a sacrifice. The specimen was uncovered this week by archaeologists and San Marcos University students, according to Reuters. They first spotted it thanks to its exposed hair and skull. But before examining the ancient

If a planet has an atmosphere, it’s probably leaking, some faster than others. And astronomers have just found a hum-dinger: an atmosphere so leaky it’s spurting out in giant jets. The exoplanet responsible for this activity is HAT-P-32b, a gas giant some 1.8 times the radius of Jupiter, around 923 light-years away. It’s spitting out

Ocean bays that pinch West Antarctica are home to two distinct populations of Turquet’s octopus (Pareledone turqueti). The shared secrets of their ancestors do not bode well for the future health of our planet. A recent DNA analysis of the two geographically separated octopus populations, published earlier this year ahead of peer review, indicates they

ChatGPT is proving to be a rather alluring assistant in many professions, but it’s not without risks, and some companies have banned the chatbot at work. It may seem obvious that uploading work-related information to an online artificial intelligence platform owned by another company is a potential security and privacy breach. Still, ChatGPT can be

WASHINGTON — Arianespace has postponed the final launch of the Ariane 5, potentially for several weeks, after discovering a potential problem with pyrotechnical systems on the rocket. Arianespace announced June 15 it was postponing the 117th and final launch of the Ariane 5, which had been scheduled for June 16 from Kourou, French Guiana. A

Our planet’s convoluted history of evolving life has spawned countless weird and wonderful creatures, but none excite evolutionary biologists – or divide taxonomists – quite like crabs. When researchers attempted to reconcile the evolutionary history of crabs in all their raucous glory in a study published in 2021, they arrived at the conclusion that the

Ultra-high pressure can have strange effects in physics and chemistry, and in a new study, high-pressure modeling has led to the prediction of four new compounds: compounds that don’t form in normal ways, have crystal structures we’ve never seen before, and can even act as superconductors in certain temperatures. Those compounds are Li14Cs, Li8Cs, Li7Cs,

Just over two decades ago, as the new millennium began, it seemed that tracks left by our ancient human ancestors dating back more than about 50,000 years were excessively rare. Only four sites had been reported in the whole of Africa at that time. Two were from East Africa: Laetoli in Tanzania and Koobi Fora

The new discovery of six more runaway stars in the Milky Way has landed the fastest object of this type yet detected in the galaxy. In fact, two of the stars are record-breakers, with heliocentric radial velocities faster than any ever seen for runaway stars. The star J1235 clocks in at 1,694 kilometers (1,053 miles)

Bringing your garden indoors and growing the right plants on your office wall (along with some sophisticated tech) could scrub the air of several common toxic pollutants, new research suggests. The findings come from scientists at the University of Technology Sydney (UTS) in Australia, who investigated whether a vertical wall system fitted with indoor plants

The idea of artificial intelligence overthrowing humankind has been talked about for decades – and programs such as ChatGPT have only renewed these concerns. So how likely is it that we’ll be able to control high-level computer super-intellgence? Scientists back in 2021 crunched the numbers. The answer? Almost definitely not. The catch is that controlling

NASA’s focus on human exploration beyond LEO reaching to the Moon and beyond is nothing less than thrilling. Last month, the Artemis 2 crew members were announced, and NASA has newly minted the not-too-subtly named Moon to Mars Program Office headed by Amit Kshatriya. The agency is boldly directing its energy toward true human space

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