Science

There’s a harsh, brutal reality to the poultry industry, which in 2021 alone supplied about 286 eggs per person in a growing US population: Billions of male chicks are routinely culled by being crushed alive or gassed at hen hatcheries worldwide. Chick culling arises from the fact that chicks from egg-laying hens are not typically

WASHINGTON — Greg Kuperman, program manager at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s Strategic Technology Office, worries that innovations emerging from the commercial space industry will never reach potential customers in the U.S. military.  A key reason for that, Kuperman told SpaceNews, is that discussions about next-generation technologies, particularly in the space sector, quickly veer

Parrots can get a lot out of video calls with their feathered friends just like we can from Zoom meetings with our favorite humans. Findings from a recent study by researchers from Northeastern University and MIT Media Lab in the US and the University of Glasgow in the UK could point to ways to better

A refined hunt for the extremely rare transformation of the Higgs boson has delivered results, providing the first evidence of a process that could hint at unknown particles. Reconciling the results of several years’ worth of proton crashes inside two different detectors at the European Organization for Nuclear Research’s (CERN) Large Hadron Collider (LHC), physicists

The pressure to publish or perish has led some desperate researchers to pay for fake papers to pad their resumés. Worse still, some of these sham papers are getting published in official scientific journals. A computer program designed to detect these made-up studies suggests far too many are slipping past peer review. The study was

Astronomers studying black holes have serendipitously found another rarity: A dead star rocketing away from its birth supernova, leaving a comet-like trail of radio emission in its wake. Named PSR J1914+1054g, the star is just the fourth known of its kind: a radio pulsar kicked at high velocity across space, for which astronomers have observed

Diplomats from 175 countries gathering in Paris for plastics treaty talks on Monday may want to pack an umbrella, but not just because there’s a chance of rain. France’s capital will also be showered during the five-day talks by billions of microplastic particles falling from the sky, according to the first-ever plastics pollution weather forecast.

Can a computer learn from the past and anticipate what will happen next, like a human? You might not be surprised to hear that some cutting-edge AI models could achieve this feat, but what about a computer that looks a little different – more like a tank of water? We have built a small proof-of-concept

WASHINGTON — NASA and Boeing said May 26 they are still working towards a July launch of the CST-100 Starliner on a crewed test flight despite “emerging issues” and concerns raised by a safety panel. In a statement issued just before the close of business ahead of a holiday weekend, the two organizations said they

Ask anyone living in a coastal area of the UK and they’ll confirm that seagulls can be a nuisance. These birds’ pilfering of food knows no bounds, and no one is safe from one of their thieving attacks. For many people, this behavior is the result of the gulls’ inherent aggression. But in reality, gulls

A reconstruction of oral microflora genomes spanning a whopping 100,000-year period of human history may have revealed a surprising shift in the kinds of bacteria that like to call our mouths home. Researchers from across Germany and the US teamed up to decode DNA extracted from the dental plaque of human and Neanderthal remains, using

Uranus takes 84 years to orbit the Sun, and so that last time that planet’s north polar region was pointed at Earth, radio telescope technology was in its infancy. But now, scientists have been using radio telescopes like the Very Large Array (VLA) the past few years as Uranus has slowly revealed more and more

Fungi pose a significant threat to crops worldwide, scientists warn in a new commentary, with increasingly “devastating” effects on our food supply. We tend to worry more about pathogens that sicken humans directly, especially viruses and bacteria. But while corn smut and stem rust might not scare us like Ebola or E. coli, maybe they

WASHINGTON — The chair of a NASA safety panel urged the agency not to rush into a crewed test flight of Boeing’s CST-100 Starliner vehicle, calling for an independent “deep look” at technical issues with the spacecraft. Speaking at a May 25 public meeting of the Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel, Patricia Sanders, chair of the

New research reveals that mushrooms and other fungi can keep themselves cooler than their surroundings. The discovery could tell us more about these organisms’ evolution and how they might respond to continued global warming. Like some of the best scientific discoveries, this temperature regulation was discovered accidentally, as one of the researchers was testing out

Scientists using ultraviolet photography say they have found an old version of a chapter of the Bible that was hidden underneath a different section of text for more than 1,500 years. Historian Grigory Kessel of the Austrian Academy of Sciences announced the discovery in an article in the journal, New Testament Studies, earlier this year.

We don’t know what the first stars in the Universe were like. Peering into the distant reaches of the early Universe, we’ve seen only traces of their presence. But a new line of evidence traced in images from the James Webb Space Telescope seems to agree with a recent idea that is gaining traction: that

A decades-old global environmental pact has averted huge amounts of sea ice loss in the Arctic, new research shows. Banning ozone-depleting gases under the historic 1987 Montreal Protocol has delayed the first, feared ice-free Arctic summer by as much as 15 years, the study found – once again demonstrating that global treaties can work to

ST. LOUIS — The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency is planning a new procurement of commercial services to monitor activities from space.  “We’re preparing for commercial advancements in analytics through our upcoming Luno contract,” NGA’s director Vice Adm. Frank Whitworth said May 22 at the GEOINT 2023 symposium. Luno is the follow-on to NGA’s economic indicator monitoring

Nurturing a forest ecosystem back to life after it’s been logged is not always easy. It can take a lot of hard work and careful monitoring to ensure biodiversity thrives again. But monitoring biodiversity can be costly, intrusive, and resource-intensive. That’s where ecological acoustic survey methods, or “ecoacoustics”, come into play. Indeed, the planet sings.

The delicious way that champagne bubbles tickle the tongue is based on how ‘soapy’ the wine is, according to new research. When poured into a glass, carbonated drinks don’t all fizz the same way. Sparkling water creates a firework-like display of popping bubbles, bursting forth across the entire surface of a glass. Beer has bubbles

The next time you whisper sweet-nothings into someone’s ear, you might want to target their left side. Neuroscientists at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne (EPFL), Lausanne University Hospital and the University of Lausanne in Switzerland have discovered a strange bias in our perception of pleasing voices. According to the brain scans of 13

The largest and most powerful solar telescope on Earth has just given us breathtaking new views of the surface of the Sun. In a series of new images, the Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope’s observations reveal the intricate details of sunspot regions, the roiling convective cells, and the motion of plasma in the solar atmosphere

France is preparing for temperatures of 4 degrees Celsius (7.2 degrees Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial levels in the country by century’s end as the world falls short in meeting climate change targets, a cabinet minister warned Sunday. Christophe Bechu, minister for ecological transition, told the weekly JDD paper that his government was no longer banking on

WASHINGTON — Three U.S. government agencies are undertaking studies to examine the safety issues associated with a new generation of launch vehicles that use liquid oxygen and methane propellants. At a May 15 meeting of the Federal Aviation Administration’s Commercial Space Transportation Advisory Group (COMSTAC), FAA officials described efforts that are underway to understand the

Earth’s hot and churning insides are largely still a mystery to scientists. Even at shallower depths, the crusty exterior of our planet contains plenty of unknowns. Magma deep in Earth’s mantle that rises to form continental crust is inherently different to the magma that seeps from mid-ocean ridges. Molten material that bursts from volcanoes on

A team of chemists from Osaka University in Japan have identified a rare property in a crystal. When exposed to the cool glow of ultraviolet (UV) light, the solid organic material transforms into a liquid. What’s more, this crystal undergoes an interesting series of changes in its luminescence as it melts that point to changes

Human history is intimately entwined with the use and control of fire. However, working out when our relationship with fire began and how it subsequently evolved has been notoriously difficult. This is partly due to the incomplete nature of archaeological records, and also because fire use was fleeting, making burnt remains difficult to detect. But

How thick is the crust of Mars? This question is what a recent study published in Geophysical Research Letters attempted to answer as it reported on data from a magnitude 4.7 marsquake recorded in May 2022 by NASA’s InSight lander, which remains the largest quake ever recorded on another planetary body. As it turns out,