Science

It’s easy to envisage other universes, governed by slightly different laws of physics, in which no intelligent life, nor indeed any kind of organized complex systems, could arise. Should we therefore be surprised that a universe exists in which we were able to emerge? That’s a question physicists including me have tried to answer for

Countless shelves line the walls of a basement at Denmark’s University of Odense, holding what is thought to be the world’s largest collection of brains. There are 9,479 of the organs, all removed from the corpses of mental health patients over the course of four decades until the 1980s. Preserved in formalin in large white

Earth, currently, is our only blueprint for planetary habitability. There may be life elsewhere out there in the big, wide galaxy, but ours is the only world on which we know, for a certainty, that it has emerged. The problem is that we’ve found nothing out there that’s exactly like our own planet: of the

An enormous stretch of seaweed measuring 5,000 miles (8,047 kilometers) wide is set to bring stench, pests, and bacteria to the beaches of Florida and Mexico. The “Great Atlantic Sargassum Belt” is a massive bloom of brown algae that stretches from the coast of West Africa to the Gulf of Mexico. It is the largest

The company behind the ChatGPT app that churns out essays, poems or computing code on command released Tuesday a long-awaited update of its artificial intelligence (AI) technology that it said would be safer and more accurate than its predecessor. GPT-4 has been widely awaited ever since ChatGPT burst onto the scene in late November, wowing

WASHINGTON — NASA and Axiom Space unveiled a prototype of the spacesuits that astronauts will wear on Artemis missions to the moon. At an event in Houston March 15, Axiom revealed the design of the suit, called the Axiom Extravehicular Mobility Unit (AxEMU), it will provide to NASA for missions starting with Artemis 3 in

We all had to make adjustments as the coronavirus pandemic unfolded – even zoo animals who were suddenly not seeing crowds of visitors pass by every single day. In a study published last year, researchers discovered how primates reacted to that shift, looking at the behavior of bonobos, chimpanzees, western lowland gorillas, and olive baboons,

Transferring information from one location to another without transmitting any particles or energy seems to run counter to everything we’ve learned in the history of physics. Yet there is some solid reasoning that this ‘counterfactual communication‘ might not only be plausible, but depending on how it works could reveal fundamental aspects of reality that have

There’s a new group of people on Earth who believe they’re aliens. Star people, or starseeds, are individuals who believe they have come to Earth from other dimensions to help heal the planet and guide humanity into the “golden age” – a period of great happiness, prosperity, and achievement. It might sound a little crazy

Compared to Earth, the Moon doesn’t have much going on. Where our planet’s surface features an impressive mix of windswept plains, ice-carved ravines, and volcanic mountain peaks, the lunar surface has impact craters. Lots of impact craters. Earth’s satellite is pocked and scarred from being pummeled with space shrapnel over billions of years, without the

The smoke from recent wildfires is threatening to slow and even reverse the recovery of Earth’s ozone layer – the same one that the world has worked so hard to heal since 1987. The ozone layer is a crucial part of the stratosphere that stops our planet from getting scorched by the Sun’s radiation. It’s

Advances in artificial intelligence are coming so hard and fast that a museum in San Francisco, the beating heart of the tech revolution, has imagined a memorial to the demise of humanity.​ “Sorry for killing most of humanity person with smile cap and mustache,” says a monitor welcoming a visitor to the “Misalignment Museum“, a

WASHINGTON — Executives seeking new businesses from connecting satellites directly to standard smartphones are divided over how quickly this market could grow. Regulatory challenges, potential spectrum interference, customer demand, and the need to fund and deploy constellations capable of voice and other high-bandwidth services are big question marks for this emerging market, according to Matt

In the Wasatch Mountains of the western US on the slopes above a spring-fed lake, there dwells a single giant organism that provides an entire ecosystem on which plants and animals have relied for thousands of years. Found in my home state of Utah, “Pando” is a 106-acre stand of quaking aspen clones. Although it

To take a picture, the best digital cameras on the market open their shutter for around around one four thousandths of a second. To snapshot atomic activity, you’d need a shutter that clicks a lot faster. Now scientists have come up with a way of achieving a shutter speed that’s a mere trillionth of a

Right now, your brain is keeping track of the passage of time without your awareness, letting you focus on better things like reading this story. This happens automatically, but not consistently. The brain’s perception of time can fluctuate, with some moments seeming to stretch or shrink relative to each objective second. While these wrinkles in

It’s the classic social faux pas. You’re in a happy clique, surrounded by all your friends – and one by one, you subsume them, absorbing them into yourself, until you’re all alone, a grotesque agglomeration alone in what was once a crowded environment. That seems to be what happened to a galaxy 9.2 billion years

A Lufthansa flight that had to land shortly after takeoff is just the latest example of extreme turbulence. Each year, pilots report an average of 5,500 encounters with severe or greater turbulence. And that number has increased in recent years, thanks to climate change. Several other events have occurred in 2023 alone. The pilot had

After 12 years of work, a huge team of researchers from the UK, US, and Germany have completed the largest and most complex brain map to date, describing every neural connection in the brain of a larval fruit fly. Though nowhere near the size and complexity of a human brain, it still covers a respectable

VICTORIA, British Columbia – Canada’s Department of National Defence is moving ahead with a new microsatellite project for space domain awareness.  The Redwing satellite will monitor objects in congested orbits and will be able to record and transmit tracking data from anywhere in its orbit, according to the department. Canadian Defence Minister Anita Anand announced

The Greek historian Herodotus reported over 2,000 years ago on a misguided forbidden experiment in which two children were prevented from hearing human speech so that a king could discover the true, unlearned language of human beings. Scientists now know that human language requires social learning and interaction with other people, a property shared with

In 2022, the physics Nobel prize was awarded for experimental work showing that the quantum world must break some of our fundamental intuitions about how the Universe works. Many look at those experiments and conclude that they challenge “locality” – the intuition that distant objects need a physical mediator to interact. And indeed, a mysterious

We humans may no longer have tails, but perhaps we have more in common with our smaller primate relatives than we thought. An analysis of accidentally broken stones used by macaques to crack nuts shows that monkeys have inadvertently been fracturing chunks of rock startlingly similar to the intentionally-created tools found at the world’s earliest

A purported exoplanet orbiting a star in the constellation of Eridanus associated with Star Trek‘s fictional Vulcan homeworld may have just been a figment in the star’s spectrum – a spectral specter. Analysis of the discovery data on several exoplanets across the galaxy has revealed that several detections were actually false positives: light fluctuations emitted

Japan could soon add more than 7,000 islands to its official list of land masses, more than doubling the number found in a tally conducted in 1987. It may sound absurd to have overlooked so many hulking chunks of land in previous counts, but with 370,000 square kilometers (140,000 square miles) of territory making up

It may sound surprising, but when times are tough and there is no other food available, some soil bacteria can consume traces of hydrogen in the air as an energy source. In fact, bacteria remove a staggering 70 million tonnes of hydrogen yearly from the atmosphere, a process that literally shapes the composition of the

WASHINGTON — Relativity Space will wait at least three days before making its next attempt to launch its Terran 1 rocket after propellant temperature issues scrubbed its first launch attempt March 8. Relativity was counting down to the inaugural launch of its Terran 1 rocket from Cape Canaveral’s Launch Complex 16 when an automated abort

Alcohol distilled from the heart of the agave succulent is often packaged with what many people would consider an icky curiosity. Floating within some mezcal bottles is a worm-like baby insect. Since its addition to the traditional Mexican drink in around the 1940s, the taxonomic identity of the alcoholic-soaked grub we dare not consume has

Determining the passage of time in our world of ticking clocks and oscillating pendulums is a simple case of counting the seconds between ‘then’ and ‘now’. Down at the quantum scale of buzzing electrons, however, ‘then’ can’t always be anticipated. Worse still, ‘now’ often blurs into a haze of vagueness. A stopwatch simply isn’t going