Science

Despite accounting for only a small percentage of the world’s population, rich nations have a long history of over-extracting raw materials from the planet, and a new study highlights just how excessive and harmful this pattern of plunder really is. In an analysis looking back over almost 50 years of natural resource extraction across the

Since its launch in 2020, a pioneering energy company called Quaise has attracted some serious attention for its audacious goal of diving further into Earth’s crust than anybody has dug before. Following the closure of first round venture capital funding, the MIT spin-off has now raised a total of US$63 million: a respectable start that

Chernobyl’s nuclear power plant and all the facilities in the Chernobyl exclusion zone have been completely disconnected and are now without electricity, Ukraine’s state energy company has announced.  Russian forces attacked the defunct nuclear facility on the very first day of the invasion (Feb. 24), seizing it after heavy fighting and taking its roughly 210 staff hostage, Live Science previously

Have you ever felt a creeping sensation that someone’s watching you? Then you turn around and you don’t see anything out of the ordinary. Depending on where you were, though, you might not have been completely imagining it. There are billions of things sensing you every day. They are everywhere, hidden in plain sight –

Nearly all of us have wished to be a fly on the wall during a particularly juicy conversation, or disappear into the background after an embarrassing gaffe. It’s not surprising that invisibility cloaks are a mainstay of fantasy fiction. In recent years, there have been many attempts to devise some sort of invisibility tech. Now,

The cutting-edge number-crunching capabilities of artificial intelligence mean that AI systems are able to spot diseases early, manage chemical reactions, and explain some of the mysteries of the Universe. But there’s a downside to this incredible and virtually limitless artificial brainpower. New research emphasizes how easily AI models can be trained for malicious purposes as

A $550 million congressional add-on in 2022 is only a down payment to kickstart the deployment of a 28-satellite constellation in low Earth orbit WASHINGTON — A $550 million increase to the Pentagon’s 2022 budget was directed by Congress to procure sensor satellites and launch them to low Earth orbit to detect and track Russian

If you’ve ever lived with a cat, you’ve probably received a painful chomp from your beloved furball’s pointy canines at least once. But 42 million years ago, your kitty’s teeth would have looked very different: Evolution was only just honing the teeth of cat-like animals to a deadly sharp tip for piercing and shredding flesh.

In the last decades of his life, Albert Einstein hoped to unite his description of gravity with existing models of electromagnetism under a single master theory. It’s a quest that continues to vex theoretical physicists to this day. Two of our best models of reality – Einstein’s general theory of relativity and the laws of

We stick calendars on the wall or load them up on our phones, but the people of the third millennium BCE used giant rocks, new research suggests. A new study explains how Stonehenge may have originally been used to keep track of a solar year (aka tropical year) of 365 and a quarter days, which

Scientists discovered remnants of an Old Stone Age culture, less than 100 miles (160 kilometers) west of Beijing, where ancient hominins used a reddish pigment called ochre and crafted tiny, blade-like tools from stone. The archaeological site, called Xiamabei, offers a rare glimpse into the life of Homo sapiens and now-extinct human relatives who inhabited the region some 40,000

Researchers in Japan are investigating the origins of a nightmarish, 300-year-old mummified ’mermaid‘, which has been worshipped for centuries due to its supposed medicinal properties. The haunting remains are most likely a gruesome amalgam of a monkey’s torso sewed onto a fish’s tail, potentially embellished with hair and nails from a human.  Hiroshi Kinoshita, board member of

Across the world, girls are more likely than boys to blame academic failure on a lack of talent, according to a large study on gender stereotypes published Wednesday.  Paradoxically, the idea that males are inherently more brilliant was most entrenched in countries that are more egalitarian.  Such stereotypes have been explored in the past, but

The Achilles tendon – the largest tendon in the human body – acts like a rubber band connecting the calf muscle to the heel bone. While we know it works like a spring that stores and releases energy as we move our legs, what’s not clear is precisely how it responds to exercise and training,

Prehistoric sites are full of stone tools that appear to have two life cycles: They’ve been crafted, used, and discarded before being picked up a second time and used again. A new study puts forward an interesting hypothesis as to why this is. The research suggests that the recycling of these tools is about them

An epic outburst from a baby star still in the process of forming has been captured in a spectacular Hubble image. Roughly 1,250 light-years away, in the Orion molecular cloud star-forming region, jets from a protostar are punching through the cloud at supersonic speeds, heating the gas and causing it to glow brightly. The result

A global analysis of sea levels over the past 2,000 years has found a rapid rate of increase in line with the Industrial Revolution. By 1863, researchers found the rate of sea level rise had clearly surpassed background variability. Unsurprisingly, it’s around this time that the first hints of ocean warming and glacier melt from

The catastrophic disaster at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in 1986 was caused by an explosion at the Reactor 4 Unit. This expelled a sizeable quantity of radioactive material into the surroundings, alongside a partial meltdown of the reactor core. The last few decades have seen substantial international efforts to safely contain and decontaminate the

SAN FRANCISCO – Acme AtronOmatic, vendor of the MyRadar weather app, won FCC approval to launch satellites to demonstrate technology for a constellation that ultimately could include 250 satellites or more. The satellites, scheduled to launch in April on a Rocket Lab Electron from New Zealand, are designed to test and validate hardware for Orlando,

An enormous impact crater, hiding deep beneath Greenland’s Hiawatha glacier, is probably the result of a kilometer-wide asteroid that crashed into Earth 58 million years ago. That’s much older than scientists presumed – roughly eight million years after the infamous impact that killed off most dinosaurs. When the Hiawatha crater was first discovered in 2015,

What happens to information after it has passed beyond the event horizon of a black hole? There have been suggestions that the geometry of wormholes might help us solve this vexing problem – but the math has been tricky, to say the least. In a new paper, an international team of physicists has found a

Explorers have found one of the most famous shipwrecks in history, Ernest Shackleton’s Endurance, deep in the icy sea off Antarctica more than a century after it sank, they announced Wednesday. Endurance was discovered at a depth of 3,008 meters (9,869 feet) in the Weddell Sea, about six kilometers (four miles) from where it was

The largest molecule yet found in a roiling disk of dust and gas around a baby star has been identified, scientists report. In this swirling cloud, astronomers detected the signature of dimethyl ether, a molecule that contains nine atoms. This oxygen-bearing molecule can act as a building block for sugars and other biomolecules, which means

Every summer, as the sea ice surrounding Antarctica retreats, tens of thousands of tourists and scientists flock to the landmass by boat and plane. The remote continent is becoming increasingly accessible – during the 2019-20 season, the number of sightseeing visitors reached 74,000, with the vast majority traveling by ship. Scientific activities on the continent

Hammered by climate change and relentless deforestation, the Amazon rainforest is losing its capacity to recover and could irretrievably transition into savannah, with dire consequences for the region and the world, according to a study published Monday. Researchers warned that the results mean the Amazon could be approaching a so-called “tipping point” faster than previously

Global energy-related carbon dioxide emissions rose by 6 percent in 2021 to a record 36.3 billion metric tons, their highest ever level, the International Energy Agency said Tuesday. “The increase in global CO2 emissions of over 2 billion metric tons was the largest in history in absolute terms, more than offsetting the previous year’s pandemic-induced

When you’re older, your home town will feel different. That’s true for everybody. But for people living today, the changes will be impossible to ignore. We usually measure climate change in terms of rising temperatures. But scientists say there’s another way of thinking about it: spatial displacement. In a study from 2019, researchers found that

Researchers have discovered two types of human brain cells that physically help us form memories. These cells play a significant role in dividing continuous conscious experience into distinct segments that can be recalled in the future.  As we move from the past, through the present, and into the future, we form autobiographical memories – reference

Two sets of giant bubbles that extend thousands of light-years above and below the plane of the Milky Way could have been produced by the same event, in spite of their significant difference in size. They’re called the Fermi bubbles and the eROSITA bubbles, and astronomers believe they were the result of activity by the

The United Nations on Wednesday agreed to start negotiating a world-first global treaty on plastic pollution in what has been hailed a watershed moment for the planet. Nearly 200 nations at the UN Environment Assembly in Nairobi unanimously agreed to create an intergovernmental committee to negotiate and finalize a legally binding plastics treaty by 2024.