Science

It’s not every day you get to rediscover the words of a world-famous thinker, an influencer of Albert Einstein himself. A nearly 20-minute video interview with the ‘father of the Big Bang‘ was found in the archives of a public-service broadcaster called Vlaamse Radio- en Televisieomroeporganisatie (VRT), located in the Flemish region of Belgium. Watching

Bar charts and line graphs are both designed to help us visualize data. They are tools to convert numerical information into pictorial narratives that can be more easily comprehended. They don’t change the data; they simply represent it. They do represent it in different ways, however, and even those slight differences can be enough to

We have a new exoplanet to one day scour for potential signs of life. Just 31 light-years away, astronomers have identified an incredibly rare Earth-sized world orbiting at a distance from its star that should be hospitable to life as we know it. If, that is, the exoplanet itself has the right conditions to be

It can be tempting to think that the recent wildfire disasters in communities across the West were unlucky, one-off events, but evidence is accumulating that points to a trend. In a new study, we found a 246 percent increase in the number of homes and structures destroyed by wildfires in the contiguous Western US between

Scientists have found a clever way to generate hydrogen straight from salty seawater. This could be another step towards a clean energy future, if renewables power the process. The new device makes a few chemical modifications to existing technologies, making it possible to extract hydrogen from untreated, unpurified seawater – which could alleviate concerns about

TAMPA, Fla. — Remote communications provider Galaxy Broadband said Feb. 1 it is buying capacity from OneWeb for $50 million in a multi-year deal to offer low Earth orbit broadband services to more sites across Canada. The agreement enables Galaxy to expand into the northern territory of Nunavut — a sparsely populated region of northern

The link between ancient volcanic eruptions and the most severe extinction event the world has ever seen just got even stronger. A new analysis of mercury isotopes has provided evidence that a quarter of a billion years ago, far-flung places in Earth’s Southern Hemisphere were blanketed with debris from volcanic eruptions in Siberia. The so-called

A burly figure emerges from the shadows of a forest, only to lumber off into the cover of trees once again. It’s a scene that’s been caught from the corner of a thousand human eyes, yet no one is any closer to looking a Bigfoot or a Sasquatch square in the face. If someone were

A gargantuan effort by a huge international team of scientists has just given us the most precise map of the all matter in the Universe obtained to date. By combining data from two major surveys, the international collaboration has revealed where the Universe does and doesn’t keep all its junk – not just the normal

As city folk sleep blanketed by the warm glow of artificial light that surrounds urban centers, stargazers feel the chill of the night sky and see all its constellations being smudged into a fuzzy blur by those same urban lights. It’s a worrying trend that stretches back decades. In 1973, astronomer Kurt Riegel warned that

Some 540 million years ago, diverse life forms suddenly began to emerge from the muddy ocean floors of planet Earth. This period is known as the Cambrian Explosion, and these aquatic critters are our ancient ancestors. All complex life on Earth evolved from these underwater creatures. Scientists believe all it took was an ever-so-slight increase

TAMPA, Fla. — Inmarsat’s latest geostationary telecoms satellite has arrived at its Florida launch site after a three-day journey from Airbus’ testing facilities in France. An Airbus Beluga plane carrying the 5,500-kilogram Inmarsat-6 F2 (I-6 F2) satellite landed at the Kennedy Space Center on Jan. 27, Airbus Space Systems spokesperson Jeremy Close said, following refueling

The violent fingers of electricity that struck a sand dune in Nebraska have left behind a configuration of crystal rarely found in nature. Inside a piece of fulgurite – or ‘fossilized lightning‘ – created by a powerful bolt of electricity traveling into and fusing sand, scientists have found a quasicrystal, an arrangement of matter once

‘Spin’ is a fundamental quality of fundamental particles like the electron, invoking images of a tiny sphere revolving rapidly on its axis like a planet in a shrunken solar system. Only it isn’t. It can’t. For one thing, electrons aren’t spheres of matter but points described by the mathematics of probability. But California Institute of

A team of archaeologists unearthed what could be the “oldest” and “most complete” mummy ever discovered in Egypt, the leader of the excavation announced on Thursday. Thought to be the remains of a man named Hekashepes, archaeologists found the 4,300-year-old mummy in an ancient tomb near Cairo from the country’s fifth and sixth dynasty –

JWST’s unparalleled ability to peer into the shrouded hearts of distant clouds has revealed the elements of biochemistry in the coldest and darkest place we’ve seen them yet. In a molecular cloud called Chamaeleon I, located over 500 light-years from Earth, data from the telescope has revealed the presence of frozen carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen,

Plastic pollution is out of control. Each year, more than 8 million tonnes of synthetic polymers enter the ocean, and while some sinks to the floor, returns to the shore, or collects in the middle of nowhere, a significant portion isn’t so easily accounted for. All that missing plastic is a mystery, but some researchers

Scientists have made a breakthrough in robotics: a shapeshifting robot that can switch between liquid and metal states to navigate tricky environments without compromising on strength. Because they can be both soft and hard, the small, sea cucumber-inspired robots can overcome the limitations of robots that are only one or the other, and thus have

Lynk Global is close to completing a ground station in Hawaii as part of plans to connect its growing constellation of small satellites to standard smartphones this spring. TAMPA, Fla. — Lynk Global is close to completing a ground station in Hawaii as part of plans to connect its growing constellation of small satellites to

Close to the summit of an underwater mountain west of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, a jagged landscape of towers rises from the gloom. Their creamy carbonate walls and columns appear ghostly blue in the light of a remotely operated vehicle sent to explore. They range in height from tiny stacks the size of toadstools to a

​Egyptian archaeologists said Tuesday they had discovered an 1,800-year-old “complete residential city from the Roman-era” in the heart of the southern city of Luxor. ​The city, dating to the second and third centuries, is the “oldest and most important city found on the eastern bank of Luxor,” according to Mostafa Waziri, head of Egypt’s Supreme

Facial pareidolia is the human tendency or illusion of seeing facial structures in an everyday objects – such as seeing the “man in the Moon,” or the face of Jesus on a piece of toast. But here’s a newly found crater on Mars that might be a case of ‘bear-adoilia.’ There’s no denying, the crater

Over ten years ago, a tsunami triggered a disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant on Japan’s east coast. After the accident, large amounts of radioactivity contaminated the ocean leading to the imposition of a marine exclusion zone and huge reputational damage to the regional fishing industry. Huge volumes of contaminated water have accumulated

Even if you think you are good at analyzing faces, research shows many people cannot reliably distinguish between photos of real faces and images that have been computer-generated. This is particularly problematic now that computer systems can create realistic-looking photos of people who don’t exist. Recently, a fake LinkedIn profile with a computer-generated profile picture

Lamborn said areas of focus for the subcommittee include hypersonic weapons and DoD space programs WASHINGTON — Rep. Doug Lamborn, a Republican representing Colorado Springs, was named chairman of the House Armed Services Committee’s strategic forces subcommittee. HASC Chairman Rep. Mike Rogers (R-Ala.), on Jan. 25 announced the committee’s seven subcommittee chairs for the 118th

Caecilians aren’t exactly your run-of-the-mill amphibian. Limbless, toothed, and worm-like, they spend their life burrowing through the soil, sensing the world with tentacles that protrude from between their eyes. Little is known about these evasive creatures, or how they evolved. Fossils of only 11 species of ancestral caecilians have ever been found, so our understanding

Physicists have just set a new record confining a self-focused laser pulse to a cage of air, down the length of a 45 meter-long (148 foot-long) university corridor. With previous results falling well short of a meter, this newest experiment led by physicist Howard Milchberg of the University of Maryland (UMD) breaks new ground for

A teen boy whose mummy had been stored in a museum since 1916 was covered in precious amulets, a study published Tuesday found. A team of scientists has digitally unwrapped the 2,300-year-old mummy using a CT scanner to uncover its secrets. The team found that the so-called “golden boy” was lavishly mummified with gold and

Our home, the Milky Way, doesn’t seem particularly odd for a galaxy. Moderately-sized, spiral in shape, with a few kinks suggestive of a disruptive past. But astronomers have just identified a quirk never before seen in any galaxy studied to date: the Milky Way is too big for its surroundings. Specifically, it appears to be

A huge iceberg nearly the size of Greater London has broken off the Antarctic ice shelf near a research station, the second such split in two years, researchers announced Monday. The British Antarctic Survey (BAS) said the formation of the new iceberg – in a natural process called “calving” – was not due to climate