Science

A single bad El Niño can drive almost 6 million children into severe hunger, a new study has found. This is up to three times as many children that have gone hungry due to the global pandemic, and a clear demonstration of how El Niños can directly impact human wellbeing on a massive scale.  “It’s

Maxar said it “wants to ensure that the government is following its own rules in connection with the procurement” of the Transport Layer Tranche 1 WASHINGTON — Maxar Technologies filed a protest with the Government Accountability Office Oct. 8 challenging a Space Development Agency solicitation seeking industry bids for 126 satellites.  SDA on Aug. 30

In rocky, frosty landscapes, specific patterns of stones can end up forming – it’s like human hands have formed them, but without any gardener being anywhere near them. A new study shows how these formations can be created with needle ice – spikes of ice that rise up from the earth and are formed with

When the Nobel Prize-winning US physicist Robert Hofstadter and his team fired highly energetic electrons at a small vial of hydrogen at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center in 1956, they opened the door to a new era of physics. Until then, it was thought that protons and neutrons, which make up an atom’s nucleus, were

Pre-human history is immensely hard to untangle. There are no early writings from the Neanderthals handily summarizing all the differences between the Australopithecus and the Orrorin. While we’re finding more ancient bones all the time, they’re still very limited, making it difficult to analyze and catalogue fossil discoveries into one of the many species of Homo, Graecopithecus, and all the

Astronomers have found a collection of stars doing something unexpected. Within 160 light-years of the Solar System, four red dwarf stars that should be quiet in radio observations have been caught emitting radio signals. According to an analysis of these signals, the best explanation for this activity is the presence of unseen exoplanets. It’s not,

For now, life is flourishing on our oxygen-rich planet, but Earth wasn’t always that way – and scientists have predicted that, in the future, the atmosphere will revert back to one that’s rich in methane and low in oxygen. This probably won’t happen for another billion years or so. But when the change comes, it’s

LONG BEACH, Calif. — NASA and Boeing are targeting the first half of 2022 to launch the rescheduled test flight of the CST-100 Starliner commercial crew vehicle as engineers continue to investigate a valve problem that postponed the mission two months ago. In an Oct. 8 statement, NASA said engineers had managed to free all

A newly discovered hippo tooth reveals prehistoric hippopotamuses roamed Britain as early as 1.5 million years ago, far earlier than we thought, giving us new insights into the land’s ancient climate. “The tooth closely matches other fossils belonging to the extinct species Hippopotamus antiquus,” said University of Leicester paleobiologist Neil Adams on Twitter. Today’s Britain

The more we look into the harsh extremes of Chile’s Atacama Desert, the more we find. Phenomena both mystifying and wonderful, occasionally bordering on alien. But in this incredibly dry place, it wasn’t just the climate that was unforgiving. Its ancient human inhabitants, making do in a parched place not best suited to hosting them,

Exoplanets – planets outside our Solar System – continue to provide astronomers with fascinating glimpses of other worlds, including the one designated WASP-76b. On this inferno-like planet, almost the size of Jupiter, the daytime surface temperatures are hot enough to vaporize iron, which could fall as rain on the slightly cooler night side. Now researchers have

Communities that rely on the Colorado River are facing a water crisis. Lake Mead, the river’s largest reservoir, has fallen to levels not seen since it was created by the construction of the Hoover Dam roughly a century ago. Arizona and Nevada are facing their first-ever mandated water cuts, while water is being released from

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. — Companies that have demonstrated the technical viability of broadband satellite megaconstellations now face a bigger challenge: closing the business case. In sessions at the Satellite Innovation conference here, industry executives and observers expressed continued skepticism that constellations of hundreds or thousands of low Earth orbit satellites will be able to generate

Within one of the lushest places on our planet, an unobtrusive green plant grows amongst many other… green plants. Although long used by the Indigenous Machiguenga people, the plant’s strange mish-mash of characteristics had scientists mystified for 50 years. “I didn’t really think it was special, except for the fact that it had characteristics of plants

Japanese-American scientist Syukuro Manabe, Klaus Hasselmann of Germany and Giorgio Parisi of Italy on Tuesday won the Nobel Physics Prize for climate models and the understanding of physical systems. The Nobel committee said it was sending a message with its prize announcement just weeks before the COP26 climate summit in Glasgow, as the rate of

US scientists David Julius and Ardem Patapoutian on Monday won the Nobel Medicine Prize for discoveries on receptors for temperature and touch. ​The duo’s research, conducted independently of each other in the late 1990s and 2000s, is being used to develop treatments for a wide range of diseases and conditions, including chronic pain. ​Patapoutian, an

Reassuring news for those waiting to delay the apocalypse for as long as possible: A new study suggests that our last line of defense against an asteroid hitting Earth is an effective strategy after all. That line of defence is what’s known as a late-time small-body disruption, which is exactly what it sounds like. It’s

More than five billion people could have difficulty accessing water in 2050, the United Nations warned Tuesday, urging leaders to seize the initiative at the COP26 summit. Already in 2018, 3.6 billion people had inadequate access to water for at least one month per year, said a new report from the UN’s World Meteorological Organization.

ST. LOUIS – LatConnect 60 will feed Spire Global Automatic Identification System (AIS) vessel-tracking data into algorithms the Australian Earth-observation startup is developing with Curtin University to prevent maritime collisions, the companies announced Oct. 5. With funding from the Australian Research Council, LatConnect 60 and Curtin University’s Intelligent Sensing & Perception Laboratory are creating sensor-fusion

Not all ants are hard workers. Some in the colony slave away only so others can avoid pulling their weight. These freeloading hangers-on are known as social parasites, and they’ve essentially forged an evolutionary shortcut through the comforts of cooperative communities. Instead of building a communal network themselves, social parasites merely exploit ones that already

Many of us come away from conversations with strangers feeling that the interaction has been awkward and unwanted on both sides. But what if we’re wrong? A new study suggests that wanting to chat in depth with new people is actually a common feeling. In other words, the next time you’re talking to someone you

For all our current proficiency at studying the cosmos, there are some basic things that are still extremely difficult to do. One of those things is gauge distances, especially for random, transient flashes of light. And now one of those transient flashes, interpreted as a possible burst of gamma radiation from 13.4 billion light-years across

The polar jet stream circles the northern hemisphere, swirling up to nine miles above our heads like a curvy, ethereal crown on the planet. This band of strong wind separates cold air from the Arctic from warmer air to the south, and it’s responsible for transporting weather from west to east across the US, over

Reservoir computing is already one of the most advanced and most powerful types of artificial intelligence that scientists have at their disposal – and now a new study outlines how to make it up to a million times faster on certain tasks. That’s an exciting development when it comes to tackling the most complex computational

WASHINGTON — NASA’s administrator says he remains confident that Congress will provide the agency with funding to allow it to select a second lunar lander developer despite a lack of public progress on funding and concerns raised elsewhere in the agency about the effect an ongoing protest could have on congressional support for the program.

As the climate crisis threatens millions of species worldwide, biodiversity conservation is now an all-hands-on-deck operation. Natural history collections play a critical role in this effort as repositories holding records of historical biodiversity shifts, like libraries made of biological specimens. In response to the extinction crisis, the call is out to scour Australia’s collections for

In this day and age, it’s harder than ever before to disconnect from work. Once a person has signed off for the day, they might feel pressured to reply to an after-hours email that pops up on their phone, even if it’s not urgent. A new psychology study by researchers from the London Business School in

One advantage to planetary science is that insights from one planet could explain phenomena on another. We understand Venus‘ greenhouse gas effect from our own experience on the Earth, and Jupiter and Saturn share some characteristics. But Jupiter also provides insight into other, farther out systems, such as Uranus and Neptune. Now, a discovery from

Can we toilet train cattle? Would we want to? The answer to both of these questions is yes - and doing so could help us address issues of water contamination and climate change. Cattle urine is high in nitrogen, and this contributes to a range of environmental problems. When cows are kept mainly outdoors, as they