Science

A comet that broke apart before it was due to appear in Earth’s night sky last year has now nevertheless given us a rare and wonderful gift. As its disembodied tail continued its journey through the Solar System, a spacecraft orbiting the Sun was able to pass through its tail, quite by chance. The European

Human society is on track for a collapse in the next two decades if there isn’t a serious shift in global priorities, according to a new reassessment of a 1970s report, Vice reported. In that report – published in the bestselling book The Limits to Growth (1972) – a team of MIT scientists argued that industrial civilization

Artificial intelligence (AI) is proving very adept at certain tasks – like inventing human faces that don’t actually exist, or winning games of poker – but these networks still struggle when it comes to something humans do naturally: imagine. Once human beings know what a cat is, we can easily imagine a cat of a different

EL PASO, Texas — Rocket Lab said July 19 that it has identified the cause of an Electron launch failure more than two months ago and that the vehicle is ready to return to flight. The Electron rocket failed to reach orbit in a May 15 launch from Rocket Lab’s Launch Complex 1 in New

Mysterious strands of DNA that seemingly assimilate genes from many different organisms in their surrounding environment have been discovered in a Californian backyard. Scientists have named these elements “Borgs”, and their discovery could help us not just understand the evolution of microorganisms, but their interactions within their ecosystems, and their role in the broader environment.

A new way of classifying magnetized plasma has led to the discovery of 10 previously unknown topological phases of plasma. Learning more about these phases, and specifically the transitions between them, could help plasma physicists chase down the white whale of energy – plasma fusion. That’s because the transitions between them support edge modes, or

After an impressive start, vaccination rates in the United States have begun to plateau, even though there’s more than enough medicine to go around and a dangerous variant on the loose. If the nation is to reach President Biden’s goal of vaccinating 70 percent of the public, some researchers say we need to start appealing

Evidence of ancient life may have been scrubbed from parts of Mars, a new NASA study has found.  The space agency’s Curiosity rover made the surprising discovery while investigating clay-rich sedimentary rocks around its landing site in Gale Crater, a former lake that was made when an asteroid struck the Red Planet roughly 3.6 billion years ago. Clay

Even as awareness around plastic pollution grows, very little is being done to solve the problem. At this rate, by 2050, some experts predict the world’s oceans will contain more plastic than fish. A think piece from the United Nations, commissioned by the G20, has now detailed everything the world should do to stop that

New technology developed by Japanese engineers has walloped the heck out of the previous data transmission speed record. Along an optical cable more than 3,000 kilometers (1,864 miles) long, the team achieved a data transmission speed of 319 terabits per second (Tb/s). This not only smashes the previous record of an already jaw-dropping 178 Tb/s,

WASHINGTON — NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope returned to science operations July 17 after a hiatus of more than a month as controllers successfully switched the orbiting observatory to a backup payload computer. NASA said the instruments of the 31-year-old telescope are now operational nearly five weeks after a payload computer, which commands those instruments, malfunctioned.

If you’ve ever actually met a dog, new research into canine behavior will come as no shock. Scientists have found that “man’s best friend” won’t necessarily help said man out with a delicious snack, even if that man has given a snack first. This is actually a little surprising for animal researchers, though, since dogs

Quantum mechanics deals with the behavior of the Universe at the super-small scale: atoms and subatomic particles that operate in ways that classical physics can’t explain. In order to explore this tension between the quantum and the classical, scientists are attempting to get larger and larger objects to behave in a quantum-like way. In the

In our daily lives, we spend a lot more time tapping at a screen and typing on a keyboard than writing with pencil and pen, so does handwriting tuition still offer anything useful? Absolutely, according to a new study. Researchers tasked 42 adult volunteers with learning the Arabic alphabet from scratch: some through writing it

A group of scientists may have just pinpointed the location on Mars of a mysterious source of methane, a gas most often produced by microbes – and NASA’s Curiosity rover could be right on top of it. Methane blips have pinged on Curiosity’s detection systems six times since the rover landed in Mars’ Gale crater in 2012,

Climate change and deforestation have flipped a large swathe of the Amazon basin from absorbing to emitting planet-warming carbon dioxide (CO2), a transformation that could turn humanity’s greatest natural ally in the fight against global warming into a foe, researchers reported on Wednesday. ​Hundreds of high-altitude air samples collected over the last decade showed that

The hugely successful Red Dead Redemption 2 (RDR2) video game puts you in a vast, open-world American West setting at the very end of the 19th century. Players can loot trains, shoot rival gang members, steal horses – and, it turns out, learn a lot about nature, too. Researchers surveyed 586 volunteers from 55 different

WASHINGTON — NASA is seeking proposals for a program to support the development of commercial space stations, even as funding for that effort is in jeopardy in Congress. NASA published a request for proposals July 12 for its Commercial Low Earth Orbit Development, or CLD, program. The effort, announced earlier this year, will provide funding

Newly discovered microfossils some 3.42 billion years old are the oldest evidence yet of a particular type of methane-cycling microbe life – and they could help us understand how life gets started in the first place, both on Earth and further out into the Universe. These life forms would have originally existed just below the

We’ve got another quantum computing milestone to report, with researchers in China unveiling a super-advanced 66-qubit quantum supercomputer called Zuchongzhi, which by one important metric is the most powerful machine of its kind we’ve seen to date. The performance of Zuchongzhi is undoubtedly impressive: it finished a designated quantum benchmark task in around 70 minutes, and

A cup of mud that has been buried beneath the floor of a cave for millennia has just yielded up the genome of an ancient human. Analysis reveals traces of a woman who lived 25,000 years ago, before the last Ice Age; and, although we don’t know much about her, she represents a significant scientific

A new set of equations can precisely describe the reflections of the Universe that appear in the warped light around a black hole. The proximity of each reflection is dependent on the angle of observation with respect to the black hole, and the rate of the black hole’s spin, according to a mathematical solution worked

Tens of million years ago, sand tiger sharks hunted in the waters off the Antarctic Peninsula, gliding over a thriving marine ecosystem on the seafloor below. All that remains of them today is their sharp pointed teeth, but those teeth tell a story. They’re helping solve the mystery of why the Earth, some 50 million

As the world gets hotter with climate change, one of the ongoing challenges humans will face is simply surviving worsening heat, with projected temperature increases expected to bring increasingly deadly heatwaves, even rendering some parts of the world uninhabitable. Against such harsh heat, a new material developed by scientists in China could have the potential

WASHINGTON — A House appropriations subcommittee advanced a spending bill July 12 that would provide NASA with a small increase over what the administration proposed for fiscal year 2022, but does not address some key areas of concern. The commerce, justice and science (CJS) subcommittee favorably reported a spending bill that provides $25.04 billion for

Songbirds are mysteriously dying across the mid-Atlantic region of the USA.  Many have been discovered ill with eye swelling and discharge; some look like they’re having trouble lifting their heads, indicative of head swelling. They also show neurological symptoms like tremors, disorientation, erratic flight, and lack of balance.  Over 280 sick or dead birds have

Scientists have succeeded in combining two exciting material types together for the very first time: an ultrathin semiconductor just a single atom thick; and a superconductor, capable of conducting electricity with zero resistance. Both these materials have unusual and fascinating properties, and by putting them together through a delicate lab fabrication process, the team behind

In a time rife with disasters, when more people than ever can find an audience online, conspiracy theories seem to be growing more outrageous by the day. We’re also more prone to believing such things under heightened stress, which is unfortunate given how damaging many of these ideas are proving to our democracies and each

“Suborbital” is a term you’ll be hearing a lot as Sir Richard Branson flies aboard Virgin Galactic’s VSS Unity winged spaceship and Jeff Bezos flies aboard Blue Origin’s New Shepard vehicle to touch the boundary of space and experience a few minutes of weightlessness. But what exactly is “suborbital”? Simply put, it means that while

In order to mitigate the global impacts of climate change, we need to dramatically reduce our carbon emissions, or even better – stop emitting completely. Many countries have recognized the need to switch from fossil fuels to renewable or ‘green’ energy in order to do this. Whilst most of us are in homes that are