Science

What if, as well as providing a fun way to enjoy our leisure time, video games could provide real benefits to our cognitive powers? That’s the promise of a new musical rhythm game that can not only teach drumming but also improve short-term memory. In a study of the game’s effects, 47 adults aged between

WASHINGTON — Engineers have restored normal attitude control of a cubesat bound for the moon nearly a month after suffering a problem during a maneuver. Advanced Space, the company that owns the Cislunar Autonomous Positioning System Technology Operations and Navigation Experiment (CAPSTONE) spacecraft, said Oct. 7 that it was able to restore normal three-axis attitude

In 1887, Australian Museum scientists undertook a pioneering expedition to Lord Howe Island, a tiny patch of land off the east coast of Australia. Among their many discoveries, they recorded “a large Blatta” – a type of cockroach – under a decaying log. This was later described as Panesthia lata, the Lord Howe Island wood-feeding

Built by the last of Spain’s Muslim rulers, the Alhambra is a regal palace that has shimmered over the city of Granada for 800 years. Throughout the day its colors seem to shift, standing out as a terracotta orange beacon under a midday Sun before giving way to red-pinkish hues in dusk’s fading light. On

Are we free or are our actions determined by the laws of physics? And how much free will do we actually want? These questions have troubled philosophers for millennia – and there are still no perfect answers. But it turns out that a character from a children’s TV series can provide a clue.Thomas the Tank

The very first stars might have appeared when the Universe was only 100 million years old, or less than 1 percent of its current age. Since then, the rapid expansion of space has stretched their light into oblivion, leaving us to seek clues about their existence in cosmic sources closer to home. By analyzing the

As the world braces for a third consecutive year of exceptional La Niña conditions, a new study reveals how our climate models might have missed this disastrous ‘triple-dip’ effect. It’s the first time in a century that La Niña has stuck around for so long, and her wrath is being felt in southern Africa and

The vast number-crunching capabilities of artificial intelligence systems mean we can better predict the future of chaotic systems based on fewer and fewer patterns of the past – and a new algorithm is adding even more accuracy to the process. Developed through next-gen reservoir computing techniques, which take a more dynamic, speedier approach to machine

WASHINGTON — After a successful launch of a Crew Dragon spacecraft whose crew included a Russian cosmonaut, a Roscosmos official struck a more conciliatory tone about relations with NASA. At a briefing after the Oct. 5 launch of the Crew-5 mission from the Kennedy Space Center, Sergei Krikalev, executive director of human space flight programs

Life’s emergence in a ‘warm little pond‘ some 4.5 billion years ago is a relatively solid foundation of modern biology. In spite of water’s vital role in facilitating early organic reactions on Earth, one of the most basic ingredients won’t form in aqueous surrounds, raising the question of how life initially acquired them. A new

The 2022 Nobel prize for physics has been awarded to a trio of scientists for pioneering experiments in quantum mechanics, the theory covering the micro-world of atoms and particles. Alain Aspect from Université Paris-Saclay in France, John Clauser from J.F. Clauser & Associates in the US, and Anton Zeilinger from University of Vienna in Austria,

Have you ever had that weird feeling that you’ve experienced the same exact situation before, even though that’s impossible? Sometimes it can even seem like you’re reliving something that already happened. This phenomenon, known as déjà vu, has puzzled philosophers, neurologists, and writers for a very long time. Starting in the late 1800s, many theories

Smothered in a hazy atmosphere that hides shallow lakes of liquid hydrocarbons, Titan is one weird world we’re dying to look at up close. Which is why NASA is preparing to launch a robotic rotocraft to scope out the scenery in 2027. We now have a better idea of just what kind of scenery awaits

Planet-heating methane spewing into the atmosphere from the damaged Nord Stream pipelines only has a modest impact on climate change, say scientists, but sharply highlights the risks of fossil-fuel-driven greenhouse gas emissions. The European Union has said it believes the leaks to the strategically important pipelines, Nord Stream 1 and 2, were caused by a

More than half of the digital data firms generate is collected, processed, and stored for single-use purposes. Often, it is never re-used. This could be your multiple near-identical images held on Google Photos or iCloud, a business’s outdated spreadsheets that will never be used again, or data from internet of things sensors that have no

KAHULUI, Hawaii — As SpaceX prepares to launch a new crew to the International Space Station from one pad at the Kennedy Space Center, it is starting work to upgrade another pad at Cape Canaveral as a backup. NASA and SpaceX completed the launch readiness review Oct. 3 for the Crew-5 mission, currently scheduled for

Burmese pythons are huge, growing up to 5 meters (16 feet) long. But their sheer size alone can’t explain their incredible gape – the amount the animal can open its mouth – required to ingest prey as large as deer or alligators. A new study details how Burmese pythons (Python molorus bivittatus) have evolved a

Another record has been broken on the way to fully operational and capable quantum computers: the complete control of a 6-qubit quantum processor in silicon. Researchers are calling it “a major stepping stone” for the technology. Qubits (or quantum bits) are the quantum equivalents of classical computing bits, only they can potentially process much more

Queen Elizabeth’s newly released death certificate contains just two curious words under her cause of death – old age. We might talk about people dying of old age in everyday speech. But who actually dies of old age, medically speaking, in the 21st century? Such a vague cause of death not only raises questions about

Around an orange dwarf star just 130 light-years from Earth, astronomers have discovered an unexpected treasure. Not only is the star orbited by three rocky super-Earth worlds, but two more exoplanets in the system are almost incredibly rare in our records. These two are super-Mercuries, a type of exoplanet so difficult to spot that we’ve

The oceans absorb more than 90 percent of all extra heat trapped by the emissions we’ve produced by burning fossil fuels. This heat is enormous. It’s as if we exploded an atom bomb underwater, every second of every day. The ocean isn’t warming at the same rate everywhere. We know the heat is concentrated in

The future of neural network computing could be a little soggier than we were expecting. A team of physicists has successfully developed an ionic circuit – a processor based on the movements of charged atoms and molecules in an aqueous solution, rather than electrons in a solid semiconductor. Since this is closer to the way

The companies will perform a Tactically Responsive Space (TacRS) mission in 2023 WASHINGTON — The U.S. Space Systems Command announced Sept. 30 it selected Firefly Space Transport Services and Millennium Space Systems to conduct a demonstration of a rapid-response space mission to low Earth orbit in 2023. The companies will perform a Tactically Responsive Space

Narwhals are enigmatic marine mammals, fascinating us with their unique appearance and secretive lifestyles under the Arctic sea ice. Yet while we still have a lot to learn about narwhals – including how to save some endangered populations from ourselves – scientists have also made a few key discoveries in recent years. Known for their

This year marks the 100-year anniversary of the discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb and, even after all this time, the famous burial site is still revealing its secrets and stirring up controversy. A renowned British Egyptologist and former British Museum curator claims to have found evidence that the tomb’s royal murals and hieroglyphics might have been

On Thursday morning, NASA’s Juno spacecraft flew within 219 miles of the surface of Europa, a large icy moon that orbits Jupiter. It’s humanity’s closest look at the frozen world in more than 20 years. The Juno mission launched in 2011 to study Jupiter, the largest planet in the solar system. After it successfully completed

Based on its market share, the world’s most notorious cryptocurrency Bitcoin results in more climate damage than the production of beef and nearly as much damage as crude oil, researchers in the United States have calculated. The findings of the new three-pronged analysis suggest Bitcoin is potentially unsustainable and could have disastrous social and environmental

Scientists have created a robot that can transform from a black glob into a swarm of tiny beads and back again. The inventors say that the robot’s ability to split itself into many pieces and then snap back together makes it potentially useful for drug delivery. The human body is full of winding, narrow passages

WAILEA, Hawaii — Ahead of a Federal Communications Commission vote on a proposal to set a five-year deadline for deorbiting low Earth orbit satellites, leaders of the House Science Committee are questioning the FCC’s authority to do so. FCC commissioners will take up at their Sept. 29 open meeting a proposal released earlier in the

As Hurricane Ian made landfall in Florida on Wednesday afternoon and residents braced for what could be days of threatening weather, the shallow estuary of Tampa Bay on the state’s west coast was eerily transformed into a vast mud flat. The levels were so low in parts that the floor of the usually-bustling harbour was