Science

A sweeping analysis of more than 72 million Facebook users has found a big bonus to having rich friends. When poor children grow up around wealthier kids and parents, they are much more likely to earn a higher salary later in life, researchers at Harvard, Stanford, and New York Universities have found. The findings suggest

Mysterious large pieces of wreckage were discovered across Southeast Asia over the weekend, and evidence is growing that they came from a Chinese rocket booster that fell to Earth uncontrolled. The booster of China’s 25-ton Long March 5B rocket pushed a new segment of the country’s space station into orbit in late July. Then, instead of pushing itself

Humans are filling the world with trash, but not all of our waste is visible to the human eye. While plastic litter on the beach is easy to spot, microplastics and ‘forever chemicals’ have leached far and wide without our barely noticing. Both forms of pollution are now so ubiquitous in the environment, they are

HOUSTON — As NASA prepares to select the crew of the second Artemis mission, the agency’s chief astronaut says the entire astronaut corps, and not a previously announced subset, is eligible for that flight and future missions to the moon. At an Aug. 5 briefing at the Johnson Space Center about the upcoming uncrewed Artemis

A bizarre seafloor creature covered with luminous orange, spaghetti-like tentacles recently made its internet debut in newly released video footage. The unusual pom-pom-shaped creature is actually a type of segmented marine worm known as a polychaete, and it belongs to an appropriately named group: spaghetti worms.  Researchers from the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI)

Since being plunged into a global pandemic, we’re probably far more aware of being surrounded by microdroplets of water. In humid air or expelled by a cough, sneeze or talking, these droplets can carry tiny particles with them, from pollution to viruses like the flu. Back in 2019, the basic chemistry of these motes of environmental

In the middle of the night, the world can sometimes feel like a dark place. Under the cover of darkness, negative thoughts have a way of drifting through your mind, and as you lie awake, staring at the ceiling, you might start craving guilty pleasures, like a cigarette or a carb-heavy meal. Plenty of evidence

It’s a record that has been broken multiple times over the past two years alone, and one that we expect to see broken again soon. Astronomers using the newly operational James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) have announced the discovery of what appears to be the most distant galaxy yet. If this sounds familiar, it’s already

Warmer waters are flowing towards the East Antarctic ice sheet, according to our alarming new research which reveals a potential new driver of global sea-level rise. The research, published today in Nature Climate Change, shows changing water circulation in the Southern Ocean may be compromising the stability of the East Antarctic ice sheet. The ice

NROL-199 was the second of two missions the NRO developed in partnership with the Australian Department of Defence WASHINGTON — A Rocket Lab Electron rocket launched a National Reconnaissance Office mission Aug. 4 at 1:00 a.m. Eastern. The NROL-199 mission lifted off from the company’s Launch Complex-1 at Mahia Peninsula, New Zealand. Rocket Lab said

Cave explorers have traversed what’s now the deepest known cave in Australia. On Saturday, a group of explorers discovered a 401-meter-deep cave, which they named Delta Variant, in Tasmania’s Niggly-Growling Swallet cave system within the Junee-Florentine karst area. Its depth just beat out its predecessor, the Niggly Cave, by about 4 meters. With a descent

Peer long enough into the heavens, and the Universe starts to resemble a city at night. Galaxies take on characteristics of streetlamps cluttering up neighborhoods of dark matter, linked by highways of gas that run along the shores of intergalactic nothingness. This map of the Universe was preordained, laid out in the tiniest of shivers

Archaeologists recently stumbled upon a set of mysterious ‘ghost footprints’ in the salt flats of a Utah desert. These unusual ancient tracks get their eerie name not because they are from an ethereal realm, but due to their earthly composition: They become visible only after it rains and the footprints fill with moisture and become

Scientists may have just tracked down the source of some mysterious infrared glows detected emanating from stars and clouds of interstellar dust and gas. These Unidentified Infrared Emission (UIE) bands have baffled scientists for decades; according to a theoretical new work, at least some of these bands can be produced by highly ionized buckminsterfullerene, more

A third set of human remains were found in Nevada’s Lake Mead on 25 July as water levels have receded to historic lows during a drought fueled by climate change.  The remains were spotted by a witness at Swim Beach on Lake Mead during the afternoon of 25 July, the National Park Service announced. Investigators retrieved the

WASHINGTON — The privately funded Polaris Program is planning its first crewed launch on a SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft in December, a mission that will include the first spacewalk on a private mission. Jared Isaacman, the billionaire who organized the Inspiration4 private astronaut mission that spent three days in orbit in September 2021, announced the

Amongst thousands of impressions in a large rock surface, one stood out from the crowd. The imprint of a tough tubular exoskeleton topped with waving tentacles, now frozen in time, looked strikingly familiar, unlike any of its neighbors. It looked just like a relative of corals, anemones, and jellyfish from a sediment layer dated 20

The motion of single atoms through liquid has been caught on camera for the first time. Using a sandwich of materials so thin they’re effectively two-dimensional, scientists trapped and observed platinum atoms ‘swimming’ along a surface under different pressures. The results will help us better understand how the presence of liquid alters the behavior of

Scientists experimenting on mice have found evidence that key parts of the modern human brain take more time to develop than those of our long extinct cousin, the Neanderthal. Like the hare and the tortoise, slow and steady is the winner here. The extra time is caused by protein differences that also appear to reduce

One of the most extreme stars in the Milky Way just got even more wack. Scientists have measured the mass of a neutron star named PSR J0952-0607, and found that it’s the most massive neutron star discovered yet, clocking in at a whopping 2.35 times the mass of the Sun. If true, this is very

A climate scientist at Tohoku University in Japan has run the numbers and does not think today’s mass extinction event will equal that of the previous five. At least not for many more centuries to come. On more than one occasion over the past 540 million years, Earth has lost most of its species in

A newly developed, water-activated disposable paper battery promises to make a big impact on single-use electronics – those temporary gadgets used in medical and industrial fields where electronic waste can quickly start piling up. The battery that has been demonstrated by researchers is biodegradable, made from sustainable materials, and cheap to put together. What’s more,

TAMPA, Fla. — Washington-based Hydrosat, a geospatial data and analytics startup, announced July 29 it has secured U.S. regulatory approval to provide global services from its upcoming thermal imaging system.  Hydrosat was awarded a National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration license at Tier 1, which has the fewest conditions under a streamlined regulatory regime that came

A farm in England was the unlikely source of a Jurassic jackpot: A treasure trove of 183 million-year-old fossils. On the outskirts of Gloucestershire in the Cotswolds, beneath soil that is currently trampled under the hooves of grazing cattle, researchers recently uncovered the fossilized remains of fish, giant marine reptiles called ichthyosaurs, squids, insects, and

Grab any physics textbook and you’ll find formula after formula describing how things wobble, fly, swerve and stop. The formulas describe actions we can observe, but behind each could be sets of factors that aren’t immediately obvious. Now, a new AI program developed by researchers at Columbia University has seemingly discovered its own alternative physics.

In a time when flaunting your best self on social media has become a norm, narcissistic traits seem to be everywhere.  In today’s slang, off-putting behaviors like entitlement, superiority, and self-congratulating are known as ‘flexing’. Such traits might be more common these days, but being narcissistic is still seen as a pathological personality trait, akin to

This weekend, a massive, uncontrolled rocket booster is predicted to hurtle back to Earth, with a high chance that at least some of the debris will be large enough to survive the descent and smash into our planet. The booster is 53.6 meters (176 feet) long and weighs around 23 metric tons, and belongs to

Humankind marks a dubious milestone Thursday, the day by which humanity has consumed all Earth can sustainably produce for this year, with NGOs warning the rest of 2022 will be lived in resource deficit. The date – dubbed “Earth Overshoot Day” – marks a tipping point when people have used up “all that ecosystems can

When mechanical engineering graduate student Faye Yap saw a dead spider curled up in the hallway, it got her thinking about whether it could be used as a robotics component.  Turning dead spiders into mechanical grippers may be some people’s idea of a nightmare scenario, but it could have tangible benefits. Spider legs can grip

TAMPA, Fla. — SpaceX has applied for more spectrum to upgrade Starlink satellite broadband services for mobile users. The company asked the U.S. Federal Communications Commission July 25 for permission to use the 2 GHz spectrum band to “augment” its mobile satellite services (MSS). Specific details about the next-generation services Starlink plans to provide were