Science

A plastic container thrown into landfill can take hundreds of years to break down naturally, but a newly discovered enzyme could eat up the waste in less than a day. The highly efficient polyester hydrolase, known as PHL7, was recently found in a German cemetery munching through compost. In the lab, researchers found it was

Scientists keep on pushing the efficiency of solar panels higher and higher, and there’s a new record to report: a new solar cell has hit 39.5 percent efficiency under the standard 1-sun global illumination conditions. That 1-sun marker is simply a standardized way of measuring a fixed amount of sunlight, and almost 40 percent of

The ocean is swimming in sound, and a new artificial intelligence tool could help scientists sift through all that noise to track and study marine mammals. The tool is called DeepSqueak, not because it measures dolphin calls in the ocean underworld, but because it is based on a deep learning algorithm that was first used

Future fusion reactions inside tokamaks could produce much more energy than previously thought, thanks to groundbreaking new research that found a foundational law for such reactors was wrong. The research, led by physicists from the Swiss Plasma Center at École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EFPL), has determined that the maximum hydrogen fuel density is about

Is your tiny robot really all that small if it’s bigger than the width of a coin? A team of scientists has built what is now the smallest-ever remote-controlled walking robot, coming in at a mere half a millimeter (less than a fiftieth of an inch) wide. Exceedingly tiny robots have a whole host of

Even if you’re enjoying gloriously fast broadband at home wherever you live in the world, you’re still going to be a long, long way behind the new record for data transmission: an incredible 1.02 petabits per second. That’s a million gigabits shifted down a line every single second. The record was set by a team

A new generation of artificial intelligence (AI) models can produce “creative” images on-demand based on a text prompt. The likes of Imagen, MidJourney, and DALL-E 2 are beginning to change the way creative content is made with implications for copyright and intellectual property. While the output of these models is often striking, it’s hard to

The US has succeeded in developing the world’s first ‘true’ exascale supercomputer, honoring a pledge made by President Obama almost seven years ago, and ushering the world into a new era of computational capability. Until now, the most speedy supercomputers in the world were still working in the petascale, achieving a quadrillion calculations per second.

From Talos, the giant bronze automaton who guarded the princess Europa in ancient Greek myths, to Cylons and Terminators, the idea of artificial humans has both fascinated and creeped us out for centuries.  Now, we’re closer than ever to making a robot look remarkably like a human, with the development of living robot skin. This icky-looking

Deep beneath the waves there’s a source of power quite unlike any other. To tap into it, Japanese engineers have constructed a true leviathan, a beast capable of withstanding the strongest of ocean currents to transform its flow into a virtually limitless supply of electricity. Ishikawajima-Harima Heavy Industries – now known simply as IHI Corporation

HELSINKI — An orbital launch attempt by Chinese startup iSpace suffered failure early Friday, following on from two failures last year. The fourth Hyperbola-1, a four-stage solid rocket, lifted off from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in the Gobi Desert at 3:09 a.m. Eastern May 13.  Apparent launch footage appeared on a Chinese social media

Octopuses are doomed to be orphans from a very young age. After a female octopus lays her eggs, she stops eating and begins self-mutilating, tearing off her skin and biting off the tips of her tentacles. By the time a young octopus wriggles out of its egg, its mother is already dead. A few months

Every time you take a step, space itself glows with a soft warmth. Called the Fulling–Davies–Unruh effect (or sometimes just Unruh effect if you’re pushed for time), this eerie glow of radiation emerging from the vacuum is akin to the mysterious Hawking radiation that’s thought to surround black holes. Only in this case, it’s the

Researchers have taken advantage of a rare opportunity to study identical (aka monozygotic) twins who were separated early in life, before being raised in different countries by different families – and there are some surprising results to report. Whereas IQ has been shown to be up to 80 percent heritable – with twins usually scoring roughly

One of the most recent snaps beamed back from the Curiosity rover on Mars has revealed a rather interesting feature in the rocks: what looks to be a perfectly carved out doorway nestling in the Martian landscape. The doorway doppelgänger is so eerily convincing we’re almost tempted to start believing that it leads to a

There is an even chance that global temperatures will temporarily breach the benchmark of 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels in one of the next five years, the United Nations warned Tuesday. The 2015 Paris Agreement on climate change saw countries agree to cap global warming at “well below” 2 °C above levels measured between 1850

The human brain is said to be the most complex biological structure ever to have existed. And while science doesn’t fully understand the brain yet, researchers in the expanding field of neuroscience have been making progress. Neuroscientists have made substantial inroads towards mapping the complex functions of the brain’s 85 billion or so neurons and

The IG determined that the basing decision “complied with Federal Law and DoD policy and that the process was reasonable” WASHINGTON — After a year-long investigation, the Defense Department’s Office of Inspector General concluded that the January 2021 recommendation to relocate U.S. Space Command headquarters from Colorado Springs to Huntsville, Alabama, was reasonable and not

Over 80 percent of international trade is carried by sea. Much of what we use and consume everyday either has been or will be transported on huge vessels which plough the global ocean. The courses these container vessels take are fixed shipping routes known as marine highways, which are not unlike motorways on land. These highways,

We already have quantum computers of a sort, but at the moment they’re not practical or reliable or large-scale enough to fully realize the massive potential of the technology. To get closer to that end goal, scientists are working towards what they say could be the ideal building block for a quantum computer. These building

Prehistoric daggers long thought to be non-functional ceremonial objects interred in warriors’ graves were actually used to slaughter and butcher animals during the early fourth millennium BCE, a new study suggests. Numerous copper-alloy daggers have been unearthed in Bronze Age warriors’ graves across Europe, along with other weapons, and archaeologists previously speculated that the daggers

We might not be able to hear sound in space, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t any. In 2003, astronomers detected something truly astonishing: acoustic waves propagating through the gas surrounding a supermassive black hole, 250 million light-years away. We wouldn’t be able to hear them at their current pitch. Emanating from the supermassive black

Throughout our planet’s history, Earth has fluctuated between a hothouse and an icehouse. Today, our home is supposed to be in a period of global cooling, but human emissions of greenhouse gasses are reversing that natural trend at a rapid and unprecedented rate. One of the last times Earth went from an icehouse to a

WASHINGTON — Two federal agencies in a turf battle over commercial spaceflight investigations say they are now talking with each other to better define their roles and responsibilities. The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) triggered the debate when it published a notice of proposed rulemaking in November 2021 to codify the role it would take

An expedition to a deep-sea ridge, just north of the Hawaiian Islands, has revealed an ancient dried-out lake bed paved with what looks like a yellow brick road. The eerie scene was chanced upon by the exploration vessel Nautilus, which is currently surveying the Liliʻuokalani ridge within Papahānaumokuākea Marine National Monument (PMNM). PMNM is one

The definition of a second, the most fundamental unit of time in our current measurement system, hasn’t been updated in more than 70 years (give or take some billionths of a second). But in the next decade or so, that could change: Ultraprecise atomic optical clocks that rely on visible light are on track to set the

For 65,000 years, Bininj – the local Kundjeihmi word for Aboriginal people – have returned to Madjedbebe rock shelter on Mirarr Country in the Kakadu region (in the Northern Territory). Over this immense span of time, the environment around the rock shelter has changed dramatically. Our paper, published last week in Quaternary Science Reviews, uses

Flung into freefall for months on end, our bodies adjust in ways that makes for a long list of health concerns for space travelers. The latest evaluation of microgravity’s warping effect on our biology focuses on the spaces surrounding the blood vessels that weave through our brain, revealing concerning changes that remain with astronauts between

In a warmer world, rising sea levels could render many coastlines, beaches, and reef islands uninhabitable, or destroy them altogether. The 1.09℃ Earth has warmed since pre-industrial times has already heightened seas by 20 centimeters. But curiously, research shows some coastlines and even low-lying coral reef islands are actually growing rather than eroding in the